"Pardonable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... show, could be exceedingly exact with numbers. But this exactness did not extend to their historical inscriptions. We could forgive them for giving us in round numbers the total of enemies slain or of booty carried off and even a slight exaggeration would be pardonable. But what shall we say as to the accuracy of numbers in our documents when one edition gives the total slain in a battle as 14,000, another as 20,500, the next as 25,000, and the last as 29,000! Is it surprising that we begin ...
— Assyrian Historiography • Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead
... it is only of late that we are beginning to aim at a more catholic spirit in literary criticism. It is not our business simply to revile or to extol the ideals of our ancestors, but to try to understand them. The passionate partisanship of militant schools is pardonable in the apostles of a new creed, but when the struggle is over we must aim at saner judgments. Byron was impelled by motives other than the purely judicial when he declared Pope to be the 'great moral poet of all times, of all climes, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... My falsehood, if you should choose to call me false, is of a very different nature, and is pardonable by all laws ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... so few days ago appeared now, in the biassed light of circumstance, a pardonable, a forgettable offence. He had loved her; he had wanted to marry her; he had, with that in mind, tricked her. He had taken advantage of the universal admission that in love as in war all things were fair. The ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... and wise and tender as ever the fondest father could have written to the dearest of daughters. Everything was explained in it—everything made clear; and gradually she realised the natural, strong and pardonable craving of the rich, unloved man, to seek out for himself some means whereby he might leave all his world's gainings to one whose kindness to him had not been measured by any knowledge of his wealth, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... said Sherburne with pardonable pride, "and we got a lot of information, too, some of it beyond price. We've learned that there will be no more attempts on Richmond by sea. The Yankee armies will come across Virginia ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... at her a moment, smiling sadly. Then, with pardonable self-esteem when we think of what manner of man it was with whom he now compared himself, "Surely," said he, "it is better to become the prey of the lion ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... transgressions, as that it would break the back of all the angels of heaven should the great God impute it to them. And he that sees this is far enough off from thinking of doing to mitigate or assuage the rigour of the law, or to make pardonable his own transgressions thereby. But he that sees not this, cannot confess his transgressions aright; for true confession consisteth in the general, in a man's taking to himself his transgressions, with the acknowledgment of them to be his, and that he cannot ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... ever seen him before. And this very calmness, that scrupulous attitude which he felt bound in honour to assume then and for ever, unless she would condescend to make a sign at some future time, added to the heaviness of her heart innocent of the most pardonable guile. ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... his too exclusively worldly experience, identified him with his particular class in society, rendering him largely the responsible representative of a libertinism in habits and sentiments that was more pardonable in his time than in our own. His poetry belongs also in another sense to the world he lived in: it is incessantly occupied with current events and circumstance, with Spain, Italy, and Greece as he actually saw them, with ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... London, and not until he was thirty-two years of age did he settle in Norwich, where he was "much resorted to for his skill in physic," and where he lived for forty-five years, when the fine church of St. Peter Mancroft, received his ashes—a church in which, let me add, with pardonable pride, my own grandfather and grandmother were married. I am glad that Norwich is shortly to commemorate by a fitting monument not the least great of her sons, one who has been aptly called ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... the best of all the Micmacs, they are sober, obedient to their priests, exact in the observance of the smallest articles of religion (if indeed there be any small). It is true that they are ignorant, but this is pardonable in them because of the difficulty of their language. One day I had given Communion to an old squaw who was ill. They were all alarmed as she was not fasting when she received; they thought that both the priest and the squaw had been guilty of great disrespect ...
— Memoir • Fr. Vincent de Paul
... the second was the heir by entail to the title of the Duke, his uncle; the eldest was to succeed to the peerage of his grandfather. The Bishop was accustomed to listen in silence to these innocent and pardonable maternal boasts. On one occasion, however, he appeared to be more thoughtful than usual, while Madame de Lo was relating once again the details of all these inheritances and all these "expectations." She ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... in war, my lords, which every reasonable man imputes to chance, or to causes of which the influence could not be foreseen; there are others that may justly be termed the consequences of misconduct, but of misconduct involuntary and pardonable, of a disregard, perhaps, of some circumstances of an affair produced by too close an attention to others. But there are miscarriages, too, for which candour itself can find no excuses, and of which no other causes can be assigned than cowardice or treachery. From the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... period when it becomes unnecessary to protest vehemently against the iron rule of an authority more despotic than that of absolute kings, and far more cruel and oppressive than the laws which but a few years ago attached the penalty of death to the commission of almost pardonable offences. Society, with the acquirement of other useful knowledge, has learned to appreciate the iniquitous folly of murder perpetrated in cold blood, without the slightest excuse. The nation which above all the countries of the world takes credit for adapting ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... power, is apparently that from which they seek distinction. Thus, we see, that school alone has the custom of representing candle-light, not as it really appears to us by night, but red, as it would illuminate objects to a spectator by day. Such tricks, however pardonable in the little style, where petty effects are the sole end, are inexcusable in the greater, where the attention should never be drawn aside by trifles, but should be entirely occupied by the ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... coming to town, I did myself the honour of waiting on you and Lady Hester Pitt: and though I think myself extremely distinguished by your obliging note, I shall be sorry for having given you the trouble of writing it, if it did not lend me a very pardonable opportunity of saying what I much wished to express, but thought myself too private a person, and of too little consequence, to take the liberty to say. In short, Sir, I was eager to congratulate you on the lustre you have thrown on this country; I wished to thank you for the security ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... growing out of unworthy personal motives at home, was now at last closed by a chapter which appeared only the more gratifying by contrast with what had gone before. Mr. Adams recorded, with less of exultation than might have been pardonable, the utter discomfiture of "all the calculators of my downfall by the Spanish negotiation," and reflected cheerfully that he had been left with "credit rather augmented than impaired by the result,"—credit not in excess of his deserts. Many years afterwards, ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... side that night, though the vision vanished at the time when the lances of the Dragon-flag rode out of the sheltering wood to welcome our coming. Well, now it seems that, when Dante was assailed by that very human, pitiable, and pardonable pain and frailty, he suddenly became aware again of the God of Love that was riding hard by him, but this time a little in front, and this time on a great black war-horse. It seemed to Dante that the wonderful youth turned a little in his saddle as he rode, ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Saint-Ferdinand was blazing like a huge bonfire. The men told off to sink the Spanish brig had found a cargo of rum on board; and as the Othello was already amply supplied, had lighted a floating bowl of punch on the high seas, by way of a joke; a pleasantry pardonable enough in sailors, who hail any chance excitement as a relief from the apparent monotony of life at sea. As the General went over the side into the long-boat of the Saint-Ferdinand, manned by six vigorous ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... about the physical interpretation of space- and time-data in the case of the general theory of relativity. As a consequence, I am guilty of a certain slovenliness of treatment, which, as we know from the special theory of relativity, is far from being unimportant and pardonable. It is now high time that we remedy this defect; but I would mention at the outset, that this matter lays no small claims on the patience and on the power of abstraction of ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... enough to suppose for a while—told him the story that had blighted his life. Not that I could have blamed him had he done this. He had endured so much obloquy, suffered so keenly and so long, that almost any retaliatory measure would have been pardonable." ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... the Divine Persons mentioned in the first Line are represented as created Beings; and that, in the other, Adam and Eve are confounded with their Sons and Daughters. Such little Blemishes as these, when the Thought is great and natural, we should, with Horace [2] impute to a pardonable Inadvertency, or to the Weakness of human Nature, which cannot attend to each minute Particular, and give the last Finishing to every Circumstance in so long a Work. The Ancient Criticks therefore, who were acted by a Spirit of Candour, rather than that of Cavilling, invented ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... then at Richmond. The Greenwich authorities were delighted with his instrument; they have seen what Herschel calls "my fine double stars" with it. "All my papers are printing," he tells Lina with pardonable pride, "and are allowed to be very valuable." But he himself is far from satisfied as yet with the results of his work. Evidently no small successes in the field of knowledge will do for William Herschel. "Among opticians and astronomers," he writes to ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... dancing lesson; and somehow, all in a moment, she was floating around that little parlor on Willett's sustaining arm in long, graceful, gliding steps that seemed admirably adapted to his, and Willett's face glowed with delight and hers with pardonable triumph, for was she not showing the belles of the army the latest thing out in the ball-rooms of fashionable society? And Sanders and Darling applauded enthusiastically, and the ladies as enthusiastically as they could, for one's charitable ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... himself; and, sure, for one man to conquer an army within the city, and another without the city, at once, is something difficult; but this flight is pardonable to some we meet with in Granada: ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... a pardonable mistake for the old-time "freshman" to think the Pitt Press in Trumpington Street was a church, but no one does this now, because the gate tower, built about 1832, when the Gothic revival was sweeping the country, is now known as "the Freshman's Church." The Pitt ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... in fact had been an omission very pardonable in so complicated a case, and professed himself instantly ready to go through that correspondence, and prove that it was in form and substance exactly applicable to the view of the case he had submitted to their lordships. He applied to his father, who sat behind him, to hand ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... which prevail'd generally among the Ancients, to impute Celestial Descent to their Heroes; The Vanity, methinks, might have been pardonable, and rational, if apply'd to an Art; since Arts, when they are at once delightful and profitable, as you will certainly leave Poetry, have one real Mark of Divinity, they become, in some measure, immortal. ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... to know myself," I confessed candidly. Then I added with pardonable mendacity: "I think I must have been taken for somebody else, if it was anything more than a desperate freak of ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... stories of Betty and Isaac Zane have been familiar, oft-repeated tales in my family—tales told with that pardonable ancestral pride which seems inherent in every one. My grandmother loved to cluster the children round her and tell them that when she was a little girl she had knelt at the feet of Betty Zane, and listened to the old lady as she told of her brother's capture by ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... the beginning of this volume, although it belongs properly only to those poems that are reprinted from the Works of 1818, the prose of which Lamb offered to Martin Burney. But it is too fine to be put among the Notes, and it may easily, by a pardonable stretch, be made to refer to the whole body of Lamb's poetical and dramatic work, although Album Verses, 1830, was dedicated ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... with the supplementary proviso, required by his Highness, that, while "having lived peaceably" since Worcester would suffice for the miscellaneous Royalists of 1650-51, who were indeed nearly the whole population of Scotland, the less pardonable Hamiltonians of 1648 would have to pass much stricter tests. In Ireland, though Protestants generally were to be qualified, there was to be like caution in admitting such as, though faithful before March 1, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... attracted little notice from the other inhabitants of the valley, for they saw nothing remarkable in his way of life, save that, when the labor of the day was over, he still loved to go apart and gaze and meditate upon the Great Stone Face. According to their idea of the matter, however, it was a pardonable folly, for Ernest was industrious, kind, and neighborly, and neglected no duty for the sake of this idle habit. They knew not that the Great Stone Face had become a teacher to him, and that the sentiment which was expressed in it would enlarge the young man's heart, and fill it with wider ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... are in the favour of the powers that be, could you not get him some letters of recommendation from some of your government friends to some of the Portuguese settlers? He understands his profession well, and has no want of general talents; his faults are the faults of a pardonable vanity and youth. His remaining with me was out of the question: I have enough to do to manage my own scrapes; and as precepts without example are not the most gracious homilies, I thought it better to give him his conge: but I know no great harm of him, and some good. He is clever and accomplished; ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... With the soup, the fish, and the heavy meats, they dealt out the virtues of their Gerome, seriously and earnestly. With the sweetmeats and the coffee they smilingly touched upon his lightest and most pardonable faults. My heart trembled for its safety. It was a well planned effective process. That night he told me of his love with the air of a man who fully expects a warm response and affirmative answer. Both were bravely denied him. I told him that he was ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... Carlyle thirteen years in searching musty German histories to produce. Carlyle says, "One of the reasons that led me to write 'Frederic' was that he managed not to be a liar and charlatan as his century was"; and indeed his adoration for Frederic is quite pardonable. He had spent thirteen years of his life in the supreme effort of making him a hero, and his great work, contained in eight volumes, is a matchless piece of literature; but there is nothing in it to justify anyone believing that Frederic was neither a liar nor a charlatan. ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... drew his revolver, took a long, steady aim, and fired. The bullet whistled past across the prairie. His second shot scored a clean hit. With pardonable pride ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... extend. But still, impatient though Nelson always was to complete whatever he had on hand, various causes delayed the wedding for another year. Even with Suckling's help the question of means was pressing; and while, with pardonable self-justification, he gloried to his betrothed that "the world is convinced that I am superior to pecuniary considerations in my public and private life, as in both instances I might have been rich," he nevertheless owned to regretting that he "had ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... the utmost bearable extremity, he looked up and declared that he saw the heavens open, and Christ standing on the right hand of God. This was too much: they threw him out of the city and stoned him to death. It was a severe way of suppressing a tactless and conceited bore; but it was pardonable and human in comparison to the slaughter ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... almost ceased to employ this subject of humour. She was undoubtedly rather foolish about her grandchildren—'fond,' as they say down there. The parents of the grandchildren did not object to this foolishness— that is, they only pretended to object. The task of preventing a pardonable weakness from degenerating into a tedious and mischievous mania fell solely upon Janet. Janet was ready to admit that the health of the grandchildren was a matter which could fairly be left to their fathers and mothers, and she stood passive when Mrs Orgreave's grandmotherly indulgences seemed ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... the nineteenth century, have had a place in Pope's works for a hundred years, and it is too late now to seek to delete them. They were written by Pope in his fourteenth or fifteenth year, and gross as they are, are pardonable in a boy of precocious genius, giving way for a laughing hour to his sense of the grotesque. Joe Warton (not Tom) pompously calls them "a gross and dull caricature of the Father of English Poetry." And Mr Bowles says, "he might have added, it is disgusting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... to appal. They kept a close watch about the cottage; they had a beast of a watch-dog—at least, unless I had settled it; and if I had, I knew its bereaved master would only watch the more indefatigably for the loss. In the pardonable ostentation of love I had given all the money I could spare to Flora; I had thought it glorious that the hunted exile should come down, like Jupiter, in a shower of gold, and pour thousands in the lap of the beloved. Then I had ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... him alternately muttering in soft tones, "What a pretty hand," and then, in harsh and hasty tones, '"Confound," ... "crusty old fellow;" and reflecting thereon, I came to the conclusion that if the expressions indicated weakness, they indicated that pardonable civilizing weakness, susceptibility to the charms of beauty; and I consequently thought more kindly of my future fellow-traveller. In the evening we were joined by my brother and a young officer of the Household ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... remainder of the year was passed in London, at his chambers in the Albany. The so-called Hebrew Melodies were, probably, begun in the late autumn of that year, and were certainly finished at Seaham, after his marriage had taken place, in January-February, 1815. It is a natural and pardonable conjecture that Byron took to writing sacred or, at any rate, scriptural verses by way of giving pleasure and doing honour to his future wife, "the girl who gave to song What gold could never buy." They were, so to speak, the first-fruits ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... conclusively the arguments of either form of intemperance; for he considers total abstinence as almost, if not quite, on a level with over indulgence. One's instinct of course shrinks at first from the idea of a deliberate clouding of the senses being ever pardonable, but the more one examines the matter the more innocent does it appear; and I freely admit that I have come to regard an offence against morals committed in the interest of science as not only excusable, but in some cases a ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... was merely a hard man in the management of his affairs; never cheating, in a direct sense, but seldom conceding a cent to generous impulses, or to the duties of kind. He was a widower, and childless, circumstances that rendered his love of gain still less pardonable; for many a man who is indifferent to money on his own account, will toil and save to lay up hoards for those who are to come after him. The deacon had only a niece to inherit his effects, unless he might choose to step beyond ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Morier, still exists on the walls of the royal palace of Negaristan in the Persian capital. There may be seen the portraits of Sir Harford Jones and Sir John Malcolm, as well as of General Gardanne, grouped by a pardonable anachronism in the same picture. There is the king with his spider's waist and his lordly beard; and there are the princes and the ministers of whom we have been reading. The philanthropic efforts of the Englishmen to force ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... is a faint hint at an amusing and pardonable little vanity of Webster's, who, as the reader will discover later, liked to think that he had a hand in pretty much every important measure in the political and literary history of the country in those early days, and remembered that when the great Washington appeared, Webster ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... on at this Rate, the Language of Shakespear, Milton, Dryden, Addison and Pope, would soon become quite superannuated. And why avoid an Expression in use, to introduce one which says precisely the same Thing? A new Word is never pardonable, but when it is absolutely necessary, intelligible and sonorous; they are forc'd to make them in Physics: A new Discovery, or a new Machine demands a new Word. But do they make new Discoveries in the human Heart? Is there any other Greatness than that of Shakespear and Milton? ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... much land in his day and his grandson, Amzi III, clung to most of it. But this little availed Phil, as we shall see. Still it was conceivable and pardonable that Fred Holton should assume that Phil was domiciled upon soil to which she had presumably ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... Mr Sampson explained, in exceedingly low spirits, 'because, in a pecuniary sense, I am painfully conscious of my unworthiness. Lavinia is now highly connected. Can I hope that she will still remain the same Lavinia as of old? And is it not pardonable if I feel sensitive, when I see a disposition on her part ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... back by confused orders, pardonable at such a time. The eager Nelson was detained at Savannah by Buell, who thought that the sounds of the engagement they heard in the Shiloh woods was a minor affair, and who wanted Nelson to wait for boats to take ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... perhaps pardonable in one who was too intent on the evolution of the world drama to follow the daily development of war-time prohibitions, I next essayed to present to the public through the medium of a book the truth ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... body of the discourse, will present themselves spontaneously. Your periods, perhaps, will be less harmonious, your transitions less ingenious, an ill placed word will sometimes escape you; but all this is pardonable. The animation of your delivery will compensate for these blemishes, and you will be master of your own feelings, and those of your hearers. There will, perhaps, be apparent throughout a certain disorder, but it will ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... a withered old fool, and not quick at all. Forgive me. But thus it stands. Since you did not guess, through pardonable ignorance of a certain fact, then, for the pleasure of absolute proof, I withhold my discovery a little longer. There is drama here, but we must be skilled dramatists and not spoil our climax, or anticipate ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... cherie, is something worth fifty times its weight in gold," said M. Roussillon when he presented the necklace to his foster daughter with pardonable self-satisfaction. "It is a sacred charm-string given me by an old heathen who would sell his soul for a pint of cheap rum. He solemnly informed me that whoever wore it could not by any possibility ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... terror and delight on execrable copperplates, which represented Christian thrusting his sword into Apollyon, or writhing in the grasp of Giant Despair. In Scotland, and in some of the colonies, the Pilgrim was even more popular than in his native country. Bunyan has told us, with very pardonable vanity, that in New England his dream was the daily subject of the conversation of thousands, and was thought worthy to appear in the most superb binding. He had numerous admirers in Holland, and amongst the Huguenots ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... made its first step on Kentucky soil with a little bit of pardonable ostentation. Every one looked upon it as the real beginning of its military career. When the transport was securely tied up at the wharf, the Colonel mounted his horse, drew his sword, placed himself at the head of the regiment, and gave the command "Forward." ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... any great sin, or great shame—God forbid; but some weak point, as we call it. Something which he had better not say or do; and yet which he is in the habit of saying and doing. I do not ask what it is. With some it may be a mere pardonable weakness; with others it may be a very serious and dangerous fault. All I ask now is, that each and every one of us should try and find it out, and feel it, and keep it in mind; that we may be of a humble spirit with the lowly, which is better than dividing ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... grave-diggers because I can not interest myself in their work; that were unwise and unfair. But truly, I abominate this business of 'cashing,' as it were, the ruins and remains, the ashes and dust, of our ancestors. Archaeology for archaeology's sake is pardonable; archaeology for the sake of writing a book is intolerable; and archaeology for lucre ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... people is a very good exponent of their culture. Yet all have seen what different views are held as to the culture of the tribes we are considering. We have, perhaps, said all that is required on this part of the subject, yet even repetition is pardonable if it enables us to more clearly understand our subject. The ornamentation on the ruins of Yucatan is so peculiar that in our opinion it has unduly influenced the judgment of explorers in this matter. They lose sight of the fact that the apartments of the houses are small, dark, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... silent for a few moments, looking him in the face. "Have you consulted your own conscience, and what it will say to you after a time? She has given all that she has to you, though there has not been a shilling,—and no money can repay her. One fault is not pardonable,—one only fault." ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... find ways of disposing of them all. Jerry, for his part, carried home a new idea of "city dudes" and their ways. These clear-eyed, clean-minded young fellows had not treated him as an inferior, nor had they committed the offence still less pardonable, from Jerry's standpoint, of condescending to his level. As fishermen, too, they had showed no mean skill, and from dislike and mistrust, Jerry had at length been brought to grudging admiration ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... are hatched is a pardonable failing with nations carrying on war with the feeling that their all is at stake. When sorrow is a guest of every household, when monetary losses cause depression, and the cry arises time after time, "What will be the outcome of all this?" then only the fairest illusions ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... you don't will. Every now and then one might, no doubt, "smoke" a little reminiscence; more frequently slight improbabilities; everywhere, of course, an absence of any fine character-drawing. But these things are the usual spots, and very pardonable ones, of the particular sun. I do not remember any French book of the type, outside the Alexandrian realm, that is as good as Belle-Rose;[306] and I am bound to say that it strikes me as better than anything of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... destruction of the balance of his mind and the morale of his nature. He was himself a wild poem; and he discoursed wild poems to us,—musical romances from Dreamland; but the luxury to himself and us was bought by injury to others which was altogether irreparable, and pardonable only on the ground that the balance of his mind was destroyed by a fatal intellectual, in addition to physical intemperance. In him we see an extreme case of a life of contemplation uncontrolled by will and unchecked by action. His faculty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... have to tell to the people of Stockholm," continued my father, while a look of pardonable elation lighted up his honest face. "And think of the gold nuggets stowed ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... said George, with a pardonable satisfaction in spinning the matter out, "one was all covered with notes, and was headed 'Padley.' I read that through, sir. It had to do with the buildings and the acres, and so forth. The second paper I could make nothing out of; it was in cypher, I think. The third paper ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... the mind that it seems rather to confirm corruption by its maxims. We deny nature on her legitimate field and feel her tyranny in the moral sphere, and while resisting her impressions, we receive our principles from her. While the affected decency of our manners does not even grant to nature a pardonable influence in the initial stage, our materialistic system of morals allows her the casting vote in the last and essential stage. Egotism has founded its system in the very bosom of a refined society, and without developing even a sociable ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... I'll show you the finest submarine that ever was built," answered the inventor with pardonable pride. "If you don't mind, give your launch orders to go back to the ship, and I'll show something that will make you ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... borne faintly in upon them. In a few minutes the housekeeper ushered Green and Malley into the room. The chief inspector returned Foyle's greetings and flung his heavy overcoat on to a chair. His eyes wandered over the prisoner with a little pardonable curiosity. Grell bore the inspection with ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... stopping to squeeze it, as one does a boil, and press from it a stream of maggots and pus. I do not think he ate or slept for a week before he died. Next to him staid an Irish Sergeant of a New York Regiment, a fine soldierly man, who, with pardonable pride, wore, conspicuously on his left breast, a medal gained by gallantry while a British soldier in the Crimea. He was wasting away with diarrhea, and died before the month ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... to build up my early reputation. I did remarkably well, though perhaps it is not my function to say so. The enemy was slightly stronger, both in cavalry and infantry, than myself [Footnote: A slight but pardonable error on the part of the gallant gentleman. The forces were exactly equal.]; he had the choice of position, and opened the ball. Nevertheless I routed him. I had with me a compact little force of 3 guns, 48 infantry, and 25 horse. My instructions were to clear ...
— Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books • H. G. Wells
... but obliteration of the sense of Right and Wrong in the minds and practices of every class. What a scene in the drama of Universal History, this of ours! A world-wide loud bellow and bray of universal Misery; lowing, with crushed maddened heart, its inarticulate prayer to Heaven:—very pardonable to me, and in some of its transcendent developments, as in the grand French Revolution, most respectable and ever-memorable. For Injustice reigns everywhere; and this murderous struggle for what they call 'Fraternity,' and so forth has a spice of eternal ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... Prostitution places on a venal basis intimate relationships which ought to spring up from natural love, and in so doing degrades them. But strictly speaking there is in such a case no "sale." To speak of a prostitute "selling herself" is scarcely even a pardonable rhetorical exaggeration; it ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... unwholesome temptations. She never asked the boys what they did with their money, but expected them to keep account in the little books she gave them; and, now and then, they showed the neat pages with pardonable pride, though she often laughed at the ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... so much more difficult to practise than the great virtues—were never forgotten all through the years in which so much of pain and of weariness might have made occasional repining, occasional forgetfulness of others, almost pardonable. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... months later, followed by a similar one addressed to the publisher Wigand, who subsequently printed the essays, it is to be inferred that Breitkopf & Haertel, though assured of the future of Schumann's compositions, doubted the financial value of his musical essays—an attitude pardonable at a time when there was still a ludicrous popular prejudice against literary utterances by a musician. In 1883, however, after Wigand had issued a third edition of the "Collected Writings on Music and Musicians" (which have also been ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... sympathy, the thoughts of men who lived without blame in a darkness they could not dispel; and to remember that, whatever charge of folly may justly attach to the saying, "There is no God," the folly is prouder, deeper, and less pardonable, in saying, "There is no God ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... not understood in those days, and consequently all was fish that came to the authoress's net. Sailor shanties and landsmen's nautical effusions were jumbled together higgledy-piggledy, along with 'Full Fathom Five' and the 'Eton Boating Song.' But this lack of discrimination, pardonable in those days, was not so serious as the inability to write the tunes down correctly. So long as they were copied from other song-books they were not so bad, but when it came to taking them down from the seamen's singing the ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... face and white hair, with only her keen eyes flashing light and fire, she looked like Pope Leo XIII. The whole physical being is as nearly submerged as possible in a great mentality. She recalls facts, figures, names and dates with unerring accuracy. It was no Argus-eyed autocrat who told with pardonable pride last night of how her chair at every great function in San Francisco was hung with floral wreaths, how bouquets were piled at her feet until she could scarcely step for them. It was a pleasing story, told by a sweet old woman, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... hand, we hear from many the very worst possible language. Some make pardonable errors, while others make blunders for which there can be no excuse save ignorance. Judging their character by their speech, what a sad condition must be theirs; and more, what a need ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... people should be so earnest and desirous to enter themselves into it. In the younger sort who by their sulphurous instinct, are subject to the tickling desires of nature, and look upon that thing called Love through a multiplying glass, it is somewhat pardonable: But that those who are once come to the years of knowledge and true understanding should be drawn into it, methinks is most vilely foolish, and morrice fooles caps were much fitter for them, then wreaths of Lawrel. Yet stranger it is, that those who have been for the first time in ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... from east to west? How much more natural that our understanding may by the volubility of our loose-capring mind be transported from his place, than that one of us should by a strange spirit in flesh and bone be carried upon a broom through the tunnel of a chimney? . . . I deem it a matter pardonable not to believe a wonder, at least so far forth as one may explain away or break down the truth of the report in some way not miraculous. . . . Some years past I traveled through the country of a ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... triumphed over ambition, and the young lady appears never to have regretted her decision; though, in a letter written just at the time when all England was ringing with the news of the violent dissolution of the Long Parliament, she could not refrain from reminding Temple, with pardonable vanity, "how great she might have been, if she had been so wise as to have taken hold of the offer ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... him helplessly, startled at his penetration and her own betrayal, but appeased by the pitying adjective which brought Gorst into the regions of pardonable discussion. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... fathers be turned from Sacquenes, that we should goe with them. An answer without reason. Necessity obliged us to goe. Those people are not to be inticed, ffor as soone as they have done their affaire they goe. The governor of that place defends us to goe. We tould him that the offense was pardonable because it was every one's interest; neverthelesse we knewed what we weare to doe, and that he should not be blamed for us. We made guifts to the wildmen, that wished with all their hearts that we might goe along with them. We told them that ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... and resemblance to the force and spirit which that system exerts; that war ought to be made against it in its vulnerable parts. These are my inferences. In one word, with this republic nothing independent can coexist. The errors of Louis the Sixteenth were more pardonable to prudence than any of those of the same kind into which the allied courts may fall. They have the benefit ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... he painted, you know," Mrs. Gisburn said with pardonable pride. "The last but one," she corrected herself—"but the other doesn't count, because ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... That evening a gentleman called at my house; he was a bachelor, well to do in the world, and hearing the story, which it was necessary to tell him, in order to explain the child's presence, he asked me with pardonable curiosity to let him see the baby. When he took her in his arms she smiled so sweetly upon him, and crowed so joyously, that his heart was touched, and he could not bear to think that the poor helpless babe ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... the subjects of ridicule or contempt; and the pain is the greater, when it is given by those whom they admire, and from whom they are ambitious of receiving any marks of countenance and favour. Yet we must allow, that affronts are pardonable from ladies, as they are often prognostics of ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... in his agonized feelings, in his distressed situation; in the agitation of that hour, or of this. I would gladly impute it to error, or to want of recollection, to confusion of mind, or disturbance of feeling. I would gladly impute to any pardonable source that which cannot be reconciled to facts and to truth; but, even in a case calling for so much sympathy, justice must yet prevail, and we must come to the conclusion, however reluctantly, which that demands ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... sentence of banishment and gave a hope that the prison doors might be opened for him. The local authorities taking no steps to enable him to profit by the royal clemency, by inserting his name in the list of pardonable offenders, his second wife, Elizabeth, travelled up to London,—no slight venture for a young woman not so long raised from the sick bed on which the first news of her husband's arrest had laid her,—and with dauntless ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... the French Translations. I observe, indeed, he talks much in the Notes of Madame Dacier and Monsieur Eustathius." What knew Samuel of Eustathius? I not only can forgive Fielding his pedantry; I like it! I like a man of letters to be a scholar, and his little pardonable display and ostentation of his Greek only brings him nearer to us, who have none of his genius, and do not approach him but in his faults. They make him more human; one loves him for them as he loves Squire Western, with all his ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... course that suggested itself was to study his sevenfold devil down; taking every precaution, of course, to keep out of the way of all additional contamination; and this course he adopted, and had conscientiously adhered to. It was with very pardonable satisfaction that he felt his malady gradually and surely give way before his unsparing regimen, until by the first of July he considered himself entirely whole and in working order, and beyond ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... mentioned as the place where Deborah directed that the forces of Zebulon and Naphtali should be concentrated, and its immediate vicinity as the scene of the celebrated contest between Barak and Sisera; but though it may appear a digression from the present subject, it would be scarcely pardonable to omit a reference to that still more wonderful circumstance, the transfiguration of Jesus Christ, which probability and tradition concur in assigning to the same remarkable spot. Three of his disciples, Peter, James, and John, accompanied ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... child of his own deeds. And if they who fill the highest ranks of public service enjoy any superior advantage or privilege, it is the opportunity to be more useful and more beloved. It is thus alone that good fortune becomes pardonable in the eyes of the envious. This is what I would have you repeat to her constantly. I wish her to treat all her companions as her equals. Many of them are better, or at least quite as deserving as she is herself, and their only inferiority is in not having had relations ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... great anti-slavery leader failed to do justice to the motives of those who, while in hearty sympathy with his hatred of slavery, did not agree with some of his opinions and methods, it was but the pardonable and not unnatural result of his intensity of purpose, and his self-identification with the cause he advocated; and, while compelled to dissent, in some particulars, from his judgment of men and measures, the great mass of the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the ideal subject, may again be compared with the real subject. After all this we may well judge what right Ewald has to call the figurative explanation "an error, which, in consideration of our present knowledge, becomes from day to day less pardonable." ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... its four component parts, obtained the name of tetrapharmacum, was so far from owing its celebrity to its royal birth, that it maintained its place on Hadrian's table to the time of his death. These, however, were mere fopperies or pardonable extravagancies in one so young and so exalted; "quae, etsi non decora," as the historian observes, "non tamen ad perniciem publicam prompta sunt." A graver mode of licentiousness appeared in his connections with women. He made no secret of his lawless amours; and to his own ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Ventnor and Bonchurch); because fortunately the most eligible and attractive spots in this romantic district are in the holding of gentlemen who have chosen such for their private residences: and certainly, if selfishness was ever pardonable, it is so in this instance; nay, for our part, we really congratulate the public, that the spirit of exclusiveness so widely exists in this happy region of the sublime and beautiful. For what a lamentable transformation it would prove of the natural character of ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon
... when the tide is high, run far out from the mainland. Narrow channels, winding bewilderingly, eat their way for miles among the sea-saturate fields of the eastward lying plain. The people, dwelling with pardonable pride upon the peculiarities of their coast line, say that any one who walked from the north to the south side of the bay, keeping resolutely along the high-tide mark, would travel altogether 200 miles. He would reach after his way-faring a spot ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... in the world,—an American girl in her father's house." Yet it was a liberty that was worlds removed from license. Undisciplined she was, impulsive, indulged beyond all European conceptions, but, in spite of a good deal of innocent coquetry and vanity, effervescing in some foolish ways very pardonable in a motherless girl, and of which a great deal too much has been made in discussing American girls, there was never one of any nation more pure-hearted and womanly. Her worst deviations from rigidly conventional standards were better than the best behavior ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... stockade, when he confessed he had fairly clambered over it, an exploit of no great difficulty from the inside. As the captain had known Joel too long to be ignorant of his love of money, and the offence was very pardonable in itself, he readily forgave the breach of orders. This was the only man in the valley who did not trust his little hoard in the iron chest at the Hut; even the miller reposing that much confidence in the proprietor of the estate; but Joel was too conscious of ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... ever a king more cleverly told that he was a liar? The Earl of Murray, Mary Stuart's bastard brother, and the first of many regents who ruled Scotland during her son's minority, was the victim of the most pardonable act of assassination that we know of,—if such a crime be ever pardonable. Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh was one of those Scotchmen who joined Mary Stuart after her escape from Loch Leven, and was condemned to death after her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... bright one. Dolly's an uncommon child," said the Doctor, who had a pardonable pride in his children—they being, in fact, the only worldly treasure that he was at ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... astonished at the young man's relation; but this just prince, finding he was to be pitied rather than condemned, began to speak in his favour. This young man's crime, said he, is pardonable before God, and excusable with men. The wicked slave is the sole cause of this murder; it is he alone that must be punished. Wherefore, said he, looking upon the grand vizier, I give you three days time ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... referred to, and which I have recently read by reasons of the reference to it in the letter to Dr. Mann, will clearly show that I have not been guilty of inconsistency or a change of opinion —the most pardonable of all offenses—but then insisted, as I now insist, that no discrimination should be made against the note holder, but that until we are ready to pay him in coin he should be allowed, at his option, to convert his money into ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... watch our mother, and stifle any unguarded expressions into which she might be betrayed, to watch you, and when we saw it was too late to prevent your sharing our secret, to make our hold upon you such that you would feel it to your own advantage to keep it with us, was perhaps only pardonable in persons situated as we were. But, Constance, while with Guy the feeling that made this last task easy was one of selfish passion only, mine from the first possessed a depth and fervency which made the very thought of wooing you seem a desecration and a wrong. For already had your ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... but pardonable blunder," said Mr. Witham, "that I died, and reached the Paradise of Poets. I had, indeed, published volumes of verse, but with the most blameless motives. Other poets were continually sending me theirs, and, as I could not admire them, and did not like to ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... Pompeius's treasure, supplies, and command of the sea, without gaining which he must inevitably have been defeated, even without a battle. Pompeius's excuse for his conduct is, in truth, his severest condemnation. It is very natural and pardonable for a young general to be influenced by clamours and accusations of remissness and cowardice, so as to abandon the course which he had previously decided upon as the safest; but that the great Pompeius, ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... have? Beauty's condition can't be upset by a little mocha, nor mine either," said his universal defender; and the Seraph shook his splendid limbs with a very pardonable vanity. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... pillar. On paying an afternoon call, it is so unusual to find a live lion included amongst the guests, that my mother's perturbation at finding herself in such close proximity to a huge loose carnivore is, perhaps, pardonable. Landseer is, of course, no longer in fashion as a painter. I quite own that at times his colour is unpleasing, owing to the bluish tint overlaying it; but surely no one will question his draughtsmanship? ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... current in Philadelphia refers to Mr. Richard Vaux, an eminent citizen and member of a highly respected old Quaker family, who in his youth had been an attache of the American Legation in London. One of his letters home narrated with pardonable pride that he had danced with the Princess Victoria at a royal ball and had found her a very charming partner. His mother replied: "It pleaseth me much, Richard, to hear of thy success at the ball in Buckingham Palace; but thee must remember it would be a great blow to ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... bright sunshine. Never did marigold under a cloudy sky shut up her heart more closely than Honor O'Callaghan. In a word, Honor had really one of the many faults ascribed to her by Mrs. Sherwood, and her teachers and masters—that fault so natural and so pardonable ...
— Honor O'callaghan • Mary Russell Mitford
... the first time that Alma affected to be absorbed in music when not consciously hearing it at all. Today the circumstances made such distraction pardonable; but often enough she had sat thus, with countenance composed or ecstatic, only seeming to listen, even when a master played. For Alma had no profound love of the art. Nothing more natural than her laying it completely aside when, at home in Wales, she missed her sufficient audience. To ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... service of hell! Your poets, spend-thrifts, and other fools of that kidney, pretend forsooth to crack their jokes on prudence; but 'tis a squalid vagabond glorying in his rags. Still, imprudence respecting money matters is much more pardonable than imprudence respecting character. I have no objection to prefer prodigality to avarice, in some few instances; but I appeal to your observation, if you have not met, and often met, with the same disingenuousness, the same hollow-hearted insincerity, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... himself so perfectly in his various writings that the careful reader sees his nature just as it was in all its essentials, and has little more to learn than those human accidents which individualize him in space and time. About all these accidents we have a natural and pardonable curiosity. We wish to know of what race he came, what were the conditions into which he was born, what educational and social influences helped to mould his character, and what new elements Nature added to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... passive is considered as tantamount to aiding and abetting. Besides, in the present case, the remaining in the ship along with the mutineers, without having recourse to such means as offered of leaving her, presumes a voluntary adhesion to the criminal party. The only fault of Heywood, and a pardonable one on account of his youth and inexperience, was his not asking Christian to be allowed to go with his captain,—his not trying to go in time. M'Intosh, Norman, Byrne, and Coleman were acquitted because they expressed a strong desire to go, but were forced to remain. This was not ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... in the heart of the strange country to which he had penetrated, Raleigh became in many ways the victim of his ignorance and his pardonable credulity. Not only was he gulled with diamonds and sapphires that were really rock-crystals, but he was made to believe that there existed west of the Orinoco a tribe of Indians whose eyes were in their shoulders, and their mouths ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... celebration of Purim, the Jewish carnival. The central figure was Haman's effigy which was burnt, amid song, music, and general merrymaking, on a small pyre, over which the participants jumped a number of times in gleeful rejoicing over the downfall of their worst enemy—extravagance pardonable in a people which, on every other day of the year, tottered under a load ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... Lord Oxford, Sidney's enemy (which he might be if he chose), and apparently a coxcomb (which is less pardonable), but a charming writer of verse, as ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... cant and humbug and affectation of all vanity is a most salutary ingredient even in poetical criticism. Johnson, with his natural ignorance of that historical method, the exaltation of which threatens to become a part of our contemporary cant, made the pardonable blunder of supposing that what would have been gross affectation in Gray must have been affectation in Milton. His ear had been too much corrupted by the contemporary school to enable him to recognise beauties which would even have shone through ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... induced you to act as you did. This declaration may seem strange to you. From what you knew of me, you acted rightly; but there may be a time, sir, when you will know me better: when the deeds which you abhor may seem not only pardonable, but justifiable. Enough of this at present. The object of my being now at your bedside is to request that what you do know of me be ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... Empires, states, continents, and islands are blended in inextricable confusion, in the minds of a large majority of even the intelligent classes, and we sometimes hear the oddest ideas imaginable. This ignorance, quite pardonable in part, is not confined to France by any means, but exists even in England, a country that ought to know us better. It would seem that M. de ——, either because I was a shade or two whiter than himself, or because he did not conceive it possible that an American could write a book ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... tin, and thrust it into the top drawer of his table. As he did so, a strange thought invaded his mind. Some day, perhaps, he would show it to her; and how delightfully she would laugh at him for his pardonable foolishness! ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... afford to smile, since the world, on the whole, will smile with me. But to apply it to the woman in the street, whose spirit is of one substance with our own and her body no less holy: to look your women folk in the face afterwards and not go out and hang yourself: that is not on the list of pardonable sins. ...
— How He Lied to Her Husband • George Bernard Shaw
... supporter of Richard II. Another ancestor, Sir Piers Legh, fell fighting at the battle of Agincourt. We do not know what manner of men the Leghs of Lyme of the present generation are, but certainly pride is pardonable in a family with an ancestry which took part in deeds not only recorded by history, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... fortune, raise the dead, recover your lost toil, and in the face of the inevitable, your arms drop. Then you neglect to care for your person, to keep your house, to guide your children. All this is pardonable, and how easy to understand! But it is exceedingly dangerous. To fold one's hands and let things take their course, is to transform one evil into worse. You who think that you have nothing left to lose, will ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... fit for a lily to touch and that's the truth," looking down at his palm that the small white hand grasped closely. "It's clean, Miss," he added with pardonable pride, "but ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... had said to me before dinner, by showing him how perfectly I understood. He liked to talk; he liked to defend his convictions and his honour (not that I attacked them); he liked a little perhaps—it was a pardonable weakness—to bewilder the youthful mind even while wishing to win it over. My ingenuous sympathy received at any rate a shock from three or four of his professions—he made me occasionally gasp and stare. He couldn't help forgetting, or rather couldn't know, how little, in another and drier clime, ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... with a thrill of pardonable pride. "During the cruise I did a couple of articles on Crete—oh, just travel-impressions, of course; they couldn't be more. But the editor of the New Review has accepted them, and asks for others. ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... was informed by one of the private pupils who exercised considerable authority over the younger boys, that although I might study the violin with the dancing-master, I was never to practise it by myself. This restriction was pardonable in one who might reasonably dread the torturing attempts of a beginner, but it was certainly not favorable to my progress. However, in course of time it came to be relaxed; that is, as soon as I could ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... line, a tendency to a particular kind of disease. It may be that, without anybody's being to blame for it or anybody's knowing it, the child was exposed to some contagious disease on the street or at school. It may be that the mother, through a little otherwise pardonable vanity, wishing to display the beauty of the child rather than to dress it in the healthiest manner, has been the means of exposing it to cold. It may be any one of a dozen things has caused the death of this child. And do you not see that in every case it ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... minds with a desire for material possessions, such as money or political position, and not with such aspirations as a desire for honor. In other words, a strong desire for wealth or power, while natural and pardonable, is considered a little sordid; while a desire for honor, or for opportunity to do good service, is held to be commendable. So, when public officials, either military or civilian, condemn a measure because it will give somebody "power," the reason given seems to be incomplete, unless a further ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... of the garden during vacation, gathered the vegetables as they ripened, and with pardonable pride carried them home to their parents. The parents, in turn, were gratified and as much interested as the children. Several of the boys had individual appliances made by their fathers for use in the garden. Often on Monday mornings would come the account of the Sunday walk with ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... boxing ended. Bobby drew Johnny one side. "Look there!" said he with pardonable pride. "Show that to your papa. I bet he can't tell it from the regular printers. ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... led with errors that reigne, as the world judgeth." He declared himself in favor of a general council, and spoke with satisfaction of an edict just despatched to Scotland, "to surcease the punishment of men for religion." "And of this purpose," adds the ambassador with pardonable sarcasm, "he made suche an oration as it were long to write, evon as thoughe he had bene hired by the Protestants to defend their cause earnestly!" Despatch to the queen, Feb. 27, 1559/60, Forbes, State Papers, i. ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... arbitrary intimations of a menial; nevertheless, that the mention of her father would afford pain to the being she loved best in the world, was a conviction which had grown with her years and strengthened with her strength. Pardonable, natural, even laudable as was the anxiety of the daughter upon such a subject, an instinct with which she could not struggle closed the lips of Venetia for ever upon this topic. His name was never ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... of what they construct from the hints that have pleased them. Some of them it takes a miserable married lifetime to undeceive; for some, not even that will serve; they continue to see, if not an angel, yet a very pardonable mortal, therefore altogether loveable man, in the husband in whom everybody else sees only a vile rascal. Whether sometimes the wife or the world be nearer the truth, will one day come out: the wife MAY be a woman of insight, and see ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... and he felt that their emergence from it was a marvel, a miracle in which they had been assisted by some greater power. He was assailed by a weakness and, trembling, he drew back from the ledge. But neither the hunter nor the Little Giant had seen his momentary collapse and he was glad, pardonable though it was. ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... in sympathy upon what, at this distance of time, appears as the least inviting article of the Whig creed. They were both partisans of the Queen. Zachary Macaulay was inclined in her favour by sentiments alike of friendship, and of the most pardonable resentment. Brougham, her illustrious advocate, had for ten years been the main hope and stay of the movement against Slavery and the Slave Trade; while the John Bull, whose special mission it was to write her down, honoured the Abolitionist ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... lay silent, watching the pencil travel the width of the page—and then back. A mass of completed manuscript lay at her side, the pages covered with carefully written, legible words. She had always taken a pardonable pride in her penmanship. For a while he watched her, puzzled, furtively trying to decipher some of the words that appeared upon the pages. But the distance was too great for him and he finally gave it up and fell to looking at her instead, though determined ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of all the Hellenes—that would not have good cause for complaint against you, when he saw that though you were enraged against Philip, who in making peace after war was merely purchasing the means to his end from those who offered them for sale—a very pardonable transaction—you were yet acquitting Aeschines, who sold your interests in this shameful manner, notwithstanding the extreme penalties which the laws appoint for ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... are friends again. And now I do think I am entitled to a picture,—at least, I think it will be pardonable if I yield to the very strong temptation I am under at this moment to buy one. Let me see: what have you in the slave-market, as ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... became the second President of the United States, listened to this speech for five hours, and called Otis "a flame of fire." "Then and there," said Adams, with pardonable exaggeration, ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... Walter, swelling with pardonable pride. "I am going there on business." "Have you ever been there ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger |
