"Extemporaneous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... yourself; never imitate.[249] Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare?[250] Where is the master who could ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... shaken, and they all shouted and returned back to their places. They have no step, but shuffle along the ground; nor does the music appear to be any thing more than a confusion of noises, distinguished only by hard or gentle blows upon the buffaloe skin: the song is perfectly extemporaneous. In the pauses of the dance, any man of the company comes forward and recites, in a sort of low guttural tone, some little story or incident, which is either martial or ludicrous; or, as was the case this evening, voluptuous and indecent; this is taken ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... are state papers, read to Congress, and were carefully composed. Others, delivered in various places, appear to have been more or less extemporaneous. All are full of their author's political philosophy, and many of them contain expressions of his opinions on general subjects, such as personal character ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... fact, too great a temptation for my friend's temperament, and the very theater for the full display of his magnificent voice; and naturally, this afternoon, off he set at a tangent, interrupting the current of his sermon by extemporaneous bursts of warning, entreaty and exhortation. Here is something like his discourse—yet done by me in a subdued tone—as, I repeat, are most extravaganzas of the ecclesiastical and spiritual sort, not only here, but in all other parts of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... Wesleyan minister of Whydah, named Bernisco, and a hundred servants. At every halting place the natives capered before them and tabored a welcome, while at Kama, where Gelele was staying, they not only played, but burst out with an extemporaneous couplet in Burton's honour: ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... diatribe, tirade, screed, rhapsody, philippic, invective, rant; soliloquy, monologue; dialogue; colloquy; trialogue; interlocution; improvisation; toast; equivocation, prevarication, quibbling; ambages, pseudology, amphibology, amphiboly, dilogy. Associated Words: extempore, extemporaneous, extemporize, extemporization, impromptu, improvise, improvisation, brogue, aphasia, amnesia, oratory, elocution, rhetoric, oratorical, rhetorical, rhetorician, elocutionary, peroration, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... evening came a great dinner at the palace, at which the King and Queen presided. The only speech on the occasion was one of congratulation made by the Emperor of Austria, and it was very creditable to him, being to all appearance extemporaneous, yet well worded, quiet, dignified, and manly. The ceremonies closed on Sunday with a grand "Te Deum" at the palace church, in the presence of all the majesties,—the joy expressed by the music being duly accentuated by ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... their necks to catch his words. I never saw anything so magical. I know how you would have enjoyed it. Its effect was a hot surprise. The revelers all worn; the people ready to go home; the waiters impatient; the speech wholly extemporaneous. It was a triumph that did honor to American oratory at its best. The applause was decisive and deafening. I never heard of anything ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... the State society held a spirited and successful convention.[167] Julia Smith gave an extemporaneous talk to the great delight of the audience, who applauded continually; Mrs. Crane, a fine elocutionist, gave a reading from Carlyle; Mrs. Hooker closed with a brief resume of the work the society ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... evanescent, fleeting, cursory, short-lived, ephemeral; flying &c. v.; fugacious, fugitive; shifting, slippery; spasmodic; instantaneous, momentaneous[obs3]. temporal, temporary; provisional, provisory; deciduous; perishable, mortal, precarious, unstable, insecure; impermanent. brief, quick, brisk, extemporaneous, summary; pressed for time &c. (haste) 684; sudden, momentary &c. (instantaneous) 113. Adv. temporarily &c. adj.; pro tempore[Lat]; for the moment, for a time; awhile, en passant[Fr], in transitu[Lat]; in a short time; soon &c. (early) 132; briefly &c. adj.; at short ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... scurried like children let out of school, around behind the set of screens that made an extemporaneous dressing-room, and began changing in a mad scramble, hoping to get away and to get their dinners eaten soon enough to enable them to see the whole bill at a movie show before ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... dullest topics and make them sparkle by odd and droll illustrations, as well as by picturesque allusions and eloquent phrases. He {254} could, when the subject called for it, break suddenly into thrilling invective. [Sidenote: 1725—Pulteney] But he had some of the defects of the extemporaneous orator. His eloquence, his wit, his epigrams often carried him away from his better judgment. He frequently committed himself to some opinion which was not really his, and was led far from his proper position in the pursuit of ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... gathering, for the children were accompanied by their mothers, and these stared at me with expectant eyes as if they would say, "See, the General is about to speak; his words are sure to be full of wisdom." I endeavoured to display great coolness, and I do not think I failed very markedly as an extemporaneous orator. I was helped very considerably in the speechmaking part of the programme by my good friends the Rev. Neethling and Mr. W. Barter, of Lydenburg. I have not now the slightest idea of what I spoke about ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... trying to construct a sentence clever enough to find its way to Caroline through the stream of conversation. Luckily for Merlin a portion of little Arthur's clothing had chosen the opportunity to threaten a collapse, and Olive had hurriedly rushed him over against a building for some extemporaneous repair work, so Merlin was able to watch, unhindered, the salon ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... contrived to display their darling tricolor by a seemingly accidental arrangement of red, white, and green among the vegetables which they exhibited in the market or carried to their homes. Nay more, the loyalty of a loyal man may in certain circumstances be more emphatically expressed by a rude, extemporaneous symbol, hastily constructed of intractable materials, than by the most elaborate and leisurely products of the needle or the loom. In such cases, the will of the man is everything; the wealth of the man nothing. The meanest rag suddenly ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... in the middle of a chorus of "Muskrat Ramble." I'd have liked to hear more—it was Dixieland times two—what the Psis call Psixieland. That's jazz played by a gang of telepaths. Each one knows what the others are about to play. The result is extemporaneous counterpoint, but without the clinkers we associate with jazz. Almost too ...
— Modus Vivendi • Gordon Randall Garrett
... say that?" he asked. Edward looked at him. Mr. Beecher's face was tense. After a few moments he said: "That's generally the way with extemporaneous remarks: they are always dangerous. The best impromptu speeches and remarks are the carefully ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... firth, which is in this place nearly a mile broad, to Castro Pol, the first town in the Asturias. I now mounted the factious mare, whilst Antonio followed on my own horse. Martin led the way, exchanging jests with every person whom he met on the road, and occasionally enlivening the way with an extemporaneous song. ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Stockjobbers," performed in November, 1692, while its author was on his death-bed, the historian introduces an entire scene into his text.[27] Any one, indeed, who can clear his mind from the unjust prejudice produced by Dryden's satire, and read the comedies of Shadwell with due consideration for the extemporaneous haste of their composition, as satires upon passing facts and follies, will find, that, so far from never deviating into sense, sound common-sense and fluent wit were the Laureate's staple qualities. If his comedies have not, like those ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... almost three-quarters of an hour to bring her round. In one brief interval of calm she managed to slip to the telephone and call a taxi. The rest of the time she spent on her knees beside the girl in the chair crooning softly. And she never knew that most of the words she set to her soothing, extemporaneous tune would have contaminated anybody, most of all ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master who ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... than in the words of an address which he delivered to the York Pioneers at Queenston, in July, 1875, on the occasion of the anniversary celebration of the battle of Lundy's Lane. The address (which was entirely extemporaneous in the delivery) is here reproduced, as reported in ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... arrived a blind singer, or bard; he was led by two boys, who accompanied his extemporaneous verses—one of them tapping with a pebble on an empty sardine-tin, while the other belaboured a beer-bottle with a rusty nail: both solemn as archangels; there was also a professional accompanist, who screwed his mouth awry and blew sideways into a tall flute, his eyes half-closed in ecstatic ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... with the failure of the old man's attempts to read this written statement. He had his own address in his pocket, but an extemporaneous speech would have ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... in these joint discussions were entirely extemporaneous in form, yet they were reported and printed in all the prominent papers in the West, and found eager readers throughout the country. The voice and manner, which add so much to the effect of a speaker, could not be reproduced on the ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... he acquires the ability to utter a phrase, and at last a short sentence, without interruption. Nature prompts the child to this exercise, which from the first attempt, to the full flow of eloquence in the extemporaneous debater, consists simply in commanding and managing one set of ideas in the mind, at the moment the person is giving utterance to others. This cannot be done by the child, but it is gradually acquired by the man; and we shall see in its proper place, that this acquisition is entirely the ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... a friend who has in him the making of a popular scientist, having an easy flow of extemporaneous theory, so that he is never closely confined to his facts. One of his theories is that pessimism is purely a literary disease, and that it can only be conveyed through the printed page. In having a single means of infection it follows the analogy of malaria, which in many respects ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... and Evening Exercises, are good books for this purpose. The works of Fletcher, Thornton, and the Home Worship of Thompson and Spurgeon are worthy of special commendation. Even when one is accustomed to extemporaneous prayer, the use of one of the above books will, nevertheless, be of great service in preventing stereotyped phrases and trains of thought. I have often found that my own needs, and I believe those of my family, have been better and more ...
— The Wedding Day - The Service—The Marriage Certificate—Words of Counsel • John Fletcher Hurst
... for Debating. Since the chief value of debating, as distinguished from written arguments, is in cultivating readiness and flexibility of wit, the speaking should be as far as possible extemporaneous. This does not imply that the speaking should be without preparation: on the contrary, the preparation for good debating is more arduous than for a written argument, for when you are on your feet on the platform you cannot run to your books or to ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... discovered that the ambition of Pippin chiefly consisted in the utterance of his speech. He saw, too, in a little while, that the nonsense of the lawyer had not even the solitary merit—if such it be—of being extemporaneous; and in the slow and monotonous delivery of a long string of stale truisms, not bearing any analogy to the case in hand, he perceived the ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... introduced into his Journey. I am myself fully convinced that a form of prayer for publick worship is in general most decent and edifying. Solennia verba have a kind of prescriptive sanctity, and make a deeper impression on the mind than extemporaneous effusions, in which, as we know not what they are to be, we cannot readily acquiesce. Yet I would allow also of a certain portion of extempore address, as occasion may require. This is the practice of the French Protestant churches. And although the ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... cause beyond the enthusiasm excited by its vehement faith and doctrines (the truth or error of which I presume neither to canvass nor to question), I should venture to ascribe it to the practice of preaching in the fields, and the unstudied and extemporaneous effusions of its teachers. The Mussulmans, whose erroneous devotion (at least in the lower orders) is most sincere, and therefore impressive, are accustomed to repeat their prescribed orisons and prayers, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... theatre, gymnasium, or even the barber's shop, in constant mutual contact, in learning wisdom and news by word of mouth. The long stories which they may have told to each other, as an outlet for their natural vitality, as extemporaneous exercises of curiosity and wit and fancy, did not creep into their literature, which included only more ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... superiority is more flattering or alluring than that which is conferred by the powers of conversation, by extemporaneous sprightliness of fancy, copiousness of language, and fertility of sentiment. In other exertions of genius, the greater part of the praise is unknown and unenjoyed; the writer, indeed, spreads his reputation to a wider extent, but receives little pleasure or advantage ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... was silence in the meeting-house. Then the voice of another preacher rose in the universal prayer, "Our Father, which art in heaven." Every extemporaneous prayer in the Church of the Brethren is complemented by the model prayer the Master taught ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... an amanuensis for the last six years. Every work that we have had published has been extemporaneously written; and out of fifty lectures and sermons that we have delivered the last year, forty-four have been extemporaneous. We have distributed many of our unpublished manuscripts; loaned to one of our youngest students, R. K————y, between three and four hundred pages, of which we were sole author—giving him liberty to copy ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... captain gave out "The Life-Boat." Books were passed to the strangers, and the commander led off in the singing. Lord Tremlyn and Dr. Ferrolan joined in with vigorous bass voices. Captain Ringgold then followed with an extemporaneous prayer, in which he poured forth his thanks to the God who rules the sea and the land for the mercy that had spared their brothers from other lands from the mighty power of the raging billows. Instead of reading a printed sermon as usual, he gave an impromptu address ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... without carrying away a sweet, refining influence, a stronger faith, and a brighter realization of heavenly truths. And there are mediums, too, from whose lips distil a lofty eloquence and a remarkable wisdom upon any or all subjects proposed, with a flow of extemporaneous poetry or of heavenly music which has never been equaled under ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... composition as a means to felicity and facility of speech. The act of writing out your thoughts is a direct aid to concentration, and tends to enforce the habit of choosing the best language. It gives clearness, force, precision, beauty, and copiousness of style, so valuable in extemporaneous and impromptu speaking. ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... sounds that proceed from the Sakais' mouths, because real songs they have none. They are accustomed, however, to improvise something of the sort in which they always allude to facts of the day but as there is nobody to collect these fragments of extemporaneous ballads they disappear from the world of memories as quickly as they have ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... with my big-whiskered friend, Lewis Brown. That gentleman gave me an angry look, but said not a word. It was clear that Captain Lordick had betrayed the secret of my citizenship, and had given him information in regard to his old friends and gossips, which differed materially from my extemporaneous effusions; so that so far from being rejoiced, as a reasonable man would have been, at finding his friends alive and well, he seemed greatly provoked, and eyed me with the ferocity of a cannibal on learning that they had not shuffled off this ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... flippant, it is because I have been trained as an extemporaneous speaker and not as a writer. For fifteen years I traveled over the country lecturing on the Mooseheart School. My task was to interest men in the abstract problems of child education. A speaker must entertain his hearers to the end or ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... Mr. Pinkney had all the advantages which a fine manly person and clear, musical voice gives to an orator. He spoke but rarely and never without great preparation. He was by no means a ready debater, and prized too much his reputation to hazard anything in an impromptu, extemporaneous address. He listened, for weeks, to King, Otis, and others who debated the question, and came at last prepared in one great effort to answer and demolish the arguments of these men. Those who listened to that wonderful effort of forensic power will never forget his reply to ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... stomachs. Gottsched, among his other labours, composed a great deal for the theatre; connected with a certain Madam Neuber, who was at the head of a company of players in Leipsic, he discarded Punch (Hanswurst), whom they buried solemnly with great triumph. I can easily conceive that the extemporaneous part of Punch, of which we may even yet form some notion from the puppet-shows, was not always very skilfully filled up, and that many platitudes were occasionally uttered by him; but still, on the whole, Punch had certainly ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... the sonnet itself was excellent and spirited. Excellent I mean in its general effect, as an improvvisazione:—how it would stand the test of cool criticism I cannot tell; nor is that any thing to the purpose: these extemporaneous effusions ought to be judged merely as what they are,—not as finished or correct poems, but as wonderful exercises of tenacious memory, ready wit, and that quickness of imagination ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... on, cards issued three weeks in advance, that you may be premeditatedly dull; the dinner is gorgeous to repletion, that conversation may be kept as stagnant as possible. Of those happy surprize invitations—those unexpected extemporaneous dinners, that as they come without thinking or expectation, so go off with eclat, and leave behind the memory of a cheerful evening—he has no idea; a man of fashion, whose place is fixed, and who has only himself to please, will ask you ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... left them. The remaining lectures were given like his conversation, which no one can hear without feeling that, with all its glow and inspiration, every sentence would be, if taken down, found faultless. It was so in his remarkable extemporaneous address yesterday. He had no notes whatever. 'But,' says our correspondent, in transmitting the report, 'I have never heard a speech of whose more remarkable qualities so few can be conveyed on paper. You will read of "applause" and "laughter," ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... Fescennine songs the Etruscans probably furnished the spectacle, all that which addresses itself to the eye, while the habits of Italian rural life supplied the sarcastic humor and ready extemporaneous gibe, which are the essence of the true comic. The next advance in point of art must be attributed to the Oscans, whose entertainments were most popular among the Italian nations. They represented in broad caricature national peculiarities. Their language ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... long in finding an oak, as Petit Andre facetiously expressed it, fit to bear such an acorn; and placing the wretched criminal on a bank, under a sufficient guard, they began their extemporaneous preparations for the final catastrophe. At that moment, Hayraddin, gazing on the crowd, encountered the eyes of Quentin Durward, who, thinking he recognized the countenance of his faithless guide in that of the detected impostor, had followed with the crowd to witness the execution, ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... but as extemporaneous composition was familiar to him, he failed not to comply with the King's hints, and was perhaps not displeased to show with how much ease he could new-model a poem, even while in ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... date, this piece is not worth a single potato." Peregrine was astonished at this surprising perversion of the words and meaning of a Latin line, which, at first, he could not help thinking was a premeditated joke; but, upon second thoughts, he saw no reason to doubt that it was the extemporaneous effect of sheer pertness and ignorance, at which he broke out into an immoderate fit of laughter. Pallet, believing that the gentleman's mirth was occasioned by his arch animadversion upon the work of Sangpree, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... ritual although in the form of translation from Latin to English, together with several Catholic ceremonies, in some places even employing candles and incense. The Calvinists, on the other hand, worshiped with extreme simplicity: reading of the Bible, singing of hymns, extemporaneous prayer, and preaching constituted the usual service in church buildings that were without superfluous ornaments. Between Anglican formalism and Calvinistic austerity, the Lutherans presented a compromise: they devised no uniform liturgy, but showed some inclination ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... fluency with which they were able to express their thoughts, and at the freshness and fulness with which thoughts crowded upon them, while actually addressing a great assemblage of people. Of course, such extemporaneous speaking is an uncertain thing. It is a hit or a miss. A little physical or mental derangement, and the extempore speaker gets on lamely enough; he flounders, stammers, perhaps breaks down entirely. But still, I hold that though the extempore speaker may think and say that his mind often produces ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... way of melancholy jest, I may call the reception-room, or the studio, by a rope stretched across, from which were suspended a blanket, a travelling shawl, and a voluminous, and evidently costly, Spanish cloak. Protruding beyond the edge of this extemporaneous screen, I could see the footposts of an iron bedstead, and the end of a large poncho, which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... too strongly the administration of the Spirit in directing the worship of God's house. The use of liturgical forms is a relapse into legalism, a consent to be taught to pray as "John taught his disciples." True, there may be extemporaneous forms as well as written forms, praying by rote as well as praying by the book. Against both habits we simply interpose the higher teaching of the Spirit, as belonging especially to this dispensation, in ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... to this speech that I did not notice the flight of Ascyltos, and while I was pacing the gardens, engulfed in this flood-tide of rhetoric, a large crowd of students came out upon the portico, having, it would seem, just listened to an extemporaneous declamation, of I know not whom, the speaker of which had taken exceptions to the speech of Agamemnon. While, therefore, the young men were making fun of the sentiments of this last speaker, and criticizing the arrangement of the whole speech, I seized ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... omission of every customary ceremonial and under the guidance frequently of men whom zeal and piety alone had ordained to the office of teachers and ministers of religion, must amongst them also have been producing a secret alienation from established forms and rituals, and a propensity to those extemporaneous effusions of devotion, or urgencies of supplication, which seem best adapted to satisfy the wants of the pious soul under the fiery trial of persecution and distress. The Calvinistic model therefore, as the freest of all, and that which most industriously avoided any resemblance of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... alarm her, acquired her friendship as well as her gratitude; and, in short, she got used to him and liked him. Not being bound by any limit of fact whatever, he entertained her, and took her out of herself a little by extemporaneous pictures; he told her all his thrilling adventures by flood and field, not one of which had ever occurred, yet he made them all sound like truth; he invented strange characters, and set them talking; he went after great whales, and harpooned one, which slapped his ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... exhibitions. Hostilities gently frothed themselves away and subsided. Decoration Day was celebrated in Samaria, according to the Hitchfield Gazette, "by a notable gathering in the Town Hall, at which the Rev. Jones offered an eloquent extemporaneous prayer and the Rev. Hopkins pronounced an elegant oration on the Civil War, after which the survivors partook of a banquet at the ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... to the mask than the theatre, is distinguished by the name of Commedia dell' Arte.[II-2] But the shamefaced character of Britons is still more alien from a species of display, where there is a constant and extemporaneous demand for wit, or the sort of ready small-talk which supplies its place, than from the regular exhibitions of the drama, where the author, standing responsible for language and sentiment, leaves to the personators of the scenes only the trouble ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... of the speeches were written out beforehand in the study, the manuscripts served as a means of further publicity afterwards. The great extemporaneous speakers, on the other hand, were attended by shorthand writers. We must further remember that not all the orations which have come down to us were intended to be actually delivered. The panegyric, for example, of the elder Beroaldus on Lodovico il Moro was presented ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... well in hand, and, without being tied down to any particular manner of expression or obliged to follow any set order of procedure, he can use his material as opportunity requires. His language should be at least partially extemporaneous; he may have a fairly clear conception of how he is to frame his sentences, but he should have nothing learned word for word. Thus his speech may have an element of spontaneity that will give it a tone of sincerity and earnestness unattainable ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... that the points at issue between the advocates of liturgical and the advocates of extemporaneous worship can be settled by a promiscuous jumbling together of the two modes, is a fond conceit, as the Reformed Episcopalians will doubtless confess when they shall have had time enough to make full trial of the following rubrics in ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... inspiration had been the love of the common people, his faith, his sympathy had all been expended in an effort to brighten the life of the too frequently neglected masses. Page's address on this occasion was entirely extemporaneous; no record of it was ever made, but those who heard it still carry the memory of an eloquent and fiery outburst that placed Knapp's work in its proper relation to American history and gave an unforgettable picture of a patient, idealistic, achieving man whose ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... liturgic uses in public worship. At about the same time the fruitful discussions of the Mercersburg controversy were in progress in the German Reformed Church. "Mercersburg found fault with the common style of extemporaneous public prayer, and advocated a revival of the liturgical church service of the Reformation period, but so modified and reproduced as to be adapted to the existing wants of Protestant congregations."[388:1] ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the wonderful thing about Webster's reply is that his notes were confined to a sheet of letter paper. Afterwards Webster said that it had been carefully prepared, for while there is such a thing as extemporaneous delivery, there is "no extemporaneous acquisition." Not until he entered the Senate Chamber and saw the crowds did he feel the slightest trepidation. "A strange sensation came. My brain was free. All ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... conversationist as he was a writer; his tone was thoroughly English, and his pronunciation, like that of Washington Irving, was singularly correct. As a speaker, he at times rose to splendid flights of oratory, although his delivery from memory was less effective than the extemporaneous style. Macaulay never married, but was always happy in the social ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... indictment of suffering!—the futility of it, both in itself and that by which it was administered! No one could know Brande without finding interest, if not pleasure, in his many chance expressions full of curious and mysterious thought. I had often listened to his extemporaneous brain pictures, as the reader knows, but I had never before heard him deliberately formulate a planned-out system of thought. And such a system! This is the gospel according ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... most often all prospect is precluded. Still, however, Mr. Pitt's situation, however inauspicious for his real being, was favourable to his fame. He heaped period on period; persuaded himself and the nation, that extemporaneous arrangement of sentences was eloquence; and that ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... other Patriot, fire in his eye, snatches barrow and mattock, and himself begins indignantly wheeling. Whom scores and then hundreds follow; and soon a volunteer Fifteen Thousand are shovelling and trundling; with the heart of giants; and all in right order, with that extemporaneous adroitness of theirs: whereby such a lift has been given, worth three mercenary ones;—which may end when the late twilight thickens, in triumph shouts, heard or heard ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... is doubtless a pleasure, and a help too, to read the good books of good men; but there are many good men who write good books, and he is among the few who cannot. He has suffered from ill health, particularly difficulties in the head; and though his gift of extemporaneous speech is remarkable, he cannot compose for printing without labor of the brain which is injurious to him. In this he also resembles Dr. Follen, of whom he reminds me, who wrote little, and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... time out of material that was perhaps but a moment before sniffing or pecking at its rim. A very little blaze sets the piece of cold fat swimming, and the black cavity soon glows and splutters with extemporaneous content. But what dreams howl about the camp-fires, what hideous scalping-humor creeps from the leathery supper into the limbs and blood of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... Judge Devens was magnificent. He spoke wholly without notes and his effort was largely extemporaneous. He began by saying that the lateness of the hour ('twas nearly six o'clock) would prevent his following the train of any previously prepared effort and he would briefly review the history of the battle and its results upon the world's history. He spoke for nearly and hour ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... herself relaxing in the library, with Basil Randolph in the opposite chair. Randolph himself had figured in the ceremony. This had been a crude imitation of a time-hallowed form and had allowed for an extemporaneous prayer and for a brief address to the young couple; but it had retained the familiar inquiry, "Who giveth—?" "Who can give?" asked Medora of Amy. Poor Joe was rather out of the question, and Brother ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... much more widely from Roman Catholicism. It did away with the episcopate and had only one order of clergy—the presbyters. [20] It provided for a very simple form of worship. In a Calvinistic church the service consisted of Bible reading, a sermon, extemporaneous prayers, and hymns sung by the congregation. The Calvinists kept only two sacraments, baptism and the eucharist. They regarded the first, however, as a simple undertaking to bring up the child in a Christian ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... this, he put his oxen under the care of a small boy, and collecting in Aunt Patsy's room the five colored women and girls who were in attendance upon her, he conducted "prars," making an extemporaneous petition which comprehended all the probable contingencies of the journey, even to the accident of the right wheel of the cart coming off, which the old man very reverently asserted that he would have lynched with a regular pin instead of a broken poker handle, if he could have ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... Tecumseh well knew the wrongs of the red men when he endeavoured, several years before the war, to induce the Osages to unite in a general Indian confederacy against the continued encroachments of the Americans, and gave extemporaneous utterance before a large assemblage to the following simple but faithful narration of their grievances. The harangue, eloquent as it is, suffers under all the disadvantages of translation, and is but the shadow of the substance, because the gestures, and the ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... saw his army was thrown 202 into confusion by this event, he thought it best to encourage them by an extemporaneous address on this wise: "Here you stand, after conquering mighty nations and subduing the world. I therefore think it foolish for me to goad you with words, as though you were men who had not been proved in action. Let a new leader or an ...
— The Origin and Deeds of the Goths • Jordanes
... she didn't know, so the story by rounds hasn't been told. The next thing she knew though, they'd hustled her into the Bend and bottled her up in that back room, but not before she'd done a little extemporaneous carvin' on her own account. I gathered that three or four of the Malabistos needed some plain sewin' done on 'em after the bell rang, and that the rest wasn't so anxious for her society as at first. She'd been cooped up for two days ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... view, she went about the construction of an extemporaneous bed in the easy-chair, with the addition of the next easy one for her feet. Having formed the best couch that the circumstances admitted of, she took out of her bundle a yellow night-cap, of prodigious size, in shape resembling a cabbage; which article of dress she fixed ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... returned to the sermon under his hand, and was revising it for the twentieth time, to perfect it before finally committing it to memory; for so should the lie of his life be crowned with success, and seem the thing it was not—an outcome of extemporaneous feeling! During what remained of the two days following he spared no labour, and at last delivered it with considerable unction, and the feeling that ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... exacerbate, excerpt, excommunicate, excoriate, excruciate, execrable, exegesis, exemplary, exhalation, exhilarate, exigency, exodus, exonerate, exorbitant, exotic, expectorate, expeditious, explicable, explicit, expunge, extant, extemporaneous, extrinsic. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... circumstances, a cook may be in want of the substances necessary to make sauce: the above composition of the several articles from which the various gravies derive their flavour, will be found a very admirable extemporaneous substitute. By mixing a large table-spoonful with a quarter of a pint of thickened melted butter, broth, or No. 252, five minutes will finish a boat of very relishing sauce, nearly equal to drawn gravy, and as likely to put your lingual nerves into good ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... and a very nice job, too, for an extemporaneous effort—if it was. Semantics says, though, that in a couple of spots it smells like slightly rancid cheese, and ... no-no, keep still! Too many planets listening in—verbum sap. Anyway, THE PRESS smells something, too, and they're screaming their lungs out, ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... howsomever, I do my best to supply his place—Jacobina, child, be still: I can't say as I knows the musket-sarvice, your honour; but I fancy's as how, like Joe Roarjug, the Methodist, we can do it extemporaneous-like at a pinch." ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... very triumph of the scene. The child, sitting down with the old man close behind it, had been thinking how strange it was that horses who were such fine honest creatures should seem to make vagabonds of all the men they drew about them, when a loud laugh at some extemporaneous witticism of Mr Short's, having allusion to the circumstances of the day, roused her from her meditation and caused her ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... all the foreigners were assembled, including the two venerable missionaries and a French priest of benign aspect, and his appearance was the signal for a fresh outburst of enthusiasm. Advancing to the front, he made an extemporaneous speech, of which the following is a ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... is important and related. Like the strongly aromatic herbs and simples,—sage, mint, wintergreen, sassafras,—the least part carries the flavor of the whole. Is there one indifferent or equivocal or unsympathizing drop of blood in him? Where he is at all, he is entirely,—nothing extemporaneous; his most casual word seems to have lain in pickle a long time, and is saturated through and through with the Emersonian brine. Indeed, so pungent and penetrating is his quality that even his quotations seem more ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... of the landlord's horses. There is no epithet too strong to express their indignation against the devoted Colonel, who was described by one imaginative peasant, who had worked himself up to a sort of descriptive convulsion, as a "Rawhacious Vagabone," a fine instance of extemporaneous word-coining of the ideo-phonetic school, which will doubtless be greedily accepted by Nationalist Parliamentarians who, long ago, exhausted their vocabulary of expletives in dealing with Mr. Gladstone and ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... following passage, in the poetical dedication of his Sea-piece to Voltaire, it seems, that this extemporaneous reproof, if it must be extemporaneous (for what few will now affirm Voltaire to have deserved any reproof,) was something longer than a distich, and something more gentle ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... good chance. Look squarely at the person whose name you wish to recall, avoiding doubt as to your ability to recall it; for doubt is itself a distraction. Put yourself back into the time when you formerly used this person's name. In extemporaneous speaking, go ahead confidently, avoid worry and self-consciousness, and, full of your subject, trust to your ideas to recall the words as needed. Once carried away with his subject, a speaker may surprise ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... sparkles gayly," pursued the clergyman, in the manner of an extemporaneous preacher who strives to catch in a net of decorations some illustration which presents itself,—"the boat tosses on from wave to wave, for dories will sail before the wind. Soon we are miles from shore, and throw the anchor. What auspicious expansion of soul and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... suggested that she might have dropped it in alighting from the carriage. And lo! they found it lying in the gutter. As the ground was frozen hard it was not even soiled. When I learned of my narrow escape, I trembled, for I had not prepared any train of thought for extemporaneous use. I should have been obliged to talk when my turn came, and if inspired by the audience or the good angels, might have done well, or might have failed utterly. The moral of this episode is, hold on to ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... tender subject of lay-preaching and lay-ministering; nor did he think it altogether prudent or decent to indulge the wishes of some of the warmer enthusiasts of the party, who felt disposed to make the rest partakers of their gifts in extemporaneous prayer and exposition. These were absurdities that belonged to the time, which, however, the Major had sense enough to perceive were unfitted, whether the offspring of hypocrisy or enthusiasm, for the present time ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... lasting remembrance of the truths offered to him. It would be a useful exercise for the instructor, he thought, to elucidate obscure phenomena and complicated structures by words only, assisting himself, perhaps, occasionally, by extemporaneous drawings. Such a course would inspire the scholar with deference for his teacher, and confidence in his own ability to acquire a similar grasp of the subject. While there is certainly some truth in this opinion, it would not be difficult, perhaps, to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Bunyan. With painful accuracy they established the exact time and place, "on the Big Onion the winter of the blue snow" or "at Shot Gunderson's camp on the Tadpole the year of the sourdough drive." They elaborated on the old themes and new stories were born in lying contests where the heights of extemporaneous invention ...
— The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan • W.B. Laughead
... the American Revolution—such as "that people," "that loyal and respectable people," "this enlightened and spirited people," etc., etc. The speakers who made use of this colloquial phraseology concerning the inhabitants of a distant continent, in the freedom of extemporaneous debate, were not framing their ideas with the exactitude of a didactic treatise, and could little have foreseen the extraordinary use to be made of their expressions nearly a century afterward, in sustaining a theory contradictory to history as well as to common sense. It is as if the familiar ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... candidate clear out of sight, if that is preferred—not caring whether you believe you have been foreordained to be saved or not, if you are only saved; nor whether you believe in the perseverance of the saints or not, if you will only persevere; nor whether you prefer prayer by Episcopal liturgy or extemporaneous ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... the North could not help fighting when it was attacked, and to give the reasons that made it necessary to fight,—reasons which none but a consistent Friend or avowed non-resistant can pretend to dispute: His ordinary style in speaking is pointed, staccatoed, as is that of most successful extemporaneous speakers; he is "short-gaited"; the movement of his thoughts is that of the chopping sea, rather than the long, rolling, rhythmical wave-procession of phrase-balancing rhetoricians. But when the lance has pricked him deep enough, when the red flag has flashed in his face often enough, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... He heard Mr. Clay deliver his celebrated reply to Josiah Quincy—a venerable statesman who still survives;—and he ever spoke of it as admirable in its way. In the same spirit he spoke of Col. Benton's extemporaneous reply to Mr. Webster in the debate on the bank veto, delivered late at night in the Senate, as surpassing any thing of the kind that he had ever heard, or that the speaker ever reached before or after. He said he thought a speech of Webster's delivered during the war or soon after ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... the process to which he is subjected, is, confessedly, an extemporaneous one, it appears from the Duke of Cornwall's statement, that it was only the form which was wanting to make it legal. Thus ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... impression, or what principal thought or thoughts, shall be left with the audience. When this is determined, then a way of working out this central idea or of working up to it—in a short speech, by a few points only—must be carefully and thoroughly planned. Extemporaneous speaking is putting spontaneously into words what has previously been well thought out and well arranged. Without this state of preparation, the way of wisdom ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... pedantically precise and formal. For correct writing, the cultivation of patience and mental accuracy is essential. Throughout the young author's period of apprenticeship, he must keep reliable dictionaries and textbooks at his elbow; eschewing as far as possible that hasty extemporaneous manner of writing which is the privilege of more advanced students. He must take no popular usage for granted, nor must he ever hesitate, in case of doubt, to fall back on ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... gathered from the Extemporaneous Discourses of Henry Ward Beecher. By a Member of his Congregation. Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Co. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... end, his tone had become slightly uncertain; and Madame Feodoreff, who was prepared for an emergency, and whose schooling in the world had been thorough, hastily interposed. Moreover, as she began to speak, old Piotr entered with an extemporaneous luncheon that did credit to a purely bachelor establishment. As he set the things down before the unexpected visitor, she, looking her host squarely in the eye, and with a manner friendly but quite without sentiment, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... ministry with a mortal horror of extemporaneous speaking. Each week we wrote two sermons and a lecture all out, from the text to the amen. We did not dare to give out the notice of a prayer-meeting unless it was on paper. We were a slave to manuscript, and the chains were galling; and three months more of such work ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... sickness. In pursuance of the humane duties of his calling, the minister of the Episcopal Church called upon me, and after a short conversation, proposed addressing the throne of grace. This he did in a few eloquent extemporaneous phrases, closing with the Lord's prayer. Now, from the outset, I felt an uncontrollable inclination to laugh; but for a time succeeded in restraining it. But when, in close succession upon the minister's words, there arose ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... began. My address to the Almighty was prepared and part of the game is to make believe that it is purely extemporaneous. Every move, intonation and gesture is noted and has its bearing on the final result. I was saying to the ecclesiastical jury: "Look here, you dumb-heads, wake up; I'm the thing you need here!" Sermon time came and with ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... South Carolina, repeated to similar classes at the University of California, and finally delivered to a larger and general audience. They are printed, the preface states, from a verbatim report, with only verbal alterations and corrections of some redundancies consequent upon extemporaneous delivery. They are not, we find, lectures on science under a religious aspect, but discourses upon Christian theology and its foundations from a scientific layman's point of view, with illustrations from his own lines of study. As ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... gourd which contained it.' The gift was received by Mac-Murrough with profound gratitude; he drank the wine, and, kissing the cup, shrouded it with reverence in the plaid which was folded on his bosom. He then burst forth into what Edward justly supposed to be an extemporaneous effusion of thanks and praises of his Chief. It was received with applause, but did not produce the effect of his first poem. It was obvious, however, that the clan regarded the generosity of their Chieftain with high approbation. Many approved Gaelic toasts were then proposed, of some of which the ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... be used any longer in any church, chapel, or place of public worship. In lieu of this the "Directory for the Publike Worship of God" was established: this contained no stated forms of prayer, but general instructions only for extemporaneous praying and preaching, and for the administration of the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper; the former of which was to be administered in the place of public worship and in the face of ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... common soldiers of that age had, like the common sailors of some fifty years ago, some one qualified to 'discourse in excellent music' among them. Many of these, like those of the negroes in the United States, were extemporaneous, and allusive to events passing around them. But what was passing around them? The grand events of a spirit-stirring war; occurrences likely to impress themselves, as the mystical legends of former times had done, upon their memory; besides which, a retentive memory ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... several times upon Cajeux (rafts, or floats, made of several bundles of canes, laid across each other; a kind of extemporaneous pontoon,) in order to take a view of mountains which had raised my curiosity. I observed, that both sides of the river had their several advantages; but that the West side is better watered; appeared also to be more fruitful both in minerals, and ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... best instructors. As a child he distinguished himself by his proficiency in arithmetic and mathematics. Music he studied early, as a science as well as an art. He invented a species of lyre for himself, and sung his own poetical compositions to his own music, both being frequently extemporaneous. But his favorite pursuit was the art of design in all its branches; he modelled in clay or wax, or attempted to draw every object which struck his fancy. His father sent him to study under Andrea Verrocchio, famous ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... misdemeanors which they have themselves defined. The same spirit pervades every act of social life. If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare, and the circulation of the public is hindered, the neighbors immediately constitute a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an executive power which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of recurring to an authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned. If the public pleasures are ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... niceties of method and expression which form so large a part of the charm of literary works; acquires a critical delicacy of taste, which renders him fastidiously sensitive to those crudities and roughnesses of speech, which almost necessarily attend an extemporaneous style. He is apt to exaggerate their importance, and to imagine that no excellencies of another kind can atone for them. He therefore protects himself by the toil of previous composition, and ventures not a sentence which he ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... tones so invigorating, that Hugh and his friend (who had both been drinking before) rose from their seats as by previous concert, and, to the great admiration of the assembled guests, performed an extemporaneous No-Popery Dance. ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... women house-servants, of remarkably neat and tidy appearance, among whom was my darky driver, entered the apartment. They took a stand at the remote end of the room, and our host, opening a large, well-worn family BIBLE, read the fifty-fourth chapter of Isaiah. Then, all kneeling, he made a short extemporaneous petition, closing with the LORD'S Prayer; all present, black as well as white, joining in it. Then Heber's beautiful hymn, "From Greenland's icy mountains," was sung; the negroes, to my ear, making much better music than ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... the poetical dedication of his "Sea-piece" to Voltaire it seems that this extemporaneous reproof, if it must be extemporaneous (for what few will now affirm Voltaire to have deserved any reproof), was something longer than a distich, and something more gentle than ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... from the hours of rest and excessive toil, it is remarkable, that she should have presided over the Convention, in the easy manner she is said to have done, and should have given so graceful and appropriate an extemporaneous speech, on taking the chair. Maria L. Giddings, daughter of Joshua R. Giddings, who represented Ohio many years in Congress, presented a very able digest on the common law. Betsey M. Cowles gave a report equally good on "Labor," and Emily ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... with respect to the elliptical method of teaching, is, to deliver some appropriate, simple, extemporaneous tale, leaving out but few words at first, and those such as must obviously strike the children; as they get used to the plan, I make the omissions more frequent, and of words less obvious. The following specimens will render the whole plain to ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... departed from simplicity; that is, he rigidly confined himself to the use of such words as he had earned the right to use. Whenever the report of one of his extemporaneous speeches came before him for revision, he had an instinctive sagacity in detecting every word that had slipped unguardedly from his tongue, which he felt, on reflection, did not belong to him. Among the reporters of his speeches, he had a particular esteem for Henry J. Raymond, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... intervention of a favorite or fashionable minister in all the exercises of religion, identifies too much the sacred subject itself with the individual who presides over it; while theatrical exhibitions of extemporaneous oratory and flights of fancy, make the ordinary ritual of public worship, or the quiet practice of private devotion, seem tame and trivial. The tendency of the evil is, that the direct access to a communion with above is barred against the deluded and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... brought on from Boston to accommodate the expected crowd, and quite an animated discussion arose ez to wich corner uv it the Convenshun wuz to ockepy. This settled, the biznis wuz begun. Genral Wool wuz made temporary Chairman, to wich honor he responded in a elokent extemporaneous speech, which he read from manuscript. General Ewing made another extemporaneous address, which he read from manuscript, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... preacher at liberty to range freely, as they wished it to do, in conducting the devotional services. It was on this very account that the friends of strong government did like it. They wished to curtail this liberty, which, however, they called license, and which they thought made mischief. In extemporaneous prayers, it is often easy to see that the speaker is aiming much more directly at producing a salutary effect on the minds of his hearers than at simply presenting petitions to the Supreme Being. But, notwithstanding this evil, the existence of which no candid man can deny, the enemies of ...
— Charles I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... verse suggesting that extemporaneous composition is most poetical, [Footnote: See Scott's accounts of his minstrels' composition. See also, Bayard Taylor, Ad Amicos, and Proem Dedicatory; Edward Dowden, The Singer's Plea; Richard Gilder, How to ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... "in the cars on his way from the White House to the battlefield" that he was told that he also would be expected to say something on the occasion; that thereupon he jotted down in pencil the brief address which he delivered a few hours later.[53] But that the composition was quite so extemporaneous seems doubtful, for Messrs. Nicolay and Hay transcribe the note of invitation, written to the President on November 2 by the master of the ceremonies, and in it occurs this sentence: "It is the desire that, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... fever was said to be rife,—in short, made so fearful a picture, that Marianne gave up the child's life at once, and has taken to her bed. I have endeavored all I could to quiet her, by telling her that the scarlet-fever story was probably an extemporaneous work of fiction, got up to gratify the Hibernian anger at Ann, and that it wasn't in the least worth while to believe one thing more than another from the fact that any of the tribe said it. But she refuses to be comforted, and is so Utopian as to lie there, crying,—'Oh, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... here and there. I defied the bishops in the matter of public extemporaneous prayer and they yielded. I bearded the poor, hunted president in his den, and yet was re-elected to my position. I was slowly winning a way, but quickly losing faith in the value of the way won. Was this the place to ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... pastor of the Tabernacle church in Salem, held religious services in the meeting-house, and preached a sermon in which he maintained that the darkness was supernatural. Congregations came together in many other places. The texts for the extemporaneous sermons were invariably those that seemed to indicate that the darkness was consonant with scriptural prophecy.... The darkness was most dense shortly after eleven o'clock."(485) "In most parts of the country it was so great in the daytime, that the people could not tell the hour by either watch ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... rabble, a ragged fellow of mechanical aspect, in a tattered black doublet and an old straw hat, ascended the pulpit. Opening a sacred volume which he found there, he began to deliver an extemporaneous and coarse caricature of a monkish sermon. Some of the bystanders applauded, some cried shame, some shouted "long live the beggars!" some threw sticks and rubbish at the mountebank, some caught him by the legs and strove to pull him from ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... was fond of hard labor. Mrs. Crawford says: "Abe was no hand to pitch into work like killing snakes;" but when he did work, it was with an ease and effectiveness which compensated his employer for the time he spent in practical jokes and extemporaneous speeches. He would lift as much as three ordinary men, and "My, how he would chop!" says Dennis Hanks. "His axe would flash and bite into a sugar-tree or sycamore, and down it would come. If you heard him fellin' trees in a clearin', you ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... clergyman, he gave a violent wrench to his conscience and an awful shock to his friends. But Mr. Duche met the issue in the true spirit, and leaving his detested "popery robe" and prayer-book at home uttered an extemporaneous invocation, without a trace of intoning, that pleased the Puritans and caused one of them to remark, "He is surely coming over ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... diluted, forms an excellent refrigerant beverage and antalkali. It enters into the composition of extemporaneous ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... afternoon, and Lincoln followed in the evening. It was the same line of argument as in the other speech. Lincoln later consented to write it out for publication. We thus have the Springfield and Peoria speech, minus the glow of extemporaneous address, the inspiration of the orator. These are important factors which not even the man himself could reproduce. But we have his own report, which is therefore authentic. The most salient point in his speech is his reply to Douglas's plausible representation that ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... has had a successful career as teacher, as preacher and, now, as business manager and editor. He ranks, also, as one of the leaders of his race, as a scholar and writer of no mean ability. He is an able debater, having few superiors as an extemporaneous speaker. Acute in thought and incisive in speech, he is a ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... While the hymns were being sung, I felt I must try to do something more, although the language seemed to defy me. I never experienced such an inward burning to speak before, and therefore I determined to try an extemporaneous address in Tsimshean. The Lord helped me: a great stillness prevailed, and, I think, a great deal was understood of what I said. I told them of our condition, the pity and love of God, the death of the Son of God on our account, and the benefits arising ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... the sermon that day, for not only was the preacher aware that bright eyes looked upon his deeds, but he saw his enemies in the front of the battle. Surely all extemporaneous speakers, in court, pulpit, or senate, must be accessible to such external influences. It ought not to be so, of course, but I fancy it is. Would John Knox have been so fiery in denunciation if those wicked maids of honor had not derided him? I doubt if a discourse delivered in a Union would ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... pieces of artillery, ten square miles of people repeated the order for silence, in loud and reiterated shouts—and at last silence obeyed the order, and there was silence. The chief brahmin rose, and having delivered an extemporaneous prayer, suitable to the solemnity and importance of the occasion, he proceeded to read the will of the late king—he then descanted upon the Molean controversy, and how it was now an article of the Souffrarian faith, which it ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... a great reputation as a speaker; but when the youth had through years practiced extemporaneous speech in the cornfields of Kentucky, he went on to train himself in language, in thought, in posture, in gesture, until his hand could wield the scepter, or beckon in sweet persuasion, until his eye could look upon his enemies ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... unobserved. It was Sir Charles Pomander, who had slipped away, with the heartless and malicious intention of exposing the husband to the wife, and profiting by her indignation and despair. Seeing Triplet, he made an extemporaneous calculation that so infernal a chatterbox could not be ten minutes in her company without telling her everything, and this would serve his turn very well. He therefore postponed his purpose, and strolled away ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... with the finest literary execution. A delicate literary ear he might have had, perhaps, but he very seldom stopped to cultivate or even indulge it. This neglect was not produced by his frequent habit of extemporaneous speech alone; for it is a singular fact, that Wendell Phillips, who rarely writes a line, yet contrives to give to his hastiest efforts the air of elaborate preparation, while Theodore Parker's most scholarly performances ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... authority on birds, and whose recent books are valuable additions to our literature, had, it may be presumed, a paper to read on the "Experiences of an Ornithologist in Mexico," though he did not read it. He made, on the contrary, what seemed to be an extemporaneous talk, exceedingly entertaining and sufficiently instructive to warrant a permanent place for it in the Auk, of which he is associate editor. We had the pleasure of examining the advance sheets of a new book from his pen, elaborately illustrated in color, and shortly ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... destitute of qualifications for it, though I could not deny that my talent was less respectable, and might be less profitable, than the meanest of theirs. My design, in short, was to imitate the story-tellers of whom Oriental travellers have told us, and become an itinerant novelist, reciting my own extemporaneous fictions to such ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... at me over a dirty white neckcloth, with the corners of that cunning mouth drawn downwards, and those small eyes turned up in sanctimonious gravity, while thou wast offering to a crowd of halfgrown boys an extemporaneous exhortation in the capacity of a travelling preacher. Have I not seen it peering out from under a blanket, as that of a poor Penobscot Indian, who had lost the use of his hands while trapping on the Madawaska? Is it not the face of the forlorn ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... To beg? He can never have the boldness to exhibit an animal for sous,—impossible; no, no, let them slink back again and sell the cross." And the child whispers courage; bids him look again along the rows; those faces seem very kind. He again lifts his eyes, glances round, and with an extemporaneous tact that completed the illusion to which the audience were already gently lending themselves, made sundry complimentary comments on the different faces actually before him, selected most felicitously. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sported, and they invited her home to tea. Just how the scrap began or what it was all about she didn't know, so the story by rounds hasn't been told. The next thing she knew though, they'd hustled her into the Bend and bottled her up in that back room, but not before she'd done a little extemporaneous carvin' on her own account. I gathered that three or four of the Malabistos needed some plain sewin' done on 'em after the bell rang, and that the rest wasn't so anxious for her society as at first. She'd been cooped ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... the dance, when the needle-merchant was all in a glow, balancing to every lady, and getting up a sort of extemporaneous affair, made from old remembrances of "The Cheat" and "The Virginia Reel," the whole company stopped short, ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... Equator and to the Pole! Vain were the auspicious breeze unless it blew upon thy opening sails; and what were the sheet-anchor, but for that cable of thine which connects it with the ship. Vegetable iron! incomparable hemp! Extemporaneous memory can scarcely follow thy services. Talk of the battering-ram—but what propelled it forward? The shot, whizzing in the teeth of adverse winds, carries thy coil to snatch the sailor from the rock where ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... intended to press upon his audience—those he had mastered long ago—but his manuscript, studying it in the sense in which actors use the word, learning it, that is, by heart laboriously, that the words might come from his lips as much like an extemporaneous utterance as possible, consistently with not being mistaken for one, which, were it true as the Bible, would have no merit in the ears of those who counted themselves judges of the craft. The kind of thing suited Fergus, whose highest idea of life was seeming. Naturally ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... mind was active; apt to take an independent, original view, and vigorous. His sermons were often very impressive and powerful. Few who heard in whole or in part his discourse on the words, "The world by wisdom knew not God"—an extemporaneous sermon—will forget the terse, vigorous sentences which came from his lips. It was, I believe, the last sermon he prepared in outline to be delivered to our churches in this country. It was full of ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... who can rhyme with facility. Anyone of them can take almost any idea you suggest off hand, and on the instant sing you a song that plays up that idea. These persons are the modern incarnations of the old time minstrels who wandered over the land and sang extemporaneous ditties in praise of their host for their dinners. But, remarkable as the gift is, many of these modern minstrels cannot for the life of them put into their songs that something which makes their hearers whistle it long after they leave. The whistle ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... concerning himself most of all. What is to become of our churches? And what is he to do? It relieves me very much to hear that Gannett's case is no worse. My love and sympathy to him when you see him. Is he not one of our noblest and most disinterested, as well as ablest men,—nay, as an extemporaneous speaker, unrivalled ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey |
