Word: subtlest
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...undertones of rural living: she cannot describe a torn sheep or a potato-digging without suggesting The Golden Bough or the poetry of St.-Joan Perse (Alexis Leger). As a woman Elizabeth Madox Roberts has her principal strength, her ultimate weakness. Her strength is an exquisite sensitiveness to the subtlest personal emotions, and to the quieter values of a well-executed prose. Her weakness is a sort of thin though sentient primness; a love of the archaic for its own sake...
...readable. To Margaret Fuller's credit is Emerson's doting praise, many another Transcendentalist's compliments to her brilliant talk, magnetism, energy. Complicating these virtues were her ugliness, aggressiveness, radicalism, sexual neurosis. Like all her biographers, Author Wade tries hard to riddle Hawthorne's characterization, subtlest and most devastating of all. "She was," said Hawthorne, "a great humbug-of course with much talent and moral reality, or else she could have never been so great a humbug...
Hypnotized by the power and harmony of his voice, fascinated by his flowing phrases, the listeners responded to the orator's least gesture and subtlest inflection. They groaned with him as he pictured the miseries of the Western people. Thunderous applause greeted his proclamation of "the cause of humanity." As he approached his climax, the crowd tensed. He named their opponents; denounced and defied them; and, challenging them to battle in a final forensic explosion, left the podium. The audience remained silent, the last words still rining in their ears: "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold...