"Spontaneous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... chief had invited the bishop to settle in his country near Magomero, adding that there was room enough for both. This spontaneous invitation seemed to decide ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... statement, though doubtless current at the time, is to my certain knowledge entirely inaccurate. Mr. Littleton was confined to his sofa at the time by an accident, and knew little of what was going on. Nobody was more surprised than himself to receive from Lord Grey a spontaneous and unexpected offer of the Chief Secretaryship of Ireland. He was fully aware of the extreme difficulties of the office, which was at that moment perhaps the most important in the Government. With equal modesty and candour ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... variation cannot be considered to be by any means a large one. The third cause that I have to mention, however, is a very extensive one. It is one that, for want of a better name, has been called "spontaneous variation;" which means that when we do not know anything about the cause of phenomena, we call it spontaneous. In the orderly chain of causes and effects in this world, there are very few things of which it can be said with truth that they are spontaneous. ...
— The Perpetuation Of Living Beings, Hereditary Transmission And Variation • Thomas H. Huxley
... art of any. And portraiture involves expression. Quite true, but expression of what? Of a passion, an emotion, a mood? Certainly not. Paint a man or a woman with the damned "pleasing expression," or even the "charmingly spontaneous" so dear to the "photographic artist," and you see at once that the thing is a mask, as silly as the old tragic and comic mask. The only expression allowable in great portraiture is the expression of character ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... to find himself famous; but his subsequent speedy apotheosis was probably not entirely spontaneous. In fact, there is reason to believe that he was carefully groomed for the role of a national hero at a critical time, the process being like the launching by American politicians of a Presidential or Gubernatorial boom at ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the thronging men, giving suggestions and orders for the morning's struggle. His manner was forced, rather than spontaneous. ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... forming a skin-like scum upon the surface. Casein, although not coagulable by heat, is coagulated by the introduction into the milk of acids or extract of rennet. The curd of cheese is coagulated casein. When milk is allowed to stand for some time exposed to warmth and air, a spontaneous coagulation occurs, caused by fermentative changes in the sugar of milk, by which it is converted into lactic acid through the ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... counter, his pillow a web of calico. If a traveller "stuck in the mud" in New Salem's one street, Lincoln was always the first to help pull out the wheel. The widows praised him because he "chopped their wood;" the overworked, because he was always ready to give them a lift. It was the spontaneous, unobtrusive helpfulness of the man's nature which endeared him to everybody and which inspired a general desire to do all possible in return. There are many tales told of homely service rendered him, even by the hard-working farmers' wives around New Salem. There was not ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... furnish arms, ammunition and military instructors to Santo Domingo. In 1860 Santana addressed himself directly to the Queen of Spain, and proposed a closer union. Bases for annexation were drawn up, founded "on the free and spontaneous wish of the Dominican people." Santana was careful to win over the local military chiefs to his ideas. His opponents vainly combatted the proposition from Curacao and from Haiti, which was ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... The stampede was spontaneous! Chairs were overturned and tables smashed in this frightful panic in the dark. No one thought of turning on the lights—everyone's sole aim was to leave that appalling ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... in these notes, a freshness of sentiment and a youthful credulity which produced the impression of a clear morning in early spring, all the frankness and faith of a mind ignorant of evil and destitute of guile; then, in the later ones, the spontaneous outburst of a heart which believes it has given itself forever, because it thinks it has encountered ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... her go without protest or reproach. A mysterious lesion seemed to have taken place, I felt astonished and relieved, yet I was heavy with sadness. My emancipation had been bought at a price. Something hitherto spontaneous, warm and living was withering ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... children as in the inferior animals, and, when they live with nature, contributes as much to their pleasure as sight or hearing. I have often observed that small children, when brought on to low, moist ground from a high level, give loose to a sudden spontaneous gladness, running, shouting, and rolling over the grass just like dogs, and I have no doubt that the fresh smell of the earth is the cause of their ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... would be more difficult. Ordinary books and papers would clearly be unsuitable for long keeping; though for comparatively limited periods they might answer if securely packed in airtight waterproof cases. Nothing liable to spontaneous decay should be admitted. Stereotype plates of metal would be even more open to objection than printed sheets. The noble metals would be too costly, the baser would corrode; and with either the value of the plates as metal would be a standing danger to the ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... enjoyment of it is that inversion of home-sickness known to some, that incurable thirst for the sense of escape, which no actual form of life [214] satisfies, no poetry even, if it be merely simple and spontaneous. ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... She looked up at him from the keyboard over which her hands were nervously wandering. "I ought to know," she said; "I also have listened." She laughed carelessly, but her glance lingered for an instant on his face, and her mirth did not sound quite spontaneous to either ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... possessed of intelligence and will, powers which demand and necessitate their own constant activity. Instinct, the gift of brute creation, ensures the preservation of life by its blind preparation for the morrow. Man has no such ready-made and spontaneous faculty. His powers depend for their effectiveness on their deliberative and strenuous exertions. And because life is a sacred thing, a lamp of which the once extinguished light cannot be here re-enkindled, ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... only asks if you be well when he meets you, but he bids you remain well at parting, and desires you to salute for him all common friends; he reverences you at leave-taking; he will sometimes consent to incommode you with a visit; he will relieve you of the disturbance when he rises to go. All spontaneous wishes which must, with us, take original forms, for lack of the complimentary phrase, are formally expressed by him,—good appetite to you, when you go to dinner much enjoyment, when you go to the theatre; a pleasant walk, if you meet in promenade. He is your ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... disgusted by his cold and irrational materialism. When men of his school talk of the elective affinity of organic types, I hear a jargon I cannot comprehend, and I turn from it in disgust; and when they talk of spontaneous generation and transmutation of species, they seem to me to try nature by an hypothesis, and not to try their hypothesis by nature. Where are their facts on which to form an inductive truth? I deny their starting condition. "Oh! but" they reply, "we have progressive ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... beauty of the poem, the dim light through which Helen's vibrating, passionate voice thrilled, all helped to impress the hearers. There was a personal quality about the chant which made it seem like a direct appeal from the singer to the heart of each listener. It came to each as a spontaneous outflowing of the singer's innermost self; a confidence made in mystic wise, sacred and inviolable, and setting him honored by receiving it forever from the common multitude of men. It was an appeal to some unspoken and unspeakable bond of fealty, which made the pulses throb and great emotions ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... undue confidence, I can say that I achieved a triumph, and put to rout the various uncomplimentary conjectures that the world had hazarded in regard to me. Society opened its arms to me as a returning prodigal, and my revulsion of feeling was all the more spontaneous from the fact, that, if some of my former acquaintances were as frivolous as ever, they had learned to conceal their emptiness by an adaptability which made them agreeable companions. There was a keen satisfaction, too, in the consciousness which became ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... loosed, and the golden bowl broken. Life lost its meaning and charm. Her father's sympathy and pride in her work had been her chief incentive and ambition, and had spurred her on when her own confidence and spirit failed. Never afterwards did she find complete and spontaneous expression. She decided to go abroad as the best means of regaining composure and strength and sailed once more in May for England, where she was welcomed now by the friends she had made, almost as to another ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... subjects as were competent to his capacity, in an honest and simple manner. After having thus warmed him by degrees, it might be proper to direct him to write down his thoughts, without any prescribed method, in the natural and spontaneous manner, in which they flowed from his mind. Thus the talk of throwing his reflections upon paper would be facilitated to him, and his style gradually formed, without teaching him any kind of restraint and affectation. ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... and wisely. The Women's Patriotic Relief, the Women's War Relief, the International Brotherhood League, and the powerful Red Cross Society, all poured in food and comforts for the sick thousands. Besides these great organizations there were also the spontaneous offerings of the people, many of them generously distributed by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle's active representatives. The tent of that journal was an excellent way-mark and a veritable house of the good shepherd for many a lost wanderer, as well as a place of comfort, cheer and rest. ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... belongs to the Organic Kingdom. He cannot in that case belong to the higher Kingdom. "If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him." After all, it is by the general bent of a man's life, by his heart-impulses and secret desires, his spontaneous actions and abiding motives, that his generation is ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... he was taken from the troop-ship when it reached harbor and the spontaneous welcome given him there and at Washington was not surpassed by the prearranged demonstrations for the Nation's distinguished ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... do know that he wouldn't do anything really indiscreet." Murray regarded her with growing favor. There was something about this boyish girl which awakened the same spontaneous liking he had felt upon his first meeting with her brother. He surprised her by ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... itself alone. But there exists between us a vital dynamic relation, for which I, being the conscious one, am basically responsible. So, as far as possible, there must be in me no departure from myself, lest I injure the preconscious dynamic relation. I must absolutely act according to my own true spontaneous feeling. But, moreover, I must also have wisdom for myself and for my child. Always, always the deep wisdom of responsibility. And always a brave responsibility for the soul's own spontaneity. Love—what is love? We'd better get a new idea. Love is, in all, generous impulse—even a good spanking. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... fame, to me would be truly painful. Why then should I suppress it? Why 'out of the abundance of the heart' should I not speak[75]? Let me then mention with a warm, but no insolent exultation, that I have been regaled with spontaneous praise of my work by many and various persons eminent for their rank, learning, talents and accomplishments; much of which praise I have under their hands to be reposited in my archives at Auchinleck[76]. An honourable and reverend friend speaking of the favourable ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... spiritual condition is one where life is spontaneous and flows without effort, like the deep floods of Ezekiel's river, where the struggles of the swimmer ceased, and he was borne by the current's ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... surprising that at this time she should begin writing short articles for the women's magazines on the subjects which presented themselves to her in her daily work. Her brief, spontaneous, friendly articles, full of meat and free from the taint of bookishness, won favor from the first. She soon found her evenings occupied with her somewhat matter-of-fact literary labors. But this work was of such a different character from that which occupied her in the ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... to you, Carl. I don't think you know that, but they are." He leaned forward precariously. "I had a talk with Barness this morning, one of his nice 'spontaneous' chats, and he pumped the hell out of me and thought I was too drunk to know it. They're expecting ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... stood in high and universal esteem. Parents read poetry to their children. Children recited poetry to their parents. And he was a dullard, indeed, who did not at least profess, in his hours of idleness, to pour spontaneous rhythm from ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... successors of St. Peter appear to have followed, rather than guided, the impulse of manners and prejudice; without much foresight of the seasons, or cultivation of the soil, they gathered the ripe and spontaneous fruits of the superstition of the times. They gathered these fruits without toil or personal danger: in the council of the Lateran, Innocent the Third declared an ambiguous resolution of animating the crusaders by his example; but the pilot of the sacred vessel could ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... hence follow that those who constitute states under the democratic form, destine them to undergo all the intervening troubles between that and monarchy; but it should at the same time be proved that social experience is already exhausted for the human race, and that this spontaneous movement is not solely the effect ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... was disciplined because she had been naughty to a playmate and had called her a little pig,—a natural appellation for one who was always dirty. These are typical examples of how the sound instincts of the child are dulled. It was a spontaneous utterance: of the childish heart when a small boy, after an account of the heaven of good children, asked his mother whether she did not believe that, after he had been good a whole week in heaven, he might be allowed to go to hell on ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... this modern mechanistic system of knowledge and design may not also be very good patriots and devoted servants of the dynasty. The artless and, on the whole, spontaneous riot of dynastic avidity displayed to the astonished eyes of their fellow craftsmen in the neutral countries by the most eminent scientists of the Fatherland during the early months of the war should be sufficient warning ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... which tore at the eyes and excruciatingly disintegrated brain and nervous tissues; the other dully glowing an equally invisible red, at the touch of which body temperature soared to lethal heights and foliage burst cracklingly into spontaneous flame. ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... "coward," had it been even unconnected with the many subsequent acts of oppression which have stamped his career, and of which it is to be hoped for the prevention of future monsters, that the infamy will long survive the records. The 26th of January, 1808, the memorable day when, by the spontaneous impulse of a united colony, he was arrested; and fortunate for the cause of humanity is it that he was then arrested, for ever** in the perpetration of the most atrocious outrages that ever disgraced the representative of a free government, has substantiated his claim to this character ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... the musical young lady took us to conjugal pairs. It was very difficult to convey to us what this conjugal love was like. Was it Elective Affinity? I asked. Yes; something like that, but still not that. It was the spontaneous gravitation in the spheres, either to other, of the halves of the dual spirit dissociated on earth. Not at all—again in reply to me—like flirting in a corner. The two, when walking in the spheres, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... lovely and respectable by the most exalted virtues, pity for the one rises to respect and affection—indignation against the other becomes exasperated to hatred, to abhorrence, and disgust; without the intervention of the will, but merely from the spontaneous movements of the heart, we sympathise, we silently pray for the one—we recoil from, we execrate the other. We are pressed by our very nature into the service of virtue; our souls are up in arms against vice and improbity, and thus we receive ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... few months' experience with the ideal life, Tyndall had commonsense enough to see that Harmony Hall, instead of being the spontaneous expression of the people who shared its blessings, was really a charity maintained by one Robert Owen. It was a beneficent autocracy, a sample ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... even than Marcus Aurelius; for in addition to the virtues, the kindness, the deep feeling and wisdom of his adopted son, he had something of greater virility and energy, of simpler happiness, something more real, spontaneous, closer to everyday life—Antoninus Pius lay on his bed, awaiting the summons of death, his eyes dim with unbidden tears, his limbs moist with the pale sweat of agony. At that moment there entered the captain of the guard, ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... after this manner. For since no germ, animal or vegetal, contains the slightest rudiment or indication of the future organism—since the microscope has shown us that the first process set up in every fertilized germ, is a process of repeated spontaneous fissions ending in the production of a mass of cells, not one of which exhibits any special character; there seems no alternative but to suppose that the partial organization at any moment existing in a growing embryo, is transformed by the agencies acting upon it into the succeeding phase of organization, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... Boyesen, whom he had found one summer day among the shelves in the Harvard library, and found to be a poet and an intending novelist. I do not remember now just how this fact imparted itself to the professor, but literature is of easily cultivated confidence in youth, and possibly the revelation was spontaneous. At any rate, as a susceptible young editor, I was asked to meet my potential contributor at the professor's two o'clock dinner, and when we came to coffee in the study, Boyesen took from the pocket nearest his heart a chapter of 'Gunnar', and read ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the qualities of terror and splendor, for intensity of purpose and sublimity of note. In the vision of Helen, for example, the intense perception of loveliness gives actual sublimity to the sweetness and radiance of mere beauty in the passionate and spontaneous selection of words the most choice and perfect; and in like manner the sublimity of simplicity in Marlowe's conception and expression of the agonies endured by Faustus under the immediate imminence of his doom gives the highest note of beauty, the quality of absolute fitness ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... lonesome at saying good-bye to his school; and to keep the boys company as long as possible, he strolled down to the bank and sat on the grass watching the bathers below him, plunging and paddling in all the spontaneous happiness ...
— The Hoosier School-boy • Edward Eggleston
... meeting was presided over by our much loved First-President, Kate Sanborn, and it was the most informal, spontaneous, and altogether enjoyable organization meeting that could be imagined, and the happy spirit came that has guided our way and helped us over the rough places leading us always to ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... her father to go to Omega Street whenever he sent for her. There was no actual pain in her mind, no passionate desire to recall her promise, no dread horror of the step to which she had pledged herself. The feeling that oppressed her was the sense that such a step should have been the spontaneous election of her grateful heart, proud of a good man's preference, instead of a weak submission to a ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... great conflict between the North and the South, the final struggle between freedom and slavery. The women who had so perseveringly labored for their own enfranchisement now gave all their time and thought to the nation's life; their patriotism was alike spontaneous and enduring. In the sanitary movement, in the hospitals, on the battle-field, gathering in the harvests on the far-off prairies—all that heroic women dared and suffered through those long dark years of anxiety and death, should have made ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... criticism that is based on convention, make the weak side of the French academic sculpture of the present day, fine and triumphant as it is. That the national thought and feeling are not a little conventional, and have the academic rather than a spontaneous inspiration, has, however, lately been distinctly felt as a misfortune and a limitation by a few sculptors whose work may be called the beginning of a new movement out of which, whatever may be its own limitations, nothing but good can come to French ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... like the spring of a cat the Italian girl flung herself between them—a remarkable exhibition of spontaneous inflammability; her eyes glittered like the points of daggers, and, as though they had been dagger points, the policeman recoiled a little. The act, which was absolutely natural, superb, electrified Janet, restored in an instant her own ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... wisdom in his speculations, if he based that immutability of government which in the sequel became a Chinese characteristic, on the physical and moral immutability of individuals by depriving them of all spontaneous action in public and private life. Originally and nominally the emperor's power as the ruler over his vassals, who again ruled in his name, was unquestionable; and the first few generations of the dynasty saw no decline of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... world knew better the tone to adopt in his communications with Elizabeth than did the chivalrous king. No man knew better than he how impossible it was to invent terms of adulation too gross for her to accept as spontaneous and natural effusions, of the heart. He received the letters from the hands of Sir Henry, read them with rapture, heaved a deep sigh, and exclaimed. "Ah! Mr. Ambassador, what shall I say to you? This letter of the queen, my sister, is full of sweetness and affection. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... said little at this meal, he thought a great deal, listening not at all to Mrs Keswick's tirades. "What a charmingly inconsiderate affair this has been!" he said to himself. "Nothing planned, nothing provided for, or against; all spontaneous, and from our very hearts. I never thought to tell her that she must say nothing to her aunt, until we had agreed how everything should, be explained, and I don't believe the idea that it is necessary to say anything to anybody, has entered her mind. But I must keep my eyes away from her if I don't ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... thanked her, simply, for what she had just told him. But to his own shame and grief he had nothing more to say. He had heard many a confession, and from many a guiltier woman's lips, but none so piteous, because none so purely spontaneous, as this. And to all he had given ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... of scientists are working on the problem of generating living forms from inorganic matter. The old idea of "spontaneous generation," for many years relegated to the scrap-pile of Science, is again coming to the front. Although the theory of Evolution compels its adherents to accept the idea that at one time in the past living forms sprung from the non-living (so-called), yet it has been generally believed that the ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... hearts are inspired, how heal- [1] ing becomes spontaneous, and how the divine Mind is understood and demonstrated? He alone knows these wonders who is departing from the thraldom of the senses and accepting spiritual truth,—that which blesses [5] its adoption by the refinement of joy and the ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... as THE MAN—the leader, the counsellor, the infallible in suggestion and in conduct—was immediate and universal. From that moment to the close of the scene, the national confidence in his capacity was as spontaneous, as enthusiastic, as immovable, as it was in his integrity. Particular persons, affected by the untoward course of events, sometimes questioned his sufficiency; but the nation never questioned it, nor would allow it ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... all hostile troops, the disposition of railway rolling-stock—yea, even aeroplane photographs of it all. What could Napoleon himself have done under the circumstances? One is inclined to suspect that that volcanic megalomaniac would have perished of spontaneous combustion of the brain. ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... I have never arrested the further spread of erysipelas, nor effected a resolution of the inflammation of the cellular tissue, more certainly; nor, if the termination in suppuration was no longer avoidable, have I ever succeeded in effecting the formation of laudable pus, the spontaneous discharge of the pus, the radical healing of the sore without any scar—how important is all this in erysipelatous inflammation of the mammae—with more certainty and thoroughness, than by means of Apis! No remedy possesses ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... that of the "Sketch Book," yet it yielded to similar treatment. The grace, romance, humor, of this "beautiful Spanish Sketch Book," as the historian Prescott called it, appealed at once to an audience which had listened somewhat coldly to the less spontaneous "Tales of a Traveler," and had given a formal approbation to the "History of Columbus," without finding very much Irving ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... member would enlarge my power of doing good. I would not, however, insinuate that my ambition was not flatter'd by all these promotions; it certainly was; for, considering my low beginning, they were great things to me; and they were still more pleasing, as being so many spontaneous testimonies of the public good opinion, and by me ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... she had been suddenly endowed with the fatal gift of reading the secret sense of every seemingly spontaneous look and movement, and that in his least gesture of affection she ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... in the looking-glass. The little mirrors in the hansom cabs had helped him most in this endeavour. Each returned to him an image so different from all the others—some cadaverous, some bloated, but each with a spontaneous distortion of its own—that it had become possible for him to strike an average tolerable to himself, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... from my spontaneous rendering of No. 15 I turned to No. 28. This one, I realised, was extremely important. I would ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... atrocities? Were they the spontaneous expression of dormant brutishness in German soldiers? Were they a sudden reversion of an entire nation ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... than one of them completely under National control, he considers that the time for planting has come. He is no such idealist or sentimentalist as to leave these new-made furrows, so terribly torn up in three years of war, to renew their own verdure by any mere spontaneous vegetation. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... custom and the surprising dignity of his employees compelled him to utter the greeting in a casual, bored manner, quite as if he did it automatically and always as if he was on the point of clearing his throat. He sorely missed Melissa's spontaneous, even vulgar "Morning, Mist' Bingle," and the rattle of cutlery and chinaware. Melissa had acquired a fine but watchful dignity. She now said "good morning, sir" in the hushed, impersonal voice of the trained servant. She never "joked" with him, as ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... full and light and spontaneous, as if all the training of the notes of her throat came unconsciously to ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... natural tendency in the light to blossom out into all forms and types of goodness. 'Fruit' suggests the idea of natural, silent, spontaneous, effortless growth. And, although that is by no means a sufficient account of the process by which bad men become good men, it is an inseparable element, in all true moral renovation, that it be the natural outcome and manifestation of an inward principle; otherwise ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... The temperature of the air in the cylinder at the end of the compression stroke of a Diesel engine operating with a compression ratio of about 16:1 is approximately 1000 degrees Fahr., which is far above the spontaneous-ignition temperature of the fuel used. Accordingly, when the fuel is injected in a highly atomized condition at some time previous to the piston reaching the end of its stroke, the fuel burns as it comes in contact with the highly heated air, and the greatly increased pressures ...
— The First Airplane Diesel Engine: Packard Model DR-980 of 1928 • Robert B. Meyer
... so long! There is an air of piety almost in the monotony and ceremonial; and then, there are the other's habits of thought which might be jarred, or feelings we might hurt.... Meanwhile our sincere, spontaneous reality is idling elsewhere, ready to vagabond irresponsibly at the beck and call of the passing stranger. And, who knows? while we are thus refusing to give our poor old friend the benefit of our genuine, living, changed and changing self, we may ourselves ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... from their couch under the canopy of heaven with the hum and bustle of a confused and irregular multitude, like bees alarmed and arming in their hives, seemed to possess all the pliability of movement fitted to execute military manoeuvres. Their motions appeared spontaneous and confused, but the result was order and regularity; so that a general must have praised the conclusion, though a martinet might have ridiculed the method ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... monopoly of property. That a child should know its father is no great matter, for I ought not in reason to prefer one human being to another because he is "mine." The mother will care for the child with the spontaneous help of her neighbours. As to the business of supplying children with food and clothing, "these would easily find their true level and spontaneously flow from the quarter in which they abounded to the quarter that was deficient." There must be no barter ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... succeeded among the Freelanders, and will unquestionably succeed among numerous other peoples. It is possible, nay, probable, that some nations may show themselves incapable of making use of this highest kind of spontaneous activity; so much the worse for them. But I hope that no one will conclude from this that those peoples who are not thus incapable—even if they should find themselves in the minority—ought to refrain ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... wings, a perpetual loss and a perpetual recovery of the equipoise, sustains them and bears them along. With them flying is a luxury, a fine art; not merely a quicker and safer means of transit from one point to another, but a gift so free and spontaneous that work becomes leisure and movement rest. They are not so much going somewhere, from this perch to that, as they are abandoning themselves to the mere pleasure ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... not base my belief on any preference from Handel's contemporaries. We may, as we are constantly being told, be degenerates; but there was no special grace whence to degenerate in our perruked forefathers. Moreover, I believe that any very spontaneous art is to a very small degree the product of one or even two or three generations of men. It has been growing to be what it is for centuries and centuries. Its germ and its necessities of organism and development lie far, far back in the soul's world-history; and it is but ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... whisky. But he believed that he would not find them as bad as he had pictured them at first, even though the Nest was a horrible place for the girl. Her running away was the most natural thing in the world—for her. She was an amazingly spontaneous little creature, full of courage and a fierce determination to fight some one, but probably to-day or to-morrow she would have been forced to turn homeward, quite exhausted with her adventure, and ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... think that they would be sunk to the level of brutes, from a deficiency of excitements, than that they would be raised to the rank of philosophers by the possession of leisure. In those countries where nature is the most redundant in spontaneous produce the inhabitants will not be found the most remarkable for acuteness of intellect. Necessity has been with great truth called the mother of invention. Some of the noblest exertions of the human mind have been set in motion ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... have seen nothing but rugged path, tree-top, and the face of the cliff, and would not have grasped the fact that the reason for the boy's wild dash was, that he was overcharged with vitality, and that energy which makes a lad exert himself in that natural spontaneous effort to get rid of some of the vital gas, flashing along his nerves and bubbling ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... discussion has recently taken place on the subject of medical education in the United States. To a foreigner, or to one not acquainted with the influences that have led to and have kept up this discussion, it might seem to be the result of a spontaneous outburst of popular feeling, earnestly demanding much-needed progress. Really, however, the very reverse is the case; and the revolutionists are those whose kind and sympathetic interest in the welfare of the community is prompted solely by selfish considerations. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... attempted any other form of verse the result, if not total failure, was mediocrity. It was a daring act of Pope to suggest by his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, a comparison with the Alexander's Feast of Dryden. The performance is perfunctory rather than spontaneous, and the few lyrical efforts he attempted in addition, show no ear for music. The voice of song with which even the minor poets of the Elizabethan age were gifted was silent in England, though not in Scotland, during ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... to shiver and our flesh to quake, and will not by any means permit themselves to be passed by or nullified? 'T is a fact that is irrepressible; and, in persons with imagination of morbid tendency, this spontaneous sympathy takes a hold so strong as to present visibly the image about which there is concern,—and, behold! your veritable spectre is begotten! So, again, of your 'love at first sight,' comme on dit,—that inevitable attraction ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... little cloud our forebodings had gathered, and chatted and laughed like the creature of joy and gladness she was. Now and then her heart would well up so full of the sunlight and the flowers, and the birds in the hedge, aye, and of the contagious love in my heart, too, that it poured itself forth in a spontaneous little song which ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... draw-poker with the unreconstructed. These Missourians were whole-souled, ample-natured males in many ways, but born with a habit of hasty shooting. The Governor, on setting foot in Idaho, had begun to study pistolship, but acquired thus in middle life it could never be with him that spontaneous art which it was with Price's Left Wing. Not that the weapons now lying loose about the State-House were brought for use there. Everybody always went armed in Boise, as the gravestones impliedly testified. Still, ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... by injury done to ourselves. This also is innocent and natural, when its occasion is sufficient, and its limits reasonable. It may prevent the repetition of injury, and the spontaneous tendency to it, which is almost universal, is an efficient defence against insult, indignity, and encroachment on the rights of individuals. But, indulged or prolonged beyond the necessity of self-defence, it is prone ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... seen many well-bred women on social pinnacles look like that, whose houses were at present barred against him. The Pratt sisters were fixed into their smartness as some faces are fixed into a grin. It was not spontaneous, fugitive, evanescent as a smile, gracefully worn, or lightly laid aside, as in Hester's case. He had known Hester slightly in London for several years. He had seen her on terms of intimacy, such as she never showed to his sisters, with inaccessible ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... little how anciently or from what rudimentary beginnings this peerless impulse dates its growth; whether spontaneous breath of divine instillment, or evolved through cycles of the eternal past, such has sanction ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... capacity to govern. Government is not an ideal abstraction—a blessing showered from a given height on the abiding masses, or a scourge applied to mortify their passions; it is something natural and spontaneous, originating in and coeval with the people, and must be adapted to their situation, their moral and intellectual progress, and to their national peculiarities. It consists of details as well as of general forms, and requires labor and industry as well as genius. The majority of the people must ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... predatory warriors yielded to a temptation that few of the corps were ever known to resist—opportunity and horseflesh. With a hardihood and presence of mind that could only exist from long practice in similar scenes, they made towards their intended prizes, by an almost spontaneous movement. They were busily engaged in separating the fastenings of the horses, when the trooper on the piazza discharged his pistols, and rushed, sword in ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... friends; but the consciousness of her expectations with respect to the colonel being known to them, threw around her a hauteur and distance very foreign to her natural manner. Emily alone, whose every movement sprang from the spontaneous feelings of her heart, and whose words and actions were influenced by the finest and most affectionate delicacy, such as she was not conscious of possessing herself, won upon the better feelings of her sister so far, as to restore between them ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... through this magic-lantern, is Topham Beauclerk, so frequently mentioned, and mentioned with praise, in Boswell's Johnson. He seems to have been a man of great elegance of manner, and peculiarity of that happy talent of conversation whose wit seems to be spontaneous, and whose anecdotes, however recherche, seem to flow from the subject. "Every thing," remarked Johnson, "comes from Beauclerk so easily, that it appears to me that I labour when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... which the President, on February 3, 1919, laid before the Commission on the League of Nations, declaring for the creation by the League of a permanent court of international justice, was not due, I feel sure, to any spontaneous thought on ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... was becoming a big girl. If it had been possible she would have detained her daughter forever in the physique of a child; she feared the time when Mary would become too evidently a woman, when all kinds of equalities would come to hinder her spontaneous and active affection. A woman might object to be nursed, while a girl would not; Mrs. Makebelieve feared that objection, and, indeed, Mary, under the stimulus of an awakening body and a new, strange warmth, was not altogether ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... no exception. The fly-trap seizes any small body that touches it, as well as an insect, and with the same tenacity; hence, we may readily conclude that these actions, so apparently spontaneous, are in reality nothing more than remarkable developments of the laws ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... intellectual blossoms, culled from their native Apulian meadows. One notes with pleasure that the happy pair are neither dukes nor princes. There is no trace of snobbishness in the offering, which is simply a spontaneous expression of good wishes on the part of a few friends. But surely it testifies to most refined feelings. How immeasurably does this permanent and yet immaterial feast differ from our gross wedding banquets and ponderous gilt clocks and tea services! Such persons cannot ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... By an almost spontaneous impulse a petition was set on foot begging the Czar to reconsider his decision. If ever a petition deserved the name "national," it was that of Finland. Towns and villages signed almost en masse. Ski-runners braved the hardships of a severe winter in the effort to reach remote ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... acknowledge, establish, and fortify that impaled territory. The temper of the times is in sundry respects favourable, notwithstanding its too frequent possession by an incensed political spirit. Has there not been for half a century a spontaneous, an ardent, a loving return in literature, of our own and all countries, to the old and great in the productions of the human mind—to nature, with all her fountains? Does not the spirit of man, in the great civilized nations at this day, travail ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... pronouncement. Personally she did not like him, but this was, after all, a matter of taste; she could not approve his actions, but conceivably there might be explanations of which she was unaware. Her manner to Cecil regained its old spontaneous friendliness, and Cecil responded with almost pathetic readiness. In her ungracious way she had grown fond of her pretty, kindly companion, and had missed the atmosphere of home which her presence had given to the saffron parlour. As they sat over their simple supper, she would study Claire's face ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... explained it in such Portuguese as the Kroomen could understand, and they in turn to such of the negroes as could understand them. Then there was such a yell of delight, clinching of fists, leaping and dancing, kissing of Nolan's feet, and a general rush made to the hogshead by way of spontaneous worship of Vaughan, as the deus ex ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... was jubilant. My spontaneous outburst of weakness at memories of home was misconstrued into a recognition of the fact that I had ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... On these three propositions enthusiasm has built arguments for city parks and playgrounds, for school gymnastics, and for temperance instruction. We have tried the remedies and now realize that too much was expected of them. Neither movement appreciated the mental and physical education of spontaneous games and play. ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... involuntary, compulsory, strained, far-fetched. Antonyms: spontaneous, voluntary, discretional, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... read these words at the foot, "Nothing has been decided as yet..." Turning to the other side with convulsive quickness, she saw the mind of the writer distinctly through the intricacies of the wording; this was no spontaneous outburst of love. She crushed it in her fingers, twisted it, tore it with her teeth, flung it in the fire, and cried aloud, "Ah! base that he is! I was his, and he had ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... four in number, two of each sex. The first in the Ministry stands as the leading elder of the society. Those who compose the Ministry are selected from the Church, and appointed by the last preceding head or leading character; and their authority is confirmed and established by the spontaneous union of the whole body. Those of the United Society who are selected and called to the important work of the Ministry, to lead and direct the Church of Christ, must be blameless characters, faithful, honest, and upright, clothed with the spirit of meekness and humility, gifted ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... principle into the creations or imitations which are of human, and those which are of divine, origin. For we must admit that the world and ourselves and the animals did not come into existence by chance, or the spontaneous working of nature, but by divine reason and knowledge. And there are not only divine creations but divine imitations, such as apparitions and shadows and reflections, which are equally the work of a divine mind. And there are human creations and human imitations too,—there is the actual house ...
— Sophist • Plato
... as we have shown, was at first a spontaneous association of merchants; but, after it had been regularly organized, admission into it became extremely difficult. A candidate had to enter, as it were, "before the mast," to undergo a long probation, and to rise slowly by his merits and services. ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... if the question were whether volitions do exist. Nobody denies that they exist; the real question is of the conditions under which they exist. Are they determined by antecedents, or are they self-determined, spontaneous, and unconnected? Is Will independent ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... at such simple-minded ebullitions of feeling; yet I would by no means be understood to laugh at them. On the contrary, they are so manifestly spontaneous and sincere as to be really touching. Whatever may be the future of the Portuguese Republic, it has given the nation some weeks of unalloyed happiness. And amid all the shouting and waving of flags, all the manifold "homages" ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... attached than courtiers, and full as easily rewarded. When once this generous desire of affection and esteem is raised in the mind, their exertions seem to be universal and spontaneous: children are then no longer like machines, which require to be wound up regularly to perform certain revolutions; they are animated with a living principle, which ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... Toxicological Powers of Coculus Indicus in Stupifying Fish. On the Combustion of Park-palings and loose Gate-posts. On the tendency of Out-of-door Spray-piles to Spontaneous Evaporation, during dark nights. On the Comparative Inflammatory properties of Lucifer Matches, Phosphorus Bottles, Tinder-boxes, and Congreves, as well as Incandescens Short Pipes, applied to Hay in particular and Ricks in general. On the value of Cheap Literature, and Intrinsic Worth (by weight) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... had sought in Austria a natural ally, interested like himself in stopping the advances of Russia. The Emperor, Maria Theresa's husband, had died in 1764; his son, Joseph II., who succeeded him, had conceived for the King of Prussia the spontaneous admiration of a young and ardent spirit for the most illustrious man of his times. In 1769, a conference which took place at Neisse brought the two sovereigns together. "The emperor is a man eaten up with ambition," wrote ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... on which the bill was founded and was carried being such that, for mere shame, foreign countries could hardly persist in maintaining a traffic which those who had derived the greatest profit from it had on such grounds renounced; though our ministers did not trust to their spontaneous sympathies, but made the abolition of the traffic by our various allies, or those who wished to become so, a constant object of diplomatic negotiations, even purchasing the co-operation of some by important concessions, ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... This cry—spontaneous, untaught, sincere—has become almost one of those conventionalities of amorous expression which belong to the vocabulary of self-abandonment. Every woman who utters it, when torn by the almost terrible extravagance of a great love, believes that ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... overpowering. It frightened her now as she thought of it, this second self that had wakened within her, and that shouted and clamored for recognition. And yet, was it to be feared? Was it something to be ashamed of? Was it not, after all, natural, clean, spontaneous? Trina knew that she was a pure girl; knew that this sudden commotion within her carried with it no ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... and perseveringly about fifteen times in a minute, until a spontaneous effort to respire is perceived, immediately upon which cease to imitate the movements of breathing, and proceed to INDUCE CIRCULATION ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... in addition to his singular physical sensations of blurred vision and clinging chill, he became aware of a growing embarrassment and constraint between himself and his companion. So far, his and her intercourse had been easy and spontaneous, because superficial. Since that first interview on the terrace a tacit agreement had existed to avoid the personal note. Now, for cause unknown, that intercourse threatened entering upon a new phase. It was as though the concentration, the tension, which he observed in her, and of which he was sensible ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... been ordered to be upright, and that of Spanish female to lop over, and this has been effected. There are sub-breeds of game fowl, with females very distinct and males almost identical; but this, apparently, is the result of spontaneous variation, without special selection. I am very glad to hear of case of ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the middle seventies were distinctly spontaneous uprisings of the people and especially of the farmers, rather than movements instigated by politicians for personal ends or by professional reformers. This circumstance was a source both of strength and weakness. As the movements began to develop unexpected ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... Catholic Women's League, Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic, Lutheran Women's League, Congress of Mothers, etc., and 34,000 were sent out with 28,000 leaflets, "Why Women Should Protest." Perhaps no more spontaneous response was ever given to anything than to this letter. All sorts of societies, not of women only but of men and of men and women, protested. More than 400 reported their action to headquarters. The number of individuals who reported that they had written to Senator Albert J. Beveridge ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... establishment and maintenance of private schools.—Now, through each of these constraints the State encroaches on the domain of the individual; the more extended its encroachments the more does it prey upon and reduce the circle of spontaneous initiation and of independent action, which constitute the true life of the individual; if, in conformity with the Jacobin program, it pushes its interference to the end, it absorbs in itself all other lives;[2203] henceforth, the community consists only of automata maneuvered from ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... or, as is more likely, by the perfectly natural and spontaneous working of his nature, he speedily made it plain to me that our relation, our acquaintance, had progressed to a stage more friendly and confidential. He did not reveal this by imparting any confidence to me; far from it; it was his silence that indicated the ease he had come to feel ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... grounds on which to examine his capability of being constant. It is well known how much suffering this early passion caused him. The object of it, after denying him no token of reciprocal love that was innocent, giving him her picture, agreeing to meetings, receiving all the spontaneous, innocent, confiding tenderness of his young and ardent heart, left him in the lurch one fine day, on account of his youth, in order to marry a fashionable, vulgar man. And thus did she destroy the charm which governed his heart. Precocious reflection, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... many similar ones, were the spontaneous expressions of men who had long contended against the change of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... conscious, and systematic questioning of their grounds. The development of our law has gone on for nearly a thousand years, like the development of a plant, each generation taking the inevitable next step, mind, like matter, simply obeying a law of spontaneous growth. It is perfectly natural and right that it should have been so. Imitation is a necessity of human nature, as has been illustrated by a remarkable French writer, M. Tard, in an admirable book, Les Lois de l'Imitation. Most ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... who has always found his most fruitful study in the open air." The most charming element of his poetry is the nature element that everywhere cheers and stimulates the reader. It is full of sunshine and bird music. So genuine, spontaneous and sympathetic are his descriptions that we feel the very heart throbs of nature in his verse, and in the prose of such records of intimacies with outdoor friends as the essay, My Garden Acquaintance. "How I do ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Ages was a progress towards unity, less successful but more spontaneous than that which was achieved under the compelling hand of the Roman armies. Christianity, wounded and threatened by the advance of the heathen, of a power opposed to them by religion and by race, was shocked into feeling the existence of Christendom. The Western spirit, which had rallied to the ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... hunting among the mountains and thickets and streams, how he makes music at dusk while returning from the chase, and how he joins in dancing with the nymphs who sing the story of his birth. This, beyond most works of Greek literature, is remarkable for its fresh and spontaneous love of wild ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... type, she was, notwithstanding, one of the most popular women in the upper Tenderloin. She dressed with more taste than most women of her class, and her naturally happy disposition, her robust spirits and spontaneous gaiety had won her many friends. For all that she was an unscrupulous grafter, the kind of woman who deliberately sets out to lure men to destruction. She knew she was bad, yet found plenty of excuses for herself. She often declared ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... own country and in its institutions at their best was so passionate and intense that it was a part of his nature, yet his refined and fastidious tastes were deeply gratified by the influences of his life in England, and the spontaneous kindness which he received added much to his happiness. At that time Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister; the weekly receptions at Cambridge House were the centre of all that was brilliant in the political and social world, while Lansdowne ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... arose a famous battle which kept Pasteur hard at work for four or five years—the struggle over spontaneous generation. It was an old warfare, but the microscope had revealed a new world, and the experiments on fermentation had lent great weight to the omne vivum ex ovo doctrine. The famous Italians, Redi and Spallanzani, had led the way in their experiments, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... on the sparkling chariots of the dew. I took this from the white hand of a young girl in whose heart poetry and purity have met, grace and virtue have kissed each other,—whose feet have danced over lilies and roses, who has known no sterner duty than to give caresses, and whose gentle, spontaneous, and ever active loveliness continually remind me that of such ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... has made north-east Ulster separatist in spirit, so far as the rest of Ireland is concerned—and unionist, so far as Great Britain is concerned. The north-east region of Ireland was the only part which was truly colonized; only a real or spontaneous colonization can carry a tribal or national spirit ...
— Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View • Arthur Keith
... be but an orderly outgrowth of present tendencies and conditions. All societies evolve naturally out of their predecessors. In sociology, as in biology, there is no cell without a parent cell. The society of each generation develops a multitude of spontaneous and acquired variations, and out of these, by a blending process of natural and conscious selection, the succeeding society is evolved. The new order will differ in no important respects from the present, except in the completer development of its more ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... mediaeval glass or carving could ever be done by the method of a "superior person" making a drawing of them, and an inferior person laboriously translating them in facsimile into the material? They are what they are because they were the spontaneous and allowed license and play of a craftsman who knew his craft, and could be trusted to use it wisely, at any ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... white robes the long procession moves; Youths throng around the bier, and high in front, Star of our hope, the glorious cross is reared, Triumphant sign. The low, sweet voice of prayer, Flowing spontaneous from the spirit's depths, Pours its rich tones; and now the requiem swells, Now dies ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... exceedingly becoming to the empress, and brought out so exquisitely her beautiful bust, and slender graceful waist, that it would have been easy to consider as a piece of coquetry what was simply Josephine's spontaneous generosity. [Footnote: ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... to begin! Then will your mind be so well braced, In Spanish boots so tightly laced, That on 'twill circumspectly creep, Thought's beaten track securely keep, Nor will it, ignis-fatuus like, Into the path of error strike. Then many a day they'll teach you how The mind's spontaneous acts, till now As eating and as drinking free, Require a process;—one! two! three! In truth the subtle web of thought Is like the weaver's fabric wrought: One treadle moves a thousand lines, Swift dart the shuttles to and fro, Unseen the threads together flow, A thousand knots ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... the same unaffected, spontaneous Tim as of yore, and hugely embarrassed by any reference to his winning of the Military Cross, firmly refusing to discuss the manner ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... of perfect health, and there was physical health also in the brightness of her eyes and the gaiety of her expression. Her face was lighted up by a smile which seemed to pervade her whole person and make it radiant with overflowing joy. A vivacity which was at the same time dignified and spontaneous appeared in every movement of her harmonious figure, and as she came into the room there was a glow of health and happiness that filled the air like the glow of sunlight through a veil of ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... had endeavoured to bring it on, with the certainly that success would strengthen them, but, at the same time, he thought it useless to deny that there was a plot to overturn the present dynasty. According to his impressions, the spontaneous movements of the disaffected were so blended with those that proceeded from the machinations of the government to provoke a premature explosion, that it was not easy to say which predominated, or where the line of separation ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper |
