"Trenchant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... much better, being young, ignorant, inexperienced, and lately married. How then could they decide so difficult a question as that of the relative wickedness and villany of men and women? Had your majesty been there, the knot of uncertainty would soon have been undone by the trenchant edge of your wit and wisdom, your knowledge and experience. You have, of course, long since made up ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... the most favourable specimens of Swift's controversial method and trenchant satire. The style is excellent—forcible and pithy; while the arguments are like most of Swift's arguments, aptly to the point with yet a potentiality of application which fits them for the most general ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... heart, was ty'd, With basket-hilt, that would hold broth, And serve for fight and dinner both. In it he melted lead for bullets, To shoot at foes, and sometimes pullets; To whom he bore so fell a grutch, He ne'er gave quarter t'any such. The trenchant blade, Toledo trusty, For want of fighting was grown rusty, And ate into itself, for lack Of somebody to hew and hack. The peaceful scabbard where it dwelt The rancor of its ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... that trenchant thrilling now. The look in Worry's eyes had been enough. He threw speed to Halloway, and on the third ball retired him, Raymond to McCord. Stern came second to bat. In Ken's mind this player was recorded with a weakness on low curves. ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... niches, or shrouded and coffined at once out of the way, we holding complacently the cemetery keys, and supposing we have learned something. But a sapling truth, with earth at its root and blossom on its branches; or a trenchant truth, that can cut its way through bars and sods; most men, it seems to me, dislike the sight or entertainment of, if by any means such guest or vision may be avoided. And, indeed, this is no wonder; for one such truth, thoroughly accepted, connects itself ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... compatible with easy and even cordial manners, and an address always considerate even when not sympathetic. He was not a loud or a long talker, but his terse remarks were full of taste and a just appreciation of things. If they were sometimes trenchant, the blade was of fine temper. Old Mr. Ferrars was there and the Viscountess Edgware. His hair had become quite silvered, and his cheek rosy as a December apple. His hazel eyes twinkled with satisfaction as he remembered the family had now produced two privy councillors. Lord Pomeroy ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... This, that the Puritan period produced two of the masterpieces of English Art—Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress.' As an absolute master of English, of sentences rolling magnificently in great waves of melodious sound, trenchant in every syllable, not to be equalled even by Shakespeare himself, Milton stands out like a giant. As for Bunyan, the Englishman who has never read 'Pilgrim's Progress' does not know his ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... and to the end of their lives as bravely sustained all the responsibilities their opinions involved. They were the pioneers in the great cause of political freedom for women, and opened the way in the true pioneer spirit. The clear sense of justice and the broad humanity which inspired their trenchant rebukes and fervid appeals not only enlightened and encouraged other women, but led to inquiry into various wrongs practised towards the sex which had up to that time been suffered in silence and in ignorance, ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... to the charge against him, and listened to the exaggerated tale of the arrest without comment, though with a look of disgust that did not escape Mr. Weaver. Perhaps he knew his man in Wilder. At any rate, a few trenchant questions brought out the fact that Friedrich had resisted only when an attempt was ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... down at the scattered fragments of the bridge with an odd kind of gravity in his eyes. It seemed a piece of trenchant symbolism that the Lovers' Bridge should break when he and Nan essayed to cross it. There was a slight, whimsical smile, which held something of pain, on his lips when he ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... paused to particularize, neither have we enumerated, the list of the combatants. Amongst them, however, were Jerry Juniper, the knight of Malta, and Zoroaster. Excalibur, as may be conceived, had not been idle; but that trenchant blade had been shivered by Ranulph Rookwood in the early stage of the business, and the knight left weaponless. Zoroaster, who was not merely a worshipper of fire, but a thorough milling-cove, had engaged to some purpose in a pugilistic encounter with the rustics; and, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... bloody eagle, with the trenchant blade, graven on the back of Sigmund's slayer. No son of king, who the earth reddens, and the raven ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... contemporary society are touched off with an inimitable delicacy of satire both in pencil and pen work. Life, like Punch, has also its more serious side; and, if it has never produced a "Song of the Shirt," it earns our warm admiration for its steadfast championing of worthy causes, its severe and trenchant attacks on rampant evils, and its eloquent tributes to men who have deserved well of the country. On the other hand, it not unfrequently publishes jokes the birth of which considerably antedates that of the United States itself; and it sometimes descends to a level ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... returned to Russia an Anglomaniac. Short hair, starched frills, a pea-green, long-skirted coat with a number of little collars; a soar expression of countenance, something trenchant and at the same time careless in his demeanor, an utterance through the teeth, an abrupt wooden laugh, an absence of smile, a habit of conversing only on political or politico-economical subjects, a passion for under-done roast beef and port wine—every ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... out of the bake-kettle, will you?' said Mary; 'and if them ducks be raw, 'tain't my fault, remember.' She was evidently a woman of few words, but trenchant. ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... Lord Macaulay himself for one of the principal Reviews not many years ago, he paid back in courteous language, and even under the conventional form of panegyric, in which one great man naturally speaks of another, a still more searching and trenchant criticism on the writings of the eminent historian. Gladstone shows, and shows clearly and conclusively, the utter inability of Macaulay to grasp subjects of a spiritual and subjective character, especially exhibited in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... heart, was ty'd; With basket-hilt, that wou'd hold broth, And serve for fight and dinner both. In it he melted lead for bullets, 355 To shoot at foes, and sometimes pullets, To whom he bore so fell a grutch, He ne'er gave quarter t' any such. The trenchant blade, Toledo trusty, For want of fighting, was grown rusty, 360 And ate unto itself, for lack Of somebody to hew and hack. The peaceful scabbard where it dwelt The rancour of its edge had felt; For of the lower end two handful 365 It had devour'd, 'twas so manful; And so much scorn'd to lurk in ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... power over words; Ruskin, whose rhythmic prose enchanted the ear; Keats, who brooded over phrases like a lover; Newman, of pure and melodious style; Stevenson, forever in quest of the scrupulously precise word; Tennyson, graceful and exquisite as the limpid stream; Emerson, of trenchant and epigrammatic style; Webster, whose virile words sometimes weighed a pound; and Lincoln, of simple, Saxon speech,—all these illustrious men were assiduous ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... embraced this new home. The vast and often decaying timbers, hewn out of the very forests they loved, cried out with all the old associations they bore and held them. The miniature citadel contained within the trenchant stockade, the old pelt stores, roofless and worm-eaten, the armory which still suggested the clank of half-armored men, who lived only for the joy of defying death. The factor's house, whence, in the days gone by, the orders for battle had been issued, and the sentence ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... that little spring in the protruding under-ledge of his desk, and out upon the trenchant stillness, broken only by the rapid, stertorous breathing of the manacled man, burst the strident tones of that same man's voice, just as they had sounded ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... said that the invective was so strong and the satire so bitter, that they presented a bar to that preferment which Swift might otherwise have obtained. He appears at this time to have cared little for public opinion, except that it should fear his trenchant wit and do ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... persuasive mode of presenting his views, had urged as a matter of justice that legislation affecting the Southern States should be open to the participation of representatives from those States; but Mr. Thaddeus Stevens, who had as keen an intellect as Mr. Seward and a more trenchant style, declared that view to involve an absurdity. He avowed his belief that there was no greater propriety in admitting Southern senators and representatives to take part in considering the financial adjustments and legislative safeguards rendered ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... his garret to work, the quiet simplicity of the little room irritated him, his theoretical search for liberty proved quite insufficient, and it became necessary that he should go downstairs, sally out, and seek satisfaction in the trenchant axioms of Charvet and the wild outbursts of Logre. During the first few evenings the clamour and chatter had made him feel ill at ease; he was then quite conscious of their utter emptiness, but he felt a need of drowning his thoughts, of goading himself on to some extreme ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... her conception of the history and the romance of wheat to Dorn at this critical time when it was necessary to give a trenchant call to hope ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... energize, stimulate, kindle, excite, exert; sharpen, intensify; inflame &c. (render violent) 173; wind up &c. (strengthen) 159. strike home, into home, hard home; make an impression. Adj. strong, energetic, forcible, active; intense, deep-dyed, severe, keen, vivid, sharp, acute, incisive, trenchant, brisk. rousing, irritation; poignant; virulent, caustic, corrosive, mordant, harsh, stringent; double-edged, double-shotted[obs3], double-distilled; drastic, escharotic|; racy &c. (pungent) 392. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... parts of the left are missing. All the jewelry has been stolen from the room. Lord Pharanx lies on the bed, stabbed through the bedclothes to the heart. Later on a bullet is also found imbedded in his brain. I should explain that a trenchant edge, running along the bottom of the sash, was the obvious means by which the fingers of Cibras had been cut off. This had been placed there a few days before by the workman I spoke of. Several secret springs had been placed on the inner ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... The zealous disciple, who had counted it an honour to be allowed to carry a sword before his master, stood forth immediately to wield the spiritual sword which had fallen from the master's grasp, and to wield it with a vigour and trenchant execution ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... Taylor, Ohio; Thomas M. Browne, Indiana; Moses A. McCoid, Iowa. It is one of the keenest, clearest expositions of the absurdity of the objections against woman suffrage that ever has been made, and ends with this trenchant paragraph: ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... talks. But incisive native writing about American traits is not lacking. If a missionary, say in South Africa, has read the New York Nation every week for the past forty years, he has had an extraordinary "moving picture" of American tendencies, as interpreted by independent, trenchant, and high-minded criticism. That a file of the Nation will convey precisely the same impression of American tendencies as a file of the Sun, for instance, or the Boston Evening Transcript, is not to be affirmed. The humor of the London Punch and the ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... attached to a large shoulder-blade, supported by a stout clavicle or collar-bone. The fore-feet are of great breadth, supported by the powerful muscles of the arm; the palm of the foot or hand is directed outwards or backwards, the lower edge being trenchant, with scarcely perceptible fingers armed with long, flat nails, strong and sharp, with which to tear up the ground and shovel the earth aside. The hind feet are small and weak in comparison, with slender claws. The head tapers to a point, the long snout being provided with a little bone which assists ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... chiefs are described as "mighty of frame and having numerous followers." In dealing with the first band, Keiko caused his bravest soldiers to carry mallets made from camellia trees, though why such weapons should have been preferred to the trenchant swords used by the Japanese there is nothing to show. (Another account says "mallet-headed swords," which is much more credible). In dealing with the second, he was driven back once by their rain of arrows, and when he attacked from another ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... always of the same cast. It varied as greatly as were the moods of the composer. The sublimity of Ossian had its opposite in the biting sarcasm and trenchant ridicule of some ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... bestirred themselves to finish the two small vessels on which the carpenters had been for some time at work. In a fortnight they were ready for sea, armed and provided with the king's cannon, munitions, and stores. Trenchant, an excellent pilot, was forced to join the party. Their favorite object was the plunder of a certain church, on one of the Spanish islands, which they proposed to assail during the midnight mass of Christmas, whereby a triple end would be achieved: first, a rich booty; secondly, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... of faith and the propriety of concession to the opposite force. Yes! Robert Elsmere was certainly right in ceasing to be a clergyman. But it strikes us as a blot on his philosophical pretensions that he should have been both so late in perceiving the difficulty, and then so sudden and trenchant in dealing with so great and complex a question. Had he possessed a perfectly philosophic or scientific temper he would have hesitated. This is not the place to discuss in detail the theological position very ably and seriously argued by Mrs. Ward. All we can say is that, ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... army, because it was professional. Mr. Smith wrote several trenchant letters to Mr. C. J. B. Marriott on ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... more reason for deliberately avoiding an emphatic ending than for mechanically forcing one. But authors and critics alike should learn to distinguish the themes which do, from the themes which do not, call for a definite, trenchant solution, and should handle them, and judge them, in accordance ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... may flourish Round about the King, They who love gold treasures All around to fling. Lords, the first of heroes, With their trenchant swords; Counsellors held in honour, ...
— Mollie Charane - and Other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... or perhaps ever spoke. There is nothing in them for which what has been said of the situation and of his views will not have prepared us, and nothing which thousands of men might not have said to one another in private for a year or two before. But the first public avowal by a responsible man in trenchant phrase, that a grave issue has been joined upon which one party or the other must accept entire defeat, may be an event ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... queen recalls the anonymous "Second Maiden's Tragedy." Marston, who shrank from nothing, would not have hesitated to show us the Archbishop, in his search for the magic ring, parting the dead queen's lips, with the ironical observation, "You cannot byte me, Madam." The trenchant satire that abounds throughout the play reminds us frequently of Marston, though there is an absence of that monstrous phraseology which distinguished his "Scourge of Villanie" and early plays. But, looking at the play as a whole, I should have very great hesitation in allowing it to be Marston's. ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... sentiment, 'Strike, but hear me first!' But when Mr. Webster went back in 1850 to speak to his constituents in his own self-defense, to tell the truth and to expose his slanderers, you would not hear him, but you struck him first." Again and again, as at the end of a paragraph of unadorned but trenchant sentences the small, firm-knit figure quivered with a leonine energy, the great, swart head was thrown backward, and the deep voice swelled into a tone of triumph or defiance, the listeners could not forbear to applaud. Once, even Seward broke forth: "I have never had so much respect for ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... denied Tammany's right to be regarded as the regular organisation, but his proclamation, defiantly and clearly made, that hereafter he should bolt its nominations even if the convention refused to impeach its regularity, struck a trenchant blow that silenced rather than excited. Such courage, displayed at such a critical moment, was sublime. An organised revolt against an association which had for years been accepted as regular by State conventions meant the sacrifice of a majority and an invitation to certain defeat, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Loores de Santa Maria and Canticas de serrana, plainly in the Galician manner and of complex metrical structure. The serranas are particularly free and unconventional. The Chancellor Pero LOPEZ DE AYALA (1332-1407), wise statesman, brilliant historian and trenchant page xiv satirist, wrote religious songs in the same style and still more intricate in versification. They are included in the didactic poem usually called ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... could listen for hours to an attack upon celebrated persons. If Mr. Holland's book had only dealt with the characteristics of the religion of the Jews, it would never have attracted attention, these critics said. It had called for notice simply because of its trenchant remarks in regard to some of those Bible celebrities who, it was generally understood, were considered worthy ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... summit to the light of day, eagerly the two combatants near the copper gun gazed for the first time into each other's eyes, and, at that trenchant glance, a tremor crossed the features of the gunner, and his arm, with its muscles of steel, suddenly became ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... those of France and America. It compares advantageously with the second par. of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) by the Representatives of the U.S., which declares, "these truths to be self-evident:—that all men are created equal," etc. It is regretable that so trenchant a state-paper should begin with so gross and palpable a fallacy. Men are not born equal, nor do they become equal before their death-days even in condition, except by artificial levelling; and in republics and limited monarchies, where all are politically ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... seen a very trenchant article from an American pen on the power of the moneyed members of a church to dictate the tone of the pulpit; and it is a common accusation against ministers, that they flatter the prevailing classes in their congregations. If their congregations are wealthy, they are ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... wore away, the spring came, and after spring, summer, with its greenery and flowers. Godfrey was happy enough during this time. To begin with, the place suited him. He was very well now, and grew enormously in that pure and trenchant air, broadening as well as lengthening, till, notwithstanding his slimness, he gave promise of ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... Regulator. This justice was our acquaintance, Judge Richard Henderson, of Granville County, the sole high officer in the provincial government from the entire western section of the colony. In this petition occur these trenchant words: "As we are serious and in good earnest and the cause respects the whole body of the people it would be loss of time to enter into arguments on particular points for though there are a few men who have the gift ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... opportunity, aimed a blow enough to cleave his adversary to the very chine; but Risingh, nimbly raising his sword, warded it off so narrowly, that, glancing on one side, it shaved away a huge canteen in which he carried his liquor,—thence pursuing its trenchant course, it severed off a deep coat-pocket, stored with bread and cheese,—which provant, rolling among the armies, occasioned a fearful scrambling between the Swedes and Dutchmen, and made the general battle to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... their place in it. You have not lived, Varhely, or you have lived only for your idol, your country, and everything amazes you. If you had, like me, wandered all over the world, you would not be astonished at anything; although, to tell the truth"—and the young man's voice became bitter, trenchant, and almost threatening—"we have only to grow old to meet with terrible ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... particular corpse, and would feel her as cold as ice itself and as slippery under my feet. My cold berth would swallow up like a chilly burial niche my bodily shivers and my mental excitement. It was a cruel winter. The very air seemed as hard and trenchant as steel; but it would have taken much more than this to extinguish my sacred fire for the exercise of my craft. No young man of twenty-four appointed chief mate for the first time in his life would have let that Dutch tenacious winter penetrate into his heart. I think that in those ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... her small black eyes upon him. She said nothing. The intrusion of a young man into matters essentially domestic she strongly disapproved. Under "D" in "Aphorisms" this woman had a trenchant note touching this matter. "D. Domesticity. Domesticity," said this note, "is the offspring of all the womanly virtues. The virtues impregnate the woman, and domesticity is the resultant child. Absence of a single womanly trait aborts or debilitates the offspring. ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... was so inexplicable as to reduce him to gibbering astonishment. There stood his imposing grandmother, so overwhelmed with amazement that her trenchant sentences failed her completely; his stepmother, wearing an expression that almost suggested delight in his discomfiture; and Diantha, as grim ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... a work rich in the raciest beauties and defects of an author long since made known to the British public, the present writer has striven to recast the trenchant humour, the scornful eloquence, the epigrammatic dash of Mr. Michelet, in language not all unworthy of such a word-master. How far he has succeeded others may be left to judge. In one point only is he aware of having ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... learned? Sight of the black horse grazing near seemed to prompt the trenchant replies. Spades belonged to Jean Isbel. He had been stolen by her father or by one of her father's accomplices. Isbel's vaunted cunning as a tracker had been no idle boast. Her father was a horse thief, a rustler, ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... Wu-Tsung was more definitely Taoist than his predecessors. In 843 he suppressed Manichaeism and in 845, at the instigation of his Taoist advisers, he dealt Buddhism the severest blow which it had yet received. In a trenchant edict[668] he repeated the now familiar arguments that it is an alien and maleficent superstition, unknown under the ancient and glorious dynasties and injurious to the customs and morality of the nation. Incidentally ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... which forms at once the fascination and the difficulty of Dante's great work. Of course, if we content ourselves with reading it merely for its "beauties," for the aesthetic enjoyment of an image here and an allusion there, for the trenchant expression of some thought or feeling at the roots of human nature, there will be no need of any harder study than is involved in going through it with a translation. Indeed, it will hardly be worth while to go to the original at all. The pleasure, one might almost say the physical ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... would not thus be deprived of his right to a reply; and was just commencing with a suitable attitude for the purpose, when lo! the trenchant knight, who sat on a small stool beside the corner buttress, with a loud cry, suddenly disappeared, and a gaping cavity in the floor sufficiently accounted for the precipitate mode of his departure. Uprising on ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... bandings, be kindly welcomed or would it be regarded as an abortion, a monster? The reader will readily understand how welcome to an author in such perplexity came the following article from the Standard (September 12), usually attributed to the popular and trenchant pen of Mr. Alfred Austin. I must be permitted to quote it entire, because it expresses so fully and so admirably all and everything I could desire a reviewer to write. And the same paper has never ceased to give me the kindest encouragement: its latest notice was courteous ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... occasion, when I had read to the Society an essay on "The Incoherence of Empiricism," I looked forward with some little anxiety to his criticisms; and when they came I felt that my anxiety had not been superfluous; he "went for" the weak points of my argument in half-a-dozen trenchant sentences, of which I shall not forget the impression. It was hard hitting, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... all the old saws?—not the rusty steel affairs that Patrick and John ply upon Down-East fire-wood at our back doors,—but those sharp-pointed, trenchant ones that philosophers love to draw across the hearts of men, cutting, tearing, grinding away, till the fibre of their being quivers under the remorseless teeth. Many were forged, we all know, in the celebrated workshop of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... There may have been too much philosophy and too little art in the presentation of the subject, too little reality and too much soaring into the heights. That is not so with Strindberg's drama. It is a trenchant settling of accounts between a complex and fascinating individual—the author—and his past, and the realistic scenes have often been transplanted in detail ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... numbers, as in the vote against Mr. Williams. The measure was not an honest one on the part of the Hebdomadal Board, and deserved to be defeated. Among the pamphlets which the discussion produced, two by Mr. James Mozley gave early evidence, by their force of statement and their trenchant logic, of the power with which he was to take part in the questions which agitated ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... there was absolutely nothing to recommend this identification of the unknown author. The intellectual characteristics of the work present a trenchant contrast to the refined scholarship and cautious logic of this accomplished prelate. Only one point of resemblance could be named. The author shows an acquaintance with the theological critics of the modern Dutch ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... Philip Schaff, than whom there is no abler or more renowned biblical scholar in the New World, has in a recent paper in the New York Herald defended Dr. Briggs. That journal aptly says: In his paper, he defines in the most trenchant language, the apparent inconsistency of the New York Presbytery in practically avowing, eighteen months ago, the same principle for which Dr. Briggs, it declares, must now stand trial. He declares that the American Presbyterian Church has herself materially changed the Westminster Confession of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... the way, on the competent authority of M. Kopitar, that this German version of the Bible is one of the most ancient extant. These books have suffered, in the binding, from the trenchant tools of the artist. The gold in the illuminations is ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Elektra took place in Dresden January 25th, 1909. It met with immense applause from one part, with trenchant criticism from ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Everywhere, whether the lecturer be sketching the salient features of the sixteenth century or of the eighteenth, whether he be dealing with Italy or America, we feel the sureness of touch of one who is familiar with every detail. Although we may often not agree with his trenchant judgments, with his paradoxes, or even with his interpretation of the teaching of history, we are made to feel that his ample knowledge would never have been at a loss for weighty arguments ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... prolong the miseries of war. At the same time Morier did not close his eyes to the danger arising from the overwhelming victories of the German armies. No one saw more clearly the deterioration which was taking place in German character, or depicted it in more trenchant terms. But it was his business to work for the future and not to let sentiment bring ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... Motte, you should employ your leisure in writing down your reflections, like the Chevalier de Montaigne. You could give us a trenchant essay on the Ingratitude of Man. Here are you host of the biggest inn in Paris—a pile more imposing than the Louvre itself. Your hospitality is so eager that you insist on entertaining me, so lavish that you ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... knavery was so well established that one evening at the Prefecture, Monsieur Tournel, a man of keen and trenchant wit, author of certain fables and songs—a local glory—seeing the ladies growing drowsy, proposed a game of "L'oiseau vole."[1] The pun itself flew through the prefect's reception rooms and afterwards through the town, and for a whole ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... conflict there is no excluding rivalry between pen and sword, but plenty of room for both. The article wittily entitled, "Mess-up-otamia" should be read by everyone who is not tired of that theme. The trenchant author of "Reflections without Rancour" displays his customary vigilance as a censor of betes noires, not sparing the whip even when some of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 15, 1917 • Various
... plays as translated by Lady Gregory, and so greatly have they influenced the folk-plays in English of the Abbey Theatre, that there is almost warrant for including him. I cannot, of course, but I must at least bear testimony to the many powers of these plays. Dr. Hyde can be trenchant, when satire is his object, as in "The Bursting of the Bubble" (1903); or alive with merriment when merriment is his desire, as in "The Poorhouse" (1903); or full of quiet beauty when he writes of holy things, as in the "Lost ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... to this scrutiny with no more evidence of surprise than a monument examined by a tourist; but when the fate of her luggage had been settled she turned suddenly to Darrow and, dropping her eyes from his face to his feet, asked in trenchant accents: "What sort of boots have ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... read her through, as so often. With a trenchant dart he glanced from her to me. I could see he began to suspect a confederacy. "That will do," he went on, with slow deliberateness. "Better so. Nurse Wade, I don't know what's beginning to come over you. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... up the fight in earnest in 1835. The western demand for responsible government pointed the way, and Howe became, with Baldwin, its most trenchant advocate. In spite of the determined opposition of the sturdy old soldier Governor, Sir Colin Campbell, and of his successor, Lord Falkland, who aped Sydenham and whom Howe threatened to "hire a black man to horse-whip," the reformers won. In 1848 the first responsible ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... brown-purple buckler he bore, [3]with five wheels of gold on it,[3] with a rim of pure white silver around it. A gold-hilted hammered sword [4]with ivory guards, raised high at his girdle[4] at his left side. A long grey-edged spear together with a trenchant bye-spear for defence, with thongs for throwing and with rivets of whitened bronze, alongside him in the chariot. Nine heads he bore in one of his hands and ten in the other, and these he brandished before the hosts in token of his prowess and cunning. [5]This then ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... appropriate speech, but that was in the seventeenth century. When Artemus Ward began a harangue of this sort, Betsy Jane knocked him off the fence on which he was sitting, and first criticising his eloquence in a trenchant style, added, "If you mean being hitched, I'm in it." In other respects the lover of Lorna Doone behaved as the best ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... rights of God are the only basis of the rights of man. One of the most sagacious of modern statesmen has borne his testimony to this fundamental truth—that religion is the only basis of social order—in words as trenchant as the guillotine which suggested them. "It is not," says Napoleon, "the mystery of incarnation which I perceive in religion, but the mystery of social order. It attaches to heaven an idea of equality which prevents the rich from being massacred ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... is not very trenchant, but its weakness is due, I think, more to timidity of statement than to lack of perception. Paley does see that a character may be "well-drawn" without necessarily being "pleasing"; and even that he may be eminently pleasing as a part of the play while very displeasing in ...
— Alcestis • Euripides
... you ever, my most acute professor of vivisection, employ your trenchant blade in the splitting ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... again stopped his allowance, Hector began to write for musical journals. At first ignorant of the ways of journalism, his wild utterances were the despair of his friends; later his trenchant pen was ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... nothing for them. He wrote in the most hopeful terms to his mother and sister, and spent his first earnings in buying gifts for them. His pride and ambition were amply gratified by the promises and interested flattery of editors and political adventurers; Wilkes himself had noted his trenchant style, "and expressed a desire to know the author"; and Lord Mayor Beckford graciously acknowledged a political address of his, and greeted him "as politely as a citizen could." But of actual money he received but little. He was extremely abstemious, his diligence was great, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... the state doctors of the day offered for the cure of the ills of the body politic—he advocated the employment, meantime, of persuasion instead of force, of gentleness rather than rigor, of charity and good works, as more effective than the most trenchant of material weapons. And, while he recommended his hearers to pray for the conversion of the erring, he exclaimed: "Let us remove those diabolical words, names of parties, factions, and seditions—'Lutherans,' 'Huguenots,' and 'Papists'—and let us retain ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... The old ladies, however, were serious obstacles to the establishment of these decorous records. They wished not only to give but to talk freely, and the more the husband wisely preached "policy" and an astute prudence, the more certainly were his cob-webs of caution torn into shreds by the trenchant ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... had certainly increased as the little grey politician denounced the witlessness of the working-class, and when they howled at him, went on to expound a trenchant doctrine of universal Responsibility, which preceded the universal Suffrage that was to come. Much of what he said was drowned in uproar. It had become clear that his opinions revolted the majority of ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... purpose of our present generalisation it is only necessary to say that Shaw, as a musical critic, summed himself up as "The Perfect Wagnerite"; he threw himself into subtle and yet trenchant eulogy of that revolutionary voice in music. It was the same with the other arts. As he was a Perfect Wagnerite in music, so he was a Perfect Whistlerite in painting; so above all he was a Perfect Ibsenite in drama. And with this we enter that ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... session to give time to form an Irish Party, to assist the Ministry, if willing; to urge them on, if lagging; in procuring justice for Ireland." O'Connell replied in a letter, rich with the vigorous trenchant logic of his very best days. He reviews the many attempts made, at various times, to form an Irish party, all of which ended in unmitigated failure. His answer to Lord Miltown, therefore is, that he cannot comply with his request—he cannot consent to postpone, even for ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... Vikings, the first point which demands notice is that Ibsen has gained a surprising mastery over the arts of theatrical writing since we met with him last. There is nothing of the lyrical triviality of the verse in The Feast at Solhoug about the trenchant prose of The Vikings, and the crepuscular dimness of Lady Inger is exchanged for a perfect lucidity and directness. Whatever we may think about the theatrical propriety of the conductor of the vikings, there is no question ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... more trenchant of the Psalms, a long psalm that had much in it about enemies and slaughter. It had a very strong meaning for him, for he put himself in the place of the writer. The enemies mentioned were, in the first place, sins—by which he denoted the more ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... parish-priest, and, as well as his friend Master Gottfried, held greatly by the views left by the famous Strasburg preacher, Master John Tauler. After the good housemother had, in strong terms, laid the case before him, she expected a trenchant decision on her own side, but, to her surprise and disappointment, he declared that Master Gottfried was right, and that, unless Hugh Sorel demanded anything absolutely sinful of his daughter, it was needful that she should submit. He repeated, ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... now stands, the Anglo-Saxon instinctively and tenaciously believes in the liberty and initiative of the individual. We, of course, are no longer Anglo-Saxon. When De Tocqueville in 1831 visited our country, surveyed our institutions and, after returning home, made his trenchant diagnosis of our democracy, he could justly designate us Anglo-Americans. That time is past; we are to-day everything and nothing: a great nation in the womb of time, struggling to ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... English House of Commons loves nothing so well as a "personal explanation," so the personalities of literature have a way of attracting us in the direct ratio of their piquancy and severity. Lord Shelburne has quite a gift of killing two birds with one stone in his trenchant criticisms. He cannot crush George III.'s father without demolishing poor Lord Melcombe en passant. "The prince's life (he says) may be judged in some degree from the account given of it in Lord Melcombe's diary—a man who passed his life with great men whom he did not know, and in the midst ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... of its chiselling to the effect at a certain distance from the eye; and to render the peculiar confusion in the midst of order, and uncertainty in the midst of decision, and mystery in the midst of trenchant lines, which are the result of distance, together with perfect expression of the peculiarities of the design, requires the skill of the most admirable artist, devoted to the work with the most severe conscientiousness, neither the skill nor the determination having as yet been given ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... of further and far more trenchant abuse was discharged by Superintendent Cairns, of the New South Wales Police. But Kilbride was already in the saddle; a covert outward kick with his spurred heel, and the third horse went cantering riderless ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... to any association of ridicule with the objects of her attachment—indeed, she once despatched a dog she fondly loved to the lethal chamber at Battersea, merely because all the hair had come off the poor animal's tail! My trenchant sarcasms had depoetised her lover in a similar fashion; their livid lightning had revealed the baldness, the glaring absurdity of the very stanzas which once had filled her eyes with delicious tears; he was dismissed, and soon disappeared ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... of cloud lie crowded and leaning against one another, rank beyond rank, far over the shining water, each cut away at its foundation by a level line, trenchant and clear, till they sink to the horizon like a flight of marble steps, except where the mountains meet them, and are lost in them, barred across by the grey terraces of those cloud foundations, and reduced into one crestless bank of blue, spotted here and there with strange flakes ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Joe could not understand, but to him they sounded like French. He smiled at the absurdity of imagining he had heard a savage speak a foreign language. At any rate, whatever had been said was trenchant with meaning. The Indians changed from gay to grave; they picked up their weapons and looked keenly on every side; the big Indian at once retied Joe, and then all ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... and the lethargic Marquess, she hastened by letter to exculpate herself to Darrell—laid, of course, all the blame on Caroline. Alas! had not she always warned him that Caroline was not worthy of him?—him, the greatest, the best of men, &c., &c. Darrell replied by a single cut of his trenchant sarcasm—sarcasm which shore through her cushion of down and her veil of gauze like the sword of Saladin. The old Marchioness turned her back upon Mrs. Lyndsay. Lady Selina was crushingly civil. The pretty woman ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... produced nothing more exquisite and nothing so ethereal. 'The Lotos* Eaters' is perhaps the most purely delicious poem ever written, the 'ne plus ultra' of sensuous loveliness, and yet the poet who gave us that has given us also the political poems, poems as trenchant and austerely dignified in style as they are pregnant with practical wisdom. There is the same versatility displayed in ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... he had not the power to describe Nature if he cared. But he did not care. I have spoken of the invented descriptions of morn and noon and sunset in Gerard de Lairesse in the book which preceded Asolando. They have his trenchant power, words that beat out the scene like strokes on an anvil, but, curiously enough, they are quite unsuffused with human feeling; as if, having once divorced Nature from humanity, he never could ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Lord Beaconsfield said, the greatest tragedies of his life had been things that never happened; Carlyle truly and beautifully said that the reason why the past always appeared to be beautiful, in retrospect, was that the element of fear was absent from it. William Morris said a trenchant thing on the same subject. He attended a Socialist Meeting of a very hostile kind, which he anticipated with much depression. When some one asked him how the meeting had gone off he said, "Well, it was fully as damnable as I had expected—a thing ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... five fair daughters of Thomas Welbore Percival, East India Merchant in The Poultry, Philippa, the eldest, the trenchant and clear-sighted, lived in Bryanston Square, mother of three children. Her husband, Mr. Tompsett-King, was a solicitor, but he was much more than that, An elderly, quiet gentleman, who talked ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... somewhat on the lines of the German renaissance, being low and rakish like a dachshund, but with just a little more freeboard than the dachshund. His legs were straight instead of bowed, as are those of his distinguished German cousin. His ears were hardly as pendulous, being rather more trenchant than pendulous, and therefore more mobile in action. His tail was facile and retrousse, with a lateral swing of about a foot and an indicated speed of seventeen hundred to the minute. When you add to these many charms, those mild eyes, surcharged with ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... the notable trio was the dwarfish fool with his shaggy black head, twisted mouth, and watchful, wandering eye, whose foolishness was but the flaunting cover of shrewd observation and trenchant vision. Going where he would, and saying what he listed, now in the Queen's inner chamber, then in the midst of the Council, unconsidered, and the butt of all, he paid for his bed and bounty by shooting shafts of foolery which as often made his listeners shrink ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that this is satire of a good trenchant sort. The reader will find plenty more of it if he will only turn to the comedy for himself. Our immediate purpose is with the sculptor for whose name Mr. Foote has found a ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... These trenchant passages were written partly, it may be imagined, to suit the English taste of the day. In that object they must have succeeded, for they were frequently transcribed into contemporary periodicals. In extenuation of Smollett's honesty of purpose, however, it may be urged that he was always ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... betray the site of the operations to the policeman, thus seriously facilitating the duties of that official towards the suppression of the species. From remote depths the crab carries a bundle of sand. You remember the trenchant way in which Pip's sister cut the bread and butter, her left hand jamming the loaf hard and fast against her bib? Just so the crab with its bundle of loose sand, though it has the advantage in the number of limbs which may be pressed into service. The feat of carrying ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... I caught sight of a face which instantly arrested my attention. A very small man, both short and slim, with a rosy complexion, protruding chin, and trenchant nose, the remains of reddish hair, and an extremely alert and vivacious expression. The broad Red Ribbon of a G.C.B. marked him out as in some way a distinguished person; and I discovered that he was the Lord Chief Justice of England,—Sir Alexander Cockburn, one of the most conspicuous ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... Mr. Asquith possesses all the appearance of greatness but few of its elements. He has dignity of presence, an almost unrivalled mastery of language, a trenchant dialectic, a just and honourable mind; but he is entirely without creative power and has outgrown that energy of moral earnestness which characterized the early years ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... formal differences between these three families are trenchant and easily remembered. The Ericae {207} are all quatrefoils, and quatrefoils of the most studied and accomplished symmetry; and they bear no berries, but only dry seeds. The Myrtillae and Aurorae are both Cinqfoil; but the Myrtillae are symmetrical in their blossom, and the Aurorae unsymmetrical. ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... which he characterised the so-called new science of spiritualism as the invention of impostors and mountebanks. His address, which lacked the author's constitutional caution and discretion, was severely handled in several of the leading journals, and a trenchant pen, in an Edinburgh cotemporary, "cut up rough" with a vengeance. Among others who replied to Dr. Thomson's strictures was Dr. Robert H. Collyer, of London, who claims to be the original discoverer of electro-biology, ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... of the Forum, with their rich carvings and colonnades and walls in tones of delicate creamy white, scarce less brilliant than the clouds which a gentle morning breeze was chasing westwards to the sea. And under the arcades of the temples cool shadows, dense and blue, trenchant against the white marble like an irregular mosaic of lapis lazuli, with figures gliding along between the tall columns, priests in white robes, furtive of gait, slaves of the pontificate, shoeless and silent and as if detached from the noise and ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... uneasiness. The outburst was the more effective for following and preceding close passionless and pointed reasoning, a trenchant review of other republics ancient and modern, and an elaborate argument in favour of the representation prescribed ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... the year 1821, O'Connell, during the intervals of Ms laborious occupations in court and on circuit, addressed a series of stirring letters to "the People of Ireland," remarkable as containing some of the best and most trenchant of his political writings. His object was to induce the postponement of the annual petition for Emancipation, and the substitution instead of a general agitation for Parliamentary reform, in conjunction with the English ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... time the whistle rang down from the ridge, splitting the air, strong and trenchant, the fiery, shrill ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... awoke later, as became its quality, but awoke gradually and surely. First, the lonely boar-spears and knives of the chase had been reddened as of old; then, had gleamed trenchant in the morning sunshine; now, doors and windows were thrown open, horses in their stables looked round over their shoulders at the light and freshness pouring in at doorways, leaves sparkled and rustled at iron-grated windows, ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... would come more extensively into operation with that progress of enlightenment which their theory assumed. [Footnote: This is urged by Hazlitt in his criticism of Malthus in the Spirit of the Age.] But the criticisms of Malthus dealt a trenchant blow to the doctrine that human reason, acting through legislation and government, has a virtually indefinite power of modifying the condition of society. The difficulty, which he stated so vividly and definitely, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... pleasantly the trenchant remarks launched by the editors, (of the work upheld) literary and musical; and examine for their predilection by turning its pages the analytical merit of its composer's names; all serious-minded men; capable lamp-bearers in the wide arcana ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... just one grain of common sense, one spark of wisdom, might not enter his head?" Alas! That brain was now impervious to advice; and the young De Broglie, from whom we quote this extract, sums up the opinion of the French plenipotentiaries in the trenchant phrase, ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... where was George?) and who interposed her sweet face between his anger and her husband's scorn. Many timid remonstrances had she uttered to George in behalf of her brother, but the former in his trenchant way cut these entreaties short. "I'm an honest man," he said, "and if I have a feeling I show it, as an honest man will. How the deuce, my dear, would you have me behave respectfully to such a fool as your brother?" So Jos was pleased with George's absence. His plain hat, and gloves on a ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... deliberate imitator of the man who wrote the Dialogue Between an Awd Wife, a Lass, and a Butcher. All that has been said about the trenchant realism of farmlife in the dialogue of 1673 applies with equal force to the dialogues of 1684. The later poet, having a larger canvas at his disposal, is able to introduce more characters and more incident; but in all that pertains to style and atmosphere he keeps closely to ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... somehow in the smaller forms that the French composer finds the trenchant utterance of his fancy. A Scherzo, after the ballad of Goethe, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," tells the famous story of the boy who in his master's absence compels the spirit in the broom to fetch the water; but he cannot say the magic word to stop the ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... very cynical negation. They have become, as Sheridan wittily said, like the blank page between the Old and the New Testament. Others have taken refuge in a kind of highly rationalised Judaism little different from pure Theism. Some of the most independent, scientific, and trenchant criticism of the Old Testament writings has proceeded from members of the race which was once distinguished for the most complete and superstitious worship of the letter of the law. Spinoza in his 'Tractatus Theologico-Politicus' led the way in this path, ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... in running, vaulting, wrestling, dancing, or in any other manly exercise, could compare with the Lancashire lads. In archery, above all, none could match them; for were not their ancestors the stout bowmen and billmen whose cloth-yard shafts, and trenchant weapons, won the day at Flodden? And were they not true sons of their fathers? And then, I speak it with yet greater pride, there were few, if any, lasses who could compare in comeliness with the rosy-cheeked, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... theoretic freedom. "We are masters of our acts," he began, "in the sense that we can choose such and such a thing; now, we have not to choose our end, but the means that relate to it, as Aristotle says." Unfortunately, even this trenchant amputation of man's free energies would not accord with fact or with logic. Experience proved that man's power of choice in action was very far from absolute, and logic seemed to require that every choice should have some predetermining cause which ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... word, portmanteau word. V. be concise &c. adj.; condense &c. 195; abridge &c. 201; abstract &c. 596; come to the point. Adj. concise, brief, short, terse,close; to the point, exact; neat, compact; compressed, condensed, pointed; laconic, curt, pithy, trenchant, summary; pregnant; compendious &c. (compendium) 596; succinct; elliptical, epigrammatic, quaint, crisp; sententious. Adv. concisely &c. adj.; briefly, summarily; in brief, in short, in a word, in a few words; for shortness sake; to come to the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... only, the god of thunder, never passed over the bridge, for fear lest his heavy tread or the heat of his lightnings would destroy it. The god Heimdall kept watch and ward there night and day. He was armed with a trenchant sword, and carried a trumpet called Giallar-horn, upon which he generally blew a soft note to announce the coming or going of the gods, but upon which a terrible blast would be sounded when Ragnarok should come, and the frost-giants and Surtr ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... and condemned to death (but reprieved), and his accuser rose in the official scale as rapidly as if he had won a great battle on land or sea. His victory was not unlike that of those British orators who made a reputation out of the impeachment of Lord Clive or Warren Hastings, save that with him a trenchant pen took the place of an eloquent tongue. I knew Chunghau both before and after his disgrace. In 1859, when an American embassy for the first time entered the gates of Peking, it was Chunghau who was appointed to escort the minister to the capital and back again ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... Measure.—When Hamlet told his guilty mother that he would set her up a glass where she might see the inmost part of her, he was doing for his mother what Shakespeare in Measure for Measure is doing for the lust-spotted world. The play is a trenchant satire on the evils of society. Such realistic pictures of the things that are, but should not be, have always jarred on our aesthetic sense from Aristophanes to Zola, and Measure for Measure is one of ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... in you, Mary!" said Mrs. Scudder,—giving vent to herself in one of those trenchant shorthand expressions wherein positive natures incline to sum up everything, if they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... hind-feet, unlike those of many animals, are valueless for defence; but yet it has not been left without ample means of protection. Examine its fore-feet, and on each will be seen two large, powerful, trenchant claws. With these, aided by its muscular power, and thick hide covered with long coarse hair, it boldly defies the ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... never late at a recitation in school or college. In court, in congress, in society, he was equally punctual. Amid the cares and distractions of a singularly busy life, Horace Greeley managed to be on time for every appointment. Many a trenchant paragraph for the "Tribune" was written while the editor was waiting for men of ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... a struggle for wealth, for honor, and precedence; of plots and counterplots, of foiled ambition and ruined reputations,— with all this Hawthorne had but slight acquaintance. We miss in him the masculine vigor of Fielding, the humanity of Dickens, and the trenchant criticism of Thackeray; but he knew that the true poetry of life (at the present time) was to be found in quiet nooks and in places far off from the turbulent maelstrom of humanity, and in his ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... his singing-voice, was sweet, but with a kind of trenchant edge upon it, a genial asperity, that gave it ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... trenchant and admirable, were perhaps made at the delightful dinner which followed the oration. Perhaps President Eliot promptly took up and threw back with eloquent energy the gage which had been thrown in the very face of the venerable ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... give the soul of man the restfulness and solacement it is ever craving. And remember, Europa, remember, Asia, that foreign culture is as necessary to the spirit of a nation as is foreign commerce to its industries. Elsewise, thy materialism, Europa, or thy spiritualism, Asia, no matter how trenchant and impregnable, no matter how deep the foundation, how broad the superstructure thereof, is vulgar, narrow, mean—is nothing, in a ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... certainly the poorer for the loss of Wickham Place. It had helped to balance their lives, and almost to counsel them. Nor is their ground-landlord spiritually the richer. He has built flats on its site, his motor-cars grow swifter, his exposures of Socialism more trenchant. But he has spilt the precious distillation of the years, and no chemistry of his can give it back to ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... meted out was that of the tiger, not of the man. For swords were busy, keen and trenchant blades hewing and hacking at the unfortunate wretches, till all was over, and those who might recover would pass to the end of their miserable days crippled and helpless, each with his right hand and left foot shorn ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... with abhorrence; as more hopelessly lost than sinners. Any one whose sphere tempted him to recognition of the foibles of others, he called the Devil; but in spite of his perception of such diabolism, he was rather fond of yielding to it, for he had a most trenchant tongue. I myself once fell under his condemnation as the Devil, by having too plainly shared his joy in his characterization of certain fellow-men; perhaps a group of Bostonians from whom he had just parted and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... wished to speak to me. The doctor, however, had no way of knowing that my statement was not true. To deny my request was simply one of his ill-advised whims, and his refusal was given with customary curtness and contempt. I met his refusal in kind, and presented him with a trenchant ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... running from the neck downwards on each side of the body. It lives entirely on ants; and on opening its mouth we found that it could not provide itself with other food, as it was entirely destitute of teeth. Its claws, which were long, sharp, pointed, and trenchant, were its only implements of defence. Its hinder claws were short and weak; but the front ones were powerful, and so formed that anything at which it seizes can never hope to escape. The object of its powerful crooked claws ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... Bernhardi has the gift of close and searching reasoning, and the ability to present his views in a vivid and trenchant form, as convincing as the writings of ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... past, during which these weapons assumed a more formidable aspect than at others; and never were they more formidable than in the times of the Coal Measures. The teeth of the Rhizodus—a ganoidal fish of our coal fields—were more sharp and trenchant than those of the crocodile of the Nile, and in the larger specimens fully four times the bulk and size of the teeth of the hugest reptile of this species that now lives. The dorsal spine of its contemporary, the Gyracanthus, a great placoid, much exceeded in size that of any existing fish: it ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller |
