"Felicitous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Rhode Island, was a model Senator. Endowed by nature with a gracious presence, integrity, and good sense, what he had to say on any question was always listened to with attention on both sides of the Senate Chamber. He excelled in the felicitous eulogies which he was called upon to deliver over departed associates. "The shaft of Death, Mr. President," said he on one of these occasions, "has been buried in this Chamber of late with fearful frequency, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... firmly entrenched herself in another. He did not seem to be able to approve of a single thing she had to tell him about the various and sundry occupations with which she filled her days in Lewisburg. But a person in so supremely felicitous a mood as Arethusa was in at the prospect of her very own Party, could not actually quarrel with anybody, however obstinate he might be; so the hours sped happily by, and ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... true poet, who, if he be worthy of his vocation, is bound not only to proclaim it to the world CLEARLY, but also clad in such a perfection of wording that it shall chime on men's ears with a musical sound as of purest golden bells. There are very few faultless examples of this felicitous utterance in English or in any literature, so few, indeed, that they could almost all be included in one newspaper column of ordinary print. ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father." When is it that the mind thus starts off into a subject at any chance hint or suggestion, pouring out the most astonishing ideas in the most felicitous language? It is only when it is possessed with it, and when its ideas are so hot and molten, that they are ready to ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... with that felicitous simplicity and eloquence of diction which characterize all Mr. Woodworth's efforts ...
— The Diving Bell - Or, Pearls to be Sought for • Francis C. Woodworth
... Mme. de Lambert, so elevated in tone, so fine in moral quality, so rich in worldly wisdom, and often so felicitous in expression, tempt one to multiply quotations, especially as they show us an intimate side of her life, of which otherwise we know very little. Her personality is veiled. Her human experiences, her loves, her antipathies, her mistakes, and her errors are a sealed book to us, excepting ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... position to say how she might have struck him the night before, but what he saw during these charmed hours filled him with admiration and gratitude. She WAS in it, this time; she had pulled herself together, she had taken possession, she was felicitous at every turn. Fresh from his revelation of Nona he was in a position to judge, and as he judged he exulted. He was thrilled and carried away, and he was moreover intensely curious to know what had happened to her, by what unfathomable art she had managed in a few hours to ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... the felicitous term given by Rev. Dr. Lyman Abbott to the period of nearly three centuries following the campaign against the inhabitants of Canaan, when the Israelites took possession of their land. The Book of, Judges is a record of those "colonial days;" and they are described also in the first ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... graphic exposition of an abstruse subject, Bounce relapsed into silence, and the whole party continued for some minutes in a profound reverie. From this felicitous condition they were awakened by the sudden appearance of Black Gibault, who darted out of the poplar bluff and made towards them at the top of his speed. He uttered no cry, but, on coming near enough to permit of his features ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... her supposed plainness. She had known how to be ugly—it was the only thing she had learnt save, if possible, how not to mind it. Being beautiful took in any case a new set of muscles. It was on the prior conviction, literally, that she had developed her admirable dress, instinctively felicitous, always either black or white and a matter of rather severe squareness and studied line. She was magnificently neat; everything she showed had a way of looking both old and fresh; and there was on every ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... Excellency as a friend; and assure you he is a Prince who has talent, but who will be the slave of his passions (SE FERA DOMINER PAR SES PASSIONS,"—not a felicitous prophecy, Herr General); "and will like nobody but such as encourage him therein. For me, I think all Princes are cast in the same mould; there is only a more and ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... husband on his return had explained the situation, winding up with the peculiarly felicitous proverb, 'Do unto others as you would be done by.' She had descended to put into her place the person who demanded muffins and an uncracked teapot as though she had a right ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... felicitous Oswald was just going to begin about the council all over again, when the portable form of our Indian uncle came stoutly stumping down the ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... The time and space we have occupied sufficiently indicate the favourable sentiments respecting it with which we have been impressed. Of the execution of the satires, from the several extracts we have given, the reader will himself be enabled to judge. This is of course unequal, but generally felicitous. In the personal allusions which occur through the work, the author exhibits, as we have before noticed, a freedom from malice and all uncharitableness, and in many of them has attained that happy desideratum which Dryden considered a matter of so ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... whether it occur in a stone, flower, beast, or in man, is absolutely identical, which, as I have already asserted, may be shown to be in some sort typical of the Divine attributes, and which, therefore, I shall, for distinction's sake, call typical beauty; and, secondarily, the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function in living things, more especially of the joyful and right exertion of perfect life in man. And this kind of beauty I shall ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... Signor Cardegna. I came to see Signor Grandi, and to ascertain from him precisely what you have voluntered to tell me. You cannot suppose that I have any object in interrupting the leisure of a great artist, or the privacy of his very felicitous domestic relations. I have not a great deal to say. That is, I have always a great deal to say about everything, but I shall at present confine myself to a ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... why attempt it? We have the music which, coming from the divinely gifted imagination of the composer, reveals in its own language a message of pathetic longing and ideal aspiration. The movement is very concise but in complete Sonata-form, and with an orchestration felicitous in the treatment of the horns and the wood-wind instruments. The Minuet, noteworthy for the three-measure rhythm of the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... left much of its interest in the hands of the restorers. It has been "done up" without mercy; its natural place would be at Rochelle the New. A sort of battlemented curtain, flanked with turrets, divides it from the street and contains a low door (a low door in a high wall is always felicitous), which admits you to an inner court, where you discover the face of the building. It has statues set into it and is raised upon a very low and very deep arcade. The principal function of the deferential old portress who conducts you over the place is to call your ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... narrative; there is much pleasantry in Mrs. Hofland's Comforts of Conceitedness; Virginia Water, by the editor, could hardly be written by his fireside—it has too much local inspiration in every line; Auguste de Valcour, by the author of Gilbert Earle, is in his usual felicitous vein of philosophic melancholy; Miss Roberts has a glittering Tale of Normandy; the Orphans, by the editor, is simple and pathetic; Palinodia ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... dealing with men which would be a great hindrance to him in his calling. But much argument is not required to guide the public, still less a formal exposition of that argument. What is mostly needed is the manly utterance of clear conclusions; if a statesman gives these in a felicitous way (and if with a few light and humorous illustrations, so much the better), he has done his part. He will have given the text, the scribes in the newspapers will write the sermon. A statesman ought to show his own nature, and talk in a palpable way what is to him important truth. ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... recurring machinery of a vision—to the origin of which latter (the dream of Scipio related by Cicero and expounded in the widely-read Commentary of Macrobius) the opening lines of the "Romaunt" point. He owes to the French poem both the germs of felicitous phrases, such as the famous designation of Nature as "the Vicar of the almighty Lord," and perhaps touches used by him in passages like that in which he afterwards, with further aid from other sources, drew the character of a true gentleman. ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... a great brickyard, with smoking chimneys. First they took out the soil to make bricks, and then they filled it up again with garbage, which seemed to Jurgis and Ona a felicitous arrangement, characteristic of an enterprising country like America. A little way beyond was another great hole, which they had emptied and not yet filled up. This held water, and all summer it stood there, with the near-by soil draining into it, festering and stewing in the sun; ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... in one sense, accomplished; that consummation substantially is realized. Sedition has, at last, countermined itself, and conspiracy we have seen in effect perishing by its own excesses. Yet still, ingenuously speaking, we cannot claim the merit of a felicitous foresight. That result has come round which we foreboded; but not in that sense which we intended to authorize, nor exactly by those steps which we wished to see. We looked for the extinction of this national scourge by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... anatomy, and in geology, he perceived facts and formed theories instantaneously, and with a spirit of inventive penetration which distanced the slower approaches of more learned men. But if his powers of mind were singularly great, the qualities which accompanied them were still more felicitous. He possessed the most singular amenity of disposition with the highest feeling, the rarest simplicity united to the highest genius. In the great distinction and the superior society to which his discovery introduced him, the native cast of his character was unchanged. Among the great ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... period of the Gothic warfare with the Moors, the Cagots were a Christian tribe that betrayed the Christian cause and interests at a critical moment. But all is conjecture. As to the name, Southey has somewhere offered a possible interpretation of it; but it struck me as far from felicitous, and not what might have been expected from Southey, whose vast historical research and commanding talent should naturally have unlocked this most mysterious of modern secrets, if any unlocking does yet ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... point of this passage stamps it as one of Bunyan's most felicitous descriptions. We who live in a later age may, indeed, suspect that he has somewhat antedated the death of Pagan, and the impotence of Pope; but his picture of their cave and its memorials, his delineation of the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... as well as to learn to think; and this art can only be obtained by the habitual study of his sensations, and an intimate acquaintance with the intellectual faculties. These are the true prompters of those felicitous expressions which give a tone congruous to the subject, and which invest our thoughts with all the illusion, the beauty, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... task, and expressions of reliance on the people's support when he tried to do his duty. To a man who can sometimes speak from the heart and to the heart as Lincoln did it is perhaps not given to be uniformly felicitous. Among these speeches was that delivered at Philadelphia, which has already been quoted, but most of them were not considered felicitous at the time. They were too unpretentious. Moreover, they contained sentences which seemed to understate the gravity ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... a felicitous arrangement of our organs of sense, that where one organ fails to convey to our inward man information regarding the outward world, another often steps in to supply its place, and perform the needful duty. We have said ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... the shell has learnt to drink by swallowing a part of the white of the egg for its food; but not having experienced how to take up and swallow solid seeds, or grains, is either taught by the felicitous industry of its mother; or by many repeated attempts is enabled at length to distinguish and to swallow ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the performer at the house of a mutual acquaintance, the couple quickly became enamored of each other. A brief engagement of less than a month was followed by marriage, and so Moscheles entered into a relation singularly felicitous in all the elements which make domestic life most blessed. After a brief tour in the Rhenish cities, and a visit to Paris, Moscheles proceeded to London, where he had determined to make his home, for in no country had such genuine ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... ceilings, isn't it?" murmured Elsie French, glancing at the heavy decoration, the stucco bosses and pendants above her head which had replaced, some twenty years before, a piece of Adam design, sparing and felicitous. ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... extremely ingenious and worthy of his mistress's fine intelligence; he greeted it with enthusiasm, and thought of it for the next twelve hours. The more he thought of it the more felicitous it seemed to him, and he went to Mrs. Vivian's the next day almost for the express purpose of saying to Angela that, decidedly, she was right. He was admitted by his old friend, the little femme de chambre, who had long since bestowed upon him, definitively, her confidence; and as in ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... henceforth in words as lofty and refined as those in which the most educated and the most gifted speak of it. Hence, in the transition between the old animalism and the new spiritualism, a jumble of the two elements, not always felicitous; attempts at ambitious description, after Burns's worst manner; at subjective sentiment, after the worst manner of the world in general; and yet, all the while, a consciousness that there was something worth keeping in the simple objective ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the world is unwittingly waiting; and in his sleeve he smiles benevolently to think how happy mankind will be as soon as he vouchsafes his epic or his story. It is delightful to us to think of all the joys with which, for twenty years, that Expositor filled the dear mind of Dr. Doddridge; how one felicitous rendering was suggested after another; how a bright solution of a textual difficulty would rouse him an hour before his usual, and set the study fire a blazing at four o'clock of a winter's morning; ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... had risen from his seat—the felicitous Mr. Truesdale. Glancing around at his fellow-members he then began to explain in the impressive but conversational tone of one whose counsels are in the habit of being listened to, that this was merely a little measure to remedy a flaw in the statutes. Mr. Truesdale believed in corporations ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of wisdom is temporarily suspended. Newman wished Madame de Cintre so well that nothing he could think of doing for her in the future rose to the high standard which his present mood had set itself. She seemed to him so felicitous a product of nature and circumstance that his invention, musing on future combinations, was constantly catching its breath with the fear of stumbling into some brutal compression or mutilation of her beautiful personal harmony. This is what I mean by Newman's tenderness: Madame de Cintre ...
— The American • Henry James
... Among many instances of the strength which accompanied this absence of strain one already alluded to may be mentioned again. Scott is one of the most literary of all writers. He was saturated with reading; nothing could happen but it brought some felicitous quotation, some quaint parallel to his mind from the great wits, or the small, of old. Yet no writer is less bookish than he; none insults his readers less with any parade, with any apparent consciousness ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... given of Fairy dances the music is always spoken of as most entrancing, and Shakespeare in felicitous terms gives utterance ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... the President, Major Fitzgerald, formally opened proceedings; and, alluding in felicitous terms to the momentous occasion, announced, amid cheers, that there were no less than nineteen competitors for the badge, who, their names having been drawn from a hat, were to address the meeting in ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... shape, was then for the first time published. I saw in this great practical and philosophical idea, the greatest improvement of which the system of representative government is susceptible; an improvement which, in the most felicitous manner, exactly meets and cures the grand, and what before seemed the inherent, defect of the representative system; that of giving to a numerical majority all power, instead of only a power proportional to its numbers, ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... Leoline, or only the flakes of falling light from the water-snakes—this joy, visiting him, now and again, after sickly dreams, in sleep or waking, as a relief not to be forgotten, [102] and with such a power of felicitous expression that the infection of it passes irresistibly to the reader—such is the predominant element in the matter of his poetry, as cadence is the predominant quality of its form. "We bless thee for our creation!" ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... monuments of EDWARDIII. and the BLACK PRINCE, severally at Westminster and Canterbury. Ishall refer to these fine shields again, and to other admirable examples with them, hereafter (Chapter IX.). The conventionalism in all these examples, however felicitous the manner in which it is treated in them, is very decidedly exaggerated. These examples, and others such as these, are not the less valuable to us because their teaching includes an illustration of the excesses that we must always ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... to them is that, beautiful though they are, their complexity would embarrass and distress the kneeling worshipper. In these matters, practical drawbacks have to be taken into account as well as abstract excellencies, and no matter how felicitous the antiphonal responses, they would be worse than useless were a puzzled congregation to refuse to join ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... and gave himself to the soul of Art, to pure expression, was, for this very reason, thought by his brother artists to be cold and unattractive. There is one sphere, however, where this exclusiveness of style and partition of labor are productive of the most felicitous results: namely, the minor drama. In England and America the same theatre exhibits opera, melodrama, tragedy, comedy, rope-dancing, and legerdemain; but in Paris, each branch and element of histrionic art has its separate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... passion-laden, In a chamber meets a maiden, Then felicitous communion, By love's strain between the twain, Grows from forth their union; For the game, it hath no name, Of lips, ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... referred to the age of the Roman Catholic Church. Lord Macaulay, in accounting for her astonishing longevity as compared with other institutions, turns with felicitous insight to female influence as one of the principal causes. In her system, he says, she assigns to devout women spiritual functions, dignities, and even magistracies. In England, if a pious and devout woman enter the cells of a prison to pray with the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... between the succeeding paragraphs. They are most skillfully dovetailed together. Now make a list of the phrases in the first fifteen pages which introduce paragraphs, telling from what in the preceding paragraph each new paragraph springs. Do you think that such a felicitous result just happened? or did ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... a felicitous affair," said the Count, "which has the fortune to introduce me to this charming company," and the Count bowed first to Bulldog and then to the school with such a marked indication in one direction that Speug ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... much mistaken in my estimate of M. Maurel's work, if it do not take rank now and hereafter among the most accurate, discriminating, and felicitous tributes which have emanated from any country in any language to the memory of the Duke ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... increasing,—the greatest master of satire in English literature, and one of the truest painters of social life that any age has produced; not so much admired by women as by men; accurate in his delineation of character, though sometimes bitter and fierce; felicitous in plot, teaching lessons in morality, unveiling shams and hypocrisy, contemptuous of all fools and quacks, yet sad in his ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... hours, waiting for a shot. Then our men took to the rifle-pits,—pits ten or twelve feet long by four or five feet deep, with the loose earth banked up a few inches high on the exposed sides. All the pits bore names, more or less felicitous, by which they were known to their transient tenants. One was called "The Pepper-Box," another "Uncle Sam's Well," another "The Reb-Trap," and another, I am constrained to say, was named after a not to be mentioned tropical locality. Though this rude sort of nomenclature ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... resemblance as a Dutch canal bears to a river flowing through rich meadows, in the freedom and grace of nature. Nevertheless, there are times and seasons when the bay of New York offers a landscape worthy of any pencil. It was at one of these felicitous moments that the Dawn cast off from the wharf, and commenced her voyage to Bordeaux. There was barely air enough from the southward to enable us to handle the ship, and we profited by a morning ebb to drop down to the Narrows, in the midst of a fleet of some forty sail; most of the latter, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... which Mr. Perrowne, elated with liberal fees, was the soul of jocularity, and Mr. Douglas let the cat out of the bag as to his relations with Miss Graves. Mr. Bangs sang "He's a jolly good fellow" to every toast indiscriminately. The Squire was felicitous in his presidential remarks; but Mr. Terry broke down at the thought of parting with Madame and with Miss Ceshile that was. Mr. Errol made a good common-sense speech, and alluded roguishly to the colonel's setting a good example that even ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... instances are rare indeed compared with those that occur in the other division. On the other hand, there are always present Hazlitt's enthusiastic appreciation of what is good in letters, his combination of gusto with sound theory as to what is excellent in prose and verse, his felicitous method of expression, and the acuteness that kept him from that excessive and paradoxical admiration which both Lamb and Coleridge affected, and which has gained many more pupils than his own moderation. Nothing ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... wanton candour. There were monsters who out of sheer, crass good nature did offend; but even they took care to couple with their "remarks" an apologetic laugh, which was intended to convey that the joke, though carried far, was just a joke. The wags—the species was not yet extinct—were especially felicitous. They treated the subject as a very original piece of humour indeed. Their treatment of it gained them an occasional cuff in the ear, and they had to be discriminative in their choice of victims. Everybody was not to be wished "returns of the day" ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... Thesmophoriazusae. On the mere grounds of taste I can see an at least equally good case made out for the Birds. That brightly plumaged fantasy has an aerial wit and colour all its own. But there are certain works in which a man finds himself at an angle of vision where there is an especially felicitous union of the aesthetic and emotional elements which constitute the basic qualities of his uniqueness. We recognize these works as being welded into a strange unity, as having a homogeneous texture of ecstasy over them that ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... signatory powers to the Quintuple Treaty of 1839 guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium. Shorn from their context as they were, these sentences are by no means illuminating, and it cannot be said that their citation in this form by Sir Edward Grey was a very felicitous one. During the paper polemics of the past months these detached words of Gladstone have been freely used by Germany's defenders and apologists to maintain that Great Britain of 1870 would not have deemed the events of 1914 a casus belli, and that its entrance into the present war on account ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... which it might appear to be already "blasted with antiquity." On only one of the previous occasions that the question was raised was the stage of discussion passed, and that was in the eighteenth century when the monument was placed in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. The issue was not felicitous. The memorial in the Abbey failed to satisfy the commemorative aspirations of the nation; it left it open to succeeding generations to reconsider the question, if it did not impose on them the obligation. Most of the poets, actors, scholars, and patrons of polite learning, who in 1741 subscribed ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... gives, in addition to the poems and lyrics contained in the two previous editions, some hundred or more pages of the later productions of the author, in the sprightly vein, and marked by the brilliant fancy and felicitous diction for which the former were noteworthy. His longest and most elaborate poem, Urania, is perhaps the best specimen of his powers. Its general tone is playful and humorous; but there are passages of great tenderness and pathos. Witness the following, from a description of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... romanticism— melodrama in fact. I want to have in poetry what we are getting in fiction—the best sort of realism. Realism is now abjuring the heroic theory; it has thrown over the old conventions, the felicitous coincidences, life arranged on ideal lines; and it has gone straight to life itself, strong, full-blooded, eager life, full of mistakes and blunders and failures and sharp disasters and fears. Life goes shambling along like a big dog, but it has got its nose on the scent of something. It is ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... extant, came from Drant of Cambridge) in the correspondence of Spenser and Harvey, and the sensible fashion in which Nash laughed at it, are among the best known things in the gossiping history of English Letters. But the coxcombry of Harvey and the felicitous impertinence of Nash have sometimes diverted attention from the actual state of the case. William Webbe (a very sober-minded person with taste enough to admire the "new poet," as he calls Spenser) makes elaborate attempts ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... FELLOW-MEMBERS:—I am sure that you have greatly enjoyed the brilliant and witty speech to which you have just listened—a speech which shows that our distinguished guest is as felicitous at the dinner-table as he is signally successful in other fields of oratory. But if you have deluded yourself with the idea that because of this change in the programme you are to escape the infliction of the usual address by the President of the Society, it ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... up of the case, when those with whom he was conferring were, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, "talked out," Mr. Seward carried all before him. His logic was clear and true, his illustration both copious and felicitous, his rapid citation of historical precedents surprising even to those who thought they had themselves exhausted the subject. His temper was too amiable and serene for stinging wit or biting sarcasm, but he had a playful humor which kept the minds of his hearers in ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the Occident. Its absence from the classical literature was a marvel and exception, a phenomenon of the clearest-minded and most active of races, who thought, but did not contemplate,—whose ideal world consisted only of simple, but stately legends of bright-limbed gods and heroes. A felicitous production of high art, also, is among the rarest of exceptions, and will be till the Millennium. Myriads of comparative failures follow in the suite of a masterpiece. We have, therefore, judged the novel by an impracticable standard, by a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... a correspondent-besides the deep, quaint strain of the sentiment, and the curious introduction of some ludicrous touches amidst the serious and impressive, as was doubtless intended by the author-appears to us one of the most felicitous specimens of unique rhyming which has for some time met our eye. The resources of English rhythm for varieties of melody, measure, and sound, producing corresponding diversities of effect, having been thoroughly studied, much ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... xxx. In connection with 1Samuel xxxi. 3 I have conjectured that the verb of which Torah is the abstract means originally to throw the lot-arrows. The Thummim have been compared in the most felicitous way by Freytag, and by Lagarde independently of him (Proph. Chald. p. xlvii.) with the Arabian Tamaim, which not only signifies children's amulets but any means of "averruncatio". Urim is probably connected with )RR "to curse" (cf. Iliad i. 11 and Numbers xxiii. 23): ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... followed by a narrative of travel in Italy, happily written, full of felicitous description, and touched by a humor which, in quality and manner, was new to English readers. Then came one of those indiscretions of the imagination which showed that the dignified and somewhat ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Quarterly for April 1818, the very same number which contained the sneering critique of Endymion. This poem is written in the heroic metre; and the extracts given do certainly comprise some telling and felicitous lines. Such are— ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... dross the talents of Mr. Cooper. With an earnestness and indefatigable zeal proportioned to the object, and which nothing but the most generous friendship could impel him to employ, Mr. Holcroft gave those powers to the instruction of our hero, and with such speedy and felicitous effect, that the young gentleman was, in the course of a few months, considered by his two friends as perfectly qualified to appear before a London audience in some of Shakspeare's most important characters. Having been for some ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... (knowing) 490. experienced, practiced, skilled, hackneyed; up in, well up in; in practice, in proper cue; competent, efficient, qualified, capable, fitted, fit for, up to the mark, trained, initiated, prepared, primed, finished. clever, cute, able, ingenious, felicitous, gifted, talented, endowed; inventive &c. 515; shrewd, sharp, on the ball &c. (intelligent) 498; cunning &c. 702; alive to, up to snuff, not to be caught with chaff; discreet. neat-handed, fine-fingered, nimble-fingered, ambidextrous, sure- footed; cut out for, fitted for. technical, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... not being always expected of them, it is not always sought by their readers with sufficient care. Anyhow, it may be suspected that this retort of Tristram's is too often passed over as a mere random absurdity designed for his interlocutor's mystification, and that its extremely felicitous pertinence to the question in dispute is thus overlooked. The point of it, of course, is that the business in which the commissary was then engaged was precisely analogous to that of exacting salt dues from perverse persons ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... Julius Hammer into my confidence, and he thought that I had given expression to the overflowing emotion of two loving young hearts in a very felicitous and charming way. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... were an oration and a poem. The latter was prepared at very short notice, and had particular reference to the visit of the illustrious hero and philanthropist, Lafayette. It purported to be the vision of the Genius of Liberty. It was a felicitous effort of the poetic muse. The gradual but certain dissolution of ancient despotic systems was predicted, as by the spirit of inspiration; and the blessings and joys of well regulated freedom were ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... uttering some affecting sentiment to your intended dupe, think of the greatest misfortune you ever had in your life; habit will soon make the association of tears and that melancholy remembrance constantly felicitous. I knew, my dear pupils, a most intelligent Frenchman, who obtained a charming legacy from an old poet by repeating the bard's verses with streaming eyes. "How were you able to weep at will?" asked I (I was young then, my pupils). "Je pensois," answered he, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... experienced a favourable reception and recruited his army. At the battle of Edghill neither side gained the advantage, though altogether about 5,000 men fell on the field. Negotiations were entered into between the king and the Parliament, and these were renewed again and again, but never with felicitous issues. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... prophets having nothing to foretell. At Frankfort, where he spoilt his watch by depositing it in unexpected holy water, and it was whispered that he had put it there to mend it, everybody knew that there was hardly a Catholic in the Parliament of whom such a fable could be told with more felicitous unfitness. ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... was impossible to listen to Scott's oral narrations, whether gay or serious, or to the felicitous fun with which he parried absurdities of all sorts, without discovering better qualities in his talk than wit—and of a higher order; I mean especially a power of vivid painting—the true and primary sense of what is called Imagination. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... years of practice in the art he adorned so richly. He answered with a gentle and sad courtesy, and concluded with these words: 'It is no discredit in a young man to esteem a senior beyond his merits.' I have always thought that very graceful and felicitous, and now that I am myself grown to be a senior I am more persuaded ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... so, we trust, while the world lasts, how few comparatively will bear to be told that there exist other fictitious narratives by the same writer,—four of them at least of no inferior interest, except what results from a less felicitous choice of situation! 'Roxana.' 'Singleton,' 'Moll Flanders,' 'Colonel Jack,' are all genuine offspring of the same father. They bear the veritable impress of De Foe. An unpractised midwife that would not swear to the nose, lip, forehead, and eye of every one of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... us, already provided with a return-ticket. We shall not decide on the lawfulness or otherwise of any attempt to depict such importations; we can only rest perfectly satisfied that, granting the author's premises, it is impossible to imagine them carried out with more felicitous skill and more exquisite consistency than in the heroine of "Vanity Fair." At all events, the infernal regions have no reason to be ashamed of little Becky, nor the ladies either: she has, at least, all ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... heart could be reached, and her resolution undermined. It lay in the suggestion that Bertha's strong inclination to visit America sprang from a desire again to behold Maurice, and that the result of their meeting, after so long a separation, might be in the highest degree felicitous. Bertha, he urged, during the absence of Maurice, had probably learned that he was dearer to her than she imagined; and, if Maurice had reason to believe that she crossed the ocean for the sake of rejoining him, could he remain ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... his aspect, a pleasing inquisitiveness concerning bird mystery, and a simple, candid style of self-revelation in his essays full of fascination, with touches now and again that remind one of the descriptive qualities of Francis A. Knight. The wood-joy that inspired the felicitous phrases and delightful reflections of John Burroughs in the Western Hemisphere finds its counterpart in these ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... glanced from the lady's face to the little egg-shaped head and back again; and, almost before he was aware of it, his tongue had found a felicitous moment: ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... always ascribing credit for his eminent intellectual achievements. And lest his reader should opine that woman stands somewhat in the shade with respect to her own intellectual triumphs, Mill undertakes the explanation. "Felicitous thoughts," he tells us, "occur by hundreds to every woman of intellect. But they are mostly lost for want of a husband or friend . . . to estimate them properly, and to bring them before the world; and even when they are brought before ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... sister Margaret, written soon after his arrival, shows a delightful relation between them and warm affection on his part. It tells in a felicitous manner of the place, the people, and his experiences. He had been to a camp-meeting and was struck with the quaint, old-fashioned garb of the girls, seeming to make the ugly ones uglier and the pretty ones prettier. It was raining when he wrote and he felt depressed, ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... crowded with an expectant audience, to whom they gave a full report of the morning's proceedings. The Hutchinsons of worldwide fame were present in their happiest vein, interspersing the speeches with appropriate songs and felicitous remarks. For five long hours on that hot midsummer day a crowded audience, many standing, listened with profound interest and reluctantly dispersed at last, all agreeing that it was one of the most impressive and enthusiastic meetings they had ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... your suggestion for Miss Kavanagh's benefit will have all success. It seems to me truly felicitous and excellent, and, I doubt not, she will think so too. The last class of female character will be difficult to manage: there will be nice points in it—yet, well-managed, both an attractive and instructive book might result therefrom. ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... the dinner late and passed in front of the dais to my seat at the other end, while General Grant was speaking. He was not easy on his feet at that time, though afterwards he became very felicitous in public speaking. He paused a moment until I was seated and then said: "If Chauncey Depew stood in my shoes, and I in his, I would be a much ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... entitled "The Last Peach," and purports to be written by a bank-officer (possibly the author had Barton in his mind while writing it) who fears he may become a second Fauntleroy. The piece contains one or two delightful passages, and is, in fact, full of happy touches and felicitous bits of description. Very charming (to me, at least) is the account of the plucking of the last peach, and very touching is the allusion to the babe Fauntleroy. But good wine (or a good peach) needs no bush; and therefore, without further comment or commendation, I present ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... 2nd.—I am extremely obliged to you for the copy of your Glasgow address, which in some degree consoles me for not having heard it, and for having lost the pleasure of seeing you this year at Brougham. Nothing can be more felicitous than some of the illustrations you have introduced, and the occasion of a mere scientific meeting has been turned to the best political purpose. No doubt in that region the absence of party gives a broader and a nobler aim to the exertions ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... you, my remark about the effect on the women themselves of this pernicious craze, my dear Miss Tarrant, you may be quite at your ease. You stand apart, you are unique, extraordinary; you constitute a category by yourself. In you the elements have been mixed in a manner so felicitous that I regard you as quite incorruptible. I don't know where you come from nor how you come to be what you are, but you are outside and above all vulgarising influences. Besides, you ought to know," the young ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... Vaguely damped by his environment, which, with the sun's retreat, had lost its charm, he gave himself up to his own thoughts, and was soon busily engaged in thinking over all that had been said by his quondam acquaintance of the dinner-table, in inventing neatly turned phrases and felicitous replies. He walked without aim, in a leisurely way down quiet streets, quickly across big thoroughfares, and paid no attention to where he was going. The falling darkness made the quaint streets look strangely alike; ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... poetry that can be so called is small. But a great deal of it is very fine, very noble, and at times very beautiful, and it discloses the distinctly poetic faculty of which rhythmic and figurative is native expression. It is impressionable rather than imaginative in the large sense; it is felicitous in detail rather than in design; and of a general rather than individual, a representative rather than original, inspiration. There is a field of poetry, assuredly not the highest, but ample and admirable—in which these qualities, more or less unsatisfactory in prose, are legitimately ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... concludes that insurrection may be justified and necessary. A greater and more important truth does not exist, and we owe its promulgation with such freedom and boldness to that most extraordinary and felicitous conjuncture at the revolution which called upon us to support a king against a king, and obliged us to explode (as has been done most completely) the divine right and passive obedience under which one king claimed, to maintain the legal title of ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... with the said Filipinas Islands may—if the Christian faith is preserved and permanently maintained in the latter, and as deeply rooted and as pure and constant as at present—look, in the said matter of religion, for felicitous and great results. The same [may be said] for what concerns the service of your Majesty, and the profitable and advantageous increase of the royal estate, since even the profits which your Majesty at present enjoys and possesses ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various
... back to her with an alert and felicitous air. How could he help the falling out of this? Of course he could not ride upon the wagon and leave a farm-boy ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... birth, with nothing in the world to depend on but his own talents, which he had abused, and the before-named patrimony, which was already nearly exhausted. It will at once be seen that there could hardly be a more felicitous conjunction of circumstances to make everybody miserable by one easy, natural step; and the step was duly taken. Of course, the young people fell in love immediately,—Everett, the Dreamer, looking on with a sort of reverent interest that was almost awe; for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... goes far to account for the transcendent success which Plunket attained at the Bar and in the House, and alike in the Irish and the English Parliament. Lord Brougham said of him that his eloquence was a continuous flow of "clear statement, close reasoning, felicitous illustration, all confined strictly to the subject in hand; every portion, without any exception, furthering the process of conviction;" and I do not know a more impressive passage of sombre passion than the peroration of his ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... unaffecting, his fancy to work in curious and desolate ways, his message to sound abstruse and strange; and these effects too are deepened by the qualities and the merits of his style. It is peculiarly his own, but it is not always felicitous. There are times when it has the true epic touch—or at least as much of it as is possible in an age of detail and elaboration; there are times when it has a touch of the pathetic—when in homeliness of phrase and ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... guest, and (for both of us I am privileged to add) our attached friend. Longfellow's name was not then the pleasant and familiar word it has since been in England; but he had already written several of his most felicitous pieces, and he possessed all the qualities of delightful companionship, the culture and the charm, which have no higher type or example than the accomplished and genial American. He reminded me, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Abbot Mosheim (such his title; Head Churchman, theological chief of Helmstadt University in those parts, with a couple of extinct little ABBACIES near by, to help his stipend) preached next Sunday, "On the Marriage of the Righteous,"—felicitous appropriate Sermon, said a grateful public; [Text, Psalm, xcli. 12; "Sermon printed in Mosheim's Works."]—and in short, at Salzdahlum all goes, if not as merry as some marriage-bells, yet without jarring to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... sought escape in graduate work in history and politics at Johns Hopkins, where, in 1886, he received his Ph.D. for a thesis entitled Congressional Government, a study remarkable for clear thinking and felicitous expression. These qualities characterized his work as a professor at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan and paved his path to an appointment on the Princeton faculty in 1890, as ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... rhetorician. He has no power at all as a writer, if writing be considered an accomplishment which can be separated from earnest thinking. Words are, with him, the mere instruments for the expression of things; and he hits on felicitous words only under that impatient stress of thought which demands exact expression for definite ideas. All his words, simple as they are, are therefore fairly earned, and he gives to them a force and significance which they do not bear in the dictionary. The mind of the writer is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... worshipers, who asked him which he considered his best comic opera; when, with a burst of joyous laughter, he named "Il Matrimonio Secreto," Cimarosa's enchanting chef-d'oeuvre, from which, doubtless, Rossini, after the fashion of great geniuses, had accepted more than one most felicitous suggestion, especially that of the admirable finale to the second act of the "Barbiere." It was during this visit of his to London, while Weber lay disappointed and dying in the dingy house in Great Portland Street, that this same Duchess ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... was rudely flung adrift. It was true that the man was largely responsible for the troubles that had fallen upon him, but this was no reason for refusing him pity, and Cyril had his strong points. He had staunchly declined to profit by a felicitous change of fortune out of consideration for the relatives who had once disowned and the woman who had deserted him. Jernyngham had been a careless fool, and Prescott suspected that he was not likely to alter much in this respect, but he did not expect others ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... Narbonne, and Captain Burney, who was father to his sister, as Mr. Locke was to M. d'A. ; and on the 1st of August the ceremony was re-performed in the Sardinian chapel, according to the rites of the Romish Church; and never, never was union more blessed and felicitous; though after the first eight years of unmingled happiness, it was assailed by many calamities, chiefly of separation or illness, yet still mentally unbroken. F. D'ARBLAY. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... sequence—a meagre harmony or an unskilful counterpoint—may in vain be looked for throughout the entire range of his compositions, the prevailing characteristics of which are a feeling as uncommon as beautiful; a treatment as original as felicitous; a melody and a harmony as new, fresh, vigorous and striking as they are utterly unexpected and out of the original track. In taking up one of the works of Chopin you are entering, as it were, a fairyland untrodden by ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... of composition has been the habit of all great orators. This, combined with the habit of reading and re-reading the best prose writers and poets, accounts in large measure for the felicitous style of such men as Burke, Erskine, Macaulay, Bolingbroke, Phillips, Everett ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... resident of that land which had, for long years, been to me a region of romance. Since the time when, as a child, my highest delight had been in the letters of a dear relative, describing to me his home and mode of life in the "Indian country," and still later, in his felicitous narration of a tour with General Cass, in 1820, to the sources of the Mississippi—nay, even earlier, in the days when I stood at my teacher's knee, and spelled out the long word Mich-i-li-mack-i-nac, that ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... represents mare finally and fully than the others my sense of the literary importance of the men whose like we shall not look upon again. Longfellow was easily the greatest poet of the three, Holmes often the most brilliant and felicitous, but Lowell, in spite of his forays in politics, was the finest scholar and the most profoundly literary, as he was above the others most deeply and thoroughly ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... tradition, and few have exercised so wide and mighty an influence. The profound, many-sided and intimate knowledge of human nature which it evinces, its vast variety of incident, its wealth of tears and laughter, its copious and felicitous diction, inevitably apt for every occasion, and, notwithstanding the frequent harshness, and occasional obscurity of its at times tangled, at times laboured periods, its sustained energy and animation of style must ever ensure for this human comedy ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... displays considerable acuteness in replying to an opponent; he is quick in his perception of anything vulnerable in the speech to which he replies, and happy in laying the weak point bare to the gaze of the House. He now and then indulges in sarcasm, which is, in most cases, very felicitous. He is plausible even when most in error. When it suits himself or his party he can apply himself with the strictest closeness to the real point at issue; when to evade the point is deemed most politic, no man can wander from it ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... draw a fine picture of things they don't know about! We all know a kitten, but come to a catamount The beast is a stranger when grown up to that amount, (A stranger we rather prefer should n't visit us, A felis whose advent is far from felicitous.) The boy who can boast that his trap has just got a mouse Must n't draw it and write underneath "hippopotamus"; Or say unveraciously, "This is an elephant,"— Don't think, let me beg, these examples irrelevant,— What they mean is just this—that a thing to be painted well Should always ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and acquirements with the most brilliant wit and genius, well and accurately informed on all subjects, both in science and art; endowed with a memory that retained whatever it received, with quick and clear perceptions, the choicest, most felicitous, and forcible language in which to clothe his thoughts, no one could doubt his meaning or withhold the tribute of wonder at ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... the Normans'—an original work of great value, though since overshadowed by the more minute 'History of the Norman Conquest,' by Professor Freeman. Yet Thierry's work is still of great interest, displaying gifts of the highest and rarest kind in felicitous combination. It shows the careful plodding of the antiquary, the keen vision of the man of the world, the passionate fervour of the politician, the calm dignity of the philosophic thinker, and the grandeur of the epic poet. Thierry succeeded ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... sets forth only his well-pondered thoughts in the most felicitous and expressive language. There is no need to form an abstract or epitome of a work in which nothing is superfluous, nothing valueless. But, as in a cabinet of gems some are more beautiful than others, or as in a garden some flowers are more attractive ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... evening of felicitous chatter, of showing off Christmas cards, of exchanging of news, of building of schemes, the most prominent being that Valetta should be in the constant companionship of Mysie and Fly until her own schoolroom should be re-established. This had been proposed by ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... labour! Not the masses; for the masses are supposed to be our rulers. What then can we call these people with whom we really cannot associate on equal terms? Why, call them THE GREAT UNWASHED. O felicitous phrase! O salve of the conscience! That is the unpardonable social sin. At the bottom of our social ladder is a dirty shirt; at the top is fixed not laurels, but a tub! The bathroom is the inmost, the strongest fortress of ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... corroboration. Nor are our other novelists much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire. Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice. He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says. Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing what is not worth finding. He hunts down the ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... contains the equivalent of some twenty thousand decasyllabic lines of poetry, that is to say more than there are in Milton's Paradise Lost, and that he has rendered faithfully the whole of this enormous mass in accordance with the intricate metrical scheme of the original, and in felicitous ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... the stranger within his gates. The family altar probably never failed from the day he first entered with his newly married wife, into their pioneer home, amid the forests, till his death. He was solemn, earnest and felicitous in prayer. The atmosphere of his home was eminently that of a christian household. Two of his four sons became officers in their churches, and also both his sons-in-law. Four of his grandsons entered the Christian ministry, and a granddaughter is the wife of ...
— Log-book of Timothy Boardman • Samuel W Boardman
... to become influential by permanent inspiration. In their highest moods, and amid their noblest hours of triumph, they were "of the earth earthy." Party; personality; crushing rejoinders, or satirical attacks; a felicitous exposure of inconsistency, or a triumphant self-vindication; brilliant repartees, and logical gladiatorship,—such are among the prominent characteristics which caused parliamentary debates in Burke's day to be so animating and interesting to those who heard, or ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... which has been so thoroughly discussed that novelty was not to be looked for; but his method and arrangement were excellent, though parts were too much expanded, and the whole might well have been condensed. There were many felicitous popular hits. The humorous touches were skilful, and the illustrations on a broad scale good, though in single images he failed. Altogether, there was a pervading air of ease and mastery, which showed him fit to be a leader of the ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... consecrated formula, and he expected it to be followed, as usual, by her rising and going down to supper. But she remained seated, and he could think of nothing more felicitous than: "I presume you're ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... "These felicitous expressions," we are told, "diffused universal enchantment, and combined with the graceful condescension and dignified affability of manner, which the Sovereign knew so well to exhibit when inclined to do so, roused the loyalty of the people to a perfect enthusiasm. For the week that he ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... the English edition, I have reason to know—thanks to the merit of Cruikshank's original and felicitous sketches—excited the greatest delight in the mind of Chamisso. In his autobiography he says that "Peter" had been kindly received in Germany, but in England ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... Franklin, I hear," said the French Minister, Count de Vergennes, to Mr. Jefferson, who had been sent to Paris to relieve our most popular representative. "I succeed him; no man can replace him," was the felicitous reply of the man who became highly esteemed by the ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... schoolmaster of Jasper, marched on through the cool of the night, regretting that he had meddled in the domestic arrangements of Swan Carlson, the Swede. The outcome of his attempted kindness to the oppressed woman had not been felicitous. Indeed, he was troubled greatly by the fear that he had killed Swan Carlson, and that grave consequences might rise out of this first adventure that ever ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... had the gift of coining extremely felicitous nicknames. I refrain from quoting those bestowed on two recent Viceroys, for they are mordant and uncomplimentary, though possibly not wholly undeserved. My father was at once christened "Old Splendid," an appellation less scarifying than ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... rationalism, not a dry, scholastic, abstract rationalism, but a living rationalism, embracing the whole field of the most exalted psychic phenomena. It is not philosophy pure and simple, but religious philosophy, an harmonization, more or less felicitous, of the postulates of reason with the dogmas of faith. It is reason mitigated by faith, and faith regulated by reason. In the darkness of the middle ages, when the Romish Church impregnated religion with the crudest superstitions, going so far as to forbid its adherents to read the Bible, ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow |
