"Nudity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Venetian color, and criticised in other respects," she concluded. And she desires Ruskin to know the "wonder and light and color and space and air" that Page had put into his "Venus Rising from the Sea," which the Paris salon of that summer had refused on the ground of its nudity,—a scruple that certainly widely differentiates the Salon of 1858 ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... perished. But, after the abandonment of the settlement as a penal depot, when it was thrown open to the public, a report was brought in that, in a distant part of the country, a white man was living with the blacks in perfect nudity; and, from his long exposure to the sun, almost of a colour with his companions. He was said to be robust looking, but with a malformation by which one of his legs was longer than the other. The description answered to the escaped convict, Dick; and, the circumstances having ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... the individual into his or her nagual was about to take place, the person must strip to absolute nudity;[49-*] and the lascivious fury of bands of naked Nagualists, meeting in remote glades by starlight or in the dark recesses of caves, dancing before the statues of the ancient gods, were scenes that stirred the fanaticism of the Spanish ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... of sentiment) the early Gothic, and many more who love far better the sweet purity of the early Renaissance. Before us Raphael presents his full figures replete with action, rich with broad, open curves in nudity, and magnificent with lines of flowing drapery. To him be accorded all due honour; but, if it is the privilege of the artist's spirit to wander still on earth, he must find his particular post-mortem punishment ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... little but the last, from which I will send your ladyship a rocket in my next letter. Lady Mary, I believe, has had a private audience of the ambassador's leg,(220) but en tout bien, et honneur, and only to satisfy her ceremonious curiosity about any part of royal nudity. I am just going to her, as she is to Versailles; and I have not time to add a word more to the vows of your ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... beyond. And they followed it to the grottoes. There was, in the rear of the park, a semicircle of five large niches of rocks surmounted by balustrades and separated by gigantic Terminus gods. One of these gods, at a corner of the monument, dominated all the others by his monstrous nudity, and lowered on ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... out of bed—thrusting one arm into a brocade nightgown, deeply furred with sables, and one foot into a velvet slipper, while the other pressed in primitive nudity the rich carpet—his Grace, without thinking farther on the assembly without, began to pen a few lines of a satirical poem; then suddenly stopped—threw the pen into the chimney—exclaimed that the humour was past—and ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... the East, nudity was, even in those days, held to be disgraceful, while the Greeks thought nothing so beautiful as the naked human body. The Hetaira Phryne was summoned before the judges for an offence against religion. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... however, ceased when it reappeared in the Chesapeak; and, in order to approach it more closely during the disembarkation, the patriot army crossed through the town. Their heads covered with green branches, and marching to the sound of drums and fifes, these soldiers, in spite of their state of nudity, offered an agreeable spectacle to the eyes of all the citizens. General Washington was marching at their head, and M. de Lafayette was by his side. The army stationed itself upon the heights of Wilmington, ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... in its obscenity. Sarudine's instinctive longing to boast, and to eclipse Volochine led him at last to speak of the splendid woman who had yielded to his charms, and gradually to reveal his own secret lasciviousness. Before the eyes of Volochine, Lida was exhibited as in a state of nudity, her physical attributes and her passion all being displayed as though she were some animal for sale at a fair. By their filthy thoughts she was touched and polluted and held up to ridicule. Their love of ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... few years ago, the captain of the Civil Guard in Tayabas Province went to the town of Atimonan, and saw natives in the streets almost in a state of nudity doing penance "for the wounds of Our Lord." They were actually beating themselves with flails, some of which were made of iron chain, and others of rope with thongs of rattan-cane. Having confiscated the flails—one ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... certainly the order of the day. Anything that does not deviate from the old beaten track meets with little encouragement from the present race of amusement-seekers, and, consequently, does not pay the entrepreneur. Nudity in public adds fresh charms to the orchestra, and red-fire and crackers have become absolutely essential to harmony. Acting upon this principle, Signor Venafra gave (we admire the term) a fancy dress ball at Drury-lane Theatre on Monday evening last, upon a plan hitherto unknown in England, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... best I could in the darkness, and she took me along a gallery into a dark room, and then into a lighted one which contained Hedvig almost in a state of nudity. She came to me with open arms as soon as she saw me, and, embracing me ardently, expressed her gratitude for my ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... next introduced. Now, however, common kerosene lamps are no longer so much of a sight even in Japan. Indeed, I had the assurance to ask for a shade to go with the one they set on the table in all the glaring nudity of a plain chimney. This there was some difficulty in finding, the search resulting in a green paper visor much too small, that sat on askew just far enough not to hide the light. The Japanese called it a hat, without the least ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... "Well, I've heard Nudity is not the cheese on public occasions: but why not go dressed like a lady as she always does, only with white gloves; and be married without any ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... conduct, you are to consider—as has been urged already—the age in which he lived. You are to remember that it was an age in which the passions and the emotions wore no such masks as they wear to-day, but went naked and knew no shame of their nudity; an age in which personal modesty was as little studied as hypocrisy, and in which men, wore their vices as openly ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... defend ourselves with the boat-stretchers which we carried, and knocked over several of them while on the wing as they flew towards us. They were incited, we discovered, to attack us in defence of their young, numbers of which, from the little gaping nudity just out of the shell to well-fledged bantlings, covered the ground. There was also a great number of eggs, many of which were newly laid. Of these we got a large store, besides half filling the boat with the birds we had killed. In vain, however, we searched all the island ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Wardrobe of the Universe; what such, more or less complete, rending and burning of Garments throughout the whole compass of Civilized Life and Speculation, should lead to; the rather as he was no Adamite, in any sense, and could not, like Rousseau, recommend either bodily or intellectual Nudity, and a return to the savage state: all this our readers are now bent to discover; this is, in fact, properly the gist and purport of Professor Teufelsdroeckh's ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the young woman showed in the chaste nudity of her lovely form, preserving, in spite of so many centuries that had passed away, the fulness of her contours, and the easy grace of her pure lines. Her pose, an infrequent one in the case of mummies, was that of the Venus of Medici, as if the embalmers had wished to save this beautiful ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... modesty is shocked by the nudity of Francis; but Italy is not Germany nor England, and the thirteenth century would have been astonished indeed at the prudery of the Bollandists. The incident is simply a new manifestation of Francis's character, with its ingenuousness, its exaggerations, its longing to ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... on its artificial islet, relieved against the shimmering lagoon, and shimmering itself with sun and tinned iron, was all day crowded about by eager men and women. Within, it was boxed full of islanders, of any age and size, and in every degree of nudity and finery. So close we squatted, that at one time I had a mighty handsome woman on my knees, two little naked urchins having their feet against my back. There might be a dame in full attire of holoku and hat and flowers; and her next ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... home, in the quietest night of summer. Such insincerity is a common besetting sin of the young male; invariably, I almost think, if he has the artistic temperament. Yet I do not think it presents itself to his mind in its nudity, but comes clothed with that sophistry in which youth, the most thoroughgoing of philosophes, is so ingenious. Consideration for the beloved object, it is called—yes! beloved indeed, though, such is the paradox in the order of things, but one of the several ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... style, the repetition of his wives and children's portraits, the apotheosis of the Rubens family! He portrayed Helena Fourment and Isabella Brandt in all stages of disarray and gowns. He put them together on the same canvas. He did not hesitate to show them to the world in all their opulent nudity. Their white skins, large eyes with wide gaze, their lovely children appear in religious and mythologic pictures at every turn you make in this museum. You become too familiar with them. You learn to know that one wife was slenderer ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... to be painted Savages, enveloped in all the superstition and wickedness of Heathenism. All the men and children go in a state of nudity. The older women wear grass skirts, and the young women and girls, grass or leaf aprons like Eve in Eden. They are exceedingly ignorant, vicious, and bigoted, and almost void of natural affection. Instead of the inhabitants of Port Resolution being improved by coming in contact with white ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... disregard of human life were displayed. In one of the villages of Champagne, during the protracted drought of 1556, the sacred scenes of the Passion were publicly enacted in the streets. The person of our Lord was represented by a young man in a state of entire nudity and bound with cords, who at every step was scourged by his companions, personating the Roman soldiers. The picture was true to life, and the blows so far from unreal that the prime actor in the scandalous performance ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... which sound philosophy and Christian faith have developed, is still strong in the minds and deeper conscience of the English-speaking races, and that were they to present materialism in all its loathsome nudity to the public gaze, they would be hissed off the stage. And so they dress it up in the clothes of the old religion just for the present, with many a quiet wink between themselves at the ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... almost complete nudity their skin is not very susceptible to touch for it is hardened and toughened by the effects of sun, rain, cold and dew which makes it as weather-beaten as that of any old salt's; besides this they are ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... may in this instance or any other repeat that the conclusion is strictly true, however comical it seems. Man within the clothes is naked, just as he is without them. Man would never have invented the clothes had he not been naked. The fact of his being clad at all does prove his essential nudity. And so in general,—the form of any judgment, being the addition of a predicate to a subject, shows that the subject has been conceived without the predicate, and thus by a strained metaphor may {282} be called the predicate's negation. Well and good! let the expression pass. But we must ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... description. They were ragged, dirty, and crawling with vermin. Most of them were nearly naked; but this was no inconvenience there, for it was so warm that those who had clothes were obliged to take them off, and nearly all were in a state of nudity. I soon found it necessary myself to disrobe, and even then the perspiration poured off me most profusely. It was ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... that is born of beauty compelled me to silence. Rose remained without moving, untroubled by the nudity which, at any other time, she would have refused to unveil. Did her emotion make her unconscious, or was it, on the contrary, lifting her to a plane in which false modesty had no place? Did she, in that brief minute, realise how our actions change their values in proportion to ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... contrast to the miserable twelve-feet-square mud-and-log cabins we passed by. Every farmer we met was a perfect picture of wretchedness and misery; their women dirty and covered with rags, which could scarcely conceal their nudity; the cattle lean and starving; and the horses so weak, that they could scarcely stand ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... silent a moment, looking out at the sleet-darkened grave-yard and the bumping horse-cars. "Yes, I am ambitious," she said at last. "And my ambition has brought me to this dreadful place!" She glanced about her—the room had a certain vulgar nudity; the bed and the window were curtainless—and she gave a little passionate sigh. "Poor old ambition!" she exclaimed. Then she flung herself down upon a sofa which stood near against the wall, and covered her face ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... every year, during the hot season. You may read about it in the next morning's paper which records how some young man, often of good family and apparently in good health, was seen behaving in the most inexplicable fashion at the hour of about 2 a.m.; jumping, that is, in a state of Adamitic nudity, into some public fountain. It goes on to say that the culprit was pursued by the police, run to earth, and carried to such-and-such a hospital, where his state of mind is to be investigated. Will our rising generation, it gravely adds, never learn the most ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... young lover." The structural novelty of the work is that, beginning with complexity—typifying the gorgeously robed Istar—the theme discloses itself little by little, as she is stripped of her jewels, until at last, when she stands forth in the full splendor of nudity, the theme is heard unaccompanied, like Isis unveiled or, to change the figure, like a scientific law which has been disclosed. The work is based on three generative themes; the second, derived from the first and of subsidiary importance, called by d'Indy the motif d'appel. ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... face. Her lovely eyes are fixed on the water. One arched and blue-veined foot is slightly raised as if the touch of the marble chilled her. Her limbs are in an easy attitude, and beautifully modelled. She is represented as a slight young girl, and the figure stands out in exquisite nudity from a background of Pompeian red, and the dark green of myrtles. With one hand she is holding aloft the masses of her rich brown hair—the attitude suggests the stretching of the muscles after repose; with the other"—but here his memory failed him. "What ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... freed on the previous day of the last scaffolding, and looking quite smart in its newness, with its broad courses of stone disposed with perfect regularity. And, in thought, he sauntered around it, charmed with its nudity, its stupendous candour, its chasteness recalling that of a virgin child, for there was not a piece of sculpture, not an ornament that would have uselessly loaded it. The roofs of the nave, transept, and apse were of equal height above ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... so fashionable in many parts of the State of Georgia during the last hot summer, and which is also said to have consisted simply of a shirt collar and a pair of spurs. But, in truth, these warriors, with shoulders and limbs in a state of nudity, with faces bestreaked with paints, with jingling trinkets dangling to their knees, and with feathered war caps waving above them, presented a truly picturesque and romantic appearance. When the center of the council house had been cleared and the musicians with the shell rattlers had taken ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... Even the waste places by the side of the road were not, as Hawthorne liked to put it, "taken back to Nature" by any decent covering of vegetation. Wherever the land had the chance, it seemed