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More "Lucidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... baby," and "Got baby solicitor." Indeed, there are really four themes here, for the last one can have two interpretations. It might mean that you had obtained an ordinary solicitor for Baby, or it might mean that you had got a specially small one for yourself. It lacks, therefore, the lucidity of the best authors, but in a woman writer this ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... of the main building, while their clustered cupolas assist the general effect of roundness aimed at by the architect. Such a church as this proves how much may be achieved by the happy distribution of architectural masses. It was the triumph of the best Renaissance style to attain lucidity of treatment, and to produce beauty by geometrical proportion. When Leo Battista Alberti complained to his friend, Matteo di Bastia, that a slight alteration of the curves in his design for S. Francesco at Rimini would 'spoil ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... lucidity. If he had to fix upon the three great wants at this moment of the three principal nations of Europe, he should say that the great want of the French was morality, that the great want of the Germans was civil courage, and that our own great want was lucidity. Our own want was, of course, what concerned us the most. People were apt to remark the defects which accompanied certain qualities, and to think that the qualities could not be desirable because of the defects which they saw accompanying them. There was no greater and ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... the impact of other desires. There had been no illusion to shelter it. She had never, she remembered now, had any illusions—all had been of the substance and the fibre of reality. Then, with the lucidity of vision through which she had always seen and weighed the values of her emotions, she realized that if she had the choice to make over again, she could not make it differently. At the time flight ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... man I am!" replied Ardan, not without some degree of complacency. Then he added simply: "Barbican, my friend, if I understand your explanations so readily, attribute it all to their astonishing lucidity. If I have any faculity, it is that of being able to scent common sense at the first glimmer. Your sentences are so steeped in it that I catch their full meaning long before you end them—hence my apparent ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... for she did not know how to spend her days when she had reviewed her flower-beds and given her orders to the gardener. Gifted with an excellent memory, and the talent which some women have for hitting on the right word, she could talk on any subject with the lucidity of a studied style. And so men came from Cosne, from la Charite, and from Nevers, on the right bank; from Lere, Vailly, Argent, Blancafort, and Aubigny, on the left bank, to be introduced to Madame de la Baudraye, as they used ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... thousand people. There was hesitation and embarrassment, but the shouts of one of his college chums, "Give it to 'em! Give it to 'em!" filled in an awkward instant, and he began to speak. There was logic and lucidity of expression, and as he talked the air became charged with reasons, and all he had to do was to ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... too, with a singular lucidity of conviction, that those forces which thus give us that mystical assurance are all the time moulding us accordingly as we give up ourselves to their influence, and that we are literally and not fancifully what winds and waters make us; that the poetry, for instance, of Wordsworth ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... the legal and theological pedantry of the time. Pedantry was flung off by the age of the Revolution, but in the eloquence of Somers and his rivals we see ability rather than genius, knowledge, clearness of expression, precision of thought, the lucidity of the pleader or the man of business, rather than the passion of the orator. Of this clearness of statement Pitt had little or none. He was no ready debater like Walpole, no speaker of set speeches like Chesterfield. His set speeches were always his worst, for in these his ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... fields then lay between Kensington and Fulham where are now the museums, and there the larks sang and the hawthorn bloomed. After an early dinner we passed the afternoon in talk on art and artists. Pyne was one of the best talkers on art I ever knew, and a critic of very great lucidity; his art had great qualities and as great defects, but in comparison with some of the favorites of the public of that day he was a giant, and in certain technical qualities he had no equal in his generation except Turner. He had the dangerous tendency, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... many muffs are boasters; while sensible fellows are occasionally tinged with a dash of both the bad qualities—they are, if I may be allowed to coin a word, sensible-boasto-muffers! Still, for the sake of lucidity, I will maintain that there are three distinct phases of character ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... indeed we will here leave off, and shut down this magazine of rubbish; right glad to wash ourselves wholly from it (in three waters) forevermore. Possibly enough the Prussian Dryasdust will, one day, print it IN EXTENSO, and with that lucidity of comment and arrangement which is peculiar to him; exasperated readers will then see whether I have used them ILL or not, according to the opportunity there was!—Here, at any rate, my reader shall he free of it. Indeed he may perceive, the ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... interested in your LIFE of your father, because I meditate one of mine, or rather of my family. I have no such materials as you, and (our objections already made) your attack fills me with despair; it is direct and elegant, and your style is always admirable to me - lenity, lucidity, usually a high strain of breeding, an elegance that has a pleasant air of the accidental. But beware of purple passages. I wonder if you think as well of your purple passages as I do of mine? I wonder if you think as ill of mine as I do of yours? ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... continued clear mentally and in a more or less normal state until the latter part of November, 1902, when he again went into a stupor. From this time until the later part of April, 1903, he had alternating periods of stupor and lucidity, with amnesia for the stuporous states. On June 21, 1903, he was discharged as recovered and returned to the Indian Territory to undergo trial for his offense. Unfortunately, no mention is made in the hospital records of any possible relation between his periodic stuporous states ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... and "De la Conduite de La Guerre," which give a high idea of their author's character and talent. There is nothing in them that ought to scare away the average reader. Their style has the geometrical lucidity which is the polytechnician's birthright, but in spite of the deliberate impersonality generally attached to that style of writing, there emanates from it a curious quality which gradually shows us the author as a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... had a very high reputation as a lawyer, and my acquaintance with him in the Senate had impressed me with the lucidity of his intellect, his systematic habits and capacity for labor. He was therefore invited ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... the methods which he expounded, he was unable to gain general acceptance of his doctrine of elements; and, strangely enough, the theory which next dominated chemical thought was an alchemical invention, and lacked the lucidity and perspicuity of Boyle's views. This theory, named the phlogistic theory, was primarily based upon certain experiments on combustion and calcination, and in effect reduced the number of the alchemical ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... abandoned himself, the suppositions suggested to him by the circumstantial care which this girl had taken in order to bring him to her, all hindered him from the attention, which the blind have, necessary for the concentration of his intelligence and the perfect lucidity of his recollection. The journey lasted half an hour. When the carriage stopped, it was no longer on the street. The mulatto and the coachman took Henri in their arms, lifted him out, and, putting him into a sort of litter, conveyed him across a garden. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... of this lady's case are very curious, but this is scarcely the place to dilate upon them further than as they affected my spiritualistic studies. She passed with extraordinary ease into the condition of lucidity, when she was conscious only of basking in light, anxious to be magnetized more deeply so as to get more thoroughly into the light, and, moreover, aware only of the existence of those who had passed away from earth. She knew they were with ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... a fairy tale; the dry bones of statistics were invested with a new and potent life, and it was shown how the yearly balancing of the national accounts might be directed by and made to promote the profoundest and most fruitful principles of statesmanship. With such lucidity and picturesqueness was this financial oratory rolled forth that the dullest intellect could follow with pleasure the complicated scheme; and for five hours the House of commons sat as if it were under the sway of a magician's wand. When Mr. ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... patient's mind should show a change for the better. There was even a consultation upon the advisability of another operation upon the head, but the patient showed such encouraging marks of growing lucidity that ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... to be a human soul, and these perturbations which dimmed it were its struggles and passionate longings for something, and that was for a more brilliant shining of the light within itself: it was in love with its own beauty, enraptured by its own lucidity; and I saw that as these things were more beloved they grew paler, for this light is the love which the Mighty Mother has in her heart for her children, and she means that it shall go through each one unto all, and whoever restrains it in himself is himself ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... read them in book form. You will experience the same pleasure as I do when you take them up, and you will at once compare them with some one of the old masters whose rival indeed he is. You will find even greater charm in the style of his historical compositions, in its terseness, its lucidity, smoothness, brilliancy and stateliness, for there is the same vigour in the historical harangues as there is in his own orations, only rather more ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... his forehead with his fist as if to pound it into a state of lucidity. "Where is he? It is a stone wall; I ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... work to describe the events which he had witnessed at Valpinson, and those, which, as he had learned from the commonwealth attorney, had taken place at Boiscoran; and this he did with all the lucidity of an experienced old lawyer who is accustomed to unravel the mysteries of complicated suits. He wound ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... common to both the Umbrian art and that of Angelico; this, however, does not depend so much on the teaching of the school, as on technical affinity; insomuch as Umbrian painting in its lucidity, charm and accuracy of colour, is in some measure derived from the art of illumination, and most probably Fra Angelico took his style from the same source, as even in his most perfect works, he always preserved ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... repolishing of his sentences, aping the style of Chalmers or of Robert Hall, and occasionally inserting some fine-sounding quotation; for apparent richness of composition was his principal aim, not truth of meaning, or lucidity ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... just as the author of "Education sentimentale" seems to have inherited in the paternal line the shrewd realism of Champagne, so de Maupassant appears to have inherited from his Lorraine ancestors their indestructible discipline and cold lucidity. ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... peculiarity of the Russian soul is that it is not ashamed to express what all men feel. And this is why Dostoievsky is not only a Russian writer but a universal writer. From the French point of view he may seem wanting in lucidity and irony; from the English point of view he may seem antinomian and non-moral. But he has one advantage over both. He approaches the ultimate mystery as no Western writer, except, perhaps, Shakespeare and Goethe, has ever approached it. He writes with human nerves ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... LADY BRITOMART. You are lucidity itself, Charles. Because Andrew is successful and has plenty of money to give to Sarah, you will flatter him and ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... and unamended, is contained in twenty-seven closely printed pages. I venture to assert boldly that any competent lawyer who is also a good parliamentary draftsman could put those twenty-seven pages of obscurity into four pages, at most, of lucidity, with two days' honest work. By how little wisdom the world is governed! And how little the representatives of the people care for the litigation or trouble or expense that their own slovenliness ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... its social, governmental and military aspects. No President's Message, no letter, no one of the emanations of Seward's letter and dispatch-writing, corrosive disease, not an article in any press compares with Butler's speech for lucidity, logic, conciseness and strong reasoning. Butler laid down a law, a doctrine—and what he lays down as such, contains more cardinal truth and reason than all that was ever uttered by the Administration. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... light which immediately precedes his appearance, and which perhaps is the most witching period of the four and twenty hours. It is the moment when every thing is distinct, even the atmosphere seeming to possess a liquid lucidity, the hues appearing gray and softened, with the outlines of objects defined, and the perspective just as moral truths that are presented in their simplicity, without the meretricious aids of ornament ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... sprang up and laid his hand affectionately on his friend's shoulder. "You are the best man in the world," he said, "and I am a vile brute. Only," he added in a moment, "you don't understand me!" And he looked at him with eyes of such radiant lucidity that one might have said (and Rowland did almost say so, himself) that it was the fault of one's own grossness if one failed to read to the ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... marks which we set up for the historic spirit—frankness and truth—corresponds one at which the historic style should first of all aim, namely, a lucidity which leaves nothing obscure, impartially avoiding abstruse out-of-the-way expressions, and the illiberal jargon of the market; we wish the vulgar to comprehend, the cultivated to commend us. Ornament should be unobtrusive, and never smack ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... of mechanics is to describe how bodies change their position in space with "time." I should load my conscience with grave sins against the sacred spirit of lucidity were I to formulate the aims of mechanics in this way, without serious reflection and detailed explanations. Let us proceed to ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... the restless spirit of their superiors. They are constantly arguing, quarrelling, gossiping—their tongues and wits are always on the move. Thus Chapman aimed throughout at energy of expression at all costs. To this he sacrificed beauty of phrase and rhythm, even lucidity. He pushed it often to exaggerated extremes of coarseness and riotous fancy. He laid on "glaring colours" till eye and brain are fatigued. To this opening phrase of Dryden no exception can be taken. But can his further charges stand? Is it true to say of Bussy D'Ambois that it is ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... critically, stood him up and measured heights and even felt his arm for muscle. Then he made a remark that while lacking lucidity ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... This state of lucidity enabled her to take note of all that was being said. The talk ran more on general questions, and less on people, than she was used to; but though the allusions to pictures and books escaped her, she caught and stored up every personal reference, and the ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... ideas, and rarely sympathetic. Where the best thoughts of the ablest men are to be displayed, it would be tempting to present an array of luminous points or a chaplet of polished gems. In the hands of such artists as Stahl or Cousin they would start into high relief with a convincing lucidity that would rouse the exhibited writers to confess that they had never known they were so clever. Without transfiguration the effect might be attained by sometimes stringing the most significant words of the original. Excepting one unduly favoured competitor, who fills two pages with untranslated ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... one. He set down his whisky, unsipped. "But he who dispenses with woman lives in sin. It is the duty of man to beget posterity, to found a home; for what is civilization but home, and what is home but religion?" The wanderer's tones were earnest; he forgot his own sins of omission in the lucidity with which his intellect saw the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... to free institutions. He wrote, in three small volumes, a history of the United States, which is a most intelligent abstract of what he had learnt in Bancroft and Hildreth. He wrote with the utmost lucidity and definiteness, and never darkened counsel with prevaricating eloquence, so that there is no man from whom it is so easy and so agreeable to learn. His lectures on the early days of the Revolution were published from time to time ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... reach down to their meaning, for meaning they must have, or be meaningless. We shall find that this Fourth Book stands in the front rank of Homeric poetry for depth and suggestiveness, if not for epical lucidity. ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... with great lucidity. The result is the throwing of an additional flood of light on the already dazzling truths of Holy Writ. The uses of such a work are self-obvious; and when we add that the plan is carried out with all the lucidity, faithfulness, piety, honest reasoning, and ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... Andre-Louis perceived the theory suggested, which Danet himself in suggesting it had not perceived. He lay now on his back, surveying the cracks in the ceiling and considering this matter further with the lucidity that early morning often brings to an acute intelligence. You are to remember that for close upon two months now the sword had been Andre-Louis' daily exercise and almost hourly thought. Protracted concentration upon the subject was giving him an extraordinary ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... she a small one. She was neither fragile nor too ample. Her carriage made her look taller than she was. She was of the brown-haired, blue-eyed type, but her eyes were not of unusual size or surpassing lucidity, being merely clear, honest, steady eyes, capable rather of fearless or disdainful attention than of swift flashes or coquettish glances. The precision with which her features were outlined did not lessen the interest ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... flung jests at her anger, Barron felt secretly surprised to note the strides his Awdrey's mind was making. Much worth consideration appeared in her sudden attack upon the picture. She had evidently been really reflecting, with coherence and lucidity. That astonished him. But still ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... was speculating as he looked on the sort of aspect he presented to the lady's discriminative regard. Of her feelings he had not a suspicion. But he knew with what extraordinary lucidity women can, when it pleases them, and when their feelings are not quite boiling under the noonday sun, seize all the sides of a character, and put their fingers on its weak point. He was cognizant of the total absence of the humorous in himself (the want that most ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this may be, this much is certain, that lucidity is one of the chief characteristics of sanity. A sane man ought not to be unintelligible. Lucidity is good everywhere, for all time and in all things, in a letter, in a speech, in a book, in a poem. Lucidity is not simplicity. A lucid poem is ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... tightening of his heart. He rose, animated by an overwhelming necessity to get the ketch under way, to leave at once, for ever, the invisible shore of the bay. He gently folded her again in the blanket, but she resisted him. "I'd rather stay up," she said with a sudden lucidity. "It's nice here; I wanted to come before, but he wouldn't ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... all three of her grandchildren coveted the sad privilege of being near her when these brief moments of lucidity came though Tony and Ted could not stand long periods of watching beside the still form as Larry could and did. It was Larry that she most often recognized. Sometimes though he was his father to her and she called him "Ned" in such tones of yearning ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... executed the brilliant stroke that disconcerted Dearborn's campaign in 1813; and who on the present occasion drew up the instructions to Riall, and to Lieutenant-Colonel Tucker, the officer in charge of the forts, with a delightful lucidity which characterizes all papers signed by him.[316] The brigs "Star" and "Charwell" left York July 23, with a re-enforcement of four hundred men for Fort Niagara, in which post the officer commanding was directed ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... Christian Apologetics down to our own day, when Pope Leo XIII directed that all Catholic seminaries and universities implant the doctrine expounded by Thomas, Angel of the Schools. A philosopher whose breadth and lucidity of mind gave such perennial interest to a system of thought that it is still followed more generally than that of any other school of philosophy—taught in the regular course even at Oxford, Harvard, Columbia—such a philosopher could have left the ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... authors ... handle a subject which has an obvious controversial side with strength, and there are convincing qualities as well as lucidity in the views ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... me! all this seems very awkward and open to misunderstanding in a letter; but when we meet I think I shall be able to tell you many new things which you have made clear to me. I hope I shall have the necessary leisure and sufficient lucidity of expression. For that purpose I want good health; for, failing this, I always lapse into that fatal irritability which frustrates everything, and always leaves the best things unsaid. For the same reason, and because our meeting is to me, as it were, the goal for which I strive as ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... Testament in the infancy of the Church and amidst associations which were not literary, to suppose that a terse production was first produced and afterwards was amplified in a later age with a view to 'lucidity and completeness[337],' rather than that words and clauses and sentences were omitted upon definitely understood principles in a small class of documents by careless or ignorant or prejudiced scribes? The reply to this question must now be left for ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... them, but do not let us cry out every day, as we are disposed to do, that never under the sun were such storms known as we are enduring. To get away from the present state of feeling, to restore lucidity and proportion to our judgments, let us read every ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... through his brain with the speed of lightning, and still stirred his heart when he was ushered into the impluvium, where the magistrates were impatiently awaiting the owner of the house. With the lucidity peculiar to him, he explained his reasons for hoping that their errand would be vain, and Apollonius replied that no one would rejoice more than he himself if the Regent should authorize him, on the morrow, to countermand his mission. He would gladly wait there longer to afford the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... regarded the book as dangerous and absurd. It cannot be denied, however, that the problems were cleverly put, and the whole of these syllogistical dialectics formed an excellent course of training. I owe my lucidity of mind, more especially what skill I possess in dividing my subject (which is an art of capital importance, one of the conditions of the art of writing), to my divinity training, and in particular to geometry, which is the truest application of the syllogistical method. M. Manier mixed up with ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... and season has at length closed, Lyndhurst having wound up by a resume of the acts of the Government, in one of those 'exercitations,' as Melbourne calls them, which are equally pungent for their severity, and admirable for their lucidity. Melbourne made a bitter reply, full of personalities, against Lyndhurst, but offering a meagre defence for himself and his colleagues. Those who watch the course of events, and who occasionally peep behind ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... He thought he loved her. He had loved her for an hour. She dared not wish for more, in the embarrassment of the false situation which irritated her frankness and her pride, and which troubled the lucidity of her intelligence. While the carriage was carrying her to San Marco, she persuaded herself that he would say nothing to her of the day before, and that the room from which one could see the pines rise to the sky would leave to them only ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... of the human stomach, in which they used words that were over a foot long by actual measurement. I have never heard such splendid words in my life; but such were their grandiloquent profundity, and their far-reaching lucidity, that I understood rather less about it when they had finished than ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... won. In spite of this remarkable piece of luck, his head grew weary; he felt it, though he continued to play. But that divining sense which leads a gambler, and which comes in flashes, was already failing him. Intermittent perceptions, so fatal to all gamblers, set in. Lucidity of mind, like the rays of the sun, can have no effect except by the continuity of a direct line; it can divine only on condition of not breaking that line; the curvettings of chance bemuddle it. Philippe lost all. After such a strain, the careless mind as well as the ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... by general consent in the present stage of psychological science require study is the nature, and if possible the cause, of a special lucidity, a sensitiveness of perception, or accessibility to ideas appearing to arrive through channels other than usual organs of sense, which is sometimes met with among simple people[1] in a rudimentary form, and in a more developed form in certain exceptional ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... they stand, and I'm not going to write 'Tales of my First Feeding Bottle' to please them. So I'm going over to Paris. I shall turn my MSS. into French and publish them there. The language lends itself to perfect lucidity, and the Paris press allows men to write as men. Besides, the French admire word-painting, which is my particular vein. The English don't. They like composition. Here an author's pen must remain always a stick ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... said with the accent of pent-up sincerity, and even relieved because she was able to say something which she felt was true. For the last few days she had felt herself several times near that madness which is but an intolerable lucidity of apprehension. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... up her brushes again, and in spite of herself moved one foot impatiently. Hardy went on, well pleased with his own lucidity. ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... myself off for my first soar down the wind. The first trial was bound to be the worst; it was an experiment I made with life, and the chance of death or injury was, I supposed, about equal to the chance of success. I believed that with a dawn-like lucidity. I had begun with a glider that I imagined was on the lines of the Wright brothers' aeroplane, but I could not be sure. It might turn over. I might upset it. It might burrow its nose at the end and smash itself and me. The conditions of the flight necessitated alert attention; ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... reply to my question leaves nothing to be desired in the way of lucidity. Now, supposing I should happen to feel some repugnance to those delicate attentions on Morillo's part that you have just alluded to, what inducement would be sufficient to persuade you to 'bout ship, and land me on the wharf at Kingston, instead of ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... especially to a young fresh mind, full of faith—the spectacle of a man meant for better things sunk at my age in such dishonour." St. George, in the same contemplative attitude, spoke softly but deliberately, and without perceptible emotion. His tone indeed suggested an impersonal lucidity that was practically cruel—cruel to himself—and made his young friend lay an argumentative hand on his arm. But he went on while his eyes seemed to follow the graces of the eighteenth-century ceiling: "Look at me well, take my lesson to heart—for it is a lesson. ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... baptized though they be actually in a state of madness. And in this case the sacrament should be bestowed on them if there be fear of danger otherwise it is better to wait until the time when they are sane, so that they may receive the sacrament more devoutly. But if during the interval of lucidity they manifest no desire to receive Baptism, they should not be baptized while in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... passionate enthusiasts for Natural Law. The Law of Nature overleapt all provincial and municipal boundaries; it disregarded all distinctions between noble and burgess, between burgess and peasant; it gave the most exalted place to lucidity, simplicity and system; but it committed its devotees to no specific improvement, and did not directly threaten any venerable or lucrative technicality. Natural law may be said to have become the common law of France, or, at all events, the admission ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... work, make no vast design, seek for no large sovereignty; and then work patiently on with ever-present enjoyment, learning his art, gaining skill and mastery over his vast and complex instrument, till he gained certainty of touch and the power of saying, with perfect lucidity, with pure transparency of phrase, exactly what he meant; and then, behind his art, to live resolutely in his simple creed, whatever article of it he could master, sure of this, that if his inspiration came, he would be able to present it worthily; ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... put into Paracelsus all that he had worked out with clearness during his youth; his theory of life is stated with lucidity in that poem. But when it was finished, and he had entered, like Sordello from Goito into Mantua, into the crowd and clash of the world; when, having published Pauline and Paracelsus, he had, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... up at him again, pointing out her chin in the most adorable fashion. Even serious-minded men have moments of lucidity. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... himself up. "Do I understand you to say, sir, that your name is Horrex? Then allow me to tell you, Horrex, that you are no gentleman. You hear?" He spoke with anxious lucidity, leaning forward and tapping the butler on the ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... rhetoric, no music without sense, no mere second-hand literary inspiration, no mannered archaism:—above all, no sickly sweetness, no subtle, unhealthy affectation. Throughout his work, whether when it is strong, or in the less worthy portions, sanity, sincerity, simplicity, lucidity, are everywhere the characteristics of Herrick: in these, not in his pretty Pagan masquerade, he shows the note,—the only genuine note,—of Hellenic descent. Hence, through whatever changes and fashions poetry may pass, ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... the scherzo is approached with eagerness. Again there is no disappointment. On numerous occasions I have testified my regard for this movement in warm and uncritical terms. It is simply unapproachable, and has no equal for lucidity, brevity and polish among the works of Chopin, except the Scherzo in C sharp minor; but there is less irony, more muscularity, and more native sweetness in this E flat minor Scherzo. I like the way Kullak marks the first B flat octave. It is ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... and in several instances these versions have been incorporated into this collection. Schiller was not less efficiently qualified by nature for an historian than for a dramatist. He was formed to excel in all departments of literature, and the admirable lucidity of style and soundness and impartiality of judgment displayed in his historical writings will not easily be surpassed, and will always recommend them as popular expositions of the periods of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... have to remember these needs too, because, if they are left out of the picture, then it becomes impossible to understand the full measure of the risk Italy has faced in undertaking this war for an idea. With a Latin lucidity she has counted every risk, and with a Latin idealism she has taken her place by the side of those who fight for a liberal civilisation ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... Jew, John Castell. I think that the matter may possibly be managed, provided that the money is all right, for, as you know, I do not work for nothing. Thus——'" And Inez dictated with admirable lucidity those suggestions as to the rescue of Castell, with which the reader is already acquainted, ending the ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... shrinking, but still wading in deeper and deeper, inch by inch, the cautious minister was fast finding himself too far advanced to retreat. He was rarely decided, however, and never lucid; and least of all in emergencies, when decision and lucidity would have been more valuable ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... coast, but every word showed the minuteness of his observation, the clear vision of a seaman able to master quickly the aspect of a strange land and of a strange sea. He presented, with concise lucidity, the picture of the tangle of reefs and sandbanks, through which the yacht had miraculously blundered in the dark before she ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... previous attacks upon the teleological argument and the nature of the present attack, would be briefly to review the reasonable objections to which all the previous attacks were open. Very opportunely a work on Theism has just been published which states these objections with great lucidity, and answers them with much ability. The work to which I allude is by the Rev. Professor Flint, and as it is characterised by temperate candour in tone and logical care in exposition, I felt on reading it that the work was particularly well suited for displaying the enormous change in the ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... to inform you," said Syme with restraint, "that your remarks convey no impression to my mind. Perhaps if you were to remove the remains of your original forehead and some portion of what was once your chin, your meaning would become clearer. Mental lucidity fulfils itself in many ways. What do you mean by saying that the train has caught you? It may be my literary fancy, but somehow I feel that it ought ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... whom I have ever heard reasoned with such perfect lucidity. He would explain a case which his client the solicitor would have wrapped up in fifty or sixty brief sheets, and involved in as much obscurity as it were well possible, to a committee in a few minutes; and I have often thought ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... of G. among historians is in the first rank, and if the vast scale of his work and the enormous mass of detail involved in it are considered along with the learning and research employed in accumulating the material, and the breadth of view, lucidity of arrangement, and sense of proportion which have fused them into a distinct and splendid picture, his claims to the first place cannot be lightly dismissed. His style, though not pure, being tinged ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... good," said Christophe, whose terrible sufferings had developed an extraordinary lucidity in his mind, and who, after enduring such unspeakable sufferings, was determined not to compromise the results of his devotion. "But she might have spared me much agony be telling my persecutors herself the secrets that I know nothing about, instead ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... Christian communities, religious authority only can legislate. These excepted, the Justinian code, with some necessary modifications, prevailed. Few changes have been made since Gregory the Sixteenth's time, and they are codified with such perfect scientific lucidity as to be available to practitioners. This is one of the special labors of the Council of State, which is aided by a commission consisting of the most eminent and learned jurists of Rome. The distinguished statesman ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... I saw him not only as an ass, but as the son of many generations of asses. I reviewed his school-days and his early manhood, and his first encounter with love, very much as one might review the proceedings of an ant in the sand. Something of that period of lucidity I regret still hangs about me, and I doubt if I shall ever recover the full-bodied self satisfaction of my early days. But at the time the thing was not in the least painful, because I had that extraordinary persuasion that, as a matter of fact, I was no more Bedford than I ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... in her lucidity, and it made her companion draw a long breath. It relieved this friend of a heavy responsibility. Pansy had a sufficient illumination of her own, and Isabel felt that she herself just now had no light to spare from her small stock. Nevertheless it ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... shades of feeling. "Economy of attention," Spencer's familiar phrase for the philosophy of style, his explanation of even the most ornate and extravagant forms, is but another name for this desired lucidity of the medium. Pater, himself, an artist in the overlaying of phrases, has the same teaching. "All the laws of good writing aim at a similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes by which the word is associated to its import. The term is right, and has its essential ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... him to typify the rise of order in her profession, over which so long had ruled chaos. And as her rich voice led the intrigued audience from one brilliant scene to another, in which she reincarnated before their eyes a very flower of the old Southern chivalry with dash, finish, and lucidity, he felt as if he had done his best and now had a right to be allowed to depart in peace from the world of tinsel and illusion. As Lindsey and Height held the audience spell-bound while the tempted wife dueled with her might against the tender and desperate lover, ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... you will even lose the advantages which you might derive from his lucidity. It is very possible that you could make him speak upon all the subjects of your indiscreet curiosity; but in that case, as I have already warned you, you will make him leave his own sphere and introduce him into yours. He will ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... form of interpretation is that of the working of great structural tendencies, or energies, or "qualities," as he calls them, which are common both to the inner and the outer universe. There are, he declares again and again with painful reiteration, but with little advance of lucidity, seven of these fundamental laws or energies or qualities, like the sevenfold colour-band of the rainbow, though they can never be untangled or sundered or thought of as standing side by side, for together in their unity ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... what had happened at Weymore: his hostess had forgotten that he was coming. Young as Faxon was, this sad lucidity of soul had been acquired as the result of long experience, and he knew that the visitors who can least afford to hire a carriage are almost always those whom their hosts forget to send for. Yet to say Mrs. ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... and spherical geometry gratis, and all who appreciated the help that was being offered to them streamed to his lessons. This young student, later Pastor Joergen Lund, had a remarkable gift for mathematics, and gave his instruction with a lucidity, a fire, and a swing that carried his hearers with him. I, who had never before been able to understand a word of the subject, became keenly interested in it, and before many lessons were over was very well up in it. As ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... outside the colleges, crowded the first lecture to show our feeling not only for M. Taine, but for a France wounded and trampled on by her own children. The few dignified and touching words with which he opened his course, his fine, dark head, the attractiveness of his subject, the lucidity of his handling of it, made the lecture a great success; and a few nights afterward at dinner at Balliol I found myself sitting next the great man. In his published Correspondence there is a letter describing this dinner which shows that I must have confided in him ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... theatre whenever she could produce an acceptable friend to accompany her. She passed her general science examination with double honors and specialized in science. She happened to have an acute sense of form and unusual mental lucidity, and she found in biology, and particularly in comparative anatomy, a very considerable interest, albeit the illumination it cast upon her personal life was not altogether direct. She dissected well, and in a year she found herself ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... and precision, Lyly attained a lucidity almost unequalled among his contemporaries. His attention to form saved him from the besetting sin of Elizabethan prose,—incoherence by reason of an overwhelming display of ornament. His very illustrations were subject to the restraint ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... 1748. He does not refer to Anthony Collins' essay on Liberty, published thirty-three years before, in which the same question is treated to the same effect, with singular force and lucidity. It may be said, perhaps, that it is not wonderful that the two freethinkers should follow the same line of reasoning; but no such theory will account for the fact that in 1754, the famous Calvinistic divine, Jonathan Edwards, President of the ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... circumstanceswe might count upon him. When the circle had been formed, Captain Len Guy spoke, without allowing any sign of discouragement to appear, and explained the position with the utmost frankness and lucidity, stating in the first place that it was absolutely necessary to lower the cargo to the coast and stow it away in one of the caverns. Concerning the vital question of food, he stated that the supply of flour, preserved meat, and dried vegetables would suffice for the winter, ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... of Christ, shared his fate. Kuhlmann also wrote a volume of verses, entitled The Berlin and Amsterdam "Kuhl- festival" at the Gathering of Lutherans and Calvinists, which sufficiently attests his insanity. The following is a specimen of the lucidity of his works: "The more I continued my doctrines, the more opposition I received, so that also the higher world of light with which I am illuminated, in their light I was enlightened, or shadowed, when I proceeded, and in their light lit I up ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... Raoul's heart. Struggling against the charm that seemed to deprive him of all his will and all his energy and of almost all his lucidity at the moment when he needed them most, he succeeded in drawing back the curtain that hid him and he walked to where Christine stood. She herself was moving to the back of the room, the whole wall of which was occupied by a great mirror that reflected her image, but not his, for ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... first—the faint foreknowledge that there was something very stiff I should have to do for her. I felt more than ever committed to my fate as, standing before her in the big drawing-room where they had tactfully left us to ourselves, I tried with a smile to string together the pearls of lucidity which, from her chair, she successively tossed me. Pale and bright, in her monotonous mourning, she was an image of intelligent purpose, of the passion of duty; but I asked myself whether any girl had ever had so ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... civilisation, has had to wait six centuries for life to be put into it by a finer-strung people at a chaster and more braced period of history. Nor should we be satisfied with such loose phrases as this, leading one to think, in a slovenly fashion (quite unsuitable to Tuscan artistic lucidity), that the difference lay in some vague metaphysical entity called spirit: the spirit of the Tuscan stonemasons of the early Middle Ages altered the actual tangible forms in their proportions and details: this spiritual quality affects ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... they are marks of mental promptitude and lucid impatience. A man will put his meaning mystically because he cannot waste time in putting it rationally. Dogmas are not dark and mysterious; rather a dogma is like a flash of lightning—an instantaneous lucidity that opens across a whole landscape. Of the same nature are Irish bulls; they are summaries which are too true to be consistent. The Irish make Irish bulls for the same reason that they accept Papal bulls. It is because it is better to speak wisdom foolishly, like ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... great misfortune, was mingled with her uneasiness; for all women have in some degree a kind of second sight, and, even in the most innocent, ignorance of evil is suddenly illumined by visions of extraordinary lucidity. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... spangled by the dew, hid him presently. What an elusive glistening gauze hung over the valley far below, where the sense of distance was limited by the sense of sight!—for it was here only that the night, though so brilliant, must attest the incomparable lucidity of daylight. She could not even distinguish, amidst those soft sheens of the moon and the dew, the Lombardy poplar that grew above the door of old Squire Grove's house down in the cove; in the daytime it was visible like a tiny finger pointing upward. How drowsy was the sound ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... release from her fears restored Lily to immediate lucidity. The collapse of Trenor's will left her in control, and she heard herself, in a voice that was her own yet outside herself, bidding him ring for the servant, bidding him give the order for a hansom, directing ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... had always reasoned it out. No suffering had ever obscured the lucidity of Edith's mind. She knew that it was her spine that had kept her brother from marrying all those years. He couldn't leave her alone with it, neither could he ask any woman to share the house inhabited, pervaded, dominated by it. Unsafeguarded by marriage, he had fallen ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... before them, but grimly they gave no heed. This, they both realized in moments of lucidity, was the last trek. Either they must find the sea, before another night, or madness would sink its fangs into their brains. And ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... steadiness of his hand and eye, the regained quiet of his susceptibilities, but the respite was temporary and lethargic. The early days—the days of six years ago, when these tabloids meant an even sweep of thought, lucidity of brain, a balance of judgment in thought and effort—were days of the past. As he had said of Lexington and his vice, the ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... made to suffer in her flesh, to experience a violent shock, a sharp pain that would put a stop to what was going on in her brain. She could think of nothing but blows to bring matters to a crisis. After the blows, she saw, with the lucidity of an hallucination, all sorts of things come to pass,—the guard arriving, the gendarmes from the post, the commissioner! the commissioner to whom she could tell everything, her story, her misfortunes, how ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... leaned over the bed, and she saw his lips, and his voice sounded in her ears. It told her that he had been waiting for her; why hadn't she come to his room? And why had he found her door bolted? Then like one bereft of reason, she slipped out of bed and went towards the door, seeing him in the lucidity of her dream clearly at the end of the passage; it was not until her hand rested on the handle of his door that a singing began in the night. The first voice was joined by another, and then by another, and she recognised the hymn, for it was one, the Veni Creator, and the singers were ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... place assigned them in his philosophy. Many of us are profusely original, in that no man can understand us—violently peculiar ways of looking at things are no great rarity. The rarity is when great peculiarity of vision is allied with great lucidity and unusual command of all the classic expository apparatus. Bergson's resources in the way of erudition are remarkable, and in the way of expression they are simply phenomenal. This is why in France, where l'art de bien dire ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... of his lucidity. In no one could Buffon's aphorism on style find a better illustration, "Le style c'est l'homme meme." In him science and literature, too often divorced, were closely united; and literature owes him a debt for importing into it so much of the highest scientific habit of mind; for showing that ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... writes under the pseudonym of Tekin Alp, and his mind is such that he appears to find romance in the idea of a united Turkey purged by indiscriminate massacre from all alien elements. But he sets forth with admirable lucidity the aims of the Nationalist party and the steps already achieved by them in their progress towards their ideal. Already the sequestered ladies of the harem have come out of their retirement and join ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... her intelligence; the precision, the promptitude, the rapidity (though her manner was by no means rapid), the largeness of the field of knowledge, the compressed outcome of which she was at any moment ready to bring to bear on the topic in hand; the sureness and lucidity of her induction; the clearness of vision, to which muddle was as impossible and abhorrent as a vacuum is supposed to be to nature; and all this lighted up and gilded by an infinite sense of, and capacity for, humour,—this ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... brings good counsel; it certainly brings calm, and cool reflection gives lucidity to the mind. At last I persuaded myself that what had occurred was after all in no way extraordinary, and that I would certainly have considered it at first a very common occurrence if I had not been dazzled by the wonderful beauty of the nun, and blinded by my own vanity. As ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... EMERSON. By Richard Garnett, LL.D. "As to the larger section of the public, ... no record of Emerson's life and work could be more desirable, both in breadth of treatment and lucidity of style, ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... state of his mind by swallowing doses of brandy and opium may not be insane in theory; in actual fact, he may be a dangerous madman. As one day followed another Meschini found it more and more impossible to exist without his two comforters. The least approach to lucidity made him almost frantic. He fancied every man a spy, every indifferent glance a look full of meaning. Before long the belief took possession of him that he was to be made the victim of some horrible private vengeance. San Giacinto was not the man, he thought, ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... Prof. Sherman's great work Roman Law in the Modern World, Boston, 1917. The learned author has laid philosophical lawyers of all countries under heavy obligations by this splendid book, as noted for its lucidity as for ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... blinded, and full of gross vapors, by reason of the perturbations of fear (which, like anger, is a short madness, and raises in the phantasy vain spectres,—videlicet, of sharks and Spaniards), mistakes our lucidity. For thy Manicheeism, let his lordship of Exeter deal with it. For thy abominable howling and caterwauling, offensive in a chained cur, but scandalous in a preacher and a brother of the Rose, we do hereby deprive thee of thine office of chaplain to the Brotherhood; and warn thee, that unless ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... together, possessed the energy necessary to animal motion; but he also saw that the nerve could lift a latch and open a door, by which floods of energy are let loose. 'As an engineer,' he says with admirable lucidity, 'by the motion of his finger in opening a valve or loosening a detent can liberate an amount of mechanical energy almost infinite compared with its exciting cause; so the nerves, acting on the muscles, can unlock an amount of power out of all proportion to the work done by the nerves themselves.' ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... of such vital importance to the effectiveness of our sermons as to merit more than passing mention, and that is the quality of lucidity. The business of the preacher is to make his meaning understood, to make his audience see what he sees, understand what he understands. It is laid upon him as a special instruction to present the truth with ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... scarcely open a chapter, in the Old Testament, that some passage does not strike me as going to prove this identity, between the red men and the Hebrews; and, were they all collected together, and published in a book, mankind would be astonished at their lucidity and weight. As for scalping, it is a horrid thing in our eyes, but it is honorable with the red men; and I have quoted to you the words of the Psalmist, in order to show the manner in which divine wisdom inflicts penalties on sin. ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... confidential gathering. The latter type of meeting is the more difficult to handle, and nothing could exceed his gift for presiding over and guiding debate. He could set out a political situation to his party with extraordinary force and lucidity. He could also, when he chose, so present an issue as to suggest almost irresistibly the conclusion which he desired—and this was how he led. Where he came short in the quality of leadership ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... be granted a glimpse of the guiding Hand that steers men's destinies; then, as comprehension is about to dawn, we lose again our temporal lucidity of vision. ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... "but remember your head has not grown a particle larger since the Spring of 1844, nor your body less; but had the same idea of Ethics been then presented to you, you would certainly not have seen its lucidity." ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... city, doubting the sincerity of her companions, asked permission to read them a poem of the master’s which she found beyond her comprehension. When the reading was over the opinion of her friends was unanimous. “Nothing could be simpler! The lines were lucidity itself! Such close reasoning etc.” But dismay fell upon them when the naughty lady announced, with a peal of laughter, that she had been reading alternate lines from opposite pages. She no longer disturbs the harmony ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... thing, absent or dead, is an apostrophe, and when an inanimate object is assumed to be alive or an animate object is assumed to be raised to a higher plane of existence it is said to be by personification. Examples of the latter figure are "death's menace," "laugh of morn." In the line "Lucidity of soul unlocks the lips" are both metonymy and personification. The following is the beginning of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... command. The captain was at his post, shortening sail, for it blew fresher: there was some rain; and thunder and lightning were at work in the heavens in the direction of the adjacent continent: the air was full of wild, unnatural lucidity, as if the frequent flashes left a sort of twilight behind them; and objects were discernible at a distance of two or three leagues. We had been busy in the first watch, as the omens denoted easterly weather; the English bark was struggling ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Arnold, in the very graceful sketch of Falkland's life published by him in aid of the Falkland Memorial, has endowed his favourite character with gifts far rarer and more memorable than those of which we have spoken; with an extraordinary largeness and lucidity of mind, with almost divine superiority to party narrowness and bias, with conceptions anticipative of the most advanced philosophy of modern times. He quotes the Dean of Westminster as affirming that "Falkland is the founder, or nearly ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... beg you to pay particular attention to it. What I say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may be in itself to call it 'chance.' It may be a bad thing, it may be a good thing. It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matching the whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in an unimaginably perfect way. All you mean by calling it 'chance' is that this is not guaranteed, that it may also ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... poems have Heine's pregnant simplicity. But, lest this comparison should mislead, we must say that there is no general resemblance between either Wordsworth, or Tennyson, and Heine. Their greatest qualities lie quite a way from the light, delicate lucidity, the easy, rippling music, of Heine's style. The distinctive charm of his lyrics may best be seen by comparing them with Goethe's. Both have the same masterly, finished simplicity and rhythmic grace; but there is more thought mingled ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... blearily, not in the least mollified but instead swinging to a certain degree of lucidity that was nevertheless governed largely by the hoot he had swallowed in ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... appearing in society after a dinner given by authors or publishers, and leaving the salons for a supper given in consequence of a bet. The demands of conversation and the excitement of play absorbed all the ideas and energy left by excess. The poet had lost the lucidity of judgment and coolness of head which must be preserved if a man is to see all that is going on around him, and never to lose the exquisite tact which the parvenu needs at every moment. How should he know how ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... and opium may not be insane in theory; in actual fact, he may be a dangerous madman. As one day followed another Meschini found it more and more impossible to exist without his two comforters. The least approach to lucidity made him almost frantic. He fancied every man a spy, every indifferent glance a look full of meaning. Before long the belief took possession of him that he was to be made the victim of some horrible private vengeance. San Giacinto was not the man, he thought, ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... crime, and so on. In cases where his activities in these things may seem to the reader to have been wanting, I beg to state that they really were not. It is I who have declined to ascend to a higher level of lucidity and correctness of diction than I am fitted for. I cannot forbear from mentioning my gratitude to Mr. George Macmillan for his patience and kindness with me,—a mere jungle of information on West Africa. Whether you my reader will ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... imposed these lies upon the human consciousness. I had long suspected that Bluebeard was the victim of a similar fatality. All the circumstances of his life, as I found them related, were far from satisfying my mind, and from gratifying that craving for logic and lucidity by which I am incessantly consumed. On reflection, I perceived that they involved insurmountable difficulties. There was so great a desire to make me believe in the man's cruelty that it could not fail ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France
... no mannered archaism:—above all, no sickly sweetness, no subtle, unhealthy affectation. Throughout his work, whether when it is strong, or in the less worthy portions, sanity, sincerity, simplicity, lucidity, are everywhere the characteristics of Herrick: in these, not in his pretty Pagan masquerade, he shows the note,—the only genuine note,—of Hellenic descent. Hence, through whatever changes and fashions poetry may ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... clear insight into the conditions of the question conveyed by the last sentence is very characteristic of Shelley. It makes us regret the non-completion of his essay on a "Future Life", which would certainly have stated the problem with rare lucidity and candour, and would have illuminated the abyss of doubt with a sense of spiritual realities not often found in combination with wise suspension of judgment. What he clung to amid all perplexities was the absolute and indestructible existence of the universal as ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... I tell her so soon how much I appreciated the opportunity of looking into hers? I could only assent in general to the proposition that there were certainly for every one such yearnings, and even such faces; and I felt the crisis demand all my lucidity, all my wisdom. "Oh yes, I'm a student of physiognomy. Do you mean," I pursued, "that you've a passion for ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... pro-German as well as those who are not, could go to Berlin and learn something, not only of the language and intellectual history of Prussia, but of the standpoint of her people—and of the disadvantages as well as the advantages of an excessive lucidity of conception. Nowhere else in Germany that I know of is this to be studied so advantageously and so easily as in Berlin, the seat of Government, the headquarters of Real-politik, and it seems to me most apparent among the ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... so strong a flood of bitterness against our poor upper class, so well intentioned for all its occasional lack of lucidity, should have arisen in so young a breast it is a little difficult for the most conscientious biographer to explain. She had partners to her heart's desire; young Lord Waynflete used his utmost arts upon her to persuade her that at least half a dozen numbers ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... committed the Sin against the Holy Ghost. (Why had he gone there to lunch? That was the key to it. WHY had he gone there to lunch?)... He began to have remorse for everything, for everything he had ever done, for everything he had ever not done, for everything in the world. In a moment of lucidity he even had remorse for drinking that stout honest cup of ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... first time since August, nineteen-fourteen, he found himself thinking, in perfect freedom and with perfect lucidity, about the War. He had really known, half the time, that it was the greatest War of Independence that had ever been. As for his old hatred of the British Empire, he had seen long ago that there was no such thing, in ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... forehead with his fist as if to pound it into a state of lucidity. "Where is he? It is a stone wall; I ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... found himself baffled, thwarted, shut out from the paradise that seemed to open all about him; it was the face of one who had found satiety in pleasure, and sorrow in the very heart of joy. There was no taint of grossness or of luxury in the face, but rather a strength, an intellectual force, a firm lucidity of thought. I confess that the sight moved me very strangely. I felt a thrill of the deepest compassion, a desire to do something that might help or comfort, a yearning wish to aid, to explain, to cheer. The silence, the stillness, the hopelessness of the pathetic figure woke in me ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... remark! I am here, in a capacity of confidence. I am here, in a position of trust. The discussion of some topics, even with Mrs. Micawber herself (so long the partner of my various vicissitudes, and a woman of a remarkable lucidity of intellect), is, I am led to consider, incompatible with the functions now devolving on me. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in our friendly intercourse—which I trust will ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... should add that the literary execution of the work is worthy of the indefatigable industry and unceasing vigilance with which the stores of historical material have been accumulated, weighed, and sifted. The cardinal qualities of style, lucidity, animation, and energy, are everywhere present. Seldom indeed has a book in which matter of substantial value has been so happily united to attractiveness of form been offered by an American author to his fellow-citizens."—New ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... verbal promptitude is out of the ordinary scope of Dickens; but we find it frequently in this particular part of Martin Chuzzlewit. Martin himself is constantly breaking out into a controversial lucidity, which is elsewhere not at all a part of his character. When they talk to him about the institutions of America he asks sarcastically whether bowie knives and swordsticks and revolvers are the institutions of America. All this (if I may summarise) is expressive of one ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... "De la Conduite de La Guerre," which give a high idea of their author's character and talent. There is nothing in them that ought to scare away the average reader. Their style has the geometrical lucidity which is the polytechnician's birthright, but in spite of the deliberate impersonality generally attached to that style of writing, there emanates from it a curious quality which gradually shows us the author as a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the guests at the house were dressing for dinner, Rnine handed the deed to Hortense. She seemed dazed by all that she had heard; and the thing that bewildered her even more than the relentless light shed upon her uncle's past was the miraculous insight and amazing lucidity displayed by this man: the man who for some hours had controlled events and conjured up before her eyes the actual scenes of a tragedy which no one ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... seemed, in fact, as though illness had renewed him, as though he were again beginning to live and learn amidst the physical pleasantness of convalescence, that still subsisting weakness which lent penetrating lucidity to his brain. At the seminary, by the advice of his masters, he had always kept the spirit of inquiry, his thirst for knowledge, in check. Much of that which was taught him there had surprised him; however, he had succeeded in making the sacrifice of his mind ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... modesty is earlier in appearance, and more fundamental, than anatomical modesty. A partial contribution to the analysis of modesty has been made by Professor James, who, with his usual insight and lucidity, has set forth certain of its characteristics, especially the element due to "the application to ourselves of judgments primarily passed upon our mates." Guyau, in a very brief discussion of modesty, realized its great significance and touched on most of its chief elements.[2] ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a tremor. He felt himself invulnerable—raised far above the shallowness of common judgment. Though he saw the Prince looking at him with black displeasure, the lucidity of his mind, of which he was very conscious, gave him an extraordinary assurance. He was ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... person he appears incapable. The texture of his expression must be stiff with allusion, or he deems it ill spun; there must be something of antic in his speech, or he cannot believe he is addressing himself to the Immortals; he has praised with perfect understanding the lucidity, the elegance, the ease, of Moliere, and yet his aim in art (it would appear) is to be Moliere's antipodes, and to vanquish by congestion, clottedness, an anxious and determined dandyism of form and style. There is something bourgeois in his intolerance ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... for many years. Bell's patent was not sustained by the courts. Sir Richard Webster, now Chief-Justice of England, was my counsel, and sustained all of my patents in England for many years. Webster has a marvellous capacity for understanding things scientific; and his address before the courts was lucidity itself. His brain is highly organized. My experience with the legal fraternity is that scientific subjects are distasteful to them, and it is rare in this country, on account of the system of trying patent suits, for a ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... as he looked on the sort of aspect he presented to the lady's discriminative regard. Of her feelings he had not a suspicion. But he knew with what extraordinary lucidity women can, when it pleases them, and when their feelings are not quite boiling under the noonday sun, seize all the sides of a character, and put their fingers on its weak point. He was cognizant of the total absence of the humorous in himself (the want that most shut him out from his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... jottings—by Richardson himself on the structure of the novel and the virtues of the epistolary style. The statements of Skelton and Spence are unusual amongst contemporary discussions of Clarissa for their brevity, lucidity, and sustained critical relevance. Richardson's own comments, though disorganized and fragmentary, show that he was attempting to develop a theory of the epistolary novel as essentially dramatic, psychologically realistic, and ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... pointing of his finger now and then, or an occasional wave of his hand, Harry detailed the circumstances. He was methodical and accurate; he might have been opening a case in the law-courts, and would have earned a compliment on his lucidity. There was something ludicrous in this treatment of the matter, but he remained very grave, although ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... to B's 5th is evidence with what perfect lucidity Lasker detects the weak spots, and how immediately he takes advantage of his ...
— The Blue Book of Chess - Teaching the Rudiments of the Game, and Giving an Analysis - of All the Recognized Openings • Howard Staunton and "Modern Authorities"
... The change of movement and position, the sight of the lamps twinkling to the rear, and the smell of damp and mould and rotten straw which clung about the vehicle, wrought in him strange alternations of lucidity and mortal giddiness. ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... faltering or obscurity. Noble pages have been read, and the scherzo is approached with eagerness. Again there is no disappointment. On numerous occasions I have testified my regard for this movement in warm and uncritical terms. It is simply unapproachable, and has no equal for lucidity, brevity and polish among the works of Chopin, except the Scherzo in C sharp minor; but there is less irony, more muscularity, and more native sweetness in this E flat minor Scherzo. I like the way Kullak marks the first B flat octave. It is a pregnant beginning. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... fury fell into dust within him, like a crazy structure, leaving behind emptiness, desolation, regret. His resentment was not against the girl, but against life itself—that commonest of snares, in which he felt himself caught, seeing clearly the plot of plots and unconsoled by the lucidity of ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... determined that the old man must not be disturbed in his profound rest by any question tending to cause a state of mental activity. The test of a very fine instrument had proved that the shortest interval of positive lucidity was followed by a slight but distinctly perceptible rise of temperature in the body, and this could mean only a waste of the precious tissues they were so carefully preserving. They hoped and believed ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... nothing; you will even lose the advantages which you might derive from his lucidity. It is very possible that you could make him speak upon all the subjects of your indiscreet curiosity; but in that case, as I have already warned you, you will make him leave his own sphere and introduce him into yours. He will no longer have any other resources than yourself. ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... my question leaves nothing to be desired in the way of lucidity. Now, supposing I should happen to feel some repugnance to those delicate attentions on Morillo's part that you have just alluded to, what inducement would be sufficient to persuade you to 'bout ship, and land me on the wharf at Kingston, ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... start, Napoleon, as logician, with his usual lucidity and precision, lays it down that they shall be strictly practical and professional. "Make professors (regents) for me," said he one day in connection with the Ecole normale, "and not litterateurs, wits or seekers or inventors in any branch ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... so, the Chancellor and the Treasury seem to have curiously narrow limitations in their capacity for clearness. Very few accountants, I imagine, consider the official figures, as periodically published, as models of lucidity. Nevertheless, we can at least claim that in this respect the figures furnished to us by the Government during the war have been quite as lucid as those which used to be presented in time of peace, and it is ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... despise money and to fling it out of window. But in reality they hardly ever let it slip through their fingers: and in vain did they do all sorts of foolish things: they never could altogether lead astray their lucidity of mind and practical sense. For the rest, their parents kept an eye on them, and reined them in. The most prodigal of them, Mannheim, would sincerely have given away all that he had: but he never had anything: ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... her about the room at Mrs. Patterson's, and, with a brief return of lucidity, how the sum of ten dollars was now due this heartless society woman who might insist upon its payment before he would again enjoy free access ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... chapters, are excellent in so far as they are identical with thought in all its shades of feeling. "Economy of attention," Spencer's familiar phrase for the philosophy of style, his explanation of even the most ornate and extravagant forms, is but another name for this desired lucidity of the medium. Pater, himself, an artist in the overlaying of phrases, has the same teaching. "All the laws of good writing aim at a similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes by which the word is associated to its ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... (though her manner was by no means rapid), the largeness of the field of knowledge, the compressed outcome of which she was at any moment ready to bring to bear on the topic in hand; the sureness and lucidity of her induction; the clearness of vision, to which muddle was as impossible and abhorrent as a vacuum is supposed to be to nature; and all this lighted up and gilded by an infinite sense of, and capacity for, humour,—this was what rendered her to me a marvel, and an object of inexhaustible study ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... he published the results of his experiments in the Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Bruenn, in a brief paper of some forty pages. But brief as it is the importance of the results and the lucidity of the exposition will always give it high rank among the classics of biological literature. For thirty-five years Mendel's paper remained unknown, and it was not until 1900 that it was simultaneously discovered by several distinguished botanists. The causes of this curious neglect are not altogether ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... ceased her heart was beating so violently that there was a rush in her ears like the noise of the river after rain, and she did not immediately make out what he was answering. But as she recovered her lucidity she said to herself that, whatever he was saying, she must not hear it; and she began to speak again, half playfully, half appealingly, with an eloquence of entreaty, an ingenuity in argument, of which she had never ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... hardly conscious of Oswyn's departure, or of the subdued entrance of the nurse, who had been discreetly waiting for it, Rainham's mind was still keenly vigilant; and it was in the relief of a certain new lucidity, an almost hieratic calm, that he reviewed that recent interview, in which he had so deliberately unburdened himself. It seemed as if, in his great weakness, the ache of his old desire, his fever of longing, bad ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... are displaying your usual lucidity," Chris said, coolly. Her heart was beating fast, but she did not show it. "Just reflect for a moment. I have found you out. I know pretty well what you are. I need not have told you anything of this. I need have done no more than gone to the police and told them where to find you. ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... course, of a man who would talk three hours without pause, and undoubtedly there were many people sadly bored by him in his day; but to those who could appreciate the remarkable stores of information he possessed, and the lucidity with which he could deal them forth,—to say nothing of his rhetorical splendors,—those discourses of his were never tedious, but full of supreme interest. To be sure, Sydney Smith sneered at his "wonderful stores of very accurate—misinformation," but he was one who did ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... sunsets to paint; but at the same time every one of Turner's contemporaries were surrounded by sunsets of precisely the same kind, and yet only Turner was capable of producing such masterpieces as his own. The case of the writer and the artist, indeed, illustrates with singular lucidity the fact which the philosophy of the evolutionary sociologists ignores that the great man does great things, not in virtue of conditions which he shares with the dullest and the feeblest of the men around him, but in virtue of the manner in ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... a feeling that they were neither of them gaining any ground. She blamed herself for her lack of lucidity. She began again, taking up the matter at a fresh point. She said that her life at present wasn't full, that it was only half a life, that it was just home and marriage and nothing else; he had his business, he went out into the world, he had ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... I cannot go, but I must add that the lines are of the most perfect metrical lucidity and the purest melody when compared with some written by the LAUREATE ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... sincerity and persistency than William Law, but it can hardly be doubted that he narrowed the range of his influence by the views he expressed with regard to culture and to all human learning. He forgot that, without the logic, the wit, the irony, the singular force and lucidity of style displayed in his own writings, he would have lost the power as a religious teacher which he was so ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... rebellion in its social, governmental and military aspects. No President's Message, no letter, no one of the emanations of Seward's letter and dispatch-writing, corrosive disease, not an article in any press compares with Butler's speech for lucidity, logic, conciseness and strong reasoning. Butler laid down a law, a doctrine—and what he lays down as such, contains more cardinal truth and reason than all that was ever uttered by the Administration. And Butler is shelved and bartered to ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... to Mainwaring, in afterward thinking about it all, how quickly his mind began to recover its steadiness after that first astonishing shock. Even as the other was speaking he discovered that his brain was becoming clarified to a wonderful lucidity; his thoughts were becoming rearranged, and with a marvelous activity and an alertness he had never before experienced. He knew that if he moved to escape or uttered any outcry he would be instantly a dead man, for the circle of the pistol barrel was directed full against his forehead and with the ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... wading in deeper and deeper, inch by inch, the cautious minister was fast finding himself too far advanced to retreat. He was rarely decided, however, and never lucid; and least of all in emergencies, when decision and lucidity would have been more valuable ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... author of "ducation sentimentale" seems to have inherited in the paternal line the shrewd realism of Champagne, so de Maupassant appears to have inherited from his Lorraine ancestors their indestructible discipline and cold lucidity. ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... was most friendly, approaching the limit of half-familiarity. I had the feeling that I was beholding in her a captured ideal. No common experience! But I didn't care. It was very lucky perhaps for me that in a way I was like a very sick man who has yet preserved all his lucidity. I was not even wondering to myself at what on earth I was doing there. She breathed out: "Comme c'est romantique," at large to the dusty studio as it were; then pointing to a chair at her right hand, and bending slightly towards ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... reckoned with. What is it then, this persistent, obscure, unnameable Thing? What is it? The question haunts the mind; it will not be put aside; and the Greek at last, like other men under similar conditions, only with a lucidity and precision peculiar to himself, makes the reply, "it is something like myself." Every power of nature he presumes to be a spiritual being, impersonating the sky as Zeus, the earth as Demeter, the sea as Poseidon; from generation to generation under his shaping hands, the figures multiply ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... very good," said Christophe, whose terrible sufferings had developed an extraordinary lucidity in his mind, and who, after enduring such unspeakable sufferings, was determined not to compromise the results of his devotion. "But she might have spared me much agony be telling my persecutors herself the secrets that I know nothing about, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... on a par, as regards lucidity and logic, with the explanations which we are given of the alleged case ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... lucidity of my feelings. I saw, with indignation, my own wretched self being angled for like a fish. And with all that, in my forlorn state, I remained prudent. I did not rush out blindly. No. I approached the inner end of the passage, as though I ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... against the lucidity of the paragraph, nor any thing to urge, at all likely to avail, against the prosecution of Van's designs upon the lady's hand and fifteen thousand florins, with "two months' conge and other advantages." No possible sophistry, to which I was equal, could ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... of sea power in its broadest sense upon the general history. Bearing, as it does, strong indications of a full use of accessible accounts, contemporary with the events narrated, I know no naval work superior to it for lucidity and breadth of treatment. Campbell was he of whom Dr. Johnson said: "Campbell is a good man, a pious man; I am afraid he has not been inside a church for many years; but he never passes a church without pulling off his hat. This shows he has ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... shower of pamphlets on both sides fell upon the country. Of these the most famous and most efficacious was the "Federalist," successive numbers of which were contributed by Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay. With a calmness of spirit, a lucidity of style, and a power of logic which make it to this day one of the most important commentaries on the Constitution, the "Federalist" strove to show that the Constitution was safe for the people and advantageous ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... misunderstood, it would be either because there was not time to fully explain or because our motives had become mixed, for I was convinced that disinterested action was like truth or beauty in its lucidity and power of appeal. ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... "is one that throws no light upon any of the facts. The second hypothesis" (which is unalloyed Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck) "is one that explains them all with transparent lucidity." Yet in his "Charles Darwin" Mr. Allen tells us that though Mr. Darwin "did not invent the development theory, he made it believable and ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... Schelling were misleading the minds of Germany, Wagner was still young: that he guessed, or rather fully grasped, that the only thing which Germans take seriously is—"the idea,"—that is to say, something obscure, uncertain, wonderful; that among Germans lucidity is an objection, logic a refutation. Schopenhauer rigorously pointed out the dishonesty of Hegel's and Schelling's age,—rigorously, but also unjustly, for he himself, the pessimistic old counterfeiter, was in no way more "honest" than his more famous contemporaries. But let us leave morality ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... clear writer in verse; Modern Love requires reading and re-reading; but at one time he had a somewhat exasperating semblance of lucidity, which still lurks mockingly about his work. A freshman who heard Mallarme lecture at Oxford said when he came away: 'I understood every word, but not a single sentence.' Meredith is sometimes equally tantalising. The meaning seems to be there, just beyond one, clearly visible on the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... by the circumstantial care which this girl had taken in order to bring him to her, all hindered him from the attention, which the blind have, necessary for the concentration of his intelligence and the perfect lucidity of his recollection. The journey lasted half an hour. When the carriage stopped, it was no longer on the street. The mulatto and the coachman took Henri in their arms, lifted him out, and, putting him into a sort of litter, conveyed him across a garden. He could smell its flowers and the perfume ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... version of the Arabian Nights, executed with peculiar literary vigor, exact scholarship, and rare insight into Oriental modes of thought and feeling, can under any shadow of presence be classed with 'the garbage of the brothels.' In the lack of lucidity, which is supposed to distinguish English folk, our middle-class censores morum strain at the gnat of a privately circulated translation of an Arabic classic, while they daily swallow the camel of higher education based upon minute study of Greek and Latin literature. When English ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... admirable Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les Origines du Cosmopolitisme Litteraire of the late Joseph Texte—an investigation unquestionably of the ripest scholarship, and the most extended research. And now once more there are signs that French lucidity and French precision are about to enter upon other conquests; and we have M. Barbeau's study of a famous old English watering-place[53]—appropriately dedicated, as is another of the books already mentioned, ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... publication, perhaps the most wonderful in the whole world, entitled a "Compendium of the Census of the United States," issued with every decade. These volumes, accessible to everybody, and arranged with marvelous skill and lucidity, offer to the social observer a complete, accurate, and suggestive survey of every field comprised within the vast domain of the national interests. An evening's address would not more than suffice to indicate the scope and appraise the value of this work, which is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... learned men, the lucidity with which they expressed their views, and the earnestness with which they defended them, captivated my attention, and opened to me a new world ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... said Mr. Holden, when the mise-en-scene was quite to his liking, "that a good map, and a few realistic models of the principal buildings dealt with in my discourse, give a lucidity and a coherence ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... Father Beron with his monotonous phrase, "Will you confess now?" reaching him in an awful iteration and lucidity of meaning through the delirious incoherence of unbearable pain. He could not forget. But that was not the worst. Had he met Father Beron in the street after all these years Dr. Monygham was sure he would have quailed before ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... short on the threshold of a great discovery in the art of fencing. Essentially a theorist, Andre-Louis perceived the theory suggested, which Danet himself in suggesting it had not perceived. He lay now on his back, surveying the cracks in the ceiling and considering this matter further with the lucidity that early morning often brings to an acute intelligence. You are to remember that for close upon two months now the sword had been Andre-Louis' daily exercise and almost hourly thought. Protracted concentration upon the subject was giving him an extraordinary penetration of vision. Swordsmanship ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... this tipsy, irreclaimable seaman, this unawakened Bill Bludger! I had framed an ideal of what my own behaviour, in my trying circumstances, ought to be. Often had I read how these islanders possess a tradition that a wonderful white man, a being all sweetness and lucidity, landed in their midst, taught them the knowledge of the arts, converted them to peace and good manners, and at last mysteriously departed, promising that he would return again. I had hopes—such things have happened—that the islanders ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... had left him, the publisher eagerly turned over the pages of her new manuscript. At a glance he saw that there was no "falling-off"—he recognised the same lucidity of expression, the same point and delicacy of phraseology which had distinguished her first effort, and the wonderful charm with which a thought was pressed firmly yet tenderly ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... distance to the equator, but also with the difference of meridians: these and similar phenomena, as they broke upon him, were discerned with wonderful quickness of perception, and made to contribute important principles to the stock of general knowledge. This lucidity of spirit, this quick convertibility of facts to principles, distinguish him from the dawn to the close of his sublime enterprise, insomuch that, with all the sallying ardor of his imagination, his ultimate success ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... Florence gathered round him,[2] met and attained, as it were, to single consciousness in him. He then no longer restrained the impulse of his oratory, but became the mouthpiece of God, the interpreter to themselves of all that host. In a fiery crescendo, never flagging, never losing firmness of grasp or lucidity of vision, he ascended the altar steps of prophecy, and, standing like Moses on the mount between the thunders of God and the tabernacles of the plain, fulminated period after period of impassioned eloquence. The walls of the church re-echoed with sobs and wailings dominated by one ringing voice. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... cataloguing of such libraries as that of the British Museum, or such collections as that of the insects in Cromwell Road. Such an index could be housed quite comfortably on one side of Northumberland Avenue, for example. It is only a reasonable tribute to the distinctive lucidity of the French mind to suppose the central index housed in a vast series of buildings at or near Paris. The index would be classified primarily by some unchanging physical characteristic, such as we ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... of Sir Robert Ball as a writer on astronomy at once popular and scientific is in itself more than sufficient recommendation of his newly published 'Atlas of Astronomy.' ... The introduction is written with Sir Robert Ball's well-known lucidity and simplicity of exposition, and altogether the Atlas is admirably adapted to meet the needs and smooth the difficulties of young and inexperienced students of astronomy, as well as materially to assist the researches of those that are ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... dismay which the unreflecting sufferers did not share. No writer who was carried away by egoistic anger or disappointment could have told these stories of unhappiness, infidelity, and luckless love with such dispassionate lucidity. ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... conciseness and lucidity, in the following pages the eminent British astronomer furnishes important particulars concerning the life of Copernicus; and he gives an account, no less interesting than instructive, of the evolution of the Copernican astronomy ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... that journal celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his contributions to its columns. Early in his career he received marked recognition from able critics, and gratifying responses from readers. It is rare in the history of an author that his books after fifty years of writing have the freshness, lucidity, and charm that Mr. Burroughs's later books have. A critic in 1876 speaks of his "quiet, believing style, free from passion or the glitter of rhetoric, and giving one the sense of simple eyesight"; and now, concerning one of his later books, "Time and Change," Mr. Brander Matthews writes: ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... day, what Petrarch has been too enthusiastically declared to be—the first of the moderns. He is so as against even the great Rabelais, because Rabelais misses directness, misses universality, misses lucidity, in his gigantic mirth; he is so as against Petrarch, because he is emphatically an impressionist where Petrarch is a framer of studied compositions; he is so against Erasmus, because Erasmus also ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... general quality of style in Bacchylides is his perfect simplicity and clearness. Where the text is not corrupt, there are few sentences which are not lucid in meaning and simple in structure. This lucidity is partly due, no doubt, to the fact that he seldom attempts imagery of the bolder kind, and never has thoughts of a subtle or complex order. Yet it would be very unjust to regard such clearness as merely a compensatory merit of lyric ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... the responsibility of command. The captain was at his post, shortening sail, for it blew fresher: there was some rain; and thunder and lightning were at work in the heavens in the direction of the adjacent continent: the air was full of wild, unnatural lucidity, as if the frequent flashes left a sort of twilight behind them; and objects were discernible at a distance of two or three leagues. We had been busy in the first watch, as the omens denoted easterly weather; the English bark was struggling ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Whether you like pumpkin and brains or not—Apicius in this dish reveals himself as the consummate master of his art that he really is—a cook for cooks; Moreover, the lucidity of his diction in this instance is equally remarkable. It stands out in striking contrast to his many other formulae which are so obscured. Many of them perhaps were precepts of likewise striking originality ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... not made her pilgrimage for nothing. But—in any event—there were advantages without doubt in the circumstance which subjected one to being perpetually pointed out as a daughter of a multi-millionaire. As this argued itself out for her with rapid lucidity, she bent and kissed Rosy once more. She even tried to do it lightly, and not to allow the rush of love and pity in her soul ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is one of the few works written in recent times by a foreign composer of the first rank for the English stage. The libretto, which was the work of Planche, is founded upon an old French romance, 'Huon of Bordeaux,' and though by no means a model of lucidity, it contains many scenes both powerful and picturesque, which must have captivated the imagination of a musician so impressionable as Weber. The opera opens in fairyland, where a bevy of fairies is watching the slumbers of Oberon. The fairy king has quarrelled ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... almost hermetically. It was much cooler here than in the place through which we had passed, and the nausea began to leave me, my brain to grow more clear. Had I known what was to follow I should have cursed the lucidity of mind which now came to me; I should have prayed for oblivion—to be spared the sight of that ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... the organism. Mayer saw that neither nerves nor brain, nor both together, possessed the energy necessary to animal motion; but he also saw that the nerve could lift a latch and open a door, by which floods of energy are let loose. 'As an engineer,' he says with admirable lucidity, 'by the motion of his finger in opening a valve or loosening a detent can liberate an amount of mechanical energy almost infinite compared with its exciting cause; so the nerves, acting on the muscles, can unlock ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... features of the coast, but every word showed the minuteness of his observation, the clear vision of a seaman able to master quickly the aspect of a strange land and of a strange sea. He presented, with concise lucidity, the picture of the tangle of reefs and sandbanks, through which the yacht had miraculously blundered in the dark ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... sacrifices for both of us, and I can't make them either. I daresay it's all right for you, but for me it would be a terrible mistake. When I think I'm doing a certain thing I mustn't do just the opposite," she kept on as for true lucidity. "There are things I've thought of, the things I like best; and they're not what you mean. It would be a great deception, and it's not the way I see my life, and it would be misery ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... which by general consent in the present stage of psychological science require study is the nature, and if possible the cause, of a special lucidity, a sensitiveness of perception, or accessibility to ideas appearing to arrive through channels other than usual organs of sense, which is sometimes met with among simple people[1] in a rudimentary form, and in a ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... plan had one great merit to the mind of a foreigner denied the lucidity of our Italian intelligence—it was adorably simple. I can give it to you now in a nutshell as I learned it later, not as I knew it then, for I did not know it then. Nobody knew it then except ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... all my anguish of resistance I found a kind of fierce joy in following her. It was lucidity at white heat: the last sublimation of passion. She might have been an angel arguing a point in the empyrean if she hadn't been, so completely, a ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... leading for the Crown, could have marshaled the facts with such lucidity and fairness as Furneaux during that ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... and those of Sophocles and AEschylus meet, it is because they move on the same heights, and thence survey with "the poet's sad lucidity" the same "pageant of men's miseries." But how dissimilar in expression Shakespeare can be, how luxuriant and apart from the austerity of Greece, we observe in one ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... Charley, with engaging lucidity, "if she were less so. It's her infernal virtue I can't stand, Gabriella. No man could stand it ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... contain some agreeable epigrams and rare specimens of style; but a plain tale of adventure, of love and war, needs none of this industry, and is even spoiled by inopportune diligence. Speed, directness, lucidity are the characteristics of Dumas' style, and they are exactly the characteristics which his novels required. Scott often failed, his most loyal admirers may admit, in these essentials; but it is rarely that Dumas fails, when he is himself ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... is inevitable and has been made again and again by those who have felt the elemental grandeur of Millet's work. As a recent writer has remarked: "An art highly intellectualized, so as to convey a great idea with the lucidity of language, must needs be controlled by genius akin to that which inspired the ceiling paintings of the Sistine Chapel."[A] This was written of the Trajanic sculptors, whose works both Michelangelo and Millet studied and admired, and indeed it is to this old Roman art, or ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... inaccuracies in his compositions, but the man of sense would find in them nothing unmeaning—- nothing useless—nothing vapid. He was not a turner of fine periods—he was not a fine writer—but he wrote with strength, precision, and lucidity; and his compositions, even where they failed to produce conviction, could never be read without creating respect for the ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... moment of the three principal nations of Europe, he should say that the great want of the French was morality, that the great want of the Germans was civil courage, and that our own great want was lucidity. Our own want was, of course, what concerned us the most. People were apt to remark the defects which accompanied certain qualities, and to think that the qualities could not be desirable because of the defects which they saw accompanying them. There was no greater and salutary lesson for ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... in the fireplace the black ashes of my letters which had just been burned, a sacrifice which, as her confessor afterwards told me, she had not been willing to make until the hour of her death. She smiled upon us all with the smile of other days. Her eyes, moist with tears, gave evidence of inward lucidity; she saw the celestial joys of the ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... from Prof. Sherman's great work Roman Law in the Modern World, Boston, 1917. The learned author has laid philosophical lawyers of all countries under heavy obligations by this splendid book, as noted for its lucidity as ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... Nordermann, who also wrote a book on the Second Advent of Christ, shared his fate. Kuhlmann also wrote a volume of verses, entitled The Berlin and Amsterdam "Kuhl- festival" at the Gathering of Lutherans and Calvinists, which sufficiently attests his insanity. The following is a specimen of the lucidity of his works: "The more I continued my doctrines, the more opposition I received, so that also the higher world of light with which I am illuminated, in their light I was enlightened, or shadowed, when I proceeded, and in their light lit ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... things as they stand, and I'm not going to write 'Tales of my First Feeding Bottle' to please them. So I'm going over to Paris. I shall turn my MSS. into French and publish them there. The language lends itself to perfect lucidity, and the Paris press allows men to write as men. Besides, the French admire word-painting, which is my particular vein. The English don't. They like composition. Here an author's pen must remain always a stick dipped in ink. It must never become what ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... many and hot opponents on this side of the Channel and in Germany, but we do not recollect to have found precisely these sins in the long catalogue of those hitherto laid to his charge. It is worth while, therefore, to examine into these discoveries effected solely by the aid of the "lucidity and solidity" of the ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... named, so the keelmen hailed in the following terms, "Like-a-goose-and-not-a-goose, ahoy!" They were much disappointed by the inattention of the crew. The keelman is religious in his way, but his ideas lack lucidity. Two friends had left their keel aground up the river and were walking across a field, when they were chased by a savage bull. They fled to a tree, and the fleeter-footed man got to the first fork. The second had swarmed a fair distance up the trunk, ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... interpretation is that of the working of great structural tendencies, or energies, or "qualities," as he calls them, which are common both to the inner and the outer universe. There are, he declares again and again with painful reiteration, but with little advance of lucidity, seven of these fundamental laws or energies or qualities, like the sevenfold colour-band of the rainbow, though they can never be untangled or sundered or thought of as standing side by side, for together in their unity and interprocesses they form the universe, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... sovereignty; and then work patiently on with ever-present enjoyment, learning his art, gaining skill and mastery over his vast and complex instrument, till he gained certainty of touch and the power of saying, with perfect lucidity, with pure transparency of phrase, exactly what he meant; and then, behind his art, to live resolutely in his simple creed, whatever article of it he could master, sure of this, that if his inspiration came, he would be able to present it worthily; and if it did not ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... power of literary form. It underwent some obscuration in the three volumes in which the great transformation of Germany and Prussia during the Napoleonic age was not very happily grouped round a biography of Stein. But here the reader once more finds that ease, lucidity, persuasiveness, and mild gravity that were first shown, as they were probably first acquired, in the serious consideration of religious and ethical subjects. Mr. Seeley's aversion for the florid, rhetorical, and over-decorated fashion of writing history ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... if done by its direction, this was not the way the commander of the Mediterranean fleet should receive word of so momentous a step taken in his district, while to Gore he sent emphatic orders to disobey Cornwallis, although the latter was Nelson's senior. Summing up with admirable lucidity the facts before him, and thereby proving that the impression under which Cornwallis's action probably was taken was erroneous, he said: "Unless you have much weightier reasons than the order of Admiral Cornwallis, or that you receive orders from the ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... the accent of pent-up sincerity, and even relieved because she was able to say something which she felt was true. For the last few days she had felt herself several times near that madness which is but an intolerable lucidity of apprehension. ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... much as he has received. Apart from his well-known mathematical attainments, he possesses by inheritance the political and historical mind, and an intrepid determination to pierce convention and look to ultimate things. He has written abundantly and, where the subject permits, with a singular lucidity, candour, and charm. Especially his Philosophical Essays and his little book on The Problems of Philosophy can be read with pleasure by any intelligent person, and give a tolerably rounded picture of the tenets of the school. Yet it must be remembered that Mr. Russell, like Mr. Moore, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... are popular and obvious, consisting in a strain of liberal, enlightened sentiment, an ingenious and original cast of thought, and a painstaking lucidity of style which leaves the writer's meaning even prosaically plain. There is a good deal of absurd and even puerile exegesis in its pages, which makes you wonder how so much sentimentality can co-exist with so much ability; but the book is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... was nearer six than five millions. In regard to the peace proposals he found himself unable to better the late Prime Minister's statement that the Allies would require "adequate reparation for the past and adequate security for the future." In lucidity and dignity of statement Mr. Asquith was certainly above criticism. Lord Devonport has been appointed Food Controller and warned us of rigours to come. The most thrilling speech heard at Westminster this month has been that of Major ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... were invested with a new and potent life, and it was shown how the yearly balancing of the national accounts might be directed by and made to promote the profoundest and most fruitful principles of statesmanship. With such lucidity and picturesqueness was this financial oratory rolled forth that the dullest intellect could follow with pleasure the complicated scheme; and for five hours the House of commons sat as if it were under the sway of a magician's wand. ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... the Nile nearest to the Red Sea, and thence up the river to Gordon; but, after considerable hesitation, the military authorities decided that this was riot a practicable plan. Upon that, he foresaw, with perfect lucidity, the inevitable development of events. Sooner or later, it would be absolutely necessary to send a relief expedition to Khartoum; and, from that premise, it followed, without a possibility of doubt, that it was the duty of the Government to do so at once. This he saw quite ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... the mere transition from one thought to another gives his prose a curious air of disjointedness as if he flitted arbitrarily from one thing to another, and jotted down anything that came into his head. His writing has clarity and lucidity, it abounds in terseness of expression and in exact and discriminating phraseology, and in the minor arts of composition—in the use of quotations for instance—it can be extraordinarily felicitous. But it lacks spaciousness and ease and rhythm; it makes too ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... came out of the wood and the yellow stars came out to crown it, as my friend, with the lucidity of despair, explained to me (on the soundest scientific principles, of course) that nothing would be any good at all. We must sleep the night in the lane, except in the very unlikely event of some ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... was just the reason." She was speaking frankly, as a child can speak; but children have their own code of honour, and it forbids them to give away a friend. "Jan was telling us, only the other day," she explained with careful lucidity, "how his father had once caught a mermaid in a pool there. We wanted very much to see one, and so we planned to go. But afterwards, when father rowed us home, we did not like to tell him about it. We were afraid he would laugh at ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... With returning lucidity she found herself, panting and dishevelled, arms pinned to her sides, struggling on for all that, being hustled by some half a dozen men across a narrow ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... their efficacy, we should bear in mind that at the time he was writing, before the era of Enclosure Acts, over a third of England was still common land. However, whatever opinion may be held on this point, there can be no denying the lucidity and incisiveness of ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... with a very slight degree of severity, "I like lucidity, of all things, and am afraid I shall hardly be able to converse satisfactorily with you, unless ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... elements common to both the Umbrian art and that of Angelico; this, however, does not depend so much on the teaching of the school, as on technical affinity; insomuch as Umbrian painting in its lucidity, charm and accuracy of colour, is in some measure derived from the art of illumination, and most probably Fra Angelico took his style from the same source, as even in his most perfect works, he always preserved a remembrance ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... matter of great importance, as anyone can see; still one cannot help feeling that a certain amount of sincerity would not be wholly blamable. To state, then, with studied moderation a belief that in unfortunate moments of lucidity is irresistibly borne in upon most of us—the blind agitation caused mostly by hunger and complicated by love and ferocity does not deserve either by its beauty, or its morality, or its possible results, the artistic ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Republique, 1886, most valuable works; a third vol., Hist., etc., sous le Consulat. M. le Capitaine DESBRIERE, Projets de Debarquement, 2 vols., 1901, a phase of the great war told with all the care and lucidity which distinguish the best French ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... importance, for it is the transition from behaviour to conduct. The more integrated behaviour is harmonious and consistent behaviour toward a larger and more comprehensive situation, toward a bigger section of the universe; it is lucidity and breadth of purpose. The child playing with fire is only wrong conduct because it is behaviour that does not take into account consequences; it is not adjusted to enough of the environment; it will be made right by an enlargement ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... Rotherby, "I declare you should have been a lawyer. We haven't a pleader of such parts and such lucidity at ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... Successful action, as in arts, crafts, games, sports, and the like, must needs have subtle and accurate knowledge behind it; but the possessor of such knowledge is seldom able to impart it with any approach to lucidity. On the other hand, it frequently happens that one who has a retentive memory is able to impart information glibly and correctly, without possessing any real knowledge of the ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... Russian soul is that it is not ashamed to express what all men feel. And this is why Dostoievsky is not only a Russian writer but a universal writer. From the French point of view he may seem wanting in lucidity and irony; from the English point of view he may seem antinomian and non-moral. But he has one advantage over both. He approaches the ultimate mystery as no Western writer, except, perhaps, Shakespeare ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... fattened on molasses, and had been rewarded with a premium. I am indebted for all knowledge of this anomalous tractate to the "Agricultural Biography" of Mr. Donaldson, who seems disposed to give a sheltering wing to the curious theory broached, and discourses upon it with a lucidity and coherence worthy of a state-paper. I must be permitted to quote Mr. Donaldson's language:—"The author's ideas are no romance or chimera, but a very feasible entertainment of the undertaking, when a social revolution permits the fruits of all climes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... are scattered up and down the writings of Plato: especially Laws, Population; Free Trade; Adulteration; Wills and Bequests; Begging; Eryxias, (though not Plato's), Value and Demand; Republic, Division of Labour. The last subject, and also the origin of Retail Trade, is treated with admirable lucidity in the second book of the Republic. But Plato never combined his economic ideas into a system, and never seems to have recognized that Trade is one of the great motive powers of the State and of the world. ...
— The Republic • Plato
... American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... of just what had happened. That part of the philosophy was no clearer than that of the imponderables, which had largely dropped out of mind. The terminology represented an advance in knowledge, but was lacking in lucidity, for no one knew what a force of any ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... a blank day. I grudge any interruption of our experiments. At present they merely embrace the physical signs which go with slight, with complete, and with extreme insensibility. Afterward we hope to pass on to the phenomena of suggestion and of lucidity. Professors have demonstrated these things upon women at Nancy and at the Salpetriere. It will be more convincing when a woman demonstrates it upon a professor, with a second professor as a witness. And that I should be the subject—I, the sceptic, the materialist! At least, I have shown ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... experience the same pleasure as I do when you take them up, and you will at once compare them with some one of the old masters whose rival indeed he is. You will find even greater charm in the style of his historical compositions, in its terseness, its lucidity, smoothness, brilliancy and stateliness, for there is the same vigour in the historical harangues as there is in his own orations, only rather ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... phantasm still more empty.... Besides, you are mistaken about your strength. You cannot—no, you never can exist without us." They had touched the galling spot: Augustin knew his weakness only too well. And his burning imagination presented to him with extraordinary lucidity these pleasures which he could not do without. They were not only embracements, but also those trifles, those superfluous nothings, "those light pleasantnesses which make us fond of life." The perfidious ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... an English critic, who candidly confessed that he respected German philosophy because of its complete incomprehensibility, as instanced by Hegel's doctrines, until the study of Schopenhauer had made it clear to him that Hegel's lack of lucidity was due not so much to his own incapacity as to the intentionally bombastic style in which this philosopher had clothed his problems. Like every man who is passionately thrilled with life, I too sought first for the conclusions of Schopenhauer's system. With its aesthetic side I was ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... Kensington to working men. The lecturer was Professor Huxley; his subject, the Common Lobster. All the apparatus used was a good-sized specimen of the creature itself, a penknife, and a black-board and chalk. With such materials the professor gave us not only an exposition, matchless in its lucidity, of the structure of the crustacea, but such an insight into the purposes and methods of biological study as few could in those days have anticipated. For there were as yet no Science Primers, no International Series; and the "new biology" came upon us like ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... four o'clock when Mr. CHAMBERLAIN rose to "open the Budget" (he clings to that old-fashioned phrase), and just after six when he completed a speech which Mr. ASQUITH (himself an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer) justly praised for its lucidity ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... etherealizing and intensifying the intellect. This was peculiarly the case in the instance of Mr. Lowndes. As the disease progressed, attenuating and debilitating the physical man, his intellectual faculties grew brighter, and brighter, assuming a lucidity almost supernatural. At length he passed from time while yet young, leaving a vacuum which in South Carolina has never been filled. His death was at a time his services were most needed, and as with Clay, Jackson, and Webster; his death was a ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... Doctor Prance on the lucidity of her mind, and then he said: "Is Miss Birdseye really sick? Is her ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... her berth, staring at the shadows overhead, the rush of the wheels was in her brain, driving her deeper and deeper into circles of wakeful lucidity. The sleeping-car had sunk into its night-silence. Through the wet window-pane she watched the sudden lights, the long stretches of hurrying blackness. Now and then she turned her head and looked through the opening in ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... his hand affectionately on his friend's shoulder. "You are the best man in the world," he said, "and I am a vile brute. Only," he added in a moment, "you don't understand me!" And he looked at him with eyes of such radiant lucidity that one might have said (and Rowland did almost say so, himself) that it was the fault of one's own grossness if one failed to read to the bottom ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... arrogance when it is high-bred. Such qualities do not help her, for all her spare, clean movement, to achieve the march or rush of narrative; such qualities, for all her satiric pungency, do not bring her into sympathy with the sturdy or burly or homely, or with the broader aspects of comedy. Lucidity, detachment, irony—these never desert her (though she wrote with the hysterical pen that hundreds used during the war). So great is her self-possession that she holds criticism at arm's length, somewhat as her chosen circles hold the barbarians. If she had a little less of this pride ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... for the most part but temporary. Yet the winner of her heart was scarcely to be envied. She was apt—she has herself thus expressed it—to see people through a prism of enthusiasm, and afterwards to recover her lucidity of judgment. Great, no doubt, was her power of self-illusion; it betrayed her into errors that have been unsparingly judged. For her power of calm and complete disillusion she was perhaps unique among women, and ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... virtue of this discovery, the present was an occasion when he wanted Richard's undivided attention. Once seated, Senator Hanway went to the heart of the affair; he made himself clear, for years of debate had educated him to lucidity. What he desired was a plain, sequential rehearsal in the Daily Tory of those claims and charges ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... not been able to write much, in consequence of the darkness. That which he communicated, accordingly, had to pass through the fiery ordeal of the Irishman's brains. As a matter of course it did not come with particular lucidity, though Mike did succeed in making his auditors ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
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