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More "Diction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... faults of style which are the fruits of self-consciousness and ambition. Whether we read the Old Testament story of Abraham's servant seeking a bride for Isaac, or the New Testament narrative of the walk of the risen Christ with his disciples to Emmaus, the inimitable simplicity of the diction would make us think that we were listening to the dialect of the angels who never sinned in thought, and therefore cannot sin in style, did we not know rather that it is the phraseology of ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... writing. Coleridge scribbled in the copy that now lies on the shelves of the British Museum this tribute to its author: "I remember few passages in ancient or modern authors that contain more just philosophy in appropriate, chaste or beautiful diction than the fine following pages. They reflect equal honour on Godwin's head and heart. Though I did it in the zenith of his reputation, yet I feel remorse even to have only spoken unkindly of such a man.—S. ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... she was a little kid, Charles, as you express it with that elegance of diction and refinement of thought that seem never to desert you. Accordingly—er— [impatiently] Now I have forgotten what I was going to say. That comes of your provoking me to be sarcastic, Charles. Adolphus: will you kindly tell me ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... master and mistress; so that if, for example, it happened that, when they were not at home, a visitor called on a Sunday, he was sure to be told by Hassan that Sir Alexander and Lady Duff Gordon were at church, or even—for his diction was equal to this—that they were "attending Divine service." Your mother had valour enough to practise true Christian kindness under conditions from which the bulk of "good people" might too often shrink; when ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... shades of remote antiquity; and even the century when it first made its appearance, has eluded the vigilance of antiquarian research. Before entering upon its poetical merits, we must observe a striking peculiarity in the diction: there is not a single word in it, but that is of Anglo-Saxon origin, so that it may be considered as an admirable specimen of pure English, and as calculated to inspire the infant mind with a distaste for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... out Fibsy for her especial attentions, and the boy accepted the honor with a gentle grace that astounded me. When talking to her he lost entirely his slang and uncouth diction and behaved as to the manner born. He was chameleonic, I could see, and he unconsciously took color from ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... Mr. C.'s Poems actually appeared, before which time he had seen occasion to make many alterations in the proposed arrangement of, and had added some of his most beautiful compositions to, the collection. It is curious, however, that he never varied the diction of the Sonnet to Schiller in the particular to which he refers ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... very general way. In their answers, Corny used the word "raised," while Christy was "brought up." Several phrases in more common use at the South than at the North were noted in his answers, which did not appear in the diction of Christy. ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... now to say something concerning the sentiments, characters, incidents, moral, and diction of the poem, and [Greek: oroton apo proton], let us speak of the sentiments. These, as I observed before, are not, like Lucan's, obtruded upon the reader, but suggested by incidents. For instance, does ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... and they described the Deity under many noble images, and in the most elevated language. The hymn of Cleanthes, in particular, is justly admired for the grandeur of its sentiments, and the sublimity of its diction. But if in reading these descriptions, we hastily associate with them modern conceptions of Deity, and neglect to recur to the leading principles of the sect, we shall be led into fundamental misapprehensions of the true doctrine ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... not your anxious Mind perturb Should Grammar's Law your Diction fail to curb: Be comforted: it is like Tacitus: Tis mostly done by ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... the inns, or are closely associated in the minds of students with the life of the law-colleges. Shakspeare's plays abound with testimony that he was no stranger in the legal inns, and the rich vein of legal lore and diction that runs through his writings has induced more judicious critics than Lord Campbell to conjecture that he may at some early time of his career have directed his mind to the study, if not the practice, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... this description with that of another poet, a poet who sent forth his poetry daintily dressed in verse as well as carelessly wrapped in prose. Liszt tells us that Chopin had in his imagination and talent something "qui, par la purete de sa diction, par ses accointances avec La Fee aux Miettes et Le Lutin d'Argail, par ses rencon-tres de Seraphine et de Diane, murmurant a son oreille leurs plus confidentielles plaintes, leurs reves les plus innommes," [FOOTNOTE: The allusions are to stories by Charles Nodier. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... proceeded in silence for a few minutes. Mrs. Cullom had said but little, but John noticed that her diction was more conventional than in her talk with David and himself in the morning, and that her manner at the table was distinctly refined, although she ate with apparent appetite, not to say hunger. Presently she said, ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... the farming population and their ways and diction. He learned by their parlance and Bible phrases to construct "short sentences of small words," but he had all along the idea that "the plain people are more easily influenced by a broad and humorous illustration than in any ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... and in it there is seldom anything ambiguous, muddy, confused or uncertain. Get down a volume of "Lives of the Poets," and prove my point for yourself, by opening at any page. It was Boswell who set his own light, chatty and amusing gossip over against the wise, stately diction of Johnson, and allowed Goldsmith to say, "Dear Doctor, if you were to write a story about little fishes, you would make them talk like whales," and the mud ball has stuck. The average man is much more willing to take the wily Boswell's word for it than to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... of Father Prmare, for it can scarcely be called a translation, there is neither diction, nor sentiment, nor character; it is a mere tissue of unnatural, or at least very improbable events, fit only for the amusement of children, and not capable of raising one single passion, but that of contempt for the taste of those ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... to this book we really owe the existence of "Julius Caesar," "Coriolanus," and "Antony and Cleopatra." In "Coriolanus" whole speeches have been taken bodily from North, while in "Antony and Cleopatra" North's diction has been closely followed. North did not translate from the original Greek, but from an old French version by James Amyot, Bishop of Auxerre in the times of Henry II of England. The selections here given are printed with the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... disposal than any other Italian, and the Siennese dialect is sweeter and more energetic than that of Florence, though the latter claims the title of the classic dialect, on account of its purity. This purity, together with its richness and copiousness of diction it owes to the academy. From the great richness of Italian we can treat a subject with far greater eloquence than a French writer; Italian abounds in synonyms, while French is lamentably deficient in this respect. Voltaire used to laugh at those who said that the French tongue could not ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... delight and reverence Madonna pictures like this have awakened as we read the words of an old chant. In quaint diction and with fanciful imagery the writer tried to express his feelings in the presence of a painting which, if not this veritable Madonna of the Chair, was ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... discourse. Theron's conquest was of exceptional dimensions. The majority, whose project he had defeated, were strangers who appreciated and admired his effort most. The little minority of his own flock, though less susceptible to the influence of graceful diction and delicately balanced rhetoric, were proud of the distinction he had reflected upon them, and delighted with him for having won their fight. The Presiding Elders wrung his hand with a significant grip. The extremists of his own charge beamed friendship ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... poetry. Although Tasso himself did not think much of it, and did not take any steps to publish it, the judgment of his contemporaries and of posterity has placed it next in point of merit to the Gerusalemme; and by Italians it is especially admired for its graceful elegance of diction. Leigh Hunt executed a very good translation of it, which he dedicated to Keats. Its choruses, which are so many "lyrical voices floating in the air," are very beautiful. It was designed for the theatre, and was acted with ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... how he became a skilled artificer with his pen, and how with obstinate persistence he taught himself daintiness of diction. In his first book of travels he mentions how the branch of a tree caught him, and the flooded Oise bereft him of his canoe. "On my tomb, if ever I have one," he wrote, "I mean to get these words inscribed, HE CLUNG TO HIS PADDLE." The paddle he chose was his pen. It was ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... work—introduced in connection with the demoniac characters—are inferior to the rest. They have occasionally a quaint, antique flavor, suggesting the diction of the Elizabethan lyrists, but without their delicate, elusive richness of melody. Here most we perceive the absence of that highest, ripest intellectual culture which can be acquired only through contact and conflict with other minds. It is not good ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... perfected the tragic mask. He improved the tragic dance, and by his use of scenic decoration and stage machinery, secured effects that were unknown before him. His chief claim to superior excellence, however, lies after all in his poetry. Splendid in diction, vivid in the portraiture of character, and powerful in the expression of passion, he is regarded by many competent critics as the greatest tragic poet ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the weight and gravity of substance, it is both a lovelier and a more lovable work, and it is everywhere more significantly accented. He has written few things more luxuriantly beautiful than the "Guinevere" movement, nothing more elevated and ecstatic than the apotheosis which ends the work. The diction throughout is richer and more variously contrasted than in the earlier work, and his manipulation of the ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... never so peculiarly liable to hinder rather than to help as in early adolescence, when the soul has a new content and a new sense for it, and so abhors and is so incapable of precision and propriety of diction. To hold up the flights of exuberant youth by forever being on the hunt for errors is, to borrow the language of the gridiron, low tackle, and I would rather be convicted of many errors by such methods than use them. Of course this has its place, but it must ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... shoes"; that the crossbow was "an object of wonder and delight to the children of olden chivalry"; that Shakespeare "caressed the fame of the hero-king with the richest coruscations of his genius";—not to name a multitude of other facts stated with equal cost of thought and splendor of diction. But Mr. Towle spares us nothing, and sometimes leaves as little to the opinion of his readers as to their imagination. Having to tell us that Henry learned, in his boyhood, to play upon the harp, he will not poorly say as much, but will lavishly declare, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... closed behind him Symes dropped the catch that he might read Mudge's bulky letter undisturbed. Mudge's diction was ever open to criticism, but he had a faculty for conveying his meaning which genius well ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... me doit tout, et que pour sa grandeur J'ai foul sous les pieds remords, crainte, pudeur; Qu'avec un coeur d'airain exerant sa puissance, J'ai fait taire les lois et gmir l'innocence, Que pour lui, des Persans bravant l'aversion, 870 J'ai chri, j'ai cherch la maldiction; Et pour prix de ma vie leur haine expose, Le barbare ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... however, permitted yourself certain expressions concerning his lordship here, which we cannot allow to remain where you have left them. You must retract, sir, or make them good." His gravity, and the preciseness of his diction now, sorted most oddly ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... around, the atmosphere is perfumed with affectation. A toilet is described with the solemnity of an altar raised to the goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction to set off the meanest things. . . . It is the perfection ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... had not been used before. The second Silesian school is more ambitious; but its poetic flights are more disappointing even than the honest prose of Opitz. The "Shepherds of the Pegnitz" had tried to imitate the brilliant diction of the Italian poets; but the modern Meistersaenger of the old town of Nuernberg had produced nothing but wordy jingle. Hoffmannswaldau and Lohenstein, the chief heroes of the second Silesian school, followed in their ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... Egesteans, descended from Trojan ancestors, whose city he, for an injury of their king Laomedon, had overthrown. However, all these may be merely other instances of the same happy taste that makes him correct the diction of Philistus, and abuse Plato and Aristotle. This sort of contention and rivalry with others in matter of style, to my mind, in any case, seems petty and pedantic, but when its objects are works of inimitable excellence, it is absolutely senseless. Such actions in Nicias's ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... was the first fruit of his brain, this passionate rending aside of the curtain, which hung like a shroud before the grim horrors of that seething lower world of misery. In his earlier work there had been a certain delicate fancifulness, an airy grace of diction and description, a very curious heritage of a man brought up in the narrowest of lines, where every influence had been a constraint. There was nothing of that in the words which were leaping now hot from his heart. ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... though the tongue be all mere natural English, yet those that are but a little acquainted with them cannot understand one-half of what they say. It is not possible to explain this fully by writing, because the difference is not so much in the orthography of words as in the tone and diction—their abridging the speech, "cham" for "I am," "chil" for "I will," "don" for "put on," and "doff" for "put off," and the like. And I cannot omit a short story here on this subject. Coming to a relation's house, who was a school-master at Martock, in Somersetshire, I went into ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... presence of God is, or where we have the glory of that happy vision. Moses, that was bred up in all the learning of the Egyptians, committed a gross absurdity in philo- sophy, when with these eyes of flesh he desired to see God, and petitioned his Maker, that is truth itself, to a contra- diction. Those that imagine heaven and hell neighbours, and conceive a vicinity between those two extremes, upon consequence of the parable, where Dives discoursed with Lazarus, in Abraham's bosom, do too grossly ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... been graceful, nor the diction, yet she knew that Ace had struck the mark fairly, for woman indeed needed no tutor to teach her to understand man—woman ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... century. In that author's work, entitled the "Philosopher's stone," mention is made of medicine that cures all leprous diseases. This passage, some authors suppose, to have given the first hint of the matter, though Geber himself, perhaps, meant no such thing; for, by attending to the Arabic style and diction of this author, which abounds in allegory, it is highly probable that by man he means gold, and by leprous, or other diseases, the other metals, which, with relation ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... Hutchinson, we never heard him plead anything of moment, except that he was finically Frenchified in his diction; of which he gave this instance—that having occasion to notice a brick wall, (which was literally that, not more and not less,) when reconnoitring the French defences, he called it a revetement. And we ourselves remember ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... it seems, differed from Boileau, Voltaire, and D'Alembert, who had taken upon them to proscribe all modern efforts to write with elegance in a dead language. For a decision pronounced in so high a tone, no good reason can be assigned. The interests of learning require, that the diction of Greece and Rome should be cultivated with care; and he who can write a language with correctness, will be most likely to understand its idiom, its grammar, and its peculiar graces of style. What man of taste would willingly forego the pleasure of reading Vida, Fracastorius, Sannazaro, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... idea in the same manner as in Misconceptions and Natural Magic. Note the felicity of imagery and diction. ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... frankness and truthfulness is equal to that of any of his detractors. William Rosse Cobbe, in a volume entitled "Dr. Judas, or Portrayal of the Opium Habit," gives with great frankness of confession and considerable purity of diction a record of his own experiences with the drug. One entire chapter of Mr. Cobb's book and several portions of other chapters are devoted to showing that De Quincey was wrong in some of his statements, but notwithstanding his criticism of De Quincey, Mr. Cobbe seems to have experienced ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... time I had not fully voiced my discovery. Naturally, my first jottings were but efforts to express in feeble diction Truth's ultimate. ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... case, the diction is equal to the deed: the clear and vivacious style of the writer is fully up to the level of ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... of any diction is its appropriateness. The man who talks of dignified things as he would of a baseball game—unless he is doing it deliberately for humor, caricature, or burlesque—is ruining his own cause. The man who discusses trifles in the style of philosophy ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... simplicity of diction, occur in almost every kind of composition. They are mostly founded on some similitude or relation of things, which, by the power of imagination, is rendered ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... books of its class is its distinction of manner, its unusual grace of diction, its delicacy of touch, and the fervent charm of its love passages. It is a very attractive piece of romantic fiction relying for its effect upon character rather than incident, and upon vivid dramatic presentation."—The Dial. "A stirring, ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... the business of the Chorus, and made the dialogue, or spoken portion, take the leading part in the play. (2) A third actor and scenery were due to Sophocles. (3) Tragedy acquired also its magnitude. Discarding short stories and a ludicrous diction, through its passing out of its satyric stage, it assumed, though only at a late point in its progress, a tone of dignity; and its metre changed then from trochaic to iambic. The reason for their original use of the trochaic tetrameter was ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... majesty of the Scriptures strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the Gospel hath its influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers with all their pomp of diction; how mean, how contemptible are they compared with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a book, at once so simple and sublime, should be merely the work of man? Is it possible that the sacred personage, whose ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... the words with a particular reference to the constitution; any how, so far as the duty is expressed, it perfectly accords with that instrument; if there are any inconsistencies in it, they may be rectified; I believe the intention is well understood, but I am far from supposing the diction improper. If the description of the persons does not accord with the ideas of the gentleman from Georgia, (Mr. Jackson,) and his idea is a proper one for the committee to adopt, I see no difficulty in ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... care a damn what people think!" cried he, heated to unusual manliness of diction. "But it's half what ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... of Mme. Calve, who is especially fond of her songs. She has accompanied Calve on an American tour, and has appeared with her before Queen Victoria at Windsor. She sings herself with a light but attractive voice and the most perfect diction. Of late she has composed for Calve some acting ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... voice and just emphasis of Cowper, the clerk of the court, near relation of the amiable poet. On the third day Burke rose. Four sittings were occupied by his opening speech, which was intended to be a general introduction to all the charges. With an exuberance of thought and splendour of diction which more than satisfied the highly raised expectations of the audience, he described the character and institutions of the natives of India; recounted the circumstances in which the Asiatic empire of Britain had originated; and set forth the constitution of ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... Nevertheless, I made but little progress in his poetry. His modernisms were out of tune with the strain of my aspirations at that moment, and I did not find the unexpected word and the eccentricities of expression which were, and are still, so dear to me. I am not a purist; an error of diction is very pardonable if it does not err on the side of the commonplace; the commonplace, the natural, is constitutionally abhorrent to me; and I have never been able to read with any very thorough sense of pleasure even the opening lines of "Rolla," that splendid lyrical outburst. What I remember ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Dyce prided themselves on the purity of their diction, and they usually abstained from plantation dialect; but when embarrassed, frightened or excited, they invariably relapsed into the lingo of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... his scheme of action demanded time for its perfect fulfillment and ultimate success. He let the little timorous chatterbox talk. Her voice was soft and musical as the cooing of a wood-dove, and the sweet full notes chimed in striking contrast to her uncouth speech. But Joan's diction gave pleasure to the listener. It had freedom and wildness, and was almost wholly innocent of ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... The diction of the version is, on the whole, characterized by simplicity and ease. Yet the author, like many another translator of Old English, tries to give his style an archaic tinge by preserving the compound forms characteristic of that language, ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... of them." But I said, "A visitor is [naturally] bashful; do thou begin." "True," answered she and recited some of the choicest verses of the poets, past and present, so that I knew not whether more to marvel at her beauty and grace or at the charm of her diction. Then said she, "Is thy bashfulness gone?" "Yes, by Allah!" answered I. "Then, if thou wilt," rejoined she, "recite us somewhat." So I repeated to her a number of poems by old writers, and she applauded, saying, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... hatred; truthful in conduct, with an ironical reserve. He talks little, either of himself or of others; neither desiring his own praise, nor caring to utter blame. He wonders at nothing, bears no malice, is no gossip. His movements are slow, his voice deep, his diction stately (III.). ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... to him as a crime, was his bad English. He spoke our language, but not well. His accent was foreign: his diction was inelegant; and his vocabulary seems to have been no larger than was necessary for the transaction of business. To the difficulty which he felt in expressing himself, and to his consciousness that his pronunciation was bad, must be partly ascribed the taciturnity ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... years of age, improving even in fire and imagination as well as in judgment, witness his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, and his fables, his latest performances. He was equally excellent in verse and prose: His prose had all the clearness imaginable, without deviating to the language or diction of poetry, and I have heard him frequently own with pleasure, that if he had any talent for writing prose; it was owing to his frequently having read the writings of the great archbishop Tillotson. In his poems, his diction is, wherever his subject requires it, so sublime and so truly poetical, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... declares, "I can never express my grateful sense of the good nature of Mrs Oldfield ... nor do I owe less to her excellent judgment, shown in some corrections which I shall for my own sake conceal." The comedy is dedicated, with the graceful diction and elaborate courtesies of the period, to Fielding's cousin, that notable eighteenth-century wit, the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; and from the dedication we learn that to Lady Mary's approval, on her first perusal, the play ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... Lame one still lamer by imperfect memory, but spite of bald diction, a little done to it might improve it into a good one. You have nothing else to do at ["Talk kay" here written and scratched out] Torquay. Suppose you try it. Well God bless you all, as wishes Mary, [most] sincerely, with many thanks for Letter ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... words and recondite phrases imparted a great air of learning to the style of the new critic; and from the unintelligible sublimity of his diction, it seemed doubtful whether he was a poet from Highgate or a philosopher from Konigsberg. At all events, the reviewer preserved his incognito, and while his praises were rung at no less than three tea-tables, even ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... commended as one of the most charming pictures that have ever appeared of country life. The books of the Howitts, delineating the same class of subjects in England and Germany, are not to be compared to Miss Cooper's for delicate painting or grace and correctness of diction. ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... we were obliged to sit impatiently through a rambling discourse, given in a half-belligerent manner, on the deterioration of moral standards. Re-reading Clara's notes, I find that the subject matter is without originality and the diction inferior. But the lecture ceased abruptly, and the time for questions ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Bob, "but I'm not obliged to say what I mean now. I'm an alum. I can use as bad diction as I please and the long arm of the English department can't reach out and spatter my mistakes with ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... to have answered to the name of Jasmine would have been to proclaim her sex at once. Even the grim old master smiled at her through his horn spectacles as she entered the school-house of a morning, and any graceful turn in her poetry or scholarly diction in her prose was sure to win for her his unsparing praise. Many an evening he invited the "young noble" to his house to read over chapters from Confucius and the poems of Le Taipoh; and years afterward, when he died, among his most cherished ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... reference to another of the copies, he arrived by degrees at a clear understanding of the whole matter. The story was set forth in rhyming doggerel. The poet was not blessed with a gift of melody or of style. Absence of scansion tortured the ear. Coarseness of diction offended the taste. And yet, as he read on, Julius reluctantly admitted that the cruel tale gained credibility and moral force from the very homeliness of the language in which ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... fact's a fact—and 't is the part Of a true poet to escape from fiction Whene'er he can; for there is little art in leaving verse more free from the restriction Of Truth than prose, unless to suit the mart For what is sometimes called poetic diction, And that outrageous appetite for lies Which Satan angles with for ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... bold to take Richelieu and his time as a subject and thus to challenge comparison with Dumas's immortal musketeers; but the result justifies the boldness.... The plot is admirably clear and strong, the diction singularly concise and telling, and the stirring events are so managed as not to degenerate into sensationalism. Few better novels of adventure than this have ever ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... continues, with a good deal of indignation:—"I sha'n't allow the bonfire no more—no, not at all; nor the fireworks neither—no, nothing of no kind of the sort." All this in his natural voice: then, swelling in dignity and in diction, "but, for the accumulated pile of combustibles, I say—for the combustible pile that you have accumulated, that you may not be deprived of the merit of doing a good action, the materials of which it is composed, that is to say, the logs of wood, and the bavins of furze, with the pole and ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... published under the patronage of the court, consisted of comment without news. This paper, called the Observator, was edited by an old Tory pamphleteer named Roger Lestrange. Lestrange was by no means deficient in readiness and shrewdness; and his diction, though coarse, and disfigured by a mean and flippant jargon which then passed for wit in the green room and the tavern, was not without keenness and vigour. But his nature, at once ferocious and ignoble, showed itself in every line ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... which strong feelings may justify in Shylock, and learn from Shakespeare's conduct of that character the terrible force of every plain and calm diction, when known to proceed from a ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... the idea, and the latter appears not to have strength enough to clear the passage. Occasionally, a short, sharp sentence comes like a flash of lightning from the cloud of his verbiage, and relieves the twilight of his diction. There are but few felicitous phrases in his manifold volumes. He has hardly any of those happy combinations of words which stick fast to the memory, and do more than pages to express the author's meaning. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... He was just in rewarding their services—more than just: he was generous and kind. But he did not have real associates, real friends; therefore it is not surprising that he met with so little gratitude. Even his diction shows this independence, this isolation. It would be difficult to find an author of any nation in a cultivated age so free from the influence of the language of his predecessors. Caesar was unique among the great Roman writers in having been ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... is that Mr Carlyle deals. To speak in our own plain common-place diction, it is to the elements of all religious feeling, to the broad unalterable principles of morality, that he addresses himself; stirring up in the minds of his readers those sentiments of reverence to the Highest, and of justice to all, even to the lowest, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... their beauties, that I was compelled with a rash hand to pluck the nettles away that choked the healthy growth of the young, fresh, and budding flowers; preserving, as nearly as I could, their ancient simplicity and diction. Others, by local and nameless poets, I have given as I found them. Those ballads, virtually my own, are stated to be so in the notes, and these, with great fear and tribulation, I hang as a votive wreath on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... reread them. He compared them with the paragraphs in the newspaper brought by Bulmer, and thrown by him on the table after his first outburst of helpless wrath. They were identical in wording, of course, but, somehow, their meaning was clearer in the printed page: and David, despite his uncouth diction, was ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... He is a high-bred, sporting Englishman. His manner, his dress and his diction are the perfection of English elegance. His movements are quick and graceful. He talks lightly and with ease. He is full of life and unsmiling ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... it thrilling, crisp and short, In purest diction drest, with gems of thought So intermingled with the story's warp and woof, That from beginning I can scarcely ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... sacrifice that the noblest of the race had always been called upon to make. In giving themselves to this cause they were giving themselves to their country. They were offering themselves to God. In simple diction, and in clear flowing speech, the sermon proceeded without pause or stumbling to the end. The preacher closed with an appeal to the soldiers present to make this sacrifice of theirs at once worthy and complete. These bodies of theirs were sacred and were devoted to this cause. It was their ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... suffering or danger brings then nearer to the heart of things, they were offered the chaff of divinity, and its wheat was left for less needy gleaners, who knew where to look. Even the fine old Bible stories, which may be made as lifelike as any history of our day, by a vivid fancy and pictorial diction, were robbed of all their charms by dry explanations and literal applications, instead of being useful and pleasant lessons to those men, whom weakness had rendered as docile as children in a ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... the Purgatory, and Divorce itself the Paradiso of human life? You would not be likely to think the better of me, and I should certainly think less well of myself. Though I am conscious of a homespun quality of thought and diction, I must keep within the limits set me by nature, eschewing "brilliancy" and continuing to deal not in abstract ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... always so in fine poetry. The value of versification, when it is indissolubly fused with meaning, can hardly be exaggerated. The gift for feeling it, even more perhaps than the gift for feeling the value of diction, is the specific gift for poetry, as distinguished from other arts. But versification, taken, as far as possible, all by itself, has a very different worth. Some aesthetic worth it has; how much, you may experience by reading poetry ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... customers with shrewd unfriendly eyes, set out the glasses and the accompanying bottles—he never needed to inquire what these men would take; he knew the tipple of every soul in Barnriff by heart—Abe opened out. He was unctuous and careful of his diction. He was Barnriff's lay-preacher, and felt that this attitude was ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... director and truer voice, "I have proposed to myself to imitate and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men.... I have taken as much pains to avoid what is usually called poetic diction as others ordinarily take to produce it." And he erected this practice into a general principle in the ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... emphasizing is by means of simple alliteration. On the other hand it must be noticed that he employs alliteration for the sake of euphony alone much more frequently than he uses it for the purpose of emphasis. So that we may conclude by saying that simple alliteration forms the basis of the euphuistic diction, just as we have seen antithesis forms the basis of the euphuistic construction. This brief survey of the framework of euphuism is far from being an exhaustive analysis. All that is here attempted is an enumeration ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... the subject. Others give themselves up to elaborate and exhaustive research and excite the admiration of their hearers, either by their scientific reasonings, their eloquence, the studied grace of their gestures, or by their perfect diction. Others add to all this beautiful and useful teaching, but so that it only slips in here and there, as it were, by chance, and is not expressly dwelt upon. But when we have only one aim, and when all our reasonings and all our ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... a Liberian romance written by Henry F. Downing, a colored man who evidently spent some years in Liberia. The diction is good, the style pleasing, and the story interesting, but it is not a sympathetic portrayal of African character and customs. It is written from a white man's point of view and shows a tendency to regard the white man's civilization ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... architecture commenced through care bestowed on window tracery for itself instead of as an avenue or vehicle for the admission of light. Read "words" for tracery, "thought" for light, and we see how inspiration avenges itself so soon as diction is made paramount; artifice, which demands and misses watchful self-concealment, passes into mannerism; we have lost the incalculable charm of spontaneity. Comparison of "Eothen" with the "Crimea" will I think exemplify this truth. The first, ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... again under which troubadour poetry was produced, apart from the limitations of its subject matter, tended to foster an obscure and highly artificial diction. This obscurity was attained, as we have said, by elevation and preciosity of style, and was not the result of confusion of thought. Guiraut de Bornelh tells us his method [37] in a passage worth quoting in ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... is the answer Webster gives to such as may object that he has not constructed his plays upon the classic model. He seems to have had a certain sombre richness of tone and intricacy of design in view, combining sensational effect and sententious pregnancy of diction in works of laboured art, which, when adequately represented to the ear and eye upon the stage, might at a touch obtain the animation they now lack ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... letter the street laborer should bear in mind that only the letter of a street-laborer is expected from him, no matter to whom his communication may be addressed and that neither the grammar nor the diction of a Chesterfield or Gladstone is looked for in his language. Still the writer should keep in mind the person to whom he is writing. If it is to an Archbishop or some other great dignitary of Church or ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... intelligence in the course of it,—rather too much so for entire credibility. It is quite possible that there is more of it than Hawthorne ever wrote, but that does not prevent us from having faith in the larger portion of it. The purity of its diction, the nice adaptation of each word to its purpose, and the accuracy of detail are much in its favor; besides which, the personal reflections in it are exactly like Hawthorne. The published portion of the diary in ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... petition drawn up; and, but that we fear our sketch is already too long, we could gratify the reader's curiosity by submitting a few of them. It is sufficient to say, that they came to him in every shape—in all the variety of diction that the poor English language admits of—in the schoolmaster's best copy-hand, and choicest sesquipedalianism of pedantry—in the severer, but more Scriptural terms of the parish clerk—in the ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... Mrs. Hamilton," Sadie interrupted enthusiastically, again forgetful of niceties in diction by reason of her excess of feeling, "maybe you ain't in strong with that bunch! They were all singing and praying for you all last night to beat the band. They made so much fuss Pop had to go up with a club, and threaten ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... The orchestra was perfect, at its best I think in the "scherzos" which they took in beautiful style—so light and sure. I liked the instrumental part much better than the singing. French voices, the women's particularly, are thin, as a rule. I think they sacrifice too much to the "diction,"—don't bring out the voices enough—but the style and training are ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... success which was marked less by vociferous calls before the curtain than by the deeper and more discreet approval of discriminating playgoers. She had revealed qualities with which she had not hitherto been credited; purity of diction, nobility of pose, ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... subject-matter and its style, of being chiefly due to Chapman. In 1654 two tragedies, Alphonsus Emperour of Germany and The Revenge for Honour, were separately published under Chapman's name. Their authorship, however, is doubtful. There is nothing in the style or diction of Alphonsus which resembles Chapman's undisputed work, and it is hard to believe that he had a hand in it. The Revenge for Honour is on an Oriental theme, entirely different from those handled by Chapman ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... speech, tongue, vernacular; dialect; idiom, phraseology, diction; argot, flash, slang, lingo, cant, jargon, gibberish; Volapuk, pasilaly, Esperanto. Associated Words: lingual, linguistic, linguist, linguistics, philology, philologist, philological, polyglot, glottology, glossology, paleography, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... certain that in the main they must have be merely oral tradition, and few have exercised so wide and mighty an influence. The profound, many-sided and intimate knowledge of human nature which it evinces, its vast variety of incident, its wealth of tears and laughter, its copious and felicitous diction, inevitably apt for every occasion, and, notwithstanding the frequent harshness, and occasional obscurity of its at times tangled, at times laboured periods, its sustained energy and animation of style must ever ensure for this human comedy unchallenged rank ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... breeze, is comfortable and sedative. One's own secret and awkward convictions, never expressed because not lawful and because it is hard to get words to bear them lightly, seem then to be heard aloud in the mild, easy, and confident diction of an immortal whose voice has the blitheness of one who has watched, amused and irreverent, the high gods in eager and secret debate on the best way to keep the gilt and trappings on the body of the ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... approximate meaning where the literal was impossible, to turn all this into fairly smooth English. But in such a process all the strength and individual character of the original would inevitably have been lost. What I have endeavoured to do is to indicate the diction which a man of Wagner's peculiar turn of mind would have used, if he had written in English instead of ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... comment is made on a particular line or a particular image, rhyme, word, etc. In short, as so often in Johnson, we are confronted with the large general statement in so much of the criticism in the Lives. The "diction" of Lycidas is "harsh." "Some philosophical notions [in Paradise Lost], especially when the philosophy is false, might have been better omitted." The plays of Nicholas Rowe are marked by "elegance of diction." Dryden is not often "pathetick." Some of ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... all you need physical development; you must broaden your chest through breathing exercises; you are too thin chested. You must become physically stronger if you ever hope to sing acceptably. Then you must study diction and languages. This is absolutely necessary for the singer. Above all you must know how to pronounce and sing in your own language. So many do not think it necessary to study their own language; they think they know that already; but one's mother tongue requires ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... the two plays, with the exception of the Prologue, which is not found in the Dutch, agree speech by speech from beginning to end, the English version is not a slavish translation; indeed, the ease and happiness of the diction, and the freedom with which it moves, give it, until the Dutch text is examined, the tone of an original work, and the translator must have been a man of no small ability to achieve such a success. It should be said that the oldest Dutch edition now extant appears to have been printed ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... rude people are always founded on nature, and therefore the feelings of a more polished generation immediately sympathize with them. We need no numerous notes, no antiquarian dissertations, to enable the most ignorant to recognize the sentiments and diction of the characters of Homer; we have but, as Lear says, to strip off our lendings—to set aside the factitious principles and adornments which we have received from our comparatively artificial system of society, and our natural feelings are in unison with those of the bard ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... faithfully to their tasks to further as far as their strength allowed the science and art of healing. In the medical writers of the older period of Salerno who had not yet been disturbed by Arabian culture or scholasticism, we cannot but admire the clear, charmingly smooth, light-flowing diction, the delicate and honest setting forth of cases, the simplicity of their method of treatment, which was to a great extent dietetic and expectant, and while we admire the carefulness and yet the copiousness ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... like a god. Christ had even a literary style of his own, not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious use of the A FORTIORI. His "how much more" is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in the clouds. The diction used ABOUT Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... driven back to Wales by contrary winds. And of this event a poem was made in the reign of James I, which is quoted by Westcote as written by a "modern poet," though he does not give us the name. The verse still retains a smack of the Elizabethan diction—not the Shakespeare magic, indeed, but the euphuistic, antithetical, ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... in his sifting of evidence, and more convincing in the planning of his cases. The business man will be even more sharply alive to business. The college student can better grasp his studies, and write with stronger thought and clearer diction. The cook will get a finer flavor into the food. And so on to the end of the list. Why? Not by any magic, but simply and only because man was created to be animated and dominated by the Spirit of God. That ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... health excellent; character docile, upright, grateful; conduct very regular: has always distinguished himself by his application to the mathematics. He is passably acquainted with history and geography: is weak enough as to his Latin diction and other elegant accomplishments: would make an excellent sea-officer: deserves to be transferred to ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... 'Mardi' may be called a splendid failure. It must have been soon after the completion of 'Omoo' that Melville began to study the writings of Sir Thomas Browne. Heretofore our author's style was rough in places, but marvellously simple and direct. 'Mardi' is burdened with an over-rich diction, which Melville never entirely outgrew. The scene of this romance, which opens well, is laid in the South Seas, but everything soon becomes overdrawn and fantastical, and the thread of the story loses itself in a ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... historical compositions for mere literary execution is the Chronicle of Alvaro de Luna, to which I have had occasion to refer, edited in 1784, by Flores, the diligent secretary of the Royal Academy of History. He justly commends it for the purity and harmony of its diction. The loyalty of the chronicler seduces him sometimes into a swell of panegyric, which may he thought to savor too strongly of the current defect of Castilian prose; but it more frequently imparts to his narrative a generous glow of sentiment, raising it far ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... the picture of Catherine de Medicis, prowling "like a wolf among the bodies and the blood," in a passage of the Louvre—the picture is taken unwittingly from the "Iliad." There was in you that reserve of primitive force, that epic grandeur and simplicity of diction. This is the force that animates "Monte Cristo," the earlier chapters, the prison, and the escape. In later volumes of that romance, methinks, you stoop your wing. Of your dramas I have little room, and less skill, to speak. "Antony," ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... only a selection taken haphazard from the mass of fugitive literature which the early years of the Reformation brought forth. In spite of a certain rough but not unattractive directness of diction, a prolonged reading of them is very tedious, as will have been sufficiently seen from the extracts we have given. Their humour is of a particularly juvenile and obvious character, and consists almost entirely ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... has completely overthrown every hope that Macpherson's 'Ossian' might prove the translation of a series of poems complete in themselves; but, while the imposture is discovered, the merit of the work remains undisputed, though not without faults—particularly, in some parts, turgid and bombastic diction.—The present humble imitation will be pardoned by the admirers of the original as an attempt, however inferior, which evinces an attachment to their favourite author. [Malcolm Laing (1762-1818) published, ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... the salle is fully as interesting to me as the performance, good as that is—with a handsome, delicate-looking young professor of music playing the violin, an actor from the Palais Royale showing a diction altogether remarkable, two well-known gymnasts doing wonderful stunts on horizontal bars, a prize pupil from the Conservatory at Nantes acting, as only the French can, in a well- known little comedy, two clever, comic monologists of the La Scala sort, and as good as I ever heard ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... everything; each kind of writing will have rules of its own, from which it will not be allowed to swerve, and which distinguish it from all others. Style will be thought of almost as much importance as thought; and the form will be no less considered than the matter: the diction will be polished, measured, and uniform. The tone of the mind will be always dignified, seldom very animated; and writers will care more to perfect what they produce than to multiply their productions. It will sometimes happen that the members of the literary class, always living ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... touch with the original. Even in the best translated work is probably wanted the subtle vitality natural to the original language, for it defies an attempt, however elaborate, to transmit all there is in the original. Correctness of diction may be there, but spontaneity is gone; ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... compositions in verse. The present poem (with the exception of a very few lines) has been entirely rewritten, and has at least the comparative merit of being less vague in the thought, and less unpolished in the diction, than that ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... brother playwrights. But he carried to fanatic extravagance his devotion to the purity of the stage. Warned by earlier example, few dramas which could possibly be considered of a political complexion were now submitted for examination. Still the diction of the stage demanded a measure of liberty. But Mr. Colman would not allow a lover to describe his mistress as "an angel." He avowed that "an angel was a character in Scripture, and not to be profaned on the stage by being applied to a woman!" The exclamation, "Oh, Providence!" was not ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... which Effie could produce, who, though a lively girl, had been a remarkably careless scholar, but even to her more considerate sister's own powers of composition and expression. The manuscript was a fair Italian hand, though something stiff and constrained—the spelling and the diction that of a person who had been accustomed to read good composition, and mix ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... opening of the Civil War, whatever the faith or the practice of the adult inhabitants of the country, the Bible story and the Bible diction were familiar to all. The speeches of the popular orators of that day were filled with distinct allusions to the Bible and these were quickly and clearly apprehended by the people. It may be questioned whether popular speeches of the present ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... form of the Icelander. As a saga, therefore, Voelsunga is far behind not only such great works as Njala, but also many of the smaller sagas. It lacks form, and is marred by inconsistencies; it is often careless in grammar and diction; it is full of traces of the decadent romantic age. Sigurd, in the true spirit of romance, is endowed with magic weapons and supernatural powers, which are no improvement on the heroic tradition, "Courage is better than a good sword." At every turn, ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... great romance, "The Toilers of the Sea" ("Les Travailleurs de la Mer"), published in 1866, was written during his exile in Guernsey. Of all Hugo's romances, both in prose and in verse, none surpasses this for sheer splendour of imagination and diction, for eloquence and sublimity of truth. It is, in short, an idyll of passion, adventure, and self-sacrifice. The description of the moods and mysteries of the sea is well-nigh incomparable; and not even in the whole of Hugo's works can there be found anything more vivid than Gilliatt's ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... occasionally from the heavy and rhetorical style which beset all European literature (except Italian, which itself did not wholly escape) in the fifteenth century. But still one can see in it that improvement of narrative method and diction which has been referred to: and occasionally, amid the crowd of tricky wives, tricked husbands, too obliging and too hardly treated chambermaids, ribald priests and monks, and the like, one comes across quite different things and persons, which are, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... in my possession at last. Levy roared down the tube, and the young man of the imperfect diction ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... animation. "The new people! My goodness, sir, yes! Have you seen them? Have you seen Newport, for instance?" His diction now (and I was to learn it was always in him a sign of heightening intensity) grew more and more like the formal speech of his ancestors. "You have seen ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... though it wants one particular, which the critic enumerates in the constituent parts of an epic poem, namely metre; yet, when any kind of writing contains all its other parts, such as fable, action, characters, sentiments, and diction, and is deficient in metre only, it seems, I think, reasonable to refer it to the epic; at least, as no critic hath thought proper to range it under any other head, or to assign it a particular name ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... a fact—and 't is the part Of a true poet to escape from fiction Whene'er he can; for there is little art in leaving verse more free from the restriction Of Truth than prose, unless to suit the mart For what is sometimes called poetic diction, And that outrageous appetite for lies Which Satan angles with for ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... love adventure. David had his. A very pretty young Quakeress, of about David's age, came from North Carolina to visit Mr. Kennedy, who was her uncle. David fell desperately in love with her. We cannot better describe this adventure than in the unpolished diction of this illiterate boy. If one would understand this extraordinary character, it is necessary thus to catch such glimpses as we can of his inner life. Let this necessity atone for the unpleasant rudeness of speech. Be it remembered that this reminiscence was written ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... beauty, which throws a charm over his impassioned song, more easily felt than described, and not to be escaped by those who have once felt it. We think that he has more definiteness and roundness of general conception than the late Mr. Keats, and is much more free from blemishes of diction and hasty capriccios of fancy.... The author imitates nobody; we recognize the spirit of his age, but not the individual form of this or that writer. His thoughts bear no more resemblance to Byron or Scott, Shelley or Coleridge, than to Homer or Calderon, Ferdusi ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Academician of a feebler age. While pondering these difficulties, and comparing the readings of his many manuscripts, the thought occurred to Michelangelo that, between leaving the poems unpublished and printing them in all their rugged boldness, lay the middle course of reducing them to smoothness of diction, lucidity of meaning, and propriety of sentiment.[7] In other words, he began, as Signer Guasti pithily describes his method, 'to change halves of lines, whole verses, ideas: if he found a fragment, he completed it: if brevity involved the thought in obscurity, he amplified: ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... very same witticism meets us again, in the Hebrew Machberoth of Immanuel. But obviously it would be an endless task to trace the similarities of poetic diction between Hebrew and other poets: suffice it to realize that such ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... talks little, either of himself or of others; neither desiring his own praise, nor caring to utter blame. He wonders at nothing, bears no malice, is no gossip. His movements are slow, his voice deep, his diction stately (III.). ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... philosophy of the nineteenth century, or the beauties of Pindar, or, with some again, the truths of Christianity. Few understand children, still fewer understand antiquity. If we look in the Veda for high poetical diction, for striking comparisons, for bold combinations, we shall be disappointed. These early poets thought more for themselves than for others. They sought rather, in their language, to be true to their own thought ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... not attempt to imitate the lofty diction of the Seasons or Windsor Forest, the noble poem from which, I imagine, Thomson derived his sonorous style. He had a humble mind and knew his limitations, and though he adopted the artificial form of verse which prevailed down to his time he was still ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... purpose of illustration perfectly well, but considered as a separate story it is somewhat too explanatory in diction, and too condensed in form. Just as the long story is analysed for reduction of given details, so this must be analysed,—to find the details implied. We have to read into it again all that has ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... Θ must have had the Ο´ text before him, since the coincidences of diction, though not so continuous as in the Song of the Three, are still far too numerous to be accidental. Bissell (p. 443) says of all the three pieces, "Θ simply recast the version of LXX." This dictum, however true of the ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... men of the priestly class, and other educated persons. By the Sanskrit proper to an [ordinary] man, alluded to in the second passage, may perhaps be understood not a language in which words different from Sanskrit were used, but the employment of formal and elaborate diction." MUIR'S Sanskrit Texts, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... general appearance giving evidence of a clean, active ascetic life and a strong moral and physical make-up. He was inclined to keep the light of his conversational powers under a bushel, and at times spoke only when aroused from apparent self-centered thought. His voice was deep and pleasant, his diction and expression perfect, his thoughts, clothed in finished sentences, were entertainingly expressed and at times exhibited a rich vein of the choicest humor. He was the leading member of the conference—certainly the brainiest—and it fell ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... business of the Chorus, and made the dialogue, or spoken portion, take the leading part in the play. (2) A third actor and scenery were due to Sophocles. (3) Tragedy acquired also its magnitude. Discarding short stories and a ludicrous diction, through its passing out of its satyric stage, it assumed, though only at a late point in its progress, a tone of dignity; and its metre changed then from trochaic to iambic. The reason for their ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... Author on such a subject; and writing for the press has been but very little my employment, I trust that an ample excuse will be granted for any errors that may appear, or for the want of that happiness of diction with which more able and accomplished ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... worthy, noble, or beautiful idea, clad in a corresponding form, is then the core of every art production; and although much of which the fundamental idea is neither worthy, noble, nor beautiful, is sometimes admired, yet the impression on the whole is painful, as would be exquisite diction and entrancing eloquence flowing from the lips of a man of genius arguing in a cause unholy and pernicious to the best ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... one department of prose literature in which Latin was undisturbed and unsophisticated. This was the department of law and administration. The legal diction escaped, in a great measure, from the influence of classicism; it kept on its even way through the whole period, and as it was an ordinary school subject under the empire, the language of the law books exercised great influence in the formation of the prose style that ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... "Cylchgrawn," or Circle of Grapes, another magazine, under the auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The subjects of this poet's compositions were patriotic, sentimental and religious, and his poems are characterised by deep pathos, and great sweetness of diction.] ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... high fever while he was writing, and the blood-and-thunder Magazine diction he adopted did not calm him. Two months afterward he was reported fit for duty, but, in spite of the fact that he was urgently needed to help an undermanned Commission stagger through a deficit, he preferred to die; vowing at the last ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... amusement. He is grotesque and droll in his manner, and above all always restrained. His literary life is full of sprites and gnomes that frolic before young children and once before mature people. The Griffin and the Minor Canon is a beautiful fairy story lifted from childhood's thought and diction into a mature realm. His humor is plain and simple, cool and keenly calculating. A friendly critic has said of one of his stories, "With a gentle, ceaseless murmur of amusement, and a flickering twinkle of smiles, the story moves ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... have generally been made in the terms of original documents, or the publications of the day; as I deemed it more just and proper so to do, than to give them my own coloring. And I must apprize the reader, that instead of aiming to express the recital in the fluency of rhetorical diction, or of aspiring to decorate my style of composition with studied embellishments, MY PURPOSE HAS SIMPLY AND UNIFORMLY BEEN TO RELATE FACTS IN THE MOST PLAIN AND ARTLESS MANNER; and I trust that my description of scenes and occurrences will be admitted to be natural and free from ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... precise diction, careful word choice, a relatively large working vocabulary, and relatively little use of contractions or street slang. Dry humor, irony, puns, and a mildly flippant attitude are highly valued —- but an underlying seriousness and intelligence ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... his father and others, in which she almost unconsciously revealed rich stores of varied information gathered from books, the discourse of the wise and learned met in her travels, and her own keen yet kindly observations of men and things. These, with the elegance of her diction, and the ready play of wit and fancy, ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... being insufficient for the requirements of the schools—will give some idea of the plan of the work:—"In writing this little book, I have aimed less at symmetrical perfection than at simplicity of diction, and such arrangement as would lead from the known to the unknown, by which the older children in our public schools might learn not only the actual facts about the laws they live under, but also some of the principles which underlie all law." The reprinting ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... them at all, and has no right to expect from any body a patient hearing. A slow and faltering rehearsal of words clearly prescribed, yet neither fairly remembered nor understandingly applied, is as foreign from parsing or correcting, as it is from elegance of diction. Divide and conquer, is the rule here, as in many other cases. Begin with what is simple; practise it till it becomes familiar; and then proceed. No child ever learned to speak by any other process. Hard things become easy by use; and skill is gained by little and little. Of the whole method of parsing, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... takes nothing is worth nothing. Rabbi ben Ezra was a universal genius and wanderer, whose travels brought him as far as England. His philosophy of life Browning has depicted in the well-known poem, whose beauty of diction and clarity of thought atone for ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... realize that Tito had come dangerously near the truth. His translation of the Greek Testament had forced him to the conclusion that much of the material contained in the Gospels was not Jesus' own words, but the commentaries of his reporters; not the Master's diction, but theological lecturing by the writers of the Gospels. Moreover, in the matter of prayer, especially, he was all at sea. As a child he had spent hours formulating humble, fervent petitions, which did not ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... would dizzy the arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw neither, in respect of his quick sail. But, in the verity of extolment, I take him to be a soul of great article, and his infusion of such dearth and rareness as, to make true diction of him, his semblable is his mirror, and who else would trace him, his umbrage, ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... followed the fortunes of Christian in the stately diction of the Pilgrim's Progress must wish to know from whence came those wonderful word pictures with which the dreamer of Bedford Jail gems his masterpiece. That phrase "delectable mountains" conjures up in each individual reader's mind those particular ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... the Early Days," by Col. G. L. Cole, and I find it an interesting and instructive narrative, clothed in good diction and pleasing style. Few of the Argonauts took time or trouble to make note of the events of their journey and our California gold episode is remarkably barren of literature, a fact which makes Col. Cole's book ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... very considerable advance towards a chaste and sober diction, but not much either in development of character or composition of parts. Barabas the Jew is a horrible monster of wickedness and cunning, yet not without strong lines of individuality. The author evidently ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... ostentatiousness as being sinful. They acquire a taste for neatness for which their fathers are so conspicuous; they learn to be prudent and saving; the very tone of voice with which they are always addressed, establishes in them that softness of diction, which ever after becomes habitual. Frugal, sober, orderly parents, attached to their business, constantly following some useful occupation, never guilty of riot, dissipation, or other irregularities, cannot fail of training up children to the same uniformity of life and manners. If they are left ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... purity of his diction is the more remarkable as he was a Carthaginian by birth, and therefore spoke an idiom as diverse as can be conceived from the Latin in syntax, arrangement, and expression. He came as a boy to Rome, where he lived as the slave of the senator Terentius Lucanus, by whom he ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... had seemed to many to have fallen greatly short of the splendour of its opening. Jeffrey said however quite truly, claiming to be heard with authority as his "Critic-laureate," that of all his writings it was perhaps the most finished in diction, and that it equalled the best in the delicacy and fineness of its touches, "while it rises to higher and deeper passions, not resting, like most of the former, in sweet thoughtfulness, and thrilling and attractive tenderness, but boldly wielding all the lofty and terrible elements of tragedy, and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... which produced the Faerie Queene II. The Author of the Faerie Queene III. Study of the Faerie Queene: 1. A Romantic Epic 2. Influence of the New Learning 3. Interpretation of the Allegory 4. The Spenserian Stanza 5. Versification 6. Diction and Style IV. Chronological Table ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... reverence, calls for a studied piece of careful acting. H. P. M. Jones sustained this part, and sustained it well. He gave it the dignity which it needed, and if his natural gift of physical stature helped him somewhat, so also did the smooth diction and easy repose which he had evidently been ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Style and diction are the determining factors in the poetic form of lyric verse, along with the perhaps indistinguishable and indefinable quality of melodiousness. Of Bjrnson's style or manner in the larger sense it must be said that it ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... off his commodity, and so adds exorbitancy to his statements, which will leave a balance in hand after all. But people will not be deceived again and again. His credit becomes damaged. His moral bill returns dishonoured. His extravagance of diction, like extravagance in expenditure, involves him in difficulties, and thus the immediate fate of mendacity symbolizes that awful retribution which will finally exclude all liars from the society of ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... the syllable ah, is harmful. Not only is this vowel sound, as Lilli Lehmann says, "the most difficult," but the proper pronunciation of all words within the whole range of the voice is thereby impeded. Diction and tone work should therefore go hand in hand. "The way in which vowel melts into vowel and consonants float into their places largely determines the character of the tone itself." Without finished pronunciation speech and song of emotional power ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... mine is not yet written. There is one important feature, nay, the most important feature of all—the style of language, the diction—on that, Barnstaple, you have not ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... confers. When writing a letter the street laborer should bear in mind that only the letter of a street-laborer is expected from him, no matter to whom his communication may be addressed and that neither the grammar nor the diction of a Chesterfield or Gladstone is looked for in his language. Still the writer should keep in mind the person to whom he is writing. If it is to an Archbishop or some other great dignitary of Church or state it certainly should be couched in terms different from those he uses to John Browne, his ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... contradictions. In spite of these faults, however, which a close study reveals, it is nevertheless the grandest product of Middle High German epic poetry, and deservedly the most popular poem of older German literature. It lacks, to be sure, the grace of diction found in Gottfried von Strassburg's "Tristan und Isolde", the detailed and often magnificent descriptions of armor and dress to be met with in the epics of Hartman von Ouwe; it is wanting in the lofty philosophy of Wolfram von Eschenbach's "Parzival", and does not, as this latter, lead the reader ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... Dryden above himself in "All for Love"; but it was Dryden who said of him, by instinctive conviction rather than judgment, that within his magic circle none dared tread but he. Is he to blame for the extravagances of modern diction, which are but the reaction of the brazen age against the degeneracy of art into artifice, that has characterized the silver period in every literature? We see in them only the futile effort of misguided persons to torture out of language the secret of that inspiration which should ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... second process of recognition. Thus the hearer hears, but does not understand. It is probably for some such reason as this that we resort to words to make the message clear. Herein lies the importance of the words themselves, and of the diction of the singer. ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... whose faultless diction, remarkable fluency of expression and discriminating choice of words, made him a master speaker and writer, attributed his facility to the training he received in the home of his father, a minister, where the children were constantly encouraged in the use of correct English and in the ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... of which it is a detached fragment. The editor has been enabled to add several verses of beauty and interest to this edition of Tamlane, in consequence of a copy, obtained from a gentleman residing near Langholm, which is said to be very ancient, though the diction is somewhat of a modern cast. The manners of the Fairies are detailed at considerable length, and in ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... was to be commended; But the bulky Mr. Chapple—he who assisted Billy Blee in wassailing Miller Lyddon's apple-trees—stoutly criticised Will, and told him that his conduct was much to blame. The younger argued against this decision and explained, with the most luminous diction at his command, that 'twas in the offering of such a task to a penniless man its sting and ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... embellish his pages with narratives of great exploits and brilliant achievements. Neither the Records nor the Chronicles can be said to display such a propensity in any marked degree. The Chronicles do, indeed, draw upon the resources of Chinese history to construct ethical codes and scholarly diction for their Imperial figures, but the Records show no traces of adventitious colour nor make an attempt to minimize the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... comely dress ought to go with comely diction," said Abe. "But that's a thing you can't learn in books. There's no grammarian of the language of dress. Then I'm so big and awkward. It's ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... Julius Caesar, Cassfelyn, and Cymbaline, and extending to Edwin and Elgiva: the titles of the intervening pieces are the Imperial Pirate and the Dragon King. There is much wild and beautiful romance in the diction, but we take the most attractive portion to be the lyrical portion, as the Chants, Dirges, and Choruses. We recommend them as models for the play-wrights who do such things for the acting drama, and if the poetship to a patent theatre be worth acceptance, we beg to commend ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... all before the public. My earnest effort has been to be as faithful to the poet as possible, and for this reason I have not attempted to render rime, a dangerous obstacle to a natural expression of the poet's thought and diction. But I hope that the critics will judge my work as that of a mere pioneer. I know there is value in the theme; and if this value is made sufficiently evident to arouse the interest of poetry lovers in the achievements of contemporary Greece I shall have ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... of his Genius, the Extent of his Knowledge and Reading, the Power and Address with which he throws out and applies either Nature, or Learning, there is ample Scope both for our Wonder and Pleasure. If his Diction, and the cloathing of his Thoughts attract us, how much more must we be charm'd with the Richness, and Variety, of his Images and Ideas! If his Images and Ideas steal into our Souls, and strike upon our Fancy, how much ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... Population and others"). It is a masterly piece of writing. Coleridge scribbled in the copy that now lies on the shelves of the British Museum this tribute to its author: "I remember few passages in ancient or modern authors that contain more just philosophy in appropriate, chaste or beautiful diction than the fine following pages. They reflect equal honour on Godwin's head and heart. Though I did it in the zenith of his reputation, yet I feel remorse even to have only spoken unkindly of ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... Hume, often forced him to close the volume with a mixed sensation of delight and despair." From this testimony we may judge, that a simple style appears to the best judges to be more difficult to attain, and more desirable, than that highly ornamented diction to which writers of inferior taste aspire. Gibbon tells us, with great candour, that his friend Hume advised him to beware of the rhetorical style of French eloquence. Hume observed, that the English language, and English taste, do not admit of this ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... a work of great daring, starred with poetry of thought, feeling, and diction, but occasionally obscure; the writer can scarcely fail to be a leading spirit of his ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the lift, or, as it is called, the elevator. With all that we hear of American hustle and hurry it is rather strange that Americans seem to like more than we do to linger upon long words. And indeed there is an element of delay in their diction and spirit, very little understood, which I may discuss elsewhere. Anyhow they say elevator when we say lift, just as they say automobile when we say motor and stenographer when we say typist, or ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... in order to accompany him on his way. He would waylay cabinet ministers in streets, bishops (though himself not of their faith) in closes, and royal personages incognito. He would impede their progress, or walk delicately beside them, talking softly, respectfully, with that perfect propriety of diction and address which he ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... know that these so- called uncouth phrases were to return to common use. To-day it would be absurd to say that the Bible is full of uncouth phrases. Professor Cook has said that "the movement of English diction, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was on the whole away from the Bible, now returns with ever-accelerating speed toward it." If the phrases went out, they came back. But it is true that the English of the King James version is not ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... the fineness of its diction and for its clear presentation of the subject, relieved here and there by a quaintly humorous turn of phrase that is altogether delightful."—Colin C. Stewart, ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... book of Mr. Southey's "Joan of Arc," to line 452, as acknowledged, was written by Mr. Coleridge, with the intermixture of 97 lines, written by Mr. Southey, in which there are noble sentiments, expressed in the loftiest poetical diction; and in which also there is a tutelary spirit introduced to instruct and counsel the Maid of Orleans. In the second edition of "Joan of Arc," Mr. Southey omitted the whole of these lines, and intimated to Mr. C. his intention so to do, as early ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... each other. Indeed, after Wordsworth had developed his theory of poetical realism in the preface to a volume published in 1800, Coleridge rejected and criticised it as wholly untenable. All three, however, may be considered as comrades in a revolt against the conventional diction of eighteenth century poetry, from which Coleridge's "dreamy tenderness" and mystical flights of fancy were as remote as Wordsworth's rusticity and almost prosaic studies ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... Hobbs, in the preface to his own bald translation of the Ilias (studying poetry as he did mathematics, when it was too late), Mr Hobbs, I say, begins the praise of Homer where he should have ended it. He tells us, that the first beauty of an Epic poem consists in diction, that is, in the choice of words, and harmony of numbers. Now, the words are the colouring of the work, which in the order of nature is last to be considered: the design, the disposition, the manners, and the thoughts, are all before it; where any of those are wanting or imperfect, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... olden times, fifteen or twenty years ago, when telegraph wires were still young, and messages were confined to diplomatic secrets, horse-racing, and the rise and fall of stocks, lovers used to indulge in rapturous expressions which would run over pages; but the pith and strength of laconic diction has now been taught to us by the self-sacrificing patriotism of the Post Office. We have all felt the vigour of telegrammatic expression, and, even when we do not trust the wire, we employ the force of wiry language. ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... him there are many things significant of the age of transition in which he lived; in him the mixture of Frenchman and Englishman is still in a sense incomplete, as that of their language is in the diction of his poems. His gaiety of heart is hardly English; nor is his willing (though, to be sure, not invariably unquestioning) acceptance of forms into the inner meaning of which he does not greatly vex his soul by entering; nor his airy way of ridiculing what he has no intention of helping to overthrow; ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the coarse and unchristian words she had written in the letter that was by that time passing through the hands of the weary night-shift of mail-clerks down in the General Post-office. And when she did read it in print, she was so pleased and proud of the fluency of her own diction, and so many of her nephews and nieces said so many admiring things about what she might have done if she had only gone in for literature, that it really never occurred to her at all to think whether she had been any more just and charitable ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... prose—especially in Gargantua, his most important work, which is an amplified and Germanized version of the first book of Rabelais—is hard to read on account of its recondite allusions, far-fetched puns, and generally eccentric diction. As a poet he is at his best in the Lucky Boat of Zrich, a narrative poem which describes, with much patriotic warmth, the notable feat of a Swiss boat-crew in rowing from Zrich to Strassburg in a single day (June 21, 1576) to attend a Schtzenfest. The ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... expressing her profound sense of the new life she owed to Katherine; nor did the latter, when talking with her face to face, ever realize that there was any social difference between them. Rachel's voice, manner, diction, and natural refinement were what might be expected from a gentlewoman, only that through all sounded a strain of harsh strength, the echo of that fierce despair from whose grip the tender consideration of her new friend had delivered her. The evening's sail was very tranquil and soothing. ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... Established Church of Scotland has produced, Dr. John Caird is one of the most brilliant as a preacher, as a thinker, and as a rhetorician. During the comparatively short period of his ministry, he secured a world-wide fame for the eloquence and beautiful diction of his sermons, and although his pulpit appearances are now few and far between, they are sufficiently important to draw together larger congregations than any Church in Glasgow could possibly accommodate; to find a prominent place in the newspapers ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... "with great energy on the government of the passions. His look was venerable, his action graceful, his pronunciation clear, and his diction elegant. He showed, with great strength of sentiment and variety of illustration, that human nature is degraded and debased, when the lower faculties predominate over the higher. He communicated the various ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... "scherzos" which they took in beautiful style—so light and sure. I liked the instrumental part much better than the singing. French voices, the women's particularly, are thin, as a rule. I think they sacrifice too much to the "diction,"—don't bring out the voices enough—but the style and training are perfect ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... pictorial quality, and some of his stories had so stimulated my imagination that I was eager to have more time with him among his wards. Without precisely following his narratives I had found myself able to reproduce the spirit of them in my own diction. His ability as a sign-talker was of especial service to me for, as he signed to his visitors, he muttered aloud, for my benefit, what he was expressing in gesture, and also what the red man signed in reply. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... his really famous "obscurity." This obscurity is variously ascribed to a diction unduly learned, or almost unintelligibly colloquial, or grotesquely inventive; to figures of speech drawn from sources too unfamiliar or elaborated to the point of confusion; to sentences complicated by startling inversions, by double parentheses, by broken constructions, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... Brierly, aren't you?" His voice was soft and quietly modulated. His diction was that of a fairly ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... devoted as much attention to the acquirement of conversational ease, as he did to skill in writing, he would have been as successful in the one art as in the other. From early life it was his great ambition to be not merely a fine but a forcible writer. He did not seek splendor of diction, but that perspicuity, that transparency of expression which would convey the thought most ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... and reverence Madonna pictures like this have awakened as we read the words of an old chant. In quaint diction and with fanciful imagery the writer tried to express his feelings in the presence of a painting which, if not this veritable Madonna of the Chair, was ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... mind of considerable refinement, but little originality. In the form of ode, elegy, eclogue, or sonnet, we have verses which show tender feeling and a genuine appreciation of nature. But the human interest is slight, and the author is unable to escape from the conventional poetic diction of the eighteenth century. Phrases like "vocal groves," "Pomona's rich bounties," or "the sylvan choir's responsive notes" meet the reader at every turn; direct observation and concrete imagery are sacrificed to trite abstractions, until ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... people are always founded on nature, and therefore the feelings of a more polished generation immediately sympathize with them. We need no numerous notes, no antiquarian dissertations, to enable the most ignorant to recognize the sentiments and diction of the characters of Homer; we have but, as Lear says, to strip off our lendings—to set aside the factitious principles and adornments which we have received from our comparatively artificial system of society, and our natural feelings are in unison with those of the bard of Chios and ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... laborious investigations. He succeeded at length in placing his name in the first rank of British scientific thinkers and writers. His works are characterized by a fine union of strict science, classic diction, and enchanting description, which rises not unfrequently into the loftiest vein of poetry. The fruits of his researches were ever made to bear upon the defence and elucidation of the Oracles of Truth. Our common Christianity owes much to his pen. Viewing him as a journalist, Mr. Miller ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... a breeze, is comfortable and sedative. One's own secret and awkward convictions, never expressed because not lawful and because it is hard to get words to bear them lightly, seem then to be heard aloud in the mild, easy, and confident diction of an immortal whose voice has the blitheness of one who has watched, amused and irreverent, the high gods in eager and secret debate on the best way to keep the gilt and trappings on the body of ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... difficult circumstances:—in fact all the modern authors represented in the present book may be said to have been prolific as writers. Gumundur Frijnsson was equally versatile as a writer of short stories and poems. He has a rich command of imagery and diction, and his style, at times a little pompous, is often powerful though slightly archaic in flavour. The ancient heroic literature doubtless fostered his manly ideas, which, however, sprang from his own experience in life. One must, he felt, be hard on oneself, and on one's ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... conspicuous lapses of his predecessors Raymond with all his guile fell into another pitfall. He lauded the Rose, the Daisy, the Garland of Vine Leaves worn by Eleanor, Marguerite, and Beatrice in three canzonets so perfect in form, so exquisite in diction that they rivalled the ditties of Thibault of Champagne, who was hitherto accounted as having written "the most delightful and most melodious canzonets that at ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... mayor in that year, according to one account: but the name recurs pretty positively in 1327-8, and about that time Randall Higgenet, a monk of Chester Abbey, wrote the plays. But in the text handed down they are of a much later style of diction, and no doubt later in date than the Towneley ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... Principles, V, ch. 9, 7. In heathen Iceland, mariners were always paid a certain quota of the profits. Leo, in Raumer's historischem Taschenbuch, 1835, 524. The same was often the case in China. McCulloch, Comm. Diction. v. Canton. In England, its employment was rendered very difficult by the laws of partnership, which made each individual, except in great chartered societies, responsible for all kinds of debts contracted ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... opinions, whether for their learning, logic, or diction, will compare favorably, in the judgment of some of our best lawyers, with those of any judge upon the Supreme Bench of the Union. It is true what he has accomplished has been done with labor; but this is so much more to his praise, for such work was not to be hastily done, and it was proper ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... lamp pidgin" (pidgin meaning thing in the mongrel speech, Chinese in form and English in diction, which goes by ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... with swift, unresisting agony. This was the first fruit of his brain, this passionate rending aside of the curtain, which hung like a shroud before the grim horrors of that seething lower world of misery. In his earlier work there had been a certain delicate fancifulness, an airy grace of diction and description, a very curious heritage of a man brought up in the narrowest of lines, where every influence had been a constraint. There was nothing of that in the words which were leaping now hot from his heart. Yet he knew very well ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... night, however, we were obliged to sit impatiently through a rambling discourse, given in a half-belligerent manner, on the deterioration of moral standards. Re-reading Clara's notes, I find that the subject matter is without originality and the diction inferior. But the lecture ceased abruptly, and the ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... from most books of its class is its distinction of manner, its unusual grace of diction, its delicacy of touch, and the fervent charm of its love passages. It is a very attractive piece of romantic fiction relying for its effect upon character rather than incident, and upon vivid dramatic presentation."—The Dial. "A stirring, ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... the atmosphere is perfumed with affectation. A toilet is described with the solemnity of an altar raised to the goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction to set off the meanest things. . . . It is the perfection of ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... community of students should also have some common point of interest and discussion. Pope, for such a purpose, has some real advantages. He is far enough from our own times to stand aloof from the corroding controversies of the age—he is near enough to speak in a diction but slightly differing from our own. He is sparkling with wit and brilliant good sense, and his poems are all separately short. But if Lord Carlisle count it for his main advantage that he is by distinction a moral poet, and this I must suppose ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... of diction,' he concloods, 'an' a lover of proper speakin', I'm onreserved in the view that the statements of both ought to be preeserved as spec'mens ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... has written a discord in black and white. It is a strong saying, excellent in diction, broadly and boldly set down in ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... beginning of the day was always devoted by her to the New Testament in Greek, after which she read select orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles, which I judged best adapted to supply her tongue with the purest diction, her mind with the most excellent precepts, and her exalted station with a defence against the utmost power of fortune. For her religious instruction, she drew first from the fountains of Scripture, and afterwards from ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... He put Toombs' visit to Grant, "crawling at the seat of power," against his eulogy of a dead enemy. I have never heard such a scoring from one man to another. It was magisterial in its dignity, deadly in its diction. Nothing short of a duel could have settled it in the olden time. But when Lamar, white with rage, had finished, Toombs without a ruffle said, "Lamar, you surprise me," and the host, with the rest of us, took it as a signal to rise from table and rejoin the ladies ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... century called a virtuoso, an accomplished model of the seductions of her time. Jeliotte had taught her singing and the clavecin; Guibaudet, dancing; Crebillon had taught her declamation and the art of diction; the friends of Crebillon had formed her young mind to finesse, to delicacies, to lightness of sentiment, and to irony of the esprit of the time. All the talents of grace seemed to be united in her. No woman mounted a horse better; none captured ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... warmer acknowledgments. "Lastly," he declares, "I can never express my grateful sense of the good nature of Mrs Oldfield ... nor do I owe less to her excellent judgment, shown in some corrections which I shall for my own sake conceal." The comedy is dedicated, with the graceful diction and elaborate courtesies of the period, to Fielding's cousin, that notable eighteenth-century wit, the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; and from the dedication we learn that to Lady Mary's approval, on her first perusal, the play owed its existence. What ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... He delighted in Plato's simile of the ship, where the majority are nothing, and the captain rules. His opinions were not popular, except his dislike for the Church of Rome. He is read partly for his exquisite diction, and partly for the patriotic fervour with which he rejoices in the achievements of England, especially ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... of the rest, and a reference to the acting ended it. "Miss Rose Euclid, in the trying and occasionally beautiful part of Haidee, was all that her admirers could have wished." ... "Miss Cunningham distinguished herself by her diction and bearing in the small part of the Messenger." The final words were, "The reception ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... any how, so far as the duty is expressed, it perfectly accords with that instrument; if there are any inconsistencies in it, they may be rectified; I believe the intention is well understood, but I am far from supposing the diction improper. If the description of the persons does not accord with the ideas of the gentleman from Georgia, (Mr. Jackson,) and his idea is a proper one for the committee to adopt, I see no ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction which is characteristic of his genius [among them the "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey"]. In this form the ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... idealist, and thus akin to the Romanticists—though he lacks their perfection of diction—in his feeling for the beauty of atmospheric effects, and also in his enthusiasm for music, which he loved passionately. The description of Montriveau's emotions when the cloistered Duchesse de Langeais plays in the church of Spain—and Balzac tells us that the sound of the organ bears ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... overthrown every hope that Macpherson's Ossian might prove the translation of a series of poems complete in themselves; but while the imposture is discovered, the merit of the work remains undisputed, though not without faults—particularly, in some parts, turgid and bombastic diction."[9] ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... friend of Mme. Calve, who is especially fond of her songs. She has accompanied Calve on an American tour, and has appeared with her before Queen Victoria at Windsor. She sings herself with a light but attractive voice and the most perfect diction. Of late she has composed for Calve some acting songs, such as ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... that in the end, being quite disheartened, he foresook the assembly; and as he was walking carelessly and sauntering about the Piraeus, Eunomus, the Thriasian, then a very old man, seeing him, upbraided him, saying that his diction was very much like that of Pericles, and that he was wanting to himself through cowardice and meanness of spirit, neither bearing up with courage against popular outcry, nor fitting his body for action, but suffering it to languish through ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... first promulgated by the great Rishi Dwaipayana, and which after having been heard both by the gods and the Brahmarshis was highly esteemed, being the most eminent narrative that exists, diversified both in diction and division, possessing subtile meanings logically combined, and gleaned from the Vedas, is a sacred work. Composed in elegant language, it includeth the subjects of other books. It is elucidated by other Shastras, and comprehendeth the sense of the four Vedas. We are desirous of hearing that ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... and governor of the world; and they described the Deity under many noble images, and in the most elevated language. The hymn of Cleanthes, in particular, is justly admired for the grandeur of its sentiments, and the sublimity of its diction. But if in reading these descriptions, we hastily associate with them modern conceptions of Deity, and neglect to recur to the leading principles of the sect, we shall be led into fundamental misapprehensions of the true doctrine of Stoicism. For according ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... him, will always hold the first place with English readers as the ideal knight of the Holy Grail. The matchless diction of Tennyson has given the less perfect form of the legend a supreme charm and beauty. But Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parsifal, as spiritualized and humanized in Wagner's lyric drama, will be seen ...
— Parsifal - A Drama by Wagner • Retold by Oliver Huckel
... towards her, and his ears caught much of what she said. He was astonished at the grace and perfection of her language; it seemed to him like a strain of music filled with every melody of earth and heaven, surpassing poets in beauty of diction, philosophers in truth,—and in purity of affection, all the saints and sweetest women of whom ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of Soule & Williams, in Boston, 1861. A number of incomplete discussions on financial and economic subjects were found among his papers. A critic writes that "he exhibited much grace of style, elegance of diction, and ...
— Fifty years with the Revere Copper Co. - A Paper Read at the Stockholders' Meeting held on Monday 24 March 1890 • S. T. Snow
... symbol, is undoubtedly an affectation of great simplicity and familiarity of language. They disdain to make use of the common poetical phraseology, or to ennoble their diction by a selection of fine or dignified expressions. There would be too much art in this, for that great love of nature with which they are all of them inspired; and their sentiments, they are determined shall be indebted, for their effect, to nothing ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Professor Albert E. Hancock says: "An author's vocabulary is of two kinds, latent and dynamic: latent—those words he understands; dynamic—those he can readily use. Every intelligent man knows all the words he needs, but he may not have them all ready for active service. The problem of literary diction consists in turning the latent into the dynamic." Your dynamic vocabulary is the one you ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... standpoint. There is no justification of this war from any standpoint. There is only an explanation of the war from an economic standpoint. All these specious arguments on the precipitating causes of the war can be but for the display of brilliant forensic oratory and matchless diction. Let us thrust aside in these dark moments of peril ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... thought than in the Bhagvat-Geeta. Warren Hastings, in his sensible letter recommending the translation of this book to the Chairman of the East India Company, declares the original to be "of a sublimity of conception, reasoning, and diction almost unequalled," and that the writings of the Indian philosophers "will survive when the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance." It is unquestionably ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... language, and the want of technical skill in the makers of the law, that statutes often give occasion to the most perplexing and distressing doubts and discussions, arising from the ambiguity that attends them. It requires great experience, as well as the command of a perspicuous diction, to frame a law in such clear and precise terms, as to secure it from ambiguous expressions, and from all doubts and criticisms upon ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... in this case it is not mistaken diction. Foreboding suggests coming evil; the laughter of boys is wholehearted. It was merely that things were not exactly as they should be; it was not natural that age should be so youthful. The fates were playing, and ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... business; and he boasts of being speechless. Before Botticelli he is mute. But if there is any good in Botticelli (there is much good, and much evil too) it is emphatically the critic's business to explain it: to translate it from terms of painting into terms of diction. Of course, the rendering will be inadequate—but so is Botticelli. It is a fact he would be the first to admit. But anything which has been intelligently received can at least be intelligently suggested. Pater does suggest an intelligent cause for the cadaverous colour of Botticelli's "Venus ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... been the product of a school curriculum, or of an academic training. In no single instance, as far as can be ascertained, has nobility of character, or the possession of genius, or soundness of judgment, or even beauty of diction in literature, been attributable to the grind in grammatical rules, the fact-cramming, and the mental gymnastics which go to make up what ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... and the misuse of words rife among us can be checked by diligent exercises in good English, such as this book provides. These exercises, in conjunction with others to be found in different volumes by the same author, will serve to correct careless diction and slovenly speech, and lead to the art of speaking and writing correctly; for, after all, accuracy in the use of words is more a matter of habit than of theory, and once it is acquired it becomes just as easy to speak or to write good English as bad English. ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... whereas the one aim which proper education should most zealously strive to achieve would be the suppression of all ridiculous claims to independent judgment, and the inculcation upon young men of obedience to the sceptre of genius. Here a pompous form of diction is taught in an age when every spoken or written word is a piece of barbarism. Now let us consider, besides, the danger of arousing the self-complacency which is so easily awakened in youths; let us ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Platen is, barring his Weltschmerz (world weariness, compare Lenau) and the fact that he spent a good part of his life in foreign lands, the exact opposite of Heine. While Heine affects a certain carelessness of rhyme and rhythm and diction, Platen observes a studied elegance. His verse form is faultless as if chiselled in marble, his rhymes the most careful and pure. His ballads have a stately majesty of rhythm that reflects the inherent nobility ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... venerable creature with a look of almost superstitious awe. "Facts are facts," he answered shortly, shutting his mouth with a little snap. "Unless this bird has been deliberately taught historical details in an archaic diction—and a shipwrecked sailor is hardly likely to be antiquarian enough to conceive such an idea—he is undoubtedly a survival from the days of the Commonwealth or the Restoration. And you say he runs on with his tale for an hour at a time! ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... Jupiter Pluvius, the Neuter Gender, Pantheism, Noah's Ark, Mackintoshes, and the Passive Mood; but I will record the one point upon which the two persons emerged in some agreement. It was that there is such a thing as an atheistic literary style; that materialism may appear in the mere diction of a man, though he be speaking of clocks or cats or anything quite remote from theology. The mark of the atheistic style is that it instinctively chooses the word which suggests that things are dead things; that things have no souls. Thus they will not speak of waging war, ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... in the velvet mitt. Not let anybody get fresh with you. Been getting careless about my diction. Slang. Colloquial. Cut it out. I was first-rate at rhetoric in college. Themes on—Anyway, not bad. Had too much of this hooptedoodle and good-fellow stuff. I—Why couldn't I organize a bank of my own some day? And ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... as it did of mere rudiments, was an insult to the high average of intelligence that obtained amongst them. They were not taught one thing thoroughly, not even their own language, and remained handicapped to the end of their lives for want of a grounding in grammar. When you find a woman's diction at fault, never gird at her for want of intelligence, but at those in authority over her in her youth, who thought anything in the way of education good enough for a girl. Even the teachers at St. Catherine's, some of them, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... assigning them to Boethius as their author, scholars, especially recent scholars, have felt the gravest possible doubts of their being really his, doubts which have of late ripened into an almost complete certainty that he was not their author. The difficulty does not arise from anything in the diction or in the theology which points to a later age as the time of their composition, but from the startling contrast which they present to the religious atmosphere of the 'Consolation of Philosophy.' Here, in these theological treatises, we have the author entering cheerfully ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... defaced pages by reference to another of the copies, he arrived by degrees at a clear understanding of the whole matter. The story was set forth in rhyming doggerel. The poet was not blessed with a gift of melody or of style. Absence of scansion tortured the ear. Coarseness of diction offended the taste. And yet, as he read on, Julius reluctantly admitted that the cruel tale gained credibility and moral force from the very homeliness of the language ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the Senate his message of March 1, 1886, which has taken a high rank among American constitutional documents. It is strong in its logic, dignified in its tone, terse, direct, and forceful in its diction. ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... the fault of that man!" said the butler passionately, his eyes shining with anger and indignation and his usual careful diction sacrificed to the greater need of plain speech. "It's him that has done it with his sneerin' mockin' ways that would bring an angel to tears—his penny-savin', snivelin' meanness that grudges her every cent ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... richer in the precious article. In Mr. Hudson, also, the quality has an individual character, and is the racier from its genuineness and from its root in his intellectual constitution. This wit is, perhaps, the leading characteristic of his style, though his diction varies sufficiently with the varying demands of his subjects, and often glides from the tingling concussion of antithesis into the softest music, or rises from sarcastic brevity and stinging emphasis into rich and sonorous amplification. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... well-spiced "story" in which Shelby, with his diction chastened and his colloquialisms omitted save where they lent a racy strength, was made to say the things the reporter concluded he ought to have said—it was a party organ—and to sparkle after a fashion which is actually attained by few in the ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... all hope of obtaining La Perpetua for a model, when one day I receive an anonymous letter, the handwriting and diction of which seem to be the production of an uninstructed Ethiop. The writer assures me that somebody or other is at present engaged in the useful occupation of working for my complete overthrow and subjugation, and that if I require further particulars on the subject I may easily ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... later prophets. For the rest, we are quite weary of Mr. Laing, and are content to have shown that everywhere he is the same biassed, inconsequent, untrustworthy writer. His only power is a certain superficial clearness of diction and brilliancy of style, and this is brought to bear on a mass of information drawn confessedly from the labours of others, and selected in the interest of a foregone conclusion, without a single attempt at a fair ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... the letter very slowly, as though to find, in each word and sentence, some other meaning which might allay her present distracting thoughts. Vainly did the reader search for relief. The diction was plain, clear and definite. No chance to escape. No fond smiles from Hope's cheering presence. Hope had fled, with agonizing gaze, as Lady Rosamond once more read that letter. Every word was stamped upon her heart in characters of bold ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... cannot elevate." They had to describe the great battle of good and evil and they described both; but they accepted a working Victorian compromise about what should happen behind the scenes and what on the stage. Dickens did not claim the license of diction Fielding might have claimed in repeating the senile ecstasies of Gride (let us say) over his purchased bride: but Dickens does not leave the reader in the faintest doubt about what sort of feelings they were; nor ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... matter, Milton's manner is always and unmistakably "the grand manner." His imagination is lofty, his diction noble, and the epic of Paradise Lost is so filled with memorable lines, with gorgeous descriptions, with passages of unexampled majesty or harmony or eloquence, that the crude material which he injects into the Bible narrative is lost sight of in our ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... has achieved this manner of diction, these rhythms for its dearest beliefs, a literature is surely established.... Wyclif, Tyndale, Coverdale and others before the forty-seven had wrought. The Authorised Version, setting a seal on all, set a seal on our national style.... ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... deficient, as the excerpt given shows, in dignity and weightiness, but neither there nor elsewhere has he any of the finer qualities of style, his rhythm being harsh and unmusical, his diction cumbrous and diffuse. ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... first criticism, polished numbers, if you mean melodious versification, this perhaps the general ear will not deny me. If you mean classical, chaste diction, free from tautologous repetitions of the same thoughts in different expressions; free from bad rhymes, unnecessary epithets, and incongruous metaphors, I believe you may be safely challenged to produce many instances ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... fifty of a fever contracted while he was on a business errand in Pensacola. Among those who visited him in his last years, one has left this description of him: "Dissipation has sapped a constitution originally delicate and feeble. He possesses an atticism of diction aided by a liberal education, a great fund of wit and humor meliorated by a perfect good nature and politeness." Set beside that kindly picture this rough etching by James Robertson: "The biggest devil among them [the Spaniards] is the half Spaniard, half Frenchman, half ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... contributed to the Cause (if any) of Female Emancipation?' and being a total ignoramus up to date of the sheer existence of said hon'ble gentleman, I shall abstain from scratching my head over so Sphinxian a conundrum, and confine myself to knuckling to the obiter diction ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... practicing with them for too long a time in the closet. The technique of violin playing can best be acquired before the virtuoso appears in public, although no amount of training in itself will make a great violinist, but the basic elements of acting, grace, diction, etc., can just as well be acquired behind the footlights and so many great actors have acquired them, as many of the greatest have ignored them. There can be no hard and fast rules laid down for this sort of ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... affect superiority in. Poor Jackson, whom you all call the Yankee cad, and who is not a cad at all in his proper place among the engineers at our works, believes in the sham refinements he sees around him at the at-homes he is so fond of. He has no art in him—no trained ear for music or for fine diction, no trained eye for pictures and colors and buildings, no cultivated sense of dignified movement, gesture, and manner. But he knows what fashionable London listens to and looks at, and how it talks and behaves; and he makes that his standard, and sets down what is ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... give birth to," indicate, "the fruit of the womb, the begotten"—an expression which meets us time and again in the pages of the Hebrew Bible. The words offspring, issue, seed, used in higher diction, explain themselves and find analogues all over the world. To a like category belong Sanskrit garbha, "brood of birds, child, shoot"; Pali gabbha, "womb, embryo, child"; Old High German chilburra, "female lamb"; Gothic kalbo, "female ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... to say that the two grandest of all Similes were those of the Ships hanging in the Air, and 'the Gunpowder one,' which he used slowly and grimly to enact, in the Days that are no more. He certainly then thought Milton the sublimest of all the Gang; his Diction modelled on Virgil, as ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... reviewing' Marmion, 'fixed on this narrative of the Abbess as a passage marked by 'flatness and tediousness,' and could see in it 'no sort of beauty nor elegance of diction.' The answer to such criticism is that the narrative is direct and practical, and ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... all the works of Renan a pathos that stirs the mind to its inmost depths, his power of diction is wondrous sweet and strong, his ardent adoration of something indefinite, dreamy, ideal, takes our hearts ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
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