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Wildness   /wˈaɪldnəs/   Listen
Wildness

noun
1.
A feeling of extreme emotional intensity.  Synonym: abandon.
2.
The property of being wild or turbulent.  Synonyms: ferocity, fierceness, furiousness, fury, vehemence, violence.
3.
An unruly disposition to do as one pleases.  "The element of wildness in his behavior was a protest against repressive convention"
4.
An intractably barbarous or uncultivated state of nature.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Wildness" Quotes from Famous Books



... the speech which the emissary of the Church makes to Carlo when he reaches his presence after his arduous passage of the Alps. I suppose that all will note the beauty and reality of the description in the story this messenger tells of his adventures; and I feel, for my part, a profound effect of wildness and loneliness in the verse, which has almost the solemn light and balsamy perfume of ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... again when he rode into the Panhandle, and as luck would have it he fell in with an outfit who were driving cattle to Montana, a job that would take until late fall. To his chagrin stories of his wildness had preceded him. Ill rumor travels swiftly. Pan was the more liked and respected by these riders. But he feared that gossip of the southern ranges would reach his mother. He would go home that fall to reassure her of his well-being, and ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey

... into the unseen were still insufficient or unconvincing, the common ground on which we are treading sometimes shakes under us, and we feel as Humboldt describes himself to have felt at the first shock of an earthquake. Strange pieces of mysterious wildness are let fall in our way, coming suddenly on us like spectres, and vanishing without explanation or hint of their purpose. What are those Phoeacian ships meant for, which required neither sail nor oar, but of their own selves ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... and its development. He was adroitly led to talk of Piney Ridge Cottage and the people who lived there, their home and community life, their trials, their hopes, their ideals. Ere he was aware, Chester was again in the canyons, and crags and mountain peaks, whose wildness was akin to the wildness of the ocean. Then when his ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson

... broken ridges and chasms and ravines, with masses of piled-up rocks and uprooted trees, with clouds of drifting snow flying through the air, and the hurricane's roar battling through the forest at our feet adding to the wildness of the scene, which is unrelieved by the slightest vestige of animal ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... Lady Honoria, that with all your wildness, I should be very sorry you should know ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... had not been hurt by her experiences, because it was only the wildness of youth that had carried her to the verge of making mistakes and then sent her reeling back, she reacted quickly. She was no longer the reckless, heedless Joan—the change made Martin frown. He put full value on her cropped hair and thin body—he had grappled with ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock

... entered, a woman and a slim toreador were dancing. The music was of an exciting nature, and the character of the performance and the performer immediately took the artists captive. The dance was an eccentric mixture of drollness, innocence, and wildness. When watching the toreador, Frederick felt as if he were in an arena at Seville; when watching the girl, as if he were near the Gulf of Corinth, or on one of the islands of the Cyclades. He promptly decided to leave ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... well. Chroniclers are found who seem to have agreed that the name is the whole cause of the roaring winds and waves around Cape Leeuwin, but that the roughness is in reality the result of satisfaction in bearing one so awe-inspiring, and that the "Lioness" is trying to live up to her natural wildness and fury, and fully succeeding ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... begun to be severe, the Squire would surely have parted with what must have been in his view useless lumber, and was so easily convertible into cash. The Library offered a strange spectacle: chairs thrown down, and broken glasses, bore witness to the wildness of last night's revel; the splendid carpet was strewn with the ends and ashes of cigars, and with packs of cards; and on the table, scratched in all directions by the sharp spurs of fighting-cocks, still lay the dice and caster. The atmosphere ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn

... resisted, he said, for a fortnight. Alas! I knew what that meant. Yes, he must have it; it was just the thing to help him with a something he was writing—'not to read, you know, but to make an atmosphere,' etc. So he used to talk; and the odd thing was, that we always took the wildness seriously; he seemed to make us see just what he wanted. 'I say, John,' was the next I heard, at the other end of the shop, 'will you kindly send me round that set of' so-and-so, 'and charge it to my account?' 'John,' the son of old Oldbuck, and for ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard

... European, together with his dress, which appeared to have been chosen with inimitable good taste from the most varied costumes, gave him a peculiar air, which not a little heightened the impression produced by his appearance. A degree of wildness in his looks warranted the supposition that he was an enthusiast, but his deportment and carriage showed that his character had been formed by ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... were driven about in all directions, and as they met us, awakened almost as much apprehension as would a reef of rocks. We passed many islands uninhabited, and with their impervious forests still remaining in primitive wildness, clothed in the beauty of a perpetual verdure unknown in northern regions, and soon came in sight of the white houses of the island of Java, which surrounded with lofty trees and blooming gardens, proclaimed themselves the dwellings ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur

... the lassitude that suddenly took possession of that adorable face, the only thing that remained expressive and brilliant was the eyes, eyes in which the factitious gleam of the Jenkins pills was heightened by the constitutional wildness. ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... the moral sensibilities, and even the beauty of nature is not appreciated, when "all save the spirit of man is divine." But when men are earnest and true, uncorrupted by the vices of self-interest, and unseduced by the pleasures of factitious life, then even nature, in all her wildness, is a teacher and an inspiration. The grand landscape, the rugged rocks, the mystic forests, and the lofty mountains, barren though they be, bring out higher sentiments than the smiling vineyard, or the rich orange- grove, or the fertile corn-field, where slaves ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... came to Eleanor's cheek, and a light gleamed suddenly in her eyes, as if the very wildness of this proposal lent it fascination; but she shook her head, smiling a little sadly. "You are of my world," she said: "you ought to know better than that. I am not so brave as you think. I must do what is expected of me, and I am ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... thought that I was on shipboard; for the first sound I heard was that of the sea booming against the castle walls. I arose, looked out of the window of my bedchamber, and saw that the whole prospect bore an air of savage wildness. As I contemplated the scene, my imagination was seized with the idea of remoteness from civilized society: the melancholy feeling of solitary grandeur took possession ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth

... they continued upon their course, until they came to the brow of a steep descent, down which the path ran in a zigzag manner, through a dark, gloomy ravine, now rendered intensely so to our travelers, by the hour, their thoughts, the wildness of the scenery around, and the dense growth of cedars covering the hollow, whose untrimmed branches, growing even to the ground, overreached and partly obstructed their way. By this time only one or two stars were visible in the heavens; and they shone with pale, faint gleams; ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett

... inhabited. Here and there a lone cot, a mere speck, met the eye amidst a landscape composed of nothing but barren wastes and thick forests, nearly impervious to the light. We had penetrated about half a mile through one of the latter, my attention occupied with the romantic wildness of the scene, when we were alarmed by the howling of a wolf. My guide crossed himself, and began cracking his whip with the noise and singular dexterity peculiar to the French postillions; and as we entered a part of the forest, ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes

... sensuality, would be as ridiculous as to class his seraphic beings among the products of the Christian imagination. They belong to the generation of the fauns; like fauns, they combine a certain savage wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy of inspiration, a delight in rapid movement as they revel amid clouds or flowers, with the permanent and all-pervading sweetness of the master's style. When infantine or childlike, these celestial sylphs are scarcely ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... is loosely draped in white; the light hair falling down below the linen folds. She has turned suddenly towards you; and there is an expression in the eyes—although they are very tender and gentle—as if the wildness of a momentary terror, or distraction, had been struggled with and overcome, that instant; and nothing but a celestial hope, and a beautiful sorrow, and a desolate earthly helplessness remained. Some stories say that Guido painted it, the night before her execution; some ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... Lucretilis, or by the banks of the clear- flowing and ice-cold Digentia, either stretch himself to dream upon the grass, lulled by the murmurs of the stream, or do a little fanning in the way of clearing his fields of stones, or turning over a furrow here and there with the hoe. There was a rough wildness in the scenery and a sharpness in the air, both of which Horace liked, although, as years advanced and his health grew more delicate, he had to leave it in the colder months for Tivoli or Baiae. He built a villa upon it, or added ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... vulgar. It is the bean in it. The bean is a vulgar vegetable, without culture, or any flavor of high society among vegetables. Then there is the cool cucumber, like so many people,—good for nothing when it is ripe and the wildness has gone out of it. How inferior in quality it is to the melon, which grows upon a similar vine, is of a like watery consistency, but is not half so valuable! The cucumber is a sort of low comedian in a company where the melon is a minor gentleman. ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... strange turns my frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy; for, while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of Fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... guided and sustained by a power denied to himself. They wrote from the dictation of the imagination; and they found a response in the imaginations of others. He, on the contrary, sat down to work himself, by reflection and argument, into a deliberate wildness, a ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... parts of the earth's face which offer the necessary combination of a certain wildness with a kindly variety. A great prospect is desirable, but the want may be otherwise supplied; even greatness can be found on the small scale; for the mind and the eye measure differently. Bold rocks near hand are more inspiriting than distant Alps, and ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... from the wildest and poorest of the Scottish peasantry. In their belts all bore long knives of rough manufacture, and most of them carried slings hanging from the belt, in readiness for instant use. In spite of the wildness of their demeanour they seemed kindly and hospitable; and many were the questions which they asked Ronald concerning the King of Scotland and his knights who ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty

... and wild-looking assemblage we are, I make no doubt, yet fitting well into the foreground of the scene, with its rude and incipient civilization insulting the dominant wildness of Nature all around. Long before the sun has had time to climb above the ranges our muster is complete, and a larger party assembled than a stranger would imagine it possible to gather from so sparsely populated a district. Some thirty, settlers and ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay

... were cornfields: and there are drives and walks and exotic shrubs. At first, loving my own hills so well, I was puzzled to understand why I should also enjoy Starkweather's groomed surroundings. But it came to me that after all, much as we may love wildness, we are not wild, nor our works. What more artificial than a house, or a barn, or a fence? And the greater and more formal the house, the more formal indeed must be the nearer natural environments. Perhaps the hand of man might well have been less evident in developing the surroundings ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson

... Can you imagine the wildness of life in such a jungle of cannibalism? No wonder the savage instinct is so deeply ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis

... grass, and filling the hollows flush with snow. At times, to keep from being blown over, it was necessary to lean against the gusts. Aladdin was conscious of not making very rapid progress, but there was something exhilarating in the wildness, the bitter cold, and the roar of the wind; it had an effect as of sea thundering upon beach, great views from mountain-tops, black wild nights, the coming of thunder and freshness after intense heat, or any of the thousand and one vaster ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris

... was. But Spillsbury was young and wild, and his wildness assumed an unpleasant character. It was the kind of wildness which people do not talk about—at least, not nice people. He had inherited a considerable fortune, and the control of four factories, the best of which ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace

... grand sunrise on the Swiss Alps, exhibited in 1844, wherein the artist's real power was in some measure displayed, though I am convinced he is still capable of doing far greater things. So in his foliage he is apt to sacrifice the dignity of his trees to their wildness, and lose the forest in the copse, neither is he at all accurate enough in his expression of species or realization of near portions. These are deficiencies, be it observed, of sentiment, not of perception, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin

... Dartmoor are scored with the works of the tin-streamers, who turned about the streams and examined the beds for 'grain-tin.' Many of the ruined 'blowing-houses' are still to be seen on the moor. Mrs. Bray mentions a curious testimony to the wildness and remoteness of the parts in which some of the miners must have worked: 'A very old woodcut ... exhibited a whole pack of hounds harnessed and laden with little bags of tin, travelling over the mountains ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote

... adventurous lives of Western pioneers and immigrants has suggested nearly as many stories as the chivalric deeds of knight-errantry. These tales of frontier life are, however, as a rule, characterized by such wildness of fancy and such extravagancy of language that we have often wondered why another Cervantes did not ridicule our border romances by describing a second Don Quixote's adventures on the prairies. We are pleased to notice, that in the new series of Frontier ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic

... Thackeray's admiration of the Corkagian beauties of his day. There was one in particular, driving a donkey in a straw-coloured governess cart, to whose graceful charm we succumbed on the instant. There was an exquisite deluderin' wildness about her, a vivacity, a length of eyelash with a gleam of Irish grey eye, 'the greyest of all things blue, the bluest of all things grey,' that might well have inspired the English poet to write of her as he did of his own Irish ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... and endeavoured to grasp her hand. She shrunk from him with dread, for there was a glare in his eye, and a wildness in his look which suggested the horrible idea that he was attacked with insanity. She looked round with the intention of escaping from the cabin, when the door opened and Donna Julia entered. Hernan was calm in an instant, and bowing to the Spanish lady, he said ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston

... the protected flocks of tame wild ducks have become one of the most interesting sights of Florida. At Palm Beach the tameness of the wild ducks when within their protected area, and their wildness outside of it, has been witnessed ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... that one visits before he gives himself to the wildness of the solitudes of Nubia. It stands at the very frontier. As one goes up the Nile, it is like a smiling adieu from the Egypt one is leaving. As one comes down, it is like a smiling welcome. In its delicate ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... jump on the platform, and then sped on. There was not a human being to meet us. The station had been without operators for three days, and was bitterly cold. We soon had a big fire started in the telegraph room, and were sitting beside it, discussing the loneliness of the place and the wildness ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith

... the same enemy in other animals. The fear of man is slowly acquired, as I have elsewhere shown, by the various animals which inhabit desert islands; and we see an instance of this, even in England, in the greater wildness of all our large birds in comparison with our small birds; for the large birds have been most persecuted by man. We may safely attribute the greater wildness of our large birds to this cause; for in uninhabited islands large birds are not more fearful than small; and the magpie, so wary in ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... such a height, as mocks our vision, this man Was in the freshness of his being, such, So gifted virtually, that in him All better habits wond'rously had thriv'd. The more of kindly strength is in the soil, So much doth evil seed and lack of culture Mar it the more, and make it run to wildness. These looks sometime upheld him; for I show'd My youthful eyes, and led him by their light In upright walking. Soon as I had reach'd The threshold of my second age, and chang'd My mortal for immortal, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... These complex causes will naturally have produced in Hamlet the disposition to escape from his own feelings of the overwhelming and supernatural by a wild transition to the ludicrous,—a sort of cunning bravado, bordering on the flights of delirium. For you may, perhaps, observe that Hamlet's wildness is but half false; he plays that subtle trick of pretending to act only when he is very near ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge

... it in me to laugh at the whole miserable hocus-pocus, had I been less indignant. The situation was, besides, sufficiently grave; and as I listened to this silly and profane juggling, and observed the wildness of my grandfather's bearing, it became plain to me that he could not long endure such an influence. I guessed from his talk that the old man's disorder was based upon the idea of treasure lost, sunk, or hidden hereabout; for our coast was dangerous, a menace to vessels, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... which Cooper excelled. The scene of the one was laid on Lake Ontario and its shores; the other, on the little lake near which he had made his home; and the whole atmosphere of both is redolent of the beauty and the wildness ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury

... fell on the hollow figure in armor which he had dubbed Brian de Bois Guilbert, and he determined instantly to carry out the plan that had first occurred to him, which from its very wildness might spell success. At least try it he would; anything was better than leaving the young Spanish girl in the hands of this evil crew, especially as the Mexican dwarf had openly declared his intention ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt

... not intend to rest just yet. The wildness of the place and the spirit of the storm stirred him. He stood upon the shelf and the others dimly saw his tall and erect young figure. Slowly he began to chant in his own tongue, and his ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler

... larger, wilder, and grander in the bold contours of its cloud-capped tors, but the wildness of Exmoor is blended with a sweet and gentle charm which is all its own. It presents us with a panorama of misty woods, gleaming water, and glowing heather; a combe-furrowed moorland clothed with scrub oaks and feathery larches. After leaving this forest shrine the Exe enters ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath

... among the flowers. Again he saw her dancing, like a wraith, in the moonlight; he saw her, in the little blue serge frock and shady hat, measuring him with her cool eyes; and again, laying plates on the flapping cloth with white hands, or racing with him against the wildness of the storm. He saw her with her fair wet braids hanging to her knees, and her slender fingers twisting among the gold. He saw her with the light of the harness-room fire upon her as she promised to be ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey

... easily forget that figure, bright in the sunshine, conducting with his whole body, passionate, possessed by a demon, bounding in the frenzy of his inspiration from side to side, contorted, rhythmic, ecstatic. It seemed so wonderfully American, in its combination of entire wildness and entire regulation, with the whole just a trifle fantastic. Completely friendly and befriended as I was, I couldn't help feeling at those moments very alien and very, very old—even more so than after the protracted game had ended in a victory for Harvard, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... of his that he ran away, general; he was under a misconception altogether, and neither my father nor mother blamed him in the slightest. I only say this to show that he did not run away from wildness. No one could have been steadier than he was. It was a frightful mistake connected with his birth which I need not trouble you about. We were greatly attached to each other, and my father and mother are completely broken ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty

... rose and sank several times in the surges of the pool. His face on these occasions exhibited a mingled expression of terror and mischievous wildness; for although he could not swim a stroke, the very buoyancy of his mercurial temperament seemed partially to support him, and a feeling of desperate determination induced him to retain a death-like gripe of ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne

... Jasper sent for me again. His manner now was changed. The wildness and despair had left it. He was his old, cool, collected self. He was in the sort of mood when he always had an ascendency over me—the sort of mood when he showed that wonderful business faculty for which I could ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade

... poems; Sordello of Mantua was the first to adopt the ballad form of writing, and many of his love songs are expressed in a pure and delicate style. Both of these poets are immortalized in the Divine Comedy of Dante. The history of Geoffrey Rudel illustrates the wildness of the imagination and manners of the troubadours. He was a gentleman of Provence, and hearing the knights who had returned from the Holy Land speak with enthusiasm of the Countess of Tripoli, who had extended ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... intricacies intervene, No artful wildness to perplex the scene; Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother, And half the platform just reflects the other. The suffering eye inverted Nature sees, Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... from going on and doing things; you will do great things. It's in you. I think maybe it's the wildness in me that has taken this turn in you. You have more brains in a little minute than I ever had: you are amazingly clever and wise. I'm glad it was left for me to discover it; that's one credit I've got on ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson

... beautiful, and the water, in one portion, is strewn with islands; few of which are large enough to be inhabitable, but they all seem to be appropriated, and kept in the neatest order. As yet, I have seen no wildness; everything is perfectly subdued and polished and imbued with human taste, except, indeed, the outlines of the hills, which continue very much the same as God made them. As we approached the head of the lake, the congregation of great hills in the distance became ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... comment to make it interesting. A detail of facts, in which your Royal Highness, in behalf of your country, has been so honourably engaged, may not prove unwelcome in aid of recollection; and a detail of facts, built on the experimental horrors of popular power, and which, proceeding from the wildness of theory to the madness of practice, has swept away every vestige of civil polity, and would soon leave neither law nor religion in the world, cannot, either in point of instruction or warning, be unreasonably laid before my ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz

... lived with him, and kept his house in some sort, and played with his little boy occasionally. You may suppose she was not a very staid personage, for she was at this time only seventeen years old, and as I was more than twenty-seven, I occasionally checked her wildness, while I could not help laughing at her graceful follies. She should have been born of a French mother and a Spanish father, for she was gay and volatile as the summer insect, and yet she had much depth of feeling, and was full of romantic tenderness, with sometimes a haughty expression that ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various

... one to think with tolerance, if not with tenderness, on the most relentless and unreasonable foe. Apart from its scientific value, and purely as a moral agent, the play was worth the candle. My companion knew no more of me than that I enjoyed the wildness of the scene; but as I bent in the shelter of his large frame he said, 'I should like to see you attempting to describe all this.' He rightly thought it indescribable. The name of this gallant fellow was ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... man, and embodied itself in him. For it is in ourselves that the mysteries we seek to destroy almost invariably find their last shelter and their most fitting abode, the home which they had forsaken, in the wildness of youth, to voyage through space; as it is in ourselves that we must learn to meet and to question them. And truly it is no less wonderful, no less inexplicable, that man should have in his heart an immutable instinct of justice, than it was wonderful and inexplicable that the gods should ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck

... grotesque and uncanny, yet the pleasure in mere noise and dancing is childish and harmless. The picture is imposing and beautiful in its simplicity, gruesome in its wildness and sensuality, and splendid with the red lights which play on the shining, naked bodies. In the blackness of the night nothing is visible but that red-lit group of two or three hundred men, careless of to-morrow, given up entirely to the pleasure ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... those southern latitudes that fair weather was always of short duration, and was a certain presage of a succeeding storm. On the 7th of March they were passing along the coast of Staten Island, which surpasses all others in the wildness and horrors of its appearance. It seems to be composed entirely of rocks, terminating in a vast number of rugged points, which tower up to a prodigious height, all covered with everlasting snow, while the points themselves are surrounded with frightful precipices. The hills appear ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith

... history of the Bodahl people. So he turned back and battled once more with the wind and snow as far as Fleet Street; and then he rushed excitedly into the 'Morning Intelligence' office, and asked with the wildness of despair to ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... decay; civilisation will preserve the race of the red man yet to multiply. Civilisation, too, may preserve the buffalo. The hunter races must disappear, and give place to the more useful agriculturist. The prairies are wide—vast expanses of that singular formation must remain in their primitive wildness, at least for ages, and these will still be a safe range for ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid

... the subject is one in itself almost incapable of color, and although, in order to increase the wildness of the impression, all brilliant local color has been refused even where it might easily have been introduced, as in the figures; yet in the low minor key which has been chosen, the melodies of color have been elaborated to the utmost possible pitch, so ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... that at least a wound had been given. Just beyond, the gang evidently had dispersed, each one for himself, leaving behind everything that impeded their progress. The region was almost impenetrable in its wildness except by those who knew all its rugged paths. The body of the man whom June had wounded, however, was found, clothed in a suit of Quaker drab stolen from Mr. Reynolds. The rest of the band with few exceptions met with fates that accorded ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe

... have great troubles in the end. It's for that, Deirdre, I'm praying that you'll come quickly; and you may take the word of a man has no lies, you'll not find, with any other, the like of what I'm bringing you in wildness and confusion in my own mind. DEIRDRE. I cannot go, Conchubor. CONCHUBOR — taking a triumphant tone. — It is my pleasure to have you, and I a man is waiting a long while on the throne of Ulster. Wouldn't you liefer be my com- rade, ...
— Deirdre of the Sorrows • J. M. Synge

... bed; and that Mrs. Neath often beat her. She was a bright, intelligent child, black-haired, olive-complexioned, with lively blue eyes which expressed at once the natural trustfulness of youth, a certain boldness and wildness derived from gipsy ancestors, and a questioning wonder that this pleasant-looking world should ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... moonlight, on the broken mill-stone that served his house as a doorstep—and as yet he had not slept under the rotting roof. About him was a dooryard gone to a weed-jungle and a farm that must be reclaimed from utter wildness. His square jaw was grimly set and the hands that rested on his knees were tensely clenched. His eyes held a far-away and haunted fixity, for they were seeing again the cabin he had left in Virginia with its ugly picture of sudden and violent death and the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... the main road, and took a course nearly parallel, over a plain where not a sign of a wagon wheel was visible. After we had lost sight of the road, we began to meet cattle grazing upon the prairie, and by their wildness, we imagined that visitors were a rare sight ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes

... fixed upon him, as they had been throughout the visit—opened to their fullest capacity, in a gaze of only partially alcoholic wildness. ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington

... annuals and bulbs in due order of succession, or with neat espaliers, with fruit trees, or even gooseberry and currant bushes, trained along them, instead of being suffered to grow in a state of ragged wildness, as is too ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... a sudden up from the darkness came music. It was human music, but of a wildness and a weirdness that startled the boy as it fluttered and danced across the dull red waters of the swamp. He hesitated, then impelled by some strange power, left the highway and slipped into the forest of ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... sunlight. Many of the tubes are inclined, and the ejected shafts of water collide above them, producing explosive clouds of shattered vesicles of moisture that float off or drop in miniature rains over the lake. This wildness of fountains extends over many a mile. All the jets are not in tubes. Many uncovered fountains are ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... great mass of rocks thrown together by the hand of nature with wildness and confusion, strike the mind with more grandeur, than if they were adjusted to one ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham

... the death of his mother. Macbeth is conquered by fate, but not by his adversary.—He grasps the sword with a desperate hand;—he knows that he is about to die;—but wishes to try whether human strength cannot triumph over destiny. There is certainly in this head, a fine expression of wildness and fury—of trouble and of energy; but how many poetical beauties do we miss? Is it possible to paint Macbeth plunged in guilt by the spells of ambition, which offer themselves to him under the shape of witchcraft? How can painting express the ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael

... apt to come over the novice in such scenes; but we at once felt ourselves attracted by the surpassing loveliness of Niagara. The gulf below was more imposing than we had expected to see it, but it was Italian in hue and softness, amid its wildness and grandeur. Not a drop of the water that fell down that precipice inspired terror; for everything appeared to us to be filled with attraction and love. Like Italy itself, notwithstanding so much that is grand and imposing, the character of softness, and the witchery ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper

... personality. To them a "he-woman" who "wore pants" and admitted no sex inferiority was at best a "hussy without shame." If such a woman chanced also to be beautiful beyond comparison with her less favored sisters, the conclusion was inescapable. They could read in her self-claimed emancipation only the wildness of a filly turned out to pasture without halter or hobble; the wildness of one who scorns respectability; for primitive morality is pathetically narrow. It may sing piously about the pyre of a burning witch, but it ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck

... looked such a jolly place to me that the mere sight of a classroom would sometimes fill me with abhorrence. But, mon Dieu! if other fellows were wild occasionally, they accepted the penalties, and the affair was finished; on me rested a responsibility—my wildness was communicated to Gregoire. Scarcely had I resigned myself to dull routine again when Gregoire, the industrious, would find himself unable to study a page, and commit freaks for which he rebuked me most sternly. I swear that my chief remembrance ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick

... water-cart. I took it to him; and when I approached him, I had not a word to say, for my grateful heart was in my throat strangling my utterance. He threw his arms about my neck, cried, laughed, thanked, scolded, blessed, and reproached me, all in the wildness and delirium of his delight. 'Why did you do it?' said he, 'oh it was kind and loving in you!—very kind and foolish—and wrong, and generous, and extravagant—dear, good, naughty boy! I am very angry with you; but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various

... "Papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under ground, whence he could never come to us again." She was a very beautiful woman of a noble spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst all the wildness of her transport, which, methought, struck me with an instinct of sorrow, that before I was sensible of what it was to grieve, seized my very soul, and has made pity the weakness of my heart ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis

... answered : I looked up, and met all his wonted benignity of countenance, though something still of wildness in his eyes. Think, however, of my surprise, to feel him put both his hands round my two shoulders, and then kiss my cheek ! * I wonder I did not really sink, so exquisite was my affright when ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay

... manners or unused element may at first trouble him, and to meet the nature and beauty with which it is filled: we cannot doubt that such a reader will be intensely touched by finding, amidst all its wildness and remoteness, such a startling realism, such subtilty, such close sympathy with all the passions that may move ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous

... put to a variety of trials. In vain she offered herself to the strangers of the village in which she was accidentally cast as a servant; her child, her dejected looks, her broken sentences, a wildness in her eye, a kind of bold despair which at times overspread her features, her imperfect story who and what she was, prejudiced all those to whom she applied; and, after thus travelling to several small towns ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald

... grants made by the British government after the conquest to loyalists, Protestant clergy, and speculators—grants calculated to keep large sections of the country in a state of wildness—the seigniorial estates had to be cultivated and settled within a reasonable time if they were to be retained by the occupants. During the French dominion the Crown sequestrated a number of seigniories for the failure to observe the obligation of cultivation. As late as 1741 we find an ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot

... your good beauties be the happy cause Of Hamlet's wildness: so shall I hope your virtues Will bring him to his wonted way again, To both ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare

... attendant sprites were gentle and docile; but there was one who had a strain of wildness in him. In his hand he carried a bow, and at his shoulder a quiver of arrows, and he looked as if, some day or other, he might be up ...
— The Unruly Sprite - The Unknown Quantity, A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke

... which, at the grave of those we love, is, of all sounds, the most withering. The bustle around seemed to waken the mother from a wretched revery. She raised her glazed eyes, and looked about with a faint wildness. As the men approached with cords to lower the coffin into the grave, she wrung her hands, and broke into an agony of grief. The poor woman who attended her took her by the arm endeavoring to raise her from the earth, and ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... so near the course of the railroad train that it would seem we should disperse them with fright. "I wept when I must see my good friend, Capitaine, the Count de Lasselles, depart from our ship in one of those tug boats. It was a pain in my breast that he must leave me to go into the wildness of Canada." ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess

... his master one of those long heavy rifles, which the Indians usually make choice of for killing the buffalo, elk, and other animals whose wildness renders them difficult of approach. He then, unbidden, and as if tutored to the task, placed himself in a stiff upright position in front of his master, with every nerve and muscle braced to the most inflexible steadiness. The young officer next threw the rifle on the right shoulder of the boy ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson

... alone in this old house until you don't see things clearly. Dear Peter, don't you know? You can't go out and talk like that to white folks and—and not have some terrible thing happen to you! Oh, Peter, if you would only marry me, it would cure you of such wildness!" Involuntarily she got up, holding out her arms to him, offering herself to his needs, with her frightened eyes fixed ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... at once. The girl's eyes were disconcertingly direct, her voice and her manner disturbed him with their judicial calmness, so at variance with the wildness he remembered. ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower

... still farther, like little islands, half submerged in a sea of foliage, were pastures of tender green dotted with juniper bushes, almost black in their density, and fields of rye struggling painfully through the stony soil—the entire scene presenting a picture of mingled wildness and cultivation, aridity ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet

... it to be a picture of life, but a Romance, grim, grotesque, quaint, of which the Hospital might be the fitting scene. It might have so much of the hues of life that the reader should sometimes think it was intended for a picture, yet the atmosphere should be such as to excuse all wildness. In the Introduction, I might disclaim all intention to draw a real picture, but say that the continual meetings I had with Americans bent on such errands had suggested this wild story. The descriptions of scenery, etc., and of the Hospital, might be correct, ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... to think there might be a foundation for Mrs Yule's hypothesis—that the novelist was not altogether in his sound senses. At first he scouted the idea, but as time went on it seemed to him that Reardon's countenance certainly had a gaunt wildness which suggested disagreeable things. Especially did he remark this after his return from an August holiday in Norway. On coming for the first time to the City Road branch he sat down and began to favour Reardon with a lively description of how he had enjoyed himself abroad; ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... not a coarse, ignorant man, for he was well brought up," said Matthew, dubiously. "'Twas only wildness that made him a soldier, and maids rather like your man ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... of quite an ancient forest. The checkerberry and partridge-plum, with their glossy green leaves and scarlet berries, still carpet the ground under its deep shadows; and prince's-pine and other kindred evergreens declare its native wildness,—for these are children of the wild woods, that never come after plough and harrow ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... periwinkle being so numerous and set on such a fine bright green carpet, of two distinct types of foliage, that to my mind they suggested a most pleasing form of spring bedding, and also one of semi-wildness, which, for quiet beauty, more laboured planting could certainly not excel. Most Ericas require peaty soil; in the case of this, however, it is not necessary. Doubtless it would do well in peat, but I have ever found ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood

... shade of trees, soon to reappear over the next shelving rock."[138] Or, to quote from another writer,[139]—"The descent from the summit is gradual, but is everywhere broken by precipices and towering rocks, which time and the elements have chiselled into strange fantastic shapes. Ravines of singular wildness and grandeur furrow the whole mountain-side, looking in many places like huge rents. Here and there, too, bold promontories shoot out, and dip perpendicularly into the bosom of the Mediterranean. The ragged limestone banks are ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... burnet, and green clover, Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank, Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems But hateful docks, rough thistles, kexes, burs, Losing both beauty and utility; And as our vineyards, fallows, meads, and hedges, Defective in their natures, grow to wildness. Even so our houses and ourselves and children Have lost, or do not learn for want of time, The sciences that should become our country; But grow like savages,—as soldiers will That nothing do but meditate on blood,— ...
— The Life of King Henry V • William Shakespeare [Tudor edition]

... gleamed with a wildness scarcely less frightful than the ghastly look of the old man, his chest heaved, his fingers were clenched, and his breathing ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper

... sand and an iron cement, or "hard-pan," below the sand. Here uncounted millions of slender sea-pines cover the plain; they stand in serried rows, as regular as a hop-garden, gloomy and without the sweet wildness of nature. And every pine is bitterly scarred, so that it may bleed its gum for traders. When the plantations are near their full growth they are cut down, stacked to season slowly, and the trees finish their existence as mine timbers ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts

... into the Backwoods first from Mr. Owen himself, with whom I foregathered three years ago in London, and of whom you have given so very true and graphic a picture. What extraordinary mildness and plausibility that man possesses! I never before saw an instance of actual wildness—madness of theory accompanied by such suavity and soberness of manner. Did you see my friend, Miss Sedgwick? Her letters show a large and amiable mind, and a little niece of nine years old, who generally writes in them, has a style very unusual ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... articles of furniture. On a long stone, above the bed, were these few, but terrible words:—Zedekias Ursel, imprisoned here on the Ides of March, A.D.——. Died and interred on the spot"—A blank was left for filling up the period. The figure of the captive could hardly be discerned amid the wildness of his dress and dishabille. The hair of his head, uncut and uncombed, descended in elf-locks, and mingled with ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... is such that I shall be forced to implore the king to send you to prison, or into exile. You are not fit to be at large. Abduction—imprisonment—criminal assault. These are not simple gallantries; and though I might be willing to pardon and overlook many excesses, committed in the wildness of licentious youth, I never could bring myself to forgive a deliberate and premeditated crime. Do you know, you monster," he continued approaching Vallombreuse, and whispering in his ear, so that no one else could hear, "do you know ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier

... him coming out of a body in the shape of a black toad, as at Bordeaux in 1610. But it was easy to make it up to them by a grand display of splendid stage scenery. The affair of Provence owed much of its success to Madeline's desolate wildness and the terror of Sainte-Baume. Loudun was regaled with the uproar and the bacchanal frenzy of a host of exorcisers distributed among several churches. Lastly, Louviers, as we shall presently see, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet

... off before he spoke to her; but, with his thick, short-cropped hair standing on end, a bare head only added to the wildness of his appearance. ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay

... but do as I tell you. You expect everybody to be as wild and wayward as yourself." And the countess smiled on her son in a manner which showed that she was proud even of his wildness and his waywardness. ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... as statues. Every building was filled with crowds of silent Indians,—those on the back rows seated in the Turkish fashion, but those in front with their feet to the ground. All were turbaned, all fantastically painted, all in dresses varying in ornament but alike in wildness. One chief wore a tall black hat, with a broad, massive silver band around it, and a peacock's feather; another had a silver scull-cap, with a deep silver bullion fringe down to his eyebrows, and plates of silver from his breast to his knee, descending ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... we see a wild young man, we say, and justly: "Poor fellow! there are great excuses for him, he has been so badly brought up." True, but his wildness will ruin him all the same, whether it be his father's fault or his own that he became wild. If he drinks he will ruin his health; if he squanders his money he will grow poor. God's laws cannot stop for him; he is breaking them, and they will ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley

... In terror they hurry to another spot; but the awful voice follows their steps, and its tones shake the ground under them. What wonder, if, broken down by all this, Hamlet utters words which would be irreverent in their levity, were they not terrible in their wildness? Have you never marked what pathos there is in a very trivial phrase used by one so crushed down by grief that he acts and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... clearly cut as a cameo, the forehead smooth and high, the nose delicately aquiline, the lips a perfect cupid's bow, the eyebrows high and arched. The eyes themselves were soft and dark and had the wildness of the wilderness-born, whilst the hair, black and luminous as the raven's wing, crisped in curls instead of hanging in the straight plaits of the ordinary native woman. She moved forward slowly with graceful stride ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns

... pupil of an exiled Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge. But the effects of being reared in France, and too early thrown into the dissolute Courts of Europe, were evident at the Restoration, when Charles the Second and his friends returned to startle England with their "exceeding wildness." What else could be the effect of a youth spent as the Earl of Chesterfield records:[273] at thirteen years old a courtier at St Germaine: at fourteen, rid of any governor or tutor: at sixteen, at the academy of M. de Veau, he "chanced to have a quarrel with M. ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard

... dogs are kind beasts. Their wildness was partly gone; they had lost their likeness to the wolf, and had become more like Duke, the finished model of the canine race,—in a word, they were becoming civilized. Duke could certainly claim a share in their education; he had given them lessons and an example in good ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne

... the ground. Alan, leaning against a pine tree, looked down at her. The sunlight fell through the swaying boughs on her glory of burnished hair and lighted up the curve of cheek and chin against the dark background of wood brown. All the defiance and wildness had gone from her for the time and she seemed like a helpless, weary child. He wanted to take her in his arms ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... thirty hungry men. It is far from the mainland; the storm, which lasted through two days, was too violent for raft or boat to live, and at so early a season native craft are never seen on these seas. Briefly, a week might have elapsed before our friends at El-Muwaylah, who were startled by the wildness of the wind, could have learned our plight, or could have taken measures ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... magnificent ranch and the proprietor must be a wealthy man. The third was one of disappointment; everything was so quiet, so still. There was no rush or bustle. No horsemen riding around with cracking whips; no shouting, no atmosphere of wildness. And, worst of all, there were no droves of cattle tearing around. Just a few old milch cows near by, peacefully grazing their day away, and philosophically awaiting milking time. These, and a few dogs, a horse or two loose in the corrals, and a group ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum

... slowly: "She is in no fear of your batteries now—she is beyond them. When she was there, she was not child enough to think that foolish game with the vanished chaplain was a marriage. Did you think to gull a lady so beyond the minute's wildness? She is not there," he added again in a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... words of A. Viskovatof, one of the fairest and most discriminating of Russian travellers: "Nature has not properly brought out the moral and intellectual capacity of the Caucasian highlanders. Through the superficial crust of ignorance and wildness you may see in every mountaineer a frank and acute intellect, and, brigand though he may be, he still shows evidences of human feeling and of a soul. His brigandage, indeed, is only the external roughness which results naturally from his education, his circumstances and his mode of life. Beneath ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... of the lyric describing the wail of the Scottish woman who plays her harp on the cliff, and sings above the raging of sea and wind. The third catches most happily the whimsicality of the poet's reminiscences of childhood, but hardly, I think, the contrasting depth and wildness of his complaint that, along with childhood's games, have vanished Faith and Love and Truth. In the last, however, the cheery majesty that realizes Heine's likening of Death to a cool night after the sultry day ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... the wildness of his hopes, he rushed out of the garden. He summoned a gondolier, threw himself into the boat, and hastened to the dwelling of Cinthia, where the inhabitants already were folded in the ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis

... Concord Lotus, Eloquence Lotus Flower, Estranged Love Lotus Leaf, Recantation Love in a Mist, Perplexity Love Lies Bleeding, Desertion Lucurn, Life Lupine, Voraciousness Madder, Calumny Magnolia, Love of Nature Maiden Hair, Secrecy Mallow, Wildness Mallow, Marsh, Beneficence Marrow, Syrian, Persuasion Manchineal Tree, Duplicity Mandrake, Rarity Maple, Reserve Marianthus, Hope for Better Marigold, Grief, Chagrin Marigold, French, Jealousy Marigold and Cyprus, Despair Marjoram, Blushes Marvel of Peru, Timidity ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole

... Stanton and taking his hand in both of his, drew the man toward him. All the wildness and intolerance in his manner had passed, and as he raised his eyes they were full of ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis

... sense of impending doom, "there might be trouble." He didn't know what she meant, but whatever it was, she evidently meant it with determination. Already she had impressed him with the quality which, for want of a better word, he thought of as "wildness." It was a quality which he had found strangely, if secretly, alluring, and he acknowledged now that this note of "wildness," of unexpectedness, of "something different" in her personality, had held ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow

... twenty-five years ago as at this day, and he would not have been expected to be rich, or to have the acquaintance of rich Americans. Already, at that remote period, certain fellow-countrymen of ours had satisfied the English taste for wildness in us. There had been Buffalo Bill, with his show, and there had been other Buffalo Bills, literary ones, who were themselves shows. There had then arisen a conjecture, a tardy surmise, of an American fineness, which might be as well in its way as the American wildness, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... provisions and ignorant of the country, might, at least before the roads were made, have wandered among the rocks, till he had perished with hardship, before he could have found either food or shelter. Yet what are these hillocks to the ridges of Taurus, or these spots of wildness ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson

... slaves, and the service to which they were subjected was no matter of choice. Numbers had got attached to the soil; and inheriting the blood of Persians, White Huns, or aboriginal inhabitants for three generations, had simply unlearned the wildness of the Tartar shepherd. Others fell victims to the religion of their conquerors, which ultimately, as we know, exercised a most remarkable influence upon them. Not all at once, but as tribe descended after tribe, and generation followed generation, they succumbed to the creed of Mahomet; and they ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... was not an optical illusion. The landscape alone, which varied at every turn, and gave us new beauties from any point of view, was of itself worth all the pains of an excursion to the eastward of the Jordan; and the park-like scenes that sometimes softened the romantic wildness of the general character as a whole, reminded us of similar spots in less ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell

... have taken any one of several other books, and they would have illustrated my point snugly and more conveniently; but just that right touch of craziness that Nobel had in mind, and that goes with great experiment of spirit—the chill, Nietzsche-like wildness, that bravado before God and man and before Time, that swinging one's self out on Eternity, which make Upward a typical man of genius, would have been lacking. K—— (whose criticisms of books are the most creative ones I know) said of Upward's book that he felt very happy ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... ideas and sentiments succeed each other, and the head and the heart exercise themselves, men continue to shake off their original wildness, and their connections become more intimate and extensive. They now begin to assemble round a great tree: singing and dancing, the genuine offspring of love and leisure, become the amusement or rather the occupation of the men and women, free from ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... are not too greatly depressed, is turned into a song. These songs are said to be incoherent and nonsensical. But this proceeds principally from two causes, an improper conjunction of words, arising from an ignorance of the language in which they compose; and a wildness of thought, arising from the different manner, in which the organs of rude and civilized people will be struck by the same object. And as to their want of harmony and rhyme, which is the last objection, the difference of pronunciation is the cause. Upon the ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson

... brain; they do not help it—not even in the lighter kinds of labor. They unseat the judgment, pervert vision. Productions, cast off by the aid of the use of them, are but flashy, trashy stuff—or exhibitions of the prodigious in wildness or grotesque conceit, of the kind which Hoffman's tales give, for example; he was one of the few at all ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... been so intimately connected with it, that he was a most excellent narrator. The episode with the Bellestres and Monsieur's kindly care, the efforts to subdue in some measure the child's wildness and passion for liberty, which made the father smile, thinking of his own exuberant spirits and adventures, her affection for the Indian woman, her desultory training, that Father Rameau believed now had been a sinful mistake, her ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various

... soft breezes of summer; the noon-day smoke of the dinner fires rose up, and was gently borne away to the more wide-spread scene of grandeur and cultivation that lay in the champaign country below it. On each side of the glen were masses of rock and precipices, just large enough to give sufficient wildness and picturesque beauty to a view which in itself was calm and serene. In the distance about a mile to the north, stood out a bold but storm-vexed headland, that heaved back the mighty swell of the Atlantic, of which a glimpse could be caught ...
— Lha Dhu; Or, The Dark Day - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... been a relief to Mary to have them thus disposed of safely; and Adelaide would have obeyed; but the other two had been worked up to a state of wildness, such as befalls little girls who have let themselves out of the ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Wildness best describes these leafy solitudes in which roads are almost unknown, and which the larger beasts as well as men ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly

... wildness of that sea, four miles from shore, Thomas Jefferson Brown seemed to heave himself up out of the water, as if the strength of a thousand swimmers had suddenly come to him. He let out a cry of triumph, of love, of joy; and he came back and gripped the ...
— Thomas Jefferson Brown • James Oliver Curwood

... which he owns we are often precipitated by our invention, when we depend too much upon the strength of it; as magnanimity (says he) may run up to confusion and extravagance, so may great invention to redundancy and wildness. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber

... these four families are well understood in typical examples, how easy it will be to attach either subordinate groups or specialities of habitat, as in America, to some kinds of them! The entire order, for their purity and wildness, are to be named, from Artemis, "Artemides", instead of Caryophyllaceae; and next them come the Vestals (mints, lavenders, etc.); and then the Cytheride Viola, Veronica, Giulietta, ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin

... thoughts soaring to the highest pinnacles of imagination as in the Triumph of Life, and with the enjoyment of the high ideals of others, as in reading the Spanish dramas: music also gave enchantment when Jane Williams played her guitar. With the intense beauty of the scenery, and the wildness of the natives who used sometimes to dance all night on the sands in front of their house; the emotions of life seemed compressed into this time, spent in what would be considered by many great dulness, in the company of Trelawny and ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti

... tender-hearted. But he was weak of will, merely passive in endurance, and quite without energy. He had a graceful, fanciful, but almost weak intellect. I mean, it just bordered on mental deficiency; and at times his dreamy eyes took a wildness that was said to make him painfully like his mother in her last days. He was an absurd but gracefully romantic idea of his family consequence. He was very handsome, and very like the miniature of the late Duke. It was most desirable that his cousin should not meet him, especially as she was ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... train of ideas in which I had indulged before my friends left me continued to flow with a vividness and force increased by the stillness and solitude of the scene; and the full moon has always a peculiar effect on these moods of feeling in my mind, giving to them a wildness and a kind of indefinite sensation, such as I suppose belong at all times to the true poetical temperament. It must be so, I thought to myself; no new city will rise again out of the double ruins of this; no new empire will be founded upon these colossal remains of that of the old Romans. The world, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy

... hearts can go with him, as I think, if he speak with some humility, so far as his daily self carry him, out of a cloudy light of vision; for whether he understand or not, it may be that voices of angels and archangels have spoken in the cloud, and whatever wildness come upon his life, feet of theirs may well have trod the clusters. But a man so plunged in trance is of necessity somewhat still and silent, though it be perhaps the silence and the stillness of a lamp; and the movement of the Play as a whole, if we are to have time ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats

... the Sea (1903), The Well of the Saints (1905), and The Playboy of the Western World (1907) we have a richness of imagery, a new language startling in its vigor, a wildness and passion that contrast strangely with the suave mysticism and delicate spirituality of his ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various

... could not help weeping again; for she thought of the splendid palfreys and hackneys of her French knights and ladies, and at this first view Scotland appeared to-her in all its poverty. Next day it was to appear to her in all its wildness. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... horizontally from the trunk of a very large old fig-tree, which had been lately felled, and begged to have something painted on it as an ornament for his cottage. The man being an especial favorite, Piero desired his son Leonardo to gratify his request; and Leonardo, inspired by that wildness of fancy which was one of his characteristics, took the panel into his own room, and resolved to astonish his father by a most unlooked-for proof of his art. He determined to compose something which should have an effect similar to that of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various

... struck with the pastoral wildness of this Liddesdale air, and wrote these words to it for the Museum: the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... would remain unanswered. Prayer will henceforth be my only occupation. Excuse me for leaving you, but I am fatigued from my journey!'—He spoke the truth for he was as pale as a spectre, with a kind of wildness about the eyes, and so changed since the day before, as to be hardly the same man. His hand, when he offered it on parting from me, was dry and burning. The Abbe d'Aigrigny soon came in. 'Father,' said M. Hardy to him, 'have the goodness to see M. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... springs, that soothes, that delights, that transports the soul? At the prospect of the wide and deep ocean, or some huge mountain whose top is lost in the clouds, or of an old gloomy forest, are not our minds filled with a pleasing horror? Even in rocks and deserts is there not an agreeable wildness? How sincere a pleasure is it to behold the natural beauties of the earth! To preserve and renew our relish for them, is not the veil of night alternately drawn over her face, and doth she not change her dress with the seasons? How aptly are the elements ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley

... friable; it is largely broken into felspar, quartz, and mica, with schorl, chlorite, and hornblende. No great elevation is attained—nothing above 160 feet; the grandeur of the coasts, which certainly does not equal that of North Cornwall, consists in their rugged wildness and the fantastic weathering of their crags. Contorted formations, logans and rock-basins, reveal the decomposition of softer measures that has been proceeding for ages. The isles lie about 27 miles west of Land's End, but the journey from Penzance to St. Mary's ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... suffering apparently from weakness, he paused, leaning for support against the doorway. His eyes were bright, his sunken cheeks told of fever or famine. His clothes stained and dusty, and his unkempt hair, added to the wildness of his appearance. For a moment he and the owner of the room glared at one another in speechless wonder. Then a name sprang ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman



Words linked to "Wildness" :   passion, wild, willfulness, intractableness, savageness, fractiousness, wilfulness, savagery, intractability, tameness, passionateness, untamed, intensity, unruliness, intensiveness



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