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More "Characteristic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... again beside her lover, with a mute obedience characteristic of impassioned natures at times, and when they had wrapped themselves up over head and ears in the sailcloth again, they plunged back into the now thick night. Tess was so receptive that the few minutes of contact with ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... discovered, and 'from that moment,' writes Haydon, 'the destiny of my life was changed. My picture was caricatured, my name detested, my peace harassed. I was looked at like a monster, abused like a plague, and avoided like a maniac.' There is probably some characteristic exaggeration in this statement, but considering the power wielded at this time by the Academy and its supporters, Haydon would undoubtedly have done better, from a worldly point of view, to keep clear of these controversies. The prudent and sensible Wilkie was much distressed ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... thought without robbing it of its ancient advantages. And those advantages are incalculable: Time first for thought and reflection (narrow streams cut deep) leading to the growth of a sturdy freedom of action—which is, indeed, a natural characteristic of the man who has his feet firmly ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... of Almighty God is one of the characteristic acts of humanity. The brute looks up to heaven, but man alone looks up with thought of God and to adore. "The entire creation grew together to reflect and repeat the glory of God, and yet the echo of God slumbered ...
— The Worship of the Church - and The Beauty of Holiness • Jacob A. Regester
... with that quick change of mood characteristic of his temperament, had already decided that it was not worth while attempting to rear any seed from this barren soil. The Prince's intentions were good enough, but they would come to nothing—his father would see ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... as yet considered are characteristic of distinct breeds; but there are other differences, either confined to individual birds, or often observed in certain breeds but not characteristic of them. These individual differences are of importance, as they might in most cases be secured and accumulated by man's power of selection; and thus ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... threadbare constitutions, and lavish their rupees: next the obsequious, smirking, money-making China-man, with his poking shoulders, and whip-like pig-tail: then the stout, squat Hottentots—who resemble the Dutch in but one characteristic!—and half castes of every intermediate tint between black and white. These are well relieved and contrasted by the tall, warlike figures and splendid costume of his Majesty's 72nd Highlanders, who, with the 98th regiment, form the garrison of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... command. This will furnish fresh material for assaults in Congress on the President, if that body should meet again next month, for placing this officer in so responsible a command, whatever may be his skill, when the soldiers and the people have no faith in him. It is characteristic of the President to adhere to what he deems just and proper, regardless of anticipated consequences. This was the habit of ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... [His appointment of Superintendent of the Military Academy carried with it the temporary rank of Colonel of Engineers], and many think it a very good likeness. To me, the expression of strength peculiar to his face is wanting, and the mouth fails to portray that sweetness of disposition so characteristic of his countenance. Still, it was like him at that time. My father never could bear to have his picture taken, and there are no likenesses of him that really give his sweet expression. Sitting for a picture was such a serious business ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... editions illustrating Christian's journey. After the deaths by fire and sword of the Martyrs, the Pilgrim's difficulties in the Slough of Despond, or with the Giant Despair, afforded pleasurable reading; while Mr. Great Heart's courageous cheerfulness brought practically a new characteristic into Puritan literature. ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... "Their chief characteristic," said the man in black, "is a rage for grandeur and gentility; and that same rage makes us quite sure of them in the long run. Everything that's lofty meets their unqualified approbation; whilst everything humble, or, as they call it, 'low,' is scouted ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... everywhere; from the very ends of the country, and even from beyond the sea; and many brought ladies, and all brought squires and troops of servants. It was a most gaudy and gorgeous crowd, as to costumery, and very characteristic of the country and the time, in the way of high animal spirits, innocent indecencies of language, and happy-hearted indifference to morals. It was fight or look on, all day and every day; and sing, gamble, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... commonplace inactivity of mind there was one strong characteristic, one bit of colour in all these grey tints: Kate was dreamy, not to say imaginative. When she was a mere child she loved fairies, and took a vivid interest in goblins; and when afterwards she discarded these stories for others, it was not because ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... characteristic of Arlt. His letters were noncommittal; but Bobby says he has had his own fair share of honors. I am glad, for he ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... not distinctly appear at what period of his life Arago composed the autobiography, but it bears throughout the characteristic stamp of his ardent and energetic disposition. The reader will, perhaps, hardly suppress a smile at the indications of self-satisfaction with which several of the incidents are brought forward, while the air of romance which invests some of the adventures may possibly give rise to some suspicion ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... been a Venetian characteristic; nor is it now, when Venice is only a museum and show place. All the Venetians—the men, that is,—whom one sees in the Piazza have an air of profound self-satisfaction. And this palace of the Doges is no training-place for humility; ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... character, but could not have been more appropriate; because the wish of those who desire to testify their regard for you this evening, Mr Marrot, is not to give you an intrinsically valuable or useful present, but to present you with a characteristic ornament which may grace your dwelling while you live, and descend, after you are gone, to your children's children (here he glanced at Loo and her troop), to bear witness to them that you nobly did ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... attributes of a personal deity, an almighty and just creator, who would necessarily be responsible for these evils as for all things else, if he existed. If the world be the work of an omnipotent maker, its essential moral characteristic partakes of the nature of his attributes; and the main moral feature of our world is evil, and not good. This is the ever-recurring refrain of Job's discourses. Nor does he hesitate when occasion offers to proclaim his conviction in the plainest of plain language, for he entertains no fear ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... perfection in the peculiar school to which they belong, as any thing of the sort which in any part of the world I have visited. They are laid out in long umbrageous walks, in exquisitely kept lawns, in bowers, alcoves, and a lake at once extensive and well managed; and are, with characteristic liberality, thrown open to the public at all hours, both of night and day. Nay, nor is this all. Bands of music play here and there amid its alcoves; there is a sort of coffee-house or restaurateur within the gates; and the theatre may almost be said to form part of the establishment, ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... confusing from their very vividness. Confusing, also, because each one of them was doubled by a haunting consciousness of his likeness to her father. The traits common to both men, rather than those individually characteristic of the younger, had been in evidence. And, in her present happier mood, Damaris also desired a picture to set in the storehouse of memory. But it must represent this brother of hers in and by himself, divorced, as far as might be, from ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... friend. With characteristic directness she had cut the Gordian knot of our misunderstanding by telling me, against Dicky's protests, all about the old secret which her past and that of my husband shared. After her story, with all that it revealed of her sacrifice ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... their companions, and crossed a highly cultivated district. Long stretches of prairie, known as the "Low Level Plains," next met their gaze, dotted with countless sheep, and shepherds' huts. And then came a sandy tract, without any transition, but with the abruptness of change so characteristic of Australian scenery. Mount Simpson and Mount Terrengower marked the southern point where the boundary of the Loddon district cuts ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... distinct painting; 10 he repeated with emphasis,—the last two lines conscious that his own age was eighty; 13, 14, and 15 are favourites with me. G. concurred in the suggested praise. The stanza 24 he declared to be sublime. The characteristic speeches of Wilkes and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... back upon it, I am tempted to think that the psychological peculiarity of that woman might be summed up in an exorbitant and absorbing interest in herself—a Narcissus attitude—curiously complicated with a fantastic imagination, a sort of morbid day-dreaming, all turned inwards, and with no outer characteristic save a certain restlessness, a perverse desire to surprise and shock, to surprise and shock more particularly her husband, and thus be revenged for the intense boredom which his want of ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... his back, along the cloisters behind the cathedral, and looked at the rich grass plot in the centre, he had the strangest sense of being at home—far more than he had ever been at home before. "Portly capons," he used to murmur to himself, under the impression that he was naming a characteristic ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... disappeared, or all but disappeared, in the Mississippi Valley. The only one that comes to me now, as possibly of the old French days, is one which is preserved in an adage not at all French but quite characteristic of the independent life that has occupied the banks of all the rivers: "Paddle your own canoe." Yet even in the space of one or two generations of agricultural life that, too, is disappearing, supplanted by a synonymous phrase, borrowed of fields that have entirely forgotten the primitive ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... with pleasure. She was so easy to get on with, he said to himself; and she certainly had a wonderfully kind smile. But he felt too that she needed greater wisdom, and he was ready to give it—a friendly characteristic of the big open spaces "where life is so simple ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to some characteristic anecdotes of Robert's youth, and wondered whether he would be appreciated now. She did not think Sir Bevil held the same opinions as Robert or Miss Charlecote; he was an upright, high-minded soldier, with honour and subordination ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... search in a remote room of the palace, busy on a map. Magruder accosted him and reproached him for his absence. The earnest worker looked up from his labors with the calm, mild gaze which was so characteristic of the man, and, pointing to his instruments, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... mustn't bother you," he said; "as for Sam, I suppose he will go his own gait! I don't know where he gets his stubbornness from. I myself am the most reasonable man in the world. All I ever ask is to be allowed to follow my own judgment. I asked his mother if obstinacy was a characteristic of her family, and she assured me it was not. Certainly Eliza herself has no will of her own. I don't think a good woman ever has. And, as I say, I never insisted upon my own way in my life—except, of course, in matters where ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... the class of social phenomena seemingly characteristic of the distinct races in France, if we extend our field of vision to cover all Europe, suggests an explanation for the curious coincidences and parallelisms noted above, which is the exact opposite of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... counterpart in men, whose thighs are those of women when they are sly, cunning, false, and cowardly. Camille's neck, instead of curving inward at the nape, curves out in a line that unites the head to the shoulders without sinuosity, a most signal characteristic of force. The neck itself presents at certain moments an athletic magnificence. The spring of the arms from the shoulders, superb in outline, seems to belong to a colossal woman. The arms are vigorously modelled, ending in wrists of English ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... it must be understood, was none of theirs—and to replace him on that precarious throne from which he had been so rudely thrust. We have already said that he was a man who never knew when he was beaten, and in the years which we have yet to chronicle this characteristic appears again and again; for age had no effect apparently, either mentally or physically, on this man of iron who had by this time reached the age ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... have four: the ex ordium, or introduction; the narratio, or statement of facts; the confirmatio, or proof proper, both direct and refutative; and the peroratio, or conclusion.[59] This is the characteristic movement of rhetoric, which, as is readily seen, is quite different from the plot movement of poetic.[60] The parts are capable of further analysis. Consequently most writers of the classical period subdivide the proof proper ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... prefer gaudy colours, and keep their hair confined close to their head by a large comb. They have also another delightful characteristic, which indeed the men share with them; I mean a beautiful voice, soft and tremulous among the women, rich, sonorous, and majestic among their lords. An American traveller has said, "A common bullock-driver on horseback, delivering ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... true features of a Government than the morality or vices of its functionaries, I will finish this man's portrait with the following characteristic touches. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... woman, with curiously limpid blue eyes, and a shrill hard voice like a fog-siren, that does not seem to belong to her personality. One is always haunted with the idea that she might be Scotch. Lady Gastwyck rises. She is a short dark woman with deep-set eyes and one very remarkable characteristic. She has apparently only one eyebrow. She really has two, but they meet together in one dark straight line, and give her a forbidding aspect. She has a habit of walking with her chin thrust forward and her long arms curved like a boxer's. She advances upon Lord Gumthorpe. He instinctively ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... with the Dutch," their pending negotiations for settlement at "Hudson's River," he evidently made capital of, and traded upon, his former kindness to some of them when they were in straits,—a most contemptible thing in itself, yet characteristic of the man. He led the Pilgrims to "break off" their dealings with the Dutch by the largest and most positive promises of greater advantages through him, few of which he ever voluntarily kept (as we see by John Robinson's sharp arraignment of him), his whole object being ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... are not the same to us and to him. He is careful to give the doors and windows, the chimneys with their smoke, the lines of the fence, and the walk in front; he insists on the divisions of the bricks and the window-panes: but for what is characteristic and essential he has no eye. He gives what the house is to him, merely a house in general, any house; it would not help it, but only make the defect more prominent, to straighten and complete the lines. An artist, with fewer and more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... ruling thing) is inconsistency and confusion in the things which relate to good and evil. But different men have different reasons; and generally what they imagine to be base, they do not confess at all. But they suppose timidity to be a characteristic of a good disposition, and compassion also; but silliness to be the absolute characteristic of a slave. And they do not at all admit (confess) the things which are offences against society. But in the case of most errors for this reason chiefly they are induced to confess them, because ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... were written by a man of thirty or thirty-five, strong, vigorous, aggressive, fortunate, and successful, the appeal seems out of harmony, and lacks that delicate adaptation of speech to surroundings which is characteristic ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... of graduation. Dudley led the class. There was a great crowd of fine people. The last speech of all on the programme was "Honest Work Honorable—Dudley Crawford." With a characteristic manliness he stood up bravely for work. So fine were his arguments, so undaunted his bearing, that the audience were carried away. Dr. Parmlee took off his spectacles to wipe his eyes. Dudley's mother could not conceal her pleasure. "Franklin's hands ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... it was. It was the Right Hon. Winston Churchill. As he darted into the crowded lobby, which, as usual at the luncheon-hour, was filled with Belgian, French, and British staff officers, diplomatists, Cabinet Ministers and correspondents, he flung his arms out in a nervous, characteristic gesture, as though pushing his way through a crowd. It was a most spectacular entrance and reminded me for all the world of a scene in a melodrama where the hero dashes up, bare-headed, on a foam-flecked horse, and saves the heroine or the old homestead or the family fortune, ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... which is at least as necessary to the formation of a fair and intelligent opinion. Her mind, however, is so keen and so incisive, so prompt to seize the most curious facts, so apt in discovering characteristic details, that even when she speaks of places and peoples with whom we are all familiar, she compels us to listen, and irresistibly holds our attention. It has been said that in some respects her manner ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... so characteristic of these upper regions, there are no fewer than sixty-seven in the basin of the main middle branch, besides countless smaller pools. In the basin of the Illilouette there are sixteen, in the Tenaya basin and its branches thirteen, ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... to consider it as a starting point for progress. This is the heavy Indian rug known as the Navajo blanket. Originally fashioned to withstand the cold and exposure of outdoor life, it has combined thickness, durability and softness with excellent colour and weaving and perfectly characteristic design. ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... hall in Quebec East, surrounded by the electors of the constituency which had been faithful to him for 40 years. He accepted the blow with the tranquil fortitude which was his most notable personal characteristic; but the feature in the disaster which must have made the greatest demand upon his stoicism was this indication that his old surbordinate and one time friend was—apparently—about to supplant him in the leadership of his own people. The election figures showed that whereas Laurier ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... regular, well-cut features indicating little to the physiognomist unless it be the great gift of self-possession. His hair was cut short, and he wore no beard beyond an absolutely black moustache. His teeth were perfect in form and whiteness,—a characteristic which, though it may be a valued item in a general catalogue of personal attraction, does not generally recommend a man to the unconscious judgment of his acquaintance. But about the mouth and chin of this ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... through the tranquillized thoroughfares; and as you saunter along, you have all London to yourself, Andrew Selkirk, but with the mart of the world for your desert. And when October comes on, it has one characteristic of spring,—life busily returns to the city; you see the shops bustling up, trade flowing back. As birds scent the April, so the children of commerce plume their wings and prepare for the first slack returns of the season. ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... accepted this notoriety with characteristic variation. Miss Flora, after cordially welcoming one "nice young man," and telling him all about how strange and wonderful it was, and how frightened she felt, was so shocked and distressed to find all that she said (and a great deal ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... him all possible assistance in his researches; and so he seeks him out and forms an acquaintance with him, which the old man encourages to a certain extent, taking an evident interest in him, but does not disclose himself; nor does Middleton suspect him to be an American. The characteristic life of the Hospital is brought out, and the individual character of this old man, vegetating here after an active career, melancholy and miserable; sometimes torpid with the slow approach of utmost age; sometimes feeble, peevish, wavering; sometimes shining out with a ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... attention, however otherwise occupied, has never relaxed in its record of the phenomena characteristic of the plague-wind; and I now define for you, as briefly as possible, ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... household about to remove itself half around the world, into a house distracted with packing, cheerless with linen-covers, desolate with rolled-up rugs and cold lunches and half-packed trunks, came, in a matter-of-fact manner characteristic of its writer, Judith's answer to Sylvia's letter. Sylvia opened it, shrinking and fearful of what she would read. She had, in the days since hers had been sent, imagined Judith's answer in every possible form; but never in any form remotely resembling what Judith wrote. The letter stated ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... position, where was there ever an American girl of any age who acknowledged to social inferiority? Katie alone felt, though she could hardly explain it, the want of something in her new teacher which had been peculiarly characteristic of the old one, who was a plain, elderly woman, without much education,—namely, personal love and devotion to the Lord Jesus, showing itself in an earnest desire that her scholars might also learn to ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... aren't paid for imagining!" interrupted the Billionaire, stabbing at him with that characteristic gesture. "Just what do you know about it? No technicalities, mind! Essentials, that's all, and ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... answers with a double meaning that were so much in the fashion of the time and so characteristic of ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... precede love, and carve it indelibly on the soul. At his age, the ardor of the heart, restrained by moral ardor, leads to an inward conflict, which explains the long and respectful hesitations, the tender debatings, the absence of all calculation, characteristic of young men whose hearts and lives are pure. Studying, though furtively, so as not to attract the notice of Conti, the various details which made the marquise so purely beautiful, Calyste became, before long, oppressed by a sense of her majesty; he felt himself dwarfed ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... as it once was to admire this [poem]; but I confess indocility to correctness, at least the correctness which varies with fashion. The Forsaken Merman is not a perfect poem—it has tongueurs, though it is not long; it has its inadequacies, those incompetences of expression which are so oddly characteristic of its author; and his elaborate simplicity, though more at home here than in some other places, occasionally gives a dissonance. But it is a great poem,—one by itself,—one which finds and keeps its own place in the fore-ordained gallery or museum, ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... greater part of the book is its one blemish, for we would fain know more of how he lived in China. There is some evidence that he consorted with the Mongol conquerors rather than with the Chinese, and that Chinese was not one of the languages which he learned. He makes no mention of several characteristic Chinese customs, such as the compressed feet of the women, and fishing with cormorants (both of which are described by Ordoric of Pordenone after him); he travelled through the tea districts of Fo-kien, but he never mentions tea-drinking, and he has no ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... that there shall be an improvement, either in some particular point, as a matter of utility, or some change in an artistic direction. A manufacturer in putting out a new chair, or a plow, or an automobile, adds some striking characteristic. This becomes his talking ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... what there was after all in Mr. Quisante. Their friends could only wonder, asking plaintively what the Duke thought of his brothers' proceedings. The Duke, however, made no sign; making no sign ranked as a characteristic of the Duke's. ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... about to discover the entrance, when a figure in white, shown by a small silver lamp which she held in her hand, beckoned him into a side apartment. Gurth had some reluctance to obey the summons. Rough and impetuous as a wild boar, where only earthly force was to be apprehended, he had all the characteristic terrors of a Saxon respecting fawns, forest-fiends, white women, and the whole of the superstitions which his ancestors had brought with them from the wilds of Germany. He remembered, moreover, that he was in the house of a Jew, a people who, besides the other unamiable ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... solid benefits which Germany owed to Masonic influences, one shrinks from saying much of the extravagances in which its Masonry indulged before the French Revolution. Yet they are so characteristic of the age, so significant to the student of human nature, that they must be hinted at, ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... prose was like that of a Frenchman writing his own language with the respect which Frenchmen pay to French. Even English things had to come to him through France, if he was to prize them very highly; and there is a passage in "Dilemmas" which I have always thought very characteristic of his own tastes, as it refers to an "infinitesimal library, a few French novels, an Horace, and some well-thumbed volumes of the modern English poets in the familiar edition of Tauchnitz." He was Latin by all his affinities, and ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... seeing the latter adorned with all the accomplishments (of a warrior). There is only one person in this world, viz., the son, and none else, whom people desire to become superior to themselves. All high-souled preceptors have this characteristic, viz., that they impart all the mysteries of their science unto either sons or devoted disciples. Becoming his sire's pupil, O Sanjaya, and obtaining all those mysteries with every detail, the son of Saradwat's daughter has become a second Drona, and a great hero. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... that day he was exceedingly busy, and he did not attempt further explanations to himself. He overhauled the bunk and spread the blankets out on the wild rose bushes to sun while he cleaned the floor. Billy's way of cleaning the floor was characteristic of the man, and calculated to be effectual in the main without descending to petty details. All superfluous objects that were small enough, he merely pushed as far as possible under the bunk. Boxes and ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... with Cambridge on neutral waters in an eight-oared cutter match, but is generally defeated, for a very characteristic reason—Cambridge picks a crew of the best men from the whole University; Oxford, more exclusive, gives a preference to certain colleges over men. Christchurch, Magdalene, and a few others, will ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... have something which will convince Mademoiselle that she is mistaken. I was able to get hold of one of his Majesty's collars which he had just worn. Its size is distinctly characteristic, being 18 inches. Now it would be very easy to verify the fact that the real King wears this size and also whether it fits the supposed impostor. In any case, Monsieur, from inquiries made among the hotel servants I find there can be no doubt that Frederick-Christian ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... cures, the miracles, are, indeed, the creation of that need of the Lie, that necessity for credulity, which is a characteristic of human nature. At first, when little Bernadette came with her strange story of what she had witnessed, everybody was against her. The Prefect of the Department, the Bishop, the clergy, objected to her story. But Lourdes grew up in spite of all opposition, just as the Christian religion did, because ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... The characteristic flavor and suggestion of these Idyls is like pure spring-water. This is, perhaps, why the modern reader is apt to be disappointed in them when he takes them up for the first time. They appear minor and literal and tasteless, as does most ancient poetry; ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... Everything would bear witness to this barbarism to whosoever should look closely. One would see that the number vingt comes from viginti, and that formerly this g and this t were pronounced with a roughness characteristic of all the northern nations; of the month of Augustus has been made the month of aout. Not so long ago a German prince thinking that in France one never pronounced the term Auguste otherwise, called King Auguste ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... reach the foundation for the faith in a moral government of the world, which it has been the uniform characteristic of religions to assert; but a government, as thus analytically reached, not easily corresponding with that which popular religion speaks of. Such feeble sentiments as mercy, benevolence and effusive ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... general state, usually used with an adjective describing the state. Use of the word 'mode' rather than 'state' implies that the state is extended over time, and probably also that some activity characteristic of that state is being carried out. "No time to hack; I'm in thesis mode." In its jargon sense, 'mode' is most often attributed to people, though it is sometimes applied to programs and inanimate objects. In particular, ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... Ginny, with her characteristic bluntness. "I just wanted to amuse the others and make them think I was awfully clever and that was plain outright conceit and selfishness. I guess that's the way I do most things. Well, I've learned a lesson. And there isn't anything I wouldn't do for you, Jerry Travis. If I don't play better ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... the diverse diarists to whom we owe so much of our intimate knowledge of their time, were both frequently here, and both have left us characteristic passages about it; Evelyn enlarging upon the art treasures and the gardens, Pepys noting that "it was pretty to ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold
... needless to remark that the "New Red" is not always red; sometimes it is yellow, at others, like some of the Storeton stone, white. These red rocks occupy a large part of Lancashire and Cheshire, and especially in the latter county give the characteristic scenery which distinguishes it. The escarpment of the Peckforton Hills of which Beeston Castle Hill is an outlier, and that at Malpas, farther south, gives rise to some very beautiful scenery; and again at Grinshill and Hawkstone, in Shropshire, ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... born the heir to the throne of one of the Grecian kingdoms. He possessed, in a very remarkable degree, the energy, and enterprise, and military skill so characteristic of the Greeks and Romans. He organized armies, crossed the boundary between Europe and Asia, and spent the twelve years of his career in a most triumphant military incursion into the very center and seat of Asiatic power, destroying the Asiatic armies, conquering the most splendid cities, defeating ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... when compared with Raffaelle's, they seem more touched with earthly feeling, and have less of the pure ideal: they are, if I may so express myself, too sentimental: sentiment is, in truth, the distinguishing characteristic of Guido's style. It is remarkable, that towards the end of his life, Guido more frequently painted the Mater Dolorosa, and gave to the heads of his Madonnas a look of melancholy, disconsolate resignation, which is ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... gave a cool nod to the newcomer, and stitched on with characteristic zeal and strict attention ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... long before the Massachusetts man planted his roof-tree in the soil of Mississippi. A hopeful scion he, showing no improvement on the paternal stock. Rather the reverse; for the grasping avarice, supposed to be characteristic of the Yankee, is not improved by admixture with the reckless looseness alleged to be habitual in ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... were as disastrous as in the time of Wang Mang. And once more, as then, a popular movement broke out, that of the so-called "Yellow Turbans". This was the first of the two important events. This popular movement had a characteristic which from now on became typical of all these risings of the people. The intellectual leaders of the movement, Chang Ling and others, were members of a particular religious sect. This sect was influenced by Iranian Mazdaism on the one side ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... letter explaining his extraordinary breach of good behaviour had been characteristic of the man. For whilst it was couched in more or less conventional terms of apology, the writer obviously regarded his action as justified and assumed in Paul an understanding which rendered pique impossible. Paul's theory regarding Thessaly's ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... said something to the men, Bill Hardacre and his mate Dugald Finlayson, about having everything on board—all his life and happiness, or something to that effect—at which they laughed and chaffed him as the launch backed from the pier, and started off in the tearing hurry characteristic ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... a state of feeling, of attitudes that mirror forth the soul, declared itself a main passion; and it grew and strengthened, to the detriment of the other Art still so dear to me. With the patience of a cat before a mouse-hole, I watched and listened, picking one characteristic phrase out of hours of vain chatter, interested and amused by an angry or loving glance. Like the midges that fret the surface of a shadowy stream, these men and women seemed to me; and though I laughed, danced, and ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... [20] Even the characteristic conditions of writing books, that least mechanical of pursuits, have been profoundly ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... perpendicular position of the letter in relation to the line. That is of great value in individualizing a machine. It is very seldom that machines, even when they are new, are perfect in this particular. It does not seem much until you magnify it. Then anyone can see it, and it is a characteristic that is fixed, continuous, and not much changed by variations in speed ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... Marxians, and the party became in effect merely one of advanced Radicalism. It is too soon to guess what will be the effect of the split between Majority and Minority Socialists which has occurred during the war. There is in Germany hardly a trace of Syndicalism; its characteristic doctrine, the preference of industrial to political action, has ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... shown that alcohol in all forms is not only useless for these purposes, but does actual damage, since it lessens the resistance of the patient, weakens the heart, and helps along the prostration which is the characteristic effect of the rattlesnake venom. Alcohol has, for many years, been used as an antidote for collapse under an anaesthetic administered for surgical purposes, but no intelligent physician nowadays thinks ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... about the worn capitals of pillars, or craning forth over the church-leads with the open mouths of gargoyles. About them all there is that sort of stiff quaint unreality, that conjunction of the grotesque, and even of a certain bourgeois snugness, with passionate contortion and horror, that is so characteristic of Gothic art. Esmeralda is somewhat an exception; she and the goat traverse the story like two children who have wandered in a dream. The finest moment of the book is when these two share with the two other leading characters, Dom Claude and Quasimodo, the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... acumen, notes that in Vecchi's five part madrigals for the stage the employment of the odd voice is plainly governed by musical needs. It has to be common to both personages in a scene for two and hence it is always the least characteristic voice. Its chief business is to fill in ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... course is the Dumb taught to sing by the favor of the earl; resolute John Florio, the translator of Montaigne, is Heavy Ignorance; Tom Nash is the Learned, who has had feathers added to his wing; and Marlowe is the Grace to whom is given a double majesty! Marlowe's chief characteristic was majesty, says Mr. Massey; therefore, we suppose, he is spoken of as grace. The rest of his "exquisite reasons" may be found at pages 134-143 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... and practice on this subject. Friend Hopper, Joseph Carpenter, and the few who resemble them in this respect, are exceptions to the general character of modern Quakers, not the rule. The following very characteristic anecdote shows how completely Isaac was free from prejudice on account of complexion. It is an unusual thing to see a colored Quaker; for the African temperament is fervid and impressible, and requires more exciting forms of religion. David Maps and his wife, a very ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... with Leicester at the moment. She ventured to call him 'traitor' and to accuse him of conspiring with the Prince of Orange. Notwithstanding this, his influence was still paramount with her, and it was characteristic of her shrewd petulance to confide in Leicester's protege, although not in Leicester himself. Towards the end of March, Raleigh settled ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... under any other designation; but "The four kinds of ground" (viererlei Acker), the title which seems to be in ordinary use among the Germans, is logically more correct, inasmuch as it points directly to the central idea, and expresses the distinctive characteristic. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... theme of it was to prove that every charge made by Socialism against the capitalist system could be justified by the writings of the foremost professors of economic science. It embodied another Fabian characteristic of considerable importance. Other Socialists then, and many Socialists now, endeavoured by all means to accentuate their differences from other people. Not content with forming societies to advocate their policy, they insisted that it was based on a science peculiar to themselves, ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... With characteristic irony Horace puts his fancies into the mouth of Alphius, a miserly money-lender. No one yearns so keenly for the country and its imagined peace as the overworked city man, when his pulse is low and his spirits weary ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... complete life of the greatest man of modern times, nothing has been omitted or slighted. His early History, Political Career, Speeches, both in and out of Congress, the great Lincoln-Douglas Debates, every state paper, speech, message and two inaugural addresses are given in full, together with many characteristic STORIES AND YARNS by and concerning Lincoln, which have earned for him the ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... document into a soda-water bottle, and rams the cork home. At the same moment, and without effort, he gives birth to one of his most characteristic epigrams.) ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie
... mentioned her bereavement, unless in such allusion to Frado. She donned her weeds from custom; kept close her crape veil for so many Sabbaths, and abated nothing of her characteristic harshness. ...
— Our Nig • Harriet E. Wilson
... services beyond the countenance and contemplation of the statutes were habitual with those whose name was legion. The law, for example, conceded no property rights to the slaves, and some statutes forbade specifically their possession of horses, but the following characteristic letter of a South Carolina mistress to an influential citizen tells an opposite story: "I hope you will pardon the liberty I take in addressing you on the subject of John, the slave of Professor Henry, Susy his wife, and the orphan children of my ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... 'Nothing was more characteristic of Rubens than his choice of subjects from the mythology of the Greeks and the works of the ancient poets; and in nothing did he display more freedom, originality, and poetry.' Among his most famous mythological pictures is the 'Battle of the Amazons,' now ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... his country by Howe on this occasion were eminently characteristic of the special qualities of that great officer, in whom was illustrated to the highest degree the solid strength attainable by a man not brilliant, but most able, who gives himself heart and soul to professional acquirement. In him, profound ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... henceforth identify the murderer among a thousand. In the struggle the mask had been partially pushed aside, exposing a portion of the man's face. A scar of peculiar shape showed white against the olive skin, close to the curling black hair. But to Darrell the pre-eminently distinguishing characteristic of that face was the eyes. Of the most perfect steel blue he had ever seen, they seemed, as they turned upon him in that intense glance, to glint and scintillate like the points of two rapiers in a brilliant sword play, while their look of concentrated fury and malignity, more demon-like ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... parts of Shirley she missed that unique expression of actuality which, over and over again, she accomplished in Villette. For the expression of a social milieu, for manners, for the dialogue of ordinary use, for the whole detail of the speech characteristic of an individual and a type, for the right accent and pitch, for all the vanishing shades and aspects of the temporary and the particular, the greatest and the fieriest writer is at the mercy of observation and experience. It was ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... that of all the gifts and honours conferred upon her by the loyalty of the people this was the most acceptable. Yet Green,[51] in describing Elizabeth's reign, says: "Nothing is more revolting in the Queen, but nothing is more characteristic, than her shameless mendacity. It was an age of political lying, but in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... be inferred from Talon's proposals and schemes already mentioned that his thoughts were now occupied with the external affairs of the colony. This indeed was to be the characteristic feature of his second administration. When in Canada before he had concentrated his attention chiefly upon judicial and political organization, and had directed his efforts to promote colonization, agriculture, industry, and trade—in a word, the internal economy ...
— The Great Intendant - A Chronicle of Jean Talon in Canada 1665-1672 • Thomas Chapais
... It is characteristic of Howe that he was at first attracted by the thought of what might benefit Nova Scotia, and that he gradually passed from this to a great vision of Empire, in which his early idea was absorbed though not destroyed. His first speech on the subject was delivered ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... divesting himself of his coat, preparatory to settling the difference in the characteristic Irish manner. Nothing loth, the Yankee put himself in attitude, determined to stand up for the rights of his fair one, no matter ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... shall go with Miss Dale. But, my dear! my love! Seriously, where are we? One hears of lover's quarrels. Now I never quarrel. It is a characteristic of mine. And you speak of me to my cousin Vernon! Seriously, plighted faith signifies plighted faith, as much as an iron-cable is iron to hold by. Some little twist of the mind? To Vernon, of all men! Tush! she has been dreaming of a hero of perfection, and the comparison is ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... told, she never mentioned my name nor the names of those who died so tragically, and she bequeathed the entire enormous fortune, which was supposed to have served as the motive for the murder, to various charitable organisations. It is characteristic that even under such terrible conditions her motherly instinct did not forsake her altogether; in a postscript to the will she left me a considerable sum, which secures my existence whether I am in prison ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... which the last tenant had allowed to become dirty and damaged, appealed to his artistic nature. He loved the great oak beams which stretched across the ceilings, and rejoiced in the quaint nooks which were a characteristic of the old building. The furnishing, too, brought him constant pleasure. There happened to be a man in the town who dealt in antique furniture, and he also manufactured new furniture from old models. Why, Paul did not know, but since he had been in the habit ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... was filled with admiration, and he felt that she of all others would be the wife for a man embarked on the uncertain tides of Wall Street. At last he wrote to her and renewed his offer. The reply was characteristic. ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... used to observe afterwards that a single second's deviation of characteristic thought and he would have gone mad. Stronger minds in a parallel situation would have indeed collapsed. But a weaker man can never confront the inevitable, but clings more stubbornly to hope. They are only weak individualities who, in the act ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... cynicism he could not remove from his mind those softly brilliant dark eyes; the earnest thoughtful lines of the pure young face; and the changing lights and shadows in that silky hair. Also, in the course of his work, he was continually reminded of her; for her characteristic drawings appeared more and frequently in the magazines, and grew better, stronger, more convincing from ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... radium, Sir William Ramsay and Professor Soddy remarked that when the gas is radioactive there are first obtained rays of gases belonging to the argon family, then by degrees, as the activity disappears, the spectrum slowly changes, and finally presents the characteristic aspect of helium. ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... pointed than in former days, her complexion had faded, or perhaps in these private moments it had not been worth while to enhance it; though there was no carelessness in the general attire, the black velvet gown, and delicate lace of the cap, and open ruff always characteristic of her. The small curls of hair at her temples had their auburn tint softened by far more white than suited one who was only just over forty, but the delicate pencilling of the eyebrows was as marked as ever; and the eyes, on whose colour no one ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the edge of the road were shoved down the embankment by the weight of the dense mass surging along its center. And then to add to the terror of the moment there was heard above the shouts and oaths of the struggling mob a low, foreboding hum, the characteristic drone of Austrian aeroplanes. It is hard to see what could have come of the situation but complete and bloody disaster if it had not been for the decided action of some Italian officers. By main force they thrust into the middle of the entrance ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... practical utility. It is to the peculiar mechanical property of this gluten that wheat flour owes its superior power of detaining the carbonic acid engendered by fermentation, and thus communicating to it the vesicular spongy structure so characteristic of good bread.[37] It may also be added, that the results of more than one hundred trials have satisfied me that a diminution or loss of elasticity in the gluten is the surest index of the amount of injury which ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... eight pieces together in the manner shown. So impressed was he with the ingenuity of his performance that he set the puzzle to his geometry class as a little study in dissection. But the remainder of the story has never been published, because, so it is said, it was a characteristic of the principals of academies that they would never admit that they could err. I get my information from a descendant of the original boy who had most reason to ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... him, and intended to keep it up until able to draw a bead on him. Evans sent word back in reply, that he was also looking for the Mohawk, and dared him to shoot him if he could. The only palliating characteristic of the despicable wretch was his bravery, and he really did do his utmost to gain a shot at the Indian who had threatened him. But he engaged in a game in which his antagonist was his superior, and had paid ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... fresh new interest next morning before he could get his clothes on. He exploited in this way three hundred and sixty-five red-hot new eagernesses every year of his life. But I am forgetting another characteristic, a very pronounced one. That was his deep glooms, his despondencies, his despairs; these had their place in each and every day along with the eagernesses. Thus his day was divided—no, not divided, mottled—from sunrise to midnight with alternating brilliant ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... inspiration; and Hutcheson means that he was indebted to Shaftesbury. Indeed, there is much of the sturdy commonsense of the Scottish school about him, particularly perhaps in that interweaving of ethics, politics and economics, which is characteristic of the school from Hutcheson in the middle seventeenth century, to the able, if neglected, Lorimer in the nineteenth.[17] He is entitled to be considered the real founder of utilitarianism. He first showed how difficult it is in politics to draw a distinction between ethical right and ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... little!" I had been embracing him with an octopus grip. I could detect the same faint, fragrant, natural odor which had been characteristic of his body before. The thrilling touch of his divine flesh still persists around the inner sides of my arms and in my palms whenever I recall ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... and rapid manner James Gilmour sketched, with not a few most characteristic touches, the first twenty-six years of his life. He enables us to see the quick, merry, receptive lad, developing, after a brilliant collegiate course and a careful training in theology and in practical Christian life, into the strong, resolute missionary. No one who ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... dejection of an ancient torrent. It sometimes requires long and careful study to detect the primitive form, masked as it is by groves of trees, by cultivated fields, and often by houses, but, when examined closely, and from different points of view, its characteristic figure manifestly appears, and its true history cannot be mistaken. Along the hillock flows a streamlet, issuing from the ravine, and quietly watering the fields. This was originally a torrent, and in the background may be ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... those who are naturally sensitive, shy, and timid, are apt to suspect that they lack the ability which others have. It is characteristic of such youths that they distrust their own ability and are very easily discouraged or encouraged. It is a sin to shake or destroy a child's self-confidence, to reflect upon his ability or to suggest that he will never amount to much. These discouraging words, like ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... sullen and hostile. For some days after his encounter with Edgar his face was so swollen up that he was scarcely able to see. He would have been compelled to work as usual, for humanity is not a characteristic of the Arabs; but Edgar told the sheik's wife that if the man was forced to work at present he would be very ill, and that he must for a time remain quiet and apply bandages soaked in hot water to his face. Under this treatment the swelling gradually ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... best word he can for his friends, the rat-catchers—the rat-killers—the Napoleons of the vermin war—the exterminators of the catchable rats—the Nimrods of the hunting-grounds to be found in sewers and cellars, and under barn floors. The passage looks very like an advertisement; but since it is characteristic, and as the statements are curious, and really not without importance, they shall be ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... cigarette, eyed the letters with that whimsical lift of the brows so characteristic of Parmalee, and lazily blew smoke toward them. Then, regarding the smoke, he idly waved a hand through it. "Poor, silly little girls!" But there was a charming tolerance in his manner. One felt his generous recognition that they were not wholly ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... With the Arabians there is a medium between Heaven and Hell, where men suffer no punishment, but yet do not attain that tranquil and even happiness which they suppose to be characteristic of heavenly enjoyment. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Britain.' The object from which our next illustration (Fig. 12) was engraved represents a deer, and was a knife-handle. Eyes at all trained in art can readily observe the wonderful spirit and freedom of these ancient sketches. They are the rapid characteristic work of true artists who know instinctively what to ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... was powdered white; the effect of his florid color and his dark eyes was accented by the contrast; his pointed beard revealed its natural tints because of his habit of frequently brushing his hand over it, and was distinctly red. He was lithe and lean and nervous, and had the impatient temper characteristic of mercurial natures. It mattered not to him what was the coercion of the circumstances which had led to the reception of the stranger here, nor what was the will of the majority; he disapproved of the step; ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... Jennings's place when Daddy made his very characteristic appearance. Milton, a boy of thirteen, was gloomily holding sacks for the measurer, and the glory of the October day was dimmed by the suffocating dust, and poisoned by the smarting beards and chaff which had worked their way down his neck. The bitterness ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... cases are different: Charlie has such peculiarities of genius. The artistic nature, you know, requires soothing." Here they stopped, and rang at the door of a neat little house, and were ushered into a pair of those characteristic parlors which show that they have been arranged by a home-worshipper, and a mother. There were plants and birds and flowers, and little genre pictures of children, animals, and household interiors, arranged with a loving eye ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that Christianity has had in the past. I should be greatly chagrined to be accused of irreverence in discussing religion. Irreverence is ever a sign of a narrow intellectual horizon and a limited vision. The scoffer is the product of the limited knowledge characteristic of what Engels called "metaphysical materialism." Unfortunately the mental development of many in the past has been arrested at this Ingersoll-Voltaire stage. But with the growth of Modern Socialism ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... wife, my poor Mansus," he said, "does so because she doesn't think well of him. That is our ruling passion, our national characteristic, the primary cause of most crimes, big or little. That is why Kara is a bad criminal and will, as I say, end his ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... world-appearance was really derived from the reality of Brahman, which was self-luminous in all our experiences. The world appearance is an illusory creation, but the sense of reality that it carries with it is a misattribution (anyathakhyati) of the characteristic of the Brahman to it, for Brahman alone is the true and the real, which manifests itself as the reality of all our illusory world-experience, just as it is the reality of s'ukti that gives to the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... possessed judgment nor feeling for the merits of a writer, nor for poetical beauties; and he complains at the same time that this court had neither duly estimated his tragedies nor his epic poems. It is characteristic both of the court and of Voltaire that he eagerly pressed himself forward for admission to its favor, and sought to attract attention by a work which be himself called a piece of trash, and that the court extended its approbation and applause to this miserable ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... they and General Leonard Wood met, and they all soon fell into the old-time familiarity. Roosevelt urged vehemently his desire to go to France, and said that he would go as a private if he could not lead a regiment; that he was willing to die in France for the Cause. At which Mr. Root, with his characteristic wit, said: "Theodore, if you will promise to die there, Wilson will give you any commission you ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... its lakes or along an encircling drive. For want of any other sufficient opportunity to display the architecture of the countries assembled, one of the interior facades of the Paris building has a series of characteristic house-fronts looking upon an allee of but fifty feet in width, which is dignified by the title of "The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... as if by magic, the flood of invasion, brought back victory to the standards of Islam, and bade fair to overwhelm the presumptuous Muscovites in the waters of the Danube. Moltke in his account of the war of 1828, had noted a peculiarity of the Ottomans in warfare (a characteristic which they share with the glorious defenders of Saragossa in 1808) of beginning the real defence when others would abandon it as hopeless. This remark, if not true of the Turkish army as a whole, certainly applies to that part of ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... exceedingly elaborate and bearing at intervals the merchant's mark again. Upstairs in the big bedchamber is a ceiling of beams worked in bold roll mouldings; and there is an exquisite little parlour, lined with linen fold panels, with a breastsummer carved with strange animals. This elaboration is characteristic. It is all of a piece with Coggeshall Church, and with all those other spacious East Anglian churches, Lavenham, Long Melford, Thaxted, Saffron Walden, Lynn, Snettisham, lofty and spacious, which the clothiers built out of their newly won wealth. The ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... be remembered that Lichfield had asked long ago, "But who, pray, are the Stapyltons?" It was characteristic of Colonel Musgrave that he went about answering the question without delay. The Stapletons—for "Stapylton" was a happy innovation of Roger Stapylton's dead wife—the colonel knew to have been farmers in Brummell County, and Brummell Courthouse is within an hour's ride, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... Varney, with a sneer that habit had rendered familiar to his features, and which forms the principal characteristic which painters have assigned to that of Satan—"at your pleasure," he said; "you may enjoy your liberty and your studies until the daggers of Sussex's followers are clashing within your doublet and against your ribs." The old man turned pale, and Varney proceeded. ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... loving messages from "Annie" and told her in the bright, humorous way which was characteristic of Edgar Goodfellow, of many pleasant little incidents of his journey. One of the nights to look back upon and to gloat over in memory was this night by the fireside at Fordham cottage with the Mother—a night of calm and content under ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... lest the subjects should seem to be governed by tyranny, not by authority. It is better to imitate Cicero, who, when he had it in his power either to spare or to strike, preferred, as he tells us himself, to seek occasions for pardoning rather than for punishing, which is characteristic of ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... subjects selected. These two subjects had been taught from books even earlier; but memorising science out of books is far less useful as training than memorising grammars and vocabularies. The characteristic discipline of science can be imparted only through the laboratory method. The schoolmasters and college faculties who took this step by no means admitted Spencer's contention that science should be the universal staple at all ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... It is one great characteristic of genius to do great things with little things. Paxton could see that so small a matter as a greenhouse could be dilated into a crystal palace, and with two common materials—glass and iron—he raised the palace of the genii; the brightest idea and the noblest ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... though the best kinds are still to be met with, it is really superseded in modern drawing-rooms by embroideries all originating in the present desire after Oriental colouring and design, but of kinds distinctly characteristic and individual. ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... the conversation was frivolous, quite the Shakespeare and musical glasses kind of speech. Then Mrs. Jasher, who had no idea that her good dinner should be wasted in charming nothings, introduced the subject of the mummy by a reference to Professor Braddock. It was characteristic of her cleverness that she did not address Don Pedro, but pointed her speech ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... we went among the ferns and flowers until we met a swamp, a different kind of swamp to those we had heretofore met, save the little one last mentioned. This one was much larger, and a gem of beauty; but we had to cross it. It was completely furnished with characteristic flora. Fortunately when we got to its edge we saw a woman crossing before us, but unfortunately she did not take a fancy to our appearance, and instead of staying and having a chat about the state of the roads, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... "woman's war against whisky" had been inaugurated by the woman suffrage party, its aspect, in the eyes of newspapers, would be different from what it now is. If Lucy Stone had set the movement on foot, it would have been so characteristic of her! What more could one expect from such a disturber of public peace? She, who has no instinctive scruples against miscellaneous crowds at the polls, might be expected to visit saloons and piously serenade their ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the characteristic, which distinguishes the memory from the imagination, we must immediately perceive, that it cannot lie in the simple ideas it presents to us; since both these faculties borrow their simple ideas from ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... important line that led upward from the chaos of Archaean worms is that of the Arthropods. Its early characteristic was the acquisition of a chitinous coat over the body. Embryonic indications show that this was at first a continuous shield, but a type arose in which the coat broke into sections covering each segment of the body, giving greater freedom of movement. The shield, in fact, became ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... is a characteristic of the so-called Sleeping Sickness that is decimating the tribes around Victoria Nyanza that the victim, although he goes into a coma, never actually sleeps from the time of taking the disease until the end, usually more than a year later. The natives, a tribe that came originally down from Egypt, ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... the first order, while they made her an irresistible force in art. When she came upon the stage she filled it with the brilliant vitality of her presence. Every movement that she made was winningly characteristic. Her least gesture was eloquence, Her voice, which was soft or silvery, or deep or mellow, according as emotion affected it, used now and then to tremble, and partly to break, with tones that were pathetic beyond description. ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... considerable lassitude and weakness on his return. During the expedition he conceived the idea, and wrote, in the three days immediately succeeding to his return, the "Witch of Atlas". This poem is peculiarly characteristic of his tastes—wildly fanciful, full of brilliant imagery, and discarding human interest and passion, to revel in the fantastic ideas that his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... home-coming for a day or two and attend to a purely personal matter at a ranch lying to the west. Hopalong, knowing the reason for Red's wish, grinned and told him to go, and not to propose until he had thought the matter over very carefully. Red's reply was characteristic, and after arranging a rendezvous and naming the time, the two separated and rode toward their destinations, while the rest of the outfit kept ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... "It is characteristic of Chalmers," writes Mr. Lovett, "that he was able to exert considerable influence over this ruffian, and even saw good points in him, ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... appal the wife of the humblest pauper of a New England village. Another woman, also from the West, was with her at the time of her infant's birth, but scarcely had the "latest-found" given the first characteristic shriek of its debut upon the stage of life, when this person herself was taken seriously ill, and was obliged to return to her own cabin, leaving the poor exhausted mother entirely alone! Her husband lay seriously sick himself at the time, and of course could offer her no assistance. ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... also appeared—"Elsie Venner" and "The Guardian Angel." They have undoubted merits, showing the keen thought, the descriptive power, and the play of fancy which are so characteristic of the author, and each has a subtle motive to which the characteristic incidents are made subservient. But Dr. Holmes is not great as a novelist as he is great in other things. The stories in one aspect are ambulatory ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... some quite marked characteristics by which its presence may be recognized. They may not all be noticeable together in any one person. But one or more will be found in every person whom it succeeds in influencing and dominating. One characteristic is this: it covets praise. It feeds and fattens on commendation. It constantly seeks to be highly esteemed, to have its worth properly appraised. It is immensely impressed with its own importance, its value to society, its keenness, wisdom or aptness, and wishes ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... that THE FORMATION OF HABITS ought naturally to be, as it is, the special characteristic of age. As for the muscular powers, they pass their maximum long before the time when the true decline of life begins, if we may judge by the experience of the ring. A man is "stale," I think, in their language, soon after thirty,—often, no doubt, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic temperament, and possessed of the most piercing black eyes I ever saw in a woman's head. With no more education than other women of the middle classes in her day, she had an excellent mental capacity. Her most distinguishing characteristic, however, was rapidity of thought. If one ventured to suggest that she had not taken much time to arrive at any conclusion, she would say: "I cannot help it; things flash across me." That peculiarity has been ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... The glass is left to dry long enough for the shellac to get nearly hard and to allow most of the alcohol to evaporate. It is then heated before a fire, or even over a Bunsen, till the shellac softens and begins to yield its fragrant characteristic smell. ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... had worked with the Serbians had learned to respect and admire them for their patriotism, courage and patient endurance. We felt that their outstanding characteristic was their imagination, which, turned into the proper channels and given a chance to develop, should produce for the world not only famous painters and poets but also great inventors. This vivid imagination is found in the highest and lowest of the land. To illustrate ...
— The White Road to Verdun • Kathleen Burke
... Driscoll, Captain of the Scouts, who had done such good service to the Eighth Division. What passed between the general and the Irish captain no man knows, probably no man will ever know. But when Driscoll rode up at the mad gallop so characteristic of the man there was that in his hard, ugly, wind-tanned face which spoke of stern deeds to be done. He did not ride alone, this Irish-Indian Volunteer captain—Rundle's own aide, Lord Kensington, of the 15th Hussars, was on his right hand, and on his ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... positions, is frequently very effective; but, when long continued, it grows wearisome and monotonous. As our late writers are much given to it, they should be on their guard lest it become a national characteristic. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... manliness is the characteristic of seafaring men, or, rather, of life on board ship. This often gives an appearance of want of feeling, and even of cruelty. From this, if a man comes within an ace of breaking his neck and escapes, it is made a joke of; and no notice must be taken of a bruise or cut; and any expression of ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... crested ferns in cultivation, this, of which the annexed is an illustration, is one of the most distinct; so different indeed it is from the type, that it is questionable if it really is a form of it; the most essential characteristic, that of the fructification at the extreme edge of the lobes of the pinn, is altogether absent, and the whole habit of the plant is also thoroughly distinct. It is of equally robust growth, but its handsomely arching fronds, which are from 3 feet to 4 feet in length, are produced in great ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... success to the senate in three short words: "Veni, vidi, vici" (I came, I saw, I overcame). In September, Csar was again in Rome, where he remained only three months, arranging affairs. There were fears lest he should make a proscription, but he proceeded to no such extremity, exercising his characteristic clemency towards those who had been opposed to him. A revolt occurred at this time among the soldiers at Capua, and they marched to Rome, but Csar cowed them by a display ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... marshes of the body, looking for trouble, and, like their Hibernian descendants, wherever they see a head they hit it. They are the incarnation of the fighting spirit of our ancestors, and if it were not for their retention of this characteristic in so high a degree, many classes of our fixed cells would not have been able to subside ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... their natural liberty. The colour of these people is a dark chocolate; their features bear a strong resemblance to the African negro; they have the same flat nose, large nostrils, wide mouth and thick lips; but their hair is not woolly, except in Van Dieman's Land, where they have this further characteristic of the negro. ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... Justin," he began, striking at once the note which seemed to him (so far as he could guess) most likely to be characteristic of an ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... and in many of the largest the position of fireplaces could plainly be discovered. As a type of one of the more complicated I have chosen that figured to illustrate the arrangement of these cavate dwellings (figure 245). Many are smaller, others have more lateral chambers, but one type is characteristic of all. ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... God there is always an accompanying idea of the restricted obligation of the individual. To care for one's own family or one's own clan or tribe and present a hostile front to the rest of mankind has always been the characteristic feature of primitive morality. It was peculiarly the teaching of Christ which brought to the world the idea that the area of moral obligation is co-extensive with the world itself. There are no racial or national lines which can limit the extent of our responsibility. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... Not less characteristic of the New Learning was the intellectual pressure it strove to bring to bear on the wavering Pope. Cranmer was still active in the cause of Anne Boleyn; he had just published a book in favor of the divorce; and he now urged on the ministry an appeal to the learned opinion of Christendom ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... silent. She awaited his anger. She meditated upon his gutter patois, the Boeotian dialect characteristic of Gopher Prairie. He laughed puzzlingly. When they came into the glow of the house he laughed ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... to the English character on this point, let us now cite a most observing one in the West. Kant, in Konigsberg, was surrounded by Englishmen and by foreigners of all nations—foreign and English students, foreign and English merchants; and he pronounced the main characteristic feature of the English as a nation to lie in their severe reverence for truth. This from him was no slight praise; for such was the stress he laid upon veracity, that upon this one quality he planted the whole edifice of moral excellence. General integrity could not exist, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... on the fiction of the eighteenth century, its prevailing coarseness was reprehended. But this characteristic was objected to on the score of taste, but not at all on that of truth or morality. The novelist of that time would not have faithfully represented the society about him had he not allowed himself that license which universally ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... had in him something of the aristocrat, which is very near to the anarchist. It was characteristic of him that he turned into this dark and irregular entry as casually as into his own front door, merely thinking that it would be a short cut to the house. He made his way through the dim wood for some distance and with some difficulty, until ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... physiological mechanism of speech and phonation are affected in this disease; but there are degenerative diseases of the brain in which the psychical mechanism of speech is affected, e.g. General Paralysis of the Insane, in which the affection of speech and hand-writing is quite characteristic. There is at first a hesitancy which may only be perceptible to practised ears, but in which there is no real fault of articulation once it is started; sometimes preparatory to and during the utterance there is a tremulous motion about the muscles of the mouth. ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... through which young Henry Stuart now led his seafaring companions was of that rich, varied, and beautiful character which is strikingly characteristic of those islands of the Pacific which owe their origin to volcanic agency. Unlike the low coral islets, this island presented every variety of the boldest mountain scenery, and yet, like them, it displayed all the gorgeous beauty of a rich tropical ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... present everywhere, but in very different proportion. Characteristic of Romance literatures and also of the English, is the great predominance of the conservative elements. Thus not only is the literature of the constitutional mother-country democratic, but also the literature of France, otherwise so decidedly aristocratic: ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to make a diversion in our heroine's favour. It had hitherto been a matter of faith with all the Liberal party that Lady Eustace had had something to do with stealing her own diamonds. That esprit de corps which is the glorious characteristic of English statesmen had caused the whole Government to support Lord Fawn, and Lord Fawn could only be supported on the supposition that Lizzie Eustace had been a wicked culprit. But Lady Glencora, though very true as a politician, was apt to have opinions of her own, and ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... lord-lieutenant himself read the address, to which Lothair replied with a propriety all acknowledged. Then came the address of the mayor and corporation of Grandchester, of which city Lothair was hereditary high-steward; and then that of his tenantry, which was cordial and characteristic. And here many were under the impression that this portion of the proceedings would terminate; but it was not so. There had been some whispering between the bishop and the archdeacon, and the Rev. ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... brave and lovely servant-maid (whom the aquiline-nosed woman, though not at all answering the description, always mysteriously implied to be herself). After several years, this brave and lovely servant-maid was married to the landlord of a country Inn; which landlord had this remarkable characteristic, that he always wore a silk nightcap, and never would on any consideration take it off. At last, one night, when he was fast asleep, the brave and lovely woman lifted up his silk nightcap on the right side, and found that he had no ear there; upon which she sagaciously ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... story has no possible bearing either on Pope or on "The Dunciad," but was evidently seized by the shifty publisher as the nearest thing to hand when he came to patch up another pamphlet against Pope. Nothing could be more characteristic of Curll than his willingness to make capital out of his own disgrace. So hurried was the compilation of "The Female Dunciad" that he even printed the letter designed to introduce Mrs. Haywood's tale to the readers ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... him on every side, and his clothes were several times torn, nothing cut his skin. When the shell passed through the logs below, the old sailor dropped his bucket, waved his hat, and gave three cheers; in which heroic act he was employed as the dangerous missile exploded. This characteristic feat probably saved his life; for from that instant the Indians ceased to fire at him, and even to shoot their flaming arrows at the block, having taken up the notion simultaneously, and by common consent, that the "Saltwater" ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... to be characteristic throughout. The strange thing was that Macomber, the rancher, had already traded his mustang and money to boot for the sorrel. The deal, whether wise or not, had been consummated. Brackton came out with Red Wilson, and they had to have ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... her. It was a year ago now—and the letter had been hardly more than a note. The police had worked themselves into a frenzy over the Gray Seal, the papers had grown absolutely maudlin—and she had written, in her characteristic way: ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... the revival of Palestrina at St. Joseph's, and he liked Ferrabosco's pavane. He would like to have a harpsichord; even if he did not play on it much, it would be a beautiful, characteristic piece of furniture.... And it would be a good idea to ask Mr. Innes to bring all his queer instruments to Berkeley Square, and give a concert to-morrow night after his dinner-party. His friends had bored him ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... vary but little in color pattern, for, even in Eutamias dorsalis, which is one of the most aberrant of the chipmunks in color pattern, the pattern is characteristic of Eutamias. ...
— Genera and Subgenera of Chipmunks • John A. White
... smiled charmingly, old as she was—she yielded as his mother might have yielded—when the young man took her hand and entreated her to interest herself in his marriage. "Must I really speak to Grace?" she asked, with a gentleness of tone and manner far from characteristic, on ordinary occasions, of the lady of Mablethorpe House. Horace saw that he had gained his point. He sprang to his feet; his eyes turned eagerly in the direction of the conservatory; his handsome face was radiant with hope. Lady Janet (with her mind ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... that had never been a characteristic of Leopold. The girl began to wonder if there might not possibly be a vein of nobility in the man, after all, that she had never discovered. Since she had entered his apartments at Blentz he had been in every way a different man from the Leopold she had known ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... It is a common characteristic of all substance that it is never present in a subject. For primary substance is neither present in a subject nor predicated of a subject; while, with regard to secondary substances, it is clear from the following arguments (apart from others) that they ...
— The Categories • Aristotle
... we are forced to depend on the journal kept by Governor Winthrop, who busied himself not only with this, making the first entry on that Easter Monday which found them riding at anchor at Cowes, but with another quite as characteristic piece of work. A crowded storm-tossed ship, is hardly a point to which one looks for any sustained or fine literary composition, but the little treatise, "A Model of Christian Charity," the fruit of long and silent musing on ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... the definitions being—'a cant term for running up a score at an alehouse or tavern'—with which cf. Goldsmith's Essays (1765), viii, 'He ran into debt with everybody that would trust him, and none could build a sconce better than he.' This explanation seems to me to make Thomas's remark a very characteristic one." See Grose's Classical Dictionary of the vulgar tongue.) Scottish witch Scythians Sentronell ( centinel) Seven deadly sinnes, pageant of Shakespeare imitated; his use of the word road ("This Doll Tearsheet should be some road") illustrated; mentioned in Captain ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... proposal. But, after his death, which occurred in October, 1572, the new regent, the Earl of Morton, professed his willingness to undertake the accomplishment of the deed, if Elizabeth would openly acknowledge it. This she refused to do, and the plot failed. It is characteristic that the last Douglas to play an important part in Scottish history should be the leading actor in ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... Another characteristic thing about the old locomotion was the dog cart—small carts used by pedlars and others drawn along the high roads by a dog or dogs. Sometimes these old pedlars would drive to Royston market with their "carriage and pair" of dogs in rattling ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... group of young faces, crowded together by the window, and lit up by the unsympathetic light, had something characteristic and unusual in its aspect, that might have ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... courtesy, made up of dignity and grace, which was famous all the world over, but of which no one could have an appropriate opinion, unless he had been the recipient of it. In a character so complex and diversified, one may ask what was the dominant feature, what was the supreme quality, the one characteristic which marked the nature of the man. Was it his incomparable genius for finance? Was it his splendid oratorical powers? Was it his marvellous fecundity of mind? In my estimation it was not any one of these qualities. Great as they were, there ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... Popery was a sure characteristic of Puritanism. The house of commons discovered other infallible symptoms of the prevalence of that party. They petitioned the king for replacing such able clergy as had been silenced for want of conformity to the ceremonies.[*] ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... her remaining in town at such an unusual season of the year would appear unaccountable to her fashionable acquaintance, Lady Delacour contrived for herself a characteristic excuse; she declared that there was no possibility of finding pleasure in any thing but novelty, and that the greatest novelty to her would be to remain a whole summer in town. Most of her friends, amongst whom she had successfully established a character for caprice, were satisfied ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... small defense allocation (1% of GDP) helped Japan advance with extraordinary rapidity to the rank of second most technologically-powerful economy in the world after the US and third-largest economy after the US and China. One notable characteristic of the economy is the working together of manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors in closely-knit groups called keiretsu. A second basic feature has been the guarantee of lifetime employment for a substantial portion of the urban ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the ledge, which afforded them a capital breastwork, and stationed himself at the mouth of the tunnel which was nearest the trail. It had already been arranged what each man was to do. They were in possession. For the rest they must wait. What they thought at that moment no one knew. Their characteristic appearance had slightly changed. The melancholy and philosophic Demorest was alert and bitter. Barker's changeful face had become fixed and steadfast. Stacy alone wore his "fighting look," which ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... of this quarrel was sufficiently characteristic to be the real one. Moved by the attack of Great Britain upon his principality, Harden-Hickey decided upon reprisals. It must be remembered that always he was more Irish than French. On paper he organized an invasion of England from Ireland, the home of his ancestors. It was because ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... the greatest success in solving these problems were Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, Cima da Conegliano, and Carpaccio, and we find each of them enjoyable to the degree that he was in touch with the life of his day. I have already spoken of pageants and of how characteristic they were of the Renaissance, forming as they did a sort of safety-valve for its chief passions. Venice, too, knew the love of glory, and the passion was perhaps only the more intense because it was all dedicated to the State. There ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... before Count de Maurepas by a characteristic memorial, apparently written in 1699. In this he proposed to gather all the tribes of the lakes at Detroit, civilize them and teach them French, "insomuch that from pagans they would become children ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... building intended for the recitations of rhapsodists and the performances of citharaedists, before the theatre was in existence. In its general form and arrangements the odeum was very similar to the theatre. There were, however, some characteristic differences. The odeum was much smaller than the theatre, and it was roofed over. The ancient and original Odeum of Athens in the Agora was probably erected in the time of Hipparchus, who, according ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... interesting, even a staple or a small nail might receive his undivided attention for minutes at a time. How important is the species difference in this connection, I have no means to judge, but if we may not consider these different modes of behavior characteristic of P. rhesus as contrasted with P. irus, we must conclude that remarkable individual differences exist among monkeys, for whereas Skirrl is by nature a mechanical genius, Sobke has apparently no such disposition. I can imagine no more ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... about me; I shall be all right," he said, as he hastened from the room. It was characteristic of him that he forgot his clinical thermometer, and was never known to have a ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... which we are now so familiar, which has wrought both Scotland and England so much woe, yet added so intense an interest to many chapters of national history. The early Stewards are present by name in all the great national events: but have left little characteristic trace upon the records, as of remarkable individuals. They took the cross in repeated crusades, carrying their official coat with its chequers, the brand of the Chief Servitor of the Scottish Court, through the wars of the Holy Land, till they came finally ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... of the Commonwealth. In passing through Cambridge Port, he was gratefully cheered by the assembled citizens, and eloquently addressed by one of the most distinguished, in the name of the whole. The reply of Lafayette was characteristic and affectionate. He was met by the Corporation and Professors, on his arriving within the precincts of the college, and thus addressed by ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... perhaps an incongruous spectacle. But where, as here at Foligno, a whole city has made itself a festival, where there are multitudes of citizens and soldiers and country-people slowly moving and gravely admiring, with the decency and order characteristic of an Italian crowd, I have nothing ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... these two and the different lives they lived. Some romantic notion or other was working in her! And again he looked at Courtier. A Quixotic type—the sort that rode slap-bang at everything! All very well—but not for Babs! She was not like the glorious Garibaldi's glorious Anita! It was truly characteristic of Lord Dennis—and indeed of other people—that to him champions of Liberty when dead were far dearer than champions of Liberty when living. Yes, Babs would want more, or was it less, than just a life of sleeping under the stars for the man she loved, and the cause he fought ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... became almost audible as I concentrated on my heart radio. In the characteristic, slightly hoarse whisper of Kashi, {FN28-2} I heard his summons again and again. I seized the arm of one of my companions, Prokash Das, {FN28-3} and smiled ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... disguise, Lord Littimer says. He knows pretty well everything. He has been very restless and uneasy for the past day or two, and yesterday he left saying that he had business in London. Early to-day I had a characteristic telegram from him saying that he was at Longdean, and that I was necessary to his comfort there. I was to come clothed in my right mind, and I was to bring Mr. ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... God, I have had innumerable trials, some of them tortures, but have been brought safely out of every one. I afterwards found that each trial was exactly what was needed for the alteration of some objectionable characteristic in myself. No trial that came was unnecessary. When its work was ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... the kindly eyes so tenderly smiling upon her. After all, that was the Calvert way! To meet whatever came with "head erect and colors flying," and she, too, was Calvert. She'd prove it! Cried she, with that characteristic toss ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... to the Villalonga camping plan. At one time Clarence completely abandoned the idea, throwing the watchful and silent Rachael into utter consternation. Carol was alternately bored by the plan and wearily interested in it. Their characteristic absorption in their own comfort was a great advantage to Rachael at this particular juncture; she had been included in Mrs. Villalonga's invitation as a matter of course, but such was the life of the big, luxurious establishment known as the "camp" that all ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... endeavor to reflect the real world in art, but have, even if expressed conventionally, a certain poetical meaning—in short, a soul. Their influence on the whole art of the West is undeniable, and extended to the landscape-painting of the Italians, but without preventing the characteristic interest of the Italian eye for nature from ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Then one spring morning I struck him in Piccadilly, by the railings of the Green Park. He was standing still, a large, blue air-ball in his hand, steadfastly regarding the Porters' Rest. Our greeting was characteristic. ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... in Sect. XXVIII. under the name of paralysis of the lacteals; but as the word paralysis has generally been applied to the disobedience of the muscles to the power of volition, the name is here changed to inirritability of the lacteals, as more characteristic of the disease. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... with in real life. Indeed, he had come to regard the world of reality and that of fancy as entirely distinct, and to believe that only here and there, as a man or woman possessed something like genius, would there be a marked deviation from ordinary types. The slight differences, the little characteristic meannesses or felicities that distinguished one from another, did not count for very much in his estimation. When a knowledge of such individual traits was essential to his plans, he mastered them with singular keenness and quickness of comprehension. When such knowledge was unnecessary, ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... It was characteristic of Jewdwine that in this courting of Opportunity there had been no violent pursuit, no dishevelment, no seizing by the hair. He had hung back, rather; he had waited, till he had given himself value, till Opportunity ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the State, and in a more pressing and formal manner requested him to permit them to use his name as a Presidential candidate, more with the idea of securing his nomination for Vice-President than with any further expectation. To this he now consented. His own characteristic language, however, plainly reveals that he believed this would be useful to him in his future Senatorial aspirations solely, and that he built no hopes whatever on national preferment. A quarrel was going ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... corn, all hands of us, men and boys and dogs, leave hoeing or haying, and drive them out. And, by the way, the frequency with which most of us have had occasion to leave important labors to drive back unruly cattle, rendered lawless by neglect of our fences, well illustrates a national characteristic. We are earnest, industrious, and intent on doing. We can look forward to accomplish any labor, however difficult, but lack the conservatism which preserves the fruit of our labors—the "old fogyism" which puts on its spectacles ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... early period up till about 1640, Rembrandt's etching is characterised by a clear lineal manner with little tendency to the chiaroscuro which gradually became the characteristic feature of his artistic style in etching as well as in painting. Later he tends to a greater breadth of treatment in line, and a less imitative treatment of physical form. At first his experiments in chiaroscuro were produced by the close mesh ...
— Rembrandt, With a Complete List of His Etchings • Arthur Mayger Hind
... classes: that he stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable to Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation. No more characteristic instance could be found than in the family of Kirstie Elliott. They were all, and Kirstie the first of all, ready and eager to pour forth the particulars of their genealogy, embellished with every detail that memory had ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cannot stand the bayonets of the old Toughs. Forward." The men sprang to the charge, and about one hundred of the Fusiliers to the very teeth of destruction, facing inevitable death with a coolness and fearlessness so characteristic of the British soldier. But a body of the enemy's horse suddenly appeared on the flank of the column of Infantry compelling them to form square to resist cavalry, and thus the brave little party were ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... as in barium chloride, indicates that the relative weight of the atom of radium is about 225. As thus prepared, radium is a well-marked chemical element, forming a series of compounds analogous to those of barium and showing a characteristic line spectrum. But, unlike most other chemical elements, it is intensely radio-active, and produces effects some two million times greater than those ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... variation of only two degrees. The period from April to November, when the south-east trade winds prevail, called the dry or east monsoon, is slightly warmer than the remaining six months which make up the rainy season. The heaviest rainfall is in the months of December, January, and February. The chief characteristic of the climate of Java is, therefore, not so much its heat as its equability: it is rarely wet all day long even in the wet season, and at least one shower may be expected each ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... resembles its father, may later on resemble its mother, or inversely. Certain peculiarities of a certain ancestor appear suddenly, often at an advanced age. It is needless to say that peculiarities concerning the beard cannot appear till this has grown, and this simple fact is so characteristic that it has been called hereditary disposition. Everything may be transmitted by heredity, even to the finest shades of sentiment, intelligence and will, even to the most insignificant details of the nails, the form of the bones, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... had invited forty people to hear Mrs. Farrinder speak, and now Mrs. Farrinder wouldn't speak. But she had such a beautiful reason for it! There was something martial and heroic in her pretext, and, besides, it was so characteristic, so free, that Miss Birdseye was quite consoled, and wandered away, looking at her other guests vaguely, as if she didn't know them from each other, while she mentioned to them, at a venture, the excuse for their disappointment, confident, evidently, that they would agree with ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... of authorship, either in the house or the landlord, who is one of those few writers of the age that stand upon their own foundation, without patronage, and above dependence. If there was nothing characteristic in the entertainer, the company made ample amends for ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... Ainos, whom the Japanese look upon as savages, there is still much of the obscenity of speech which belongs to all society[20] in a state of barbarism; but it has been proved that genuine modesty is a characteristic of the Aino women.[21] A literal English translation of the Kojiki, however, requires an abundant use of Latin in order to protect it from the grasp of the law in English-speaking Christendom. In Chamberlain's version, the numerous cesspools are thus filled up with a dead language, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... Right Hon. Winston Churchill. As he darted into the crowded lobby, which, as usual at the luncheon-hour, was filled with Belgian, French, and British staff officers, diplomatists, Cabinet Ministers and correspondents, he flung his arms out in a nervous, characteristic gesture, as though pushing his way through a crowd. It was a most spectacular entrance and reminded me for all the world of a scene in a melodrama where the hero dashes up, bare-headed, on a foam-flecked horse, and saves the heroine or the ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... the brotherhood. He often represented his church as its messenger, and was usually called to preside as moderator over the associations within the jurisdictions of which he lived. His hospitality was of that warm and generous kind which was characteristic of pioneer days. His ample and comfortable country mansion, situated upon a much-frequented highway, came to be known far and wide as the ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... The feeling which excites to the preservation of the species is as proper as that which induces the preservation of the individual. Passionate, exclusive, and durable love for a particular individual of the opposite sex, it has been well said, is characteristic of the human race, and is a mark of distinction from other animals. The instinct of reproduction in mankind is thus joined to an affectionate sentiment, which adds to its sweetness ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... my mistress's danger, be it what it may," answered Rose, with her characteristic readiness of speech ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... who have graced these collections look as diverse as sheep to their shepherd, or the members of a Chinese family to their uncle; and if there is an allegation which I would 'deny with both hands', it is this: that an insipid sameness is the chief characteristic of an anthology which offers—to name almost at random seven only out of forty (oh ominous academic number!)—the work of Messrs. Abercrombie, Davies, de la Mare, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... stunned by the dismal tidings of his losses coming so thick upon him. Yet he did not waste his time in idle crimination or complaint; but immediately set about making preparations to meet the storm with all his characteristic energy. He wrote, at once, to such of his captains as he believed still faithful, commanding them to be ready with their troops to march to his assistance at the shortest notice. He reminded them of their obligations ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... Germany against the "treachery" and "unworthiness" of German women in bestowing chocolates and flowers on the prisoners, as well as doing other little services for them. The attitude towards prisoners approved by the men—one trusts it is not to be regarded as a characteristic outcome of Masculinism—is that of petty insults, of spiteful cruelty, and mean deprivations. Dr. Helene Stoecker, a prominent leader of the more advanced band of German Feminists, has lately published a protest against this treatment of enemies who are helpless, unarmed, ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Orson especially attended in Carthage was Tudie Litton, as pretty a creature as he could imagine or desire. For manifest reasons he affected an interest in her brother Arthur. And Arthur, with a characteristic brotherly feeling, tried to keep his sister in her place. He not only told her that she was "not such a much," but he ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... running commentary of scorn at all created things extant, with ironical and sardonic additions that were terrible. It reviled all human endeavor, it quenched all sentiment, it suspended frivolity, it scattered reverie, it paralyzed action. It was omnipotent. More wonderful and characteristic than all, the very existence of this tremendous organ was unknown to the camp for six months after the arrival of its modest owner, and only revealed to them under circumstances that seemed to point more conclusively than ever to her ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... had caught cold through a mistake of his valet, who sent him out on a bitter winter day with a thin Sevres china box instead of a thick tortoiseshell. That brought him out of the ruck, you see, and people remember him. Even some small characteristic, such as having an apricot tart on your sideboard all the year round, or putting your candle out at night by stuffing it under your pillow, serves to separate you from your neighbour. In my own case, it ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... permits the very devil to saddle and ride it as he pleases. It seems to be characteristic of every phase of life that one will not yield to another—will not submit to any demand. Everyone is disposed to force his arrogant authority. The presumption is that supreme honor and final success depend upon ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... leaders, although ignorant men, manifesting an intelligence and tactical skill that puts trained armies to shame. Could not the tendencies of criminals be used for the good of their country? The qualities developed in primitive races by constant warfare against the forces of nature are characteristic also of criminals. Let those whom nature has destined to reproduce impulsive and brutal instincts in a civil and industrial age be permitted to employ them in defending civilisation with true primitive valour against ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... found in the difference in bodies, or in the fact that it followed the wish of Him who brought the disease into the world. For there ensued with some a deep coma, with others a violent delirium, and in either case they suffered the characteristic symptoms of the disease. For those who were under the spell of the coma forgot all those who were familiar to them and seemed to be sleeping constantly. And if anyone cared for them, they would eat without waking, but some ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... roadside were yellow with the first primroses, and patches of golden daffodils could be seen in the woods, though spring seemed to be far enough away that chilly day. It was characteristic of one's experience in France that, as we sat down to dinner that evening in an Abbeville hotel I had beside me an officer in the British army who had been in Canada for a number of years and who had, during that time, been a frequent caller at my home in Toronto. The spontaneous manner in which ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... study of the publications of the parent society in England, with a view of learning their discoveries. The result was far from hopeful. I found that the phenomena brought out lacked that coherence and definiteness which is characteristic of scientific truths. Remarkable effects had been witnessed; but it was impossible to say, Do so and so, and you will get such an effect. The best that could be said was, perhaps you will get an effect, but more likely you will not. I could not feel any assurance ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... soon learned that the most outstanding characteristic of veteran fliers was modesty. A new chivalry had sprung up with the development of the air service. Every successful flier had to be a thorough sportsman to win through, and never did the boys meet a real veteran at the, game who would tell of his ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... prompted him carelessly to take her hand to inspect the wedding-ring. It was only her hand, but as Frank held it in his own, he felt it growing warm and flushed, while the color deepened on Ethelyn's cheeks, and then died suddenly away at Frank's characteristic remark, spoken for her ear alone, "You feel like thunder, ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... of supplies, fell back upon Venta Quemada, where he was soon followed by his foe, anxious to deal a decisive blow before the royal forces could concentrate. Boyaca, the site now occupied by the hostile armies, was a wooded and mountainous country and one well suited to Bolivar's characteristic tactics. Placing a large part of his troops in ambush and manoeuvring so as to get his cavalry in the enemy's rear, he advanced to the attack with a narrow front. On this Barreiro made a furious assault, forcing his opponents to recoil. ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... his relations with these ministers of pleasure, the Regent's better qualities often exhibit themselves agreeably. To the pretty actress, Emilie, whose heart was so completely his, he always acted with a characteristic generosity and forbearance; and her conduct is by no means less pleasing than his. Once, we are told, when he expressed a wish to give her a pair of diamond ear-rings at a cost of fifteen thousand francs, she demurred ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... in the village of Abu Kirkas. It is not possible, unfortunately, to assign a precise date to these objects. They were found in a tomb which contained no other remains; this tomb was surrounded by others, all of them likewise very much disturbed, but equally characteristic of the general nature of the Middle Empire tombs, and containing nothing but Middle Empire objects. Since, in general, few tombs of this site show signs of intrusive burial of a later age, there is no reason to suppose that ...
— Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms • H. Ling Roth
... philosophers who can be generally understood without a commentary. All his theories claim to be drawn direct from the facts, to be suggested by observation, and to interpret the world as it is; and whatever view he takes, he is constant in his appeal to the experience of common life. This characteristic endows his style with a freshness and vigor which would be difficult to match in the philosophical writing of any country, and impossible in that of Germany. If it were asked whether there were any circumstances apart from heredity, to which he owed his mental habit, the ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... morning just before I left the house." Fumbling in her bag, Grace drew forth a bulky looking letter, bearing a foreign postmark, and tearing open the end, drew out several closely folded sheets of thin paper covered with Eleanor's characteristic handwriting. ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... compel them, told them that of course they could do as they liked, but that they would speedily forget all they had learned. But the impatience of restraint of any kind, or of doing anything unless perfectly disposed to do it, which was a British characteristic, was too strong, and many were influenced by the scoffs of the newcomers, who, not having seen them in the day of battle, asked them scornfully if the Sarci were slaves that they should ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... Again he said, with characteristic energy, "If any one, during my administration, shall appeal, I will make him a foot shorter, and send the pieces to Holland and let him appeal ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... that the Jews in turn submitted to the influence of foreign literatures. Immanuel Romi, for example, at his best, is an exponent of Provencal versification and scholastic philosophy, while his lapses testify to the self-complacency and levity characteristic of the times. Yehuda Romano, one of his contemporaries, is said to have been teacher to the king of Naples. He was the first Jew to attain to a critical appreciation of the vagaries of scholasticism, but his claim to mention rests upon ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... of these psychological factors is still a hope for the future. Many parts of the field have never yet been touched by the plow of the psychologist. The only method which seems possible to-day is to select a few characteristic topics of social discussion and to outline for each of them in what sense a psychologist might contribute to the solution or might at least further the analysis of the problem. The aim is to show that our social difficulties are ultimately dependent upon mental conditions which ought to be cleared ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... met the young people with his characteristic awkwardness, bustle, and much giggling. He was delighted to see Paklin as the latter had predicted and ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... noisette" which is agreeable rather than otherwise. Monbuttu women, according to Parke, have a strong Gorgonzola perfume, and Emin told Parke that he could distinguish the members of different tribes by their characteristic odor. In the same way the Nicobarese, according to Man, can distinguish a member of each of the six tribes of the archipelago by smell. The odor of Australian blacks is less strong than that of negroes and has been described ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the stable where Tolliver was riveting a broken tug. It was characteristic of the man that all his tools, harness, and machinery were worn out or fractured. He never brought a plough in out of the winter storms or mended a leak in the roof until the need was insistent. Yet he was not lazy. He merely did not know how to ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... say one word of apology for myself, in answer to those who have accused me,—always without bitterness, and generally with tenderness,—of having forgotten, in writing of clergymen, the first and most prominent characteristic of the ordinary English clergyman's life. I have described many clergymen, they say, but have spoken of them all as though their professional duties, their high calling, their daily workings for the good of those around them, were ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... eye. A mournfulness was over the place, like the terror of a contagion. Yet it had been a cheerful house, and one where even recently there had been high junketings. Replanted with timber for the famous singer who had sold it to Jenkins, it revealed clearly the kind of imagination which is characteristic of the opera-house in a bridge flung over the miniature lake, with its broken punt half filled with mouldy leaves, and in its pavilion all of rockery-work, garlanded by ivy. It had witnessed gay scenes, this pavilion, in the singer's time; now ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... wrought out of marble while Joe heard insult and lie. As a matter of fact Joe had smiled in the face of death more than once, and this is a school through which even diplomats rarely pass. Yet it was with an effort that he maintained the characteristic good-natured expression when the door to Donnegan's shack opened and he saw big George ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... it of its former occupant, but have done something towards furnishing it; so that it has become characteristic ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... up the passage with the royal assurance characteristic of him, and held out his hand to ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... were due to a combination of these morbid predispositions, together with injurious external influences, and thus explained all symptoms and all diseases. He found a name for every phenomenon and a solution for every problem. And though it was precisely in this characteristic that he abandoned scientific methods and practical utility, it was also this quality that gained for him his popularity and prominence in the ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... child of Nature; falseness was a thing unknown to her; she gave herself up without reserve to her impressions; she acknowledged them, or, rather, allowed them to be seen without the affectations of petty and calculating coquetry, characteristic of Parisian girlhood. During this day she sat more than once with her palette in one hand, her brushes in another, without touching a color. With her eyes fastened on the officer, and her lips slightly apart, she listened, in the attitude of painting a stroke which was never painted. She was not ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... Conyngham, with characteristic good-nature, had made himself so entirely at home on board the Mediterranean trader that his presence was equally welcomed in the forecastle and the captain's cabin. Even the first mate, his present interlocutor, a grim man ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... probably the most assiduous worshipper at the great Corsican's shrine. How often has he not entered his sanctum at the War Office, peering forward with that purposeful dominating look on his face, and discovered a few specks of dust upon his favourite effigy. With a quick characteristic motion of the thumb resembling a stab he rings the bell. A flunkey instantly appears. "Bust that dust," says the WAR MINISTER. And then, correcting himself instantly, with a genial smile, "I should say, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... Grace became aware of the curious reticence that had vaguely annoyed Evelyn. "Where do you live, Miss Brent!" she asked with the sudden directness so characteristic of her. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... transaction. In New York, if a horse falls down there is at once an audience of a dozen persons; in Salonika the downfall of a horse is nobody's business, but a copper coin changing hands is everybody's. Of this local characteristic, John T. McCutcheon and I made a careful study; and the result of our investigations produced certain statistics. If in Salonika you buy a newspaper from a news-boy, of the persons passing, two will stop; if ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... only that I eat with the family and not in the kitchen. In the summer they hire a cook and others, but in the winter there are only me and Dawn and the old woman," said this frank and communicative individual in the frank and communicative manner characteristic of ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... has long been noticed that there are among fishes two styles of tail-fins. These are the even-lobed, or homocercal (Fig. 68), and the uneven-lobed, or heterocercal (Fig. 69). The one is characteristic of ordinary fishes (teleosts), the other of sharks and some other orders. In structure the difference is even more fundamental than in form. In the former style the backbone stops abruptly in a series of short, enlarged joints, and thence sends off rays to form the tail-fin (Fig. 68); in ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... and six legs, each having five joints and ending in tiny claws. The wings are many-veined membranous sacs, covered with scales that are coloured according to species and arranged to form characteristic family markings. They are a framework usually of twelve hollow tubes or veins that are so connected with the respiratory organs as to be pneumatic. These tubes support double membranes covered above and below with down. At the bases of the wings lie their nerves. The fore-wings each have a heavy ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... wide country," she observed, abandoning her torture with a suddenness that was a characteristic of her nature. When Beatrice had made a man look and act the fool she was ready to stop; one cannot say that of every woman. "One can draw long, deep breaths without robbing one's neighbor of oxygen. Everything is so big, and broad, and generous, out here. One can ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... Dombey's master-vice, that ruled him so inexorably, an unnatural characteristic? It might be worthwhile, sometimes, to inquire what Nature is, and how men work to change her, and whether, in the enforced distortions so produced, it is not natural to be unnatural. Coop any son or daughter of our ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... inward hope that a fine easterly breeze which had been blowing for some days would carry him well down channel and then chop round from the southward in good time to baffle his old friend during the passage of the Flying Cloud through the Downs. A somewhat curious and amusing characteristic of the friendly rivalry between the skippers was that, whilst each implicitly believed in his own ship, he affected a faith in the superior qualities of the other, and framed his remarks accordingly. So when the little farewell chat ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... field glass is almost a necessity to careful study. He is a grayish, graceful sparrow, with streaks of reddish brown, chestnut caps, and a small black spot in the middle of the brownish breast. One white wing bar is a distinguishing characteristic, and a better one is the difference in color of the two mandibles; the upper one is black and the lower one yellow. The tinkling notes of the tree sparrows sound like the music a pipe organist makes when he uses the sweet organ and the ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... Irish humour with which he used to delight us; and the romance, the poetry, the religion of 'Italia la bella' form the subjects of his pencil. The scene near Corpodibacco (we know the spot well, and have spent many a happy month in its romantic mountains) is most characteristic. Cardinal Cospetto, we must say, is a most truculent prelate, and not certainly an ornament ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... has accomplished his task. I have carefully examined it in every part, and cannot see where any improvement can be made. It is pre-eminently a United Brethren Hymn-Book, providing as it does for every phase of our characteristic church life. It combines the solidity and stateliness of the standard hymns of the ages, with the life and sprightliness of the modern gospel song. The most recent songs are here for the young people, while the older members of the Church will hail with delight the reappearance of old songs ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... mention of that characteristic weapon of the Dyaks, the sumpitan, or, as it is called by foreigners, the blow-gun. The sumpitan is a piece of hard wood, from six to eight feet in length and in circumference slightly larger than the handle of a broom. Running through it lengthwise is a hole about the size of a lead-pencil. A ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... century, must have belonged to the reign of George II. It was, however, upon travellers by coaches that the full oppression of the old vicious system operated. The elder Scaliger mentions, as a characteristic of the English in his day, (about 1530,) a horror of cold water; in which, however, there must have been some mistake. [5] Nowhere could he and his foreign companions obtain the luxury of cold water for ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... pursuing Apaches first fired their two shots, one of them slightly wounded the hand of young Chadmund, while the other, unsuspected by the lad, buried itself in the body of the mustang and inflicted a fatal wound. It was characteristic of the noble creature that his indomitable courage should remain to the last. He kept up his astonishing speed until his rider voluntarily checked him, and then his gait remained his natural one until nature succumbed and ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... back by his hours of delirium. However, the natures of both men were rigid, no question from Marius to M. Fauchelevent was possible. Such an idea had not even occurred to him. We have already indicated this characteristic detail. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... home to Grafton Street after the first night of the revival of "Richard III." and slipped on the stairs, injuring his knee. With characteristic fortitude, he struggled to his feet unassisted and walked to his room. This made the consequences of the accident far more serious, and he was not able ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... his plan, the burly chieftain set about carrying it out with characteristic promptness. Without saying good-bye, he rose to his feet, and walking rapidly off, soon disappeared in the direction of the spot where took place his encounter with the puma and his ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... differing in all respects, consequently as having their origins of as opposite a nature as are their appearances. But the nature and formation of those bodies are not left in this obscurity; for, the secondary masses, which are interposed, participate so precisely of what is truly opposite and characteristic in the primary and tertiary masses, that it requires nothing more than to see this distinction of things in its true light, to be persuaded, that in those three different things we may perceive a certain gradation, which here takes place among the works of nature, ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... to the Fair, "took it all in," and Samantha relates their experiences in her well-known quaint style. The characteristic illustrations of their adventures by C. Grunwald ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... pleasure," said Varney, with a sneer that habit had rendered familiar to his features, and which forms the principal characteristic which painters have assigned to that of Satan—"at your pleasure," he said; "you may enjoy your liberty and your studies until the daggers of Sussex's followers are clashing within your doublet and against your ribs." The old man turned pale, and Varney proceeded. "Wot ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... not what horrors of war might befall their city. Yet the Danes—as brave and noble a people as any upon earth—yielded not to despair. They bitterly felt the cruel nature of their position, and with characteristic fortitude and unflinching resolution, prepared to meet it. They might be conquered, and their capital given to the flames—they knew that; but undauntedly did they rely on their native bravery, and the justice of their cause; for they believed they ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... statement is open to question. It is certain, however, that in the House of Commons the Whigs habitually alluded to Washington's army as "our army," and to the American cause as "the cause of liberty;" and Burke, with characteristic vehemence, declared that he would rather be a prisoner in the Tower with Mr. Laurens than enjoy the blessings of freedom in company with the men who were seeking to enslave America. Still more, the ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... reached it, and the Dukes of Suffolk, Norfolk, and Richmond, together with the Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyat, and a few of their gentle men, rode back to meet him. They had scarcely, however, reached the foot of the hill when the royal party appeared in view, for the king with his characteristic impatience, on drawing near the castle, had urged his ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Your very gravedigger has forgotten his avocation in his electorship, and would quibble on the Franchise over Ophelia's grave, instead of more appropriately discussing the duration of bodies under ground. From this tendency, from this gradual attrition of life, in which everything pointed and characteristic is being rubbed down, till the whole world begins to slip between our fingers in smooth undistinguishable sands, from this, we say, it follows that we must not attempt to join Mr. Tatler in his simple division of students into Law, Divinity, and Medical. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... disastrous—one which equally accompanies great intellectual labors and minor tasks. I allude to worry. When we medical men speak of the workings of the brain we make use of a term both expressive and characteristic. It is to cerebrate. To cerebrate means to think, to reason, and to reach conclusions; it means to concentrate and to work hard. To think, then, is to cerebrate. To worry is ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... ferocious, indicating a character of daring and vindictive energy, and a disposition where forgiveness or remorse rarely tempered the fiercer passions. As he looked round the raven raised his head on a sudden, and peering at him with that curious and familiar eye so characteristic of the tribe, gave a loud and hollow croak, which again arrested the notice ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... advantage of the difference and fan the flame. Charles Duffy had messages conveyed to him, to the effect that a rumour was abroad charging him with treachery; and to John Mitchel, perhaps by the same agents of dissension, it was stated that he, too, was suspected. It is unfortunately characteristic of Irishmen to be suspicious; and it was the object of one of Mr. O'Connell's eternal lessons to perpetuate and extend this degrading national vice. Whether the representations made to either of these friends were the result of national prejudice, ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... sitting alone with his confessor and private chaplain, Father Ricardo, a man of middle age, middle height, attenuated form, round head with coarse black hair, piercing dark eyes, aquiline nose somewhat thick, and the loose mouth characteristic of devout Roman Catholics, High Church people, and others who are continually being wound up to worship an unseen Deity by means of sensuous enjoyment; the uncertain lines into which the lips fall in repose indicating fairly the habitual extent of their emotional indulgences. His manners were ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... him to me was how he could cherish on the one hand such devotion as he plainly did, to France, and on the other hand such a passionate attachment to the United States. In truth, that double patriotism is one of the characteristic features of ...
— In Madeira Place - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... and with an absence of that roguishness which was characteristic of her. Playful words, arch smiles, and a touch of coquetry had seemed natural to Nell; but now her grave tone and her almost wistful ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... and ready at an instant's call. Not brilliant in intellect, perhaps, but absolutely clear, and replete with expedients to meet every probable contingency, Howe exhibited an equable, unflagging energy, which was his greatest characteristic, and which eminently fitted him for the task of checkmating an enemy's every move—for a purely defensive campaign. He was always on hand and always ready; for he never wearied, and he knew his business. To great combinations ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... part which popular imagination had given him to play. His eyes were described as "steely" by a lady journalist, who had occasion to watch him during the sensational trial of Mrs. Lorimer. His chin she described later on in her article as "characteristic of a strong fighter." His manner in court was exceedingly severe. In private life, especially during his summer holiday, he tried not to look like a judge, and was always pleased when strangers mistook him for a country gentleman, the owner of a landed property. He had a broad figure, and emphasised ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... "self-help" corps. When a flood came and washed away the bridge leading to the picket line, no sapper was required to show them how to throw a suspension bridge above the flood from tree to cliff. It was characteristic of the Regiment that they carried out in war their peace training, never allowing the atmosphere of ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson
... he did not seem to mind. He carried his hands in the peculiar horizontal pockets of his trousers, and stuck out his figure, in a way to indicate that he gave permission to all to think of him exactly what they pleased. Those pockets were characteristic of the whole costume; their very name is unfamiliar to the twentieth century. They divide the garment by a fissure whose sides are kept together by many buttons, and a defection on the part of even a few buttons is apt to be inconvenient. ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... original features and in its adaptations from foreign sources, was reflected in that of the Jews." It would be interesting to analyze this important process of assimilation, but we can concern ourselves only with the works of the Jewish intellect. Again we meet, at the threshold of the period, a characteristic figure, the thinker Sa'adia, ranking high as author and religious philosopher, known also as a grammarian and a poet. He is followed by Sherira, to whom we owe the beginnings of a history of Talmudic literature, and his son Hai Gaon, a strictly orthodox ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... consist of only one person instead of two, and that one necessarily imperfect. You will regret it bitterly; but when at last you deign to open your eyes, the evil will be past cure. Do what we will, women do not, and never will, possess the qualities which are characteristic of men, and these qualities are absolutely indispensable to family life. Already Macumer, blinded though he is, has a dim foreshadowing of this future; he feels himself less a man through his love. His visit to Sardinia is a proof to me that he hopes by this ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... idea was a defensive occupation of the Colenso position, although Botha, with characteristic spirit, proposed to send a commando across the river to face the British on the open. The initiative, always a disadvantage when attacking an enemy strongly posted and entrenched, was thus imposed upon Buller. It was not doubted that he would be ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... be vested with a degree of intelligence rather above than below the average range of human intellect. Far from this, honest Jean could do little or nothing more than eat, drink, sleep, and grunt; in which respects she was totally unrivalled, and the effect of her proficiency in these characteristic qualities became daily more manifest. At first, as I have mentioned, when her name was called from any part of the ship, she would caper along, and dash impetuously up to the group by whom she was summoned. But after a time she became so excessively fat and lazy that it required many ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... station and the grocer's wagon which stood hitched in front of Mr. Hartman's door. But the sight of the little group of neighbors on the station platform was very gratifying to every one of the youthful Greenfields, and each proceeded to show her pleasure in her own characteristic way. This second farewell-taking was very brief, however, for down the tracks came the puffing train, stopping at the narrow platform only long enough for the laughing, chattering girls to climb aboard, before ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... was the change? It was hard to say. The long, thin figure was nerveless in its poses; the slender brown hand that had had a characteristic vigor, lying listlessly open on the arm of his chair, no longer looked capable of a tense, muscular grasp of life; the slightly elongated oval of the face, with its complexion and hair like the Japanese, ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... your characteristic touch of cruelty. We may as well part now and be done with it. But the children you cannot have. Remember that I relinquish none of my rights on this point. I demand that you surrender Edith at once ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... scale the true proportion of each loss from each cause can be accurately gauged at a glance. It will be seen that the Triple Entente and Japan have had no loss from capture or internment, that the Entente's characteristic of fighting has been "above board," i.e., by gunfire, while that of the enemy has been ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... vengeance, with the remorse of Hagen, is all true, and not exaggerated in motive. But while the motives are appreciated, it is not in the power of the poet to develop the exposition of them, to make them dramatically characteristic, as well as right in their general nature. It is just this dramatic ideal which is the ambition and inspiration of the other poet; the character of Brynhild has taken possession of his imagination, and requires to be expressed in characteristic speech. A whole poetical world is open to the ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... comparatively small defense allocation (1% of GDP) helped Japan advance with extraordinary rapidity to the rank of second-most-technologically-powerful economy in the world after the US and third-largest economy after the US and China. One notable characteristic of the economy is the working together of manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors in closely-knit groups called keiretsu. A second basic feature has been the guarantee of lifetime employment for a substantial portion of the urban labor force. Both features ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... vigilance is the price of liberty. The tendency of our own times, stimulated by scientific discoveries and their practical application, is to political consolidation, to the absorption of lesser communities in greater; just as disintegration was the leading characteristic of the darker ages. The scheme of Charlemagne to organize Europe into a single despotism was a brilliant failure because the forces which were driving human society into local and gradual reconstruction around various centres of crystallization: were irresistible to any ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and the desire for it. And yet, on the surface of things at least, the man had been nothing more than rude; as Cleggett watched the machine make off towards an isolated road house on the bayside he wondered at the quick intensity of his own antipathy. Unconsciously he flexed his wrist in his characteristic gesture. Scarcely knowing that ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... was unusual in those days—the finest woodwork was brought to a high polish, as well as all the brass utensils and steel fire-plates and dogs and such things. No two rooms were alike; each possessed some marked characteristic of its own—one bedroom, for example, was distinguished by its fourpost bed with its paintings on the canopy and head—another, by its little two-light high window with Adam and Eve in stained glass; another with a ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... back just in time to see another figure, carrying luggage, descend the steps and enter the car. He was still close enough to know that not a word was spoken nor a sound made; there was not even the familiar and usual bang of the automobile door. But a certain characteristic swing of the person with the luggage, as he passed one bag and then the other into the car, showed Tom that the figure was that of young Roscoe Bent. Then the car rolled away, leaving him gaping and speculating in the concealment of a ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... this be the relation of faith to reason, we see the explanation of what seems at first sight to the philosopher to be the most irritating and hypocritical characteristic of faith. It is always shifting its intellectual defences. It adopts this or that fashion of philosophical apology, and then, when this is shattered by some novel scientific generalisation of faith, probably after a passionate ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... the Templar, with his characteristic calmness, "a knight, Rebecca, must encounter his fate, whether it meet him in the shape of sword or flame—and who recks how or where a ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... tent stands out very distinctly by contrast against a dark horizon, and almost before he had left the ranch house yard the man on the impatient, mouse-coloured broncho knew that he had company; yet, characteristic in his every action, he did not hurry. Methodically he put up the pony in the new barn, fed and bedded him for the night. From the adjoining stall, out of the darkness, there came a nasal puppyish whine and the protest of a straining chain. Had it been daylight, an observer would ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... impossible to resist him, and so yielded with characteristic briskness of decision. "Very well, if you will let me dive from the boat afterwards. Hold tight, preux ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... ground, defending himself cleverly. Not one single blow from the powerful fist of Diaz reached him, Phil exhibiting the wonderful self-control that was characteristic of him. He even found opportunity to warn Teddy to get out of the tent until the tempest had ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... harmony, in art, as "a normal state of completeness in the relation of things to each other." This "state of completeness" in a harmonious scheme is such that we have no desire to change or modify any detail or characteristic. ...
— Applied Design for Printers - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #43 • Harry Lawrence Gage
... and wide, even into domains where the king's authority did not reach. Much of the Code is occupied with regulating the relations between the merchant and his agent. The agency was that form of commenda which is so characteristic of the East at the present. The agent takes stock or money of his principal, signs for it, agrees to pay so much profit, and goes off to seek a market, making what profit he can. There is much ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... it appeared—the son of a celebrated litterateur of a past day—had called to show some beautiful drawings by the celebrated "Dicky" Doyle, a relation of Dr. Conan Doyle. With Mr. Newnes—and it is thoroughly characteristic of the man—to close with a good bargain is but the work of a moment, and therefore I was not surprised, as he placed the dainty pictures before me, to learn that he had purchased them for reproduction in his world-famed magazine. After luncheon, Mr. Newnes suggested ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... with characteristic eagerness to the invitation. "Shall I? But won't Maud mind? Do ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... outlines of the body could be traced, even the features, these having that unnaturally sharp definition which seems to belong to faces of the dead, but is really characteristic of those only that have been wasted by disease. From the silence of the room one would rightly have inferred that it was not in the front of the house, facing a street. It really faced nothing ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... tribes on the middle Columbia was the measles. The disease was commonly fatal among them, owing largely to the manner of treatment. When an Indian began to show the fever which is characteristic of the disease, he was put into and inclosed in a hot clay oven. As soon as he was covered with a profuse perspiration he was let out, to leap into the cold waters of the Columbia. Usually the ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... easily acquired, it has very little beauty. It is not for the sake of that commonplace usefulness that we should care to spend trouble upon permanent foundations in any tongue. The mind is satisfied only by the genius of the language, its choicest forms, its characteristic movement, and, most of all, the possession of its literature from within, that is to say of the spirit as it speaks to its own, and in which the language ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... manifest; it is meant as a witness to others and ourselves; it must find expression in the external, if internally it is to be real and strong. It is the characteristic of a symbolic action that it not merely expresses a feeling, but nourishes and strengthens the feeling to which it corresponds. When the soul enters the fellowship of God, it feels the need of external separation, ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... the biographers of Knox, have not taken the trouble to unravel this question of the treaty of July 24. But the behaviour of the Lords and of Knox seems characteristic, ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... of Pushkin's career that the mighty star of Byron first rose, like some glittering, but irregular comet, above the literary horizon of Europe. The genius of the Russian poet had far too many points of resemblance, in many of its most characteristic peculiarities, with the Muse of the Noble Childe, for us to be surprised at the circumstance that the new and brilliant productions of Byron should have a powerful influence on so congenial a mind ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... always one of the sources of power of the Emperor Napoleon, and perhaps the rarest among them, that the marvellous fecundity of his mind, and the inexhaustible variety of the projects and conceptions which he was constantly turning over, reciprocally sustained and complemented each other. This characteristic of his genius has been ignored; and little honor has been done to his foresight when he has been depicted as taken in some degree unawares by the failure of his maritime plans, and constrained to improvise by a supreme ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... This characteristic scruple in the lawyer gave him a high standing in his profession, and naturally led to success at the bar, besides winning for him the respect and admiration of troops of warm ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... far as that goes it follows almost necessarily from my views upon aristocracy and democracy that I declare for the conventional equality of women, that is to say for the determination to make neither sex nor any sexual characteristic a standard of superiority or inferiority, for the view that a woman is a person as important and necessary, as much to be consulted, and entitled to as much freedom of action as a man. I admit that this decision is a choice into which temperament enters, that I cannot produce compelling ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... a characteristic of frontier life that one learns to face facts. June looked at them now, clear-eyed, despair in her heart. As she walked beside Jake to the corral, as she waited for him to hitch up the broncos, as ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... and unpretentious building, which was largely due to the munificence of Archbishop Laud, was begun in 1635 and finished two years later. It cost, with the buildings above, about L4,200. Its dreary late-Gothic windows and heavy tracery, and the Spartan severity of its unbacked benches, are characteristic of the time of transition, alike architectural and religious, to which it belongs. It has been from that time to this the Parliament House of the University, where all matters are first discussed by the Congregation of resident Doctors and Masters; ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... a chase? To all appearance, yes; a probability strengthened by the relative size and character of the vessels. One is a barque, polacca-masted, her masts raking back with the acute shark's-fin set supposed to be characteristic of piratical craft. The other is a ship, square-rigged and full sized; a row of real, not painted, ports, with a gun grinning out of each, proclaiming ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... tertulias his mother attended evenings in his company, it was enough for him to recite a fable or get off some piece of learning characteristic of a studious child eager to bring his school work into the conversation, for the women to rush upon him and ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... as in the time of Wang Mang. And once more, as then, a popular movement broke out, that of the so-called "Yellow Turbans". This was the first of the two important events. This popular movement had a characteristic which from now on became typical of all these risings of the people. The intellectual leaders of the movement, Chang Ling and others, were members of a particular religious sect. This sect was influenced by Iranian Mazdaism on the one side ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... desolate home, tore it into a thousand shreds. There was something characteristic of her husband in these little honourable scruples that cut her to the heart. "Why didn't he read it?" she repeated, wringing her hands and walking up and down the room. "He knows Mr. Stanmore quite well. Why didn't he read it? and then he would have ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... glee with a characteristic cheer or yell, that at once set fire to the easily inflamed spirits of the dogs, causing them to resume their excited gambols and furious barking. This effectually stopped the ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... of study of this question of prostitution I learned to know personally many of the characteristic White Slaves of the West and South Side "levees." One "Alice" I shall never, never forget. Beautiful aside from her dissipation, a high school graduate, grammar and syntax perfect, manner exquisite. "Alice," seduced at eighteen, was at the age of twenty-one away down the line in ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... preserved, or the same confidence might not be felt in its preservation, in a country whose legislators are more possessed (as is apt to be the case on the Continent) with the mania for uniformity. A people having that unbounded toleration which is characteristic of this country for every description of anomaly, so long as those whose interests it concerns do not feel aggrieved by it, afforded an exceptionally advantageous field for trying this difficult experiment. In most countries, if it was an object to retain different systems of law, it might ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... written accepting the invitation. As that from the tailor to the lord was short and characteristic it ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... additional flavour to his style, since they present few difficulties to the modern reader, and yet sound like echoes from the earlier periods of the language. Generally he is content to follow his author with almost plodding fidelity, but occasionally he makes additions which are eminently characteristic. His author having remarked:—"Il nest an Jour Duy nulle chose qui tant grieue Rome ne ytalie come fait le college Des notaires publiques Car ilz ne sont mie en accort ensemble"—Caxton improves ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... absolutely the same individuals with Jupiter, Venus, and Cupid as Odysseus undoubtedly is with Ulysses—still I cannot see why, in making a version of (say) Theocritus, one should not use by way of preference those names by which he invariably called them, and which are characteristic of him: why, in turning a Greek author into English, we should begin by turning all the proper names into Latin. Professor Blackie's authoritative statement[H] that "there are whole idylls in Theocritus which would ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... which in many places was tawny yellow. Along the river bank grew tall reeds, sedges and rushes. Beyond the plain, and beyond the blue waters, rose the Island of Euboea, and ranges of mountains, those mountains of Greece which are so characteristic in their unpretentious bareness, which neither overwhelm nor entice, but which are unfailingly delicate, unfailing beautiful, quietly, almost gently, noble. In the distance, when he turned his head, Dion could see the little Albanian village of Marathon, a huddle of tiny houses far off ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... tender, and kind. The gray hair was arranged in rows of little quaint old-fashioned curls on either side of the head, under a plain lace cap. At one corner of the mouth there was a mark, apparently a mole, which added to the characteristic peculiarity of the face. I looked and looked, fixing the portrait thoroughly in my mind. This woman, who had almost insulted me and my relatives, was, beyond all doubt or dispute, so far as appearances went, a person possessing unusual attractions—a person ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... for the present, I must say 'nay.' I am resolved to be a home-body the coming year, with the exception of attending the celebration of Mrs. Stanton's eightieth birthday and our regular Washington convention." Among the characteristic short letters is this to Dr. Sarah Hackett Stevenson, of Chicago, who had asked for a word of encouragement in regard to a hospital she was founding for mothers whose children were born ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... in awaking him, and then flew back to try and save some of her own treasures. The first thing she thought of was her portfolio of drawings, which she dragged outside; but it had already been partially burned, and most of the valuable and characteristic sketches she had made at the different durbars were destroyed. She next tried to rescue her jewels, many of which she had worn the night before; her pearls were lying on the dressing-table, and she was only just in time to save them; one of the strings had caught ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... and spirit is, in the nature of the case, far more difficult to determine. It is possible that some court-plays may show the influence of the artificial arrangement of characters and the conventional play of motives characteristic of the pastoral drama. But it is a matter of the greatest difficulty to analyse with certainty such structural peculiarities as these, still more so to assign them with confidence to their proper origin. Many characteristics which one ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... over him. Then he watched and listened. The cedar-wood burned with a clear flame, and occasionally snapped out a red spark. The voices of the Navajos, scarcely audible, sounded "toa's" and "taa's"—syllables he soon learned were characteristic and dominant—in low, deep murmurs. It reminded Hare of something that before had been pleasant to his ear. Then it came to mind: a remembrance of Mescal's sweet voice, and that recalled the kinship between her and the Navajo chieftain. ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... infirmity, weakness, age, or youth cannot support themselves. There is room, I think, in the world for both kinds of individualist, though the contemplative individualists are in the minority; and perhaps it must be so, because a certain lassitude is characteristic of them. If they were in the majority in any nation, one would have a simple, patient, unambitious race, who would tend to become the subjects of other more vigorous nations: our Indian empire is a case in point. Probably China is a similar ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is one of the most picturesque rivers of North America. Its name is indeed characteristic: the word Genesee being formed from the Indian for Pleasant Valley, which term is very descriptive of the river and its vicinity. Its falls have not the majestic extent of the Niagara; but their beauty compensates for the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... This impersonality is perhaps a later characteristic. The original form of the Chinese character for T'ien Heaven represented a man. The old Finnish and Samoyede names for God—Ukko and Num—perhaps belong to ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... of virtues to be cultivated. This zeal for righteousness marks the character of Paul both before and after his conversion. Nay, it explains his conversion. "Into this spirit, so possessed with the hunger and thirst for righteousness, and precisely because it was so possessed by it, the characteristic doctrines of Christ, which brought a new aliment to feed this hunger and thirst—of Christ, whom he had never seen, but who was in every one's words and thoughts, the Teacher who was meek and lowly in heart, who said men were brothers and must love one another, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... parts: Tiflis properly so called, or the ancient town; Kala, or the citadel; and the suburb of Issni. This town is built on the Kur, and the greater part of its outer walls is now in ruins. Its streets are so narrow, that 'arbas,' as the lofty carriages so characteristic of Oriental places are called, could only pass with difficulty down the widest, whilst in the others a horseman would barely find room to ride. The houses, badly built of flints and bricks cemented with mud, never last longer than about fifteen years." In Klaproth's ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... His delicate body soon sank under the hardships of his terrible existence. One day while sweeping the streets he ruptured a blood-vessel and died there, with no mourners save his fellow-criminals.—See Hubner ii., pp. 583-591. "Characteristic and Historical Anecdotes of Joseph II." "Friedel's Letters from Vienna," vol. ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... audience. Some of his university admirers, who appreciated academic honors more than the musician did, urged him to accept the degree of Doctor of Music, for which he would have to pay a small fee. The characteristic reply was a Parthian arrow: "Vat te tevil I trow my money away for dat vich the blockhead ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... for in the background the minor characters in the little drama had filled a role all their own. In the doorway stood Harrison, bound to witness the outcome of her master-stroke and experiencing no small triumph in it. Behind her Mammy, with characteristic African emotion, was doing a veritable camp-meeting song of praise, though it was a voiceless song, only her motions indicating that her lips were forming the words, "Praise de Lawd! Praise Him!" as she ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... age of eighty. The young duke admired women, but he placed them too high and respected them too much; in fact, he adored them, and was only at his ease with those whom he could not respect. This characteristic caused him to lead a double life. He found compensation with women of easy virtue for the worship to which he surrendered himself in the salons, or, if you like, the boudoirs, of the faubourg Saint-Germain. Such habits and his puny figure, his suffering face with its blue eyes turning ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... operations the present volume must appeal as forecasting movements strictly within the bounds of actuality. A literal translation is all that has been attempted, with absolutely no embellishment to make it "popular" or easy reading. With characteristic bluntness this German officer brushes aside non-essentials and goes to the main point in daring fashion. For that very reason it is exceedingly pertinent ...
— Operations Upon the Sea - A Study • Franz Edelsheim
... suggestion without hesitation. It was common enough for the pickets on either side to grow friendly both before and after those terrific but indecisive battles so characteristic of the Civil War, a habit in which the subordinate officers sometimes shared while those of a higher rank closed their eyes. It did no military injury, and contributed somewhat to the smoothness ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... have been accustomed to them from infancy; so that, upon the whole, his household presents one of the few tolerable specimens that can now be met with, of the establishment of an English country gentleman of the old school. By the by, the servants are not the least characteristic part of the household; the housekeeper, for instance, has been born and brought up at the Hall, and has never been twenty miles from it; yet she has a stately air that would not disgrace a lady that had figured at the court of ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... overflowed the uneven brick pavement to the asphalt was characteristic: women in calico, drudges, women in wrappers, with sleepy, awestricken faces; idlers, men and boys who had run out of the saloons, whose comments were more audible and caustic, and a fringe of children ceaselessly moving on the outskirts. The crowd parted at their approach, and they reached ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Scott in the 'Discovery' in November 1901. He, with several naturalists, landed on the eastern side to collect specimens, but remained only a few hours. He refers to the penguins, kelp-weed and tussock grass; certainly three characteristic features. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... genuinely, respectably, marital relation. He told me that after his interview at the Embassy he would have thrown everything up, would have tried to sell his shop, and leave the country, only he felt certain that his wife would not even hear of going abroad. Nothing could be more characteristic of the respectable bond than that," went on, with a touch of grimness, the Assistant Commissioner, whose own wife too had refused to hear of going abroad. "Yes, a genuine wife. And the victim was a genuine brother-in-law. ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... orphaned nephew of Sir Gilbert Faversham, is a wholesomely mischievous lad who nevertheless has the beautiful faith and love for the Saviour so characteristic of the early sixteenth century Christians. How he saves the fortress of Rhodes from the besieging Turks, is later betrayed, captured and tortured by them in the hope that he may be made to turn traitor and apostate, and ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... to read letters from John Quincy Adams, Thaddeus Stevens, Gerrit Smith, Theodore Weld, and others, who had been invited to deliver addresses, but who, from various causes, were obliged to decline. That from Weld was characteristic of the earnestness of the man. After stating that for a year and a half he had been prevented from speaking in public on account of an affection of the throat, and must therefore decline the invitation of the committee, ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... this policy was a measure of Napoleon's already referred to, but little known. In some respects it was more successful than any other; it certainly is most characteristic of the man. The evil aimed at was cured at the time, and the permanent question is less acute in modern France than in any other European country. For years past there had been chronic distress among the agricultural classes in some of the most fertile districts of France, notably ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Tumblers, namely, a splash cock and kite hen (neither of which are blue or barred), and from the first nest he got a perfect blue bird, and from the second a silver or pale blue bird, both of which, in accordance with all analogy, no doubt presented the usual characteristic marks. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... enrolled Spenser in that band and order of poets,—with one exception, not the greatest order,—to whom the wonderful passion of love, in its heights and its depths, is the element on which their imagination works, and out of which it moulds its most beautiful and characteristic creations. ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... apostasy out to hire.(44) The paper left behind him, called Thoughts on Religion, is merely a set of excuses for not professing disbelief. He says of his sermons that he preached pamphlets: they have scarce a Christian characteristic; they might be preached from the steps of a synagogue, or the floor of a mosque, or the box of a coffee-house almost. There is little or no cant—he is too great and too proud for that; and, in so far as the badness ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... case, Bentley thought, the Mind Master would take action during the first hours of darkness. Bentley was gambling desperately on what he knew to be characteristic of ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... hold. The men as usual trooped in, and the room was crowded; the scene was a striking one. Fine stalwart men to the number of sixty were present—free rovers of the sea, men who never call any one master, with all the characteristic independence and even dignity of those who follow the sea. There was present the coxswain of the lifeboat, and there were present also most of the men who manned the lifeboat a few hours afterwards. In every man's face was written the story of dangers conquered, and a lifelong ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... not want to make out your bird the first time; the book or your friend must not make the problem too easy for you. You must go again and again, and see and hear your bird under varying conditions and get a good hold of several of its characteristic traits. Things easily learned are apt to be easily forgotten. Some ladies, beginning the study of birds, once wrote to me, asking if I would not please come and help them, and set them right about certain birds in dispute. I replied that that would be getting their knowledge too ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... the cabinet of a lover of Folk-lore are two quaint and humble memorials by which two "inglorious Miltons" have perpetuated their affection, each in characteristic sort. The one was a potter; the other, probably, a shepherd. The "pignus amoris" of the former is a small earthenware vessel in the shape of a book, intended apparently to hold a "nosegay" of flowers. The book ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... poplars—the poplars are very characteristic, dear. And the women toilers in the sunset fields garnering up the golden grain. You might exclaim, 'Why are they always in blue?' Have ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the employment and effects of the one offensive maritime measure left open by the exigencies of the war; the cruises directed against the enemy's commerce, and the characteristic incidents to which they gave rise. In this pursuit were engaged both the national ships of war and those equipped by the enterprise of the mercantile community; but, as the operations were in their nature more consonant to the proper purpose of privateers, so the far ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... way was through woods: at the bottom of the slope we found ourselves by a fine brook, which we forded. Then began an ascent as precipitous, slippery and unpleasant. The trail followed the bank of the stream. Passing through a dense jungle of vegetation, where the air was hot and wet, the flora was characteristic. Trees with large, coarse, broad pods enclosing two or three great seeds, trees with acorn-shaped red fruits, quantities of sensitive plants covered with pink flowers, occasional orchids bearing flowers ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... thus extending back into the regions of doubt and fable; neither did I conceive I was committing any grievous historical sin in helping out the few facts I could collect in this remote and forgotten region with figments of my own brain, or in giving characteristic attributes to the few names connected with it which I might ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... struck with the simple and earnest strain of devotion which this letter breathed. It was but indifferently written and spelt. But this the rather tended to endear the hitherto unknown writer, as it seemed characteristic of the union of humbleness of station with eminence of piety. I felt quite thankful that I was favoured with a correspondent of this description; the more so, as such characters were at that time very rare in the neighbourhood. I have often wished that epistolary intercourse of this kind were ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... transformation, and at an early age he hastened to put it in training. All day long he was pulling faces. As an artist will sketch everything he comes across, so Mike would endeavour to imitate any characteristic expression or attitude, animate or inanimate, in the world around him. Dogs, little boys, and grotesque old men were his special delight, and of all his elders he had, it goes without saying, a private gallery of irreverently ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... on the flange above its normal position opposite the web of the ring, and resulted usually in the breaking out of a piece of the flange or in several radiating cracks with or without a depression of the flange. These breaks were very characteristic, and the cause was readily recognizable, even though the intruding substance was ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • James H. Brace, Francis Mason and S. H. Woodard
... a strong work ethic, mastery of high technology, and a comparatively small defense allocation (1% of GDP) have helped Japan advance with extraordinary rapidity to the rank of second most powerful economy in the world. One notable characteristic of the economy is the working together of manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors in closely knit groups called keiretsu. A second basic feature has been the guarantee of lifetime employment for a substantial portion of the urban ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... such daydreaming in our precarious condition. Face the facts as they exist in the present. After we kick the aliens out of our solar system, maybe we can go back to the old ideas again. Maybe. I'm not even very sure of that. But as for now, the characteristic of despair is the lowest common denominator among the combat patrols, and we therefore have mutinies, disobedience of orders, defections of every variety. That is a real situation, and it will persist until we can induce ...
— Shock Absorber • E.G. von Wald
... (nature), its characteristics, and its source, I have, ye learned Brahmanas, declared to you, accurately and in due order, everything about (the quality of) Darkness. Who is there that truly understands it? Who is there that truly sees it? That, indeed, is the characteristic of Darkness, viz., the beholding of reality in what is not real. The qualities of Darkness have been declared to you in various ways. Duly has Darkness, in its higher and lower forms, been described to you. That man who always bears in mind the qualities mentioned here, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... been silent about herself and her past, but they found a letter from one of her old schoolmates asking about teachers' salaries in the West, and they wrote to her begging her to make known my mother's condition to her relatives if any were living. At length came a letter from grandfather—characteristic to the last. The old home was there, for her and for her children, but no home for the traitor, as he called father. She must give him up even to his name. No Bogardus could ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... hot iron, to know them again if they escape. This is the treatment bestowed on those "who save other men the labour of sowing, tilling, and reaping."* (* La Bruyere Caracteres edition 1765 chapter 11 page 300. I will here cite a passage strongly characteristic of La Bruyere's benevolent feeling for his fellow-creatures. "We find (under the torrid zone) certain wild animals, male and female, scattered through the country, black, livid, and all over scorched by the sun, bent to the earth which ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... these rich materials plainly appear mixed with the mould." It is not strange, if this were the case, that the natives—who, though apparently gentle and well disposed, were barbarians—should naturally have possessed the taste so characteristic of a barbarous people, and have loved to decorate themselves even lavishly with ornaments rudely fashioned in this rare metal. Yet they seemed to know little of its value, and to care less for it than for fuss and feathers. Either they were a ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... Vinci and others have imposed upon the world, for Christ, to begin with, must be a Jew. And even when, in the course of my researches for a Jewish model, I became aware that there were blonde types, too, these seemed to me essentially Teutonic. A characteristic of the Oriental face, as I figured it, was a sombre majesty, as of the rabbis of Rembrandt, the very antithesis of the ruddy gods of Walhalla. The characteristic Jewish face must suggest more of the Arab ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... he stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable to Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation. No more characteristic instance could be found than in the family of Kirstie Elliott. They were all, and Kirstie the first of all, ready and eager to pour forth the particulars of their genealogy, embellished with every detail that memory had handed down or ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... suggestive characteristic of the time,—another of its promises. So far we find Progress gathering fulness and strength,—making sure of itself. It has also been gathering impetus. It has been, all along, accumulating momentum, and now it sweeps on with breathless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... at home?" asked Sarah Brown, after a pause, during which she made her characteristic effort to remember what she ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... have, therefore, to consider first of all is fundamentally: What is Man? What is a man? What is a human being? What is the defining or characteristic mark of humanity? To this question two answers and only two have been given in the course of the ages, and they are both of them current to-day. One of the answers is biological—man is an animal, a certain kind of animal; the other answer is a mixture partly biological and partly mythological ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... temptation to transcend proper limits in quoting from this most characteristic production ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... at Pyrford was a spider whose appearances have been oftenest noted at Hampton Court. These creatures, large, black, and horrific, were accordingly known as 'Hampton Courters,' but received no welcome, being slain on sight, their slayer quoting a characteristic saying which he had heard ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... counts her full share of fearless truth-seekers in most departments of inquiry, yet there is on the whole no weakening, but a rather marked confirmation, of what has become an inveterate national characteristic, and has long been recognised as such; a profound distrust, namely, of all general principles; a profound dislike both of much reference to them, and of any disposition to invest them with practical authority; and a silent but most pertinacious ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... answered, and he wished Frank to hear from him. After various preparations, he at last got settled down to his task, and, before the evening was over, a letter was written. As the first letter which Dick had ever produced, and because it was characteristic of him, my readers ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... soil are found that are well adapted for fruit-growing, but they all have one general characteristic which is a sine qua non of success—viz., they must possess good natural drainage, so that there is no danger of their becoming waterlogged or soured during periods of continued or heavy rainfall, as these conditions are fatal to fruit culture under tropical and semi-tropical ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson
... information about Gray's Ode, I send an entertaining and very characteristic circumstance told in Mrs. Bigg's (anonymous) Residence in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 32, June 8, 1850 • Various
... he, as a staunch Whig detested, made it one of their complaints against him that he built palaces for farmhouses. At first he met with that stolid opposition to progress which seems the particular characteristic of the farmer. For sixteen years no one followed him in the use of the drill, though it was no new thing; and when it was adopted he reckoned its use spread at the rate of a mile a year. Yet eventually he had his reward; his estate came to command the pick of English tenant farmers, ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... is often lost sight of, but which, if it should lose this, would find itself paralyzed; and in trade, and in the mechanic's shop, gives that honesty in performance, that thoroughness and solidity of work, which is a national characteristic. This conscience is one element, and the other is that loyal adhesion, that habit of friendship, that homage of man to man, running through all classes,—the electing of worthy persons to a certain ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... assemblage of the inhabitants of this City were present at what we consider to be one of the most important and interesting ceremonies lately witnessed in this part of the Province. Though there was none of the gaudy appearance and display characteristic of religious or Masonic Processions, yet to the mind of the philosopher and friend of education, the simple and appropriate ceremony, an account of which we are about to lay before our readers, presented more charms than if decked out with all the ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... imported a resolute cheerfulness into all that he did. The man, as I have said, was not in any way distinguished, but there can be no doubt that the thought of his heavenly smile was a very sustaining one, and that the sense of responsibility that the possession of such a characteristic gave him, undoubtedly made him endeavour to smile like the Cheshire Cat, when he did not feel ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... among the greatest writings of the Old Testament. While there is a powerful argument running through them all, the logic is not cumulative but rather moves in a spiral, frequently returning to the same subject but having a gradual onward movement. It is the characteristic Oriental method of thinking, which is the opposite of that of the Western world. These poems are grouped into three cycles which apparently represent the prophet's thinking during succeeding periods. The first cycle is ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... the highlands of Tiflis, Louise possessed all of the unreasoning bigotry characteristic of the people inhabiting that region. She was religious to the very depths of superstition, and she chose Lubny for a dwelling-place, less for its resemblance to the sunny hills of her native province than for its proximity to several ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... is fully transformed, changes his shape, acquires wings and wing-cases; nevertheless, like the female, he possesses, from the time when he is hatched, the pale lamp of the end segment. This luminous aspect of the stern is characteristic of the entire Glow-worm tribe, independently of sex and season. It appears upon the budding grub and continues throughout life unchanged. And we must not forget to add that it is visible on the dorsal as well as on the ventral surface, whereas the two large belts peculiar ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... leading characteristic of Thomas Henry Hall Caine as a man, just as extreme conscientiousness is his leading characteristic as a writer. He possesses in a high degree the sense of the responsibility which an author owes to the public and to himself. ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... them the superfluous wealth of the State. And public benefactors, in turn, had statues erected to their memory by their grateful admirers. The genius of the age expressed itself in marble histories. And these histories stand in the mystery of absolute perfection—the glory and the characteristic of a great and ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... several French-Canadian women were in the church, crouched at the feet of the marble statue of the Virgin, near the gorgeous altar. As the church door complainingly opened and disclosed the wet, weary figure of little Mother Soulard, the worshippers, with that lack of curiosity so characteristic of French-Canadian women when in church, did not look up, nor even appear to notice her as she crowded past them, and also knelt before the statue that had given such wonderful answers to prayer. Devoutly ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... eager to be at his enemy, and moving with his characteristic energy—Jackson sent a small force down to make a night attack on the British camp; also a schooner, heavily armed with cannon, to co-operate from the river. It was a wild and inconsequent fight; but it checked the advance of the British, who now were still more impressed with the need of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... was neither eating nor talking, which was far from pleasant to behold. He was very much esteemed by Mr. Carter, nevertheless; not so much because he was clever, as because he looked so eminently stupid. This last characteristic had won for him the sobriquet of Sawney Tom, and he was considered worth his weight in sovereigns on certain occasions, when a simple country lad or a verdant-looking linen-draper's apprentice was required to enact some little part in the ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... network of creeks, here surrounds a large island upon which stand the ruins of the famous city which was for more than four centuries the capital of Siam. The bulk of the inhabitants live in the floating houses characteristic of lower Siam, using as thoroughfares the creeks to the edges of which the houses are moored. The ruins of the old city are of great archaeological interest, as are the relics, of which a large collection is housed in the local museum. Outside the town ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... of these opiates my soul gradually settled into a sort of pleasing pensive melancholy. Has it not been said, that melancholy is a characteristic of genius? I make no pretensions to genius: but I am persuaded that melancholy is the habitual, perhaps the natural state of those who have the misfortune to feel ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... (1% of GDP) have helped Japan advance with extraordinary rapidity to the rank of second most technologically powerful economy in the world after the US and third largest economy in the world after the US and China. One notable characteristic of the economy is the working together of manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors in closely-knit groups called keiretsu. A second basic feature has been the guarantee of lifetime employment for a substantial portion of the urban labor force. Both features are now ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... them tacitly ignored. In the end they decided that it might be wiser not to conceal Audrey's knowledge of the existence of a second key; and they told Mr. Cowl, because he happened to be at hand. In so doing they were ill-advised, because Mr. Cowl at once acted in a characteristic and inconvenient fashion which they ought to ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... I have so far tried to indicate will have to be frequently noticed in the course of the following pages. One point may be emphasised before proceeding: a main characteristic of the whole social and political order is what is now called its 'individualism.' That phrase is generally supposed to convey some censure. It may connote, however, some of the most essential virtues that a race can possess. Energy, self-reliance, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... overjoyed. In private talk with Harvey she sang the praises of her step-daughter, whom, she declared, any man might be proud to have won. For Alma herself had so much pride; the characteristic, said Mrs. Frothingham, which had put dangers in her path, and ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... remarkable and interesting person. He stood about Sir Charles's own height, but was slimmer and straighter, with an aquiline nose, strangely piercing eyes, very large black pupils, and a finely-chiselled close-shaven face, like the bust of Antinous in our hall in Mayfair. What gave him his most characteristic touch, however, was his odd head of hair, curly and wavy like Paderewski's, standing out in a halo round his high white forehead and his delicate profile. I could see at a glance why he succeeded so well in impressing ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... is a monument to some members of the Thrale family who died between 1676 and 1704, adorned with a shield of arms and a crest on a ducal coronet. Mrs. Thrale's marginal note on Boswell's account of her husband's family is curious and characteristic: ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... think I could touch it," confessed Rod; "but I was bound to try my handsomest for it." Which was characteristic of the ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... felo de se, he had ordered all his other actions with a carelessness arguing one of three things: cynical indifference to the actual outcome of his false clue; sublime faith in the stupidity of the police; or a stupidity of his own as crass as that said to be characteristic of the ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... companions of elderly spinsters; therefore, if there are many of the latter, there will be more cats, fewer field-mice, more bees, richer clover fields, and finer cattle! Each link is real and the whole chain is a characteristic example of the countless ways that the natural destinies of living ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... Greece exactly as they appeared to their contemporaries, Faustus obligingly yielded to the proposal. The heroes of the Trojan war walked in procession before the astonished auditors, no less lively in the representation than Helen had been shewn before, and each of them with some characteristic attitude ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... our days. Jerrold did not know the successful men who presided over it. He had no patrons; and he had few friends. The isolation and poverty in which he formed his mind and style deepened the peculiarity which was a characteristic of these. They gave to his genius that intense and eccentric character which it has; and no doubt (for Fortune has a way of compensating) the chill they breathed on the fruits of his young nature enriched their ripeness, as a touch of frost does with plums. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... France bears the characteristic name of Chanson de Geste, or song of deed, because the trouveres in the north and the troubadours in the south wandered from castle to castle singing the prowesses of the lords and of their ancestors, whose reputations they thus made or ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... more characteristic of that life than its extreme fluidity. The Japanese population represents a medium whose particles are in perpetual circulation. The motion is in itself peculiar. It is larger and more eccentric than the motion of Occidental populations, though feebler ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... stood by while Romulus made this speech, their countenances animated with excitement and pleasure. The maidens themselves seemed much inclined to yield to their fate. Their resentment gradually subsided. It has been, in fact, in all ages, characteristic of women to be easily led to excuse and forgive any wrong on the part of another which is prompted by love for herself: and these injured maidens seemed gradually to come to the conclusion, that considering all the circumstances of the case their abductors were ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... inherited many of the traits which for a thousand years had been characteristic of the Phoenicians. It was a vast business-house, protected by a strong navy, indifferent to most of the finer aspects of life. The city and the surrounding country and the distant colonies were all ruled by a small but exceedingly powerful group ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... silently erect. Her chief personal characteristic was that air of hot-house fragility so often seen in American girls, but in that silence her chin squared, her lips set, the delicate brows contracted in a beetling frown. It was no longer the face of a girl of two-and-twenty which confronted the spinster across the ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... "like the rhythm of a song," {euruthmon}. See Mr. Ruskin's most appropriate note ("Bib. Past." i. 59), "A remarkable word, as significant of the complete rhythm ({ruthmos}) whether of sound or motion, that was so great a characteristic of the Greek ideal (cf. xi. 16, {metarruthmizo})," and much more ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... finish. Raising his head, he gazed across the river for a few minutes with that stony fixity of attention which is a characteristic of his kind. But for the ruffling of his black mane to the touch of the passing breeze he might have been wrought from golden bronze, so motionless, so statuesque ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... under the egis of the Russian throne is perfectly evident to them; they know that it is the Russian Government which has resuscitated the Finnish race, systematically crushed down as it had been in the days of Swedish power. The more prudent among the Finlanders realize that now, as before, the characteristic local organization of Finland remains unaltered, that the laws which guarantee the provincial autonomy of Finland are still preserved, and that now, as before, the institutions are active which satisfy its social and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
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