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More "Opulence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dialect for the richest of all the languages among men, and the stupid adoration of follies for the purest religion? And since slavery is good for the blacks, it is good for their masters, bringing opulence and the opportunity of educating a race. The slavery of the black is good in itself; he shall serve the white man forever." And nature, which better understood the quality of fleeting interest and passion, laughed as it caught the echo, ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... and Dr. Johnson's other letters to Mr. Levett, I am indebted to my old acquaintance Mr. Nathaniel Thomas, whose worth and ingenuity have been long known to a respectable, though not a wide circle; and whose collection of medals would do credit to persons of greater opulence. BOSWELL. ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... house, in which peeresses and the relatives of peers are allowed to sit—observed of all men—prettily dressed, attentive—a beautiful flower-bordering, so to speak, to the male assemblage below. The variety and brilliancy of colour given by their fashionable clothes adds a great richness and opulence and lightness to the scene; in fact, takes away anything like sombreness, in appearance and aspect at least, from an assembly which otherwise is calculated to suggest sinister reminiscences of coming ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... practising, in the character of an observer, even vice as well as virtue; drawing a lesson from his own frailties, and making a study of his own follies. He dissipated his fortune in premeditated prodigality, and terminated a studious opulence in excessive poverty; living on the miserable salary of a copyist, when in idea he was governing the world. In the estimation of some, a sage—of others, a madman; at one time sanguine to enthusiasm, at another ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... expected then to learn, that the everlasting laws of righteousness were to give way to imaginary, political, and commercial expediency; and that thousands of our fellow-creatures were to be reduced to wretchedness, that individuals might enjoy opulence, or government ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... As you walk on the street to your office, or place of business, continue this thought. As you go about your daily duties in the home or workshop, let the mind be saturated with a spirit, a feeling and thinking of abundance—"The opulence of the Universal Source of Supply now meets all my needs," "The Abundant Life Giving Spirit of Prosperity now leads and guides me into the paths of plenty, peace and power," "My mind is filled with prosperous ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... Plato called "banqueting his own thoughts") that led Pope, as well as Lord Byron, to prefer the silence and seclusion of his library to the most agreeable conversation.—And not only too, is the necessity of commerce with other minds less felt by such persons, but, from that fastidiousness which the opulence of their own resources generates, the society of those less gifted than themselves becomes often a restraint and burden, to which not all the charms of friendship, or even love, can reconcile them. "Nothing is so tiresome (says the poet of Vaucluse, in assigning a reason for not living ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... naturally presumed, that the injuries which they had suffered, and the dangers which they still apprehended from his most inveterate enemy, would secure the fidelity of a party already considerable by their numbers and opulence. Even the conduct of Maxentius towards the bishops of Rome and Carthage may be considered as the proof of his toleration, since it is probable that the most orthodox princes would adopt the same measures with regard to their established clergy. Marcellus, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... second cabin steward on a Brazos liner I became quite haughty. Poverty! You don't know what it means until you've rubbed elbows with it in the Far East and the Far South. Here you have the Bowery Mission bread line. That's a fair sample, Bob, of our American opulence. Free bread!" ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... renewed as a theory of morals; and henceforth, in short, this master of visible things, this so ardent lover, will be a lover of the invisible, with—Yes! there it is constantly, in the Platonic dialogues, not to be explained away—with a certain asceticism, amid all the varied opulence, of sense, of speech and fancy, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... decayed, and there increased in proportion that feverish agony of anticipation with which a man, educated in a sense of consequence, and possessed of opulence,the supporter of an ancient name, and the father of two promising children,foresaw the hour approaching which should deprive him of all the splendour which time had made familiarly necessary to him, and send him forth into the world to struggle with poverty, with ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... mansions of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. As she made her way through the stately corridors, the handsome staircases, the vast drawing-rooms—full of flowers, though it was in the depth of winter, and decorated with the taste peculiar to women born to opulence or to the elegant habits of the aristocracy, Augustine felt a terrible clutch at her heart; she coveted the secrets of an elegance of which she had never had an idea; she breathed in an air of grandeur which explained the attraction ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... be present at the great council to be holden for taxation. Very early, however, talliages had been exacted by the crown from those who were not military tenants; and this imposition daily grew in importance with the relaxation of the feudal tenures, and the increasing opulence of towns. The attempt of the barons to include talliage, and even the vague mention of the privileges of burghs, are decisive symptoms of this silent revolution. But the generally feudal character of the charter and the main object ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... beauty or in art; Nothing is wrought to-day that shall endure For earth's adornment, through long centuries; Not ours the fervid worship of a God That wastes its splendid opulence on glass, Leaving but hate for hungry human hearts. Yet great this age; its mighty work is man Knowing himself the universal life. And great our faith, which shows itself in works For human freedom and ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... gives birth, on those feelings which he nourishes in the beings amongst whom his destiny has placed him; grandeur may dazzle them; power may wrest from them an involuntary homage; force may compel an unwilling obedience; opulence may seduce mean, may attract venal souls; but it is humanity, it is benevolence, it is compassion, it is equity, that unassisted by these, can without efforts obtain for him, from those by whom he is surrounded, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... dawning ray Smiles o'er the hills and gives the promised day, Drives fraud and rapine from their nightly spoil, And social nature wakes to various toil; So from the blazing mine the golden store Mid rival states shall spread from shore to shore, Unite their force, its opulence to share, Extend the pomp but sooth the rage of war; Wide thro the world while genius unconfined Tempts loftier flights, and opens all the mind, Dissolves the slavish bands of monkish lore, Wakes the bold arts ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... serious when it was also discovered that among these effects were a thousand shares in the Rising Sun Mining Company, which a day or two after his demise, and while people were still laughing at his grotesque benefaction, suddenly sprang into opulence and celebrity. Three millions of dollars was roughly estimated as the value of the estate thus wantonly sacrificed. For it is only fair to state, as a just tribute to the enterprise and energy of that young and thriving settlement, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... dilated upon, is one of the healthiest and strongest on the face of the earth. We are not demoralized or effeminated by the luxury and abundance which are ours, but elevated rather, and strengthened by the very magnificence and opulence of our circumstances, and by the perfect freedom, under healthful restraint, which we enjoy through the community's strong, vigorous, moral ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... haute fortune, D'un roi trop indolent souverain absolu, Surcharge de travaux dont le soin L'importune. Bruhl, quitte des grandeurs L'embarras superflu. Au sein de ton opulence Je vois le Dieu des ennuis, Et dans ta magnificence Le ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... instances a tonic and sometimes an alternative constitutional treatment is required before pregnancy will take place. On the contrary, there are well-authenticated cases of women who were stout and barren in opulence becoming thin and prolific ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... virtuous ministry would have done and said. This, therefore, is what our minister could never think of saying or doing. A ministry of another kind would first have improved the country, and have thus laid a solid foundation for future opulence and future force. But on this grand point of the restoration of the country, there is not one syllable to be found in the correspondence of our ministers, from the first to the last; they felt nothing for a land desolated by fire, sword, and famine; their sympathies ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... of our story. She had every advantage of rank and wealth, for her father was a deacon of the church, and owned sheep, and oxen, and exceeding much substance. There was an appearance of respectability and opulence about all the demesnes. The house stood almost concealed amid a forest of apple trees, in spring blushing with blossoms, and in autumn golden with fruit. And near by might be seen the garden, surrounded by a red picket fence, enclosing all sorts of magnificence. There, in autumn, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the Great Lakes and in finding fabulous rewards in furs. The Dutch on the Hudson were similarly engaged by means of the western trails to the country of the Iroquois, while the planters of Virginia had discovered an easy opulence in the tobacco crop, with slave labor to toil for them, and they were not compelled to turn to the hardships and the hazards of the sea. The New Englander, hampered by an unfriendly climate, hard put to it to grow sufficient food, with land immensely difficult to clear, ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... taste, and produce that agreeable effect which always results from the combination of comfort, rural beauty, and useful industry. A manufactory in a picturesque situation, surrounded by the usual characters of opulence, is one of the most pleasing features of an English landscape, combining whatever we most admire in nature and art, with moral associations, that produce in the mind ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... calm and reserved opulence about the Weightman mansion that spoke not of money squandered, but of wealth prudently applied. Standing on a corner of the Avenue no longer fashionable for residence, it looked upon the swelling tide of business with an ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... race:—"Europeans, native Portuguese, Armenians, Mugs, Chinese, Hindoos, Mussulmans, natives of Sumatra, Mozambik, and Abyssinia." This official reporter states that thus more than a thousand youths had been rescued from vice and ignorance and advanced in usefulness to society, in a degree of opulence and respectability. The origin of this noble charity is thus told to Dr. Ryland by Carey himself in a letter which unconsciously reveals his own busy life, records the missionary influence of the higher schools, and reports the existence of the mission ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... Charles I. (Frederick Henry, grandfather of William III. being Stadtholder of Holland) the Dutch discovered this island. The enterprise of that people had raised them to the zenith of their power: unless by England, they were unrivalled in nautical science and commercial opulence. More for the purposes of trade than the acquisition of knowledge, they were anxious to discover unknown countries, and to conceal the information they possessed from ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature; and, more recently, not only Pope[554] and Dryden[555] have been beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower.[556] Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgat[557] and Caxton,[558] from Guido di Colonna,[559] whose Latin romance of the Trojan war ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... more: the progress of an author who alternates, in turn, between fact and his private fancies (like unequal crutches) cannot in reason be undisfigured by false steps. Therefore it is judicious to confess, Madam, that more than once I have pieced the opulence of my subject with the poverty of my inventions. Indisputably, to thrust words into a dead man's mouth is in the ultimate as unpardonable as the axiomatic offence of stealing the pennies from his eyes; yet if ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... England, and the vital interest of the empire, has abandoned a resistance, too feeble to deserve the praise of fortitude, and too irregular to deserve the fruits of victory. The moneyed interest sees its gigantic opulence threatened by a hundred-handed grasp; but makes no defence, or makes that most dangerous of all defences, which calls in the invader as the auxiliary, bribes him with a portion of the spoils, and only provokes his appetite for the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... matter of surprise, when we consider the energy with which the tuneful art is cultivated, and the importance with which it is invested, by the Italians. In the freedom happily enjoyed by Englishmen, all pursuits are open to individual enterprise and ambition; and every path to fame or opulence is thronged with busy eager aspirants, all running the race of eminence and distinction, with that strong purpose of the will which leaves but little opportunity for the indulgence of tastes, which, though they often exist among the individuals of these classes, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... car. She liked its spacious lawns and its terraced Italian garden—they were so admirable for garden parties and open-air theatricals. She liked the useless size of the house—it ministered to her love of opulence. ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... government was seen in Megara, a neighboring State, situated on the isthmus, between Corinth and Attica, and which attained great commercial distinction. As a result of commercial opulence, the people succeeded in overthrowing the government, an oligarchy of Dorian conquerors, and elevating a demagogue, Theagenes, to the supreme power, B.C. 630. He ruled tyrannically, in the name of the people, for thirty years, but was expelled by the oligarchy, which regained power. ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... the Hotel de Soto, with its many divinities, nor in the palace of Nelse Ackerman, the king, had he felt such a sense of his own lowliness as the sight of this calm, slow-moving great lady inspired. She was the embodiment of opulence, she was "the real thing." Despite the look of kindliness in her wide-open blue eyes, she impressed him with a feeling of her overwhelming superiority. He did not know it was his duty as a gentleman to rise from his chair when a lady entered, but some instinct brought him to his feet and caused ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... minutes to four. During the drive she had begun by expecting to meet Arthur on his way to the hotel, and even in Piccadilly, where delays of traffic had forced upon her attention the glittering opulence and afternoon splendour of the London season, she had still thought of him and of the interview which was to pass between them. But here she was obsessed by her immediate environment. The approach ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... her mother's brother, and a number of elated New York relatives came to the Belgian capital, shedding their American opulence as the sun throws out its light. The skill of a general was required to direct, manage and control the pageant of the sixteenth. Thousands of dollars were tossed into the cauldron of social ambition by the lavish mother, who, from behind an army of ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... wife, "we in America have so far got out of the way of a womanhood that has any vigor of outline or opulence of physical proportions, that, when we see a woman made as a woman ought to be, she strikes us as a monster. Our willowy girls are afraid of nothing so much as growing stout; and if a young lady begins to round into proportions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... him the exact sum which he had deposited. You may imagine how much interest might be earned by the sum of fifteen millions left in the hands of a Jewish Frankfurt banker for a period of eight years! It is from this time that dates the opulence of the House of the Brothers Rothschild, who owe to the probity of their founder the high financial ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... or three antiquarians can incontestably prove that he was the son of Sir John Nobody, and nephew of the above. To me, I confess, he appears distinguished scarcely more by the splendor of his imagination than by the opulence of his knowledge, and the imperial command which he possesses over it. But, in truth, the accuracy or otherwise of history, when it is at all remote, is a matter in which I feel less interest than I once did. I ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... spectacles. As for the music, we may be certain that in the beginning it followed the lines laid down in the "Orfeo." It rested first on the basis of the frottola, but when the elegant and gracious madrigal provided an art form better suited to the opulence of the decorative features of the embryonic lyric drama, the madrigal became the dominating element in the music. Together with it we find in time the dance slowly assuming that shape which eventually became the ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... pale olive of peace had from me nothing but scorn. The peaceful triumphs of the law, the calm pleasures of commerce and finance, were extolled in vain. To the toga of our Ciceros, to the robe of our magistrates, to the curule chair of our legislators, to the opulence of our Mondors, I preferred the sword. One would have said that I had sucked the milk of Bellona. 'Victory or Death!' was already my motto, and I ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... Yesterday I had two hundred oxen, to-day I have sixty, to-morrow I shall have a hundred. Clunic has three cows, but they are thin; Nicclu has only two, but they are fat. Which is the richer, Clunic or Nicclu? The signs of opulence are deceitful. What is certain is that everyone eats and drinks. Tax people according to what they consume. That would be wisdom and ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... of time, by the exercise of that art, to his natural gifts for which he had now added the wholesome tonic of experience, Peace passed from a poor and obscure lodging in a slum in Lambeth to the state and opulence of a comfortable suburban residence in Peckham. These were the halcyon days of Peace's enterprise in life. From No. 25 Stangate Street, Lambeth, the dealer in musical instruments, as Peace now described himself, sallied ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... image! scarce my straining eye Can reach thy hands, which, fill'd with golden fruit And wreaths of blessing, from Olympus' height Shower treasures down. As by his bounteous gifts We recognize the monarch (for what seems To thousands opulence is nought to him), So you, ye heavenly Powers, are also known By bounty long withheld, and wisely plann'd. Ye only know what things are good for us; Ye view the future's wide-extended realm; While from our eye a dim or ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... work, Saint Thomas of Villanueva distributing Alms, to my mind offers the entire impression of that full life of Andalusia. In the splendour of mitre and of pastoral staff, in the sober magnificence of architecture, is all the opulence of the Catholic Church; in the worn, patient, ascetic face of the saint is the mystic, fervid piety which distinguished so wonderfully the warlike and barbarous Spain of the sixteenth century; and lastly, in the beggars covered with sores, pale, ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... little she was cruelly flogged, so she says, and occasionally she deviated into the truth. A kind lady, the Marquise de Boulainvilliers, investigated her story, found it true, and took up the Valois orphans. The wicked mother went back to Bar-sur-Aube, which Jeanne was to dazzle with her opulence, after she got possession of ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... by the noble inland seas that clasp our shores, are a sign and promise of the commercial greatness that awaits us in the future. We may well be proud of the condition of our agricultural interest—that great interest which underlies every other; which alike gives to the wealthy his opulence and the beggar his crust. Our farmers have unmistakably indicated their determination to accept of no secondary position in the quality of their wheat, and their wool is not only rapidly gaining the first rank as respect ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... to see anything. Now her eyes were in requisition. Here there was even more attention paid to comfort and appearances than in the dining-room. In the simplest possible manner; but somebody had been at work there who knew that elegance is attainable without the help of opulence; and that eye and hand can do what money cannot. Eye and hand had been busy everywhere. Very pretty and soft native mats were on the floor; the windows were shaded with East Indian jalousies; and not only personal convenience but tastes were regarded ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... legal; laws have convenient syllogisms to quiet consciences. My visit was a drama. To be Providence itself; actually to fulfil that futile wish, 'If heaven were to send us twenty thousand francs a year,'—that silly wish we all make, laughing; to bring opulence to a family sitting by the light of one miserable lamp over a poor turf fire!—no, words cannot describe it. My extreme justice seemed to them unjust. Well! if there is a Paradise my father is happy in it now. As for me, ...
— Madame Firmiani • Honore de Balzac
... movement, and displaying a straight length of pink and white petticoat. Thus prepared she fared forth over the still smoking turf. The storm had passed, but the atmosphere remained thick and humid. A certain opulence of colour obtained in the landscape. The herbs in the grass, wild-thyme, wild-balm, and star-flowered camomile, smelt strongly aromatic as she trod them under foot, while the beds of bracken, dried and yellowed by the drought, gave off a ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Saint-Germain protected the princess by a respectful silence due to her name, which is one of those that all men honor, to her misfortunes, which they ceased to discuss, and to her beauty, the only thing she saved of her departed opulence. Society, of which she had once been the ornament, was thankful to her for having, as it were, taken the veil, and cloistered herself in her own home. This act of good taste was for her, more than for any other woman, an immense sacrifice. Great deeds ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... grown rich by his flocks and tillage, looks forward to the enjoyment of his opulence in domestic happiness. The companion of his early labors and privations forms the chief object in the picture; but while he was dreaming of future bliss, the envious eye of a savage, which had recognised in that prosperous ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... the thaw was complete, and hundreds of sweepers were employed in cleaning away the snow from the streets. The clear blue sky was just beginning to be illumined by its first stars, when Madame de la Motte, elegantly dressed, and presenting every appearance of opulence, arrived in a coach, which Clotilde had carefully chosen as the best looking at the Place Vendome, and stopped ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... do a great deal of good with a hundred pounds. If you will set this gentleman's mind at ease by taking his pound, I will give the other ninety-nine [Bill, astounded by such opulence, instinctively ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... border of a lake. The rain sometimes forms a sheet of water of considerable extent; and the geologist, who beholds in everything the past rather than the present state of nature, can have no doubt but that the whole plain is a great basin dried up. Laguna has fallen from its opulence, since the lateral eruptions of the volcano have destroyed the port of Garachico, and since Santa Cruz has become the central point of the commerce of the island. It contains only 9000 inhabitants, of whom nearly 400 are monks, distributed in ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... we believed, in Memorable Murders, and we never got farther with it, but by the time we reached Boston we were rolling in wealth so deep that we could hardly walk home in the frugal fashion by which we still thought it best to spare car fare; carriage fare we did not dream of even in that opulence. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... generally prevalent in my time; it is not an English vice; nor did I ever hear of any great losses sustained in this way. But, were it otherwise, I must hold, that, considering the numbers, rank, and great opulence, of the students, such a habit would impeach the spirit and temper of the age rather than the vigilance or magisterial fidelity of the Oxford authorities. They are limited, like other magistrates, by honor and circumstances, in a thousand ways; and if a knot of students will ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... The winter had been a fairly prosperous one for the sisters, and their slowly accumulated savings had now reached the handsome sum of two hundred dollars; but the satisfaction they might have felt in this unwonted opulence had been clouded by a suggestion of Miss Mellins's that there were dark rumours concerning the savings bank in which their funds were deposited. They knew Miss Mellins was given to vain alarms; but her words, by the sheer force of repetition, had so shaken Ann Eliza's peace that after long ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... N. wealth, riches, fortune, handsome fortune, opulence, affluence; good circumstances, easy circumstances; independence; competence &c. (sufficiency) 639; solvency. provision, livelihood, maintenance; alimony, dowry; means, resources, substance; property &c. 780; command of money. income ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of characteristic expensiveness, and provoked the same general comment. Rushbrook seldom drank wine; Somers had selected it. But the barbaric opulence of the entertainment culminated in the Californian fruits, piled in pyramids on silver dishes, gorgeous and unreal in their size and painted beauty, and the two Divas smiled over a basket of grapes and peaches as outrageous in dimensions and glaring ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... this announcement, but as the days went by he only settled deeper into the snug corners of the Haney home, making no further mention of his triumphal eastward progress. On the contrary, he had the air of a regular boarder, and turned up promptly for meals, rotund and glowing in the opulence of his ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... is evidently a man—sets forth the wealth of comfort, opulence, that surrounds him in his new-found peace. The scene, being laid in the land Kailua, Oahu—the place to which the enchanted tree Maka-lei[204] was carried long ago, from which time its waters abounded in fish—fish are naturally the symbol ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... of shadowed amethyst—again of a flushed blue, whereupon float great clouds, silken and ruddy, as in the backgrounds of Veronese's pictures. The beauty of the light lightens and beautifies the over-heavy opulence of ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... took place hi the financial world. Families who had lived in opulence found themselves suddenly reduced to indigence. Schemers who had been reveling in the delusion of princely fortune found their estates vanishing into thin air. Those who had any property remaining sought to secure it against reverses. Cautious persons found there was no safety for property ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... is enabled to heap to himself luxuries at the expense of the necessaries of his neighbour; a system admirably fitted to produce all the varieties of disease and crime, which never fail to characterize the two extremes of opulence and penury. A speculator takes pride to himself as the promoter of his country's prosperity, who employs a number of hands in the manufacture of articles avowedly destitute of use, or subservient only to the unhallowed cravings of luxury and ostentation. The nobleman, who employs the peasants ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... For that was thine before; I ceded all of dust I knew, — What opulence the more Had I, a humble maiden, Whose farthest of degree Was that she might, Some distant heaven, Dwell timidly ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... constantly for information on this great subject, I was led to the examination of a printed card or table of the dock duties of Liverpool, which was published annually. The town of Liverpool had so risen in opulence and importance from only a fishing-village, that the corporation seemed to have a pride in giving a public view of this increase. Hence they published and circulated this card. Now the card contained one, among other facts, which was almost ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... bad to fall from the heights of opulence, and know not how to sweep a room, make a bed, or cook a meal, as it is to rise to an exalted position, and know not how to welcome company or preside ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... convenient; the dining room designed for stately banquets, but the furniture of the table was not after the manner of feasts, though the best the country afforded, and the supply of meat improved daily, while the fruit told of the kindly opulence ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... Feng, "my eldest uncle say that things were in such a state, and how couldn't I believe? but what surprises me is how it ever happened that this family attained such opulence and honour!" ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... but she wanted comradeship, a living and frank exchange of the best in both, with the deeper feelings untroubled. To be fixed at the mouth of a mine, and to have to descend it daily, and not to discover great opulence below; on the contrary, to be chilled in subterranean sunlessness, without any substantial quality that she could grasp, only the mystery of the inefficient tallow-light in those caverns of the complacent-talking man: this appeared to her too extreme a probation for two or three ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... by, Sent magic shadows o'er the rye. Within the leafy coppice, lo, More wealth than miser's dreams could show, The blackbird's warm and woolly brood, Five golden beaks agape for food; The Gipsies, all the summer seen Native as poppies to the Green; The winter, with its frosts and thaws And opulence of hips and haws: The lovely marvel of the snow; The Tamar, with its altering show Of gay ships sailing up and down, Among the fields and by the Town; And, dearer far than anything, Came back the songs you used to sing. (Ah, might you sing ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... Swinton with her friends, who, being persons of pedigree and opulence, were better able to guard her, I went to the end of my own journey; and here, from what ensued, it is needful I should relate that, in this undertaking, I left my own house under the care of my brother, and that I was ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... exceptions, joint-stock banks, and the proprietors are liable to the public for the whole of the bank responsibilities to the last shilling of their private fortunes. The number of persons connected with these banks as shareholders is very great, almost every man of opulence in the country being a holder of stock to a greater or a less amount. That some jealousy must exist among so many competitors in a limited field, is an obvious matter of inference. Such jealousy, however, has only operated for the advantage of the public, by the maintenance of a common and vigilant ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... the distinction of preparing this system has devolved; a security that it will be both well and faithfully executed, and which, in the same proportion that it reflects credit on the editor, will embalm with additional honours, the memory of SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE; a genius, who in the opulence of his imagination, and his rich and inexhaustible capabilities, as a poet, a logician, and a metaphysician, has not perhaps been surpassed since ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... precious stones; a fashionable apothecary's next to it almost outrivaled it with its gorgeous globes, the gold and green precision of its shelves, and the marble and silver soda fountain like a shrine before it. All this specious show of opulence came upon him with the shock of contrast, and with it a bitter revulsion of feeling more hopeless than his feverish ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... writes: "No painter of our time could so well recall the bright and happy creations of Veronese." The difference between them is more one of period than of temperament. Paolo Veronese represented the opulence of a rich, strong society, full of noble life, while Tiepolo's lot was cast among effeminate men and frivolous women, and full of the modern spirit himself, he adapts his genius to his time and devotes himself to satisfy the theatrical, sentimental vein of the Venice of ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... plainly was this conspicuous when, on entering the library, we found Mr. Rochester—alone! The envied possessor of all this opulence can be no happy man. He was seated with his head bent on his folded arms, and when he looked up a morose—almost a malignant—scowl blackened his features! Hastily beckoning to the governess, who entered with us, to ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... Byzantine in its architecture, suggesting the Mosque of Ahmed I, at Constantinople, its Gallic decorations have made it essentially French in spirit. The ornamentation of this palace is the most florid of any building in the Exposition proper. Yet this opulence is not inappropriate. In size and form, no less than in theme, the structure is well adapted to carry such rich decoration. This is the palace of the bounty of nature; its adornment symbolizes the rich ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... the shanty to youngsters,' said Mr. Holt, as he turned from pushing back the shutter, 'that they may see what they have to expect. From such a start as this we Canadians have all waked up into opulence—that is, the hardworking share of us; and there's room enough for tens of thousands to do the same ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... one land that God had blessed, and challenged the grinning watermen from Gravesend and Hampton Court to deny it; and the sun with ardour drove from the sky every invading cloud, leaving Essex and Kent as far as eye could see perfect green gardens of opulence. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is to fashion Joseph Lebons and Fouches.—In this situation and with these sentiments it is evident that the lower clergy will treat its chiefs as the provincial nobility treated theirs.[1431] They will not select "for representatives those who swim in opulence and who have always regarded their sufferings with tranquility." The curates, on all sides "will confederate together" to send only curates to the States-General, and to exclude "not only canons, abbes, priors and other beneficiaries, but again ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... time, was Sir Josiah Child. There were those who still remembered him an apprentice, sweeping one of the counting houses of the City. But from a humble position his abilities had raised him rapidly to opulence, power and fame. At the time of the Restoration he was highly considered in the mercantile world. Soon after that event he published his thoughts on the philosophy of trade. His speculations were not always sound; but they were the speculations ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... everything, compared quality and make with Jacksonville productions, and decided to buy nothing, but in refusing to buy she had an air of opulence and taste hard to please which surpassed the effect ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... Continental wars incur a debt of L800,000,000: did she not give L20,000,000 to free her West India slaves; did she not expend L7,000,000 to combat the famine of Ireland? Is not the proposed expenditure for the National Executive of the present year an evidence of her boundless opulence? And yet to save a trifling outlay compared with the injustice now done, the representative of Her Majesty is compelled to carry about under his skirts a parcel of convictism; to deposit these tokens ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... live under conditions at least supportable. Whence comes their heart-burning? Why is it found not only among those of modest though sufficient means, but also under shades of ever-increasing refinement, all along the ascending scale, even to opulence and the summits of social place? They talk of the contented middle classes. Who talk of them? People who, judging from without, think that as soon as one begins to enjoy ease he ought to be satisfied. But the ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... depends upon liberty. Till 1806 it was a flourishing city. With England in particular, whose manufactures and colonial produce were allowed to be freely imported, its commercial relations were of the highest importance. For the opulence which Leipzig then enjoyed it was indebted to its extensive traffic, which contributed to the prosperity of Saxony in general; but it was more particularly the numerous adjacent villages and hamlets that owed to our city their respectability, ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... trust that the scenes of dignity, opulence, and wisdom, set forth in these superficial letters, are not unsettling your intellect and causing you to yearn for ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... sweepstakes—L3 in fact. A sporting cousin told me that I had better "put it on Cauliflower," who was the favourite for The City and Suburban. He put it on Cauliflower for me, and we won, so that a career of easy opulence seemed open. Then I took to backing horses, a brief madness. I read all the sporting papers, and came to the conclusion that the prophets are naught. If you look at their vaticinations, you will find that they all select ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... spring, looking west from the house, between the masses of dark evergreens that had borne the rigours of the winter and the young leaves just breaking through. Heathfield's park is, I think, the loveliest in Sussex, lying as it does on a southern slope, with its opulence of foliage, its many rushing burns (the source of the Cuckmere), its hidden ravines and deep silent tarns, and its wonderful view of the Downs and the sea. The park once belonged to the Dacres of Hurstmonceaux, whom we are about ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... of the towns in Lancashire, cursing, it would seem by their looks, the stop of trade which gives them leisure, and the laws which prevent them employing their spare time. God's justice is requiting, and will yet further requite those who have blown up this country into a state of unsubstantial opulence, at the expense of the health and morals ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... opulence of beauty in the forms and motions of the cataract! It is comparatively narrow at the top of the precipice, although, as we said, the tide that pours over is thirty-five feet broad. But it widens as it descends, and curves a little on one side as it widens, so that it shapes ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... lawful kings of the dandies, you would have cried, "What perfect taste!"—but such is human nature, that the dandies who dined with him said to each other, "He pretend to imitate D——! vulgar dog!" There was little affectation of your more showy opulence. The furniture in the rooms was apparently simple, but, in truth, costly, from its luxurious comfort—the ornaments and china scattered about the commodes were of curious rarity and great value; and the pictures on the walls were gems. At dinner, no plate was admitted on the table. The ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... Polly before the realisation of opulence and its anxieties and responsibilities. That only dawned upon him on the morrow—which chanced to be Sunday—as he walked with Johnson before church time about the tangle of struggling building enterprise that constituted the rising urban ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... exceedingly minute beginnings, and generally take a name from situation, or local circumstances. Would the Lord of a manor think it an honour to give his name to two or three miserable huts? But, if in a succession of ages these huts swell into opulence, they confer upon the lord an honour, a residence, and a name. The terminations of sted, ham, and hurst, are evidently Saxon, and mean the same thing, ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... economic, not romantic. Freddy had no money and no occupation. His mother's jointure, a last relic of the opulence of Largelady Park, had enabled her to struggle along in Earlscourt with an air of gentility, but not to procure any serious secondary education for her children, much less give the boy a profession. A clerkship at thirty shillings a week was beneath ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... have delighted to shed round it the splendors of fiction, and even the historian as forgotten the sober gravity of narration, and broken forth into enthusiasm and rhapsody in its praise. Triumphs and gorgeous pageants have been its reward; monuments on which art has exhausted its skill, and opulence its treasures, have been erected to perpetuate a nation's gratitude and admiration. Thus artificially excited, courage has risen to an extraordinary and factitious degree of heroism; and arrayed in all the glorious "pomp and circumstance of war," this turbulent ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... centuries of complete neglect. When the Sassanians looked about for a foundation on which they might work, and out of which they might form a style suitable to their needs and worthy of their power and opulence, they found what they sought in the Hatra edifice, which was within the limits of their kingdom, and at no great distance from one of the cities where they ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... many things to call their attention. But when the matter is once set on foot, an address from the Legislature can at any time procure assistance from His Majesty's Ministry. Yet six thousand pounds per annum appears to me a trifle, considering the increased opulence of the country. It is not probable that the Roman Catholics will object to such an arrangement,—they have already three Seminaries said to be well endowed,—but if any of them be poor the Legislature ought to ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... into the mid-stream of perfunctory eloquence. With all his disrobing he had retained his top-hat; he held it in his right hand with the brim pressed against his thigh, very much in the manner of a showman at a circus. It contributed largely to the opulence of his gestures. ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... surrounded herself, the more particularly appealed to her when contrasted with the lean years of her earlier life. Her days of want, joined to her natural inclinations, had created a hunger for the good things of the earth, which her present opulence had not yet stayed. She still held out her hands to grasp the beautiful, satisfying things which money, guided by a mind of some force and a natural refinement, can buy. Therefore, it was a considerable sacrifice ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... from hollow opulence to voluntary poverty,—one under the pressure of a vice, the other through the promptings of the purest virtue. None of these petty details are useless in teaching the lesson which ought to be learned from this present history, drawn as it ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... came and went. It was positive opulence. The super with the goose couldn't approach it for patness. My editor had brought me the apple sauce as well, without even giving me the trouble ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... appear in the presence of those, whom the established arrangements of society call his superiors, who are more copiously endowed with the treasures of language, and who, confident perhaps in the advantage of opulence, and what is called, however they may have received it, a liberal education, regard with disdain his artless and unornamented explanations. He did not, it may be, expect this. And, having experienced several times such unmerited ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... more perfectly ridiculous and absurd than the manner in which M. Crapelet flies out at the above expression! He taunts us, poor English, with always drawing comparisons against other nations, in favour of the splendour and opulence of our own Hospitals and Charitable Foundations—a thought, that never possessed me while writing the above, and which would require the peculiar obliquity, or perversity of talents, of my translator to detect. I once thought of dissecting his petulant and unprovoked ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... you ever play piquet? I have fallen a victim to this debilitating game. It is supposed to be scientific; God save the mark, what self-deceivers men are! It is distinctly less so than cribbage. But how fascinating! There is such material opulence about it, such vast ambitions may be realised - and are not; it may be called the Monte Cristo of games. And the thrill with which you take five cards partakes of the nature of lust - and you draw four sevens and a nine, and the seven and nine of a suit that you discarded, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rigid economy, thrifty, prudent, just, and eminently conscientious; of Portia one can only think as of a creature born in the very lap of luxury and nursed in the midst of sunny magnificence, whose very element was elegant opulence and refined splendor, and by whose cradle Fortune herself stood godmother. She seems like a perfect rose, blooming in a precious vase of gold and gems and exquisite workmanship. Camiola's contemptuous rebuff of her ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... of similar pursuit, they took a genteel house in a respectable part of the town, and dividing themselves into classes of masters, clerks, out-riders, shopmen, porters, and servants, and thus making a show of opulence, they easily obtained credit, and laid in goods of every kind, which they sent into the country and sold, or bartered for other commodities; these commodities they brought up to London, and sold for ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... would not refer the starving people to the taxes, to the ill-gotten gains of the princes, as the source of their poverty? German princes and German distress! In other words, the taxes on which the princes live in opulence and which the people pay with the sweat of their blood! What inexhaustible material ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... incline so to act as to originate a spirit of dissatisfaction in the settlement. To a want of this council, it may not be too much to attribute the present unsettled state of the colony, and the maturation of a faction which has perverted the streams of justice, and which has impeded the growth of opulence throughout the settlement, merely to enrich a select party at the expense of the general welfare, and consequently to spread vice and ruin through a land, whose prosperity has never become their care, although it was a solemn pledge of their leaders to support and cherish it ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... company of Duryodhana, O bull of Bharata's race! Once on a time, O monarch, many kings repaired to a self-choice at the capital of Chitrangada, the ruler of the country of the Kalingas. The city, O Bharata, full of opulence, was known by the name of Rajapura. Hundreds of rulers repaired thither for obtaining the hand of the maiden. Hearing that diverse kings had assembled there, Duryodhana also, on his golden car, proceeded thither, accompanied by Karna. When the festivities ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... the 1st of June 1810. He there learned from my correspondence that the Hanse Towns-refused to advance money for the pay of the French troops. The men were absolutely destitute. I declared that it was urgent to put an end to this state of things. The Hanse towns had been reduced from opulence to misery by taxation and exactions, and were no longer able to provide ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... of the prairie, she smiles to her sire—the sun, Robed in the wealth of her wheat-lands, gift of her mothering soil, Affluence knocks at her gateways, opulence waits to be won. Nuggets of gold are her acres, yielding and yellow with spoil, Dream of the hungry millions, dawn of the food-filled age, Over the starving tale of want her fingers have turned the page; ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... descended as warriors and invaders upon the different states of Greece. They appear to have attached themselves to maritime situations, and the wealth of their early settlements is the theme of many a legend. The opulence of Orchomenus is compared by Homer to that of Egyptian Thebes. And in the time of the Trojan war, Corinth was already termed "the wealthy." By degrees the Aeolians became in a great measure blended and intermingled with the Dorians. Yet so intimately connected are the Hellenes ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... owned such opulence of womanly character or such splendor of womanly manners or multitudinous instances of wifely, motherly, daughterly, sisterly devotion, as it owns to-day. I have not words to express my admiration for good womanhood. Woman is not only man's equal, but in affectional ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... tastefully dressed, as she had always been, a certain style of languorous silken deshabille which she was wont to affect in better health now became her paler cheek and feverishly brilliant eyes. There was the same opulence of lace and ornament, and, whether by accident or design, clasped around the slight wrist of her extended hand was a bracelet which he remembered had swept away the last dregs ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... proportion to the extent and ready supply of the helps they furnish to facilitate researches of every kind. Among these helps a wisely selected collection of books of reference stands foremost. Considering the vast extent and opulence of the world of letters, and the want of experience of the majority of readers in exploring this almost boundless field, the importance of every key which can unlock its hidden stores becomes apparent. The printed catalogue of no single library is ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... these:—first, its powers, the range of its endowments; secondly, its apparent destiny. Some subtle judges in this field of criticism are of opinion, and ever had that opinion, that amongst the modern languages which originally had compass enough of strength and opulence in their structure, or had received culture sufficient to qualify them plausibly for entering the arena of such a competition, the English had certain peculiar and inappreciable aptitudes for the highest offices of interpretation. Twenty-five centuries ago, this beautiful little planet on which ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... continued to increase; the towns were well built, fully inhabited, and in possession of a lucrative and extensive commerce; they had many fine ships constantly employed, and abounded with hardy and intrepid seamen; opulence was visible in their streets, and happiness in their dwellings. But times have sadly changed with them. Let us inquire into the causes which led to their decay. The first cause is the failing of their several havens, some by the desertion of the sea, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... the manner of his first return, shook its head darkly. A tramp—a burglar, even. God knew what! When, on his third visit home, he brought an air of extreme opulence, plenty of money, and a sartorial perfection undreamed of locally, the heads wagged even harder. A gambler probably; a ne'er-do-well certainly; and one to break his mother's heart in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... proposed "dry arches" to the New London Bridge are now becoming matters of speculative interest, we hope this entrance to our metropolis will ultimately present a similar display of architectural elegance. LONDON, with all her opulence, ought not to yield in comparison with any city in the world; and it is high time that the march of taste ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... eagerness to earn sixpence had impressed me unfavorably as to the character of the master. "Here," thought I, "are all the signs of riches; and yet this poor old woman, living on the very threshold of opulence, is in want of ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lips and projecting but intelligent eyes, clothed in a new suit, wearing an enormous black pearl in his necktie and a diamond ring on his finger; the very ideal of Mammon in every detail of his person and of his carefully advertised opulence. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... sword—the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men—stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism. The love of plunder, always a characteristic of hill tribes, is fostered by the spectacle of opulence and luxury which, to their eyes, the cities and plains of the south display. A code of honour not less punctilious than that of old Spain, is supported by vendettas as implacable as ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... is desired in order to obtain a greater degree of respect from our fellow-creatures. And, Sir, if six hundred pounds a year procure a man more consequence, and, of course, more happiness than six pounds a year, the same proportion will hold as to six thousand, and so on as far as opulence can be carried. Perhaps he who has a large fortune may not be so happy as he who has a small one; but that must proceed from other causes than from his having the large fortune: for, caeteris paribus, he who is rich in a civilized society, must be happier than he who is poor; as riches, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... did not wane, but, if possible, grew on him. His ventures all prospered, his profits from risky speculations poured in, his normal income from his heritage increased; and, of all this opulence, every surplus denarius was paid out for gems and curios. Yet he never was so much a faddist as to lose a day from the games of the circus and the amphitheater. He viewed every show of gladiators, every day of racing, almost ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... gates, although, in a measure, she was entitled to look upon it as her own home. Perhaps never so much as now she realized what a deep gulf lay between her husband's family and herself. This was a world she had never known—a world of opulence and luxury. She did not know how she had summoned up courage enough to come. Yet there was no time to be lost. Immediate action was necessary. Howard must have the best lawyers that money could procure. Judge Brewster had been deaf to her entreaties. He had declined ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... of the room, and opposite to the door, was the fireplace, with a green velvet mantel-shelf, on which a few extremely elegant ornaments, the last relics of the opulence of two families, were arranged. These consisted of a curious clock, in the shape of an elephant supporting on its back a porcelain tower which was filled with the choicest flowers; two candelabra in the same style, and several precious ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... found a means of earning his living and that of his family—especially the latter. For his own living was like that of the crows, "got round the country somewhere!" But with the lightest and most kindly heart in the world, Boyd Connoway found himself in trouble owing to the very means of opulence which had brought content to ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... Bugbee, whose family opulence grew out of the only merchantable article a Hebrew is never known to seek profit from, thought she could be made presentable in the first circles if taken in hand in good season. So it came about that, before many weeks had passed over her as a scholar in the great educational establishment, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... they to the least distinction in this world?—the answer is not immediately apparent. But indeed they are Welf of the Welfs, in this respect as in others. One asks, with increased wonder, noticing in the Welfs generally nothing but the same albuminous simplicity, and poverty rather than opulence of uttered intellect, or of qualities that shine, How the Welfs came to play such a part, for the last thousand years, and still to be at it, in conspicuous places? Reader, I have observed that uttered intellect is not what permanently makes way, but ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of elegance there may have been in the exterior of the imperial dwellings, it was amply compensated by the interior, in which all the opulence of the Peruvian princes was ostentatiously displayed. The sides of the apartments were thickly studded with gold and silver ornaments. Niches, prepared in the walls, were filled with images of animals and plants curiously wrought of the same ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... murderous work. By the aid of the "Council of Blood," and of the sheriffs and executioners of the Holy Inquisition, he was able sometimes to put eight hundred human beings to death in a single week for the crimes of Protestantism or of opulence, and at the end of half a dozen years he could boast of having strangled, drowned, burned, or beheaded somewhat more than eighteen thousand of his fellow-creatures. These were some of the non-combatant victims; for of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... new plate, Sevres porcelain, and white damask, was redolent of opulence. The dishes were from Chevet, the wines from a celebrated merchant on the Quai Saint-Bernard, a personal friend of Matifat's. For the first time Lucien beheld the luxury of Paris displayed; he went from surprise to surprise, but he kept his astonishment to himself, like a man who had spirit ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... companion in the crowded vestibule of London's most famous club restaurant. He was to a certain extent out of the picture among the crowd of this new generation of pleasure seekers, on the faces of whom opulence and acquisitiveness had already laid its branding hand. The Mecca alike of musical comedy and the Stock Exchange, the place, however, still preserved a curious attraction for the foreign element in London, ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... minute that flew. Thus the usual track of supposition was thoroughly broken up. Men knew not what to imagine. There were some who even conceived that Mr. Ellison would divest himself of at least one-half of his fortune, as of utterly superfluous opulence—enriching whole troops of his relatives by division of his superabundance. To the nearest of these he did, in fact, abandon the very unusual wealth which was his ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Southern California resort a world-weary woman, young and beautiful but disillusioned, meets a girl who has learned the art of living—of tasting life in all its richness, opulence and joy. The story hinges upon the change wrought in the soul of the blase woman by this glimpse into a ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... as the eye can trace the prospect round The splendid tracts of opulence are found; Yet scarce a hundred annual rounds have run. Since first the fabric of this power begun; His noble stream, inglorious, Mersey roll'd, Nor felt his waves by lab'ring art controll'd: Along his side a few small cots were spread, His finny ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 270, Saturday, August 25, 1827. • Various
... effort—of the Temple of Fame, an immense cage, sixty miles long, and its inhabitants the great writers of classic times, and is chiefly valuable as showing the estimation in which the classic writers were held in that day. This is also in octosyllabic verses, and is further remarkable for the opulence of its imagery and its variety of description. The poet is carried in the claws of a great eagle into this house, and sees its distinguished occupants standing upon columns of different kinds of metal, according to their merits. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... of this many-voiced throng; he drifted a speck on the bosom of the flood that poured into the waiting race train. He was tossed into a seat by the swirling tide, and as the train moved he looked at his fellow-passengers. There was a pleasant air of opulence all about him. Gold chains of fair prominence, diamonds of lustrous hue, decorated the always rotund figures. He fell to wondering why the men were all of a gross physique; why did the ladies wear dresses of such interminable ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... deer hidden in the thicket shade. This was a magical evening, primed with wonders, in the glamour of which Master Harkness could find nothing better for him to rehearse than the progress of his amours with his mother's housemaid. Yet something of the evening glow, something of the opulence of summer smouldered in his words. He painted his mistress with the colour of the sunset, he borrowed of it burnt gold to deck her clay. He hymned the whiteness of her neck, her slender waist, her whispers, the kisses of her mouth. The scamp ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... The parapets that are whitewashed? The roads that are repaired? fountains, and fooleries? [Footnote: Jacobs: und solches Geschwatz. The proceedings of Eubulus are here more particularly referred to.] Look at the men of whose statesmanship these are the fruits. They have risen from beggary to opulence, or from obscurity to honor; some have made their private houses more splendid than the public buildings; and in proportion as the state has declined, their fortunes ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... on his way, his eye, ever open to every symptom of culinary abundance, ranged with delight over the treasures of jolly autumn. On all sides he beheld vast store of apples: some hanging in oppressive opulence on the trees; some gathered into baskets and barrels for the market; others heaped up in rich piles for the cider-press. Farther on he beheld great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts, and holding out the promise ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... ripening the fruit he will afterwards wither, and cause to drop from the bough. Bernardo was possessed by this desire; and as he never dreamed that any pencil in Arezzo, but his own, could reproduce upon canvass the lovely countenance of Beatrice, he spent, as from his opulence he could now afford to do, a considerable portion of his time in painting her portrait. The girl, however, who was not greatly addicted to meditation and could not read, for books had not then come into ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 399, Supplementary Number • Various
... in the midst of America (between the Great Lakes and the gulf, the Alleghanies and the Rockies) embraced over seven hundred and fifty million acres. One-half of it, roughly, was covered with giant forests inhabited by fur-bearing animals with opulence upon their backs. One-half was covered with vegetation, varying from the luxuriant prairie grass to the sage-brush of the shadeless plains, plains roamed by beasts clothed with valuable robes. Two-thirds of this domain was arable, with only the irrigation ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... catacombs—the Tombs of the Kings—some of which were scrawled with graffiti, laboured perhaps by some idle Nabathaean boy in the time of Christ. They found remains of furnaces, picked up some coins, and saw undoubted evidences of ancient opulence. That was all. Thence they made for Makna, passing on their way a catacombed hill called "the Praying Place of Jethro," and a shallow basin of clay known as Moses' Well. From Makna, where they found their gunboat waiting for them, they then cruised to El Akabah, the ancient Eziongeber, in whose ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... been a blow to Anne's pride to realise that she had married—spiritually—beneath her. Her pride now recovered wonderfully, seeing in this very inequality its opportunity. She beheld herself superbly seated on an eminence, her spiritual opulence supplying Walter's poverty. Spiritually, she said, it might also be more blessed to ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... Ontario came some twenty thousand more. It needs no {313} trick of fancy to call up the scene, and one marvels that neither poet nor novelist has yet made use of it. Here were fine old Royalist officers of New York reduced from opulence to penury, from wealth to such absolute destitution they had neither clothing nor food, nor money to pay ship's passage away, now crowded with their families, and such wrecks of household goods as had escaped raid and fire, on some cheap government transport or fishing schooner ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... generous gondolier, and we go to the Hall—a dismal, bleak place, ghastly with the memories of last year's opulence and plenty, and here Giuseppe's fare is swelled by the stranger's mite. But here Giuseppe tells me of the "Relief Boat" which leaves for the flooded district in the interior, and here, profiting by the lesson he has taught me, I make the resolve to turn my curiosity to the account ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... are mere versions and adaptations. The plots and stories are generally borrowed. Some of the worst are unspeakably bad, but the best, with their subtle and imperious command of language, stately and splendid imagery, careless opulence of incident, learning, and illustration, wit, wisdom, humor, and philosophy, insight into the complex abysses of human passion, familiarity with the secret motives of human conduct, and profound meditation upon the most sombre ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... purposes, which reflect such credit on Liverpool, and are giving such an impulse to the public mind, have mostly been originated, and have all been effectively promoted, by Mr. Roscoe; and when we consider the rapidly increasing opulence and magnitude of that town, which promises to vie in commercial importance with the metropolis, it will be perceived that in awakening an ambition of mental improvement among its inhabitants, he has effected a great benefit to the cause of ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... knowledge and skill until we reached the obvious fatuity of "Count Robert" and the imbecilities of "Castle Dangerous." Any half-dozen of such books as "Redgauntlet," "The Pirate," and "Kenilworth" were sufficient to give a man the reputation of being great—and yet even that overwhelming opulence was at last worn down into mental poverty. Poor Scott never gave himself time to recover when once his descent of the last perilous slope had begun, and he suffered for his ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... not in Mammon's worship pleasure, But find your richest, dearest treasure In God, his word, his work; not leisure. The mind, not sense, Is the sole scale by which to measure Your opulence. ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... mind with the desire for high intellectual culture, and so much to animate the spirit heroically to meet all the ills of this eventful life. Notwithstanding her experience of the heaviest temporal calamities, she found, in the opulence of her own intellectual treasures, an unfailing resource. These inward joys peopled her solitude with society, and dispelled even from the dungeon its gloom. I know not where to look for a career ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... moving into the back woods, who have been accustomed to the decencies of life, think it little matter how they live, because no one sees them. Thus we have known a family of some opulence to reside for years in a cabin unfit for the abode of any human being, because they could not find time to build a house; and whenever it rained hard, the females were necessarily engaged in rolling the beds from one corner of the room to another, in order to save them from the water that poured ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... the source of the degradation of our own cities but this same curse of selfishness which is ready to march to opulence and luxury over the bodies of the starved and poisoned toilers of our towns and factories, and thinks it can justify its barbarity by an off-hand reference to Political Economy and its irrefragable laws? "Supply and demand"—sacrosanct enactments of man's ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Carthaginians appointed Asdrubal, his son-in-law, to succeed him.(709) This general, to strengthen his footing in the country, built a city, which, by the advantage of its situation, the commodiousness of its harbour, its fortifications, and opulence occasioned by its great commerce, became one of the most considerable cities in the world. It was called New Carthage, and is at this day known ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... reason to infer that the vast sum of money which must of necessity have been expended in the improvement of the harbour, has been unprofitably sunk. During the late war the islanders rapidly increased in opulence, as the island was filled with troops and emigrants, who greatly enhanced the value of home produce; but the cessation of hostilities restored matters to their natural order, and the Jerseymen bewail the return of peace and plenty ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... them, only that which was natural to Browning's genius. The interwoven parentheses remain, the rushes of invention into double and triple illustrations, the multiplication of thought on thought; but for these we may even be grateful. Opulence and plenitude of this kind are not common; we are not often granted a man who flings imaginations, fancies and thoughts from him as thick and bright as sparks from a grinder's wheel. It is not every poet who is unwilling ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... heart-breaking—there was something so moving in the comparison which this unfortunate creature, obscure and disdained, infirm and miserable, made of herself with Adrienne de Cardoville, the very type of resplendent youth, beauty, and opulence—that Agricola was moved even to tears; and, holding out one of his hands to the speaker, he said to her, tenderly, "How very good you are; how full of nobleness, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... earning his living and that of his family—especially the latter. For his own living was like that of the crows, "got round the country somewhere!" But with the lightest and most kindly heart in the world, Boyd Connoway found himself in trouble owing to the very means of opulence which had brought content to ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... Persans jeune enfant apport, Je gouverne l'empire o je fus achet. Mes richesses des rois galent l'opulence. Environn d'enfants, soutiens de ma puissance, Il ne manque mon front que le bandeau royal. 455 Cependant (des mortels aveuglement fatal!) De cet amas d'honneurs la douceur passagre Fait sur mon coeur peine une atteinte lgre; Mais Mardoche, assis aux portes du palais, Dans ce ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... indeed, little inferior to any in the kingdom. The country is beautiful and charmingly varied, and, from the diversity of soil, suited to varied productions; the whole thickly interspersed with seats and villas of persons of opulence, possessing their conservatories, hot-houses, and stoves, their orchards, flower and kitchen gardens: whilst few towns can boast (as Wakefield can) of so many gardens within its enclosure, cultivated with so much assiduity and skill, so much taste and deserved success. Seven years ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... muddy," retorted Joey with dogged pessimism. They trooped off after him, each one lighter hearted in spite of a dull reluctance, simply because Colonel Grand had brought not only the sunshine but a life-saving opulence. ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... house, between the masses of dark evergreens that had borne the rigours of the winter and the young leaves just breaking through. Heathfield's park is, I think, the loveliest in Sussex, lying as it does on a southern slope, with its opulence of foliage, its many rushing burns (the source of the Cuckmere), its hidden ravines and deep silent tarns, and its wonderful view of the Downs and the sea. The park once belonged to the Dacres of Hurstmonceaux, whom we are about to meet. Traces of the original house, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Pettigrew told each Northerner, as soon as he could get him from Mrs. Garnet's presence, that Virginia was the Mother of Presidents; that the first slaves ever brought to this country came in Yankee ships; that Northern envy of Southern opulence and refinement had been the mainspring of the abolition movement; and—with a smile of almost womanly heroism—that he—or his father at least—had lost all his slaves ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... for some years of the property which Strabo, a veteran soldier, had held of the imperial government. The care of this small property fell upon him, and another and more serious charge was added to it. The long prosperity of the province had increased the opulence and enlarged the upper class of Sicca. Officials, contractors, and servants of the government had made fortunes, and raised villas in the neighbourhood of the city. Natives of the place, returning from Rome, or from provincial ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... England for her Continental wars incur a debt of L800,000,000: did she not give L20,000,000 to free her West India slaves; did she not expend L7,000,000 to combat the famine of Ireland? Is not the proposed expenditure for the National Executive of the present year an evidence of her boundless opulence? And yet to save a trifling outlay compared with the injustice now done, the representative of Her Majesty is compelled to carry about under his skirts a parcel of convictism; to deposit these tokens of imperial interest he is driven to have recourse to artifice, trickery ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... literature, the arts, commerce, were below them. It is to the middle class we must look for the safety of England: the working educated men, away from Lord North's bribery in the senate; the good clergy not corrupted into parasites by hopes of preferment; the tradesmen rising into manly opulence; the painters pursuing their gentle calling; the men of letters in their quiet studies; these are the men whom we love and like to read of in the last age. How small the grandees and the men of pleasure look beside ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... huge, ample-paunched baronet with his red, flat face, heavy lips and projecting but intelligent eyes, clothed in a new suit, wearing an enormous black pearl in his necktie and a diamond ring on his finger; the very ideal of Mammon in every detail of his person and of his carefully advertised opulence. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... that dwindles here. Contrasted faults through all his manners reign: Though poor, luxurious; though submissive, vain; Though grave, yet trifling; zealous, yet untrue; And ev'n in penance planning sins anew. 130 All evils here contaminate the mind That opulence departed leaves behind; For wealth was theirs,[16] not far removed the date When commerce proudly nourished through the state, At her command the palace learnt to rise,[17] 135 Again the long-fallen column sought the skies,[18] The canvas glowed, beyond e'en nature warm,[19] ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... "we in America have so far got out of the way of a womanhood that has any vigor of outline or opulence of physical proportions, that, when we see a woman made as a woman ought to be, she strikes us as a monster. Our willowy girls are afraid of nothing so much as growing stout; and if a young lady begins to round into proportions like the women in Titian's and Giorgione's pictures, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... fashioning of their finery. In this genial atmosphere many of the Jews grew great in the study of science, literature, history, philosophy and all that makes for mental betterment. They increased in numbers, in opulence and in culture. Their thrift and success set them apart as a mark for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... this horrible half-hour, he faced a future so alluring as by its beauty to intimidate him. Youth, love, long years of happiness, and (by this capricious turn) now even opulence, were the ingredients of a captivating vista. And yet he needs must pause a while to think of the dear comrade he had lost—of that loved boy, his pattern in the time of their common youthfulness which gleamed in memory as bright and misty as a legend, and of the perfect chevalier who had been ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... magical, so dream-like almost, in its disproportion to the rest of the town. While the ancient city, whose life had withdrawn itself from century to century, was gradually shrinking all around it, the Grand'Place itself remained an immovable, gigantic, magnificent witness to the might and opulence of old, when Ypres was, with Ghent and Bruges, one of the three queens of the western world, one of the most strenuous centres of human industry and activity and the cradle of our great liberties. Such as it was yesterday—alas, that I cannot say, such as it is to-day!—this ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of a swim, it had it; it ate leaves when it wanted a vegetable diet, it dug under the bark for worms and grubs; when it wanted fish it caught them, when it wanted eggs it laid them. If the grubs gave out in one tree it swam to another; and as for fish, the very opulence of the supply was an embarrassment. And finally, when it was thirsty it smacked its chops in gratitude over a blend that would ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a rustler, but always a dude, rode from El Paso in deep disgust at his steady losses at faro and monte. The pecuniary side of these caused him no worry, for he was flush. This pleasing opulence was due to his business ability, for he had recently sold a claim for several thousand dollars. The first operation was simple, being known in Western phraseology as "jumping"; and the second, somewhat more ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... she might as well make a thorough job of it and began to grow fat and sweet-tempered and to acquire dimples. And Persis made the pleasing discovery that in the months during which she had been a woman of property, she had not spent her income and resolved at once on rectifying this needless opulence. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... would not apply with the same force farther north, where the air seems thinner and less capable of absorbing and holding the sunlight. Indeed, the opulence and splendor of our climate, at least the climate of the Atlantic seaboard, cannot be fully appreciated by the dweller north of the thirty-ninth parallel. It seemed as if I had never seen but a second-rate article of sunlight or moonlight until I had taken ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... secured at the neck with a brooch which consisted of a single flaming beryl. Boots which extended halfway up his calves, and which were trimmed at the tops with rich brown fur, completed the impression of barbaric opulence which was suggested by his whole appearance. He carried a broad-brimmed hat in his hand, while he wore across the upper part of his face, extending down past the cheek-bones, a black visard mask, which he had apparently adjusted that very moment, for his hand was still raised to ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... told how an idea had come to the mind of an idle yegg named "Missouri" Horton. He told how this wary and cunning and romantic-spirited outlaw had planned his attack, how he had hired the cellar next to the granite-walled citadel of opulence, how he had learned the location of the vaults, how he had figured out the thickness of the masonry, how he had slowly and quietly prepared for ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... touch with Bond Street and theatreland in half-an-hour by fast car. She liked its spacious lawns and its terraced Italian garden—they were so admirable for garden parties and open-air theatricals. She liked the useless size of the house—it ministered to her love of opulence. ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... future progress of society towards a state of happiness through the increase of opulence which would itself depend on the growth of justice and "liberty"; and they insisted on the importance of the increase and diffusion of knowledge. Their influence in promoting a belief in Progress is vouched for by Condorcet, the friend and biographer of Turgot. As ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... with new plate, Sevres porcelain, and white damask, was redolent of opulence. The dishes were from Chevet, the wines from a celebrated merchant on the Quai Saint-Bernard, a personal friend of Matifat's. For the first time Lucien beheld the luxury of Paris displayed; he went from surprise to surprise, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... are not brought immediately under our notice. That these funds were not however adequate to his style of living is plain: Perhaps his train may be considered only as incumbrances, which the pride of family and the habit of former opulence might have brought upon his present poverty: I do not mean absolute poverty, but call it so as relative to his expence. To have "but seven groats and two-pence in his purse" and a page to bear it, is truly ridiculous; and it is for that reason we become so familiar with its contents, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... lapped in material comfort only intensified his spiritual pangs. The Tancreds were rich, and their wealth was not of to-day or yesterday; they had the dim golden tone, the deep opulence of centuries. And they were generous, they gave him of their best; so that, besides being bored, he had the additional discomfort of feeling himself a bit of a brute. As he lay awake night after night in his ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... are tight, and wooden shoes have disappeared. Mr. Pitt and the city of London may fancy what they will, but France will not come a-begging to the Mansion-house this year or two. In truth. I impute this air of opulence a little to ourselves. The crumbs that fall from the chaises of the swarms of English that visit Paris, must have contributed to fatten this province. It is plain I must have little to do when I turn my hand to calculating: but here is ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... of that gala day was a glorious evening. Rich and warm and beautiful, self-indulgent nature had swaddled herself about in barbaric bands of colour, a drowsy opulence of green and scarlet, soft-toned amber and pale, veiled azure. It was an hour when the senses riot in carnival, when colour sings and sound seems pink and gold, when light is fragrant and flowers emit ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... doctor, after a moment's pause, "that it is wise or right in a girl like Dora Bannister, accustomed to fine living, good society, and an atmosphere of opulence, to allow a poor man like Ralph Haverley to fall in love with her? And he will do it, just as sure ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... to describe in detail the rapid descent from opulence and station to poverty and insignificance, which now transpired to mark this era in the singular fortunes of Elwood and his family. Their history, for the next three months, was but the usual painful one ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... of strength and opulence, and that by her own industry, which America arrived at, you ought to have advised her to set up for herself, and proposed an alliance of interest with her, and in so doing you would have drawn, and that at her own expense, more real advantage, and more ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... towards the level of the river. There was a dainty and yet sober brightness about the whole picture. Summer in the North is for Nature a time of expansion and of joy as it is elsewhere, but there is none of that opulence, that sudden splendour and superabundance, which mark it in the South. In these bare green valleys there is a sort of delicate austerity even in the summer; the memory of winter seems to be still lingering ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Lord Chesterfield's maxims would make a young man a mere man of pleasure; but an English gentleman should not be a mere man of pleasure. He has no right to such selfish indulgence. His ease, his leisure, his opulence, are debts due to his country, which he must ever stand ready to discharge. He should be a man at all points; simple, frank, courteous, intelligent, accomplished, and informed; upright, intrepid, and ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... figure, "The Call of Fortune," accompanies them. Some of the characters are actual portraits, as are also the Artist, Writer, Scholar, Architect and Sculptor in the opposite panel, "The Arrival in the West." In this the lavishness and opulence of California welcome the pioneers. Mr. Du Mond is a member of the International Jury of Awards in the Fine ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... man, breathing of opulence in air and attire, came briskly forward and held up his hand to receive both sticks, with a harlequin bow from the dark-eyed Oriental, who wore a spruce black broadcloth suit, in honour of America, and a red fez, in loyalty, doubtless, to the ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... affection, and very naturally presumed, that the injuries which they had suffered, and the dangers which they still apprehended from his most inveterate enemy, would secure the fidelity of a party already considerable by their numbers and opulence. Even the conduct of Maxentius towards the bishops of Rome and Carthage may be considered as the proof of his toleration, since it is probable that the most orthodox princes would adopt the same measures with regard to their established clergy. Marcellus, the former of these prelates, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... hour; or six and twenty dollars for every minute that flew. Thus the usual track of supposition was thoroughly broken up. Men knew not what to imagine. There were some who even conceived that Mr. Ellison would divest himself of at least one-half of his fortune, as of utterly superfluous opulence—enriching whole troops of his relatives by division of his superabundance. To the nearest of these he did, in fact, abandon the very unusual wealth which was his own before ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a people for ages civilized and cultivated; cultivated by all the arts of polished life, whilst we were yet in the woods. There have been (and still the skeletons remain) princes once of great dignity, authority, and opulence. There are to be found the chiefs of tribes and nations. There is to be found an ancient and venerable priesthood, the depository of their laws, learning, and history, the guides of the people whilst living, and their consolation in death; a nobility of great antiquity and renown; a multitude ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... upon, is one of the healthiest and strongest on the face of the earth. We are not demoralized or effeminated by the luxury and abundance which are ours, but elevated rather, and strengthened by the very magnificence and opulence of our circumstances, and by the perfect freedom, under healthful restraint, which we enjoy through the community's strong, vigorous, moral and ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... the nations of the earth to-day must accept the ideals of the advancing tide of modern civilization, or perish! A people whose national festival is a bull-fight, has still something to learn. Much of mediaevalism still lingers in the methods and ideals of Spain. In the time of her opulence and splendor these methods and ideals were hers. So she believes in them and clings to them still. She has been the victim of a vicious political system, to which an intensely proud, patriotic, and brave people have believed they ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... bill was brought in, Charles Townshend concluded a speech in its favor with words to the following effect: "And now will these Americans, children planted by our care, nourished up by our indulgence, till they are grown to a degree of strength and opulence, and protected by our arms—will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?" To which Colonel Barre replied: "They planted by your care? No, your oppressions planted them in America! They fled from tyranny to a then uncultivated ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... and sack the sea-coast city of Bombasharna and take from it provisions for several years, while he himself would marry the Queen of the South. And again the pirates cheered, for often they had seen seacoast Bombasharna, and had always envied its opulence ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... trade's unfeeling train Usurp the land and dispossess the swain; Along the lawn, where scattered hamlets rose, Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose, And every want to opulence allied, And every pang that folly pays to pride. These gentle hours that plenty bade to bloom, Those calm desires that asked but little room, Those healthful sports that graced the peaceful scene, Lived in each look, and brightened all the green; These, far departing, seek a kinder shore, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... house; he has become soft, yielding, humble, decorous to a fault. He was a constant witness of my husband's kindness, wit, and gaiety, and made me remark for the first time, by his admiration for wealth, the opulence with which I am surrounded, and which up to this moment had only produced a disagreeable impression upon me." Considering the very different points of view of the writers, these letters are remarkably in unison. The solid fact of the daily visits ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... this age in beauty or in art; Nothing is wrought to-day that shall endure For earth's adornment, through long centuries; Not ours the fervid worship of a God That wastes its splendid opulence on glass, Leaving but hate for hungry human hearts. Yet great this age; its mighty work is man Knowing himself the universal life. And great our faith, which shows itself in works For human freedom and for racial good. The true religion lies in being kind. No age is greater ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... saved many, perpetuates in your Transactions the means by which Britain may now, on the most distant voyages, preserve numbers of her intrepid sons, her Mariners; who, braving every danger, have so liberally contributed to the fame, to the opulence, and to the maritime empire, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... being already full. On this very first day of his arrival, he perceived between the English and the people among whom he had hitherto lived, such essential difference in customs, appearance, and way of living, as inspired him with high notions of that British freedom, opulence, and convenience, on which he had often heard his mother expatiate. On the road, he feasted his eyesight with the verdant hills covered with flocks of sheep, the fruitful vales parcelled out into cultivated enclosures; the very cattle seemed to profit by the ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... her, I think, among other agreeable impressions, a sense of gentle opulence. In the old time she had never known what it was to have more than enough of anything agreeable in the ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... trailing shrubs that hid pillars, veranda, and even the long facade of a great and dominant mansion. But the delicacy of floral outlines running to the capitals of columns and at times mounting to the pediment of the roof, the opulence of flashing color or the massing of tropical foliage, could not deprive it of the imperious dignity of size and space. Much of this was due to the fact that the original casa—an adobe house of no mean pretensions, dating ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... in a refined way. He loved art, filled his house with statues and pictures, and extended a generous patronage to the painters. He was a collector of books, and, as Crabbe and less conspicuous men discovered, a helpful friend to their writers. Guests were ever welcome at his board; the opulence of his mind and the fervid copiousness of his talk naturally made the guests of such a man very numerous. Non invideo equidem, miror magis, was Johnson's good-natured remark, when he was taken over his friend's fine house and pleasant gardens. Johnson was of a very ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... by, did you ever play piquet? I have fallen a victim to this debilitating game. It is supposed to be scientific; God save the mark, what self-deceivers men are! It is distinctly less so than cribbage. But how fascinating! There is such material opulence about it, such vast ambitions may be realised - and are not; it may be called the Monte Cristo of games. And the thrill with which you take five cards partakes of the nature of lust - and you draw four sevens and a nine, and the seven and nine of a suit that you discarded, and O! but the ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of June 1810. He there learned from my correspondence that the Hanse Towns-refused to advance money for the pay of the French troops. The men were absolutely destitute. I declared that it was urgent to put an end to this state of things. The Hanse towns had been reduced from opulence to misery by taxation and exactions, and were no longer ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... an opulence which we must do Raleigh the credit to say was expended not on debauchery or display, but in the most enlightened efforts to extend the field of English commercial enterprise beyond the Atlantic. ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... And the sum which he had received for Polyeuka by no means represented all his savings. He did not like to think that he had denuded this man who had been his partner of everything in order that he himself might be unnecessarily rich. It was not pleasant to him to think that the fatness of his opulence had been extracted from Jack Adamson and from—Euphemia Smith. When the application for return of the money had been first made to him from Australia, he hadn't known what he knew now. There had been no eloquence ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... cent. higher than the former. The extortion is justified by those who practice it on the ground that their losses by bad debts, though their advances are always secured by mortgage on the growing crop, overbalance the profits; this assertion is scarcely borne out by the comparative opulence of the "merchant" and the pitiful poverty of the laborer. Some of the largest and wealthiest planters have sought to protect their tenants from the merciless clutches of the contrary merchant, who is more frequently than not an Israelite, by advancing supplies of necessary articles ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... count de Tendilla redeemed his promises like a loyal knight; and this miracle, as it appeared in the eyes of Fray Antonio Agapida, is the first instance on record of paper money, which has since inundated the civilized world with unbounded opulence. ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... mercantile glories crowd on my fancy, emblazoned in the most effulgent colouring of an ardent imagination. Borne on her soaring pinions, I wing my flight to the time when Heaven shall have crowned my labours with success and opulence. I see sumptuous palaces rising to receive me; I see orphans, and widows, and painters, and fidlers, and poets, and builders, protected and encouraged; and when the fabrick is pretty nearly finished by my shattered pericranium, I cast my eyes around, and find John Andre by a small coal-fire ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... from cause to effect, and seeing but a meager sprinkling of people on the streets throughout the day, and these seeming, for the most part, merely idlers, and in no wise accessory to the evident thrift and opulence of their surroundings, the observant stranger will be puzzled at the situation. But when evening comes, and the outlying foundries, sewing-machine, wagon, plow, and other "works," together with the paper-mills and all the nameless industries—when the operations of all these ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... educated him—he acknowledged no other superiority but the mental: "he was disposed, too," said Professor Walker, "from constitutional temper, from education and the accidents of life, to a jealousy of power, and a keen hostility against every system which enabled birth and opulence to anticipate those rewards which he conceived to belong to genius and virtue." When we add to this, a resentment of the injurious treatment of the dispensers of public patronage, who had neglected his claims, and showered pensions and places on men unworthy of being ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... for the precious metals of Peru and Mexico, two thousand mules being kept for the transportation of those rich ores. It was also the seat of a great trade in negro slaves, for the supply of Chili and Peru. The merchants of the place lived in great opulence and the churches were magnificently adorned, the chief among them being a handsome cathedral. Beautiful paintings and other costly works of art ornamented the principal dwellings, and everything concurred to add to the importance and ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... Duke d'Harcourt, with a smile, "in that case you are already paid; for I know all that you do in Paris, and especially in this neighborhood. I know that want meets here with a better reception than opulence, and that you look on all sufferers as having an equal claim on your attention. You must be aware, that knowing this I have already given ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... made one end of the window like the remove from a mine, those satin-smooth spheres, those cuts as of red and white marble? She had eaten apples, but these were as the apples of the gods, lying in a heap of opulence, with a precious light-spot like a ruby on every outward side. The turnips affected her imagination like ivory carvings: she did not recognize them for turnips at all. She never afterwards believed them to be turnips; and as for cabbages, ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... yellow note was a good one, but she was still a trifle cold. If her lips had been a little fuller... Strange she had never thought about that before. Well, next time she would touch them ever so deftly into a suggestion of ripe opulence. She sauntered slowly down Post Street, turned into Montgomery. There were scarcely any women on the street and the men who passed were, for the most part, in preoccupied flight. Yet she saw more than one ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... resort a world-weary woman, young and beautiful but disillusioned, meets a girl who has learned the art of living—of tasting life in all its richness, opulence and joy. The story hinges upon the change wrought in the soul of the blase woman by this glimpse into a ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... reasoning citizen would not refer the starving people to the taxes, to the ill-gotten gains of the princes, as the source of their poverty? German princes and German distress! In other words, the taxes on which the princes live in opulence and which the people pay with the sweat of their blood! What inexhaustible material for declamatory ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... his craft, a tall thin form lay on a bed, arrayed in a nightgown belted around him, with pain on his brow, and a thousand stormy passions agitating his bosom. Everything in the apartment indicated a man of opulence and of expense. Henbane Dwining, the apothecary, who seemed to have the care of the patient, stole with a crafty and catlike step from one corner of the room to another, busying himself with mixing medicines and preparing dressings. The sick man groaned once ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... one arm, thereby securing greater freedom of movement, and displaying a straight length of pink and white petticoat. Thus prepared she fared forth over the still smoking turf. The storm had passed, but the atmosphere remained thick and humid. A certain opulence of colour obtained in the landscape. The herbs in the grass, wild-thyme, wild-balm, and star-flowered camomile, smelt strongly aromatic as she trod them under foot, while the beds of bracken, dried and yellowed by the drought, gave off a ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... entirety, the street-scenes and shop-window displays were obliterated altogether. Nothing at all was said about the "great round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen lolling at the doors and tumbling into the streets in their apoplectic opulence." Nothing about the ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars, and "winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe." Nothing about the canisters ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... COLONIES: OPULENCE.-The Phoenicians were the first great colonizing nation of antiquity. It was the fashion of Assyrians and other conquerors to transport to their own lands multitudes of people, whom they carried away as captives from their homes. The Phoenicians—in this particular the forerunners ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... failed in every attempt to obtain even the rank of lieutenant. With scarcely the means of existence, he retired to La Planche with his family. There he lived for some years, suffering the grief and the many annoyances caused by the sudden change from opulence to want, and by the impossibility of supplying all the requirements of his numerous family. A short illness terminated his distressed existence, and his mortal remains were deposited in the cemetery of Vertoux. My ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... Democratic party in Sardinia, and this city is its focus. Genoa, in fact, has never been reconciled to the decree which arbitrarily merged her political existence in that of the present Kingdom. She fondly cherishes the recollection of her ancient opulence, power and glory, and remembers that in her day of greatness she was the center and soul of a Republic. Hence her Revolutionary struggle in 1848; hence the activity and boldness of her Republican propaganda now. To see Italy a Federal Republic, whereof Piedmont, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... in the same individual without any apparent connection, or any modification of the one by the other. That Shakespeare has in one instance, that of Iago, approached to this, and that he has done it successfully, is perhaps the most astonishing proof of his genius, and the opulence of its resources. But in the present tragedy, in which he was compelled to present a Goneril and a Regan, it was most carefully to be avoided;—and therefore the only one conceivable addition to the inauspicious influences on the preformation of Edmund's character is given, in ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... blobs of fat womankind trailing snapping veils. The car trailed a long streamer of dust that tasted of the road. When this was penetrated they entered upon a stretch of pleasant travel for eyes and wheels, on a long, long channel through a fruitful prairie, a very allegory of placid opulence. ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... populace dispersed beyond all hope of return, no rage vented in fire and ruins upon the unoffending houses and walls. Together also with advantage, a reputation for clemency was obtained among the allies, by the preservation of a city of the greatest celebrity and opulence, the demolition of which, all Campania, and all the people dwelling in the neighbourhood of Campania, would have bewailed, while their enemies were compelled to admit the ability of the Romans to punish ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... powers, the range of its endowments; secondly, its apparent destiny. Some subtle judges in this field of criticism are of opinion, and ever had that opinion, that amongst the modern languages which originally had compass enough of strength and opulence in their structure, or had received culture sufficient to qualify them plausibly for entering the arena of such a competition, the English had certain peculiar and inappreciable aptitudes for the highest offices of interpretation. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... people of sufficient opulence to contract for so vast a fishery, the Company might undertake it themselves; three or four gun-boats would be necessary to protect the fishermen; and a small fort should be erected at Tambisan or Tawi Tawi. ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... form of insanity as you can find within the walls of an asylum. Lots took wings sky-ward. Hale bought one for June for thirty dollars and sold it for a thousand. Before the autumn was gone, he found himself on the way to ridiculous opulence and, when spring came, he had the world in a sling and, if he wished, he could toss it playfully at the sun and have it drop back into his hand again. And the boom spread down the valley and into the hills. The police guard had little to do and, over in the mountains, the ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... complexities and opulence of beauty in the forms and motions of the cataract! It is comparatively narrow at the top of the precipice, although, as we said, the tide that pours over is thirty-five feet broad. But it widens as it descends, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... that when flames eat out the heart of a great city, devour its vast business establishments, storehouses and warehouses, sweep through its centres of opulence, destroy its wharves with their accumulation of goods, spread ruin and havoc everywhere, it is impossible at first to estimate the loss. Only gradually, as time goes on, is the true loss discovered, and never ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... the women varies according to their degrees of opulence. Queen Fatima, and a few others of high rank, like the great ladies in some parts of Europe, pass their time chiefly in conversing with their visitors, performing their devotions, or admiring their charms in a looking-glass. The women of inferior ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... valuable bridges, drainage cuts, and other small jobs, that great undertaking was the last masterpiece of his long and useful life. His later days were passed in deserved honour and comparative opulence; for though never an avaricious man, and always anxious to rate his services at their lowest worth, he had gathered together a considerable fortune by the way, almost without seeking it. To the last, his happy cheerful disposition enabled him to go on labouring at the numerous ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... of respite—the temptation was irresistible. And he really liked the kind uncomplicated Hickses. A wholesome honesty and simplicity breathed through all their opulence, as if the rich trappings of their present life still exhaled the fragrance of their native prairies. The mere fact of being with such people was like a purifying bath. When the yacht touched at Naples he agreed since they were so awfully kind—to go on to Sicily. And when the ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... so often happens, this sudden growth of riches had a tendency to accumulate in the hands of a minority of the people, with the inevitable consequence, on the one hand, of the widening of the gulf which divided poverty from opulence; on the other, with the creation among rich and poor alike of a consuming eagerness and passion for gain, if not by legitimate means, then by wild speculation or corrupt venality. Bubble companies came into existence, only to bring ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... Cambridge. His elegant person, his accomplished manners, his refined scholarship, made him the idol of the Harvard boys. Even in his youthful days he excelled as an orator, and was the easy master of the platform. But to him came the sirens singing of leisure, of opulence, and ambition. Full oft he looked forward to the day when he would be the champion of "elegant repose and cultivated conservatism" of the patrician element in his patrician state. But suddenly the Christ, in the person of one of his little ones, crossed the young scholar's path. One golden ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... rooms. The money-lender was served well. His employees in the store had been with him for years. They were worked very hard and their pay was not great, but their money was sure, and their employment was all the year round. So many billets upon the prairie depended upon the seasons—opulence one month and idleness the next. On the ranches it was often worse. There is but little labor needed in the winter. And those who have the good fortune to be employed all the year round generally experience a reduction in wages at the end of the fall round-up, and find themselves doing ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... liberty of thought and contempt for public opinion which do tear from a woman her modesty of soul, robbed of which she loses her charm. Alas! my subsequent misfortunes have failed to lessen the faults I learned through opulence. My father," she continued, with a sigh, "the Duc de Verneuil, died, after duly recognizing me as his daughter and making provisions for me by his will, which considerably reduced the fortune of my brother, his legitimate son. ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... given us yet another rendering, restoring to the story its classic setting, in The Poison Maid.[3] Thus, within the space of a hundred years, three master-craftsmen have found their inspiration in the slender anecdote which Aristotle, in the opulence of his genius, was content to hurry into a few sentences and bury beneath the mass of ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... characteristic of the dress of these southern women, will come home to him unexpectedly, and awaken in him that satisfaction with which we tell ourselves that we are the richer by one more beautiful experience. Or it may be something even slighter: as when the opulence of the sunshine, which somehow gets lost and fails to produce its effect on the large scale, is suddenly revealed to him by the chance isolation—as he changes the position of his sunshade—of a yard or two of roadway with its stones ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... duty with great delicacy and kindness. Deeply mortified as was the discarded favorite, she was not entirely unprepared for the announcement. She had for some time been painfully aware of her waning influence, and had been preparing for herself a retreat where she could still enjoy opulence, ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... sect was laid in republican states, as its clerical discipline was settled on a democratic basis, and as the countries which adopted that form of government were chiefly poor, the preachers having lost the rank and opulence enjoyed by the Roman Church, were gradually thrown on the support of the people. Insensibly they became occupied with the ideas and tenets natural to the common people, which, if they have usually the merit of being honestly ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... everlasting laws of righteousness were to give way to imaginary, political, and commercial expediency; and that thousands of our fellow-creatures were to be reduced to wretchedness, that individuals might enjoy opulence, or government ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... the Hacienda del Venado. The proprietor, Don Augustin Pena, was a man of great opulence. In addition to a rich gold mine which he worked, at no great distance off, he was the owner of countless herds of horses, mules, and cattle, that in a half-wild state roamed over the vast savannahs and forests that constituted the twenty leagues of land belonging to the hacienda. ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... husbands. It is difficult to reconcile the tenderness which they show towards their children, and the barbarity with which they correct them, especially the daughters, who are much neglected both by the father and mother. However, it is in their appearance that they display their opulence. They ornament their ears, arms and legs, with rings of gold and silver. They put so much alloy in their silver, that it is little else than whitened copper. The poorer class make use of no other metal ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... situated in the immediate vicinity of his own palace. The known virtues of the murdered prince caused his shrine to be visited as that of a martyr; and such was the fame of his miracles, that the city and cathedral attained a degree of opulence from the pious contributions of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 576 - Vol. 20 No. 576., Saturday, November 17, 1832 • Various
... his own use, and reaped the crops. Even travellers were attacked to enrich this extraordinary thief, and six vessels were afterward dispatched to Rome with the plunder, which he asserted was sufficient to permit him to revel in opulence the remainder of his life, even if he were obliged to give up two ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... of a theologian, and are no less admirable for the excellence of their arrangement than for their evangelical spirit and scriptural doctrine. Originally meant to be heard, they lose somewhat by being read. But few can read them without being delighted with the opulence of his imagination and impressed with the solemn earnestness of his convictions. Like the subject of the portrait described by him in the House of the Interpreter, he stands "like one who pleads with men, the law of truth written ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... pint at Aden or Colombo,—and on the Exodus and the Pharaohs—pleasures reserved for the Red Sea; a commercial traveller, who arranged theatricals, and cast himself for all the principal parts; a humorous and naive person who industriously hinted at the opulence of his estates in Ireland; two stately English ladies of title; a cheerful array of colonial knights and judges off to Europe for a holiday; and many others, who made little worlds unto themselves, called cliques ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the self-sustained mind of genius has often been misunderstood, and seldom valued as it ought to be. The presumptuous weak who mistake the wish of distinction for the workings of talent, admire the eccentricities of the gifted youth who is reared in opulence, and, mistaking the prodigality which is only the effect of his fortune, for the attributes of his talents, imitate his errors, and imagine that, by copying the blemishes of his conduct, they possess what is illustrious ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... the sparse light from the bedside lamp, with a fresh interest in its significance. He saw with new understanding the conventionalism of the pose—hip thrust out, arm akimbo, shoulder cocked—contrasted against the dark vivacity of the face and all the pulsing opulence of the flesh. It was an epic, an epic of the savage triumphant against civilization, of the spirit victorious against the forms ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... HIS father, and her evident hopeless inability to comprehend his position. His mother, he feared, was indeed low!—but HE was his father's son! Nevertheless, he gave her a funeral at Atherly, long remembered for its barbaric opulence and display. Thirty carriages, procured from Sacramento at great expense, were freely offered to his friends to join in the astounding pageant. A wonderful casket of iron and silver, brought from San Francisco, held the remains of the ex-washerwoman of Rough and Ready. But a more remarkable innovation ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... to those who hold wealth in esteem—and understand by this word, not the opulence of the few, but the comfort, the well-being, the security, the independence, the instruction, ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... Agricola and Stahl led up to Robert Boyle, with whom modern chemistry may be said to begin. Even as late as 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Vienna found that all had transferred their superstitions from religion to chemistry; "scarcely a man of opulence or fashion that has not an alchemist in his service." To one scientific man of the period I must refer as the author of the first scientific book published ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... certainly justified. Everything in the house to which she was going was calculated to intimidate people, to set them down, crush them, penetrate and overwhelm them with a sense of their own inferiority. There was an ostentatious and studied show of money, a clever display of wealth. Opulence aimed at the humiliation of less fortunate beings, by all possible means of intimidation, by outrageous or refined forms of luxury, by the height of the ceilings, by the impertinent airs of the lackeys, by the footman with his silver chain, stationed in the entrance-hall, by the silver plate on which ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... malheureux de la haute fortune, D'un roi trop indolent souverain absolu, Surcharge de travaux dont le soin L'importune. Bruhl, quitte des grandeurs L'embarras superflu. Au sein de ton opulence Je vois le Dieu des ennuis, Et dans ta magnificence Le repos fait ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... so motley an assemblage lack a certain pictorial quality, a somewhat fantastic opulence of reference and allusion. Of what might its members speak while they waited for the drawing aside of the piece of baize which hung between them and an Oriental camp? There was the staple of their wealth, a ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... not out of opulence, or congenial occupation, but out of the tread-mill of newspaper life, and under such conditions from 1870-1887 he delivered the poem at Lynchburg's celebration of its founding; at the unveiling of the monument raised to Annie Lee by the ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... Raphael, is a striking instance in his poverty-stricken youth, compared with his latter years of opulence. This is the reason why the same prize, the same triumph, the same bays are awarded to great ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... is, and can only be, in this country, an appendage to opulence and rank. Several varieties are cultivated in our forcing-stoves, and grace the tables of the rich, and in as great perfection as they can be had between the tropics. In their wild state, they affect the sides of rivulets, and often under the shade of lofty trees; but ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... you might be a name for the world to acclaim, and when Opulence dawns on the view, Why slave like a Turk at Collegiate work for a wholly inadequate screw? Why grind at the trade—insufficiently paid—of instructing for Mods and for Greats, When fortunes immense are diurnally made by a lecturing ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... failure of a great financial company had brought about a crisis on the Bourse. The news of the inability of Wermant, the 'agent de change', to meet his engagements, had completed the downfall of M. de Nailles. Not only death, but ruin, had entered that house, where, a few hours before, luxury and opulence had seemed ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... or less stormy times of the First Great War, we of the Navy were always able to buttress our resolution with golden hopes of a future opulence denied to our less fortunate comrades in the trenches. Whenever the struggle was going particularly badly for us—when, for instance, a well-earned shore-leave had been unexpectedly jammed or a tin of condensed milk had overturned into somebody's sea-boot—we used to console each ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... understood when the general financial condition of the city is called to recollection. Every one who has known the country but for a few years back must remember the almost general bankruptcy occasioned by the failure of land speculating men of opulence and high credit. During that time commerce in all its classes sensibly felt the shock, and business languished in all its branches. No wonder that the theatre, which can only be fed by the superflux of all other departments ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... took form in his mind—of himself growing grey and pleasurably tired, surrounded by opulence and the demonstrative respect of everybody, smiling with virtuous content as he strolled along between his two daughters, miracles of beauty and tenderness, holding each ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... by perpetuating the bigoted oppression of their fellow-subjects; their rulers and their guides have told them that they would equal the vigour of France by equalling her atrocity; and they have gone on wasting that opulence, patience, and courage, which, if husbanded by prudent and moderate counsels, might have proved the salvation of mankind. The same policy of turning the good qualities of Englishmen to their own destruction, which made Mr. Pitt omnipotent, ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... sense is this an exaggeration. Deep as science and research have explored, extensive as is the field which genius and art have occupied, they have an Herculean labor yet to perform before India will have yielded up all her opulence of learning. The literature of the world in all ages has been richly furnished, if not actually inspired, from that fountain. The Wisdom of the Ancients, so much lauded in the earlier writings of Hebrews, Greeks, and Phoenicians, was abundantly represented in the lore of these ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... bandage, pouring liquids down his throat, though he knows they will give him a headache, sitting up all night shaking bits of bone together for the mere purpose of giving somebody a chance of winning all his money, or offering bets on racehorses to afford himself and family an opportunity of changing opulence for beggary! He has the popular ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various
... very superb structures. Let us add a quantity of fine, amusing, and varied streets, like the Rue de Rivoli, and I do not despair of Paris presenting to the eye, when viewed from a balloon, that richness of line, that opulence of detail, that diversity of aspect, that grandiose something in the simple, and unexpected in the beautiful, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... frightful enough for any one; but perhaps more so for those who have always lived in opulence. I cannot beg—I must absolutely see my child starve before I can beg! What ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... the genteel. Like many warm-hearted, honest, clever, and otherwise sensible persons, Clara was a snob, but a charming little snob. She ordered him to forget that he belonged to the people. She refused to listen when he talked in the dialect. She made him dress with opulence, and even with tidiness; she made him buy a fashionable house and fill it with fine furniture; she made him buy a brougham in which her gentility could pay calls and do shopping (she shopped in Oldcastle, where a decrepit aristocracy of tradesmen ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... "I am rich—you are poor. I have farms, estates, vineyards—you shall choose amongst them wherewith to live happily for the rest of your days. Convey this letter safely, and exchange your comfortless and disreputable wanderings for a settled home and opulence." ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... am considering now that multitude of people who live under conditions at least supportable. Whence comes their heart-burning? Why is it found not only among those of modest though sufficient means, but also under shades of ever-increasing refinement, all along the ascending scale, even to opulence and the summits of social place? They talk of the contented middle classes. Who talk of them? People who, judging from without, think that as soon as one begins to enjoy ease he ought to be satisfied. But the middle classes themselves—do they consider themselves satisfied? ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... Stephanie. He was therefore the more ready to listen to Josephine's suggestion of the marriage of Louis and Hortense. This union in every respect seemed exceedingly desirable. Napoleon could gratify their highest ambition in assigning to them posts of opulence and honor. They could also be of great service to Napoleon in his majestic plan of redeeming all Europe from the yoke of the old feudal despotisms, and in conferring upon the peoples the new political gospel of equal rights for ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... from the Legislature to the Senate, from the Senate—who knows whither? He was already the idol of society, the applauded orator, the brilliant champion of the eloquent refinement and the conservatism of Massachusetts. The delight of social ease, the refined enjoyment of taste and letters and art, opulence, leisure, professional distinction, gratified ambition, all offered bribes to the young student." The measure of his manhood is in the way he thrust aside all honours and emoluments that stood in the path of duty. Only he who knows ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... they? Who are they? Delinquents by nature, such as are to be found in most of our large cities; people born with savage instincts; men who would rather pass their days in the midst of vice and open corruption than live a life of honour and opulence. ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... turn blind submission into rational obedience. It taught men, as Hall has said, that true liberty smothers the voice of kings, dispels the mists of superstition, and by its magic touch kindles the rays of genius, the enthusiasm of poetry, the flame of eloquence, pours into our laps opulence and art, and embellishes life with innumerable institutions and improvements which make it one ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom which foresees and intends the opulence to which it gives rise; it is rather the gradual result of the propensity, in human nature, to barter and exchange one thing for another. The power of exchanging their respective produce makes it ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... say of the wealth, the capacity for production, of France—the bright, cheerful, smokeless industry of the wonderful country which produces, above all, the agreeable things of life, and turns even its defeats and revolutions into gold. The whole town has an air of almost depressing opulence, an appearance which culminates in the great place which surrounds the Grand-Theatre—an establishment of the highest style, encircled with columns, arcades, lamps, gilded cafes. One feels it to be a monument to the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... spoke of military glory, and the formation of a vast slave empire, to include Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies. The merchants were assured that Charleston would be a free port, rivaling New York in its trade and opulence. ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... first landing in Porto Rico at Naguabo, where the Caribs afterward destroyed a Spanish settlement, he gave its present name to the island when he put in Aguada for water. Charmed with the beauty of the bay, the opulence of vegetation, the hope of wealth in the river sands, he christened it "the rich port," and extending this, applied to the whole island the name of San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico—St. John the Baptist of the Rich Port. The natives knew their island as Boriquen. Later came Ponce de Leon, who founded ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... things, too; for another winter was coming, and already the frost lay white on the fields in the mornings. The little house took on a new air of prosperity. There were days when it seemed almost swaggering with opulence. ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... mentioned. The scenery around was of a dark, solemn, and somewhat melancholy cast, according well with the architecture of the house. Everything appeared to be kept in the highest possible order, and announced the opulence ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... vast thine image! scarce my straining eye Can reach thy hands, which, fill'd with golden fruit And wreaths of blessing, from Olympus' height Shower treasures down. As by his bounteous gifts We recognize the monarch (for what seems To thousands opulence is nought to him), So you, ye heavenly Powers, are also known By bounty long withheld, and wisely plann'd. Ye only know what things are good for us; Ye view the future's wide-extended realm; While from our eye ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... parapets that are whitewashed? The roads that are repaired? fountains, and fooleries? [Footnote: Jacobs: und solches Geschwatz. The proceedings of Eubulus are here more particularly referred to.] Look at the men of whose statesmanship these are the fruits. They have risen from beggary to opulence, or from obscurity to honor; some have made their private houses more splendid than the public buildings; and in proportion as the state has declined, their fortunes ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... Ploughing is quite a new industry up here. There are some of the settlers round who have got lands under plough before this; but not to any great extent. To us it seems to open up a boundless vista of opulence, and there is no end to our speculations, and to the general ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... simple nature, and which had endeared him to his partners. He set half a dozen Chinamen to work, and followed, although apparently directing, their methods. The great difficulty was to restrain and control the excessive vegetation, and he matched the small economies of the Chinese against the opulence of the Californian soil. The "garden patch" prospered; the neighbors spoke well of it and of him. But Jackson knew that this fierce harvest of early spring was to be followed by the sterility of the dry season, and that irrigation could alone make his work profitable in the end. He brought ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars, and winking, from their shelves, in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... lost his fervent heat. The strain is now pitched in a lower key than in the 'Tale of Troy Divine': we begin to miss that high and equable sublimity which never flags or sinks, that continuous current of moving incidents, those rapid transitions, that force of eloquence, that opulence of imagery which is ever true to Nature. Like the sea when it retires upon itself and leaves its shores waste and bare, henceforth the tide of sublimity begins to ebb, and draws us away into the dim region of myth and legend. In saying this I am not forgetting the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Hippoclus, was descended, as likewise Epaminondas was, from an honorable family in Thebes; and, being brought up to opulence, and having a fair estate left him whilst he was young, he made it his business to relieve the good and deserving amongst the poor, that he might show himself lord and not slave of his estate. For amongst men, as Aristotle observes, some are too narrow-minded to use their wealth, and ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... would pitch my tent on the rougher shores of Kennebeck; this will always be a country of health, labour, and strong activity, and those are characteristics of society which I value more than greater opulence and voluptuous ease. ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... with the dreamy romanticism which found such splendid exponents, while he was yet in his early youth, in Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt. Imagination in its higher functions he seemed to lack. A certain opulence and picturesqueness of fancy united in his artistic being with an intelligence both lucid and penetrating, and a sense of form and symmetry almost Greek in its fastidiousness. The sweet, vague, passionate aspiration^, the sensibility that quivers with every breath of movement from the external ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... priest in the little intermingling half-hour of their lives that lay shaken out before them, and dropped unerringly. It really hardly mattered, but she always had such instants. She was aware of the shadow of a regret at the opulence of her personal effect; her hand went to her throat and drew the laces closer together there. An erectness stole into her body as she sat, and a look into her eyes that divorced her at a stroke from anything that could have spoken to him ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... les mains des Persans jeune enfant apport, Je gouverne l'empire o je fus achet. Mes richesses des rois galent l'opulence. Environn d'enfants, soutiens de ma puissance, Il ne manque mon front que le bandeau royal. 455 Cependant (des mortels aveuglement fatal!) De cet amas d'honneurs la douceur passagre Fait sur mon coeur peine une atteinte lgre; Mais Mardoche, ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... vindictiveness about the portrait of Ginevra Fanshawe, a touch of that fierce, intolerant temper that caused Blanche Ingram to be strangled by the hands of her creator. Ginevra is not strangled. She lives splendidly; she flourishes in an opulence of detail. ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... of her trade.... Where goes the value of our labor but to those who, taking advantage of our folly, ship for us, buy for us, sell to us, and, after turning our own capital to their profitable account, return laden with our money to enjoy their easily earned opulence at home." ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
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