to lie fallow. There is a certain tawny nudity of the South, bare sun-burnt plains, coloured like a lion, and hills clothed only in the blue transparent air; but this was of another description—this was the nakedness of the North; the earth seemed to know that it was naked, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... North did his dirty worst to misrepresent this picture, and perhaps it was he who induced the Home Secretary to believe that our publication was "obscene." In reality the obscenity is in the Bible. The writer of Exodus contemplated sheer nudity, but the Freethinker dressed Jahveh in accordance with the more decent customs of the age of reason. I would cite on this point the judgment of Mr. Moncure D. Conway, the famous minister of South Place Chapel. He expressed himself as follows in a discourse ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... boot-jack beautiful? Is a crow-bar? Yet these are simple, they have no superfluous parts, they exactly serve their ends, they stand related to all things through the laws of chemistry and physics. A flower is beautiful, a shell on the beach is beautiful, a tree in full leaf, or in its winter nudity, is beautiful; but these things are not very simple. Complex things may be beautiful also. A village church may be beautiful no less than a Gothic cathedral. Emerson was himself a beautiful writer, a beautiful character, and his works are ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... hempen stuff, in the Summer, with an addition of a very coarse woolen jacket, breeches and shoes in Winter. But since the war, their masters, for they cannot get the cloathing as usual, suffer them to go in rags, and many in a state of nudity. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... about her body. It would be considered an outrage to strip her and leave her stark naked in the middle of the room. I cannot see why a man should not be credited with some feeling of modesty about his soul. I detest having my last garments plucked from me in public. Complete spiritual nudity causes me ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... Division of the Treasury Department, who, upon my wants being made known to him, procured proper relief, obtaining through Mrs. Bigelow and ladies in the town, clothing and proper care for five women who were rescued in a state of entire nudity. The men rescued were taken charge of by the citizens, who did all in their power to relieve their distress. All the rescued were greatly exhausted, having been in the ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... with rich drapes, had something of the appearance of a Sarkian harem. Although there were only five of the Alexander family present, there were at least twenty Lani whose costumes ranged from the black G string and halter of the household staff to the utter nudity of Douglas's playthings. They were all female, and Kennon wondered for a moment ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... more general sense, their divisions are but three, viz, those who eat human bodies, the dog eaters, and those who have no custom of the kind. Early in the morning the pupils would be out on, the beach, or on the rocks, in a state of nudity. Each had a place in front of his own tribe, nor did intense cold interfere in the slightest degree. After the poor creature had crept about, jerking his head and screaming for some time, a party of men would rush out, and, after surrounding him, would commence ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... women are stark naked; but it must be allowed that their nudity is not so startling as would be that of an European without clothes, for the faces, arms, and generally every part of their bodies are tattooed. Sometimes the taste of these designs is really wonderful. They pierce ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... into the living-room occupied by us as sleeping quarters, generally at such awkward moments as when we were dressing or undressing. This was a matter of constant annoyance to Lyte, as the people persisted in announcing themselves with a "Bon jour, monsieur," no matter what state of nudity ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... of bad materials a showy speech; he turned the public eye from the guilt of the libel to the popular value of the press; where others would have given a dull pleading, he gave a stately romance; where the jury, in feebler hands, would have been suffered to see the facts in their savage nudity, he exhibited them clothed in classic draperies, and dazzled the eye with the lofty features and heroic attitudes of ancient love of country. All the skill of man could not have saved Peltier from a verdict of guilty; but the genius of the orator invested his ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... "Vergine Santa, d'ogni grazia piena," but a Virgin, whose brick-dust coloured face, harsh unfeminine features, and muscular, masculine arms, give me the idea of a washerwoman, (con rispetto parlando!) an infant Saviour with the proportions of a giant: and what shall we say of the nudity of the figures in the back-ground; profaning the subject and shocking at once good taste and good sense? A little farther on, the eye rests on the divine Madre di Dio of Correggio: what beauty, what sweetness, what maternal love, and ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... centre, when what was his astonishment when he beheld under a long glass-case a figure of a woman modelled in wax, of exact and certainly of beautiful proportion! It was as large as life, and in a state of perfect nudity. The face lifted up, and discovered the muscles beneath; in fact, every part of the image could be removed, and presented to the curious every part of the human frame, modelled exact, and coloured. Newton was indeed astonished: he had witnessed several articles in the other room, ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... amity reassured the natives, who, seeing them, now turned the bows of their canoes, and paddled towards the boats. The canoe contained four men, almost in a state of nudity, their only covering consisting of a narrow slip of cotton fastened round the middle. They were copper-coloured, and extremely ugly: their hair jet black, very long, and falling down the back; eyes were also black, and deeply sunk in the head, giving a vindictive appearance to the ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... although many buffets are given and received, these are not regarded seriously, and there are seldom any fights. Col. Bivar says the contending villagers in their excitement, sometimes relapse into a state of almost complete nudity. The party which succeeds in obtaining possession of the post is supposed to gain health and prosperity during the coming year. Col. Bivar remarks that the origin of this so-called ceremony is said to be that the god of thunder, ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... soon as we have yielded to the infernal temptation, the lying prism vanishes, the halo disappears, and there only remains vice in all its hideousness and repulsive nudity. It is then that we hear a threatening voice mutter secretly in the depths ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... be no reason why he should confine himself to one tree alone for food, and entirely strip it of its leaves. During the many years I have ranged the forests I have never seen a tree in such a state of nudity; indeed, I would hazard a conjecture that, by the time the animal had finished the last of the old leaves, there would be a new crop on the part of the tree he had stripped first, ready for him to begin again, so quick is the process of vegetation ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... laborious. Each load consists of from fifty to seventy-five pounds of metal, which is carried in a very irksome and inconvenient manner in an untanned hide, called a capacho. The hapire performs his toilsome duty in a state of nudity, for, notwithstanding the coldness of the climate, he becomes so heated by his laborious exertion, that he is glad to divest himself of his clothing. As the work is carried on incessantly day and night, the miners are divided into parties called ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... figure was a study in satin nudity, whence, from a jeweled girdle, light draperies swept downward, covering the feet and swinging, a shimmering curve out into the foreground of the canvas, the curve being cut off in its apogee by ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... his command, and followed him down the staircase. The shop and the portal were now thronged with the inhabitants of Finisterra, men, women, and children; the latter for the most part in a state of nudity, and with bodies wet and dripping, having been probably summoned in haste from their gambols in the brine. Through this crowd the figure whom I have attempted to describe pushed his way with an ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... eight feet wide, and twelve long. It had a fire in the centre; and no vent either for smoke or heat. The chiefs who were with us threw off their mats and lay down close together in a state of perfect nudity. I had not been many minutes in this oven, before I found the heat and smoke, above, below, and on every side, to be insufferable. Though the night was cold, Mr. Kendall and myself were compelled to quit our habitation. I crept out, ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... of the day, as well as bathing therein, men and women together, with a decided heedlessness of the conventionalities. The Maoris of New Zealand could not show more utter disregard for a state of nudity than was exhibited by one group of natives whom we saw. The admirable climate, the hot springs, the beautiful gardens, vineyards, and abundant fruits, render this place thoroughly attractive, notwithstanding that so large a portion consists of adobe ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... free and unshackled in her loose draperies, quite unabashed in her state of semi-nudity—gay, reckless, wooing pleasure on the wing, surely she might have posed as the embodied archetype of France itself. So has this pagan among modern nations borrowed something of the antique spirit of wantonness. Along with its theft of the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... wear! Now, as this is a true ditty, I do not assert—this, you know, is between us— That she's in a state of absolute nudity, Like Powers's Greek Slave or the Medici Venus; But I do mean to say, I have heard her declare, When at the same moment she had on a dress Which cost five hundred dollars, and not a cent less, And jewelry worth ten times more, I should guess, That she had not a thing ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... the "Eagle" the boys resumed their old sport of swimming and gathering wood. About this time, owing no doubt to the complaints of the riverside inhabitants, the city authorities determined to stop all further rows and displays of nudity. The orders against naked bathing were strictly enforced by a constable named Sam Long. Before the boys got thoroughly acquainted with him, he often captured an offender's clothing, which he detained until the ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... and wide, on every hand The prairie all environs me; I see Nought save a stretch of green and treeless land, Conspicuous alone for nudity: A sea of earth, a boundless stretch unspanned Except by ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... waiting for the moment—should it ever come—when Richard would again recognise her, and give himself to her again. And those vigils proved a searching enough experience, notwithstanding her long apprenticeship to service of sorrow—which was also the service of her son. For, in the mental and moral nudity of delirium, he made strange revelation, not only of acts committed, but of inherent tendencies of character and of thought. He spoke, with bewildering inconsequence and intimacy, of incidents and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... prolific verbosity of pontificated dogma which has graced the scroll of medical science, whole libraries have been written—and ably written, too—by skillful pens for the sole purpose of covering the simple nudity of the agnostic position of science—the dreaded, confidence-shattering ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... time we speak of the Indians of Iquitos went about in almost a state of nudity. The Spaniards and half-breeds alone were clothed, and much as they scorned their indigenous fellow-citizens, wore only a simple shirt, light cotton trousers, and a straw hat. All lived cheerlessly enough in the village, mixing little ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... loads and water, the latter having been corded in mats, became quiet only with sleep. Add to these scenes and uproar the deafening volubility of twenty Arabs and Nubians, each shouting within the true barbaric key, the seven-eighths nudity of the blacks, the elaborate and flashing wear of the upper servants, and the small asperities of this my menial world—all of these with a refreshing breeze, a clear atmosphere, the air laden with ozone and electric life, the sky inviting the serenest contemplation, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... summer. If the Elizabethans had been forced to drive in closed cars through the Nevada desert in the summertime, they might have started a cult of nudity, Malone felt. It was bad enough now, in what was ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... carved on the left of the portico by which you enter; first, her refined head with its bird's helmet, surmounted by a solar disc; then, as the light continues to descend, her neck and shoulders, and her arm, raised to make who knows what mysterious, indicating sign; and finally the slim nudity of her torso, and her hips close bound in a sheath. Behold her now, the goddess, come completely out of the shadow. . . . But she seems surprised and disturbed at seeing at her feet, instead of ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... many suffered burning with unclouded serenity, with triumphant feelings of cheerfulness and joy. Their orthodox enemies accused them of gratifying their passions at midnight assemblages in darkened rooms, to which both sexes in a condition of nudity repaired. A similar accusation, as is well known, was brought against the primitive Christians by the fashionable society ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... obliged to obey—for, apart from the black woman's threat, she had no alternative but to put on the costly garments which had been procured for her, her own clothes being torn to pieces; and of course she did not wish to remain in a state of nudity. She therefore dressed herself—and in truth, the garments were well selected, and fitted her to a charm. Even when attired in her old clothes, she had looked exceedingly pretty; but now, dressed in an elegant costume which displayed her fine shape and budding charms to the best advantage, she ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... structure in the classic manner and turn its lines into ornament, adding only what may help to complete and unite its suggestions. This puritanism in design is rightly commended, but its opposite may be admirable too. We may admit that nudity is the right garment for the gods, but it would hardly serve the interests of beauty to legislate that all mortals should always go naked. The veil that conceals natural imperfections may have a perfection of its own. Maxims in art are pernicious; beauty is here ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the very best phase of morals and public manners in the purest state of Roman society. What must have been the worst? The worst! Well, I will give you an idea of it. The Emperor Nero drove through the streets of the capital with his mistress in a state of nudity; and the Emperor Commodus first seduced and then murdered his own sister. Here reason, blinded by lust, was their guide. These people were not troubled with that terrible book called the Bible. Happy (?) state. How would we like to have our homes in the midst of such fellows? ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... illumination divided into four parts, with a handsome border—not quite perhaps so rich as the preceding. Among the subjects, there is a singular one of Lancelot du Lac helping a lady out of a cauldron in a state of nudity: two gentlemen and a lady are quietly looking on. The text appertaining to this subject runs thus: "Et quant elle voit lancelot si lui dist hoa sire cheualiers pour dieu ostes moy de ceste aure ou il a eaue qui toute mait Et lancelot vint a la aure ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... never art if art means idealism. The realism of the thing was its offensiveness. Ideal nakedness may be divine,—the most godly of all human dreams of the superhuman. But a naked person is not divine at all. Ideal nudity needs no girdle, because the charm is of lines too beautiful to be veiled or broken. The living real human body has no such divine geometry. Question: Is an artist justified in creating nakedness for its own sake, unless he can divest that nakedness ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... of the Prodigal.—His departure from his father's house. A resolute youth in the garb of nudity, with a bandage over his eyes; his right hand is tied behind him and in his left is a bunch of flowers; he turns and gives ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... common lodging-house, and lived in comparative decency. Some score of us, or perhaps a dozen, went up together for surgical examination, and were made to strip stark naked in each other's presence. I had never objected to this amongst my own kind and kindred, when one exposed one's nudity by the side of the clean brook or yellow canal in which we used to bathe in boyhood; but amongst this crew it was hard, and even terrible. We had all been bathed, perforce, before the medical examination began; but a mere tubbing does not cleanse the mind ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... they would have the triumphal opening; already Paris was covered with picture placards: you saw Tom, as a caryatid, supporting the weight of a palace; the Three Graces entwined in their radiant nudity; the impersonator standing, like a Don Juan, surrounded by a bevy of women: the ballet-girl, the shop-girl, the fine lady; then, besides those, the New Trickers—"My idea!" thought Lily, but she didn't care a jot now—the New ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... giving way to the ordinary cloth ones of his white companion. It is so with the blanket, which is being shed for the coat; and, again, this is true with the moccasin, which is being replaced by the leathern shoe. The dress of the female has undergone the same alteration. From almost a state of nudity, they have been raised to a position from which they look upon silk and satin with a "connoisseur's eye." When New Mexico was part and parcel of the domain of Old Mexico, Taos was the seat of much smuggling from the United States, and many an apparent pack of grain drawn ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... sit as the hero of a fancy picture, bought at the Academy by the flattered parents. There is a grove, a flock of toy sheep, drapery in the grand style, a mahogany Satyr taking a thorn out of the little pink foot of a conventional nudity—poor survivals of the Titianesque. But the head is an obvious portrait, and a happy one; far more like the real boy, so tradition says, than the generalized chubbiness ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... had been established for nearly seven years, and during the whole of that time the natives had been permitted to go about the streets in a state of nudity. [Note 109 at end of para.] This was not only an outrage on decency and propriety, but it was demoralising to the natives themselves. Like Adam, after having come in contact with the tree of knowledge, ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... such a sight. They were almost coal-black in colour, and inspection of them through the telescope showed them to be absolutely naked, wherefore I decided not to pay them a visit until some future occasion when Billy should not be with me, although, apart from their state of nudity, they impressed me as being ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... toothless, grateful old man. He beguiled me into an ascent of the solitary tower, from which you may look down on the big sallow river and glance at diminished Tarascon and the barefaced, bald-headed hills behind it. It may appear that I insist too much upon the nudity of the Provencal horizon—too much considering that I have spoken of the prospect from the heights of Beaucaire as lovely. But it is an exquisite bareness; it seems to exist for the purpose of allowing one ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... the upper edge and slipped it down quickly, turning it inside out, as one would skin a snake. The arm appeared, white, plump, round, so suddenly bared as to produce an idea of complete and bold nudity. ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... to death. Albinos are valued, though their colour is not admired. If death occurs in a natural manner, the body is usually either buried in the village or outside. A large portion of the negro races affect nudity, despising clothing as effeminate; but these are chiefly the more boisterous roving pastorals, who are too lazy either to grow cotton or strip the trees of their bark. Their young women go naked; ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... American cousins. The inherent absurdities that are second nature to us exhale for them the full flavour of their grotesqueness. The idea of an insignificant boy peer taking precedence of Mr. John Morley! The idea of having to appear before royalty in a state of partial nudity on a cold winter day! The necessity of backing out of the royal presence! The idea of a freeborn Briton having to get out of an engagement long previously formed on the score that "he has been commanded to dine with H.R.H." ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the Supreme Court, says, "If I had been a legislator I would never have voted for this law.... It is evident that mere nudity in painting and sculpture is not obscenity. It is a false delicacy and mere prudery which would condemn and banish from sight all such objects." Public opinion should be directed against the vice society which ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... are sometimes pestilential. If any doubt this truth let him remember the nightmares wherein his nudity made torment. And, while remembering the anguish such lack of clothing has occasioned in dreams, let him think with pity on the suffering of Zeke whose plight was real. It was in sooth, a predicament to strain the savoir faire of the most polished ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... civilisation, but to infuse a new religious spirit, to clear and purify the human conscience. A perfect Christian spirit can exist quite outside civilisation as well as in the midst of the most complicated civilisation. A Christian negro, in his nudity, picking up dates under a palm tree, can be as good and saintly a man as any business man from the Strand in London or from the Fifth Avenue in New York. And, on the contrary, the most civilised men, like Bismarck and ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... that gives me life.—Live Jesus, when his mouth touches me with an amorous kiss.—Live Jesus, when he calls me, my sister, my dove, my lovely one.—Live Jesus, when his good pleasure reduces me to nudity; live Jesus, when his blandishments fill me with chaste delight."—And this erotic stuff is for ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... to cure diseases, and especially snake-bite. One day all the women were transplanting rice, and it was found that Lona could do as much work as all her companions put together. So they watched her, and when she thought she was alone she stripped off her clothes (nudity being an essential element in magic), muttered some spells, and threw the plants into the air, when they all settled down in their proper places. Finding she was observed, she tried to escape, and as she ran the earth opened, and all the water of the rice-fields followed her and thus was formed ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... be next to feel the refreshing torrent. We let slip the garment of timorous covering very easily when nudity is commonplace. Vait-hua was to teach me to be modest without pother, to chat with those about me during my ablutions without concern for the false vanities of screens or even the shelter of rocks as in the river in Atuona. In such scenes one perceives that immodesty ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... was adopted by the National Assembly. This decalogue of free men, formed in the forests of America, contained more metaphysical phrases than sound policy. It applied as ill to an old society as the nudity of the savage to the complicated wants of civilised man: but it had the merit of placing man bare for the moment, and, by showing him what he was and what he was not, of setting him on the discovery of the real value of his duties and his rights. It was the ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... made a mystery of marriage, which, veil by veil, it is the duty of the successful novelist to disclose. If I were a novelist I should seek my characters in the Divorce Court; if I were a painter I should study those superstitions which have grown up around human nudity so that the very word 'naked' has become invested with a covert significance and must very shortly be obsolete. I contemplate opening a new Pythagorean Institute for instruction of the artistic young. Above the portal I shall cause to be inscribed the following profound thought: ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... spirit that we owe the mysteries lying buried in every human word? In the word True do we not discern a certain imaginary rectitude? Does not the compact brevity of its sound suggest a vague image of chaste nudity and the simplicity of Truth in all things? The syllable seems to me ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... and opportunity; intimate things also were suddenly dragged from neglected, veiled and darkened corners into an acute vividness of perception. Close at hand in the big art museum I came for the first time upon the beauty of nudity, which I had hitherto held to be a shameful secret, flaunted and gloried in; I was made aware of beauty as not only permissible, but desirable and frequent and of a thousand hitherto unsuspected rich aspects of life. One night in a real rapture, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... a birthday morning. The tender beauty of everything around her reassured Catherine, who had come from town in a mood of strange apprehension. As she looked at the expectant woods awaiting their lovely costume in fragile nudity, at the violets that seemed to sing in odours, at that pale and shallow sky which is a herald of the deeper skies to come, it seemed to her impossible that Mark, who could be so blithe, so radiant, could turn to dark imaginings in such an atmosphere of exquisite enterprise. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... was to the manners of an age which counts its women not dressed if they are not half undressed, and with his sensibilities further calloused by a night devoted to restaurants the entree to which, for women, seemed to be conditioned on at least semi-nudity, Lanyard was none the less inclined to think he had never seen, this side of footlights, a gown quite so daring as that which revealed the admirably turned person of the lady who named herself Liane. There was so little of it that, he reflected, its cost must have been ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... was a very good likeness of Wilhelm as Apollo in Olympian nudity, handsome, slender and vapid, in its resemblance to school copies of the antique. A charming little cat with Pilar's features was rubbing herself against his leg. The pussy blinked up at the young Greek god with an expression of adoration, half-comic, half-touching, while he bent his head ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... thirsting for opportunity, took advantage of the "fair," and assembled in hundreds, while the Kafirs, in a species of unbelieving surprise, met them in thousands to exchange wares. It was a new idea to many of these black sons and daughters of nudity, that the horns which they used to throw away as useless were in reality valuable merchandise, and that the gum, which was to be had for the gathering, could procure for them beads and buttons, and brass-wire and cotton, with many other ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... of sunlight, stood his new neighbour, wholly unclad, doing exercises of some sort before a long gilt mirror. Hedger did not happen to think how unpardonable it was of him to watch her. Nudity was not improper to any one who had worked so much from the figure, and he continued to look, simply because he had never seen a woman's body so beautiful as this one,—positively glorious in action. As she swung her arms and changed from one pivot of motion to another, muscular ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... in the centre of Mrs. Willy P. Goldmark's yellow and gold drawing-room, under a thousand-candle-power chandelier, with reflectors aimed at her from every point of the compass. I had seen her wincing and shivering there in her outraged nudity at ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... named Tomby, who speaks excellent Arabic. This fellow has been twice to Khartoum, and he wears clothes, instead of walking about in a state of absolute nudity like his countrymen. He has an excellent rifle that was given to him by his old master, a French trader, Monsieur Bartholome. Tomby has been employed as interpreter; and having been born and bred in these parts, he is a perfect chronicler. It appears ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... caused the Filipina women of the place to be stripped and compelled to march before him on the public plaza in a state of nudity. ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... a state of perfect nakedness?" he replied, "Yes; they used to think they tore their clothes all to pieces; some of them would do that." "In point of fact, were they not fastened to the tables, sitting in a state of perfect nudity?" Answer: "They used to be so at the table; they were chained all round." In regard to the apparatus, so ingeniously cruel, by which one of the patients (Norris) was chained ten or twelve years, Haslam, the apothecary at Bethlem, when asked, "Do you think that his confinement ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... passing one, were struck with this circumstance, and their bursts of laughter, running and hiding their faces, and loud giggling, left no one in ignorance of the cause of their extreme bashfulness. Thousands of both sexes pass daily beneath the same statue, without a thought of its nudity, and it is looked upon as a ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... here to say a word in explanation of that frank and innocent nudity which is so characteristic a trait of the best Greek art. The Greek admiration for the masculine body and the willingness to display it were closely bound up with the extraordinary importance in Greece of gymnastic ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... boudoir, the floor of which would be completely covered with looking glasses, and filled with furniture intended by their shape and softness to augment the voluptuousness of our embraces. No costume whatever would be put on in this room. Nudity alone would have a right to remain there. There would be pieces of furniture to excite the senses and whereon to recline, others enabling us to suck each of our members, to lick, to frig, to kiss, to enjoy, ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... that purpose they had borrowed or got together about a dozen Arab dresses of kinds, wherewith to cover the bodies and limbs of the unsophisticated Shilluks. The national costume for men is a state of nudity, but they occasionally sprinkle their bodies with red or grey ashes. The women usually wear scant leather or thong aprons. When the Sirdar ascertained the true cause of the delay, time pressing, he intimated he would waive for the nonce their putting on ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... beings. The souls of heroes were given to them for lovers and husbands. One of the most graceful of the early Indian myths is the story of the apsaras, Urva. Urva loved Puravaras and became his 'wife, on the condition that she was n-ever to behold him in a state of nudity. They remained together for years, till the heavenly companions of Urva determined to secure her return to them. They accordingly beguiled Puravaras into leaving his bed in the darkness of night, and then with a lightning flash ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... man, who, if and when he can realise it and has detached himself from his unworthy because unreal surroundings, is himself God. Akin to Vedantic mysticism is the Yoga system, which teaches extreme asceticism, retirement into solitude, fastings, nudity, mortification of the flesh, profound meditation on unfathomable mysteries, and the endless reiteration of magic words and phrases as the means of accelerating that ineffable fusion of God and man. The materialism of the Sankhya and the idealism of the Vedanta combine to ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... that the Pope, scandalized at the nudity of certain figures, a nudity which Daniele da Volterra was afterwards charged to clothe, sent word to Michael Angelo that he ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... exquisite, in the armless figure of the Venus de Milo,—from the aerial posture of John of Bologna's Mercury, to the inimitable and firm dignity in the attitude of Aristides in the Museum of Naples,—from the delicate lines which teach how grace can chasten nudity in the Goddess of the Tribune at Florence, to the embodied melancholy of Hamlet in the brooding Lorenzo of the Medici Chapel,—from the stone despair, the frozen tears, as it were, of all bereaved maternity, in the very bend of Niobe's body and yearning gesture, to the abandon gleaming ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... moment he thought she was going to throw herself on his neck and burst into tears. A sudden impulse seemed to impel her. But they saw each other in their semi-nudity. She, who had not noticed it before, was now conscious that she was only half dressed, that her arms were bare, her shoulders bare, covered only by the scattered locks of her unbound hair, and on her right shoulder, near the armpit, on lowering her eyes, she perceived again the few drops of ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... is as yet under the charm of Southern art and of ancient models; he does not weary of invoking and depicting the gods of Olympus. Nudity, which the image-makers of cathedrals had inflicted as a chastisement on the damned, scandalises him no more than it did the painters of Italy. He sees Venus, "untressed," reclining on her couch, "a bed of golde," ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... weight of it convinced him that it was not all damma: he examined it, and found that it was the great ruby of the Pegu kingdom which had been lost, and which the old man had for so many years, in a state of nudity and incarceration, held in his left hand. I asked one of the Burmah chiefs whether this ruby now in the possession of the King of Ava was so fine as represented: his answer was in truly Eastern hyperbole—"Dip it in the Irrawaddy," said he, (that ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... deliberately inviting them to build their structures on sand instead of rock." [Footnote: Edmond Holmes, What is Poetry, p. 68.] Every reader of contemporary poetry is aware that along with its exhilarating freshness and force there has been a display of singularity and of silly nudity both of body and mind. Too intimate confidences have been betrayed in the lyric confessional. It is a fine thing to see a Varsity eight take their dip in the river at the end of an afternoon's spin. Those boys strip well. But there are middle-aged ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... that Bartleby was an immoral person. But what could he be doing there?—copying? Nay again, whatever might be his eccentricities, Bartleby was an eminently decorous person. He would be the last man to sit down to his desk in any state approaching to nudity. Besides, it was Sunday; and there was something about Bartleby that forbade the supposition that he would by any secular occupation violate the proprieties of ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... sold here in the same open way that the business is carried on in Zanzibar slave-market. A man goes about calling out the price he wants for the slave, who walks behind him; if a woman, she is taken into a hut to be examined in a state of nudity. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... with a hideous crash, while the cry of Murder, thieves, murder, was repeated by many voices, and rendered him almost immoveable. In the next moment, the butler, the cook, the groom, and indeed every person in the house, appeared on the stair-case, some almost in a state of nudity, and shrinking from each other's gaze, and all armed with such weapons as chance had thrown in their way, to attack the ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... defended, but then his punishment was altogether too severe. There is every reason to suppose that DIANA wanted some one to accidentally notice her proficiency in swimming, else why should she have chosen a place of popular resort for her bath? And then the simple nudity in which she was surprised was not nearly as suggestive as the peculiar costumes in which our fashionable ladies now-a-days enter the surf in the presence of admiring crowds. However, ideas change with successive ages, and what we now consider perfectly proper would probably have brought ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... by the Turks, "stripped and manacled and offered for sale in the market place," and so had a sentimental appeal which went straight to the heart of a sentimental people, and overcame any antagonism which her nudity might have produced. It inspired Elizabeth Barrett Browning to a not very noteworthy sonnet, clergymen gave it certificates of character, so to speak, and "it made a sensation wherever shown, and was fondly ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... provinces on the South Sea. They who go to look for them, and do not enter there, will be lost. On the coast is no maize: the inhabitants eat the powder of rush and of straw, and fish that is caught in the sea from rafts, not having canoes. With grass and straw the women cover their nudity. They are a ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... and white marble and its multitude of slender and brilliant forms, rising upward like an altar of candelabra. A new spirit appears here, a more delicate sensibility; it is not excessive and disordered as in the north, and yet it is not satisfied with the grave simplicity, the robust nudity of antique architecture. It is the daughter of the pagan mother, healthy and gay, but more ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... of the pieces, but complete the full abandon and veracity of the farm-fields and the home-brew'd flavor of the Scotch vernacular. (Is there not often something in the very neglect, unfinish, careless nudity, slovenly hiatus, coming from intrinsic genius, and not "put on," that secretly pleases the soul more than the wrought and re-wrought polish of the most perfect verse?) Mark the native spice and untranslatable twang ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... unsatisfied craving for the nudity of paganism," she interrupted, "but that love, which is the highest joy, which is divine simplicity itself, is not for you moderns, you children of reflection. It works only evil in you. As soon as you wish to be natural, you become ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... 'Eygyr, the generating power.' Time rolls on; faith lessens; the flocks are led to graze within the rocky circle of the giants, even the bones of the warriors moulder into dust; the lay is no longer heard; and the fable, reduced again to its original simplicity and nudity, becomes the fitting source of pastime to the untutored peasant and the listening child. Hence we may yet trace no small proportion of mystic and romantic lore in the tales which gladden the cottage fireside, or, century after century, ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... work. The warriors of Rude who are chanting the Marseillaise in the group at the left are not professional soldiers, they are armed citizens, marching to work out their sublime and violent mission. Their nudity makes them appear to me like sans-culottes in Grecian helmets. . . . Here there is more than the glory and egoism of a great nation. All Europe is awake to new life, thanks to these Crusaders of Liberty. . . . The nations call to mind certain images. If I think of Greece, I see the columns ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... pathos to which Crabbe could make no pretension. From Chaucer, Crabbe passes to the great but very different master, on whom he had first built his style. Was Pope, then, not a poet? seeing that he too has "no small portion of this actuality of relation, this nudity of description, and poetry without an atmosphere"? Here again, of course, Crabbe overlooks one essential difference between himself and his model. Both were keen-sighted students of character, and both described sordid and worldly ambitions. But Pope was strongest ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... Fifty Springs, we pursued a southerly course over more hills, and through fertile valleys, where we saw Indians in a state of nudity, who looked at us from a distance, but never approached our wagons, nor molested any one. On the twenty-fourth of September, we turned due north and found the tracks of wagon wheels, which guided us to the ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... these villages are "picturesque." This is the only reference I find to the people and their conditions. I have seen nothing but horror, and yet I went into these places without prejudice, prepared to be interested in the industry of the Southern country, and with no idea of the tragedy and nudity of these people's existence. The ultimate balance is sure to come; meanwhile, we cannot but be sensible of the vast individual sacrifices that must fall to destruction ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... retired for the night, the former complained of the heat, and suggested that they should sleep without any covering or night dresses, and by way of example got into bed in a state of perfect nudity. ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... the intention of placing themselves beyond the possibility of breaking their vow, or of giving evidence of their constancy, certain it is that they loaded their prepuce with an enormous fibula, or ring; and, in their warm climate, where nudity does not shock ideas of propriety or decency, devout women not unfrequently repaired to these soi-disant saints, to admire and venerate such efforts of virtue and self-denial; they are even reported to have knelt down, ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... of the nudity of arm and leg he must have presented to eighteen's tender sensibilities in Mr. Latz's expression now as he sat well forward on the overstuffed chair, his overstuffed knees strained apart, his face nude of all pretense and creased ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... two dead horses were lying in a lake of mud about the very door of the railway station; three of them were females in absolute nudity. The fourth was a male, with one stocking on. This proved to be Hillsbro' Harry, warned in vain up at Damflask. When he actually heard the flood come hissing, he had decided, on the whole, to dress, ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... passing into the Olympian Gardens, throw himself on a vernal bank. She seized this opportunity to become familiar with the god. The frolicsome deity honoured her with his caresses; and from this amour sprung the god of Love, who resembles his father in jollity and mirth, and his mother in his nudity. The allegory is ingenious. The union of poverty with riches must inevitably produce the most delightful ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... exercises, themselves little heeding to cover their thighs in walking, believing themselves, says Plato, sufficiently covered by their virtue without any other robe. But those, of whom St. Augustin speaks, have given nudity a wonderful power of temptation, who have made it a doubt, whether women at the day of judgment shall rise again in their own sex, and not rather in ours, for fear of tempting us again in that holy state. In brief, we allure and flesh them by all ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... think of my companions; I had forgotten them. Now in the painful surges of awakening realization, of full human understanding of that inhuman annihilation, I turned to them for strength. Faintly I wondered again at Ruth's scantiness of garb, her more than half nudity; dwelt curiously upon the red brand across ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... hung here and there, some bronzes of Hosmer and Powers, a marble venus by Potter, a now forgotten sculptor, and other objects of art—nothing of any distinction. Pleasing, appropriately colored rugs covered the floor. Mrs. Cowperwood was shocked by the nudity of the Venus which conveyed an atmosphere of European freedom not common to America; but she said nothing. It was all harmonious and soothing, and she did not feel herself capable to judge. Frank knew about these things so much ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... were in Grand Lake. Hubbard remarked that it looked like Lake George, save that the hills were lower. For a few miles above its outlet the shores on both sides of the lake are low. Then on the south come bluffs that rise, stern and grand in their nudity, almost perpendicularly from the deep, clear water, while on the north come lower hills, the most part wooded, that retreat more gently from the rocky shore. Heading for the extreme upper of the lake, where ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... as ignoble an animal as a Barbary ass, goaded by a dusky little islander almost in a state of nudity, that, an hour before sunset on the day of his arrival, the English traveller approached the casino of the Consul's daughter, for there a note from Major Ponsonby had invited him to repair, to be introduced to his daughter, and to taste his oranges. The servant who received ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... expression which I do not accept." "It is your personal enemy"; says Talleyrand to him, one day, "if you could have shot it away with bullets, it would have disappeared long ago!"—It is because good taste is the highest attainment of civilization, the innermost vestment which drapes human nudity, which best fits the person, the last garment retained after the others have been cast off, and which delicate tissue continues to hamper Napoleon; he throws it off instinctively, because it interferes with his natural behavior, with the uncurbed, dominating, savage ways of the vanquisher ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... camote-vine apron, called pay-pay. Often no girdle was worn, but the women held a small bunch of leaves against the body in lieu of an attached apron. Sometimes, however, their hands were occupied with their burdens, and their nudity seemed not to trouble them in the least. The women remove their skirts, they say, because they usually possess only one at a time, and they prefer to go naked in the rain and while working in the wet sementeras rather than sit in ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... apathetic stare of extreme solemnity. Remember the mercury was 92 degrees, so the women may be excused for having nothing more than petticoats or loose trousers on in the privacy of their home, the children for being in a state of nudity, and the man for being clothed in a loin cloth! As I grew used to the darkness I saw a toothless old woman smoking in a corner, fanned by two girls, who, I believe, are domestic slaves. Near one of the window openings a young woman was lounging, and two others were attentively ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... poets thus assert, occasionally, that the unblushing nudity of their pride is a conscious departure from convention, they would not have us believe that they are fundamentally different from older singers. One seldom finds an actual poet, of whatever period, depicted in the verse of the last century, whose pride ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... only lived like other men! If he had only listened to the worst among them, if he had only torn the veil early from every limb of that draped female figure, that iron maiden, if he had only seen it in its horror of nudity, with its sharp nails for eyes, and its jagged knives where the bosom should be, he should not be pressed to death ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... school." Of the profane subjects, he instances the Fornarina, "with a deep bright glow on her face, naked below the waist, and well pleased to be so, for the sake of your admiration—ready for any extent of nudity, for love or money—the brazen trollop that she is! Raphael must have been capable of great sensuality to have painted this picture of his own accord, and lovingly." These are the iconoclasms of the Goth and Vandal at their first advent to Rome. They ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... received no pay, but were satisfied with what plunder they got after a battle; and accordingly, this principle stimulating them, they were always foremost on any contest, dispute, or battle. They begin the campaign almost in a state of nudity, and seldom return to their homes without abundance of apparel, arms, horses, camels, and money; but this property quickly disappears, and these people are soon again reduced to their wonted misery and ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... about the boiler of the steam boat, a few pieces of dried apples that had been dropped and trodden under foot, which, with her toothless gums, she attempted to masticate with all the eagerness of a starving swine. Little children, from one to four years old, were crawling about in a state of nudity, and almost of starvation, while their own mothers and fathers, were staggering, and fighting, and swearing. It is a fact, that while these poor creatures cannot articulate a word of any thing else in English, the most awfully profane expressions will drop from their lips in English, ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... lost the proper conception of form, and the feeling for delicacy and beauty of outline, it followed of course that they became more and more removed from nature in their desire to rival each other in the forced attitudes of their figures, and in the exhibition of nudity, until at last such disgusting caricatures were produced as we find in the works of Martin Heemskirk or Franz Floris, artists who were even deficient in good colouring, the old inheritance of ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... death-throes had bitten the ankles of Madame de San-Real, who still held in her hand her dagger, dripping blood. The hair of the Marquise had been torn out, she was covered with bites, many of which were bleeding, and her torn dress revealed her in a state of semi-nudity, with the scratches on her breasts. She was sublime so. Her head, eager and maddened, exhaled the odor of blood. Her panting mouth was open, and her nostrils were not sufficient for her breath. There are certain animals who fall ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac |
