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More "Imperious" Quotes from Famous Books



... phenomena, it is not astonishing that the people of the surrounding district became seriously disquieted. And to the disquiet was joined an imperious need of knowing the true condition of the mountain. The Carolina newspapers had flaring headlines, "The Mystery of Great Eyrie!" They asked if it was not dangerous to dwell in such a region. Their articles ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne

... Pasquale in an imperious gesture of his arm. "Afterward, captain. You shall ask her a ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine

... clearings, where tired-looking men were grubbing new-land for tobacco, and I remember that a half-grown boy, with a sullen look, threw a chunk at us and viciously shouted that if we would stop a minute he would whip both of us. I imagined that he was kept from school by the imperious demand of the tobacco patch, and I sympathized with him in his wrath against mankind. A little further along we came within sight of an old log house, and then the laughter of children reached our ears. We had arrived at the place where my work was ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read

... this evil is incident to the position of things. Indeed, it would be unfortunate if national hypocrisy could not find a better excuse for itself than in that of the individual. In civilized life, society is ever under the imperious necessity of moving onward in legal forms, nor can such forms be avoided without the most serious disasters ensuing. To absolve communities too abruptly from the restraints of ancient ideas is not to give them liberty, but to throw them into political vagabondism, and hence it is that ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... motioned me to remain, with an imperious gesture whose fierceness showed the tumult underlying her brave front. "No; I want you should stay. I want you should hear what I say, so's you can tell folks, if you have to. Now, look here, Emma," she ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... up to Weston, chatting to the patient and her nurse as she arranged them, with such sweetness, such smiles, such an abandonment of kindness, that both looked after her amazed, when, again, she vanished. What had become of the imperious absent-minded young ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... acknowledging of duetie, in such particular sort, he told him, that were there was no duetie owing, there none should be performed, assuring him that the whole company and shippes in generall stood resolutely vpon the negatiue, and would not yeeld to any such vnreasonable demaund, joyned with such imperious and absolute maner of commanding. Why then, said he, if they wil neither come to yeeld, nor shew obedience to me in the name of any king, I wil either sinke them or bring them to harbor, and so tell them from me. With that the frigat ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt

... as they grew older, naturally took part in the bitter disputes continually taking place between Henry and Eleanor. As Geoffrey once said, it was their inheritance not to love one another. The princes were all proud, headstrong, and selfwilled, and hence little disposed to obey their imperious father; and Henry, though in some ways weakly indulgent to his sons, was most autocratic in disposition. As his sons became young men, he gave them certain provinces in France to rule. But he would allow them no real power, and the proud young princes were determined not to ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene

... women confers not only a privilege but a grave burden and responsibility. We condemn the man who neglects to vote as recreant to his duty. If women are enfranchised, the right conferred becomes an obligation as imperious to them as to men; on those opposed as on those who favor the act. I think the women of Dakota should have a voice in determining whether they should assume this burden or not. So much for the general proposition. There are two other features ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... gentlemen!" said the Captain in a quick imperious manner—the roughness of his old life on the Mississippi would still break out—"See here, gentlemen! It seems I'm not to know if we are to return from the Moon. Well!—Pass that for the present! But there is ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... the rancho's cove, I perceived every body under arms, and heard Don Rafael command my boatmen, in a loud, imperious voice, to begone, or he would fire. Standing on the thwarts of the boat, I ordered the oarsmen to back water, and leaping into the sea, waist-deep, struggled alone to the beach, calling "mi tio! mi tio!"—"my uncle! ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... small room in which there were three people, one a pleasant-faced man, so affable and kind that Mrs. Rawson thought she could have got on with him very well if she had had a chance. By him stood a tall imperious lady who rustled a voluminous skirt—a person of importance, Mrs. Rawson judged her to be from the deference with which a little thread-paper-man listened to her—the costumier, she learnt from ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore

... childless man stung Victor into opposition. He gasped for air and struck the table with his fist. Then he hissed like a rocket; he, too, could talk as well as the long one. Before anybody had noticed him, he was standing on his chair, challenging attention by an imperious movement of his fist, and swallowed once more. "Attention, Garibaldi wants to speak!" called a workingman that knew him. All looked astonished at the stranger. Many laughed at his agitation. His necktie glowed lurid like a midsummer eve bonfire against the pictures ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... all of which, together with the stables and other inferior offices, are richly gilt and painted of various gaudy colours. Near one of the seraglio gates is erected a large wooden house, where many a disobedient Pasha has awaited the decree of banishment issued against him by his imperious master. There, too, he was shipped on board the vessel destined to carry him into exile; or, if condemned to expiate his offences with his life, it was there the bowstring was applied. Hence this entrance is known by the appellation ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo

... to mount the stairs. Lancelot put his hand on her shoulder, and turned her face towards him, and said in an imperious whisper: ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill

... on the other hand, had the making of a great popular leader, in spite of his imperious manners and somewhat dictatorial bearing. The head of one of the oldest families in the North of England, Lord Durham entered the House of Commons in the year 1813, at the age of twenty-one, as Mr. John George Lambton, and quickly distinguished ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid

... cooler perception of the truth. She should have been a man: a great navigator!" cried the little, dark, enthusiastic rhetorician. "Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty; never have ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson

... dispatched to make the decent inquiries are not suffered to return home till they have undergone the ceremony of a previous ablution. Yet this selfish and unmanly delicacy occasionally yields to the more imperious passion of avarice. The prospect of gain will urge a rich and gouty senator as far as Spoleto; every sentiment of arrogance and dignity is subdued by the hopes of an inheritance, or even of a legacy; and a wealthy childless citizen ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... the soundest and most enlightened basis. Humane without being sentimental—moral but not uncharitable—religious but not fanatical—he surveys society, its actors and its crimes, with the eve of enlightened philanthropy, experienced reason, and Christian charity. He is neither a fierce, imperious Romish bigot like Bossuet, nor a relentless Calvinistic theologian like D'Aubigne, nor a scoffing infidel like Voltaire. Deeply impressed with the vital importance of religion to the temporal and eternal welfare of mankind, he is yet enlightened ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various

... El Rey to himself, far from the rest, for she knew his imperious temper and that trouble would ensue if he was near ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe

... with you here went over, and said, producing the bracelet, 'that the young maid, Chui Erh, had stolen it, and that she had detected her, and come to lay the matter before our lady Secunda. I promptly took over the bracelet from her; and recollecting how imperious and exacting Pao-y is inclined to be, fond and devoted as he is to each and all of you; how the jade which was prigged the other year by a certain Liang Erh, is still, just as the matter has cooled down for the last couple of years, canvassed at times by some people eager ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... in a foreign tongue, warm-voweled, all-voweled, and love-exciting. Softly throbbing, voice and strings arose on sensuous crests of song, died away to whisperings and caresses, drifted through love-dusks and twilights, or swelled again to love-cries barbarically imperious in which were woven plaintive calls and madnesses of invitation and promise. It went through Saxon until she was as this instrument, swept with passional strains. It seemed to her a dream, and almost was she dizzy, when ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... tenderness of her allusions to him; from the fact, which indirectly appears, that he first cooled towards her, and the pang—not of wounded vanity—which this gave her; and yet more unmistakably from the forgiveness which she, imperious and relentless as she was, extended, manifestly, again and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... into the bedroom, she took from a suit-case a framed oil-painting, and returning with it to the sitting-room, placed it on a chair, and stepped back, gazing at it hungrily. Her large brown eyes, normally hard and imperious, were strangely softened. Her ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse

... Louis XVIII. was succeeded by his brother, the Count d'Artois, under the name of Charles X., a venerable man seventy years of age, who, notwithstanding his great reverses, had "neither learned nor forgotten anything." Polignac, his incapable and imperious minister, the tool of the Jesuits, had, since 1829, impugned every national right, and, at length, ventured by the ordinances of the 25th July, 1830, to subvert the constitution. During three days, from ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... gave the listless old tree a certain benign tilt, and because sundry other happenings consequent upon a misunderstanding of the laws of nature took exceptional though quite wayward turnings, I am still able to hold a pen in the attempt to accomplish the task imposed by imperious strangers. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... child. When her father, a moment later, rubbed his eyes, and awoke from his sleep upon the veranda, it was to see a goddess, erect and triumphant, striding toward the house with the helpless body of a man lying across that breast where man had never lain before,—a goddess, at whose imperious mandate he arose, and cast open the doors before her. And then, when she had laid her unconscious burden on the sofa, the goddess fled; and a woman, helpless and trembling, stood before him,—a woman that cried out that she ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte

... Guarani, and without patience to acquire it, confusion reigned in the missions as in a tower of Babel,' and he goes on to say 'an imperious tone of order was substituted for the paternal manner (of the Jesuits), and as a deaf man who cannot hear has to be taught by blows, that was the teaching they (the Indians) had to bear.' Shortly, he says, 'a ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham

... and tastes were warlike, and his office enabled him to gratify them in this instance. For the conciliatory tone which De Lessart had employed toward the Imperial Government, he now substituted a language not only imperious, but menacing. Prince Kaunitz, who still presided over the administration at Vienna, attached though he was to the system of policy which he had inaugurated under Maria Teresa, could not avoid replying in a similar strain, until at last, on the 20th of April, Louis, ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge

... magic was of another kind and a thousand times more mighty; a song rose into the air which leapt and soared like a flame, imperious as the flashing of a sword, triumphant as the waving of a banner, wonderful as the dawn and fresh as the laughing sea. And once more Princess Kunigmunde was aware that the music was familiar to her. She had heard something like it in the chapel ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring

... An imperious, ringing note had entered into her voice, which made me regard her with a sudden doubt. About her was the same charm and mystery that had held me silent and curious, the same unnatural assurance, and cold disregard of her surroundings; but her eyes had grown ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand

... courage to speak. Nevertheless, I do not know how to resist the wishes of our amiable host, our eminent Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and of those who surround me here. This is quite an unexpected surprise for me; but it comes in so imperious a way that I cannot but submit, hoping you will ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root

... one, and the male with the female neither male nor female,"[2] might form the text for a chapter of no small importance in human history. The Greek lucidity, which made all mysticism impossible in their art as it was alien from their life, did not do away with this imperious demand; and their cult of beauty was the issue of their attempt, imperfect indeed at best and at worst disastrous, to reunite the fragments of ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... make clear in the metaphysical portion of this book is that these two views of life, while always liable to return upon us with every renewed movement of the isolated reason, are in truth unreal projections of man's imperious mind. When we subject them to an analysis based upon our complete organ of research they show themselves to be nothing but tyrannous phantoms, abstracted from the genuine reality of the soul as it exists within ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... grisette (like all good daughters, she is very fond of her literary father) raised to a higher power, dealt with in a satiric fashion unknown to her parent, but in perfectly kindly temper. She is, though just a little imperious, a thoroughly "good sort," and, with occasional blunders, really a guardian angel to her good-hearted, not uncourageous, but visionary and unpractical lover and husband. She has the sharpest of tongues; the most housewifely and motherly of attitudes; the flamingest of bonnets. It ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... proud, and praise them. "Are women kind?" Ay! wondrous kind and please them, Or so imperious, no man can endure them, Or so kind-hearted, any ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... hour's time at the furthest. This action was like the spark in the tinder, and completely roused the anger and indignation of his hearers, who had scarcely been able to restrain their excitement during the reading of the summons, which the Englishman had delivered in an imperious voice, and which an interpreter had translated word for word to the ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway

... was unreasonably annoyed to find that her brother, Mr. John Shipley, had taken advantage of the absence of Grant to pay marked attention to Clementina, and had even prevailed upon that imperious goddess to accompany him after dinner on a moonlight stroll upon the veranda and terraces of Los Pajaros. Nevertheless she seemed to recover her spirits enough to talk volubly of the beautiful scenery she had discovered in ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte

... sacred white coast, which the greatest of Frenchmen should only approach as a prisoner, stood a man of less imperious mould, and of sweet and gentle presence—a man who was able to command himself in the keenest disappointment, because he combined a quick sense of humour with the power of prompt action, and was able to appreciate his own great qualities without concluding that there were no other. His face, ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... new good fortune was the last she would have, and that there her short-lived prosperity would cease. Indeed, she soon saw that in Darnley she had given herself not a devoted and very attentive husband, as she had believed, but an imperious and brutal master, who, no longer having any motive for concealment, showed himself to her just as he was, a man of disgraceful vices, of which drunkenness and debauchery was the least. Accordingly, serious differences were not long in springing up ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... remarked that, at the point of starting, there was an unusual stir and noise on the platform. Messieurs les voyageurs were not complete; somebody was missing from one of the carriages. The station-master and the guard kept up a brisk and angry conversation, which ended in an imperious wave of the ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold

... to hazard a conjecture, but checked herself, remembering that even so faint an evidence of a disposition to advise might possibly be resented by her cold and imperious lord. ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... The imperious Egypt of the Theban dynasties had passed away, but a new Egypt had arisen, not without storm and struggle, in its place. As long as the campaigns of the Pharaohs had been confined to the Nile valley and the Oases, Thebes had been the natural centre ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... illustrates Henry's impulsive and imperious character, and is not, necessarily, a premonition of his final attitude ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott

... was not on the side of promise that this prayer would be fulfilled; and as the day advanced, Bulstrode felt himself getting irritated at the persistent life in this man, whom he would fain have seen sinking into the silence of death imperious will stirred murderous impulses towards this brute life, over which will, by itself, had no power. He said inwardly that he was getting too much worn; he would not sit up with the patient to-night, but leave him to Mrs. Abel, who, if ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... other self and perpetual companion—the very book she had been sketching in when George Fairfax surprised her by the churchyard wall. There was no help for it, no disobeying that imperious finger of her father's; so she brought the book meekly and laid ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... Durrant, sweeping down upon them in her imperious manner, "you remember Mrs. Adams? Well, that is her niece." And Mr. Bowley, getting up, bowed politely ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... Mrs. Culpeper, a small imperious woman of distinguished lineage and uncertain temper, had gone through an entire life seeing only one thing at a time, and never seeing that one thing as it really was. If her husband embodied the moral purpose, she herself was an incarnation of the evasive idealism of ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow

... advance. At that place, or at Bedford, my ulterior resolution must be taken, either to advance with the troops into the insurgent counties of this state, or to return to Philadelphia, for the purpose of meeting Congress, the third of next month. Imperious circumstances alone can justify my absence from the seat of government whilst Congress is in session; but if these, from the disposition of the people in the refractory counties and the state of ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... within their walls for several weeks longer. This evidence of the haughty insolence of Count Orloff was related among the Romans with undisguised pleasure, and they thanked him for having thus humiliated and insulted the proud and imperious republic. But they suspiciously shook their heads when they learned that he seemed disposed to display his pride and arrogance in Rome! They told of a soiree of the Marchesa di Paduli which Alexis Orloff had attended. As they there begged of him to give some proof of the very superior strength ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... is slender, and the well-cut nostrils are separated by a sweet little pink partition—an imperious, mocking nose, with a tip too sensitive ever to grow fat or red. Sweetheart, if this won't find a husband for a dowerless maiden, I'm a donkey. The ears are daintily curled, a pearl hanging from either lobe would show yellow. The neck is long, and has an undulating motion full of dignity. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac

... strange scene was interrupted by a sharp, imperious knock at the door, and as De Mouchy, with a start, swung round his chair and rose to his feet the door was pushed open without further ceremony, and he saw before him the beautiful but pitiless face of Diane de Poitiers, and behind ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats

... say I dropped in as it were." Lisbeth brushed the hair from her temples, and turned to me with an imperious gesture. ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol

... collection of poems; excerpts from Adam Bremensis; a dissertation on the first inhabitants of Norway; the life of Eric the Traveller; of Olave Trygvason; of St Olave; of the earls of Orkney; of Suerir; of Haco the Aged; of his son Magnus; of Magnus the Good; of Harald the Imperious; of Einar Sockason of Greenland; and of Oelver the Mischievous; it contains also a general chronology down to A.D. 1394, the year in which the MS. was completed. The work, from the life of Eric the Traveller to the end of St Olave's ...
— The Norwegian account of Haco's expedition against Scotland, A.D. MCCLXIII. • Sturla oretharson

... Helen I had once known so well, with her aspect of almost severe purity, could ever blush. There was a new sort of beauty about her: a soft richness of tint and texture seemed added to cheek and lip, and the old imperious concentration of her glance was, for the moment, quite gone. Still, although I could easily see that she was frightened at her own temerity in allowing my more than brotherly freedom, I could not find it in my heart to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... invited to Rome by Julius II. in 1504 to aid in erecting the unapproachable monument which the Pope projected raising for himself. Then commenced a series of contentions and struggles between the imperious and petulant Pope and the haughty, uncompromising painter, in which the latter certainly had the best of it. At one time in the course of the quarrel, Michael Angelo departed from Rome without permission or apology, and stoutly refused to return, though followed hotly by no less than ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler

... remarked, had a turn for mimicry; and it was with an irresistible feeling of deferential awe creeping over him that Coates heard the contents of Lady Rookwood's epistle delivered with an enunciation as peremptory and imperious as that of her ladyship's self. The letter was hastily indited, in a clear, firm hand, and partook of its writer's decision of character. Dick found no difficulty in deciphering ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... into actual hostilities, and substituting imbitterment for the secret good will of the Swedish government and people, who, in common with the Russian nobles and subjects, were alienated by the imperious and merciless exactions of the French demands. The secret aim of Great Britain was so to nourish this ill-will towards France, and so to avoid causes of offence by herself, as to convert covert hostility ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan

... know that I can stay! Forget the wild and foolish things I said. No thought of mine shall wrong Charles—I swear it solemnly. Catherine!—do not bid me leave you. Cannot you trust my honour?" His eyes held hers, by turns they seemed to become beseeching and imperious. ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... refreshed the exhausted energies of the desolate wanderer; in an instant he collected his senses, remembered all that had passed, and comprehended his present situation. He returned the lion a glance as imperious, and fierce, and scrutinsing, as his own. For a moment, their flashing orbs vied in regal rivalry; but at length the spirit of the mere animal yielded to the genius of the man. The lion, cowed, slunk away, stalked with haughty timidity through the ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli

... along the kind of path that Lagardere had made in the bundle of hay, and as he came he spoke, and his tone was menacing and imperious. "Let me feel your blade. I can ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... find the most interesting figure in the book that stoical father, whose austere, energetic, imperious, and relentless character showed the temperament of the Scotch Covenanter of the seventeenth century, inspired by the principles and philosophy of France in the eighteenth. No doubt, for those in search of strong dramatic effects, the lines of this strenuous indomitable nature are full of impressiveness.[3] ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley

... surface of the city splendid. A craving for fine objects was his own dearest emotion, he wanted to see cities, states, and the nation ready to spend with equal fervour. It all came apparently to a matter of spending. Morrison entertained no doubt that an imperious demand would create an abundant supply of what he called the best art. Whether we were to transport bodily the great monuments of Europe to America, or merely were to supply beauty off our indigenous bat, was not clear from Morrison's address, ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather

... meanwhile are we to go on living under martial law? They demanded the dissolution of the illegal and, at best, long superannuated Chamber, and fresh elections. The call for freedom grew louder, more insistent, more imperious and dangerous, until M. Venizelos took a first tentative step towards ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott

... man, relent a little. Ads-heartikins! you young gentlemen are made of iron and steel, I think; I'm sure, said he, my heart's turned into butter, and is running away at my eyes. I never felt the like before.—Said my master, with an imperious tone, Get out of my presence, hussy! I can't bear you in my sight. Sir, said I, I'm going as fast as ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson

... did CLEOPATRA WOO Her vanquished victor, couched on scented roses, And PHARAOH from his throne With more imperious tone Addressed in some such terms rebellious MOSES; And esoteric priests in Theban shrines, Their ritual conned from hieroglyphic signs, Thus muttered incantations dark and deep To Isis and Osiris, Thoth and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various

... clearly as in the present instance, have I observed that safeguard of justice which Providence has placed in the nature of man. Such is the imperious dominion with which truth and reason wave their sceptre over the human intellect, that no solicitation, however artful—no talent, however commanding—can seduce it from its allegiance. In proportion to the humility ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous

... youthfulness which the maturer intellect always pardons. He had never taken her politics seriously—why should he? With her head on his shoulder he had listened to her extravagant diatribes against the North. He had forgiven her outrageous indictment of his caste and his associates for the sake of the imperious but handsome lips that uttered it. But when he was compelled to listen to her words echoed and repeated by her friends and family; when he found that with the clannishness of her race she had drawn closer to them in this controversy,—that she depended upon them for her intelligence and information ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte

... the abode of parental oppression," calmly replied Don Lope; "and in your lover you shall find that tenderness, which a father denies; nay, start not, these words may perhaps alarm you, yet consider it is our only resource, and that imperious necessity is a law to which we must all submit. In a short time you shall be mine in the face of heaven, and now, you must ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio

... always something imperious about this great man. He brooked no interference. His excessive dignity compelled respect. He never allowed familiarities; you could not safely presume on his good nature. He never permitted you to get too near. This abnormal self-confidence conveyed ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... superiority over his legal associates and the natural impetuosity of his nature sometimes made him excessively dogmatic, and his manner though courteous even to a fineness towards those whom he liked was imperious and even unguarded toward his political enemies. At one time, having cited Dormat (the noted French jurist, 1625-1696, author of "The Civil Laws in their Natural Order," 1689) in the course of an argument, Governor Bernard ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath

... His customary imperious manner was struggling with a special feeling for this woman before him. She did not reply, but waited to hear where her part might come in. Her eyes did not fall from ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... frequently compelled large tributes in wampum from the Long Island Indians. The Pequots also for many years prior to 1637, exacted large annual contributions from the same tribes while they were still further subject to the levies of the imperious Mohawks. Thus the mint of wealth at their very doors became to its possessors the source of untold misery. Constant fear kept them toiling at the mines, while the scanty proceeds of their labor only quickened the greed of their savage masters. ...
— Wampum - A Paper Presented to the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society - of Philadelphia • Ashbel Woodward

... found in the case of work. Work is a necessity as imperious as war ever was. Looked at frankly and truthfully, work is a disagreeable necessity and not a good in itself. Yet by persuading ourselves that work is a blessing, that it is dignified and honorable, our willingness to work is materially increased, and therefore the process of adaptation is facilitated—in ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson

... stamped impatiently on the ground, for the master of Burgsdorf stood and stared at her with open mouth. It was something new to him to be commanded and disposed of in this way by a young woman; but at the last imperious words he came bashfully forward and took the satchel from the driver's hand. The young lady evidently thought it the most natural thing in the world to ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner

... gate clashed, dust flew from the door-mat, a heavy step echoed in the hall, an imperious voice called "Sophy!" and Aunt Kipp entered with a flourish of trumpets, for Toady blew a blast through his fingers which made the ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott

... husbands being in the full enjoyment of absolute power, no complaint is heard in their presence. An apparent tranquillity prevails in the household; the women are eager to anticipate the wishes of an imperious and sullen master; and they attend without distinction to their own children and those of their rivals. The missionaries assert, what may easily be believed, that this domestic peace, the effect of fear, is singularly disturbed when the husband is long absent. The wife who contracted the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... beautiful girl, tall, stately, imperious, was coming down one of the roseways with her arms full of the great crimson blossoms. If the king had been a scholar in the learning of the Greeks he would have compared the girl to some one of the glorious goddesses of the Hellenic ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... stopped him with an imperious gesture. He looked rather stern, and then, as though conscious that this was not the attitude to take, ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates

... behind the agent, and winked at me, and made motions for me to foller him into the buttery. He wunk several times before I paid much attention to 'em; but finally, the winks grew so violent, and the motions so imperious, yet clever, that I got up, and follered him into the buttery. He shet the door, and stood with his back against it; and says to me, with his voice fairly tremblin' ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... prompting of innate power which we call Genius, and not from labored obedience to a theory or rule; and the presence of genius or innate prompting is directly opposed to the perpetual consciousness of a rule. The action of faculty is imperious, and excludes the reflection why it should act. In the same way, in proportion as morality is emotional, i.e., has affinity with Art, it will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic feeling and action, and not as the recognition of a rule. Love does not say, "I ought to love"—it ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... grimly. Her worry was not confined to this particular phase of Elsa's imperious moods; it was general. There was that blond man with the parrot. Martha was beginning to see him in her dreams, which she considered as a presage of evil. There was also the astonishing lack of interest in the man who was waiting at home. Elsa rarely spoke of him. Nobody could tell ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath

... of the "trial of their faith being much more precious than of gold which perisheth," the apostle utters forth an imperious call to entire sanctification. "But as He which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation; because it is written, Be ye holy, for I am holy." Thus he quotes from the words of the great lawgiver in Leviticus—that Moses, whom all Jews have delighted to honor, and ...
— The Theology of Holiness • Dougan Clark

... maritime Ionians practise when they accept the hegemony of a Spartan landsman; enough of submission do the free citizens of Hellas show when they suffer the imperious Dorian to sentence them to punishments only fit for slaves. But when the Spartan appears in the robes of the Mede, when the imperious Dorian places in the government of a city, which our joint arms now occupy, a recreant who has changed an Eretrian birthright ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton

... words the King of Samandal burst out laughing falling back in his throne against a cushion that supported him, and with an imperious and scornful air, said to King Saleh: 'King Saleh, I have always hitherto thought you a prince of great sense; but what you say convinces me how much I was mistaken. Tell me, I beseech you, where was your discretion, when you imagined to yourself so great an absurdity as ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon

... Flying Cloud ranged up on the larboard quarter of the barque, the excited blue-clad figure appeared to suddenly go demented altogether, for, rushing to the barque's gangway, he threw himself over rather than descended the vessel's side into a boat which was towing alongside, and with imperious gestures seemed to command the boatmen to convey him to the approaching ship. They obeyed, and the distance of the two vessels being but short, in less than a minute a voice—well known, ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood

... policeman for a foreign government. They foresee the subterfuges by which Serbia will doubtless wish to avoid giving a clear and direct reply; that is why a short interval will perhaps be fixed for her to declare whether she accepts or not. The tenor of the note and its imperious tone almost certainly insure that Belgrade will refuse. Then military operations ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various

... happy! Ah! Margot! Cunning Margot! spreading the treasures of those dear dead women before their imperious little descendant! Wise old Margot, who must speak so carefully that she will not break that girl's heart! Margot, who must undo all the trouble that years of evasions from Grandy and lies from Mademoiselle D'Ormy have ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke

... this he thought that he would go on the morrow. When the morrow came he determined to postpone the journey another day! The calls of duty are so much less imperious than those of pleasure! On that further day he still meant to go, as he sat about noon unbraced, only. partly dressed in his room at the barracks. His friend Johnstone was back in Ennis, and there was also a Cornet with the troop. He had ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope

... flushed face crowned the extraordinary structure like a blossom, scarcely controlling its laughter. She was as tall as her mother, and as imperious, as crested, and proud; and in spite of the pigtail, the girlish semi-circular comb, and the loose foal-like limbs, she could support as well as her mother the majesty of the gimp-embroidered dress. Her eyes ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... with his imperious gesture, and she turned from him, clinging to my neck. I was vexed now, and, much as I feared discourtesy to one of Mr. Stewart's guests, felt like holding my own. Keeping the little girl tight in my arms, I pushed past him toward the fire. To my great wrath he began pulling at her shawl ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic

... the chapels of monasteries, where we find it contrasted with the otherwise so ascetic economy of the worshippers. The paintings and gildings of their church, the gem-bright marbles and fantastic carvings, are really but the monastic tribute to sensuous delight—an imperious need for which the fond imagination of Rome has officiously opened the door. One smiles when one thinks how largely a fine starved sense for the forbidden things of earth, if it makes the most of its opportunities, may gratify this need under cover of devotion. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... once, Mr. Lowington," said the vice-principal; "and I am free to say I would not have tolerated such an instructor as Mr. Hamblin. He hasn't a particle of sympathy with the students. He is haughty, stiff, and overbearing. He is imperious, fretful, snarling, and tyrannical. In a word, I don't blame the boys for ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic

... can be master of, How I divined their capabilities! From the soft-rinded smoothening facile chalk 95 That yields your outline to the air's embrace, Half-softened by a halo's pearly gloom; Down to the crisp imperious steel, so sure To cut its one confided thought clean out Of all the world. But marble!—'neath my tools 100 More pliable than jelly—as it were Some clear primordial creature dug from depths In the earth's heart, where itself breeds itself, And whence all baser substance may be worked; Refine it ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... well thou know'st How haughty and imperious is his mind; Thou for the Gods in haste prepare the feast; Then shalt thou learn, amid th' Immortals all, What evil he designs; nor all, I ween, His counsels will approve, or men, or Gods, Though now ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... might have got up and stretched itself but for good manners, and walked out in childish boredom at having to wait for the rise of the curtain, but sat on instead, diffusing an atmosphere of affluence and delicate scents, and suggesting, with imperious chins, the use of quick orders in a world of ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... me,—yes; but will suffer no one else to love me! This must end some day. I am weary of the bondage." And sauntering towards the ladies, he listened in silence, but not apparently in displeasure, to his queen's sharp sayings on the imperious mood and irritable temper of the iron-handed builder of ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... to promote the happiness of the people and facilitate their progress toward the most complete enjoyment of civil liberty. On an occasion so interesting and important in our history, and of such anxious concern to the friends of freedom throughout the world, it is our imperious duty to lay aside all selfish and local considerations and be guided by a lofty spirit of devotion to the great principles on which our institutions ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson

... began. First it would be the Madam herself, off on her rounds of inspection, but stopping long enough for a few minutes' chat with her guest. She would be followed by the elderly, apologetic housewoman, to put his things in order, answering Jacqueline's imperious demand for haste with an humble "Yais 'm, Miss Jacky, I's hurryin' fas' as a pusson kin go, but de Madam wouldn't like it a bit ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly

... to be severely felt; brandy, far from appeasing this imperious necessity, augmented it, and richly merited the name of "tiger's milk" applied to it by the African natives. Scarcely two pints of water remained, and that was heated. Each of the party devoured the few precious drops ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne

... hoping each day for news of his admiral's dash into the Channel. But Villeneuve, who knew Keith had a squadron in the Channel, and had a vague dread of Nelson suddenly making his appearance, had a better appreciation of the small chance of the scheme giving any result than the imperious soldier-Emperor, who had come to believe that what he ordered must succeed. From Vigo, Villeneuve wrote to the Minister of Marine, Decres, that his fleet was hardly in condition for any active enterprise. It had met ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... given us, but that one book is worth a thousand chronicles. In the wandering, gossipy pages of Jocelyn of Brakeland the life of the twelfth century, so far as it could penetrate abbey walls, still glows distinct for us round the figure of the shrewd, practical, kindly, imperious abbot who looks out, a little travestied perhaps, from the ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green

... name at the bottom, that's all. Father wrote the rest to save you trouble. Now, please." Powerless against an imperious magnetism which would have compelled him to sign his own death-warrant, he scrawled the words. As she took up the precious scrap of paper, and hid it in her bosom, the door opened, and Mrs. Edwards ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy

... for men to join our fighting forces, which is our primary need, has been and is being nobly responded to here at home and throughout the empire. That call, we say with all plainness and directness, was never more urgent or more imperious than today. For this is a war not only of men but of material. To take only one illustration, the expenditure upon ammunition on both sides has been on a scale and at a rate which is not only without all precedent but is far in excess of any expert ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... conciliated the Bohemians, but such a course was not consonant with the character of the imperious and despotic Albert. He urged his son to measures of arbitrary power which exasperated the nobles, and led to a speedy revolt against his authority. Rhodolph and the nobles were soon in the field ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott

... I pride myself on, it is self-possession and a willingness to face anybody and give as good as I get, but that magnificently imperious way of looking with those large eyes always disconcerted me. I could not brace myself enough to meet them with any show of impudence, though the old lady had not ceased to regard that as the chief trait of my ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous

... no desire for secrecy or rebellion on the part of the dwellers of the cottage, for hardly had Sir Marmaduke's imperious knock echoed against the timbered walls, than the door was opened from within by Richard Lambert who, seeing the two gentlemen standing on the threshold, stepped back immediately, allowing ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy

... author, whose name, for fear of the Sex's resentment I conceal, brings her in, calling to Adam at a great distance, in an imperious haughty manner, beckoning to him with her hand, thus; Here, says she, you cowardly faint-hearted wretch, take this branch of heavenly fruit, eat and be a stupid fool no longer; eat and be wise; eat and be a God; and know, to your eternal shame, that your wife has ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe

... which he saw Lena unavoidably separated from him by profound and subtle differences; the sceptical carelessness which had accompanied every one of his attempts at action, like a secret reserve of his soul, fell away from him. He no longer belonged to himself. There was a call far more imperious and august. He came up to the bungalow, and at the very limit of the lantern's light, on the top step, he saw her feet and the bottom part of her dress. The rest of her person was suggested dimly as high as her waist. She sat on a chair, and the gloom of the low eaves descended ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad

... want to know anything," she replied in an imperious, almost a stagy voice, as for a moment ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef

... some Jilt for a long time sustain'd, Who has Imperious o'er his Pocket reign'd; At length grown weary of so loose a Life, Or for some other Cause, he takes a wife: The Jilt now like a Fury flings and tears, Ten thousand Oaths to be reveng'd she swears: Threatens to come before his very Door, For Whores are plagues that never ...
— The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses from Men • Various

... as if he were emerging from some enchanted spot in the "Arabian Nights," abounding with giants and men "getting dead." He had no more belief in what this imperious little imp had told him than he had in the predictions of Licorice Stick, or ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... is big enough to make room for a glorious, imperious, world-possessing, world-commanding beauty like this, we are no longer its disciples. It is become a play word. It lags behind truth. Let it be shut in with its rim of hills—the word beautiful—its show of sunsets and its bouquets and its doilies ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee

... riding in Central Park and you can hear auto horns there, but the hoofbeats don't drum that wild way. And there aren't so many riding together. And no auto horn I ever heard gave out with that sweet yet imperious ta-ta-ta-TA. ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... tongue," said the imperious husband; "or, rather, go away and leave us. I have a word or two to say to Harry Clavering, which had ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope

... lisped Georgina, wanting undivided attention, and laying an imperious little hand on his ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston

... food," said the imperious stranger, "after, you shall make a bed for me in your inner room, and sit before this house that none may disturb me, for it is to my high purpose that no word shall go to M'ilitani that I ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace

... brown eyes and curls like yellow floss; from her childishness and ignorance of what children at ten years of age are usually taught, she was supposed by strangers to be no more than eight years of age; she was an imperious little lady, impetuous, untrained, self-reliant, and, from much intercourse with strangers, not at all shy, looking out upon the world with confiding eyes, and knowing nothing to be afraid of or ashamed of. Nurse had been her only teacher; ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin

... have fallen victims to fever in certain lands is terrible: it is a matter of serious consideration whether any motives, short of imperious duty, justify a person in braving a fever-stricken country. In the ill-fated Niger expedition, three vessels were employed, of which the 'Albert' stayed the longest time in the river, namely two months and ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton

... gentlemen, and you are not a gentleman; we have not been thieves, and you have proved yourself a thief; we have spoken the truth, and you are, what you are so fond of calling your cousin, who is worth two of you, a liar. Now listen. However imperious I may have grown in my old age, I can still respect the man who thwarts me even though I hate him; but I despise the man who deceives me, as I despise you, my dear son Philip—and I tell you this, and I beg you to ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... the sergeant cut him short with an imperious gesture, and the young man seeing that the guard also had fallen stiffly into rank, turned to the tailor. He was overflowing with good nature: he must speak to some one. "If you had not been ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... Christians are right upon Rationalistic principles in all the more important of their allegations; that is to say, to establish the Resurrection and Ascension of the Redeemer upon a basis which should satisfy the most imperious demands of modern criticism. This would form the first and most important part of the task. Then should follow a no less convincing proof that Rationalists are right in demurring to the historical accuracy of much which has been too obstinately defended by so-called orthodox writers. This ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler

... nations and dynasties determined by its sway—but here in our every-day life we see its influence, direct or indirect, forceful and ubiquitous beyond aught else. Any statesmanlike view, therefore, will recognize that here we have an instinct so fundamental, so imperious, that its influence is a fact which has to be accepted; suppress it you cannot. You may guide it into healthy channels, but an outlet it will have, and if that outlet is inadequate and unduly obstructed irregular channels ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger

... world. In the midst of our most serious affairs there intrudes the imperious question of bread and butter. So long as there are stomachs to digest—and as yet we are unable to dispense with them—we must find the wherewithal to fill them, and the powerful will live by the sufferings of the weak. Life is a void that only death can fill. Hence ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... loftiest term to which all philosophy directs itself; that imperious necessity of the human mind, that pivot round which it is compelled to group the aggregate of its ideas: Unity, this source, this centre of all systematic order, this principle of existence, this central point, unknown in its essence, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... mentions in his letters, the adagio of this concerto. This larghetto in A flat is a trifle too ornamental for my taste, mellifluous and serene as it is. The recitative is finely outlined. I think I like best the romanze of the E minor Concerto. It is less flowery. The C sharp minor part is imperious in its beauty, while the murmuring mystery of the close mounts to the imagination. The rondo is frolicksome, tricky, genial and genuine piano music. It is true the first movement is too long, too much in one set ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... the flu epidemic returned upon us, she stood by, efficient, deft, and gallant, though still imperious, until the day when she clashed her lath-and-tinsel sword of theory against the tempered steel of the Little Red Doctor's experience. Said the Little Red Doctor (who was pressed for time at the moment): "Take orders. Or get ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... Prussian kings, he had won a friend for life who, as will subsequently appear, proved of service to him. The general character of life in Prussia also greatly contributed to strengthen in him that independent bearing of which Spontini's imperious splendor had given him a hint, and which subsequently was to invest his own art with so much importance in ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl

... than as it puts it in the hands of others. When he came to the throne, Godwin, Earl of Kent, was the most popular man in England; he possessed a very great estate, an enterprising disposition, and an eloquence beyond the age he lived in; he was arrogant, imperious, assuming, and of a conscience which never put itself in the way of his interest. He had a considerable share in restoring Edward to the throne of his ancestors; and by this merit, joined to his popularity, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... of the new star could not live without eating, and their stomachs were suffering from the imperious laws of hunger. Michel Ardan, as a Frenchman, was declared chief cook, an important function, which raised no rival. The gas gave sufficient heat for the culinary apparatus, and the provision box furnished the elements of this ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne

... of the Straits of Malacca. And here, the monsoon which had favoured us over so many miles of the pathless ocean, suddenly forsook us. Sails were of no further use, and we braced up our sweat glands for four or five days of increasing heat. In obedience to the demands of an imperious, ever-rising, thermometer, we reduced our rig to the least possible articles consistent with decency and the regulations of the Service—which latter, by the way, discriminates not between the caloric of the north pole and ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith

... eyes again. The sweetness of her young voice thrilled and troubled him. But for his promise to Uchida he would have fled at once, as from temptation. Ume-ko, seeing his embarrassment, withdrew, but not until she had made an imperious gesture to old Mata, commanding her to serve him with rice ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa

... possessed over the slaves and Hottentots demoralized them, and made them tyrannical and blood-thirsty. At too great a distance from the seat of government for its power to reach them, they defied it and knew no law but their own imperious wills, acknowledging no authority,—guilty of every crime openly, and ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat

... do? What should he choose? Be false to the most imperious souvenirs, to all those solemn vows to himself, to the most sacred duty, to the most venerated text! Should he ignore his father's testament, or allow the perpetration of a crime! On the one hand, it seemed to him that he heard "his Ursule" supplicating for her father ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... Excelsior an unapproachable divinity, as inaccessible and cold as her father was impulsive and familiar. An atmosphere of chaste and proud virginity made itself felt even in the starched integrity of her spotless skirts, in her neatly-gloved finger-tips, in her clear amber eyes, in her imperious red lips, in her sensitive nostrils. Need it be said that the youth and middle age of Excelsior were madly, because apparently hopelessly, in love with her? For the rest, she had been expensively educated, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... added greatly to the power of the Spaniards, as Obando appointed Juan Ponce de Leon to keep the Indians of that quarter under subjection. This man was possessed of good sense and great courage, but was of an imperious and cruel disposition, and soon formed projects of extending his authority beyond the narrow bounds which had been assigned him. Learning from the Indians of his province, that the island of St Juan de Puerto Rico, called Borriquen by the natives, was very rich in gold, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr

... book alone the abbey has given us, but that one book is worth a thousand chronicles. In the wandering, gossipy pages of Jocelyn of Brakeland the life of the twelfth century, so far as it could penetrate abbey walls, still glows distinct for us round the figure of the shrewd, practical, kindly, imperious abbot who looks out, a little travestied perhaps, from the ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green

... How imperious, then, is the obligation imposed upon every citizen, in his own sphere of action, whether limited or extended, to exert himself in perpetuating a condition of things so singularly happy! All the lessons of history and experience must be lost upon us if we are content to trust ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... should have so little control, even of her own feelings, before an assembly. Mrs. Harvey has never distinguished herself as a public speaker. Resolute, impetuous, confident to a degree bordering on the imperious, with power of denunciation to equip an orator, she yet shrinks from the gaze of a multitude with a woman's modesty, and the humility of a child. She does not underestimate the worth of true womanhood by attempting to act a distinctively ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... one who, with no cure of souls in the Church, felt himself suddenly impelled to lift up his voice. The child of the people, he knew all their material and moral woes, and their mysterious echo sounded in his own heart. Like the ancient prophet of Israel, he heard an imperious voice saying to him: "Go and speak to the children of my people." "Ah, Lord God, I am but a child, I know not how to speak." "Say not, I am but a child, for thou shalt go to all those to whom I shall ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier

... essentially an aristocracy. To remove the dangerous example of a successful and powerful republic, where every man has equal rights, civil and religious, and where a privileged order in Church and State is impossible, has become in the minds of England's governing classes an imperious necessity. Compared with the importance of securing this result, all other considerations weigh as nothing. Brothers by blood, language, and religion, as they have been accustomed to call us while we were united and formidable, we are now, since civil war has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... him along the kind of path that Lagardere had made in the bundle of hay, and as he came he spoke, and his tone was menacing and imperious. "Let me feel your blade. I ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... Alva was allowed, in the name of his master and himself; to make submission to the Church and his peace with Rome. The Spanish general, with secret indignation and disgust, was compelled to humor the vanity of a peevish but imperious old man. Negotiations were commenced, and so skilfully had the Duke played his game during the spring and summer, that when he was admitted to kiss the Pope's toe, he was able to bring a hundred Italian towns in his hand, as a peace-offering to his holiness. These ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... proud imperious thing. There was something Southern in her. Very dark blue eyes she had, much darker than ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells

... before remarked, had a turn for mimicry; and it was with an irresistible feeling of deferential awe creeping over him that Coates heard the contents of Lady Rookwood's epistle delivered with an enunciation as peremptory and imperious as that of her ladyship's self. The letter was hastily indited, in a clear, firm hand, and partook of its writer's decision of character. Dick found no difficulty in deciphering it. ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... be worse than useless to have any words with this imperious Chilian, who in his petty command felt more arrogant than a king on this throne. Accordingly he began in ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood

... of; we might as well demand that a lady should be the tallest woman in the world, like the Shropshire giantess,(12) as that she should be a paragon in any other character, before we began to love her. Esmond's mistress had a thousand faults beside her charms: he knew both perfectly well! She was imperious, she was light-minded, she was flighty, she was false, she had no reverence in her character; she was in everything, even in beauty, the contrast of her mother, who was the most devoted and the least selfish of women. Well, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... heavy breathing, and then he tried to check it that he might steal away undiscovered. Divers emotions fought for the possession of him. He was in the meeting of many waters, each capable of whirling him where it chose, but two only imperious: the one the fierce joy of being loved; the other an agonizing remorse. He would fain have stolen away to think this tremendous thing over, but it tossed him forward. "Grizel," he said in a ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie

... "Most imperious son of Saturn, what a word hast thou spoken? Surely now any man who is mortal, and knows not so many designs, might accomplish this against a man. How therefore ought not I, who boast myself to be chief of the goddesses, both from birth and also ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer

... on this, as on most occasions, was our friend Cockerell,—affectionately known to the entire Battalion as "Sparrow,"—and his qualifications for the post were derived from three well-marked and invaluable characteristics, namely, an imperious disposition, a thick skin, and ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)

... society. The daughters of Mme. de Rambouillet, and her son, the popular young Marquis de Pisani, formed a nucleus of youth and gaiety. To these we may add the beautiful Angelique Paulet, who at seventeen had turned the head of Henri IV, and escaped the fatal influence of that imperious sovereign's infatuation by his timely, or untimely, death. Fair and brilliant, the best singer of her time, skilled also in playing the lute, and gifted with a special dramatic talent, she was always a favorite, much loved by her friends and much ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... pathological degeneration of this particular emotion, which is very common and appears in various forms, but does not seem to me to be at all morbid. Certainly it is morbid when a man allows himself to be insulted, bound and flogged, but it is fairly normal when his passionate admiration is roused by an imperious woman, who passes him by like a queen without even noticing his abject adoration; when he longs to kneel down before her and kiss her feet, which in reward would spurn him. Quite normal, too, is the boyish happiness ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... The same imperious impulse drove CALLOT, at the age of twelve years, from his father's roof. His parents, from prejudices of birth, had conceived that the art of engraving was one beneath the studies of their son; but the boy had listened to stories of the miracles of Italian ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... imperious head, and then again she smiled, for out of the depths of the garden, with an embellishment of divers trills and roulades, came a man's ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell

... and no good man Whose eye shall ever come to scan The record of the imperious ban That made our life so sad a span Shall read or hear, who shall not pray For us for ever." Then anon Died Balan; but the sun was gone, And deep the stars of midnight ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... Rome has never been famed for her tolerance; her energy and indomitable will have been too frequently manifested by the stern behests of imperious authority. The sovereign pontiffs, with their claims of infallibility, have left the Pagan far behind in the ardor of persecution and the more than imperial character of their governments. Julian published edicts of universal toleration; from time to time he assumed the garb of each ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... will—which seems in some mysterious way to warn every woman when the great miracle of love is drawing near. It is as though Love's shadow fell across her heart and she were afraid to turn and face him—shrinking with the terror of a trapped wild thing from meeting his imperious demand. ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler

... lazy Ballinger pulled himself together and ploughed through the two last furrows that he would have left for next day in Barker's time. Even for Ballinger and Curtis she had smiles that atoned for her little air of imperious command. ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair

... great man is often compelled to light for his right to live in the freedom of spirit. Prophets, poets, teachers, and artists have known the scorn, hatred, and rejection of society; they have known also its flatteries, rewards, and imperious demands; and they have learned that in both moods society is the foe of the highest development and of the noblest talent. He who breaks under the scorn or yields to the adulation becomes the creature of those whom he would serve, and ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... plane is—another coat of paint. On the other hand, if we had a room finished in old English oak, growing blacker and blacker every year; in mahogany or in cheap and mournful black walnut, what could we do if the imperious mistress of the world should decree light colors? With rare, pale, faded tints on the walls our strong, bold, heavy hard-wood finish would be painful in the extreme. We couldn't change the wood and we couldn't ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner

... Channel. But Villeneuve, who knew Keith had a squadron in the Channel, and had a vague dread of Nelson suddenly making his appearance, had a better appreciation of the small chance of the scheme giving any result than the imperious soldier-Emperor, who had come to believe that what he ordered must succeed. From Vigo, Villeneuve wrote to the Minister of Marine, Decres, that his fleet was hardly in condition for any active enterprise. It had met with trying weather ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... and in awe of the sovereign, as far as their fickle nature would allow. It was not then, as is still asserted, the mere caprice of a despot which brought upon the Greek world the scourge of the Persian wars, but the imperious necessity of security, which obliges well-organised empires to subjugate in turn all the tribes and cities which cause constant trouble on its frontiers. Darius, who was already ruler of a good third of the Hellenic world, from Trebizond to Barca, saw no other means of keeping ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... here at once," she called, and made an imperious gesture. (I wonder whether she realised who he was, or thought no further as yet, in her emergency, than just that here, providentially, was a ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... only you mustn't be alone," answered Mr. Stuart in his rather imperious way. "You'd better take Colquhoun and his sister along with you. They're artists, and he knows something of the language and the ways ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various

... him are pervaded and informed and guided by intellect, so the most earnest struggles of intellect seem to be calmed and made gentle in their vehemence, by a more essential rationality of taste. That imperious mind, which seems fit to defy the universe, is ever subordinate, by a kind of fascination, to the perfect law of grace. In the highest of his intellectual flights—and who can follow the winged rush of that eagle mind?—in the widest ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various

... vividly, as I had never suspected the pale little Helen I had once known so well, with her aspect of almost severe purity, could ever blush. There was a new sort of beauty about her: a soft richness of tint and texture seemed added to cheek and lip, and the old imperious concentration of her glance was, for the moment, quite gone. Still, although I could easily see that she was frightened at her own temerity in allowing my more than brotherly freedom, I could not find it in my heart to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... me that I could continue on my way; that they would certainly take care of me in Aerschot, as I had been firing at Germans, and they would shoot me when I arrived. I would have liked better to return to Louvain, but with an imperious gesture he pointed out my road to Aerschot, and I continued. On arriving within a few hundred meters of the town ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various

... manner of pains, to do all in his power, to put on every shape, and sacrifice his own ease and life to procure the spiritual improvement of the least of those who are committed to his charge. He is incapable of imperious haughtiness, which alienates the minds of inferiors, and renders their obedience barely exterior and a forced hypocrisy. His commands are tender entreaties, and if he is obliged to extend his authority, this he does with secret repugnance, losing sight of himself, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... nothing of bitterness, but lulled his soul instead, and when it passed, he would be left with thankfulness for his moment of fleeting bliss and ineffable comfort. Or again, he awoke to reality with a longing that fiercely would not be denied. "Oh, I want—Jack'leen!" Often and often the imperious smothered cry all but passed his lips. And then he would shake himself, as out of physical slumber, and he would take up his life again. But he would be a shade deeper in the devil's own mood, of ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... unstudied simplicity, graphic and vigorous, and glowing with the thoughts and images of a luminous though unpolished mind, flowed from his lips majestic and resistless. Added to all was that awakening voice whose echoes had so long resounded through thy great North-west. Now it rang out, stern, abrupt, imperious, like the call of a trumpet to battle; now softened down to tones broken, tender, and pitying as those of a bereaved father sorrowing over his hapless children; then, as visions of the utter extinction of his race would break upon his prophetic soul, it would come ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady

... the horse. Even in his brief survey of the family, the night before, Mac had come to a decision upon two points. He did not like his Aunt Phebe; he did like his Uncle Allyn. And Allyn, unaccustomed to children though he was, promptly became the slave of his imperious ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray

... You little recked, imperious head, When shrilled your shattering trumpets' noise, Your frigid sections would be read By ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various

... ought to be, my own master upon this subject. I am still of the same opinion; I still hold that parents have no right to make their children miserable by any arbitrary dictation upon a question of such vital importance as that of whom they shall marry. Parents have an undoubted right, nay it is an imperious duty which they owe to their children, to direct their choice with respect to suitable connections, and they have a right to interpose the authority of their advice and recommendation to their children. But the law of God and of man says[14], ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt

... assist him, and procure men as guides and to carry his baggage to the villages of the mountaineers. This, however, was not so easily done. A quarrel took place, and the natives, refusing to obey the imperious orders of the lieutenant, got out their knives and spears to attack him and his soldiers; and Mr. Allen himself was obliged to interfere to protect those who had come to guard him. The respect due to a white man and the timely ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... promised to read to Chloe that afternoon, when a child's footsteps were heard coming down the hall, the handle of the door was turned hastily, and then, as it refused to yield, Enna's voice called out in a fretful, imperious tone, "Open this door, Elsie Dinsmore. ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley

... castle near Sarnen, in Unterwalden, where his imperious temper, his exactions, his cruelties, and his debaucheries aroused a universal feeling of hatred among the peasants, that culminated in his expulsion and the destruction of his stronghold. The latter is popularly believed to have occurred on January 1, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... was the face of a woman fifty years of age, with massive chin, slightly sunken cheeks, a prominent nose, heavy eyebrows, and a high forehead rather scantily streaked by gray hair. There was no trace of the girlish bloom I had known, of the beauty that once had been hers, but the imperious manner ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field

... it so impossible to throw off her old proud ways, for she really intended to relent enough, at least, to have an explanation, and possibly—her thoughts could never go farther than this, and here she was, in the same imperious way, shutting her better self away from even a fair consideration of duty. These thoughts flashed through her mind while she walked on, apparently with the greatest indifference to either his words or his presence. But with a great effort she ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson

... home for a finality, and there had dallied a twelvemonth, lapped in the Elysium of freedom and youth. Every want anticipated, every whim gratified, servants prostrate before her, father adoring her,—the year sped on wings of silent joy, and left her a shade more imperious than it met her. Launched into society, wealthy and winning, Eloise counted, too, her lovers; but she spurned them so gayly that her hard heart became a proverb through all the region round, wherever the rejected travelled. It is true that Mr. Erne had often expressed his film of dissatisfaction ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... I had succumbed supinely to this imperious domination. The sentiment of deep awe with which I habitually regarded the elevated character, the majestic wisdom, the apparent omnipresence and omnipotence of Wilson, added to a feeling of even terror, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... allowed, even in dream, to rest in lower things until satiety brings disillusion. The higher destiny is swift at her heels; and ever, just as she would nestle in some new covert, she is torn from it by the imperious Best of All that claims ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... prince, and his curiosity pressing him to solve the secret, Elfric followed Edwy down the stairs to the lower hall, where Redwald was on guard. He seemed to await the lads, for he bowed at once to the prince and proceeded to the outer door, where, at an imperious signal from him, the warder threw the little inner portal open, ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... not answer, and he went on. "Listen!" he said in his old, imperious way. "What couldn't we do together an the world, for the ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough

... where I sat was unlighted save by the waning sun, and I could see but little of its long vista, without neglecting a very imperious appetite. The lattice was covered, I thought, with vine-leaves, and I felt sure, too, that some orange boughs, reaching across the patio wall, mingled with the foliage above my head. But all I was certain of was the relish of the fowl and the delicious refreshment of the cool ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various

... There was something imperious in her demand, but Ross found himself describing in detail their past adventures, first on the world of sand and sealed structures where the derelict had rested for a purpose its involuntary passengers had never understood, and then of the Terrans' limited exploration of that ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton

... under stones or beneath the bank and rest till dawn. In the course of time they reach the quiet upper reaches of the river or go up rivulets and drainpipes to the isolated ponds. Their impulse to go on must be very imperious, for they may wriggle up the wet moss by the side of a waterfall or even make a short excursion in ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... occasion would she have given way so completely; she would have rushed to the King's presence, overwhelmed him with impetuous prayers, extorted somehow the permission to go on. But Charles was safe at seven miles' distance, and his envoys were imperious and peremptory, like men able to enforce obedience if it were not given. She obeyed at last, recovering courage a little in the hope of being able to persuade Charles to change his mind, and sanction another assault on Paris from the other side, by means of a bridge over the ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant

... a woman on the wrong side of fifty. The complexion was extremely fair, with gray shades in it. The eyes, pale in color but singularly imperious and direct, were sunk deep under straight brows. The nose was long, prominent, and delicately sharp in the nostril. These features, together with the long upper lip and severely cut mouth and chin, the slightly ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... rebuked, even as the schoolboy is. He has his wife to read him lectures, and rap his knuckles; he has his master, his landlord, or the mayor of his village, to tell him of his duty in an imperious style, and in measured sentences; if he is a member of a legislature, even there he receives his lessons, and is told, either in phrases of well-conceived irony, or by the exhibition of facts and reasonings which take him by surprise, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... said the host to himself. "Can he be afraid of this boy?" But an imperious glance from the stranger stopped him short; ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... in a Parisian manner. She looked with practical amiability at her guests, who dined noisily and with great fire, discussing momentous problems furiously, making wide, maniacal gestures through the cigarette smoke. Meanwhile the little handful of waiters ran to and fro wildly. Imperious and importunate cries rang at them from all directions. "Gustave! Adolphe!" Their faces expressed a settled despair. They answered calls, commands, oaths in a semi-distraction, fleeting among the tables as if pursued by some dodging animal. Their breaths came in gasps. ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane

... poetic, and that hopelessly prosaic word "pail" would kill a whole volume of sonnets. Whitman's poems are reckless rhapsodies over creation in general, some times sublime, some times ridiculous. He declares that the ocean with its "imperious waves, commanding" is beautiful, and that the fly-specks on the walls are also beautiful. Such catholic taste may go in science, but in poetry their results are sad. The poet's task is usually to select the poetic. Whitman never bothers to do that, he takes everything in the universe from fly-specks ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... the child learned by example and precept the great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, he was going to remain what by nature we all are,—imperious, demanding, and self-seeking. The whole scheme must fail if his education failed. It is not too much to say that the success of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution depended, in the minds of certain early Democrats, upon the woman. ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... turn their attention to trade and manufactures, which appear to offer the readiest and most powerful means of success. In this respect they share the instincts of the poor, without feeling the same necessities; say rather, they feel the most imperious of all necessities, that of not ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... coming to recognize the high claim of a moral obligation to study the yesterdays of this imperial and imperious race. The preservation of this record in abiding form is all the more significant because all serious students of Indian life and lore are deeply convinced of the insistent fact that the Indian, as a ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon

... then yielded to an imperious urge to clasp her to his heart and comfort her. She twisted out of his arms, and snapped, "Don't you ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes

... minute, nor a second!" retorted Mihalevitch with an imperious wave of the hand. "Not one second: death does not delay, and life ought not ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev

... not come from China," replied Karamaneh. "My father was a pure Bedawee. But my history does not matter." (At times there was something imperious in her manner; and to this her musical accent added force.) "When your brave brother, Inspector Weymouth, and Dr. Fu-Manchu, were swallowed up by the river, Fu-Manchu held a poisoned needle in his hand. The laughter meant that the needle ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... planning for a vast empire of slavery, an empire which should include not only the southern half of the United States, but also Mexico, Central America, and possibly a portion of South America. The advocates of slavery certainly presented and maintained an imperious and despotic temper. Feeling was running high on both sides in ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham

... their way through the street traffic in Dave's machine. Whatever had been his forecast of impending disaster, the streets held little hint of it. They were congested with traffic and building material. Although it was late at night the imperious clamour of electric rivetters rattled down from steel structures on every hand. Office blocks, with their rental space all contracted months in advance, were being rushed to completion by the aid of arc lights and double shifts. But presently ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead

... he asked, watching Nellie, as in obedience to an imperious command from her grandmother, she began to set out ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt

... stood for some minutes, stroking his black beard, while his fierce eyes glanced from one pale face to another along the miserable line of his captives. In a harsh, imperious voice he said something which brought Mansoor, the dragoman, to the front, with bent back and outstretched, supplicating palms. To his employers there had always seemed to be something comic in that flapping skirt and short cover-coat above it; ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... frankness and reticence, of childishness and pride, seemed to augur a future that was perplexed and full of dangers. As time passed the less pleasant qualities in this curious composition revealed themselves more often and more seriously. There were signs of an imperious, a peremptory temper, an egotism that was strong and hard. It was noticed that the palace etiquette, far from relaxing, grew ever more and more inflexible. By some, this was attributed to Lehzen's influence; but, ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey

... destruction of liberty—a multiplication of statutes which have scarcely been recorded ere a second legislative body has annulled them. Each State has, in fact, been an immense centralized power; and as bitter as has been the South against centralized National power, we have in it seen a most imperious, tyrannical exercise of centralized power under the specious name of State rights. The evil is such a constantly increasing one under the old constitutions, that they are being revised in many States with special intent to check ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... It was an imperious demand, that every one in the Dering household had become used to, likewise, to the speaker, a mite of humanity, with wicked big blue eyes, a pug nose, and a ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving

... French arms; and he had lived to see the beginning of a third war which tasked his great powers to the utmost. Between him and the celebrated captains who carried his plans into execution there was little harmony. His imperious temper and his confidence in himself impelled him to interfere too much with the conduct of troops in the field, even when those troops were commanded by Conde, by Turenne or by Luxemburg. But he was the greatest Adjutant General, the greatest ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... own only, for it has been and is still felt by numbers. No one without these walls, nor indeed within, but may to-morrow be made liable to the same insult and obstruction, in the discharge of an imperious duty for the restoration of the true constitution of these realms, by petitioning for reform in Parliament. The petitioner, my Lords, is a man whose long life has been spent in one unceasing struggle for the liberty of the subject, against ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... an imperious gesture. "There is no use arguing about it," he said, coldly. "But there are two or three things that I want to tell you—that I think you ought to know. You can take them from me or not, as you please. My ideas and policies that made this institution what it is to-day ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright

... his hereditary trade of territorial aristocrat. At a very early age he had disgraced himself by asking his mother whether he might be a watchmaker when he grew up, and his feeble sense on that occasion of the impropriety of an earl being anything whatsoever except an earl had given his mother an imperious contempt for him which afterward got curiously mixed with a salutary dread of his moral superiority to her, which was considerable. His aspiration to become a watchmaker was an early symptom of his extraordinary turn for mechanics. An apprenticeship of six years at ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... the estates made answer on the 21st March. It could not be called hard, they said, to require the withdrawal of the Spanish troops, for this had been granted in 1559, for less imperious reasons. The estates had, indeed, themselves made use of foreigners, but those foreigners had never been allowed to participate in the government. With regard to the assembly of the states-general, that body had always enjoyed the right of advising with the Sovereign on ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... and bring his eyes to bear in the search. But he had well determined upon his course of action: he sat rigidly in his place with his eyes fixed upon the doorway about which the chief's followers were grouped, till there was a slight stir and the stern-looking warrior appeared, looking fierce and imperious, as he strode slowly out and acknowledged Frank's haughty bow, when his countenance relaxed a little, but assuming ignorance of the present upon the camel, he advanced with open hand to greet his visitor, saying a few words of ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn

... expressive pantomime. As for Tabary, a broad, complacent, admiring imbecility breathed from his squash nose and slobbering lips: he had become a thief, just as he might have become the most decent of burgesses, by the imperious chance that rules the lives of human geese ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various

... rules it. We become conscious of the capability of transferring our affections, for they have already broken faith; and we lose that sweet confidence that comforted the loves of our youth. We are either imperious or jealous, as the advantages appear in our favour or against us. A gross alloy enters into the love of our middle life, sadly detracting from ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid

... lifting white imperious hand, "suffer me one word, at least; in justice to myself I ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... dreamy, as it were. The round-limbed beauty at his side crushed her gauzy draperies against him, as they trod the figure of the dance together, but it was no more to him than if an old nurse had laid her hand on his sleeve. The young girl chafed at his seeming neglect, and her imperious blood mounted into her cheeks; but he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... Indian Colonel, a small man with a fierce face and a tight collar, who roars like a bull and says, "Zounds, Sir," on the slightest provocation. Opposite to him was his wife, a Roman-nosed lady, with an imperious manner, and a Colonel-subduing way of curling her lip. On my left was the funny man. As usual he was of a sea-green colour, and might be expected at any moment to stagger to a porthole and call faintly for the steward. Further down the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various

... This imperious order brought David to his senses, and without a word he handed her the letter. Eagerly seizing it, she began to read. It took her longer than the old man to make out its meaning, and when the truth at last dawned upon her mind she gave a glad cry of joy, and her eyes beamed with delight as she ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody

... lips wooed him not. There was none of the invitation such women extend elsewhere; far otherwise, it was the men who craved, the women who dispensed. When they listened it was as to a petitioner on his knees, when they gave it was like an alms. Imperious, free-moving, high-headed creatures, they ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett

... every direction came the imperious suggestion that some more effective form of government should be adopted. This was granted. True, Governor Simpson did not succeed in satisfying all the Settlers, though in this respect he found it easier to supply ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce

... replied Kerry; and no one who had heard the high official tones of the imperious Chief Inspector would have supposed that they could be so softened and modulated. "You should have ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer

... eyes strained and fixed. Looking at her profile, she seemed to him paler, her features no longer soft with childlike innocence, but hard, a something resolute on them which till now had existed only in her voice and her imperious will; and yet her youthful grace was there, and the gold of ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet

... unfavourably judged, but must in candour be looked upon as possibly carrying in itself means and powers that have not yet been unfolded. But unhappily a difficulty occurs which would not have occurred with a writer in prose—the law of the verse is imperious. Ten syllables must be kept, and rhyme must be kept; and in the experiment it results, generally, that whilst the rehabiting of Chaucer is undertaken under a necessity which lies wholly in the obscurity of his dialect—the proposed ground or motive of modernization—far ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various

... in a consternation of amazement, and a soul divided between rekindled love in all its fires and pity and honor towards her he had betrayed before the altar of heaven, Robert Somerset sacrificed both to his imperious passion. He adored the woman on whose account he had left the country, and though every tie, sacred and just, bound him to the tender and faithful wife he must forsake to regain that idol, he at once consigned her to the full horrors of ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... ask that question, Miss Effingham! You have every right to put it, and the answer, at least, shall add no further cause of self-reproach. Give me, I entreat you, but a minute to collect my thoughts, and I will endeavour to acquit myself of an imperious duty, in a manner more manly and coherent, than I fear has been observed for the last ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper

... youth. Thou, roaming under forest boughs With thy dear brother and thy spouse Shalt richer meed of glory gain Than if three worlds confessed thy reign. Sad is our fate, O Rama: we, Abandoned and repelled by thee, Must serve as thralls Kaikeyi's will, Imperious, wicked, born to ill." ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... Let us read over this note, which is like the testament of his liberty. He says, 'If you love me, I entreat you, obey.' And you hesitate to obey. Then you do not love him. Can you not understand, unhappy child, that M. Bertomy has his reasons, terrible, imperious reasons, for your remaining in obscurity ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau

... brows and looked almost angrily at Svensen. "Do what thou hast to do!" and his tones were sharp and imperious. "I ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... along the iron arteries, and its thews of steel. And while I was admiring the adaptation of means to end, the harmonious involutions of contrivance, and the never-bewildered complexity, I saw a grimed and greasy fellow, the imperious engine's lackey and drudge, whose sole office was to let fall, at intervals, a drop or two of oil upon a certain joint. Then my soul said within me, See there a piece of mechanism to which that other you marvel at is but as the rude first effort of a child,—a force which ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... beauty that are conquering in her sex, all the wit and insinuation that even surpasses youth and beauty; yet to render her character impartially, she had also abundance of disagreeing qualities mixed with her perfections. She was imperious and proud even to insolence; vain and conceited even to folly; she knew her virtues and her graces too well, and her vices too little; she was very opinionated and obstinate, hard to be convinced of the falsest argument, but very positive in her fancied judgement: abounding in her own sense, ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn

... above his head, he heard Oliver Dromore—a voice one could always tell, pitched high, with its slight drawl—pleading, very softly at first, then insistent, imperious; and suddenly Nell's ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... threats to awe whom yet with deeds Thou canst not. Hast thou turned the least of these To flight, or if to fall, but that they rise Unvanquished, easier to transact with me That thou shouldst hope, imperious, and with threats To chase me hence? err not, that so shall end The strife which thou callest evil, but we style The strife of glory; which we mean to win, Or turn this Heaven itself into the Hell Thou fablest; ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... I can never play the coquette. I am like a mother with her child; I endure anything from you; I, that was once so imperious and proud. I have made dukes and princes fetch and carry for me; aides-de-camp, worth more than all the court of Charles X. put together, have done my errands, yet I am treating you as my spoilt child. But where is the use of coquetry? It would be pure waste. And yet, monsieur, ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac

... life for sixteen years. At fourteen and fifteen I often thought that the time was come when I should commence my pilgrimage, which I had cheated my own mind into believing was my imperious duty: but a reluctance to quit my Aunt; a remorse for the grief which, I could not conceal from myself, I should occasion her for ever withheld me. Sometimes when I had planned the next morning for my escape a word of more than usual affection from her ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

... Already he was being stamped in gold on Jenny's face. The coarser face of the world was to wear his smile too. For the pebble had only been thrown in at New Zion. Who knows to what coasts of fame the imperious ripples of his personality would circle on before they touched the shores ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne

... indicate some such goal as that to which this turbulent cavalcade of humanity is wending. A knowledge of this must be in our subconscious being, or we would find the sacrifices men make for the State otherwise inexplicable. The State, though now ostensibly secular, makes more imperious claims on man than the ancient gods did. It lays hold of life. It asserts its right to take father, brother, and son, and to send them to meet death in its own defense. It denies them a choice or judgment as to whether its action is right or wrong. Right or wrong, ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell

... that he knew what wolf it was. He tried to declare what he knew, but Sweyn saw him start at the words with white face and struggling lips; and, guessing his purpose, pulled him back, and kept him silent, hardly, by his imperious grip and wrathful ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman

... "Fragrant Love," and to the other "Y Ai," "Precious Affection." But although every one entertained feelings of secret admiration for them, and had the wish to take liberties with the young fellows, they lived, nevertheless, one and all, in such terror of Hseh P'an's imperious influence, that they had not the courage to come forward ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... in the palace with him, he never admitted them to any share in his politics; and if any of the ministers paid them the compliment of seeming attachment, it was more for the air than for the reality. The Princess Royal, Anne, married in Holland, was of a most imperious and ambitious nature; and on her mother's death, hoping to succeed to her credit, came to Holland on pretence of ill health; but the King, aware of her plan, Was so offended that he sent her to Bath as soon as she arrived, and ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... and for the sole pleasure of work. I have come across several reeds stopped up with flock though containing nothing at all, or else furnished with one, two or three cells devoid of provisions or eggs. The ever-imperious instinct for gathering cotton and felting it into purses and heaping it into barricades persists, fruitlessly, until life fails. The Lizard's tail wriggles, curls and uncurls after it is detached from the animal's ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... although sleep became an imperious necessity for men who had walked fifteen miles on the ice, the doctor wished to have a few serious words with his companions about the ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne

... puzzled as to what next to do. From Roy Stone's brief description of the Don's family, he guessed at the identities of the two women. While he stood irresolute, the girl recovered from her fright. Her dark eyes flashed, and she commanded him in an imperious tone ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge

... though his jurisdiction over the Jerseys was disputed, and until his recall in 1681 to meet an unfounded charge of dishonesty and favouritism in the collection of the revenues, he proved himself to be a capable administrator, whose imperious disposition, however, rendered him somewhat unpopular among the colonists. During a visit to England in 1678 he was knighted. In 1686 he became governor, with Boston as his capital, of the "Dominion of New England," ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... not going to bed that night, of all nights in the year, when life or death hung trembling in the balance. She went into the bedroom till the bustling house was still, and heard busy feet passing to and fro in the room she might not enter; and voices, imperious, though hushed down to a whisper, ask for innumerable things. Then there was silence; and when she thought that all were dead asleep, except the watchers, she stole out into the gallery. On the other side were two windows, cut into the thick stone wall, and flower pots were placed on the shelves ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... diminish, but increases, as the months roll by. The call for men to join our fighting forces, which is our primary need, has been and is being nobly responded to here at home and throughout the empire. That call, we say with all plainness and directness, was never more urgent or more imperious than today. For this is a war not only of men but of material. To take only one illustration, the expenditure upon ammunition on both sides has been on a scale and at a rate which is not only without all precedent but is far in excess of any expert forecast. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... tempestuous advance was a feat; for him, moreover, whose counsels had so lately been derided, to interest the pursuers at such a moment enough to make them listen—to find the word—was a greater; and by the word, and by gestures at once vehemently imperious and imploring, to stop them was still greater; but he did it. He had come at just the moment before the moment that would have been too late. They all heard him. They all knew, too, he was not trying to save the ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington

... being placed in the bronze bull that he had made; wherein great effort may be seen in those who are thrusting him into that bull, and terror in those who are waiting to behold a death so unexampled, besides which there is the seated figure of Phalaris (so I believe), ordaining with an imperious air of great beauty the punishment of the inhuman spirit that had invented a device so novel and so cruel in order to put men to death with greater suffering. In this work, also, may be perceived a very beautiful frieze of children, painted to look ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari

... beauty, nor had she her imperious manner, the heritage to Southern women from generations of slave-holding ancestors; but she had charm and a certain distinction, and she had the stamp with which New York seals her daughters imprinted upon every tuck and frill ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton

... interested. It must have been an interesting meeting. It was as if Prince Charlie and Cromwell had met to arrange a campaign. It was a meeting between Puritan and Cavalier. Toombs was full-blooded, hotheaded, impetuous, imperious. Joe Brown was pale, angular, awkward, cold, and determined. It was as if in a new land the old issues had been buried. Toombs was a man of the people, but in his own way, and it was a princely and a dashing way. Brown was ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris

... Soft but imperious Phyllis! The theater bored Sir Peter beyond expression. But on First Nights you might be certain he would have a box. Radiant Phyllis, in white silk, leaning forward eagerly to catch every word, was tremulous with excitement at the end of the play. ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens

... but she had long since ceased to oppose the imperious Eugenia, who was to all intents and purposes the mistress of the house, and who oftentimes led her mother and weaker-minded sister into the commission of acts from which they would otherwise have shrunk. Possessed of a large share of romance, Eugenia had given to ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes

... said slowly, "you have poured out blood and soul for us all freely, but why?" The imperious need of truth awoke again. "Why have you let yourself be beaten and shot at and imprisoned and horribly threatened, to lead us all to this new Zion, wherever it may be?" She repeated the question. "If it was ambition, why did you hold to it ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall

... unflinchingly into her father's imperious eyes, wide-set on either side of a formidable Roman nose. His return gaze was less incensed than puzzled. All his life he had been habituated to subserviency, had never met opposition, and to find it from his youngest ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White

... sweet is zealous contemplation " [Richard III]; " the power of thought is the magic of the Mind " [Byron]; " those that think must govern those that toil " [Goldsmith]; " thought is parent of the deed " [Carlyle]; " thoughts in attitudes imperious " [Longfellow]; " thoughts that breathe and words that burn " [Gray]; vivere est cogitare [Lat][Cicero]; Volk der ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... I will not listen to you!" she added with an imperious little stamp of her foot, and a relapse ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope

... importance by itself, she felt that it was at this exact spot on the surface of the globe that all the subterranean wires of thought and progress came together. When she returned, with a message from the printer, she found that Mary was putting on her hat firmly; there was something imperious and dominating ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... a father great And honored in the service of the State. Public Instruction all his mind employs— He guides its methods and its wage enjoys. Prime Pedagogue, imperious and grand, He waves his ferule o'er a studious land Where humming youth, intent upon the page, Thirsting for knowledge with a noble rage, Drink dry the whole Pierian spring and ask To slake their fervor at his private flask. Arrested ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce

... to carry further the unfinished work of Archimedes, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy, of Aristotle and of Galen, naturally enough arose among the astronomers and the physicians. For the imperious necessity of seeking some remedy for the physical ills of life had insured the preservation of more or less of the wisdom of Hippocrates and his successors, and, by a happy conjunction of circumstances, the Jewish and ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley

... clash and clang, And I worked my way to the end, and I Was the head of the 'Flying Gang'. 'Twas a chosen band that was kept at hand In case of an urgent need, Was it south or north we were started forth, And away at our utmost speed. If word reached town that a bridge was down, The imperious summons rang — 'Come out with the pilot engine sharp, And ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson

... and obedient wife of Jobson; taught by the strap to know who was lord and master. Lady Loverule was the imperious, headstrong bride of Sir John Loverule. The two women by a magical hocus-pocus, were changed for a time, without any of the four knowing it. Lady Loverule was placed with Jobson, who soon brought down her turbulent ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... gave orders in a loud voice or dictatorial manner, yet his orders were always carried out obediently and willingly, and everybody showed him the greatest respect and deference. Mr. Van Ness on the other hand was imperious and ostentatious. He was prone to be critical, and often became annoyed at trifles. Patty was rapidly learning that the true character can be very easily discovered among one's travelling companions. There is something about the friction of travel that brings out all that is worst and ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells

... [Aside.] 'Tis not five hundred crowns that I esteem; I am not mov'd at that: this angers me, That he, who knows I love him as myself, Should write in this imperious vein. Why, sir, You know I have no child, and unto whom Should I leave all, ...
— The Jew of Malta • Christopher Marlowe

... passed the eastern ridge it began, after its habit, to lord it over Angel's, sending the thermometer up twenty degrees in as many minutes, driving the mules to the sparse shade of corrals and fences, making the red dust incandescent, and renewing its old imperious aggression on the spiked bosses of the convex shield of pines that defended Table Mountain. Thither by nine o'clock all coolness had retreated, and the "outsides" of the up stage plunged their hot faces in its aromatic shadows as ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... young King back into the feasting-hall by force. Some, again, think Dunstan did this because the young King's fair wife was his own cousin, and the monks objected to people marrying their own cousins; but I believe he did it, because he was an imperious, audacious, ill-conditioned priest, who, having loved a young lady himself before he became a sour monk, hated all love now, and ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens

... to Mrs Franklin. She took a glass of sherry. Mr Tankardew's brow clouded. "Ah!" he exclaimed, and moved restlessly on his chair. The servant then approached him and offered the contents of the tray, but he waved it off with an imperious gesture of his hand, and ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson

... that Miss Barfoot stood in some danger of becoming subordinate to her more vehement friend. Her little body, for all its natural dignity, put her at a disadvantage in the presence of Rhoda, who towered above her with rather imperious stateliness. Her suavity was no match for Rhoda's vigorous abruptness. But the two were very fond of each other, and by this time thought themselves able safely to dispense with the forms at first imposed ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing









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