"Have to keep an eye on you," he said with mock seriousness, at which Betty made a little face.

Under the influence of Campano, who died in 1477, he advances allegory as the explanation which makes the apparently light and trifling poets moral teachers of the utmost seriousness.

" "If you mean that very complimentary description for me," said Gray with sudden seriousness, "I will say to you here and now that there is no preacher in me.

But in Lord Nick he recognized his own nerveless speed of hand, his own hair-trigger balance, his own deadly seriousness and contempt of life.

Many of the countenances were marked and pleasing, and were fixed on me with great apparent seriousness while I addressed them, along with some of the neighbors.

He said this with an air of profound seriousness, and I felt inexpressibly shocked.

" "Don't agree with you, sir," Jimmy declared, with most unusual seriousness.

Not one had fallen as yet, and Iridion felt no pain or any symptom of approaching dissolution, except, it may be, the unwonted seriousness with which, having exhausted all her simple skill on behalf of the languishing plant, she sat down to consider its fate in the light of its bearing upon her own.

He was looking at the book-case before him, but a mist rose between it and his eyes, and he saw the mountain-side and the darling of his heart riding down it, the sunlight on her face, the soft tendrils of hair blown rough by the wind, the red lips apart with a smilethe little grave smile which he had kissed away into deeper, still sweeter seriousness.

The Puritan finds expression in the best poetry of the period, from Donne to Milton, and in the prose of Baxter and Bunyan; the Cavalier in a small group of poets,Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, and Carew,who write songs generally in lighter vein, gay, trivial, often licentious, but who cannot altogether escape the tremendous seriousness of Puritanism.

Once admitted into his presence, these honor-loving Persian mothers, wives, and daughters exhibited their weapons, and to show the grim seriousness of their words, they tore aside their veils, and threatened that they would kill their own husbands and sons, and end their own lives, if the deputies failed in their duty to uphold the dignity and the sovereignty of their beloved country.

In the philanthropist-father the religious seriousness rather preponderated over the fun; in the bishop-son (by a curious inversion of parts) the fun sometimes concealed the religiousness.

7. Lastly, it is our duty never so far to engage ourselves in this way as thereby to lose or to impair that habitual seriousness, modesty and sobriety of mind, that steady composedness, gravity and constancy of demeanour, which become Christians.

" With comical seriousness the Baron pointed to the empty cup and the sole remaining roll.

It was a curious age, so near and yet so far, when the ordered frame of things was still unbroken, and violence a child's dream, and poetry and art were taken with immense seriousness.

" Percival's solitary habits, combined with the invariable seriousness of his manner, led many persons to believe him melancholy, and even disposed to suicide.

To all other lovers Mathilde attributed a uniform seriousness.

And she was handsome too, with a fine oval face which suited well with the peculiar simplicity of her dress and the sober seriousness of her gait and manner.

He turned from his forge, set his hands on his hips and looked at me a moment with feigned seriousness.

" We looked at each other a moment with dreadful seriousness, and then both of us laughed to the point of holding our sides.

A grave seriousness now takes the place of that early extravagance of spirit; and the change is noticeable even in the expression of a man's face.

It was a young, fragile girl, despite the dark frown of her intense seriousness, who with accustomed gestures poked the stove, and hung bonnet and jacket on a nail and then sat down to the loaded desk; it was an ingenuous girl absurdly but fiercely anxious to shoulder the world's weight.

A narrow and one-sided seriousness is the fault of barbarians all over the world.

An old man, following us, who had been manifesting much facial seriousness in the Church, stepped calmly, but without knowing it, into a pile of soft lime, and the moment he got ankle deep his virtue disappeared amid a radiation of heavy English, which consigned the whole road to perdition.

'She seems interested in her work,' he muttered; and his mind wandered over the past, trying to arrive at a conclusion, if there was or was not a fundamental seriousness in her character, inclining on the whole to think there was, for if she was not serious fundamentally, she would not have been chosen by Mr. Poole for his secretary.