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More "Felicity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... authentic simplicity of his heart. And when the point of saturation is reached, to use an engineer's phrase, the artist, still preserving his own innocence, begins to produce. And this, one may remark in passing, is the happiest time of his life! He combines the felicity of youth, the wisdom of age, and the unencumbered vitality of manhood. He knows, even while in love, as he frequently is at such periods, that there are loftier peaks beyond, mountain-ranges of emotion ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... a child came to them, a strong, beautiful boy, worthy to be the heir of such a house, the heart of the rose was filled with overflowing fragrance. Happiness was heaped upon happiness. Every wish brought its own accomplishment. Wealth, honour, beauty, peace, love—it was an abundance of felicity so great that the soul of Hermas could hardly ...
— The Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke
... war-horse, the air-shattering trumpet, 130 The unvaried, still-returning hour of duty, Word of command, and exercise of arms— There's nothing here, there's nothing in all this To satisfy the heart, the gasping heart! Mere bustling nothingness, where the soul is not— 135 This cannot be the sole felicity, These cannot be man's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... yester-morning; and, deuce take me, if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen-and-ink fellows, merry, sociable lads,—at leaving them in the lurch, fag, fag, fag! The comparison of my own superior felicity gave me anything ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... headstrong obstinacy. Then he put his foot on a plate of sandwiches, and was within an ace of sitting down on a jam tart, much to his own consternation, poor boy, for had he destroyed that, the chief source of his own prospective felicity would have ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... holy, who did not view such a proceeding with a degree of complacency. In the pulpit Roscoe was almost powerful. His knowledge of the world, his habits of directness, his eager but not hurried speech, his unconventional but original statements of things, his occasional literary felicity and unusual tact, might have made him distinguished in a more cultured community. Yet there was something to modify all this: an occasional indefinable sadness, a constant note of pathetic warning. It struck me that I never had met a man whose words ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... wear, no few tears would have been shed. Madame, in addition to this incentive, intimated that she might attend a prayer meeting now and then-perhaps see Cicero. However, Molly could easily have forgotten Cicero, inasmuch as she had enjoyed the rare felicity of thirteen husbands, all of whom Lady Swiggs had sold when it suited ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... and a classic polish in these volumes, and a felicity of grouping and of portraiture, which invest the subject with the attractions of a living and stirring episode in the grand historic ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... incident (of a knocking at the door soon after the work of extermination was complete) did actually occur, which the genius of Shakspeare has invented; and all good judges, and the most eminent dilettanti, acknowledged the felicity of Shakspeare's suggestion as soon as it was actually realized. Here, then, was a fresh proof that I was right in relying on my own feeling in opposition to my understanding; and I again set myself ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... was fitfully glad. She was near the man who had enlarged her capacity from girl's to woman's, a little note or two of young feeling to a whole diapason; and though nearness was perhaps not in itself a great reason for felicity when viewed beside the complete realization of all that a woman can desire in such circumstances, it was much in comparison with the outer darkness of the ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... so hard to quit life in my company, Ghita? To me it would seem supreme felicity were our ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... obvious thing in life is that people are seldom as unhappy as their circumstances would lead us to expect. Nobody is happy all the time, and if he were, nobody is enough of a genius to make his undeviating felicity interesting. But a great many people are happy most of the time, and almost everybody has been happy at some time or other. It may have been only a momentary experience, but it was very real, and he likes to think about it. He is excessively ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... Boleyn, during her short felicity, proceeded from the Tower to Westminster, on the eve of her coronation, the conduit of Cheapside ran, at one end white wine, and at the other red. At Cheapside Cross stood all the aldermen, from amongst whom advanced Master Walter, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... their love, imparted a portion of that celestial fire the soul; and from that time forth the beloved became equal to the lover, and both, when their allotted course was run, entered together into the mansions of felicity. These spirits, they said, watched constantly over mankind by night and day. Dreams, omens, and presentiments were all their works, and the means by which they gave warning of the approach of danger. But, though ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... me honor, madam. It is the superlative felicity of my sublunary existence to congratulate you on this auspicious occasion," replied Mr. Sneed, as he gently pressed the gloved hand ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... which have lately so destroyed your peace. Do not, for heaven's sake, by squeamish notions of filial obedience and dutiful conduct—which I do assure you have been very long out of date—destroy your own happiness. When parents cease to care for the true welfare and felicity of their children, it becomes our positive duty to care for them ourselves. Mr. Hamilton has given you no reason for his command to withdraw yourself from the attentions of Lord Alphingham; and surely ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... return for this noble devotion, and that it may receive the favourable success of which it is worthy, all we require of you is, union, tranquillity, and efficacious co-operation. This alone is necessary to ensure the felicity ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... lot at times, bind us nearer to God and to each other! My heart earnestly joins in your comprehensive prayers. I trust they will unitedly ascend to a throne of grace, and through the Redeemer's merits procure for us peace and happiness here and a life of eternal felicity hereafter. Oh, what sacred pleasure there is in the idea of spending an eternity together in perfect and uninterrupted bliss! This should encourage us to the utmost exertion and fortitude. But whilst ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... old acquaintance is much broken, both in his spirits and constitution. How happy might that man have been, if there had been added to his natural and acquired endowments a dash of morality! If he had known how to distinguish between false and true felicity; and, instead of seeking to increase an estate already too large, and hunting after pleasures that have made him rotten and ridiculous, he had bounded his desires of wealth, and followed the dictates of his conscience! His servile ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... covered with wounds, like Lazarus—what does it matter, if his soul is saved? It is your creed as much as mine, that the soul is immortal, and that the death of the body is only its introduction, if it be saved, to a glorious future of everlasting felicity, progress, and holiness. Does the child remember how he used to cry over his lessons, when he becomes a man? Does he remember all the little difficulties of his school days, when he is inheriting the fruits of them? Just so; ten thousand times less important will ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... See Clarendon's description of England during this period, 'enjoying the greatest calm and the fullest measure of felicity that any people in any age for so long time together ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... must be allowed, was a singular beginning of connubial felicity; but there is no doubt that Johnson, tho he thus showed a manly firmness, proved a most affectionate and indulgent husband to the last moment of Mrs. Johnson's life: and in his "Prayers and Meditations," we find very remarkable evidence that his regard and fondness for her never ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... with it. With what feelings must he direct his views beyond the Rhine, where the eyes of so many thousands are now opened? He too has lived to witness days which are far from agreeable to him. He, who represented it to the countries which he forced into his alliance as a supreme felicity to have their sons led forth to fight foreign battles, and to have many thousands of them sacrificed every year upon the altar of his ambition, now sees them all abandon him, and become his bitterest enemies. The Great Empire is now an idle dream. Already is he nearly confined within that ancient ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... his Chief; and, you may depend on it, they are playing fair—in their slow way. They always think of India and of Egypt—never of Cuba. Lord! Lord! the fun I've had, the holy joy I am having (I never expected to have such exalted and invigorating felicity) in delivering elementary courses of instruction in democracy to the British Government. Deep down at the bottom, they don't know what Democracy means. Their Empire is in the way. Their centuries ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... or the robbers, or sorely bewail the misfortunes of our country, let him indulge my affections herein, though it be contrary to the rules for writing history; because it had so come to pass, that our city Jerusalem had arrived at a higher degree of felicity than any other city under the Roman government, and yet at last fell into the sorest of calamities again. Accordingly, it appears to me that the misfortunes of all men, from the beginning of the world, if they be compared to these of the Jews [3] are not so considerable as they were; while ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... these letters! I do solemnly, unaffectedly wonder how you can put so much pure felicity into an envelope so as that I shall get it as from the fount head. This to-day, those yesterday—there is, I see, and know, thus much goodness in line after line, goodness to be scientifically appreciated, proved there—but over and above, is it in the writing, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... neither said nor done nor even thought, but tasted only and felt, with no object of my felicity but the emotion of felicity itself! I rose with the sun, and I was happy; I went to walk, and I was happy; I saw 'Maman,' and I was happy; I left her, and I was happy. I rambled through the woods and over the ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... consolidated and the name of the paper should be the Minnesotian and Times. It can readily be seen that a marriage contracted under these peculiar circumstances was not likely to produce a prolonged state of connubial felicity. The relations between Foster and Newson were no more cordial under one management than had hitherto existed when the offices were separate. This unhappy situation continued until about the time the legislature adjourned, when the partnership ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore
... single annoyance, except, indeed, that a swarm of wasps came aboard of us and alighted on the head of one of our young gentlemen, attracted by the scent of the pomatum which he had been rubbing into his hair. He was the only victim, and his small trouble the one little flaw in our day's felicity, to put us in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and cherish them. A volume would not trace all their connexions with private and public felicity. Let it be simply asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in the courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... the most genial; that its clouds are the scarcest; that its fruit is the most delicious; that the air is the most balmy; that its cigars are of the highest flavor; that the warmth and radiance of early matrimonial felicity so rarefies the intellectual atmosphere that the soul mounts higher, and enjoys a wider prospect, than ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... maketh thee weep? May God not cause an eye of thine to weep!' 'O my lord,' answered she, 'what am I that thou shouldst kiss my hand? Wilt thou have God punish me for this and that my term should come to an end and my felicity pass away? For this is what none ever attained unto.' Quoth he, 'Well said, O Tuhfeh. Know that thy rank in my esteem is mighty and for that which wondered me of what I saw of thee, I offered to do this, but I will not return unto ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... generally checked any further inquiry on the subject. Between Lady Joram and Mrs. Smellpriest there subsisted a singular analogy with respect to their conjugal attachments. It was hinted that her ladyship, in those secret but delicious moments of matrimonial felicity which make up the sugar-candy morsels of domestic life, used to sit with Sir Jenkins for the purpose, by judicious exercise, of easing, by convivial exercise, a rheumatic affection which she complained of in her right arm. There is nothing, however, ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... performance; yet some pains has been taken to trace those points of resemblance, which gave so much offence to one party, and triumph to the other. Many must doubtless have escaped our notice; but enough remains to shew the singular felicity with which Dryden, in the present instance, as in that of "Absalom and Achitophel," could adapt the narrative of ancient or foreign transactions to the political events of his own time, and "moralize two meanings in one word." Altogether abstracted from this consideration, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... "I have not failed to win love. But does love bring with it untouched felicity; that is what I ask." He hesitated. "I will not attempt to describe her. I really could not, you know, except in a feeble way, by saying that even to other eyes than mine she is a woman more wonderful than any of my sisters, if ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... pleasant, and her disposition seemed agreeable; and, certainly, if the rest of Jack Purser's wives (for this was one of the nine-and-twenty) be so well-fitted to make him happy, the sum total of his conjugal felicity must be enormous! ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... of the fair, would not be attracted to Najma, enchanted by her, if she were not endowed with such of the celestial treasures as rank above the visible lines of beauty. Our Scribe speaks of the "purity and naivete of her soul as purest sources of felicity and inspiration." Indeed, if she were not constant in love, she would not have spurned the many opportunities in the absence of Khalid; and had she not a fine discerning sense of real worth, she would not have surrendered herself to her ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... then mutual—your friends are all happy and well, and I know your arrival will not a little contribute to their felicity, as well as mine—but who have you here, Loveyet? Landed not fifteen minutes ago, and in close confab with ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... be a future life, the gods have done wisely to withhold its exact nature from us, and that, whatever uncertainties may exist in other respects, nothing can be more true than that those who now die in the arena will, in another world, find their highest felicity in the privilege of looking up from a distance at the loved emperor in whose honor they perished, and beholding him enjoying, through adoption, the society of the inhabitants of Olympus. I then—but it is useless to detail all the argument. I will read the poem itself; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... senator Petronius Maximus [1] was often alleged as a rare example of human felicity. His birth was noble and illustrious, since he descended from the Anician family; his dignity was supported by an adequate patrimony in land and money; and these advantages of fortune were accompanied with liberal arts and decent manners, which adorn or imitate the inestimable gifts of genius ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... nourishes many bad passions. True friendship will at all times avoid a rough or careless behavior. Health and peace a moderate fortune and a few friends sum up all the undoubted articles of temporal felicity. Truth is fair and artless simple and sincere uniform and consistent. Intemperance destroys the strength of our bodies and the vigor ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... soldier. So your day has at length come. I am glad of it, with all my heart and soul. It is quite good enough for you. Now you are well served for coming to fight in favor of the American rebels, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, by catching that terrible contagion—domestic felicity—which same, like the small pox or the plague, a man can have only once in his life; because it commonly lasts him (at least with us in America—I don't know how you manage these matters in France) for his whole life time. And yet after all ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... elucidation of this remarkable example of lithick literature by the ordinary modes, but with no adequate return for my labour. I then considered myself amply justified in resorting to that heroick treatment the felicity of which, as applied by the great Bentley to Milton, had long ago enlisted my admiration. Indeed, I had already made up my mind, that, in case good fortune should throw any such invaluable record in my way, I would proceed ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... attend you. But I make haste to consider you as abstracted from a court, which (if you will give me leave to use a term of logic) is only an adjunct, not a propriety of happiness. The academics, I confess, were willing to admit the goods of fortune into their notion of felicity; but I do not remember, that any of the sects of old philosophers did ever leave a room for greatness. Neither am I formed to praise a court, who admire and covet nothing, but the easiness and quiet of retirement. I naturally withdraw my sight from a precipice; and, admit the prospect ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... established in Windsor Castle; Lord Raymond and my sister, inhabited a house which the former had built on the borders of the Great Park, near Perdita's cottage, as was still named the low-roofed abode, where we two, poor even in hope, had each received the assurance of our felicity. We had our separate occupations and our common amusements. Sometimes we passed whole days under the leafy covert of the forest with our books and music. This occurred during those rare days in this country, when the ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... haunts and friends from such enthusiastic lips, delighted Albinia, and her felicity with her baby, with Mr. Kendal, with her brother and his little son, was one of the brightest things in all the world—the fresh young loving bloom of her matronhood was even sweeter and more beautiful than ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that was slowly oozing out. "Oh, how lovely!" your mother said, with a sigh of pleasure; "Come to me Horace, let me revive the drooping courage of your glorious Prick; whose lips but mine ought to raise it again for dear Gert? What intense felicity you gave me, my dear?" as he placed himself kneeling on the couch so as to bring his affair into position for her to take it into her mouth, which she did with great avidity, her hands gently holding back the foreskin and caressing his hairy balls, as first giving a good ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... accepted his attention with lazy amusement; it was true that she had suddenly and audaciously left him on the borders of the McKinstry woods in a way that might have seemed rude and abrupt to any escort less invincibly good-humored than Uncle Ben, but none of these things marred his fatuous felicity. It is even probable that in his gratuitous belief that his timid attentions had been too marked and impulsive, he attributed Cressy's flight to a maidenly coyness that pleasurably increased his admiration for her and his confidence in himself. In his abstraction ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... like that of a princess giving audience, Clavering reflected, a manner enhanced by her slight accent and profound repose, the negligent lifting of her hand to be kissed; and as she stood graciously accepting their expressions of unhoped for felicity she looked less American, more European, than ever. But Clavering wondered for the first time if that perfect repose were merely the expression of a profound indifference, almost apathy . . . but no, she was too young for that, however the war may have seared ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... which seem as defects in her polity, are the very things which make me tremble. The states of the Christian world have grown up to their present magnitude in a great length of time, and by a great variety of accidents. They have been improved to what we see them with greater or less degrees of felicity and skill. Not one of them has been formed upon a regular plan or with any unity of design. As their constitutions are not systematical, they have not been directed to any PECULIAR end, eminently distinguished, and superseding every other. The objects which they embrace are of the greatest possible ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... all that was beautiful, whether in prose or verse, in Greek, Latin, or English. His reading was wide and thorough. Nobody knew Burke so well, and he had a contagious enthusiasm for Parliamentary oratory. In composition he had a curiosa felicitas in the strictest meaning of the phrase; for his felicity was the product of care. To go through a prize-exercise with him was a real joy, so generous was his appreciation, so fastidious his taste, so dexterous his substitution of the telling for the ineffective word, and so palpably genuine his enjoyment ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... promise of his two sons, Symmachus and Boethius; happy also in the society of a refined circle of friends. Noble, wealthy, accomplished, universally esteemed for his virtues, high in the favour of the Gothic King, he appeared to all men a signal example of the union of merit and good fortune. His felicity seemed to culminate in the year 522 A.D., when, by special and extraordinary favour, his two sons, young as they were for so exalted an honour, were created joint Consuls and rode to the senate-house ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... of the world, And measure every wandering planet's course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving as the restless spheres, Will us to wear ourselves, and never rest, Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, That perfect bliss and sole felicity, The sweet ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... said Mr. Gorse, and nodded toward me. I was impressed by the felicity with which a cartoonist of the Pilot had once caricatured him by the use of curved lines. The circle of the heavy eyebrows ended at the wide nostrils; the mouth was a crescent, but bowed downwards; the heavy shoulders were rounded. Indeed, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... In his essay, "Shakespeare Once More" (Works, in, pp. 36-42), published in 1868, Mr. Lowell has treated of Shakespeare's style in a passage of extraordinary felicity and depth ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... fellows, who had outlived their days of romantic sentiment, if they ever had any, yet to whom the Queen had to declare her love for her cousin Albert, and her intention to marry him, being convinced, she said, that this union would "secure her domestic felicity, and serve the interests of her country." It was a little hard, yet a certain bracelet, containing a certain miniature, which she wore on her arm, gave her "courage," she said. Then came a yet more trying ordeal, for a modest young lady—the announcement of her intended marriage, in a speech from ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... hours or minutes—a day of uninterrupted felicity. The whole house greeted him warmly, a bright fire burned in the salon, flowers bloomed at the windows, and Cecile and the doctor made him feel how dear he was to them both. After they had dined, M. Rivals examined ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... it was only necessary for him to send his quartermasters to chalk up the billets for his soldiers to conquer the country. Cf. "The History of Henry VII," by Lord Bacon: "King Charles had conquered the realm of Naples, and lost it again, in a kind of a felicity of a dream. He passed the whole length of Italy without resistance: so that it was true what Pope Alexander was wont to say: That the Frenchmen came into Italy with chalk in their hands, to mark up their lodgings, rather than with swords ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... solid and natural, as well as delicate, so his design is always to bring to light something useful and ornamental; whence his character is the reverse to theirs, who have eminent abilities in insignificant knowledge, and a great felicity in finding out trifles. He is no less industrious to search out the merit of an author, than sagacious in discerning his errors and defects; and takes more pleasure in commending the beauties, than ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... in modern verse with Homer's serene perfection; it would take, perhaps, a greater mind than Bach's to employ all the resources of modern music with his glorious ease and directness. And greater minds than those of Bach and Homer the world has not often the felicity ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... organized, by both foreign governments and our own, to encourage the production of works of art, which the producing nations, so far from intending to be their "joy for ever," only hope to sell as soon as possible. Yet the motto was chosen with uncomprehended felicity: for there never was, nor can be, any essential beauty possessed by a work of art, which is not based on the conception of its honoured permanence, and local influence, as a part of appointed and precious furniture, either in the cathedral, the house, or the joyful thoroughfare, of nations which ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... noxious to the body, and poison the sensitive life; these poison the soul, corrupt our posterity, ensnare our children, destroy the vitals of our happiness, our future felicity, and contaminate ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... which depend upon individual will and feeling, rather than upon a broad subject founded in nature and tractable by the largest laws of art. Hence, though not irrespective of laws, such works depend upon instinctive felicity—felicity in the choice of topics and the mode of execution, felicity both in doing and in leaving undone: this high and perfect excellence, perhaps, In Memoriam has not reached, though omission and revision might lead very ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... of greater happiness, or one which opened more brilliant prospects for futurity. De Courcy conveyed his bride immediately to a favorite estate, which he possessed in Provence, whither I was permitted to accompany them; and six months glided away, in the full enjoyment of that felicity which their romantic hopes had anticipated. Winter approached, and your father was importuned to visit the metropolis, and introduce his young and beautiful wife to the gay and elevated station which she ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... lives with misery? Be mine, lovely Violetta, and in the fastnesses of my own good Calabrian castle we will defy their vengeance and policy. Their disappointment shall furnish merriment for my vassals, and our felicity shall make the happiness of thousands. I affect no disrespect for the dignity of the councils, nor any indifference to that I lose, but to me art thou far more precious than the horned bonnet itself, with all ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... over a horse's tail. There is another in the middle distance, all gone to seed at the prow, with its gondolier emaciated into an oar, at the stern; then there is a Church of the Salute, and a Ducal Palace,—in which I beg you to observe all the felicity and dexterity of modern cheap engraving; finally, over the Ducal Palace there is something, I know not in the least what meant for, like an umbrella dropping out of a balloon, which is the ornamental letter T. Opposite this ornamental design, there is an engraving of two young ladies and ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... demanded of the Pharisees, when the that port or passage, which the divine | kingdom of God should come, he Majesty (who is unchangeable in his ways) | answered them and said, The kingdom doth infallibly continue and observe; that | of God cometh not with observation. is the felicity wherewith he hath blessed | an humility of mind, such as rather | see Novum Organum. I, 93; A.L. Sp. laboureth to spell and so by degrees to | III, 301,I, 29-302; also N.O. I, 129 read in the volumes ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... imperilling the great stabilities of truth; so that in their thought, as in Nature, the dust-particle shall float and fly with the wind, and yet gravitation shall hold particle and world in firm, soft, imperial possession. And next to these are the inventors, guided by a fine felicity of intelligence to special discoveries and admirable combinations, often surpassing in this way the masters themselves. And then come the wise and great scholars, who learn quickly what has been discovered, and follow the masters not by sight ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the vocal arts, but also to all students of fundamental pedagogical principle. In its field I know of no work presenting in an equally happy combination philosophic insight, scientific breadth, moral loftiness of tone, and literary felicity of exposition.—William F. Warren, D.D., LL.D., of ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... "it would give me the profoundest felicity, the most unbounded satisfaction; but in these worn-out habiliments, in these deteriorated garments, it would not be possible, it would not be fitting that I should officiate in service of One whom, for respect, we shall not name. ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... of Lucrezia and happy in my love, to give her up appeared to me a shameful action. In order to insure the happiness of my future life, I was beginning to be the executioner of my present felicity, and the tormentor of my heart. I revolted against such a necessity which I judged fictitious, and which I could not admit unless I stood guilty of vileness before the tribunal of my own reason. I thought that Father Georgi, if he wished to forbid my visiting ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of our novelists to day. He is most exquisitely alive to the fine spirit of comedy. He has a prose style of wonderful beauty, conscientiousness and simplicity.... He has the inexorable conscience of the artist, he always gives us his best; and that best is a style of great purity and felicity and sweetness, a style without strain and yet with an enviable aptness for the sudden inevitable word.... And yet that care, that deliberation ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... sweet words,' replied Ferdinand. 'If my heart can make you happy, felicity shall ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... acknowledged, in mournful language, to be a hopeless task. A cloud of sadness shades the brow of Plato as he contemplates the fallen state of man. In the "Phaedrus" he describes, in gorgeous imagery, the purity, and beauty, and felicity of the soul in its anterior and primeval state, when, charioteering through the highest arch of heaven in company with the Deity, it contemplated the divine justice and beauty; but "this happy life," says he, "we forfeited by our transgression." Allured by strange affections, our souls forgot the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... wished to live, for as soon as that new Monferrand ministry should have fallen beneath the interpellation which he already contemplated, his own turn would surely come: he would take the reins of power in hand, abolish the guillotine and decree justice and perfect felicity. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... for your sake, and for many of our friends, have liked an odd hundred thousand pounds [by a Spanish war]; but, never mind. If they give me the choice of staying a few months longer, it will be very handsome; and, for the sake of others, we would give up very much of our own felicity." ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... deliverance. Down the hill he went singing and dancing. If mere battle with storm was a delight to the boy, what would not a mortal tussle with the elements for the love of men be? The thought itself was a heavenly felicity, and made ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... all pleasures that are attended with repentance. She allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful, that is not master of himself;—and this is the felicity of human life; a felicity that can neither be ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... of Daniel Maclise, "executed by order of the Commissioners", and called The Spirit of Chivalry. It may be left an open question, whether or no this allegorical order on the part of the Commissioners, displays any uncommon felicity of idea. We rather think not; and are free to confess that we should like to have seen the Commissioners' notion of the Spirit of Chivalry stated by themselves, in the first instance, on a sheet of foolscap, as the ground-plan of a model cartoon, with all the commissioned proportions ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... my felicity in your general saying, good, or well, etc., were a weakness which the better sort of you might worthily contemn, if not absolutely ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... rather be A goad, a scourge, for their felicity! Let suffering purify each Christian soul, Cross, rack, and flame but lead them to their goal; What here they lose—in Heaven an hundredfold they find. Be cruel,—persecute!—and so alone be kind! My words thou canst not read; thine eyes are blinded here, Wait the unveiling ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... hair, the white skin, and the graceful gait of his family; he had their delicate extremities, their long taper fingers with the inward curve, and that peculiar distinction of shapeliness of the wrist and instep, that supple felicity of line, which is as sure a sign of race in men as in horses. Adroit and alert in all bodily exercises, and an excellent shot, he handled arms like a St. George, he was a paladin on horseback. In short, he gratified the pride which parents take in their children's appearance; a pride founded, for ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... attractive than Joseph Addison; few men more eminently representative, not only of literature as a profession, but of literature as an art. It has happened more than once that literary gifts of a high order have been lodged in very frail moral tenements; that taste, feeling, and felicity of expression have been divorced from general intellectual power, from intimate acquaintance with the best in thought and art, from grace of manner and dignity of life. There have been writers of force and originality who failed to attain ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... an exact and extensive descriptive language for botany has been executed with a degree of skill and felicity, which, before it was attained, could hardly have been dreamed of as attainable. Every part of a plant has been named; and the form of every part, even the most minute, has had a large assemblage of descriptive ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... It was his peculiar felicity, not only to be born in a country of liberty, but in an age when all scholastic impertinences were banished from the world. Reason alone was cultivated, and mankind could only be ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... style, it is true, he took great pains, and in his earlier works, I am told, sometimes altered the proofs sent from the printer so largely that they might be said to be written over Yet he attained no special felicity, variety, or compass of expression. His style, however, answered his purpose; it has defects, but it is manly and clear, and stamps on the mind of the reader the impression he desired to convey. I am not sure that some of the very defects of Cooper's novels do not add, by a ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... become the appointed and accepted portion of unnumbered multitudes of innocent persons, inhabiting the districts of the world which, of all others, as it seemed, were best instructed in the laws of civilization, and most richly invested with the honor, and indulged in the felicity, of peace. ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... demoralizing influence; mothers, wives, and daughters have often, in the lonely hours of midnight, sat up with a scanty light and a dying fire awaiting the late return of a son, a husband, or a brother; with many a sigh they would trace the ruin of their domestic felicity and the wreck of their family to some lodge of ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... caricature which the representation of feeling in sculpture is apt to display. What time and accident, its centuries of darkness under the furrows of the "little Melian farm," have done with singular felicity of touch for the Venus of Melos, fraying its surface and softening its lines, so that some spirit in the thing seems always on the point of breaking out, as though [68] in it classical sculpture had advanced already one step into the mystical Christian ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... and Germany lately. Everywhere have I heard your views and your admirable essay canvassed—the views of course often dissented from, according to the special bias of the speaker—but the work, its honesty of purpose, grandeur of conception, felicity of illustration, and courageous exposition, always referred to in terms of the highest admiration. And among your warmest friends no one rejoiced more heartily in the just appreciation ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... days here between this and Christmas. Just at present I am not My own master, having stepped into the middle of a sudden match in my own family. Lord Hertford is going to marry his third daughter to Lord Villiers, son of Lady Grandison, the present wife of Sir Charles Montagu. We are all felicity, and in a round of dinners. I am this minute returned from Beaumont-lodge, at Old Windsor, where Sir Charles Grandison lives. I will let you know, if the papers do not, when our ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Lilliputian histories of Goody Two Shoes, Giles Gingerbread, Tommy Trip, &c., &c., are remarkable proofs of the benevolent minds of the projectors of this plan of instruction, and respectable instances of the accommodation of superior talents to the feeble intellects of infantine felicity." ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous
... intrusion, and subdued the strongest efforts of his fortitude. Julia too, his beloved sister—unprotected—unfriended—might, even at the moment he lamented her, be sinking under sufferings dreadful to humanity. The airy schemes he once formed of future felicity, resulting from the union of two persons so justly dear to him—with the gay visions of past happiness—floated upon his fancy, and the lustre they reflected served only to heighten, by contrast, the obscurity and gloom of his present views. He had, however, a new ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... a sailor's daughter yourself, you know Jack's account of his wife's domestic creed! 'A good fire, a clean hearth, the children abed, and the husband at sea,' is supposed to be the climax of felicity." ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... relations, herself unrelated, he expresses the Minerva side of feminine nature. It was not by chance that Goethe gave her this name. Macaria, the daughter of Hercules, who offered herself as a victim for the good of her country, was canonized by the Greeks, and worshipped as the Goddess of true Felicity. Goethe has embodied this Felicity as the Serenity that arises from Wisdom, a Wisdom such as the Jewish wise man venerated, alike instructed in the designs of heaven, and the methods necessary to carry them ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... "Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day. Thus if you teach a poor young man to shave himself and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... voice from the dramatic to the descriptive tone was unfailing and extraordinary. This was perfection of art. Nor was the evenness of the variety less striking. Every character was indicated with the same felicity. Of course the previous image in the hearer's mind must be considered in estimating the effect. The reader does not create the character, the writer has done that; and now he refreshes it into unwonted vividness, ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... popular, for the purpose of getting into Places of Honour, and Emoluments, and by these means of gratifying hereafter the noble Passion—Family Pride. Others are so inchanted with the Musick of the sound, that they conceive it to be supreme felicity. This is indeed Vanity of Vanities, and if such deluded Men ever come to their Senses, they will find it to be vexation of Spirit. When they reflect on their own folly, and injustice in having received ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... with open mouth, looking after the retreating young couple, while Miss Mary told their history; but he did not hear beyond the announcement of the reverend gentleman's marriage; his head was swimming with felicity. After this rencontre he began to walk double quick towards the place of his destination—and yet they were too soon (for he was in a great tremor at the idea of a meeting for which he had been longing any time these ten years)—through the Brompton lanes, and entering at the little ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the attempt to actualise the transcendental religious ideal may, when pursued with ardour, very easily conflict with the morality which makes domestic felicity its end. And again—as we see in the anti-militarist movement in France, in the history of the early Christian Church, in the case of the Quakers and in the teachings of Tolstoy—it may quite well set itself in conflict with ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... the Emirs and Captains of the host; moreover he distributed alms to the poor and needy and set free all the prisoners. The whole world rejoiced in the coming of Kamar al-Zaman to the throne, blessing him and wishing him endurance of glory and prosperity, renown and felicity; and, as soon as he became King, he remitted the customs-dues and released all men who remained in gaol. Thus he abode a long while, ordering himself worthily towards his lieges; and he lived with his two wives in peace, happiness, constancy and content, lying ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... these, that of Salisbury is chief, rising 424 feet from the ground, admirably designed in every detail. It was not completed till the middle of the fourteenth century, but most fortunately carries out with great felicity the spirit of the earlier style in which it was begun. Lichfield and Chichester have somewhat similar central spires, but less happy in proportion and detail than the beautiful ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... social wit requires natural humour and refinement Here, however, (as well as in the case of Plautus and Terence,) we do not possess a single fragment of any work whose Greek original is extant, to enable us to judge of the accuracy and general felicity of the copy; but a speech of considerable length from Attius' Prometheus Unbound, is in no respect unworthy of—Aeschylus, and the versification, also, is much more careful [Footnote: In what metres could these tragedians have translated the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... contemplation, and to recommend to your frequent review, some sentiments, which are the result of much reflection, of no inconsiderable observation, and which appear to me all important to the permanency of your felicity as a people. These will be offered to you with the more freedom, as you can only see in them the disinterested warnings of a parting friend, who can possibly have no personal motives to bias his counsel. Nor ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... devotion of his life, and the sweet calmness of his death. His coffin, his shroud, his grave, his pale form were reposing in lonely silence beneath the bosom of the earth; but the spirit had departed on its journey of ages, and she doubted not its perfect felicity. As often as she repaired to the spot where he was interred, and kneeled by his tomb and breathed forth her humble supplications, she found the sweet assurance that beyond the grave she would see her earthly parent, ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... what the profession or calling of these Persians—whether they were lawyers or lawgivers, grammarians or warriors—they all, or almost all, adored verbal felicity and tried their hands at verse. Poetry may be called the gold ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... is the star-track; and these are they who in the world offered no prayers and chanted no liturgies. Through other works they have attained felicity.'" ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... of every epoch and all civilizations is to find a balance between the natural aspiration for freedom that is none other than the need of personal felicity—a need as lively and profound in the heart of woman as of man—and the supreme necessity for a discipline without which the race, the state, and the family run the gravest danger. Yet this problem to-day, in the unmeasured exhilaration with which riches and power ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... splendid cavalcade issue from the portals of the fairy palace—the gallant jinn-born cavaliers, mounted on superb steeds with gorgeous housings, who accompany him to his father's capital. But alas! the brightest sky is sooner or later overcast—human felicity is—etc., etc. The old king's mind is poisoned against his noble son by the whisperings of a malignant and envious minister—a snake in the grass—a fly in the ointment of Prince Ahmad's beatitude! And to think of the old witch gaining access to the fairy palace— it was nothing less ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Scripture that before the Fall, the state of our first parents was a state of unmingled happiness. Now, it is the very nature of joy to give utterance to its emotions. Happiness must have its expression. And thus it may well be supposed that man in his primal felicity would seek to express, by every conceivable mode, the love, gratitude, and joy which absorbed every affection ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... this, as a further charm to exorcise the portent, the dance called Sambaso, which is still performed as a prelude to theatrical exhibitions by an actor dressed up as a venerable old man, emblematic of long life and felicity, was danced on a plot of turf in front of the Temple Kofukuji. By these means the smoke was dispelled, and the drama was originated. The story is to be found in the Zoku Nihon Ki, or ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... felicity consists Not in exterior fortunes.... Sacred felicity doth ne'er extend Beyond itself.... The swelling of an outward fortune can Create a prosperous, not a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... aspect of end gives rise to other vices: because when an end is very desirable, the result is that through desire thereof man sets about doing many things either good or evil. Now the most desirable end is happiness or felicity, which is the last end of human life, as stated above (I-II, Q. 1, AA. 4, 7, 8): wherefore the more a thing is furnished with the conditions of happiness, the more desirable it is. Also one of the conditions of happiness is that it be self-sufficing, else ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... indisputable by the experience of the centuries. And that truth is this: so long as a man has life, there is no need for him to despair. He may pass from the greatest misery to the greatest joy, from the greatest misfortune to the highest felicity. Take courage and, as though you were this very day beginning to recognize the value of life, strive at every moment to make ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... with the deepest sense of your goodness to me, and with the most heart-affecting gratitude, that from the happy, the thrice happy hour, that you so generously made me yours, till this moment, you have not left one thing, on my own part, to wish for, but the continuance and increase of your felicity, and that I might be still worthier of the unexampled goodness, tenderness, and condescension, wherewith you ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... I was hoping that she would drop the cake into my basket in spite of my protest, not only sparing my pride by an act of magnanimity, but allowing me at the same time the felicity of munching the plums on my way back to the Old Market. But the next moment, to my surprise and indignation, she took a generous bite of the very dainty she had offered me, making, while she ate it, provoking faces ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... if food is plenty where you live,—for that, you know, regulates matrimony,—you may be expecting to find yourself a grandfather some fine morning; a kind of domestic felicity that gives one a cool shiver of delight to think of, as among ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... 313.).—The author of the very clever series of papers in the New Monthly Magazine, to which MR. BEDE refers, is Mr. Leigh Hunt. The particular one in which Swift's Latin-English is quoted, has been republished in a charming little volume, full of original thinking, expressed with the felicity of genius, called Table Talk, and published in 1851 by Messrs. Smith and Elder, ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... mind,' she said to Marion. 'I know it's very shocking, but I've had a tiring day and an excellent tea, and oh, this heather is delicious to lie on!' She stretched herself at full length as she spoke. 'I really must smoke, just to arrive at perfect felicity for once in my life. How happy you people ought to be who always have in ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... same time, wherein our arts were endowed by God with the greatest felicity that they could possibly enjoy, there flourished one Guglielmo da Marcilla, a Frenchman, who, from his constant residence in Arezzo, and from the affection that he bore to that city, may be said to have chosen it for his country, insomuch that all men ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... bright and ready wit. There is a pretty little story told by Mrs. Ellis in her book about Mrs. Barbauld, how one day, when Dr. Aikin and a friend 'were conversing on the passions,' the Doctor observes that joy cannot have place in a state of perfect felicity, since it supposes ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... expressed his desire to see an union accomplished between England and Scotland. He was convinced that nothing could more conduce to the safety and happiness of both. He should think it his peculiar felicity if, before the close of his reign, some happy expedient could be devised for making the two kingdoms one; and he, in the most earnest manner, recommended the question to the consideration of the Houses. It was resolved that the message should betaken into consideration ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... invalids have not seemed to sustain so close a relation to their bodies as my mind does to my body. Their powers seem to have been more purely psychic. Look at Stevenson—almost bedridden all his life, yet behold the felicity of his work! How completely his mind must have been emancipated from the infirmities of his body! It is clearly not thus with me. My mind is like a flame that depends entirely upon the good combustion going on in the body. Hence, I can never write in the afternoon, ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... probably no writer equally concise. This perfection of style is the principal merit of the Paradiso, which, as I have already remarked, is by no means equal in other respects to the two preceding parts of the poem. The force and felicity of the diction, however, irresistibly attract the reader through the theological lectures and the sketches of ecclesiastical biography, with which this division of the work too much abounds. It may seem almost absurd to quote particular specimens of an excellence which ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... paradoxes of old philosophy, supported by naked reason, and the reward of mortal felicity; but labour in the ethics of faith, built upon heavenly assistance, and the happiness of both beings. Understand the rules, but swear not unto the doctrines of Zeno or Epicurus. Look beyond Antonius, and terminate not thy morals in Seneca or Epictetus. ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... elocution which would be incongruous in a drama approaching more closely to the evolutions of ordinary experience, become, in the ideal drama, artistic modes of expression; and it is in these that Ristori displays a fine selective instinct, and a rare felicity of organisation." ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... All truths, however, that are essential to faith, 'honestly' interpreted; all that are important to human conduct, under every diversity of circumstance, are manifest as a blazing star. The promises also of felicity to the righteous, in the future world, though the precise nature of that felicity may not be defined, are illustrated by every image that can swell the imagination: while the misery of the 'lost', in its unutterable intensity, though the language that describes it is ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... becoming leaders in the state and in the church, abounding, too, in riches and living in luxury and magnificence, and on the other hand sees worshipers of God despised and poor. A worshiper of self and of nature believes that standing and riches are the greatest and the one felicity possible, thus felicity itself. If he has some thought of God as a result of worship begun in childhood, he calls them divine blessings, and as long as he is not elated by them he thinks that there is a God and worships Him. But in the worship there lurks a desire, of ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... inexhaustible fund of melody of the noblest order; an almost unequaled command of musical expression; perfect power over all the resources of his science; the faculty of wielding huge masses of tone with perfect ease and felicity; and he was without rival in the sublimity of ideas. The problem which he so successfully solved in the oratorio was that of giving such dramatic force to the music, in which he clothed the sacred texts, as to be able to dispense with all scenic and stage ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... his life was happy, though he enjoyed it only thirty-eight years, and though it was not without its disappointments and rebuffs,—being a Christianised Jew, he was acceptable to neither the Jews nor the Gentiles. None the less, Mendelssohn's life was, as human lives go, one of complete felicity. ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... almost of sullenness. Rolfe had never seen her look thus, but it confirmed a suspicion which he had harboured concerning her. Why, he hardly knew—for she always presented a face of amiability, and talked in gentle, womanly tones—doubt as to Abbott's domestic felicity haunted his mind. Perhaps he now saw her, for the first time, as she commonly appeared to her husband—slightly peevish, unwilling to be disturbed, impatient when things ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... the court by the fall of Queen Anne as a worldly Lucifer, not content with her estate to be true unto her creator, making her his queen, but affected unlawful concupiscence, fell suddenly out of that felicity wherein she was set, irrecoverably with all those that consented unto her lust, whereof I am glad that ye were never; and, therefore, now welcome and never so welcome, here is the end of my tale.' And then he ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... to press too hard on these deceits and illusions of Nature, which are inseparable from our condition, and looking at age under an aspect more conformed to the common sense, if the question be the felicity of age, I fear the first popular judgments will be unfavorable. From the point of sensuous experience, seen from the streets and markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate of age is low, melancholy, and skeptical. Frankly face the facts, and see the result. Tobacco, coffee, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... treat the momentous and difficult questions he undertook to discuss in these lectures; whilst the remarkable clearness of his views, his brilliant imagination, and an extraordinary affluence of language and felicity of expression, both enlighten the understanding and gratify the most cultivated taste. Professor Mitchell did more than any other man to popularize the science of Astronomy; and the use he has made of it in defence of Christianity seems a fitting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... where he routed the French and drove them off the field pell-mell, he sings, as Carlyle says, "with a wild burst of spiritual enthusiasm, the charms of the rearward part of certain men; and what a royal ecstatic felicity there is in indisputable survey of the same." "He rises," adds Carlyle, "to the heights of Anti-Biblical profanity, quoting Moses on the Hill of Vision." To Soubise and Company the poet ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... is good for contemplation, my dear. 'Tis past, and there's the comfort! You did well to be out of that herring-barrel, Mr. Colesworth. I hadn't the courage, or I would have burst from it to take a ducking with felicity. I haven't thrown up my soul; that's the most I can say. I thought myself nigh on it once or twice. And an amazing kind steward it was, or I'd have counted the man for some one else. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the latter proscribed, might warrant a presumption that they were happy under the one, and kindly treated by the other: for though individuals may sometimes persevere in affections or habits from which they derive neither felicity nor advantage, whole bodies of men can scarcely be supposed eager to risk their lives in defence of privileges that have oppressed them, or of a religion from which they ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... me the opportunity of enjoying this picture of domestic felicity. While I am on the subject of the Emperor's ailments, I will say a few words concerning the most serious which he endured, with the exception of ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... hardly to have been expected from the most discreet and sedate statesman of the age. Still more remarkable is the careless effusion of his tenderness, and the brotherly interest which he takes in his friend's domestic felicity. When an heir is born to Bentinck, "he will live, I hope," says William, "to be as good a fellow as you are; and, if I should have a son, our children will love each other, I hope, as we have done." [211] Through life he continues to regard ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... kindness, courtesy, and justice, which are the safeguards of honor and the tokens of mutual respect between man and man. This last there must be if men are to go forward together, prosper in one another's company, find strength in the bonds of mutual service, and experience a common felicity in the relationship between the leader and ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... satisfy the eye alone with the other; the nerves which carry the sensation to the brain, flutter with the news, and knock at the house of mind for explanation. We do not anticipate being hurried into any extravaganza about the rural felicity of green trees, clinking cowbells, cane chairs, and cigars, when we recall to the trainer of surburban vines the harmony, the analogy, the relationship, which he must have observed between sounds and colors in nature's album ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of people bless the happy occasion of your excellency's return to enjoy private and domestic felicity, permit us, sir, the members of Lodge No. 39, lately established in Alexandria, to assure your excellency, that we, as a mystical body, rejoice in having a brother so near us, whose preeminent benevolence ...
— Washington's Masonic Correspondence - As Found among the Washington Papers in the Library of Congress • Julius F. Sachse
... his Son, the Holy Spirit is the unique organ by which God wills to communicate to man his own life, the supernatural life, the divine life—that is to say, his holiness, his power, his love, his felicity. To this end the Son works outwardly, the Holy ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... separation and widowhood until they meet again in that more perfect state of being, where soul will dwell with soul in blissful communion, and there will be neither death, nor absence, nor any thing else to interrupt our felicity.' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... contains more of the true old music and genuine old songs of Scotland, than any other collection with which I am acquainted. Burns gathered oral airs, and fitted them with words of mirth or of woe, of tenderness or of humour, with unexampled readiness and felicity; he eked out old fragments and sobered down licentious strains so much in the olden spirit and feeling, that the new cannot be distinguished from the ancient; nay, he inserted lines and half lines, with such skill and nicety, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... had just been made an officer put on his handsome uniform for the first time; I have seen the young bride in her wedding dress, and the princess girl-wife happy in her gorgeous robes; but never have I seen a felicity equal to that of a little girl of four years old, whom I watched this evening. She had received a new blue dress, and a new pink hat, the splendid attire had just been put on, and all were calling for a candle, for my rays, shining in through the windows of the room, were not bright enough for ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... murmured he, "To what unhoped contingency Am I owing for this felicity, A visit thus unexpected?" Then they held their cards before his eyes, And he saw, to his infinite surprise, That some sad dog had taken a rise On him, and his hungry friends likewise, And whom he half suspected; But there was Sim, Of morals dim, With a face as long, ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... both may live, strong as your love may endure, never again shall you see her alone, never more shall she be folded to your breast! For ever, I will stand a barrier between you: so shall your days consume away in the torturing desire for a felicity you ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... sheep, &c., to look after." This reflection is accompanied with a sigh when they reflect on their own hard lot. Now the fact of the matter is, these travellers know nothing about it. They may print as much as they like about the pastoral felicity of the simplicity of Mongol life; it is all humbug. Last night, two Mongols whom I know well, a petty chief named "Myriad Joy" and his scribe named "Mahabul" (I can't translate this last), came into my room, and we had a tea-spree there and then. The two have been for fifteen days in Peking on ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... what Moses had begun, wished that the Divinity should be the object not only of our fear and veneration but also of our love and devotion. Thus he made men happy by anticipation, and gave them here on earth a foretaste of future felicity. For there is nothing so agreeable as loving that which is worthy of love. Love is that mental state which makes us take pleasure in the perfections of the object of our love, and there is nothing more perfect than God, nor any greater delight than in him. To love him ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... productions enrich the present collection, "As respects these poems," says Mr. Barham's biographer, "remarkable as they have been pronounced for the wit and humor which they display, their distinguishing attractions lies in the almost unparalleled flow and felicity of the versification. Popular phrases, sentences the most prosaic, even the cramped technicalities of legal diction, and snatches from well-nigh every language, are wrought in with an apparent absence of all art and effort that surprises, pleases, and ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... nameless feelings of delight, when I found myself in the embraces of my father, my mother, and my two brothers? My dear sister Giuseppina was not then with them; she was fulfilling her duties at Chieri; but on hearing of my felicity, she hastened to stay for a few days with our family, to make it complete. Restored to these five long- sighed-for, and beloved objects of my tenderness,—I was, and I still am, one of the ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... feeding. And then—and then it is Chloe, in the dark, stark awake, and Strephon snoring unheeding; or vice versa, 'tis poor Strephon that has married a heartless jilt, and awoke out of that absurd vision of conjugal felicity, which was to last for ever, and is over like any other dream. One and other has made his bed, and so must lie in it, until that final day when life ends, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... enwrapped in feather, Harbinger of pleasant weather, Sing softly unto me. Your tuneful notes at morn and even Are antepasts of joys in heaven That bring felicity. ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... foreheads, were very fine, and that the ice and the boys sliding were also very fine? To such a picture the "Deserted Village" bears a great resemblance. It is made up of incongruous parts. The village in its happy days is a true English village. The village in its decay is an Irish village. The felicity and the misery which Goldsmith has brought close together belong to two different countries; and to two different stages in the progress of society. He had assuredly never seen in his native island such ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... present, to offer to your solemn contemplation, and to recommend to your frequent review, some sentiments which are the result of much reflection, of no inconsiderable observation, and which appear to me all-important to the permanency of your felicity as a people. These will be offered to you with the more freedom, as you can only see in them the disinterested warnings of a parting friend, who can possibly have no personal motive to bias his counsels. Nor can I forget, as an encouragement to it, your indulgent reception of my sentiment on a former ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... after going through so much. Very different from certain people, whom the habit of misfortune renders less exacting, Simon had reckoned upon happiness as complete as had been his misery. His wife and child were the sole, indispensable conditions of this felicity, and, had the mother survived her daughters, she would have no more replaced them in his eyes than they did her. Weakness or avarice of the heart, so it was; we insist upon this singularity, because the consequences of these incessant and painful regrets exercised ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... "knows the abstrusest problems of Philosophy;" says admiring Toland: much knowledge everywhere exact, and handled as by an artist and queen; for "her wit is inimitable," "her justness of thought, her delicacy of expression," her felicity of utterance and management, are great. Foreign courtiers call her "the Republican Queen." She detects you a sophistry at one glance; pierces down direct upon the weak point of an opinion: never in my whole life did I, Toland, come upon a ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... give themselves unto prayer, with patience to bear the cross now laid upon them for their trial, with boldness to confess the truth before their adversaries, and with an undoubted hope to wait for the crown and reward of eternal felicity. But when he perceived his adversaries lay wait for him, he went into Kent, and with a little packet of laces, pins, points, &c. he travelled from village to village, selling such things, and in this manner subsisted himself, his wife, ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... often envied; and that dulness is frequently beyond the reach of reproof. "We might even guess, without the authority of Pope, backed by Bacon, that there are some beauties which cannot be taught by method, but must be reached "by a kind of felicity." It is not the less interesting to notice Pope's skill in polishing these rather rusty sayings into the appearance of novelty. In a familiar line Pope gives us the view which he would himself ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... superstition, so general that it may be called proper to mankind in every climate; so deeply rooted also in human belief, that it is found to survive in states of society during which all other fictions of the same order are entirely dismissed from influence. Mr. Crabbe, with his usual felicity, has called the belief in ghosts "the last lingering fiction ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... foregoing character. He is a plain, unaffected, unsophisticated English gentleman. He is a person of great reading too and considerable information, but he makes very little display of these, unless it be to quote Shakespear, which he does often with extreme aptness and felicity. Sir Francis is one of the most pleasing speakers in the House, and is a prodigious favourite of the English people. So he ought to be: for he is one of the few remaining examples of the old English understanding and old English character. All that ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... under bombardment; every twenty-four hours thousands upon thousands of human beings were dying.... And he was not reading anything, not wishing to know anything. He was continuing his existence as though he were living in a paradisiacal felicity. Sometimes, while waiting for Freya, his memory would gloat over her wonderful physical charm, the refinements and fresh sensations which his passion was enjoying; at other times, the actual embrace with its ecstasy blotted out and suppressed ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... But our felicity was destined to be interrupted. The Shah was about to depart for his usual summer campaign, and, according to his wont, paid a round of visits to noblemen, thereby reaping for himself a harvest of presents. The physician, being reputed rich, was marked out as prey fit for the royal grasp. The news ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... teaches us, when in one of his letters to Nepos he accuses Caesar of cruelty, "For," says he, "felicity is nothing else but success in what is honourable;" or to define it in another way, "Felicity is fortune assisting good counsels, and he who is not guided by such cannot be happy. Therefore in wicked and impious designs such as those of ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... course, to a Himalayan Elysium, with its balls, picnics, and its flirtations, among which the leading lady of the piece is drawn to the brink of indiscretion, but steps happily back again into the secure haven of domestic felicity. A good deal of excellent light comedy and sparkling dialogue will always maintain for this novel a creditable place upon the Indian list; and as an indirect illustration of the social wall that separates ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... any case, is the felicity of the Oeil-de-Boeuf. Stinginess has fled from these royal abodes: suppression ceases; your Besenval may go peaceably to sleep, sure that he shall awake unplundered. Smiling Plenty, as if conjured by some enchanter, has returned; scatters ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... effect of emigration, if those that go away together settle on the same spot, and preserve their ancient union. But some relate that these adventurous visitants of unknown regions, after a voyage passed in dreams of plenty and felicity, are dispersed at last upon a Sylvan wilderness, where their first years must be spent in toil, to clear the ground which is afterwards to be tilled, and that the whole effect of their undertakings is only more fatigue ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... is my life, life is my loue, loue is my whole felicity, Loue is my sweete, sweete is my loue, 50 I am in loue, and ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... honour upon all the Emirs and Captains of the host; moreover he distributed alms to the poor and needy and set free all the prisoners. The whole world rejoiced in the coming of Kamar al-Zaman to the throne, blessing him and wishing him endurance of glory and prosperity, renown and felicity; and, as soon as he became King, he remitted the customs-dues and released all men who remained in gaol. Thus he abode a long while, ordering himself worthily towards his lieges; and he lived with his two wives in peace, happiness, constancy and content, lying the night with each of them in turn. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... is within bounds to say there was not a speech made in the House, that year, superior to this in clearness of statement, severity of criticism combined with soberness of style, or, what is most surprising, finish and correctness. In its close, clear argument, its felicity of illustration, its restrained yet burning earnestness, it belongs to precisely the same class of addresses as those which he made a dozen years later. The ordinary Congressman can never conclude inside the limits assigned ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... tired of the endless processions of cheerful, chattering gossipers that throng these courts and streets all day long, either; nor of the coarse-robed monks; nor of the "Asti" wines, which that old doctor (whom we call the Oracle,) with customary felicity in the matter of getting everything wrong, misterms "nasty." But ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... repeated action of leaders. These exaggerate the discontent; they persuade the discontented that the government is the sole cause of all the trouble, especially of the prevailing dearth, and assure men that the new system proposed by them will engender an age of felicity. These ideas germinate, propagating themselves by suggestion and contagion, and the moment arrives when the ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... Aphrodite" expresses this transient moment in the history of the Renaissance with more felicity. It would be impossible for any painter to design a more exquisitely outlined figure than that of his Venus, who, with no covering but her golden hair, is wafted to the shore by zephyrs. Roses fall upon the ruffled waves, and the ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... shame!" returned he; "it endangers your character and your happiness. Yet again, do not suffer me to interfere, if the breaking with Lord Frederick can militate against your felicity." ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... of this delightful book has taken us back into the very pang and felicity of our first great passion—our idolatry, if you will—which we are proud here and now to re-avow. When was there ever a happier or more wholesome worship for a boy than the Stevenson mania on which so many of this generation grew up? We were the luckier ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... applieth his self to abstraction. That (condition) in which the mind, restrained by practice of abstraction, taketh rest, in which beholding self by self, one is gratified within self; in which one experienceth that highest felicity which is beyond the (sphere of the) senses and which the understanding (only) can grasp, and fixed on which one never swerveth from the truth; acquiring which one regards no other acquisition greater than it, and abiding in which one is never moved by even the heaviest sorrow; ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... some of our members remarked, no gas burners to heat and deteriorate the atmosphere, or to blacken the ceilings; and therefore, under the brilliant sparkle of glow lamps, the summit of such human felicity as is expected by a body of eighteen or twenty business men, intent on dispatching business and restoring the lost tissue by means of a nice little dinner afterward, ought, according to the calculations ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 • Various
... having established the felicity of all those who gained imaginary prizes, let us proceed to show that the equally numerous class who were presented with real blanks have not less reason to consider themselves happy. Most of us have cause to be thankful for that which is bestowed; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... were ranged around three courts, distinguished by their respective gates—Bab-i-Humayum, leading into the court of the Janissaries; Orta Kapu, the middle gate, giving access to the court in which the sultan held state receptions; and Bah-i-Saadet, the Gate of Felicity, leading to the more private apartments of the palace. From the reign of Abd-ul-Mejid, the seraglio has been practically abandoned, first for the palace of Dolmabagche on the shore near Beshiktash, and now for Yildiz Kiosk, on the heights above that suburb. It is, however, visited ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... enjoying Time after the Way a Man himself likes best in the World, without going so far as wholly to withdraw from it. I have often observed, there is not a Man breathing who does not differ from all other Men, as much in the Sentiments of his Mind, as the Features of his Face. The Felicity is, when anyone is so happy as to find out and follow what is the proper Bent of this Genius, and turn all his Endeavours to exert himself according as that prompts him. Instead of this, which is an innocent Method ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... than sleep, like love itself—for love is agreement of thought—"God listens to those who pray to him; let us eat and drink, and think of nothing," says the Arabian proverb. So they ate and drank—very moderate the drinking—and thought of nothing, and talked, which should be added to complete felicity. Not, of course, all of them always together, sometimes all four, sometimes Alere, Amadis, and Amaryllis, sometimes only the ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... might be the very self of everything. The misery of man is to be balked of the sight of essence, and to be stuffed with conjecture: but the supreme good is reality; the supreme beauty is reality; and all virtue and all felicity depend on this science of the real: for courage is nothing else than knowledge: the fairest fortune that can befall man, is to be guided by his daemon to that which is truly his own. This also is the essence of justice,—to attend every one his own; nay, ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... affirm that there was even one moment of that curiously short afternoon when she became wholly and frankly a Peavey. But more than once did this felicity seem to impend, and I suspected that she might even have been more graciously endowed than with a mere Peavey capacity in general. I believed that if she chose, she might almost become a Miss Caroline Peavey. This occurred to me ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... happy as a man can be when his Armada sails in with its sunlit canvas; and yet, had that Armada gone to pieces on a coast, I think my tears over its wreckage had been the deeper emotion. Our conception of disaster outrides by far our conception of felicity. ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... conceit or expression doth affect and amuse the fancy, stirring in it some wonder, and breeding some delight thereto. It raiseth admiration, as signifying a nimble sagacity of apprehension, a special felicity of invention, a vivacity of spirit, and reach of wit more than vulgar: it seeming to argue a rare quickness of parts, that one can fetch in remote conceits applicable; a notable skill, that he can dexterously accommodate them to the purpose before him; together with a lively ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... on earth, she may live for thee, and be an instrument of thy glory, by serving thee faithfully, and doing good in her generation; or else receive her into those heavenly habitations, where the souls of those who sleep in the Lord Jesus enjoy perpetual rest and felicity." ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... and swore never to forgive his ungrateful daughter in so realistic a manner that the audience forgot to wonder how he found it out. In due time the runaways returned from the notary's, overcame the old man's harshness, received the parental blessing, and the curtain fell on a scene of domestic felicity that delighted the freshmen ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... contracted under gloomy auspices in 1885, had resulted in nineteen years of unbroken felicity. Her praise has been written in love and reverence by her husband, who was her equal comrade. The union between them was so complete as to exclude the thought of gratitude, but whatever man can owe to a woman Sir Charles Dilke owed to his wife; and though ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... road, which is one of the best and securest in England, is covered at the entrance by a strong fort and a battery of guns to the seaward, just as at Tilbury, and which sufficiently defend the mouth of the river. And there is a particular felicity in this fortification, viz., that though the entrance or opening of the river into the sea is very wide, especially at high-water, at least two miles, if not three over; yet the Channel, which is deep, and in which the ships must keep and come to the harbour, is narrow, and lies ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... one, for such as thee Love loveth, and their hearts he knoweth well, Who hoard their moments of felicity, As misers hoard the medals that they tell, Lest on the earth but paupers they should dwell: "We hide our love to bless another day; The world is hard, youth ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... and wisest of them all profess'd To know this only, that he nothing knew; The next to fabling fell and smooth conceits, A third sort doubted all things, though plain sence; Others in vertue plac'd felicity, But vertue joyn'd with riches and long life, In corporal pleasure he, and careless ease, The Stoic last in Philosophic pride, 300 By him call'd vertue; and his vertuous man, Wise, perfect in himself, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... said, in his quiet tone and looking on the ground in the gloomy shed full of shadows, "that I was on the point of just attaining a great and wonderful felicity. Another drink, I felt, would do it. The others were holding out well with me, glass ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... Letters and Life, i. 268.) Raleigh and Jonson have both recorded their opinions of it, but no one has characterized it more happily than his friend, Sir Tobie Matthews, "A man so rare in knowledge, of so many several kinds, endued with the facility and felicity of expressing it all in so elegant, significant, so abundant, and yet so choice and ravishing a way of words, of metaphors, of allusions, as perhaps the world hath not seen since it was a world."—"Address to the Reader" prefixed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... on a stone in front of his own log-hut, with his arms resting on his knees, and an expression of supreme felicity on his yellow face, while a countryman, in what appeared a night-gown, and an immense straw hat, ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... hundred miles from our families in the howling wilderness, I believe few would have equally enjoyed the happiness we experienced. I often observed to my brother, 'You see now how little nature requires to be satisfied. Felicity, the companion of content, is rather found in our own breasts than in the enjoyment of external things; and I firmly believe it requires but a little philosophy to make a man happy in whatsoever state he is. This consists in a full resignation ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... on was too terrible—the contending powers too visibly in presence of each other, for the practical, conscientious Norse mind to be content with the puny godships of a Roman Olympus. Nectar, Sensuality, and Inextinguishable Laughter were elements of felicity too mean for the nobler atmosphere of their Walhalla; and to those active temperaments and healthy minds,—invigorated and solemnized by the massive mould of the scenery around them,—Strength, Courage, Endurance, and above all Self-sacrifice—naturally seemed more essential attributes ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... represent a state of social happiness totally inconsistent with the frailties and passions of human nature, and that it is worthy rather of the poet than the historian. In describing a scene of rural felicity like this, it is not improbable that his narrative has partaken of the warmth of feeling for which he was remarkable; but it comes much nearer the truth than is generally imagined. Tradition is fresh and positive in the various parts of the United States where they were located respecting their ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... threw her arms round me, and kissed me repeatedly, trembling with emotion, and shedding many tears of joy. My father's feelings were scarcely less excited. He seemed to have risen from the lowest depth of misery to the summit of felicity, and esteemed himself more fortunate than even Indra the King ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... gave nothing but pleasure to Leontes. He recommended the friend of his youth to the queen's particular attention, and seemed in the presence of his dear friend and old companion to have his felicity quite completed. They talked over old times; their school-days and their youthful pranks were remembered, and recounted to Hermione, who always took a ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... I protested. 'I don't see the analogy. You haven't loitered; you don't come too late. A brave woman has waited for you; you have a fine felicity before you: it should be all the better, because you have won it laboriously. For heaven's sake, be reasonable!' He shook his head sadly; then added, with a gesture of sudden passion, looking out over the taffrail, at the heaving gray waters: 'It's finished. I haven't any ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... to her the reminiscence of that despised and almost forgotten civilisation she had only glanced at in her days of restraint, of sorrow, and of anger. In the cold ashes of that hateful and miserable past she would find the sign of love, the fitting expression of the boundless felicity of the present, the pledge of a bright and splendid future. She threw her arms around Dain's neck and pressed her lips to his in a long and burning kiss. He closed his eyes, surprised and frightened ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... at any rate be far less valuable than it is to many men now, under outer circumstances that are far less favourable. The goal to which a purely human progress is capable of conducting us, is thus no vague condition of glory and felicity, in which men shall develop new and ampler powers. It is a condition in which, the keenest life attainable has continually been far surpassed already, without anything having been arrived at that in itself ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... a sweet reality in the home of the young couple in Roxbury. "All the world loves a lover," says Emerson, but alas! there are exceptions to all rules, and all the world loved not Garrison in his newly found felicity as shall presently appear. ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... plaine man, was heereby perswaded that he should not onely haue a rare and notable good sonne in law, but a companion that might helpe to ad vnto his wealth much treasure, and to his estate great fortune and felicity: and to encrease this opinion in him, as also to winne his further fauour: but especially to bring his cunning Alcumistry, or rather his lend purpose to passe, he tolde him that it were folly to multiply a ...
— The Art of Iugling or Legerdemaine • Samuel Rid
... more ample opportunities afforded for their full development than perhaps anywhere else. They loved each other with a pure heart, fervently, and they sought not only the temporal good of their children, but their eternal felicity and happiness. There was no constraint in their daily and hourly watchings and teachings, but it ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... Penrith, on October 4, 1802, was not so much an importation into his existence of new emotion, as a development and intensification of feelings which had long been there. This marriage was the crowning stroke of Wordsworth's felicity—the poetic recompense for his steady advocacy of all simple and noble things. When he wished to illustrate the true dignity and delicacy of rustic lives he was always accustomed to refer to the Cumbrian folk. And now it seemed that Cumberland requited him ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... most both to learn and unlearn. Accordingly, it was to the development of the plot and the arrangement of the incidents that I directed my chief attention;—and I sought to throw whatever belongs to poetry less into the diction and the "felicity of words" than into the construction of the story, the creation of the characters, and the ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Tilloughby was a very fair rider; and everything that he saw Tilloughby do, Sam did. En route they met Hollis and Miss Stevens, cantering just where the Bald Hill road branched off, and the cavalcade was increased to six. Once, in taking a narrow cross-cut down through the woods, Sam had the felicity of riding beside Miss Stevens for a moment, and she put her hand on his horse and patted its glossy neck and admired it, while Sam admired the hand. He felt, in some way or other, that riding for that ten yards by her side ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... acknowledge that a public life more consistent is not to be found in our annals. Every part of it is in perfect harmony with every other part; and the whole is in perfect harmony with the great principles of toleration and civil freedom. This rare felicity is in a great measure to be attributed to the influence of Mr. Fox. Lord Holland, as was natural in a person of his talents and expectations, began at a very early age to take the keenest interest in politics, and Mr. Fox found the greatest pleasure ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... strikingly clever and expressive, and were at once very perfect cats and monkeys and very natural men and women. I confess, however, that they failed to amuse me. I was doubtless not in a mood to enjoy them, for they seemed to me peculiarly cynical and vulgar. Their imitative felicity was revolting. As I looked askance at the complacent little artist, brandishing them between finger and thumb and caressing them with an amorous eye, he seemed to me himself little more than an exceptionally intelligent ape. I mustered an admiring grin, however, and he blew another ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... the task I have set myself let me perform with steadiness. The felicity of that period was marred by no gloomy anticipations. The future, like the present, was serene. Time was supposed to have only new delights in store. I mean not to dwell on previous incidents longer than is necessary to illustrate or explain the great events that have since happened. ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... have had a more definite belief in pre-existence than Wordsworth, for he refers to it more than once; and The Retreate, which is probably the best known of all his poems and must have furnished some suggestion for the Immortality Ode, is based upon it. Vaughan has occasionally an almost perfect felicity of mystical expression, a power he shares with Donne, Keats, Rossetti, and Wordsworth. His ideas then produce their effect through the medium of art, directly on the feelings. The poem called Quickness is perhaps the best example of this peculiar quality, which cannot be analysed but must simply ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... returned "to fill up," as they said, some vacancies discovered. What appetites they had; and what unrestrained enjoyment! No foreboding fears of coming nightmare, or fits of indigestion, disturbed their felicity. Dyspepsia and its kindred ills, had, up to those times, never visited that healthy hunting people; and so, when such a feast of fat things as this was prepared, where they knew they were all welcome guests, they ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... was convinced that a satisfactory ending to the trouble was imminent, he naturally felt a great desire to be, somehow, the cause of Felicity's renewed happiness; to get, as it were, the credit of it. That his admiration (to put it mildly) should take the form of chivalrous devotion would be, at least, something; especially as it was evident that ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... was spoken. They rushed into each other's arms. Oh! sad—sad is the lover's parting—no pang so keen; but if life hath a zest more exquisite than others—if felicity hath one drop more racy than the rest in her honeyed cup, it is the happiness enjoyed in such a union as the present. To say that he was as one raised from the depths of misery by some angel comforter, were ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... God of heaven, who fed them by his bounty, and offered them a full and free salvation in the gospel of his Son. No enjoyments nor possessions, however ample and acceptable, can crown the soul with peace and true felicity, unless accompanied with the fear and favor of Him who can speak pardon to the transgressor, and shed abroad his love in the hearts of his children; thus giving an earnest of spiritual and eternal blessedness along with ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... desire of the heart, what is it maketh thee weep? May God not cause an eye of thine to weep!' 'O my lord,' answered she, 'what am I that thou shouldst kiss my hand? Wilt thou have God punish me for this and that my term should come to an end and my felicity pass away? For this is what none ever attained unto.' Quoth he, 'Well said, O Tuhfeh. Know that thy rank in my esteem is mighty and for that which wondered me of what I saw of thee, I offered to do ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... Miss Baker were now walking behind them, side by side. But his felicity in this respect was not at all sufficient for that gentleman. In their long journey from Egypt, he and Miss Waddington had always been within speaking distance; and who was the stranger of to-day that was thus ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... altars and sepulchres in the pagan ages are used to support those inventions. All the world knows the history of the celebrated saints Perpetua and Felicity, whose beatifications have no other foundation than the words perpetua felicitas, so very common on the monuments of that nation. The improbability of some of the fictions has been such, that in Spain itself, in the face of that respect there shown to ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... from Hymettus. Dr. Parr pronounced it the finest sentence in the English language. It is a period (that is, a cluster of sentences) moderately well, but not too well constructed, as the German nurses are accustomed to say. Its felicity depends on a trick easily imitated—on a balance happily placed (namely, "in which the wisest of mankind would rejoice to find an answer to their doubts, and rest to their inquiries"). As a bravura, or tour de force, in the dazzling fence of rhetoric, it is surpassed by ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... that we thought it expedient to send out two boats, that they might range along the coast and discover the watering-place. They were gone some days, and our water being now very short, it was a particular felicity to us that we met with daily supplies of turtle; for had we been entirely confined to salt provisions, we must have suffered extremely in so warm a climate. Indeed, our present circumstances were sufficiently alarming, and gave ...
— Anson's Voyage Round the World - The Text Reduced • Richard Walter
... for I am wise about chickens too. I know their tribe from "egg to bird," as the country people say, when they wish to express the most radical, sweeping acquaintance with any subject,—a phrase, by the way, whose felicity is hardly to be comprehended till experience ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... all Boutigny topsy-turvy. Everybody admired the young couple, who quickly returned home to domestic felicity, having decided simply to take a short trip to Paris, after a few ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... he said. "There is no happiness in store for one like myself, who has had a glimpse of divine felicity, had the cup of bliss held to his lips, and then dashed to the ground. There is nothing left to attach me to life. You have destroyed my holiest beliefs; I came forth from prison disgraced by my enemies; what is to become of me? Vainly do I question the future; for me there ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... of, and petted and patted and admired and wondered at, make up the sum of human bliss, Barty came in for as full a share of felicity during that festive week as should last an ordinary mortal for a twelvemonth. Figaro qua, Figaro la, from morning till night in three departments ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... divine | kingdom of God should come, he Majesty (who is unchangeable in his ways) | answered them and said, The kingdom doth infallibly continue and observe; that | of God cometh not with observation. is the felicity wherewith he hath blessed | an humility of mind, such as rather | see Novum Organum. I, 93; A.L. Sp. laboureth to spell and so by degrees to | III, 301,I, 29-302; also N.O. I, 129 read in the volumes of his creatures, than | (Sp. I,222,I.16 seq.) to solicit and urge and ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... somebody put out a hand to shake with him. Martin and Mary had taken him aside before dinner, and spoken to him so heartily of the time to come, laying such fervent stress upon the trust they had in his completion of their felicity, by his society and closest friendship, that Tom was positively moved to tears. He couldn't bear it. His heart was full, he said, of happiness. And so it was. Tom spoke the honest truth. It was. Large as thy ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... each tale called up by some wayside thing, he spoke of all his wanderings up and down Hind; till Kim, who had loved him without reason, now loved him for fifty good reasons. So they enjoyed themselves in high felicity, abstaining, as the Rule demands, from evil words, covetous desires; not over-eating, not lying on high beds, nor wearing rich clothes. Their stomachs told them the time, and the people brought them their food, as the saying is. They were lords of the villages of Aminabad, ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... purse. The Continental nations ought to have acted likewise; as they failed to conserve this safeguard of representation with taxation, the consequence was that everywhere excepting in England parliamentary institutions ceased to exist. England owed this singular felicity to her insular situation. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... inaccessible by stripes or torments. Thus, while the body is in bondage, on account of the religion of the soul, the soul itself is free, and, while it suffers under torture, it enjoys the divinity, and feels felicity in his presence. But if all these things are so, it cannot be within the province either of individual magistrates or of governments, consisting of fallible men, to fetter the consciences of those who may live under them. And any attempt to this ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... of pride in her ability to write this mysterious shorthand, she opened her notebook, and waited with poised pencil. The mien of the two men had communicated to her an excitement far surpassing their own, in degree and in felicity. The whole of her vital force was concentrated at the point of her pencil, and she seemed to be saying to herself: "I'm very sorry, mother, but see how important this is! I shall consider what I can do for you the ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... government though terrors reign, Though tyrant kings or tyrant laws restrain, How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! Still to ourselves in every place consign'd, Our own felicity we make or find: With secret course, which no loud streams annoy. Glides the smooth current of domestic joy. The lifted axe, the agonizing wheel, Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel, To men remote ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... reasonably hope for greatness, felicity, and renown, excelling any hitherto attained by any nation, if, standing firmly on the continent, we lose not our grasp on either ocean. Whether a destiny so magnificent would be only partially defeated, or whether it would be altogether lost by a relaxation ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... confession and a recantation of an illustrious sinner; the Coryphaeus of the amusing and new-found art, or artifice, of modern criticism. In the character of BURNS, the Edinburgh Reviewer, with his peculiar felicity of manner, attacked the character of the man of genius; but when Mr. Campbell vindicated his immortal brother with all the inspiration of the family feeling, our critic, who is one of those great artists who acquire at length the utmost indifference ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... precipitated herself. Heroically, because the odds were hopelessly adverse, her equipment, whether of natural or artificial, being so conspicuously slender. Her attempt had no backing in play of feature, felicity of gesture, grace of diction. The commonest little actress that ever daubed her skin with grease-paint, would have the advantage of Theresa in the thousand and one arts by which, from everlasting, woman has limed twigs for the catching of man. Her very virtues—respectability, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... some departed high Anglo-Indian official. She was good enough to call me by the pet-name Ruby. Some Indian friend of hers had composed a doleful poem in English in memory of her husband. It is needless to expatiate on its poetic merit or felicity of diction. As my ill-luck would have it, the composer had indicated that the dirge was to be chanted to the mode Behaga. So the widow one day entreated me to sing it to her thus. Like the silly innocent that I was, I weakly acceded. There was unfortunately no one there but I who ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... youth's favour; and the preference, upon such an occasion, must have been highly flattering to him. On the score of difficulties, Cyprians are quite in fashion; for executions and arrests are very usual in their mansions, and the last comer has the exquisite felicity of relieving them. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... were perhaps essentially less humane in their political or their private relations; that salvation came, not from without, by means of forms of government, but from within, by the wise moderation and humble activity of each man in his own circle; and that this must ever be the chief source of human felicity, while it was the easiest ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... was a singular beginning of connubial felicity; but there is no doubt that Johnson, tho he thus showed a manly firmness, proved a most affectionate and indulgent husband to the last moment of Mrs. Johnson's life: and in his "Prayers and Meditations," we find very remarkable evidence that his regard and fondness for ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... did not see Such a look as here was shown Ere its womanhood had blown Past its first felicity? - That I did not know you young, Faded Face, Know ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... above the level of the sea. But such is the benignity of the climate, that at these prodigious elevations, which even in the south of Europe are above the line of perpetual snow, are to be found cities and towns, corn-fields and orchards, and all the symptoms of rural felicity. The town of Quito itself, the capital of a province of the same name, is situated on a plateau, or elevated valley, in the centre of the Andes, nearly 9000 feet above the level of the sea. Yet there are found concentrated a numerous population, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... time Mr. Cooper had entertained an intention of writing The History of the Navy of the United Stated, and his early experience, his studies, his associations, and above all the peculiar felicity of his style when treating of nautical affairs, warranted the expectation that his work would be a solid and brilliant contribution to our historical literature. It appeared in two octavo volumes in 1839, and reached a second edition in 1840, and a third ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... discussion, some men have felicity in replying to a question, others a felicity in replying to the motive which prompted the question. In one case you get an answer addressed to your understanding; in the other, an answer which smites like a slap in the face. Thus, when a pert skeptic asked Martin Luther where ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... revelation of a great and many-sided personality and furnish invaluable testimony as to just what manner of man he was—too great indeed for music wholly to contain him. The Letters are not to be read for their felicity of expression, as one might approach the letters of Stevenson or Lamb; for Beethoven, even in his music, always valued substance more than style, or, at any rate, kept style subservient to vitality of utterance. In fact, one modern French musician claims that ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the Countess, hear the soft tones of her voice, render her little attentions, carry the delicacy of sentiment beyond the range of mortal vision, feel edified at her discourses on virtue, are not these supreme felicity for you? Leave for earthy souls the gross sentiments which are beginning to develop in you. To look at you to-day, it might be said that I was not so far out of the way when I declared love to be the work of the senses. Your own ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... middle of all this felicity, one blow from unseen Providence unhinged me at once; and not only made a breach upon me inevitable and incurable, but drove me, by its consequences, into a deep relapse of the wandering disposition, which, as I may say, being born in my very blood, soon recovered its hold of me; and, ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... daughter yourself, you know Jack's account of his wife's domestic creed! 'A good fire, a clean hearth, the children abed, and the husband at sea,' is supposed to be the climax of felicity." ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... succeeded in spreading widely his pacific views. At the time of his death, which happened at an advanced age, the calumet of peace was everywhere smoked among the northern tribes, and their numbers had greatly increased. Wampum-hair was universally honored, and regarded as the cause of this felicity. But no wife ever cooked the venison in his lodge. With the dream of his youth vanished all predilection for the softer sex. He had loved and been disappointed. Where he expected to meet gentleness he had found pride. He looked ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... ascendent over her people; and while she merited all their esteem by her real virtues, she also engaged their affections by her pretended ones. Few sovereigns of England succeeded to the throne in more difficult circumstances; and none ever conducted the government with such uniform success and felicity. Tho unacquainted with the practise of toleration—the true secret for managing religious factions—she preserved her people, by her superior prudence, from those confusions in which theological controversy had involved ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... while in her busy life, Mrs. Lenox found time to drop in as the bearer of a cheerful word and a friendly look to the ugly little apartment where Mrs. Quincy lived in the third story height of domestic felicity. ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... in search of the boat it got to be hunger-time, and two small stomachs calling lustily for food did not add to the felicity of ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... some one in the back of the hall, and many a boy away from home, careless and forgetful of his own mother, remembered her now with sudden tenderness. The words of the prayer were stiff and unnatural, but when did the Spirit of God depend upon felicity of expression? It can abound wherever there is the honest heart, and when Pearl, with tears flowing down her cheeks, but with voice steady and clear, thanked the God of all grace for sending her the answer to her prayers, even the dullest listener got a glimmering of the truth that there ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... were all forgotten. Was it possible to purchase too dearly the proud felicity of being able to say, during the rest of life, "I belonged to ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... more opportunely than at this point call attention to Mr. Tennyson's extraordinary felicity and force in the use of metaphor and simile. This gift appears to have grown with his years, alike in abundance, truth, and grace. As the showers descend from heaven to return to it in vapour, so Mr. Tennyson's loving ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and cherish them. A volume would not trace all their connexions with private and public felicity. Let it be simply asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in the courts ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... Hierocles, "is the purification and perfection of human life. It is the purification, indeed, from material irrationality, and the mortal body; but the perfection, in consequence of being the resumption of our proper felicity, and a reascent to the divine likeness. To effect these two is the province of Virtue and Truth; the former exterminating the immoderation of the passions; and the latter introducing the divine form to those who are naturally adapted ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... speaking with that cursed Yankee, and you're just traitor enough to help him to escape. I'll look to him myself, so you may stay where you are. If you should choose to rise early enough to-morrow morning, you will have the felicity of seeing him dance upon the tight-rope. Ha! ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... are we plagued and punished for our father's defaultes, that it is the greatest part of our felicity to be well born, and it were happy for humankind if only such parentes as are sounde of body and mind should be suffered to marry. An Husbandman will sow none but the choicest seed upon his lande; he will not reare a bull nor an horse, except he be right shapen in ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... are dearest to me in this world; had it been otherwise, such a terrible misfortune would have utterly overwhelmed me. Be careful therefore of your precious health for my sake, I entreat, and grant to him who flatters himself that he is now what you love most in the world the joy and felicity ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... in which my imagination placed our common home;—all this so struck me with a vivid, tender, sad, and touching impression that I saw myself as in an ecstasy transported into the happy time and the happy place where my heart, possessed of all the felicity that could bring it delight, without even dreaming of the pleasures of sense, should ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain To tell my story ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... joys of tumult, the people of the savage and the more cultivated nations sacrificed everything belonging to the peaceful economy of life, with a desperate, frantic fury. All this was the confession that there was little felicity in the heart or in the home. Nor was it found in these resources; if the wild elation might be mistaken for happiness while it lasted, it was brief in each instance, and it subsided in an aggravated dreariness of ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... about need not upset it, and introduce confusion into our life. But if we too must, like most people, be governed by external events, and make an inventory of the dealings of Fortune, and constitute other people the judges of our felicity, do not now regard the tears and lamentations of those who visit you, which by a faulty custom are lavished on everybody, but consider rather how happy you are still esteemed by them for your family, your house, and life. For it would be monstrous, if others would gladly prefer your destiny to theirs, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... with interest what you say of the political omens in England. I could wish our country a better comprehension of its felicity. But government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world should last his day. We have had in different parts of the ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... on Monday in the House of Commons on the Irish Tithes Bill. Peel made a very clever speech, attacking the Commission with great felicity, and John Russell made an excellent speech in reply, failing to excuse the Commission, which is inexcusable, but very good upon the question. Both he and Ellice spoke out. I was at the Abbey on Tuesday and yesterday for a performance and a rehearsal of the 'Messiah.' ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... Catchfly, Selene, False love Catchfly, Red, Youthful love Catchfly, White, Betrayed Cattleya, Mature charms Cedar, Strength Cedar of Lebanon, Incorruptible Cedar Leaf, I live for thee Celandine, Joys to come Centaury, Bluebottle, Felicity Champignon, Suspicion Cherry Tree, Good education Chestnut Tree, Do me justice Chinese Primrose, Lasting love Chickweed, Rendezvous Chicory, Frugality China Aster, Afterthought China Aster, Double, I agree China Aster, Single, I will think if it Chrysanthemum, Red, I love Chrysanthemum, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... explanation, and not for the purpose of avoiding criticism. I have endeavored to follow, so far as was in my power, the example of the illustrious Reporter of the Constitutional Convention of 1787; and while my notes lack the beauty and felicity which characterize his, I trust they are not less full and accurate. I submit them to the country as the best contribution which I can make to its history, at a most important and interesting period of ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... not confess that the Intelligence has been dowered at least with as profuse a beneficence as the Senses? Who that has truly tasted and fathomed human Love in its dawning and crowning joys has not thanked God for a felicity which indeed 'passeth understanding.' If we had set our fancy to picture a Creator occupied solely in devising delight for children whom he loved, we could not conceive one single element of bliss which is ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... a slow and peaceful manner. But Monsieur Pirenne was entirely satisfied with his pupil, and he assured her, "if she continued to make such stupendous progress in the next lesson, he would have the felicity of taking her out in ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... deeply agitated by the first representation of this performance; yet some pains has been taken to trace those points of resemblance, which gave so much offence to one party, and triumph to the other. Many must doubtless have escaped our notice; but enough remains to shew the singular felicity with which Dryden, in the present instance, as in that of "Absalom and Achitophel," could adapt the narrative of ancient or foreign transactions to the political events of his own time, and "moralize two meanings in one word." Altogether abstracted ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... God's love, mercy, and providence to the having or wanting of bodily provision, which no part of God's Scriptures teach us, but rather the express contrary. As it is written, 'Man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proeeedeth out of the mouth of God,' that is, the very life and felicity of man consists not in the abundance of bodily things, or the possession and having of them makes no man blest or happy; neither shall the lack of them be the cause of his final misery; but the very life of man consists in God, and in His promises pronounced by His own mouth, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... solicitude to know my opinion of her, and why so sudden his alarm when he thought it unfavourable? Perhaps he means to marry her, and to sacrifice to her innocence and her attractions all plans of ambition, and all views of aggrandizement:—thrice happy Henrietta, if such is thy prospect of felicity! to have inspired a passion so disinterested, may humble the most insolent of thy superiors, and teach even the wealthiest ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... which exists in their respective Governments. And to the defense of our own, which has been achieved by the loss of so much blood and treasure, and matured by the wisdom of their most enlightened citizens, and under which we have enjoyed unexampled felicity, this whole nation is devoted. We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations subsisting between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on ...
— A Compilation of Messages and Letters of the Presidents - 2nd section (of 3) of Volume 2: John Quincy Adams • Editor: James D. Richardson
... properly have been characterized by a word the judicious chronicler would not readily use in such a connexion, preferring to reserve it for raising images of the opposite sex. Whether because no deep felicity is likely to arise from the condition, or from any other reason, to say in these days that a youth is beautiful is not to award him that amount of credit which the expression would have carried with it if he had lived in the times of the Classical Dictionary. ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
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