Word: bethink
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...that Miss Lowell adapted as a net to catch the crabbed dialect of her much-cherished New England. That dialect imposed restrictions upon her crystalline and pyrotechnic fancy, but only in the matter of actual words. When a New Englander needs an image for swarming bees he may not bethink him of showered stars, yet sparks from a Fourth of July pinwheel are quite as effective and wholly permissible. Similarly, the macabre, the delicately gruesome, of which Miss Lowell was so fond, is to be found quite as handily in a neurotic seafarer's terror of growing grass...
...suffice to save Cynthia from standing indicted for modernity's most prevalent shortcoming: emotional anemia induced by self-seeking and self-indulgence. The book is far too finely executed to be referred to solely as a moral essay. It is an intricate story sensitively told. Yet many readers will bethink themselves of many Cynthias and wonder if it is too late, or just timely, to pass the book along...
...December, say rightly on page 21 that Smith College "bethought herself or was reminded of Poet Pierre's (Ronsard's) 400th birthday last week." But the head of the French department did not bethink himself in time to procure a bust of Ronsard to be duly "crowned," during the ceremony. A cenotaph was suggested but turned down. Finally, our professor rooted out of the Fine Arts department a bust that looked rather vaguely like Ronsard's, and it was duly crowned, with sonnets and period songs as you say. But the secret leaked out in advance; and rumor runs that...
There will be half-way gentlemen among that famous gallery of censors, neither affronted or approving, who will bethink them sadly of the beauty of "lost causes"--the minuet, quadrille, polka, and other dances once softened by a delicate formalism and ritualistic sobriety now in disuse. Even an early nineteenth century dance manual showed sings of a growing decadence, the passing of the classical restraint and solemnity of the dance of puritanical epochs. Couples were admonished above all things, thus implying that it was not the custom, "to wear a pleasing countenance; for dancing is certainly supposed...