"Buoyant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... these respects. He was a more docile patient than Brian had expected to find him. But he did not seem to recover his buoyant spirits with his strength. He had long fits of melancholy brooding, in which the habitual line between his brows became more marked than ever. But it was not until two or three weeks more of their strangely monotonous existence had passed by, that Brian Luttrell got any clue to ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... spirit. And even as he heard and felt the throb of mighty engines that came to him from afar, and considered what mastery over the deeps they represented, the thought occurred to him that he, too, was master of the boundless water, buoyant at his will. An exaltation sprang up in him as he realised throughout all his fibre its ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... end of a narrow street, lined with modern and squalid hovels, the triumphal arch of Septimus Severus and of Caracalla extends its luminous bow; and high above the heavy mass of architecture, resting upon slim aerial little columns, a buoyant aediculus shines like a coral tabernacle or a ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... buoyant, joyous, emphatic reiteration: 'Blessed,' 'blest,' 'blessings.' That is more than the fascination exercised over a man's mind by a word; it covers very deep thoughts and goes very far into the centre of the Christian life. God blesses us by gifts; we bless Him by words. The aim of His act ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... sudden fear unmans, That he his flight delays not for the view. Behind me I discern'd a devil black, That running, up advanc'd along the rock. Ah! what fierce cruelty his look bespake! In act how bitter did he seem, with wings Buoyant outstretch'd and feet of nimblest tread! His shoulder proudly eminent and sharp Was with a sinner charg'd; by either haunch He held him, the foot's sinew griping fast. "Ye of our bridge!" he cried, "keen-talon'd fiends! Lo! one of Santa Zita's elders! Him Whelm ye beneath, while ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... waters,— We part, and for aye!— My pathway leads on O'er the billows away;— These feet will grow weary In life's busy mart, These eyes be oft tear-dim, And heavy this heart; But thou wilt sing on In thy joyous unrest, Unchanging, unwearying, Buoyant and blest While the slow-footed centuries Glide on their way, And nations grow hoary, And sink in decay,— Thou, tireless and tameless, Unchecked in thy flow, Shalt sing on as ever, O ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... week amongst the Mormans, who are a remarkably industrious and energetic, as well as peculiar people. One of the elders introduced me to a daughter by his tenth wife. I had frequent dips in the Salt Lake, in company with the Mormans, their wives and families. The water of the lake is so buoyant that one might throw up one's hands and remain upright. The body would sink only ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... accounts, she was never very beautiful; but she had an instinct for strange, yet effective, costumes, which attracted much attention. She has been described as "a fluttering, buoyant, gorgeous little butterfly." Many were drawn to her. She was careless of what she did, and her name was not untouched with scandal. But she lived through it all, and emerged a clever, sympathetic woman of wide experience, both on ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... Forrester muttered. "How could a metal ship weighing tons be suspended in the air like a balloon? It is stationary, but it is not buoyant. We seem in all ...
— The Sky Trap • Frank Belknap Long
... a thoughtful pace, turned into the wagon track, and, in the shelter of the woods now, whimsically felt his pulse; then, lighting a cigar, tramped on with a buoyant stride. ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... certain fund of physical strength, or he could hardly have borne the literary labour of his later years, especially as he was subject to the medical treatment of a worse than empirical era. At one time he says, while he was at Westminster, his spirits were so buoyant that he fancied he should never die, till a skull thrown out before him by a gravedigger as he was passing through St. Margaret's churchyard in the night recalled him to a ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... heart bounds and throbs even more warmly than your own! His face is radiant with hope, which, without other source, springs out of his own buoyant nature. He has cast doubt behind him, and says, in answer to the arguments that struggle to get possession of his reason, "Let to-morrow take care of itself. ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... of grace, and sprightliness, and candor, that comes forward with light and buoyant steps across the open court, towards the inner hall; and we shall hardly find time to sketch him before he reaches it. He is about fourteen years old, but tall for that age, with elegance of form and manliness of bearing. ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... thrilled him! He had plodded so long alone. He sprang up from his place at the breakfast table where the message had been handed him, his eyes shining and his step buoyant. Securing leave of absence from school duties for a couple of days, he went at once to hire a team which would take him forty miles over the ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... American mines before the end of July. But he had already made some money out of them, and, though he would find himself sometimes trembling before he had taken his daily allowance of port wine and brandy-and-water, still he was buoyant, and hopeful of living in a park, with a palace at the West End, and a seat in Parliament. Knowing also, as he did, that his friend Lopez was intimate with the Duchess of Omnium, he had much immediate satisfaction in the intimacy which these relations created. He was getting in the ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... employed, and the reports for the last year show a smaller number of employees affected by strikes and lockouts than in any year since 1884. The depression in the prices of agricultural products had been greatly relieved and a buoyant and hopeful tone was beginning to be ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... intellect, might have set herself to work, backed by that very vow that defied poor Hitty, and, by sheer resolution, have dragged her husband up from the gulf and saved him, though as by fire; or a more buoyant and younger wife might have passed it by as a first offence, hopeful of its being also the only one. But an instinctive knowledge of the man bereft Hitty of any such hope; she knew it was not the first time; from his own revelations and penitent confessions while she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... boy's manner was light and buoyant enough to deceive even the experienced and hardened Uhlan who had constituted himself captor, his heart was heavy, for he well understood the danger of his position. He could hope for little nursing from the peculiar German minds with which he had to cope. Appearances certainly were ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson
... wondering eyes). Lots of Beetle-killer? And you will give some of it to her, to make her free and buoyant. I think one really has the right—when people happen ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 25, 1893 • Various
... now such acts are clearly obsolete. No, no, I'll mount his saddle! There's my place! How often have I dreamt, in pensive ease, He bore me, buoyant, through the world apace, His mane a flag ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... service. She did not wait to be asked to help her, but watched for opportunities, and so proved a great blessing and treasure in the lowly cottage home, that would have been very dismal and sad without her sunny, buoyant little body. ...
— Little Alice's Palace - or, The Sunny Heart • Anonymous
... which they see is popular. As for myself, I hope that with such a subject a luxuriant style may pass muster, inasmuch as the passages which are closely reasoned and stripped of all ornament are more likely to seem forced and far-fetched than those treated in a more buoyant and, as it were, more exultant strain. Nevertheless, I am just as anxious for the day to come (I hope it has come already!) when mere charming and honeyed words, however justly applied, shall give way to a chaste simplicity. Well, I have told you all about my three days' ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... to work," he would cry exultantly. "He is past the first buoyant enthusiasm of youth. Ah, Leslie, when a man begins to be serious, then he begins to be something." And her only answer would be, "I wonder, Maurice, if Claire Lessing will ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... even if it justifies me in my own eyes, what matters it to me, since it does not give me any comfort? The only thought that gives me comfort is that the descendants of decayed as well as of the most buoyant races have to go the same way,—to dust and ashes. This makes the difference between the weak and the strong a great deal less. The whole misfortune of beings like me is their isolation. What erroneous ideas have ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... heart is sick with thinking Of the misery she must find. Her mind is almost sinking— That once so buoyant mind— She cannot look before her, On the evil-haunted way. Redeem her! oh! restore her! Thou Lord of night and day! ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... prayer, then these other two which, as it were, flow from it on either side, will be possible to us; and of these two the Apostle sets first, 'Rejoice evermore.' This precept was given to the Thessalonians, in Paul's first letter, when things were comparatively bright with him, and he was young and buoyant; and in one of his later letters, when he was a prisoner, and things were anything but rosy coloured, he struck the same note again, and in spite of his 'bonds in Christ' bade the Philippians 'Rejoice in the Lord always, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... enemy's gun was a sixty-four-pound Blakely, as we afterward found, whose enormous projectile moved very slowly and gave ample time to cover,—insomuch, that, while the fragments of shell fell all around and amongst us, not a man was hurt. This soon gave the men the most buoyant confidence, and they shouted with childish delight over ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... of the Aboukir two sailors found themselves clinging to a spar which was not sufficiently buoyant to keep them both afloat. Harry, a Salvationist, grasped the situation and said to his mate: "Tom, for me to die will mean to go home to mother. I don't think it's quite the same for you, so you hold to the spar and I will go down; but promise ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... a buoyant amusement in his eyes. "That, and finding some forgotten hole of a place called ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... intolerable situation, and so, under the spell of his buoyant spirits, he determined to make an end of it once ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... detached phrases, as if they passed over a resonant sheet of water, the perfume of the flowers that bloom so strangely toward the close of Parisian balls, when the late hour, confusing all notions of time, and the weariness of the sleepless night communicate to brains which have become more buoyant in a more nervous atmosphere a sort of youthful giddiness. The robust nature of Jansoulet, that civilized savage, was more susceptible than another to these strange refinements; and he had to exert all his strength to refrain ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... celebrated Opium-Eater,[1] with bitter feeling, as—"Oxford Street!—stony-hearted stepmother! Thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children!" Here, though his spirits were not just then very buoyant, our poor little dandy breathed more freely than when he was passing through the wretched crowded court (Closet Court) which he had just quitted. He passed and met hundreds who, like himself, seemed released for a precious day's interval from miserable confinement and slavery during ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... vast spread Earth, and saw The various fashioned forms, with awe Of green and creeping life, And said, "In every moving form, With buoyant breath and pulses warm, In flowery crowns and veined leaves, A GODDESS dwells, whose bosom heaves ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... angels lead me to the happy shores, And floating paeans fill the buoyant wind. Farewell, base earth farewell.—My soul is freed: Far from its clayey cell it ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... am hardly yet, my dear friend, capable of estimating the true extent of my emotions. Like the buoyant seaweed torn from its native bed among the submarine forest of the corals, I have been tossed from wave to wave, hurried onwards by a stream more resistless than that which sweeps through the Gulf of Labrador, and far—far away as yet is the wished-for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... knew that I loved my husband's very footprints better than I did the whole human race besides; but I could not tell him so then. Oh, in those days, though my heart was so full, I had so little power of utterance! There he stood before me! he that had been so ruddy and buoyant, now so pale from loss of blood, and so miserable, that I could have fallen and groveled at his feet in sorrow and remorse at not being able ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... Doctor Walker might be concerned in it, might possibly have bothered her with unwelcome attentions; but it seemed to me that Louise was hardly a girl to take refuge in flight under such circumstances. She had always been high-spirited, with the well-poised head and buoyant step of the outdoors girl. It must have been much more in keeping with Louise's character, as I knew it, to resent vigorously any unwelcome attentions from Doctor Walker. It was the suitor whom I should have expected to see in headlong flight, not the ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... priest, as I live!" said La Tour, catching the page by his arm, and drawing him back a few paces. "But methinks your step is too quick and buoyant, my ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... at a village which reminded us, at first glance, of a boom town in the Far West. Crude shelters of corrugated iron and rough pine boards faced each other down the length of one long street. They looked sadly out of place in that landscape. They did not have the cheery, buoyant ugliness of pioneer homes in an unsettled country, for behind them were the ruins of the old village, fragments of blackened wall, stone chimneys filled with accumulations of rubbish, garden-plots choked with weeds, reminding us that here was no outpost of a new ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... American girl unique among the women of the world. Consequently, a book with a Bell heroine is sure of a hearty welcome. What, therefore, can be said of this book, which contains no less than four types of witching and buoyant femininity? There are four stories of power and dash in this volume: "The Last Straw," "The Surrender of Lapwing," "The Penance of Hedwig," and "Garret Owen's Little Countess." Each one of these tells a tale full of verve and thrill, each one has a ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... was promoted to having my arms shaken off in the character of a saviour. But I got any amount of praise at last, though I was terribly out of breath—at the very last gasp, as you might say. A man, smooth-faced, well-knit, very elated and buoyant, began talking to me endlessly. He was mighty happy, and anyhow he could talk to me, because I was past doing anything but taking a moment's rest. He said I had come in the nick of time, and was quite the ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... though at a distance and but gloomy in aspect, put all on board in buoyant spirits; but these were but transitory, our enthusiasm being soon damped by a dense fog, resembling those the Londoners are so accustomed to see in the winter, and which in an incredibly short space of time, in this instance, obscured everything around. Our proximity ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... She wrote, “If my poems are of that common order which have, as Falstaff says, a natural alacrity in sinking, the praise of hireling and nameless critics would not keep them above the gulf of oblivion. If, on the contrary, they possess the buoyant property of true poetry, their fame will be established in after years, when no one will ask, ‘What said the reviewers?’” Her remarks as to plagiarism—petty pilferings—and borrowing from others, to be found in her letters, are most interesting. She thought ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... proposed to Moya, she hesitated and responded languidly; but when Paul suggested leaving her even for a day, her fears fluttered across his path and wiled him another way. Vaguely he felt that she was unlike herself—less buoyant, though often restless; and sometimes he fancied she was pale underneath her sun-burned color like that of rose-hips in October. Various causes kept him inert, while strength mounted in his veins, and life seemed made for the pure joy ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... buoyant nature, repressed so long, began to reassert themselves, and soon burst forth in gladness. The change was slow, but sure, and by the time the spring days came and it was possible to get out into the open air, the color had come back to the pale face and the light to the dimmed eyes. She was ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... frequently as he had promised. She learnt speedily of his arrival at New York, then that he had reached Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, then that he was with his friend Sutherland on the little island amid the coral reefs. Subsequent letters, written in buoyant spirits, contained long descriptions of the scenery about him, and of the life he led. He expressed a firm confidence in Sutherland's enterprises; beyond a doubt, there was no end of money to be made by an energetic man; he ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... surely there, can the influence and pressure of the things of time on his immortal spirit be understood; how much of him was killed or changed, how much of him could not be. There are the first-fruits of his flowering manhood, when the bright and buoyant genius in him had free play and large delight in its handiwork; when the fresh interest of invention was still his, and the dramatic sense, the pleasure in the play of life, the power of motion and variety; before the old strength of sight and of flight had passed from weary ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... same time, compelled him to execute a lofty caracole. Sir Halbert Glendinning looked at the demeanour of his new attendant with that sort of melancholy pleasure with which those who have long followed the pursuits of life, and are sensible of their vanity, regard the gay, young, and buoyant spirits to whom existence, as yet, is ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... of raft formed of a couple of planks placed about five feet apart and across which a dozen short pieces of wood had been nailed, forming a buoyant platform, on which no doubt our enemies had floated themselves down from the head of the dam, where ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... of course——But that's no matter. I got Paulette off the island and, inch by inch, feeling my way, back to the channel where buoyant water, at least, lay under us. I twisted and turned like a corkscrew, but I dared not leave it. Once I cautioned Paulette never to try a short cut, just to keep abreast of me; and twice my heart was in my mouth at a hollow, instant-long clatter under our shoes. ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... round his little friend's neck, Louis wandered home, and, during the walk, easily persuaded Alfred not to say a word of what had passed; and as for Louis—oh, his eye was brighter, his step more buoyant, his heart ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... screams when the steam whistle sounds, and his mother falls down upon him from the opposite seat He laughs aloud, and seems in such buoyant spirits that the women laugh too; and very soon Netta has quite forgotten her home, as with her hand clasped in Howel's he unfolds to her his future plans and ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... fringing weeds. I am acquainted with no better Darwinian than the crab; and however clumsy he may be when taken from his own element, he has a free and floating motion which is almost graceful in his own yielding and buoyant home. It is so with all wild creatures, but especially with those of water and air. A gull is not reckoned an especially graceful bird, but yonder I see one, snowy white, that has come to fish in ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Free commune with the choir that cannot die; Science and song; delight in little things, 50 The buoyant child surviving in the man; Fields, forests, ancient mountains, ocean, sky, With all their voices—O dare I accuse My earthly lot as guilty of my spleen, Or call my destiny niggard! O no! no! 55 It is her largeness, and her overflow, Which ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... onward: the earthly Paradise was unfolded to their view; the air was balmy, and laden with rich fragrance from the numberless flowers around; but instead of filling the spirit with soft languor, and indisposing the body to exertion, the gentle breezes imparted new vigor to the frame, and the buoyant, hilarious feelings of early youth shot through the veins, making the thoughtful eye sparkle, and giving to the grave foot of saddened maturity the elasticity of childhood. A new, unsuspected power of enjoyment was awakened in the bosom of the friends, combining somewhat of the ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... like spring it seemed. The sky was a curving and solid sheet of sunlight, and the youths of the army were for the moment a great and happy family. They were marching to battle, wounds and death, but they were too young and too buoyant to think ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... mixed with it were of iron-gray, which I saw blanch to a perfect silver, while that pearly tone of his complexion, which Appleton so admired, lost itself in the wanness of age and pain. When he walked, he had a kind of spring in his gait, as if now and again a buoyant thought lifted him from the ground. It was fine to meet him coming down a Cambridge street; you felt that the encounter made you a part of literary history, and set you apart with him for the moment from ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... new energy and pluck. Nobody dreamed of being frightened away from camp by such a little thing as a meteor bursting near by, or any other strange happening. Perhaps, when night came around again, this buoyant feeling might take wings, and fly away; but then, there would be fourteen and more hours before darkness again assailed them, and what was the use fretting over ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Afloat • George A. Warren
... had got on both of these wonderful slippers, he was altogether too buoyant to tread on earth. Making a step or two, lo and behold! upward he popped into the air high above the heads of Quicksilver and the Nymphs, and found it very difficult to clamber down again. Winged slippers and all such ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... end of all this? Just what you would have supposed. She had led a life of simple, unbounded love and trust,—a buoyant, elastic gladness,—a dream of sunshine. No gray cloud had ever lowered in her sky, no thunderbolt smitten her joys, no winter rain chilled her warmth. Only the white fleeciness of morning mist had flitted sometimes over her summer-sky, deepening the blue. Little cooling drops had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... library with buoyant steps and a light heart; aye, even a little snatch of song on her lips, for she had made up her mind that she would wait there until Harry came and have a ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... layer. The river rushed through the opening. Immediately the logs in the wings were tumbled in from either side. At first the men had to do all of the work, but soon the river itself turned to their assistance. Timbers creaked and settled, or rose slightly buoyant as the water loosened the tangle. Men trod on the edge of expectation. Constantly the logs shifted, and as constantly the men shifted also, avoiding the upheavals and grindings together, wary eyes estimating the correlation of the ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... matrimony. Labor ceased to be a trouble to him; he sang and sewed from morning to night; his hot goose no longer burned him, for his heart was as hot as his goose; the vibrations of his head, at each successive stitch, were no longer sad and melancholy. There was a buoyant shake of exultation in them which showed that his soul was placid ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... and turned off, leaving the officer standing by the sentry. He went some distance back, then walked down the sand to the water's edge, and waded noiselessly into the water. The oilskin bag was, he knew, buoyant enough to give him ample ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... out. The Marechal d'Estrees had a stupefied air, as though he saw nothing but a mist before him. The Marechal de Besons, enveloped more than ordinarily in his big wig, appeared deeply meditative, his look cast down and angry. Pelletier, very buoyant, simple, curious, looking at everything. Torcy, three times more starched than usual, seemed to look at everything by stealth. Effiat, meddlesome, piqued, outraged, ready to boil over, fuming at everybody, his ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... He departed, his buoyant nature rising once more in partial relief. True to his Yankee instincts he now concluded they were only ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... straps save the third one," began Harriet. "By that time the trunk was standing on end. It was very buoyant. The idea never occurred to me that there was any danger from the trunk. I was too much concerned wondering if I shouldn't have to open my mouth, for my lungs were nearly bursting. Well, I gave the last strap a jerk and I think the ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... far from here, The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay Among the green Illyrian hills; and there The sunshine in the happy glens is fair, And by the sea, and in the brakes. The grass is cool, the sea-side air Buoyant and fresh, the mountain flowers More virginal and sweet than ours. And there, they say, two bright and aged snakes, Who once were Cadmus and Harmonia, Bask in the glens or on the warm sea-shore, In breathless quiet, after all their ills; Nor do they see their country, nor the ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... and his laugh so buoyant, that Mr. Heard, who had been fully expecting him to withdraw from the affair, began to feel that he had under-rated his swimming powers. "Just jumping in and swimming out again is not quite the same as saving a drownding man," he ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... and democracy too rigid for such splendors; but the nearest equivalent to one was the "age," let us call it that, of Theodore Roosevelt. There was the central figure—an age must have a central figure—a buoyant personality with a Renaissance zest for life, and a Renaissance curiosity about all things known, and unknown, and a boundless capacity for vitalizing everyone and everything with which he ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... his bright nod. She walked to the window and watched his buoyant figure hastening down the elm-shaded street. When she turned back into the empty room she looked as though youth had touched her on ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... vain; but distressed as his circumstances were at this date, his heart was warm and his board as hospitable as ever. Many an evening have I passed with him talking over the events of former times and of his financial schemes. I have never met with a spirit more buoyant nor a disposition more sanguine. In that Paris where he had once stood at the head of the mercantile interest, and enjoyed, with a zest of which few men were capable, every luxury that the luxurious capital could supply, he was now the double bankrupt, the prisoner of war. But to the credit ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... simply did not exist. I have never known a more buoyant, virile nature. Scott's writings abound in references to the extraordinary value he placed upon his help, and after the share which he took in the Depot and Winter Journeys it was clear that he would probably be taken ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... fists clenched and arms tense. The hot, dark countenance receded, became an alert hostility, watching its chance. Denton for one instant felt confident, and strangely buoyant and serene. His heart beat quickly. He felt his body alive, ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red— On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed, O'er the breast's superb abundance where a man might base ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... expresses their official consent to the exceptional treatment of their tribesman, and urges his request in a little speech, full of pathos and beauty and unconscious portraiture of the speaker. I take it as a picture of an ideal old age, showing in an actual instance how happy, vigorous, full of buoyant energy and undiminished appetite for enterprise a devout old age may be. And my purpose now is not merely to comment on the few words of our text, but upon the whole of what falls from the lips ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... eyes smart so sharply, that the pain which I thus suffered, together with the weakness occasioned by want of food, made me giddy and faint for some moments, but I soon grew better. I knew beforehand the impossibility of sinking in this buoyant water, but I was surprised to find that I could not swim at my accustomed pace; my legs and feet were lifted so high and dry out of the lake, that my stroke was baffled, and I found myself kicking against the thin air instead of the ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... training of the young Harvard scholars in such exercises. He had the sensibility and gentleness of a woman, the imagination of a poet, and the courage of a hero; a genial kindly sense of humor, and buoyant elastic spirit of joyousness, that made him, with his fine intellectual and moral qualities, an incomparable friend and teacher to the young, for whose rejoicing vitality he had the sympathy of fellowship as well as the indulgence ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... over the young girl, an all-pervading Hyperion, with faultless ruffles, white hands, and voice softly modulated. That evening the soldier played piquet with the wiry old lady, losing four shillings to that antiquated gamester, and, when he had paid the stakes, the young girl was gone and the buoyant beau had ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... could tell from our brief scrutiny a great change had come over the dwellers in southern Belgium. In August they had been buoyant and confident of the ultimate outcome and very proud of the behavior of their little army. Even when the Germans burst through the frontier defenses and descended on them in innumerable swarms they ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... took Martha with him day after day. He forced her to use up all of the strength that she possessed each day so that she would drop with exhaustion at night. To me he left most of the comforting of Nell—and Harriet. Like all women of buoyant and shallow nature, Nell soon began to rebound from her tragedy and it was hard to keep Billy within decorous bounds in his comforting of her. It would have been impossible to have done it at all with the former Billy, but the quiet, steady light that shone in his honest eyes ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... story, whose tale sounded to me like one told in a vision; and I could hardly bring myself to believe that I saw his daughter's form once more before me in flesh and blood, though with diminished beauty and sunk spirits. The buoyant vivacity with which she had resisted every touch of adversity, had now assumed the air of composed and submissive, but dauntless resolution and constancy. Her father, though aware and jealous of the effect of her praises on my mind, could not ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... How happy she was! This was life: one night of life was hers—no more. With the dawn came the end. This was her first—her last—night of life, but how exquisite it was! The voice of the desert sang in her ears, the light soft sand caressed her flying feet. Within bounded her heart, buoyant with leaping joy. Never had she realised the strength of her swift, straight ankles—never till now the free, joyous power ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... enough food for many days, rough as it was. In the latitude of Pitcairn, the island so famous because to it fled the mutineers of the Bounty, they all but perished. For two days a severe storm nearly overwhelmed them. The boat was more buoyant, and with the sea-anchor trailing, they came through the trial without injury. Steve said the lightning was "yoost like a leedle bid of hell." It circled them about, hissed in the water, and finally struck their mast repeatedly, so that the wise ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... working away diligently, for the work must, he says, be brought to a certain point before we start for Naples.' Besides the mantle, Tischbein was doing the Campagna. I remember that some years ago an acquaintance of mine, a painter who was neither successful nor talented, but always buoyant, told me he was starting for Italy next day. 'I am going,' he said, 'to paint the Campagna. The Campagna WANTS painting.' Tischbein was evidently giving it a good dose of what it wanted. 'It takes no little time,' writes Goethe to Frau von Stein, 'merely to cover so large ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... large enough, as he stepped rapidly backwards, to throw him prostrate on the track, while the heavy-laden cars passed on over his body. It was the work of an instant, but it was done. There lay, mangled and writhing, the young man, who, not one moment before, was buoyant, healthful, full of enterprise and hope. There was no hope of his life. With one arm extended, the only unbroken limb in his body, he speaks: "I must die—I know it—I must die, but thank God I am ready to die. Yes, I am ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... had I been helped into my bathing-suit than I sprang out upon the warm sand and without thought of fear plunged into the cool water. I felt the great billows rock and sink. The buoyant motion of the water filled me with an exquisite, quivering joy. Suddenly my ecstasy gave place to terror; for my foot struck against a rock and the next instant there was a rush of water over my head. ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... comparative importance of the individual, which one cannot do in crowded colonies. I coveted surroundings that should be primitive—an atmosphere in which my thoughts could speak to me coherent. I would be as one in a cave, looking forth on sea, and sky, and the buoyant glory of Nature; unvexed of conventions; untrammelled by social observances; building up my enchanted palace of the imagination against such a background as only the unsullied majesty of sky and ocean could present. For the result was to crown with my name an epoch in literature; ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... for Burnham had been a mighty foot-ball player in his college days. The old president rose, and the tumult sank to reverential silence while a silver tongue sent its beautiful diction on high in a prayer for the bodies, the minds, and the souls of the whole buoyant throng in the race for which they were about to be let loose. And that was just what the tense uplifted faces suggested to John Burnham—he felt in them the spirit of the thoroughbred at the post, the young hound straining at the leash, the ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... brave cap of red flannel, drawn down to eyes of lustrous black. For the rest, he gave unity and coherence to a jacket and pantaloons of heterogeneous elements, and, such was the elasticity of his spirit, a buoyant grace to feet encased in wooden shoes. Habitually came a barrel-organist, and ground before the ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... The wild, buoyant creature, how beautiful he is! I had often seen his dead carcass, and at a distance had witnessed the hounds drive him across the upper fields; but the thrill and excitement of meeting him in his wild freedom in the woods were unknown to me till, one cold winter day, ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... herself again, though she had not had more than an hour's slumber, it is true, with a dull ache at her heart that was very new and bitterly unwelcome to her, but with the buoyant vivacity and the proud carelessness of her nature in arms against it, and with that gayety of childhood inherent to her repelling, and very nearly successfully, the foreign ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... place afforded. As usual, the Malay coolies were late in arriving and began making many difficulties about various things. To cheer them I gave each f. 1.50 in advance, which made them all happy, and in buoyant, talkative spirits they immediately went off to buy rice, dried fish, tobacco, cigarettes, and other things. All was well, and at ten o'clock in the morning we finally started, with a ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... depravity. Their thoughts and mouths were never clean. The verses they wrote are too foul to transcribe as an illustration of the taste of their composers. The orgies in which they indulged were not scenes of gaiety, in which buoyant spirits and lively wit might excuse excess, but were serious, bestial, and premeditated. The dealings of these men with the female sex were but a succession of low intrigues, which destroyed all sentiment and left nothing but disgust behind them. We hear ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... professedly an epic poem, but it may be more properly described as a poetical novel. Nor can it be said to inculcate any particular moral, or to do more than unmantle the decorum of society. Bold and buoyant throughout, it exhibits a free irreverent knowledge of the world, laughing or mocking as the thought serves, in the most unexpected antitheses to the proprieties of ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... were filled by some of those foundlings of fortune, who, overwhelmed in the torrent of corruption at an early period, lay at the bottom like drowned bodies while sanity remained in them, but at length, becoming buoyant by putrefaction, they rose as they rotted, and floated to the surface of the polluted stream, where they were drifted along, the objects of terror and contagion ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... majority of the temperance men of the province, who looked upon him as their natural leader. His capacity for friendship was great, and his friends might be numbered by thousands, for he had a peculiar faculty of strongly attracting men to himself. This may be ascribed, in part, to the magnetism of a buoyant and strong nature, but it was more largely due to the extreme simplicity of his character, which remained wholly unspoiled by the favours which fortune had showered upon him. No man, however humble, had any difficulty in obtaining an interview with Sir Leonard Tilley; he was every inch a ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... buoyant, happy life does not seem to have passed away. Some beautiful tributes to him, written by other American ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... of the many secrets of English poetry, and as long as it is kept a secret it is admirable. Mr. Kelly, it must be admitted, uses it with becoming modesty and reserve and never suffers it to trammel the white feet of his bright and buoyant muse. His volume is, in many ways, extremely interesting. Most minor poets are at their best in sonnets, but with him it is not so. His sonnets are too narrative, too diffuse, and too lyrical. They ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... should be happy again. She scarcely missed her mother, she did not want her to come back; but she ached and ached to see once again that happy flush return to her father's cheek, that determined ring to his voice, that buoyant confident movement ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... many people always buoyant in spirit and mirthful in appearance as if born optimists. There are also no fewer persons constantly crestfallen and gloomy as if born pessimists. The former, however, may lose their buoyancy and sink deep in despair if they ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... unfitted for their vocation, "miserable, melancholy men, ready to yield up their last breath at any moment, who left home prematurely, and now humbly acknowledge their error." His own happy constitution and buoyant health led him to look on the best side of things, and to take the sunniest possible view of the condition of the new country he was exploring, but occasionally he reveals incidentally the reverse of the picture. Here is a sketch of a sick miner ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... self-confidence and courage, his readiness in every pinch of circumstance or change of plan, and his ever fresh enjoyment of the whole web of human experience, nature, adventure, science, toil and rest, society and solitude. It should be borne in mind that the writer of these buoyant pages was, even while he wrote, harassed by responsibility, stinted in sleep and often struggling with the prostration of sea-sickness. To this last enemy, which he never overcame, I have omitted, in my search after ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... opposition and criticism. Thereafter, his conduct of affairs helped to undermine the fabric of the Second Republic (1848-51). Flung into prison by the minions of Louis Napoleon at the time of the coup d'etat, he emerged buoyant as ever, and took up again the role that he loved ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... Leaning over him, she smoothed his hair lightly with her two hands, curling about her fingers the obstinate scalp lock that always would stand forth from his crown. Reaching up, he took her cool hands and held them tightly against his cheeks. Releasing her, he watched the progress of the buoyant form down the long deck, his soul lit with the flame that warms ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... The Egyptian's buoyant humor had dismissed the whole matter in another moment. He opened his violin-case, lovingly caressing the instrument as he took it out. Then he tucked it fondly under his chin, and resumed his walking. The delicately potent ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Virtue's side! The coral worm seems nought, but coral worms Combined heave up a reef, where mightiest keels Are stranded, and the powers of man put down. The water-drop wears out the stone; and cares Trifling, if ceaseless, form an aggregate, Whose burden weighs the buoyant heart to earth. Think not the right path may be safely left, Though 'twere but for one moment, and one step; That one departure, slight howe'er it be, From Innocence is nought. The young peach-bloom, Rudely brushed off, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... seemed to grow more settled and contented, Eliphalet Hodges waxed more buoyant in the joy of his hale old age, and his wife, all her ambitions satisfied, grew more primly ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... launched the raft, or, as it turned out to be, a sort of square, flat bottomed boat, with sides only a few inches deep, and built of planks. But it was shrunken and gaping from the heat, and at once filled with water. It was sufficiently buoyant to float when empty, but would not sustain any weight. We drew it out again; caulking was out of the question, so we collected dry reeds and tied them into bundles with grass ropes made on the spot. We fastened these bundles to the bottom and sides, and launched ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... wood rises, and the buoyant airship would have done the same, perhaps, save for the fact that it had become caught. ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... Dean came riding in one glad June morning, bronzed, and tanned, and buoyant, and tossed his reins to the orderly who trotted at his heels, while the troop dismounted and watered at the stream, Mrs. Folsom's heart was gladdened by his confident and joyous bearing. Twice, thrice ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... was still resolved never to be taken alive. "Give me liberty or give me death," was now the language of my soul. If I could not enjoy the one, I would cordially embrace the other. But it was a sad alternative after all I had suffered that I might be free, after all my buoyant hopes, all my ardent aspirations for a better life. O, it was a bitter thing, thus to stand in the darkness of night, and with my own hand carefully adjust the cord that was to cut me off from the land of the living, and ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... reading; in the evening, cards with the aunt as in the days of my father; and she always there, smiling, her presence filling my heart. By what road, O Providence! have you led me? What irrevocable destiny am I to accomplish? What! a life so free, an intimacy so charming, so much repose, such buoyant hope! O God! Of what do men complain? What ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... as an acquaintance, Elwood noted his appearance closely as he was coming up. He was a rather young-looking man, of a short, compactly built figure, with quick motions, and that peculiar springy step which distinguishes men of active temperament and hopeful, buoyant spirits; while the fox like cut of his features, the lively gray eyes that beamed from them, and the evidently quick coming and going thoughts that seemed to flash from his thin-moving nostrils and play on his curling lips, served to indicate rapid perceptions, shrewdness, and ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... period when I had opportunities of seeing Papa and Dunetchka (as her mother called Avdotia) together, this is what I remarked about them. Papa remained unceasingly in the same buoyant mood as had so greatly struck me on the day after our arrival. So gay and youthful and full of life and happy did he seem that the beams of his felicity extended themselves to all around him, and involuntarily communicated to ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... the Queen; "and Mary will bear her like herself. But alas! your young and buoyant spirit can ill spell the causes which have broken mine. Forgive me, my children, and farewell for a while—I will prepare both mind and body for this ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott |
