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More "Focus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lifeboat tore upward through the air at the highest permissible atmospheric velocity Bradley and Clio peered over Costigan's shoulders into the plate, watching in absorbed interest the scene which was being kept in focus upon it. The Nevian ship of space was plunging downward in a long, slanting dive, her terrific beams of force screaming out ahead of her. The rays of the little lifeboat had boiled the waters of the ocean; those of the parent craft seemed literally ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... armatures get badly imposed upon." Here were patent gimcrack printing devices, although he had scarce anything worth printing; all sorts of atrocious fancy borders with which he sought in vain to embellish out-of-focus under-exposures; orthochromatic filters and colour screens with which he was eliminating undesirable rays, although the chief thing his negatives lacked was light of any kind. His soiled and stained development trays were scattered about a large table amidst ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... they are, to a large extent, woven out of innumerable threads of filmy texture, and there are many indications of spiral tendencies. Each of the bright stars of the group — Alcyone, Merope, Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Atlas — is the focus of a dense fog (totally invisible, remember, alike to the naked eye and to the telescope), and these particular stars are veiled from sight behind the strange mists. Running in all directions across the relatively open spaces are nebulous wisps ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... of physiology at Berlin University and physician to the imperial household, found himself, when the war broke out, in the very focus of the madness which seized the flower of his nation. Not merely did he refuse to share that madness. Yet more daring, he openly resisted it. In reply to the manifesto of the 93 intellectuals, published in the beginning of October, 1914, he wrote a counter-manifesto, An Appeal to Europeans, which ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... against, despite of all our precautions, be introduced amongst us, measures better calculated for the destruction of a community, could scarcely be devised, than the ancient quarantine regulations; for they certainly would convert every house proscribed by their mark, into a den and focus of the most concentrated pestilential contagion, ensuring fearful retribution upon those who had thus so blindly shut them up. The mark alone, besides being equivalent to a sentence of death upon all the inmates, would effect ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... so far, that it is possible by just a touch to convert the noblest sentiment into commonplace. No more than a touch is necessary. The parabolic mirror will reflect the star to a perfect focus. The elliptical mirror, varying from the parabola by less than the breadth of a hair, throws an image which is useless. But Mr. Cardew was far more wrong than he was right. He did not take into account that what his wife said and what she felt might not ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... 1. The difficulty of giving surface to smooth water. 355 Sec. 2. Is dependent on the structure of the eye, and the focus by which the reflected rays are perceived. 355 Sec. 3. Morbid clearness occasioned in painting of water by distinctness of reflections. 356 Sec. 4. How avoided by Turner. 357 Sec. 5. All reflections on distant water are ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... that she could have so ignored the very focus of her former ambition. Then she felt shame at her unpreparedness. She caught the evening paper out of her husband's lap to find the date. November ninth and not a Christmas thing begun. Yet a few days and the news-stands would have apprised her that Christmas ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... Bacteriologist; "perhaps the microscope is out of focus for you. Eyes vary so much. Just the fraction of a ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... reform is by no means complete. There is room and call for further concessions in favor of the masses. These embryo statesmen have work blocked out for them in the future, and this is a good place for them to adjust to it the focus of their bright ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... by the Persians, and the constant reports and tributes sent from every province to the central court of the king, were well calculated to bring to it, as to a focus, the curious lore of the various nations who came in contact with or ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... three honest witnesses of a simple brawl can agree on all the details. How much more likely will be the difference in a great battle covering a vast space of broken ground, when each division, brigade, regiment, and even company, naturally and honestly believes that it was the focus of the whole affair! Each of them won the battle. None ever lost. That was the fate of the ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... calculus, calculi; dracunculus, dracunculi; echinus, echini; magus, magi. But such as have properly become English words, may form the plural regularly in es; as, chorus, choruses: so, apparatus, bolus, callus, circus, fetus, focus, fucus, fungus, hiatus, ignoramus, impetus, incubus, isthmus, nautilus, nucleus, prospectus, rebus, sinus, surplus. Five of these make the Latin plural like the singular; but the mere English scholar ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... give them condensing machinery for over 90,000,000 horsepower, all told. As I see the thing, it looks absolutely as though, when that is done, the whole Capitalist system of the world will center right there—focus there, as at a point. Let kings and emperors continue to strut and mouth vain phrases; let our own President and Congress make the motions of governing; even let Wall Street play at finance and power. All, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... liquid, one or two drops placed on the slide will suffice. The material on the slide is covered with a cover glass, before it is placed on the stage of the microscope. In focusing, do not allow the object glass of the microscope to come in contact with the cover glass. Focus upward, not downward. Special care should be exercised in focusing and in handling the eye-piece and objective. A camel's-hair brush, clean dry chamois skin, or clean silk only should be used ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... the whole argument into focus, as it were," the professor went on. "It was a settlement day on the Stock Exchange. I believe a point was made three years ago that it was curious no one had seen Farrell return, since many people who knew him would ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... The Leopard Woman, watching, at last had to close her eyes in order to escape the hypnotic quality of it. In spite of herself her senses swam in the rhythmic monotony. All outside the focus of the dancers turned gray—goom, zup! goom, zup!—was it never to end? And then it seemed to her that it never would end, that thus it would go on forever, and that so it was just and right. The men were tireless. The sweat ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... db its short or conjugate diameter. Now take half of the long diameter eE, and from point d with cE for radius mark on ee the two points ff, which are the foci of the ellipse. At each focus fix a pin, then make a loop of fine string that does not stretch and of such a length that when drawn out the double thread will reach from f to e. Now place this double thread round the two pins at the foci ff' and distend ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... with his hand. In the experiment, some of the rays passing through the smoke, the representation will be much less vivid than on the cloth; and if care be not taken to reduce the light to its smallest focus, it will ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... upon the greater events of life is a constant theme of speculation among the pragmatics; no petty detail is overlooked in the possibility of its portentous consequences. Walter Shandy's hyperbolic philosophy turned about such a focus, the exaltation of insignificant trifles into mainsprings of action. Shandy ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... had been as innocent as a child, but one which was of such deep import that it could not fail to influence him in choosing his path. A woman, in monkish precepts, had been the embodiment and concentration of what was dangerous and evil—a focus whence spread all that was to be dreaded and avoided. So defiling was their presence that a true Cistercian might not raise his eyes to their face or touch their finger-tips under ban of church and fear of deadly sin. Yet here, day after day for an hour after nones, and for an hour ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... airlock compartment is all right, so the scout ships haven't been touched. They couldn't fire on them without splitting the whole ship down the middle." Johnny leaned forward, flipped on the viewscreen, and an image came into focus. ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... own family, suddenly enriched. I knew Mrs. Bradfort had a large six thousand a year, besides her own dwelling-house, which stood in Wall Street, a part of the commercial emporium that was just beginning to be the focus of banking, and all other monied operations, and which even then promised to become a fortune of itself. It is true, that old Daniel M'Cormick still held his levees on his venerable stoop, where all the heavy men in town used to congregate, and joke, and buy and sell, and abuse Boney; ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... Brenda, Arthur Banks, or his sister was nothing more than a prologue. The whole affair had begun again to fascinate my interest. Moreover, I was becoming aware of a stern, half-tragic background that had not yet come into proper focus. ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... the character-writer's materials, they are "Human Nature, in its various Forms and Affections." Each character should focus on a single vice or virtue, yet since "the Heart of Man is frequently actuated by more Passions than one," subsidiary traits ought to be included to round out the portrait (e.g., the covetous man may also be impudent, the impudent man generous). ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... Chrysostom, the arguments of Luther, Melanchthon, and Zwingli, the outcries of Celich, Heerbrand, and Dieterich, he pondered over the problem in his little Saxon parsonage, until in 1681 he set forth his proofs that comets are heavenly bodies moving in parabolas of which the sun is the focus. Bernouilli arrived at the same conclusion; and, finally, this great series of men and works was closed by the greatest of all, when Newton, in 1686, having taken the data furnished by the comet of 1680, demonstrated that ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... of all others. This is as inevitable as is death. If we would preserve and foster racial and national diversity of traits, promote social individuality as we so eagerly foster the diversity of selves, we must speedily focus attention upon human nature and seek that knowledge of it which shall enable us to control it wisely rather ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... because of a fairly recent afternoon spent in an English garden with English friends. The question of pronunciation came up. Now you will readily see that with them and their compactness, their great public schools, their two great Universities, and their great London, the one eternal focus of them all, both the chance of diversity in social customs and the tolerance of it must be far less than in our huge unfocused country. With us, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, is each a ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... them—with the fierce wind howling around them, sweeping across a broad expanse of hidden country, blowing as if it had arisen simultaneously from every point of the compass, and making those wanderers the focus of its ferocity—the two women walked through the darkness down the hill upon which Mount Stanning stood, along a mile and a half of flat road, and then up another hill, on the western side of which ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He has a chosen people, whose breasts he has made this peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue, it is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... visions floating through his mind what marvel that it was well-nigh out of the question for Walter King to focus his attention on algebra, Latin, history, and physics. X Y seemed of very little consequence, and as for the Punic Wars they were so far away as to be hazy beyond ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... first epochs of the formation of the globe. The basalt pillars, fitted one into the other, measured from forty to fifty feet in height, and the water, calm in spite of the tumult outside, washed their base. The brilliant focus of light, pointed out by the engineer, touched every point of rocks, and flooded ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... the big tree across the street. I'm sure he's watching the Foger house, and when Andy came to the door that time, I happened to look around and saw that man focus a pair of opera glasses on him ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... with the line of the waves. The fissures in the ground generally, though not uniformly, extended in a S.E. and N.W. direction, and therefore corresponded to the lines of undulation or of principal flexure. Bearing in mind all these circumstances, which so clearly point to the S.W. as the chief focus of disturbance, it is a very interesting fact that the island of S. Maria, situated in that quarter, was, during the general uplifting of the land, raised to nearly three times the height of any other part of ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... international: Eritrea and Ethiopia have expressed general approval of the April 2002 arbitration commission ruling re-delimiting the boundary, the focus of their 1998-2000 war; United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE) will monitor activities within the 25-km wide temporary security zone in Eritrea until demarcation and de-mining are complete; Yemen has asserted traditional fishing ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... does not invalidate the importance of this fact about its origin. The name of Roman School, again, has been given to Raphael and Michael Angelo together with their pupils. The truth is that Rome, for one brief period, during the pontificates of Julius and Leo, was the focus of Italian intellect. Allured by the patronage of the Papal Curia, not only artists, but scholars and men of letters, flocked from all the cities of Italy to Rome, where they found a nobler sphere for the exercise ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... has departed from the century-old custom of writing in parallel columns each theorem and its dual. He has not found that it conduces to sharpness of vision to try to focus his eyes on two things at once. Those who prefer the usual method of procedure can, of course, develop the two sets of theorems side by side; the author has not found this the better plan in ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... with her when she is, of course, specially passive, she must receive a yet more marked influence. There is a photographic curiosity now often exhibited which, I think, illustrates the thought I want to emphasize. A family or a class can be photographed, one by one, at exactly the same focus and on the same negative, with a result that you have a clear and distinct face, not of any one's personality, but that actually combines the features of the whole into a new individual ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... of all this, it is impossible to tell; but one thing Is certain, that, in a political point of view, the Mormons are already powerful, and that the object of Smith Is evidently to collect all his followers Into one focus, and thus concentrate all his power ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... man: "Stands he not thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities?" One day I saw the American army standing "in the centre of immensities, in the conflux of eternities," at the focus of histories. One day I saw the American army in France march in answer to General Pershing's offer to the Allies at the beginning of the big drive, march to its place in history beside its Allies, the English ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... glass in focus more scales had fallen from my eyes; and now I knew why I had seen so much of Raffles these last few weeks, and why he had always come between seven and eight o'clock in the evening, and waited at this very window, with these very glasses at his eyes. I saw through them sharply now. The one ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... fighting men, the Teal sailed again, and their time of arrival was so contrived that dawn of the next morning but one found the little fleet in delightfully calm weather forming a semi-circle from one point of the shore to the other, the focus of its radius being formed by the gunboat ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... an illusion. It springs from that tendency to hero worship, ineradicable in the heart of the race, which leads every nation to have an ideal, the imagined author of its prosperity, the father of his country, and the focus of its legends. As has been hinted, history is not friendly to their renown, and dissipates them altogether into phantoms of the brain, or sadly dims the lustre of their fame. Arthur, bright star of chivalry, dwindles into a Welsh subaltern; ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... when Tee flipped the switch, the worried face of the chief mechanic sprang into focus. "Oh, there you are, Mr. Jenner. Glad I caught you before you left. We've run ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... years, again and again to seek his revealing experiences of souls amid the eddies and convulsions, the exultations and the agonies, brought into the world by the amazing "revelation of God in Christ." It is true that we nowhere approach this focus of interest, that we have no glimpse, through Browning's art, how that "revelation" shaped itself in the first disciples, far less of Christ himself. But that was at no time Browning's way of bringing to expression what he deeply cared for. He would not trumpet forth truth in his own ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... But, before this transformation is effected, let us suppose the case of his being set down in the streets of London, somewhere in the vicinity of Cheapside. What an eddying of stragglers about this new-found focus of attraction! what amazement, and curiosity to find him out, if, indeed, he be find-out-able, and not, as the unmistakable papaverian odor suggests, some Stygian bird, hailing from the farther side of Lethe. But, Stygian or not, neither Hermes nor Pan (nor Panic, his namesake) could muster ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the little brown girl and the little brown horse blurred and faded. He tried to look, but could not see. He brought his eyes to nearer vision to fix their focus for another look, and straight before him whirled a shackly old saloon, rough and tumble, its character apparent from the men who were grouped about its doorway and from the barrels and kegs in profusion outside. From the doorway issued four men, ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... inserted into a slip of wood; but they must be so placed that the whole can be seen from one point of view, although each piece must be placed so that it is one inch farther from the operator than the next lowest number. Having placed the camera eight or ten feet from the cards, carefully focus to any one of the numbers, 4 or 5 for instance and observe, not that the number is distinct, but that the minute lines or threads of the net are visible: then take a picture, exposing it a very short time, and the threads of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various
... Zone. It is hoped that the report which this mission will furnish will point out a way whereby the modicum of assistance which the United States may properly lend the Ecuadorian Government may be made effective in ridding the west coast of South America of a focus of contagion to the future commercial current passing through ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... manikins in the Hong-Kong curio-shops. Jiggle-joggle, jiggle-joggle...! For each pause she was grateful. Whenever Ah Cum (whose normal stride was sufficient to keep him at the side of her chair) pointed out something of interest, she had to strain the cords in her neck to focus her glance upon the object. Supposing the wire should break and her head tumble off her shoulders into the street? The whimsey caused another smile to ripple across ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... pin, a trifle fallaciously, into her hat—she had, with an approach to irritation, told her maid, a new woman, whom she had lately found herself thinking of as abysmal, that she didn't want her—she tried to focus the possibility of some understanding between them in consequence of ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... events, and the untoward circumstances by which their effect was thwarted, the disheartened statesman had written and forwarded on May fourteenth a second letter, of the same tenor as the first. This measure likewise had failed of effect, for the messenger had been stopped at Bastia, now the focus of Salicetti's influence, and the letter ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... spot he had already suggested as the focus of attention, and they both saw, with the quick-sightedness of men accustomed to live by the chase, the ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... been in the translation. I ought to have translated it myself. I think so because I examined into the matter and finally retranslated the sketch from the French back into English, to see what the trouble was; that is, to see just what sort of a focus the French people got upon it. Then the mystery was explained. In French the story is too confused and chaotic and unreposeful and ungrammatical and insane; consequently it could only cause grief and sickness—it could not kill. A glance at my retranslation will show ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... bare feet. In the old-timed setting of the furniture he was an alien—an anachronism—the intrusion of the hopelessly modern into the helplessly past. His hair made a rich spot in the colourless atmosphere, and it seemed to focus the incoming light from the unshuttered window, leaving the background ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... of sense,—out of focus, distorted. Some of it was opium. Didn't you coax a little of his favorite medicine out of ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... now a large and beautiful town—the capital of the Eastern Province—situated on the slopes of the Zuurberg range, near the head waters of the Kowie River, 1760 feet above the sea, and thirty-six miles distant therefrom. She is also the focus where all the roads from the interior converge to enter the only available gap through ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... way home Dr. Woodford talked of the trial, beginning perhaps to regret that his niece must go to the very focus of Roman influence in England, where there seemed to be little scruple as to the mode of conversion. Would it be possible to alter her destination? was his thought, when he rose the next day, but loyalty stood in the way, and that ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reverberation of religious zeal surprised him beyond words; and he laboured in vain, as he walked, to piece together into any kind of whole his odds and ends of knowledge—to adjust again into any kind of focus with itself his picture ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Island, on Anthracite Creek, in southwestern Colorado, and at the Placer Mountains, near Santa Fe, New Mexico, Cretaceous lignites into anthracite; those from Queen Charlotte's Island and southwestern Colorado are as bright, hard, and valuable as any from Pennsylvania. At a little distance from the focus of volcanic action, the Cretaceous coals of southwestern Colorado have been made bituminous and coking, while at the Placer Mountains the same stratum may be seen in its anthracitic ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... by its title and function, no colours could paint to the imagination anything more venerable. In that light the mind of an inquirer, subdued by such an awful image as that of the virtue and wisdom of a whole people collected into one focus, would pause and hesitate in condemning things even of the very worst aspect. Instead of blameable, they would appear only mysterious. But no name, no power, no function, no artificial institution whatsoever, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... shall bring to you the fact and the substance. I have lifted up the curtain and flooded it with the light of day. You shall have the fact for your senses. Tomorrow I shall explain it all. I shall deliver my greatest lecture; in which my whole Me has come to a focus. It is not spiritualism nor sophistry. It is concrete fact and common sense. The subject of my lecture tomorrow ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... cigar and magazine shop on the corner is the political and social focus of the neighbourhood. I shall never forget the pallid and ghastly countenance of the newsdealer when the rumour first went the rounds that "Hampy" was elected. Every evening a little gathering of local sages meets in the shop; on tilted chairs, in a haze ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... has been brought out by his career, and shows itself in his general actions and opinions. He may know how to dogmatize on theology and politics, but when he gets down to furniture he confesses that his eye is out of focus. The furniture imported or (in Melbourne) made by the large upholsterers is, with few exceptions, more gorgeous than pretty; whence one may reasonably infer that the taste of their customers—when they have any—is better suited by the grandiose than the artistic. But ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... preserving. If she had been armed with phonograph as well as a camera she might have secured a really valuable record. The man, to my knowledge, speaks eight languages, all equally badly, and when he mixes them he is well worth listening to. In order to get him into focus the girl in the blue dress kept backing away from him, holding the camera level and gazing into the view finder. The man, gesticulating more wildly than ever, followed her. She moved more and more rapidly away from him until at last she was proceeding backward along the street at a rapid trot. In ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... negro fingered his watch chain foolishly, and the prettiest of the East Indian half-castes tried hard to disguise her perception that an African in his best clothes under conviction of sin was the funniest thing in the world. The silence seemed to focus itself upon the cook, who fumbled at his coat collar and cleared his voice. It was a shock to all concerned when Stephen Arnold, picking up his hat, ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... straight lines in every direction. One of the problems of illumination in lighthouse work is to make all these beams come to one focus. We don't want to light the sky, nor the sea at the foot of the lighthouse. So a first-order light is built up of rows on rows of prisms so arranged that the light will be refracted from every direction to one point. An ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... was inevitable that I should focus my attention on my humanitarian project. During the last week of December I sought ammunition by making a visit to two of the institutions where I had once been a patient. I went there to discuss certain phases of the subject ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... mind free of disease. Furthermore, we talk of objects as things of secondary importance and the mind as everything. Now I am firmly convinced that the mind of man, so far from being a thing apart from the objects that form its environment, is, in fact, nothing else but a mirror or focus upon which objects register their impressions and that all the thinking in the world is done not really by the mind but by the objects that form our thoughts and the reasons, utterly divorced from what we call human reason, that connect together the ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... from the lamp shone from behind him, and he wondered if the picture had been condemned to hang with its face to the wall because it typified the existent rather than the past. He looked more closely, and drew back step by step, until he was in the proper focus to bring out every expression in the lovely face. In the picture he saw each moment a greater resemblance to Jeanne. The eyes, the hair, the sweetness of the mouth, the smile, brought to him a vision of Jeanne herself. The woman in the picture was older than Jeanne, and his first thought was that ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... its hind legs and rear around and call attention to itself—couldn't if it should try. But it's here and there and everywhere in America, just the same. A railroad car with one drunken fool in it gives you the idea. You focus on him and say, 'What a beastly shame!' and you entirely overlook the other fifty-odd people in the car who are quietly minding their ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... focussing-glass is placed at precisely the same distance from the lens as the collodionised glass is. To insure this, my practice is to place a piece of ground glass in the dark frame, which is afterwards to receive the collodionised glass, and to obtain the focus of the lens on that; then to put in the proposed plate, and obtain an impression as described by MR. SHADBOLT. In this way I secure myself from what I believe is often a source of fallacy in these experiments, and am sure that I give the lens ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... as much as such geese would if they existed in real life. You can see from this that it is one of those books that are full of real niceness and goodwill, and it has besides plenty of plot and lots of interesting characters, and yet somehow it gives you the feeling of being out of focus. You read on, expecting every moment that clever Miss WEBLING will give things a little push in the right direction and make them seem true, and, while you are reading and hoping, you come ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... strangeness and dramatic contrasts of life." And not only to bring suggestions, but repose, by granting to eyes wearied with minute concerns the contrasts of vast times and spaces, the majestic idea of the Whole; to change the focus and variously dispose the perspectives ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... retained him in the party of peace, he found in Berri a counter-attraction in Madame de Longueville who drew him towards that of war; and it would seem that he occupied himself more with paying court to the lovely lady than of raising and arming soldiers and making Berri a focus of resistance, both political and military; for very speedily the Prince de Conti and he were reduced to defend themselves in Bourges instead of being able to operate in the open and make any advance. The new Minister Chateauneuf showed himself worthy of the confidence of Madame ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... work putting into position the huge reflector. At first I thought it might be some method of throwing a powerful light on the house. But on closer examination I saw that it could not be a light. The reflector seemed to have been constructed so that in the focus was a peculiar coil of something, and to the ends of this coil, Garrick attached two wires which he fastened to an instrument, cylindrical, with a broadened ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... leisure with trivial useful tasks. Pleydon was extended on a chair, his fingers caught beyond his head and his long legs thrust out and crossed at the ankles. His gaze was fixed on her unwaveringly; and yet, when she tried to meet its focus, it went behind her as though it pierced the solidity of her body and the walls in the contemplation of a far-removed shining image. Her disturbance grew to the inclusion of a degree of fretfulness at his unbroken silence, his ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... scrutinize his kalendar for the commencement of the trouting, grouse-shooting, or hare- hunting season, than the younker for the time of flying kites, bowling at cricket, football, spinning peg-tops, and playing at marbles. Pleasure is the focus, which it is the common aim to approximate; and the mass is guided by a sort of unpremeditated social compact, which draws them out of doors as soon as meals are discussed, with a sincere thirst of amusement, as certainly as rooks congregate in spring to discuss the propriety ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... that the Temple of Jerusalem was never built again, for as the foundation was about to be laid, fire broke out of the ground accompanied by an earthquake. The same earthquake also destroyed Delphi, "the centre of the earth," and the focus of the religious and ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... Mr. Cave that this was not in accordance with the laws of optics as he had known them in his younger days. He could understand the rays being refracted by the crystal and coming to a focus in its interior, but this diffusion jarred with his physical conceptions. He approached the crystal nearly, peering into it and round it, with a transient revival of the scientific curiosity that in his youth had determined his choice of ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... species of maternal idolatry; centered in her child Louis Marie as rays gathered up into a focus, were all her hopes, her aspirations, her ideas of the future. If she could be assured she would live to see her son leading the armies of the empire, ruling in the cabinets of state or worshipped in the circles of the great and learned, Heaven itself ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... Milo. She has the reputation of being the very acme of sculpture, and certainly the Parisians so regard her or they would not pay her such a high tribute in the way of space and position. She is the focus of that whole wonderful gallery. No one has ever had the boldness to give her a place in the market quotations, but I can regale myself with her beauty for a mere pittance. This pittance does not at all cancel my indebtedness, and I come away feeling that I ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... let me find though few'); 'et en verite ses sonnets ont souvent le meme esprit prophetique, la meme elevation sacree que ceux de l'Homere anglais.' There cannot be graver mistakes than are here brought into one focus. Lord Byron cared little for the 'Paradise Lost,' and had studied it not at all. On the other hand, Lord Byron's pretended disparagement of Shakspeare by comparison with the meagre, hungry and bloodless Alfieri was a pure stage trick, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... stockades of Booneville and Harrodsburg and Nashville in Kentucky were on 'Dark and bloody ground,' so ought the place where we now are standing be called the dark and bloody ground of the Missouri River, for this indeed was a focus of trouble and danger, even before the river trade made ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... cleft by a great stairway. As they stood looking over the railing, 'twas like looking down upon an immense concave opal, peopled by the gorgeously apparelled. Myriad tints seeming to assimulate and focus wherever the eyes rested. Gilt bewreathed pillars, mouldings, shimmering satin, lights, jewels, flowers, ceiling, gallery and parquetry appeared like a homogeneous mass of opal. Mistress Katherine could not speak, her perturbed ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... "the objective" or "the military objective" (page 55), when unqualified, ordinarily indicates the mental objective. The term is properly applicable to a physical objective when the context makes the meaning clear. Ordinarily, and always when clarity demands, a tangible focus of effort is herein ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... her among the people going back to the village. Once she whirled with an inimitable movement, flinging her fingers toward Skag, in a gesture that seemed to focus the eyes of the whole world upon him. (And in that instant, the American men could not have spoken a word—for the richness of her ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... the shape being exactly that of the printing frame. The other end of the bamboos are tied with stout string to a piece of cardboard tube, postal tube, which slips over the lens. The length of the bamboos depends upon the focus of the lens and the amount of reduction. It will sometimes be found convenient to have the bamboo in two lengths; thus, supposing we want as a general rule 36 inches, two pieces, 24 inches each, should be obtained, and by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... Port Hueneme, California, in March 1945. There was no violence. The thousand strikers continued to work but refused to eat for two days. The resulting publicity forced the Navy to investigate the charges; as a result, the commanding officer, the focus of the grievance, was replaced and the outfit ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... seems somehow to focus the conversation, and become a stepping-stone to a review of the recent events. Evidently the principal actor in them takes that view. "I had no idea whom I was speaking to," he says, "still less that Lady Gwendolen had taken the trouble to come away from the house with so kind a motive. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... a coarse analogy, consider a parallel-sided piece of glass through which light passes. It forms no picture. Shape it so as to be bi-convex, and a picture appears in its focus. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... and admirable. But when the exercises had been duly gone through, then arose the original and powerful minds, to take full advantage of what had been gained by all the practising, and to concentrate and bring to a focus all the hints and lessons of art which had been gradually accumulating. Then the sustained strength and richness of the Faery Queen became possible; contemporary with it, the grandeur and force of English prose began ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... (ICC) represents the 125,000 Inuits of Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland in international environmental issues; a panel convenes every three years to determine the focus of the ICC; the most current concerns are longrange transport of pollutants, sustainable ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... to Myrtle Forge from New York with a mingled sense of pleasure and the feeling that his place was unsupportably empty. The loneliness of which he had been increasingly conscious seemed to have its focus in his house. The following morning he walked restlessly down the short, steep descent to the Forge, lying on its swift water diverted from Canary Creek. Unlike a great many iron families of increasing prosperity, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... deeper swish, deeper and longer drawn-out. Their voices were so high and shrill that the singing of the jungle crickets seemed almost contralto in comparison. Finally, I began to feel myself the focus of one or more of these winged weasels. The swishes became more frequent, the returnings almost doubling on their track. Now and then a small body touched the sheet for an instant, and then, with a soft little tap, a vampire alighted on my chest. I was half sitting up, yet I could not see him, ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... adapters, he fitted the camera to the eyepiece of the telescope. "That's all there is to it. You focus the 'scope eyepiece by turning this knurled knob. Then you set the camera to infinity, adjust the iris for the proper light, and put the ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... toiling at his books, sedulously attending his classes, with his Mary spending glorious Saturday mornings that, as they brought him nearer to knowledge of her, sent him from her yet more fevered; and, straining towards another point, we will focus for an instant upon Margaret his cousin, and Bill Wyvern, ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... adjusted his camera, and looked down to see that he had the proper focus before snapping the shutter. The light was good up there, and he believed he must have the greatest success with such a picture as that. Besides, it had the genuine article of life in it, which he always ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... eye; and though he had not drained the humanity entirely out of them, he had persuaded them to perfect cleanliness, if not to perfect godliness. They appeared at Mrs. Windsor's cottage that evening in an amazing condition of shiny rosiness, with round cheeks that seemed to focus the dying rays of the setting sun, and hair brushed perfectly flat to their little bullet-shaped heads, in which the brains worked with much excitement and anticipation. Their eyes were mostly blue and innocent, ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the minimum; let us pass to Guyenne; here it is, this figure like a calf walking on one leg. Of course, you will not be astonished to find discontent in Guyenne; it is an old focus for revolt, and will be enchanted to rise. They can furnish 8,000 soldiers; that is not much, but they are well trained. Then we have Bearn and Navarre; you see these two compartments, which look like an ape on the back of an elephant—they may furnish about 16,000. Let us count now—10,000 for Anjou, ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... trivial in itself during times when judicial murders were common, would have excited nothing more than passing interest had not the national sentiment been so aroused by the chaotic conditions. As it was it served to focus attention on the general maladministration over which Yuan Shih-kai ruled as provisional President. "What is my crime?" had shrieked the unhappy revolutionist as he had been shot and then bayonetted to death. That query was most easily answered. His crime was that he ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... caused by bad physical habits, so are mental ills and inefficiency chiefly due to various bad mental habits, which are allowed to fasten themselves upon us. These will be briefly discussed so as to focus attention upon them, for the first thing necessary for the correction of a bad habit is to recognize its presence. It is as important to think right as it is to give the body proper care. A good body with a mind working in the wrong direction is of no use. If we allow our minds to be disturbed ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... (alluding to the first Lord Chatham), and your counsellors are men. But it is the curse of France that she is ruled by one who is, in fact, but the agent and organ of valets and strumpets. The Court of France is no longer the focus of the great men of the country, but a band of profligates that have driven away the great. This state of things, however, cannot last long, the reign of the Pompadours must draw to an end, and Frenchmen will one day take a terrible ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... international army of amateur photographers, who had been stalking the Princess as a hunter follows an elk, or as he would have stalked a race-horse or a prominent politician, or a Lord Mayor's show, everything being fish that came within the focus of his camera. A helpless statue and an equally helpless young girl were both good subjects and at his mercy. He was bending over, with an anxious expression of countenance, and focussing his camera on the back of the Princess Aline, when Carlton approached from the rear. As the ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis
... to get his train of thought to focus once more on the submarine problem. But for some reason the business with the microphone and the speaker in the next room kept lingering in ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... of the change. He really seemed to convey to her through his silence that he understood her now, or was coming to, better than he had ever done before, better than she understood herself. And with the new understanding it was exactly as if he had found that his focus was misdirected. He no longer looked up; Imogen knew that by the fact that when, metaphorically, her eyes were cast down to meet with approbation and sweet encouragement his upturned admiration, vacancy, only, met their gaze. He no longer—so her beam pierced further and further—looked ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... and when the broad day broke upon us, there lay the low sand-hills of Cape Cod over our larboard quarter, and before us the wide waters of Massachusetts Bay, with here and there a sail gliding over its smooth surface. As we drew in toward the mouth of the harbor, as toward a focus, the vessels began to multiply, until the bay seemed alive with sails gliding about in all directions; some on the wind, and others before it, as they were bound to or from the emporium of trade and centre of the bay. It was a stirring ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... diminutive landscape dimly lighted, the wonder is whether it is all artificial, or whether one is not one's self the victim of some morbid illusion; and whether it is not indeed a real country view seen through a distorted vision out of focus, or through the ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... issues might depend. A man like Mr. Macdonald, not a workman nor a formal or real representative of workmen, was followed everywhere by the limelight; while the millions of workmen who worked and fought were out of focus and therefore looked like a fog. Just as such figures give a fictitious impression of unity between the crowds fighting for different flags and frontiers, so there are similar figures giving a fictitious unity to the crowds following ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... the revolving drum carrying the film. The photographing apparatus consists of a shutter, a quartz lens, and a stenopaic slit, 76 by 1.7 mm., between the lens and the sensitized film on the rotary drum. The quartz lens is used because it will focus the ultra-violet rays, which ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... place save that it was away up in the north- west, on one of the higher reaches of the Enyong Creek, and a two days' journey for her by water. The lads lived at a town called Ikpe, an old slave centre, that had been in league with Aro, and the focus of the trade of a wide and populous area. It was a "closed" market, no Calabar ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... humanity could have doubted. From beneath the stoic's cloak another than the dare-devil millionaire whose crazy exploits were notorious had looked out. Persistently the note of danger came to Paul Harley. Those luxurious Piccadilly chambers were a focus upon which some malignant will was concentrated. He became conscious of anger. It was the anger of a just man who finds himself impotent—the ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... with all the forms it had acquired under Louis XIV.; dignity alone was wanting. As to gaiety, there was none. Versailles was not the place at which to seek for assemblies where French spirit and grace were displayed. The focus of ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... moral and religious problems of the family find a focus in the purpose of preparing persons for social living. The family justifies its cost to society in the contribution which it makes in trained and motived lives. As a religious family its first duty is to prepare the coming generation to live in a religious society, in one which will steadily move ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... others, and set sail for St. Croix. He started under a fair breeze, but a mile out the wind dropped, and he was until midnight making the harbour of Christianstadt When they were utterly becalmed the sun seemed to focus his hell upon the little sloop. It rolled sickeningly in the oily wrinkled waters, and Alexander put his Pope in his pocket. The sea had a curious swell, and he wondered if an earthquake were imminent. The sea was ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... He crumpled helplessly to the floor, staring foolishly at the prostrate figure of Leland and at Frank, who had risen to his feet and now faced the beautiful empress of Theros. Strange lights danced before Tommy's eyes, and he found it difficult to keep the pair in focus. But he was sure of one thing—his pal was unharmed. Then the two figures seemed to merge into one and he blinked his eyes rapidly to clear his failing vision. By George, they were in each other's arms! Funny world—above or ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... dear Watson, I will. At present I am, as you know, fairly busy, but I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a text-book which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume. Our present research appears to be a case ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dead, unable to make headway against it. For a full minute or more it seemed as though half a dozen separate and distinct winds were battling together for the mastery, the yacht being the centre and focus round which the battle raged. We on the poop were buffeted helplessly this way and that, so that it was only with the utmost difficulty we could keep our feet; indeed, Mrs Vansittart was literally lifted off her feet for a moment ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... in the middle. She wore a broad-edged dhoti (the reader should not forget that all the characters are Indians), only the upper half of her body being visible, the lower being covered up by the low backs of the cane chairs. She was distinctly behind the chairs, and consequently slightly out of focus. Still everything was quite clear. Even her long necklace was visible through the little opening in the dhoti near the right shoulder. She was resting her hands on the backs of the chairs and the fingers were nearly totally out of focus, but a ring on the right ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... consideration—above all, the increased range of modern firearms. If the front of the attacking Cavalry is too narrow, it will not only have to face the fire of the troops immediately in its front, but it will be the focus of the fire from ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... was the focus of his interest. The acceleration of its speed, the condition of the cattle, the combination of lightness and completeness in its make-up were the matters that occupied him. In the evening hour of rest these were the subjects he talked of, and she noticed that Daddy John was the ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... below him was breath-taking: Earth seemed almost to hit him in the face. He had not realized it was so close. The sheer, mighty stretch of the globe filled his eyes, and for seconds he could not focus on anything else, so overwhelming to his vision was the colossal map. It reached away to left and right, before and behind, and he was so near that it seemed almost flat, a sun-gleaming plain on which stood out in sharp ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... unscrupulous men had tried to steal his ideas and models. To prevent this Tom had arranged a system of burglar alarms, and had also fitted up a wizard camera that would take moving pictures of anyone coming within its focus. The camera could be set to work at night, in connection with the ...
— Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone • Victor Appleton
... we can begin to speak of the indulgence of the passions which prompt those practices as "sin." When Paul calls the law the strength of sin, or says that the law came in that the trespass might abound, he states a truth, but sees it, if one may say so, out of focus; for the law was not arbitrarily imposed in order to brand a multitude of harmless acts as offences, but in proportion as the moral law is discerned by man's mind, acts which formerly were merely non-moral begin to range themselves on this side ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... us, with her crew collected astern, to climb up and watch us, grinning and making derisive gestures, Barkins suddenly swung round the telescope, slipped the strap over his head, adjusted it to the proper focus, as marked by a line scratched with the point of a penknife, and raised it to his eye, when, to my astonishment, I saw all the Chinamen ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... uttered, "Let there be light!" the study of astronomy was made possible. Man can gather but little of it with his eye; so he takes a lens twenty-six inches in diameter, and bends all the light that passes through it to a focus, then magnifies the image and takes it into his eye. Or he takes a mirror, six feet in diameter, so hollowed in the middle as to reflect all the rays falling upon it to one point, and makes this larger eye fill his own with light. By this larger light-gathering ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... statute book has seldom been so barren. Its principal acts were to narrow the county electorate to an oligarchy, to restrict the choice of constituencies to resident knights and burgesses, and to impair its own influence as a focus of public opinion. It was not content with legislative authority; it interfered with an executive which it could hamper but could not control. It was possessed by the inveterate fallacy that freedom and strong government are things incompatible; that the executive is the natural enemy of the Legislature; ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... his reflections were bitter. He viewed the events of the night in truer focus; he saw that by his flight he had sealed his fate—had voluntarily outlawed himself. It became frightfully evident to him that he dared not seek to draw from his bank, that he dared not touch even his modest Post Office account. With the exception of some twenty-five ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... familiar but I can't place her. Judy, see if you know her," said Molly, as she adjusted Mr. Kinsella's opera glasses to her eyes. She and Judy got the focus at the same moment and exclaimed in ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... have staid at Birmingham to-night, to have talked more with Mr. Hector; but my friend was impatient to reach his native city; so we drove on that stage in the dark, and were long pensive and silent. When we came within the focus of the Lichfield lamps, 'Now (said he,) we are getting out of a state of death.' We put up at the Three Crowns, not one of the great inns, but a good old fashioned one, which was kept by Mr. Wilkins, and was the very next house to that in which Johnson was born and brought up, and which was ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... compelled to bow to the storm by retiring from their seats of government. One common spirit pervaded the United Provinces of America, though it was more rampant in some colonies than others. The grand focus of rebellion was still at Massachusets Bay, where, towards the close of the year, in the course of predatory hostility, the town of Falmouth was cannonaded and totally destroyed, in revenge for some offence relative ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... their way to the table indicated by Thessaly, and the curious sudden silence which notability imposes upon the ordinary marked their progress. Paul's handsome olive face became the focus of a hundred glances. Several people who were seated with their backs toward the entrance, half rose to look covertly at him as he walked in. They seated themselves at the marble-topped table, Don and Paul upon the plush lounge and Thessaly upon a chair facing them. ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... were rounded. Indeed, the only straight line to be discerned about him was that of his hair, black as bitumen, banged across his forehead; even his polished porphyry eyes were constructed on some curvilinear principle, and never seemed to focus. It might be said of Mr. Gorse that he had an overwhelming impersonality. One could never be quite sure that one's words ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the box come tight against the shutter so that the light will be entirely excluded. Place the negative over the small opening in the shutter and adjust the camera box; then stand the easel with the crayon strainer on it at the proper distance to give the required size of the enlargement and focus the image sharp on the crayon paper. The strainer must stand at the same angle as the shutter; that is, if the shutter is perpendicular then the strainer must stand perpendicular also. Then go over the outline and shadow lines with the charcoal, after which open the shutter and examine the ...
— Crayon Portraiture • Jerome A. Barhydt
... with Latvia has not been signed; has made no territorial claim in Antarctica (but has reserved the right to do so) and does not recognize the claims of any other nation; 1997 border agreement with Lithuania not yet ratified; Svalbard is the focus of a maritime boundary dispute in the Barents Sea ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... were to be found in her bedroom and her boudoir. Yet, too, when she had opportunity—when Lady Tynemouth brought them to her—she read the newest and most daring productions of a school of French novelists and dramatists who saw the world with eyes morally astigmatic and out of focus. Once she had remarked to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... when a reigning monarch did not disdain to pick up a painter's pencil, and a whole city mourned an artist's death, and paid honours to his remains; all the rank, wealth, genius, talent, taste, and intelligence of the people were concentrated in one grand focus. Among the states of ancient Greece and modern Italy, the city was in fact the nation; and at Athens, Rome, Venice, and Florence, was collected all of genius, taste, and talent, the people as a body possessed. The mental qualities were thereby ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... the northern shore, with the houses grouped into cotes or little villages which almost touched elbows along the banks of the stream. In each of these hamlets the manor-house or home of the seigneur, although not a mansion by any means, was the focus of social life. Sometimes built of timber but more often of stone, with dimensions rarely exceeding twenty feet by forty, it was not much more pretentious than the homes of the more prosperous and thrifty among the seigneur's ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... the atmosphere of unreality and gloom was upon them too, and, saving the quick, short sigh that escaped from their lips now and then, neither of them spoke nor relaxed for an instant from that strain of painful attention which had for its focus their mother's stony face. Mrs. Harrington, who, in her youthful freshness and dimpled beauty, might have relieved the universal sombreness of the scene, was not in the room all day; but whether this was on account of her inability to confront sickness and trouble, or whether it was the ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... playing that weird mysterious part—the part of an International Spy. He was seeing secret things. He had, in fact, crossed the designs of no less a power than the German Empire, he had blundered into the hot focus of Welt-Politik, he was drifting helplessly towards the great Imperial secret, the immense aeronautic park that had been established at a headlong pace in Franconia to develop silently, swiftly, and on an immense scale the great discoveries of Hunstedt ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... why so many rays came from the star—with the vague wonder of drowsiness, which comes because it has been in the habit of coming from one's earliest childhood. The star divided into two, and all its beams swam about while his gaze remained fixed, and nothing seemed quite in the focus of his vision. ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... marshalled the whole train of drapers and grocers, till the year 1765, when a regular bank was established by Messrs. Taylor and Lloyd, two opulent tradesmen, whose credit being equal to that of the bank of England, quickly collected the shining rays of sterling property into its focus. ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... a focus"; it describes a "looped orbit round the sun." The eclipse of the sun is thus explained: "At the time of eclipses, the image is more or less so directly before or behind the earth that, in the case of new moon, bright rays of the sun fall and bear ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... was still enough of his former gentility about Barnet's appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too, had other things to think of that night, and he was permitted to reach the galleries about Leicester Square—that great focus ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... entranced medium instructions were given to focus a camera upon a certain chair—having first placed a shawl over the back. This was done. Dr. Ochorowicz and Mlle. Tomczyk then left the room together. At the end of a certain length of time they returned, developed the plate, and upon it was found the distinct imprint ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... interchange of dynamic consciousness between mother and child suffers no interruption at birth. It continues almost the same. The child has no conception whatsoever of the mother. It cannot see her, for its eye has no focus. It can hear her, because hearing needs no transmission into concept, but it has no oral notion of sounds. It knows her. But only by a form of vital dynamic correspondence, a sort of magnetic interchange. The idea does not ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... appertained to a splendid old dotard (a face all ski-jumps and toboggan slides), on whose protruding chest the rosette of the Legion pompously squatted. Numbers five and six had reference to Monsieur, who had seated himself before I had time to focus my slightly bewildered eyes. ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... and farmers had few fertilizers other than animal manure and compost. These were always considered very valuable substances and a great deal of lore existed about using them. During the early part of this century, our focus changed to using chemicals; organic wastes were often considered nuisances with little value. These days we are rediscovering compost as an agent of soil improvement and also finding out that we must compost organic waste materials to recycle them ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... shouted, "what in h—l are you doing with that machine gun? You've got it clean out of focus. Here, Jose, come in closer—that's right. Steady there now, and don't forget, at the second whistle you and Pete are dead. Here, you, Pete, how in thunder do you think you can die there? You're all out of the picture and hidden by that there sage brush. That's ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... They had probably passed the night at the house of Sergeant Thomas Putnam, with whom he was connected by marriage. It was at the height of the witchcraft delirium. Thomas Putnam's house was the very focus of it. There they had listened to highly wrought accounts of its wonders and terrors, had witnessed the amazing phenomena exhibited by Ann Putnam and Mercy Lewis, and their minds been filled with images of spectres of living witches, and ghosts of the dead. They had seen with their own ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... most artists have got to canalise their emotion and concentrate their energies on some more definite and more maniable problem than that of making something that shall be aesthetically "right." They need a problem that will become the focus of their vast emotions and vague energies, and when that problem is solved their work will ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... most part, no doubt, brings to the surface only the debris of lapsed memories and half-formed impressions which have never reached the focus of consciousness—the stuff that dreams are made of. But there are indications in some cases of something more than this. In some spontaneous instances the writing produces anagrams, puns, nonsense verses and occasional blasphemies ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... mountains and the soft, tropical night settled down upon the valley, our ears were assailed by a perfect babel of sound emanating from the town, which, even at the distance of half a mile, rendered sleep almost impossible. What it would have been like to be lodged in the midst of the storm focus I ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... as the six yoked mules dragged the carcass of the bull away. She was placidly putting up her book, the unmoved focus of a hundred eager and curious eyes. She smiled slightly as she saw me. "I was just telling Mr. Briggs what an extraordinary creature it was, and how you knew him. He must have had great experience to do ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated dramatic life. How may we see in them all that there is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.... While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... a disconnected sort of way," he said, evidently trying to focus his thoughts on a problem set by the gods, and which, in consequence, was incapable of logical solution by a mere mortal. "It was a fine night. I felt restless. The four walls of a room were prison-like. I strolled out. I was thinking of you. ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... capitulated to the French. The university was founded in 1436 by Henry VI. of England. During the Wars of Religion, Caen embraced the reform; in the succeeding century its prosperity was shattered by the revocation of the edict of Nantes (1685). In 1793 the city was the focus of the Girondist movement against ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... that all great European art is rooted in the thirteenth century; and it seems to me that there is a kind of central year about which we may consider the energy of the middle ages to be gathered; a kind of focus of time which, by what is to my mind a most touching and impressive Divine appointment, has been marked for us by the greatest writer of the middle ages, in the first words he utters; namely, the year 1300, the "mezzo del cammin" of the life of Dante. ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... said. "To begin with, you cannot focus properly. You have a crooked eye. I have told ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... condense Healthy aromas into poison-drops, Narcotic drugs of dangerous strength and power,— And wines of paradise to thee become Intoxicating essences of hell. Cold crystallizer of the warm heaven's gold! Thou rigorous analyst! thou subtile brain! Gathering thought's sunshine to a focus heat That blinds and burns and maddens! What, my friend! Are we, then, salamanders? Do we live A charmed life? Do gases feed like air? Pray you, pack up your crucibles and go! Your statements are too awfully abstract; Your logic strikes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... a check. A blood-stained revolution at Belgrade ousted the pro-Austrian Obrenovitch, and put in its place the rival family of the Karageorgevitch. Under the new dynasty Servia escaped from Austrian tutelage, and became an independent focus of Slav life in close touch with Russia. The change was illustrated in 1908, when Austria took advantage of the revolution in Turkey, led by the Young Turks, to annex formally the occupied territories of Bosnia and the Herzegovina. Servia, which had hoped to gain these territories, once ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... as though we were playing checkers instead of the game of life. He made no reply, but the spell was broken. I believe that both sides had been bluffing. In attempting to use my kodak while continuing the bluff, I brought matters to a focus. "What a picture you fellows will make," I said aloud, as my right hand slowly worked the kodak out of the case which hung under my left arm. Still keeping up a steady fire of looks, I brought the kodak in front of me ready to focus, and then touched the spring ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... been like Ellen; her hair was the ashes of such a fire as burned over Ellen's brows, and she had Ellen's short upper lip, though of course she had never been fierce nor a swift runner, and no present eye could guess if she had ever been a focus of romantic love. The aged are terrible—mere heaps of cinders on the grass from which none can tell how tall the flames once were or ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Lanyard was well satisfied that he now held the true focus of this conspiracy, a secret of the first consequence, far too momentous to the designs of England to be entrusted, though couched in the most cryptic cipher ever mind of man devised, even to cables or mails which ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... friend; and here, think's we, if there is anything important or business like on the man's mind, he must be near to its focus. But he started again— ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... reading, and easily take in its meaning. The act of will, the effort of attention, the intending of the mind on each word and line of the page, just as the eyes are focussed on each word and line, is the power here contemplated. It is the power to focus the consciousness on a given spot, and hold it there Attention is the first and indispensable step in all knowledge. Atten. tion to spiritual things is the ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... Budlong felt amazement that she could have so ignored the very focus of her former ambition. Then she felt shame at her unpreparedness. She caught the evening paper out of her husband's lap to find the date. November ninth and not a Christmas thing begun. Yet a few days and the news-stands would have apprised her that Christmas ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... but no one could say what a day might bring forth. The young doctor looked back over the past; he bowed beneath the burden that he felt upon him. However, due credit must be given to his friend Samuel O'Neill for assisting him to bring his sober meditations to a focus. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... to some metal uprights and struggling to focus his mind on what he was doing enough to forget that Delight Hathaway was on the other side of the partition when from the window above the bench he saw Cynthia Galbraith come rolling up to the gate in her runabout, accompanied by a ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... at Berlin University and physician to the imperial household, found himself, when the war broke out, in the very focus of the madness which seized the flower of his nation. Not merely did he refuse to share that madness. Yet more daring, he openly resisted it. In reply to the manifesto of the 93 intellectuals, published in the beginning of October, 1914, he wrote a counter-manifesto, An Appeal to ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... the top, it may be more easily flattened. After the glass is properly mounted in front of the camera, the lights are placed behind it and light is directed through the skin. The ridge detail is brought into focus on the ground glass. Before the picture is actually taken it is suggested that the ground glass be checked by first using one light and then two lights to ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... sentiment will be more decisively declared. I wish you were here at present, to take your choice of the two governments of Orleans and Louisiana, in either of which I could now place you; and I verily believe it would be to your advantage to be just that much withdrawn from the focus of the ensuing contest, until its event should be known. The one has a salary of five thousand dollars, the other of two thousand dollars; both with excellent hotels for the Governor. The latter at St. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Always the child of impulse, and careless of appearance and opinion, she felt her thoughts, none too cheerful or optimistic that morning during her long walk down the avenue, drawn by the expression upon the legless man's face to a sudden focus of triumph and solution. She struck the palm of one small workman-like hand with the back of the ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... the better to focus an opera-glass on the box. The gong solemnly announced the second act, and Alice moved her chair to face the stage. Once more Montani scanned the party with his glass. As the lights faded Alice, with the pretty languorous gesture I so well remembered, opened her fan—the fan of ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... lips an instant but, eager to be on, raised an outspanned hand to his spectacles and, with trembling thumb and ringfinger touching lightly the black rims, steadied them to a new focus. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... course, by no means all. Its making and its binding must be accompanied by a vivid, methodically directed attention, which turns all the mental light gettable in a focus upon the subject passing across the mind's screen. Before Loisette was thought of this was known. In the old times in England, in order to impress upon the minds of the rising generation the parish boundaries in the rural districts, the ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... but by the time he could focus it to fit his eyes, the man had re-mounted, riding south, and there was only the dead girl left there where she fell, an Indian girl they both knew, Anita, daughter of Miguel, the major-domo of Mesa Blanca, whose own little rancheria was ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... processes to hurried growth of the overstimulated brain. The result is a type of child with a puny body and an excitable brain,—the neurotic. The young eye, for example, is too flat (hypermetropic)—made to focus only on objects at a distance. Close application to print, or even to weaving mats or folding bits of paper accurately, causes an overstrain on the eye, which not only results in the chronic condition known as myopia,—short-sightedness,—so ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... their love had swallowed up the world, and left nothing visible beneath the sun, save itself. But the passion of Nina and her lover was that of more complicated natures and more mature years: it was made up of a thousand feelings, each naturally severed from each, but compelled into one focus by the mighty concentration of love; their talk was of the world; it was from the world that they drew the aliment which sustained it; it was of the future they spoke and thought; of its dreams and imagined glories they made themselves a home and altar; their ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... produced many changes in the Stock Exchange. The share market, which previously had been occupied by only four or five brokers and a number of small jobbers, now became a focus of vast business. Certain brokers, it is said, made L3,000 or L4,000 a day by their business. One fortunate man outside the house, who held largely of Churnett Valley scrip before the sanction of the Board of Trade was procured, sold at the best price directly the announcement was ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the theory that a stream or group of innumerable bodies, comparatively small, but of various dimensions, is sweeping around the solar focus in an orbit, which periodically cuts the orbit of the earth, thus explaining the actual cause of shooting stars, aerolites, and ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... loom in the distant future, like the cloud-castle in Cole's Voyage of Life. It may possibly be essayed in a generation or two, when Ekaterinenborg, built up into a great city by the copper, iron, gold, and, above all, the lately-opened coal-mines of the Ural, shall have become the focus of the Yenisei, Amour, Yang-tse and Indus system of railways. But here, again, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... than just the words each used. Talking aloud helped focus the thoughts more, but at the same time, thousands of little, personal, fringe ideas were present with the main idea transmitted in words. Houston had talked telepathically to Dorrine hundreds of times, but never before had so much fine detail ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... than gathering, appears to have been the focus of much ritual activity. This suggests that for the Washo the importance of ritual may have increased in proportion to the element of chance inherent in the activity undertaken. Gathering was a surety, assuming of course that there was a harvest ...
— Washo Religion • James F. Downs
... of all is that of the Greyhounds, which evolves in gigantic spirals round a dazzling focus, and then loses itself far off in the recesses of space. Fig. 24 ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... up into his face anxiously, her vivid childish beauty seeming to catch all the brightness of the place and focus it upon him. The two men had passed out of the further door and on to the recitation rooms. The girl and boy ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... collectedness, relieved by a certain touch of suspicious severity, as becomes the arbiter in a literary and philosophic matter." "And so," begins our author, "you wish to know, my dear Theophilus, WHERE I LOCATE GOD? I locate him in the centre of the universe, or, in better phrase, at the central focus, which must exist somewhere, of all the stars that make the universe, and which, borne onward in a common movement, gravitate together around ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... outset of World War II, but was nonetheless occupied for five-years by Nazi Germany (1940-45). In 1949, neutrality was abandoned and Norway became a member of NATO. Discovery of oil and gas in adjacent waters in the late 1960s boosted Norway's economic fortunes. The current focus is on containing spending on the extensive welfare system and planning for the time when petroleum reserves are depleted. In referenda held in 1972 and 1994, Norway rejected ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... his meals on the wing, as it were, to run for trains, to snatch two hours' sleep anywhere between midnight and morning, and to be jostled by rude crowds that failed to recognize his superiority. The full-backed light overcoat, during its brief existence the focus of so much attention, was lost in a dinner rush and never reappeared. But, above all, Mr. Heathcote had upon his hands the care of the helpless, miserable lackey, and never did a sick baby require more attention. John was lost amid his strange and terrible ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... it was the only sort of capital which could not fly the country in times of need. Stanley himself, though—as became a host—he spoke little and argued not at all, was distinctly of this faction; and Clara sometimes felt uneasy lest her efforts to focus at Becket all interest in the land question should not quite succeed in outweighing the passivity of her husband's attitude. But, knowing that it is bad policy to raise the whip too soon, she trusted to her genius to bring him 'with one run at the finish,' ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... French chansons. Both playing and singing were perfect of their kind. Rorie did not understand Chopin, and thought there was a good deal of unnecessary hopping about the piano in that sort of thing—nothing concrete, or that came to a focus; a succession of airy meanderings, a fairy dance in the treble, a goblin hunt in the bass. But the French chansons, the dainty little melodies with words of infantile innocence, all about leaves and buds, and birds'-nests and butterflies, pleased him infinitely. He hung over the piano with ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... the military capital. Kamakura was then only a fishing hamlet, but at the zenith of its prosperity it had grown to be a city of at least a quarter of a million of inhabitants. During a period of one hundred and fifty years it remained the centre of military society and the focus of a civilization radically different from that of Kyoto. The Taira had invited their own ruin by assimilating the ways of the Fujiwara and of the courtiers; the Minamoto aimed at preserving and developing at Kamakura the special ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... ST. MARK, VENICE, ITALY.—Facing the piazza of St. Mark, which is in the heart of Venice and the grand focus of attraction, rises the magnificent Cathedral of St. Mark, decorated with almost oriental splendor. The building dates back to the tenth and eleventh centuries, and portions of the materials used in its construction have been brought from almost ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... credulous, and inconsiderately generous to be a successful editor. If a paper could be conducted on purely altruistic principles, and without reference to profits, there would be no man fitter to occupy an editorial chair. For as an inspiring force, as a radiating focus of influence, his equal is not to be encountered "in seven kingdoms round." However, this inspiring force could reach a far larger public through published books than through the columns of a newspaper. It was therefore by no means in a regretful frame ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... as brother and king I denounce to you, generally meet at a little chateau called Loignac, the pretext being generally the chase. This chateau is, besides, the focus for intrigues to which the Guises are not strangers, and you know the strange love with which my sister pursued Henri de Guise. I embrace you, and am ever ready to aid you in all, and for all; meanwhile aid yourself by the advice ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... our friends when they are absent. Even in married life love is not diminished by distance. A man, like a burning-glass, should be placed at a certain distance from the object he wishes to dissolve, in order that the proper focus ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... color. He was always impatient of criticism which made him feel that there was any lack of technique in his works. "He has it all in him, but lacks 'school,'" was the verdict of the critics. Undoubtedly, wishing to do all that man has done, Dore would have liked to focus his powers on marvels of refinement and exactness, like Meissonier's; but he was proud of his distinctive characteristics, and wanted the least block he touched to show ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... shore. I told Charlie, therefore, to try and occupy his attention by showing him some of the other articles which we had brought. What interested him most was a telescope, through which, having adjusted the focus, we made him look at his friends. He almost let it drop in his astonishment at seeing them so near, and had not Charlie held it, it would have fallen overboard. He looked through it again and again, each time expressing by signs his wonder, and of course utterly unable to comprehend how the objects ...
— The Cruise of the Dainty - Rovings in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... the Polish nation should retain an independent and separate existence. For this reason, therefore, I consider the existence of Cracow as a state, having been thus secured by general treaty—whatever the complaints the three Powers had made that Cracow was the focus of disturbances; that revolutionary intrigues there found a centre and a means of organization; that there arose from that small state insurrection against the three surrounding Powers; that it was ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... delegates are not intent only on money-getting. And yet the Clarendon Press makes money, and the University can depend upon it for handsome subsidies. It may well depend upon it for much more. As the Bank of England—to which in its system of government it may be likened—is the focus of all the other banks, private or joint-stock, in the kingdom, and the treasure-house, not only of the nation's gold, but of its commercial honor, so the Clarendon Press—traditionally careful in its selections ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... through the gardens and pavilions of the casino on the rock, where with the coming of darkness the gayety of the town began to focus ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... appendix axis datum erratum focus formula genus larva medium memorandum nebula radius series ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... and very drunk. Very drunk or very sick. It was the middle of the day and the day was hot, but the old man had on a suit, and a sweater under the suit. He stopped walking and stood still, swaying gently on widespread legs, and tried to focus his eyes. He lived here ... around here ... somewhere around here. He continued ...
— The Circuit Riders • R. C. FitzPatrick
... good look at his old possessions, Mark made a sweep of the horizon with the glass, in order to ascertain if any other land were visible, from the great elevation on which he now stood. While arranging the focus of the instrument, an object first met his eye that caused his heart almost to leap into his mouth. Land was looming up, in the western board, so distinctly as to admit of no cavil about its presence. It was an island, mountainous, and Mark supposed it must be fully a ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... the only friend who remembered it; if confession were not good for the soul, though harder than sin to some people, of whom I am one—well, if all reasons were not at this instant converged into a focus, and burning me rather violently, in that region where the seat of emotion is supposed to lie, I should keep my trouble to myself. Yes, I have fifty times had it on my mind to tell you the whole story. But who can be certain that his best ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... the Bacteriologist; "perhaps the microscope is out of focus for you. Eyes vary so much. Just the fraction of a turn ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... seen on the cornea of the eye, when we face a window, which is much attended to by portrait painters; this is the light reflected from the spherical surface of the polished cornea, and brought to a focus; if the observer is placed in this focus, he sees the image of the window; if he is placed before or behind the focus, he only sees a luminous spot, which is more luminous and of less extent, the nearer he approaches to the focus. The luminous appearance of the ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... secondary importance and the mind as everything. Now I am firmly convinced that the mind of man, so far from being a thing apart from the objects that form its environment, is, in fact, nothing else but a mirror or focus upon which objects register their impressions and that all the thinking in the world is done not really by the mind but by the objects that form our thoughts and the reasons, utterly divorced from what we call human reason, that connect together the ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... by the landlord into a room which had been turned into a salon, felt himself instantly under the focus of an eyeglass held in the most impertinent manner by ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... heartening whirl of new popularity. To the candidate it seemed that his star had changed with stunning swiftness. His advance to the door had been a Roman progress; and when he finally reached the lobby he was still the focus of a coterie of enthusiasts who would not be shaken off. Here a new halt was made: new people surrounded him; more hand-shakings and back-slappings took place; and everything seemed merry as ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the window, came out to sketch too. She addressed gracious and yet humble remarks to them: "I see you are painting my sweet little home. May I look? Oh, what a lovely little sketch!" Once, on a never-to-be-forgotten day, she observed one of them take a camera from his pocket and rapidly focus her as she stood on the top step. She turned full-faced and smiling to the camera just in time to catch the click of the shutter, but then it was too late to hide her face, and perhaps the picture might appear in ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... and the prettiest of the East Indian half-castes tried hard to disguise her perception that an African, in his best clothes, under conviction of sin, was the funniest thing in the world. The silence seemed to focus itself upon the cook, who fumbled at his coat collar and cleared his voice. It was a shock to all concerned when Stephen Arnold, picking up his hat, got ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... man who has obtained some idea of social progress. We are still childishly pleased when we see the further subdivision of labor going on, because the quantity of the output is increased thereby, and we apparently are unable to take our attention away from the product long enough to really focus it upon the producer. Theoretically, "the division of labor" makes men more interdependent and human by drawing them together into a unity of purpose. "If a number of people decide to build a road, ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... he dragged at the strap across his breast, took a little field-glass from the case, adjusted the focus, and levelled it at ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... Solano was not spared, she comprehended the situation instantly. To Dashboard's surprise she drew a chair to her side, made the Man from Solano sit down, quietly turned her back on Dashboard, and in full view of the brilliant audience and the focus of a hundred lorgnettes, entered into conversation ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... bring the whole argument into focus, as it were," the professor went on. "It was a settlement day on the Stock Exchange. I believe a point was made three years ago that it was curious no one had seen Farrell return, since many people who knew him would be about Austin Friars late that night. ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... religious problems of the family find a focus in the purpose of preparing persons for social living. The family justifies its cost to society in the contribution which it makes in trained and motived lives. As a religious family its first duty is to prepare the coming generation ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... industrial competitiveness through labor market and tax reforms and increased research and development funds; and improved welfare services for the neediest while cutting paperwork and delays. Prime Minister RASMUSSEN's reforms focus on adapting Denmark to the criteria for European integration by 1999; Copenhagen has won from the European Union (EU) the right to opt out of the European Monetary Union (EMU). Denmark is, in fact, one of the few EU countries likely to fit into the EMU on time. Growth ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... such snatches of time that Felix could give to home affairs, for his hands were full of arrears of business, and the excitement respecting Mr. Smith necessarily occupied him. Pending the arrival of letters from the Rector, every tongue was in commotion, and the reading-room was a focus of debate and centre of intelligence. So many letters, either in assault or defence, were addressed to the editor of the Pursuivant, that only a supplement as big as the Times could have contained them. Every poor person who ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ever attain to understand and find his proper place in this Universe, this great sweeping harmonious circle of which nevertheless he feels himself to be the diminutive focus? His senses are absurdly imperfect. His ear cannot catch any music the spheres make; and moreover there are probably neither spheres nor music. His eye is so dull an instrument that (as Blanco White's famous sonnet reminds us) he ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... be persuaded. He was already beginning to see about how the cat jumped and to understand how much depended upon the gentle patronage of the luminaries of society. There was one little star, surely, whose light he should be glad to focus on himself once more—nor be indebted to another's kindness for the privilege. He had indeed ventured to call on Preciosa once or twice at her own home—in particular there was the evening on which, defying ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... Jerry-Jo stood up, turned and twisted his lithe body into such a grotesque distortion that he was quite awful to look upon, and left no doubt in the girl's mind as to whom he referred. He brought the Far Hill people into focus, sharply and suddenly. ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... photography to the study of the stars. The first photographic image of a star was obtained in 1850, by George P. Bond, with the assistance of Mr. J.A. Whipple, at the Harvard College Observatory. A daguerreotype plate was placed at the focus of the 15-inch equatorial, at that time one of the two largest refracting telescopes in the world. An image of [Greek: alpha] Lyrae was thus obtained, and for this Mr. Bond received a gold medal at the first international exhibition, ...
— The Future of Astronomy • Edward C. Pickering
... life is a constant theme of speculation among the pragmatics; no petty detail is overlooked in the possibility of its portentous consequences. Walter Shandy's hyperbolic philosophy turned about such a focus, the exaltation of insignificant trifles into mainsprings of action. Shandy bristles ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... of democracy of crime, contended for by Mr. Freeman, that has its charms to the ears of the groundlings. He is opposed to a law that punishes one class of gamblers only, instead of bringing all, within the focus of its penalties! There is much truth in this. Laws ought to be equal in their operation—but if they cannot be equal, this is no reason why there ought to be no laws at all. This conclusion is not warranted by any rule in ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... sacred fire of the State is kept ever burning by its guardians, the Vestal Virgins, and here too is their dwelling, the Atrium Vestae, and also that of the Pontifex Maximus (Regia), in whose potestas they were; these three buildings, then insignificant to look at, constituted the religious focus of the oldest Rome.[31] A little farther again to the left is the temple of Castor and the spring of Juturna, lately excavated, where the Twins watered their steeds after the battle of the lake Regillus. In front of ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... women and children of our present factory towns. By fixing our attention on people instead of things, we should almost certainly secure more and better things; but, regardless of cost, we must change the focus of our attention. ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... None of these can be said to be matters of local, as distinguished from national importance. It would not be a matter personally indifferent to the rest of the country if any part of it became a nest of robbers or a focus of demoralization, owing to the maladministration of its police; or if, through the bad regulations of its jail, the punishment which the courts of justice intended to inflict on the criminals confined therein ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... for my final performance and several Tri-D video cameras stared down at me. Pupils, lights and lenses, all came to a glittering focus on me. I slowly closed my eyes to ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... The first method for this purpose is due to Dr Priestley, who exposes the metal to be calcined in a porcelain cup N, Pl. IV. Fig. 11. placed upon the stand IK, under a jar A, in the bason BCDE, full of water; the water is made to rise up to GH, by sucking out the air with a syphon, and the focus of a burning glass is made to fall upon the metal. In a few minutes the oxydation takes place, a part of the oxygen contained in the air combines with the metal, and a proportional diminution of the volume of air is produced; what remains is nothing more than azotic gas, still however mixed with ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... bearded face shot into focus abruptly, waving a hypodermic needle. It spoke English and observed passionately either to Johnny or itself that: "Name of a Spanish cow! What is it in men that they must abuse themselves so? Now here is one ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... food and to everybody and everything that presented itself before him was a riddle that I never solved. A materialistic friend suggested that he was adjusting the focus of his wonderful eyes, and the action was certainly like that of an optician examining a lens; but I feel that there was something more ceremonial about it. This punctiliousness cost him his dinner once. I was curious to know ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... some more central body of water. Having however gained a position so much higher to the north, and almost on the same meridian, and having crossed so remarkable a feature as the Stony Desert (which, as I suppose, was once the focus of a mighty current, to judge from its direction passing to the westward), I no longer encouraged hopes which, if realized, would have been of great advantage to me, or regretted the circumstances by which I was ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... contrary, since I began collecting data for this study at the time of the first general war, I have watched the unfolding political struggle for economic and cultural objectives with the increasing conviction that politics is the primary focus, with economic forces always in play, but usually in the background, leaving the center ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... of the physical history of the universe, for in the present day these are too well understood to be contested, but likewise to prove how, without detriment to the stability of special studies, we may be enabled to generalize our ideas by concentrating them in one common focus, and thus arrive at a point of view from which all the organisms and forces of nature may be seen as one living active whole, animated by one sole impulse. "Nature," as Schelling remarks in his poetic discourse on art, "is not an inert mass; and to him who can comprehend her ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... dear Watson, I will. At present I am, as you know, fairly busy, but I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a textbook, which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume. Our present research appears to be a ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of vision, centre of action, centre of interest. Where the body is is 'here'; when the body acts is 'now'; what the body touches is 'this'; all other things are 'there' and 'then' and 'that.' These words of emphasized position imply a systematization of things with reference to a focus of action and interest which lies in the body; and the systematization is now so instinctive (was it ever not so?) that no developed or active experience exists for us at all except in that ordered form. So far ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... also at the Charite, was admitted with adynamic fever; a few days after admission the prepuce was observed to be somewhat inflamed; in spite of all treatment this progressed so rapidly that the purple discoloration presaged a gangrene, which was not slow in following; the focus seemed to be at the superior and back portion of the prepuce; an incision evacuated a quantity of purulent, serous fluid; the disease, however, extended up the organ as far as its middle before its actions ceased; the sloughs were then cast off, when it was found that part of the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... opens his eyes under water, he can see nothing distinctly; but everything is as much out of focus, as if he looked, in air, through a pair of powerful spectacles that were utterly unsuited to him. He cannot distinguish the letters of the largest print in a newspaper advertisement; he cannot see the spaces between the outstretched fingers, at arm's length, in clear water; nor at a ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... "I'm just at the beginning of the business. I've learned the projecting end of it so far. Almost anyone can put the film in the machine, switch on the light, get the right focus and turn the handle. But it's harder to film a real drama with lots of excitement in it—outdoor stuff—cattle stampeded—the sports of cowboys—a fake Indian fight; it takes lots of grit to stand up in front of an oncoming troop of horsemen, and snap them until they get so close you can see the ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... with narrowness of custom. What is true of the metropolis at that time is of course doubly true of the provinces; and a genteel little city like the one I am speaking of must have been a kind of focus of insular propriety. Even then, however, the irritated alien would have had the magnificent ruins of the castle to dream himself back into good-humor in. They would effectually have transported him beyond all waning or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... experience. The conception of unchanging spatial relations in the fundamental lines of perspective vision receives constant reinforcement from the facts of daily experience. The influence of the above-described changes in experimental conditions is mediated through their effect upon the location of the focus of the limiting and perspective lines of vision. As the plane of the upper boundaries of the enclosing walls was elevated and depressed the intersection of the two systems of lines was correspondingly raised and lowered, and in dependence upon the location of this imaginary point the determination ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... beings. Sometimes I felt myself touched, but not by them; invisible hands touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of cold, soft fingers at my throat. I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear I should be in bodily peril; and I concentered all my faculties in the single focus of resisting stubborn will. And I turned my sight from the Shadow; above all, from those strange serpent eyes,—eyes that had now become distinctly visible. For there, though in naught else around me, I was aware that there was a WILL, and ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... this type, the care which should be exercised by the school authorities in the matter of favourable conditions of light, avoidance of visual fatigue, proper distance-adjustments in all visual application as regards focus, symmetry, size of objects, copies, prints, etc., becomes at once sufficiently evident to the thoughtful teacher, as it should be still earlier to the parent. There should be a medical examination, by a competent oculist, before the child ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... should be judicious, clear, succinct; The language plain, and incidents well linked; Tell not as new what everybody knows, And new or old still hasten to a close; There centring in a focus round and neat, Let all your rays of information meet. What neither yields us profit nor delight Is like a nurse's lullaby at night; Guy Earl of Warwick and fair Elenore, Or giant-killing Jack ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... active, compassionate woman, fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular, compact and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downward and inward, to one common focus. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of glasses for "Boy's Telescope" refers to the focus, not to the size of glass. Any reliable optician will supply ...
— Harper's Young People, December 9, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... these are what my labels symbolised and recalled to me. That lost collection was a running record of all my happiest hours; a focus, a monument, a diary. It was my humble Odyssey, wrought in coloured paper on pig-skin, and the one work I never, never was weary of. If the distinguished Ithacan had travelled with a hat-box, how finely and minutely Homer would have ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... good. But they preferred doing it to boys, MacNab. Listen to me, the lot of you. Don't mind the aeroplane. Number Two in the rear rank. They're like gooseberries out here." Number Two's eyes would abruptly come to earth again and focus themselves on the man in front. "I want you to think," Jimmy would go on quietly, "of the dirty, lousy crowd of German waiters you remember at home in the days before the war. Do you remember their greasy-looking clothes, and their greasy-looking faces, and the way ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... individuality, we cannot do better than regard man in his several mundane relations, supposing that either of these might become the central, actuating focus of his being—his "ruling love," as Swedenborg would call it—displacing his mere egoism, or self-love, thrusting that more to the circumference, and identifying him, so to speak, with that circle of interests to which all his energies and affections relate. ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... white mutch stands at the door of a farmhouse in a Scottish glen. Her face is wrinkled, and her dim eyes are peering down the track which leads from the steading to the pasture. Being apparently unable to focus what she wants to see she ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... despair flashed into rage; I leapt erect, and cried: "Could I but grasp my life as sculptors grasp the clay And knead and thrust it into shape again!— If all the scorn of Heaven were but thrown Into the focus of some creature I could clutch!— If something tangible were but vouchsafed me By the cold, far gods!— If they but sent a Reason for the failure of my life I'd answer it; If they but sent ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... place was utterly transformed for him. He saw it now as she would see it when she came, even while at the same time his own eyes retained their point of view. It was as though he had lengthened the focus of a glass, and looked beyond at what was beautiful and picturesque, instead of what was near at hand and practicable. He found himself smiling with anticipation of her pleasure in the orchids hanging from the dead trees, high above the ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... inconveniences, which increases in proportion as it makes itself looked for. Athos had no longer his son to induce him to walk firmly, with his head erect, as a good example; he had no longer, in those brilliant eyes of the young man, an ever-ardent focus at which to regenerate the fire of his looks. And then, must it be said, that nature, exquisite in its tenderness and its reserve, no longer finding anything that comprehended its feelings, gave itself up to grief with all ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... from Catalonia and Valencia. Farther up is seen the bridge of boats which traverses the water. The principal object of this prospect, however, is the Golden Tower, where the beams of the setting sun seem to be concentrated as in the focus, so that it appears built of pure gold, and probably from that circumstance received the name which it now bears. Cold, cold must the heart be which can remain insensible to the beauties of this magic scene, to do justice to which ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... that the Amadis series differs from its predecessors—the Arthurian romances, and those of the paladins of Charlemagne, which are detached adventures, each complete in itself, and not bearing to any common focus.—Amadis de Gaul (fourteenth century). ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... moved it cautiously up or down, until my attention was arrested by a circular rift or opening in the foliage of a large tree that over-topped its fellows in the distance. In the centre of this rift I perceived a white spot, but could not, at first, distinguish what it was. Adjusting the focus of the telescope, I again looked, and now made it out ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... at the times as they are, and see how the business of life is transacted. Manhattan Island has something over 2,500,000 inhabitants, and is surrounded by a belt of population, several miles wide, of 12,000,000 more, of which it is the focus, so that the entire city contains more than 14,500,000 souls. The several hundred square miles of land and water forming greater New York are perfectly united by numerous bridges, tunnels, and electric ferries, while the city's great ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... were adapters, he fitted the camera to the eyepiece of the telescope. "That's all there is to it. You focus the 'scope eyepiece by turning this knurled knob. Then you set the camera to infinity, adjust the iris for the proper light, and put the ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... beautiful woman of equally good repute who happens to be a prominent figure in the most exclusive circles of this country and the favourite sister of a leader on the Administration side in the United States Senate. Of course since the developments began to focus suspicion upon them, they have been watched. Yesterday at church Miss Ballister's wrist bag was picked. Along with things of no apparent significance, it contained a note received by her the day before from Goldsborough—Geltmann rather—reminding ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... your left!" Belle's thought drove in as he had never before felt it driven. Being a Prime, she did not need a focus spot and appeared the veriest instant later than ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... pleasant again to see this Professor of Indifference doing the honours of his new purchase, when he has fairly housed it. You must view it in every light, till he has found the best—placing it at this distance, and at that, but always suiting the focus of your sight to his own. You must spy at it through your fingers, to catch the aerial perspective—though you assure him that to you the landscape shows much more agreeable without that artifice. Wo be to the luckless wight, who does not ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... depend. A man like Mr. Macdonald, not a workman nor a formal or real representative of workmen, was followed everywhere by the limelight; while the millions of workmen who worked and fought were out of focus and therefore looked like a fog. Just as such figures give a fictitious impression of unity between the crowds fighting for different flags and frontiers, so there are similar figures giving a ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... was not irritation he appeared to express, but the slight strain of an effort to get into relation with the subject. Better to focus the image he closed his ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... Whence had he come? What interests were bound up in his life? Why was his body the focus of plot and counterplot, and its possession disputed with a fierce earnestness that stopped at no crime? Perhaps, could he be got to talk, the key of the mystery might be put in my hands. Out of the mouth of the ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... Africa and Spain? And with this religious outbreak, this great revival of monotheism in Asia, there came also as remarkable a renaissance of learning, which made the Arabs the teachers of philosophy and art to Europe during a long period. Arab Spain was a focus of light while Christian Europe lay in mediaeval darkness. And still more interesting and perplexing is the character of Mohammed himself. What was he,—an impostor or a prophet? Did his work advance ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... if you are to be a Christian, you must have your whole life concentrated on, and consecrated to, one thing; and, just as the vagrant rays of sunshine have to be collected into a focus before they burn, so the wandering manifoldnesses of our aims and purposes have all to be brought to a point, 'This one thing I do,' and whatsoever we do we have to do it as in God, and for God, and by God, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... whether Hume or Buckle will weigh heavier on his page. Or if one of them looks up from his desk in a blurred near-sighted manner, it is because his eyes have been so stretched upon the distant centuries, that they can hardly focus on a room. If a scholar chances to sneeze because of the infection, let it be his consolation that the dust arises from the most ancient and respected authors! Pages move silently about with tall dingy tomes in their arms. Other tomes, whose use is past, ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... was closed off by a road barrier quite some distance away and tightly parked cars testified to the attraction of the expanding grass. Scorning these idle sightseers, I pushed and shoved my way forward to what had now become the focus of all ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... above said, that all great European art is rooted in the thirteenth century; and it seems to me that there is a kind of central year about which we may consider the energy of the middle ages to be gathered; a kind of focus of time which, by what is to my mind a most touching and impressive Divine appointment, has been marked for us by the greatest writer of the middle ages, in the first words he utters; namely, the year 1300, the "mezzo del cammin" of the life of Dante. Now, therefore, to Giotto, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... preserved, pure and untainted, the ancient, inbred integrity, piety, good-nature, and good-humor of the people of England, from the dreadful pestilence which, beginning in France, threatens to lay waste the whole moral and in a great degree the whole physical world, having done both in the focus of ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... hard upon an hour, and had not the heart to be angry. Once some one remembered me, and brought me out a half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous American cocktail. I drank it, and lo! veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus of conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for a quarter of an hour. I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will not court them. The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much French poetry as I could remember ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lonely woman is not life made endurable, even pleasant, by the possession and the love of a devoted dog! The man who would focus the burning glass of science upon the animal, may well mock at such a mission, and speak words contemptuous of the yellow old maid with her yellow ribbons and her yellow dog. Nor would it change his countenance or soften his heart to be assured that that withered husk of womanhood ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... again made the motion, as though he desired to take the glass. The savage took the loop from his neck, and handed the instrument to George. The latter put it to his eyes and pointed them to the east, carefully adjusting them to get the proper focus. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... excellent polish it is capable of. The diamond had nevertheless been placed at the head of crystals or precious stones by the mineralogists, till Bergman ranged it of late in the combustible class of bodies, because by the focus of Villette's burning mirror it was evaporated by a heat not much greater than will melt silver, and gave out light. Mr. Hoepfner however thinks the dispersion of the diamond by this great heat should be called a phosphorescent ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... see? They've nat'rally got a focus, an' w'en I 'appen to be standin' on a sunny day in front of 'em, contemplatin' the face o' natur', as it wor, through the lantern panes, if I gits into the focus by haccident, d'ye see, it just ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... things of the post and the woods crept into her heart, that seemed to her to be opening to a vague knowledge, to be looking down sweet vistas of which she had never dreamed among her other dreams of forest and lake and plain, and, at each distant focus where appeared a new glory of light, there was always the figure of the young factor with his anxious eyes. Strange new thrills raced hotly through her heart and dyed her cheeks in the darkness. She tingled from head ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... the Western diplomatists that the proceedings of the Poles was a violation of the treaty of Vienna, and that it was necessary to the integrity and peace of the Austrian empire that Cracow should be no longer a focus of rebellion. The Western governments satisfied themselves with protests, and the last green spot of Polish independence had its life stamped out by the foot ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... may call attention to the attempts made to receive the luminous impression upon a band prepared with gelatino-bromide of silver. In practice this band would unwind uniformly at the focus of the receiving telescope, which would be placed in a box, forming a camera obscura. The velocity of this band prepared for photographing the signals would be regulated by clockwork. The experiments that have been ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular, compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... if the subject can be completely rendered by showing it as it appears to a single one of the figures in the book, then there is no reason to range further. Haphazard and unnecessary plunges into the inner life of the characters only confuse the effect, changing the focus without compensating gain. But which is the centre, which is the mind that really commands the subject? The answer is not always evident at once, nor does it seem to be always correctly divined in the novels that we read. But of course in plenty of stories there can be ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... This new gold-camp has not reached the blood-spilling stage yet. It hadn't, I should say. The news of this killing will fly. It'll focus minds on this claim-buyer, Blight. His deed rings true—like that of an honest man with a daughter to protect. He'll win sympathy. Then he talks as if he were prosperous. Soon he'll be represented in this changing, growing population ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... comes because it has been in the habit of coming from one's earliest childhood. The star divided into two, and all its beams swam about while his gaze remained fixed, and nothing seemed quite in the focus of ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... engineer (section D of the Public Works Department) and I have to make an important measurement in connexion with the Apothegm of the Bilateral which runs to-night precisely through this spot. My fingers now mark exactly the concentric of the secondary focus whence the Radius Vector should be drawn, but I find that (like a fool) I have left my Double Refractor in the cafe hard by. I dare not go for fear of losing the place I have marked; yet I can get no further without my ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... than tearful children; I do not wish to pay for tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal largely in the opposite commodity. A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his ideas of art than a Beethoven or a Mozart. But it is not so. As too much light may blind the vision, so too much intellect may hinder the understanding. Berlioz's mind spent itself in details; it reflected light from too many facets, and did not focus itself in one strong beam which would have made known his power. He did not know how to dominate either his life or his work; he did not even try to dominate them. He was the incarnation of romantic genius, an unrestrained ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... the thirteenth of December to find everywhere the peculiar flatness that always follows a day which for weeks has been the focus of one's ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... fiercely that the yacht stopped dead, unable to make headway against it. For a full minute or more it seemed as though half a dozen separate and distinct winds were battling together for the mastery, the yacht being the centre and focus round which the battle raged. We on the poop were buffeted helplessly this way and that, so that it was only with the utmost difficulty we could keep our feet; indeed, Mrs Vansittart was literally lifted off her feet for ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... of insisting on a maintenance of the old Constitution, went into alternative proposals—including the adoption of the Referendum. This was their constructive line; the destructive resolved itself largely into an endeavour to focus resistance on the question of Ireland—the purpose for which alone, they said, abolition of the veto was demanded. As has often happened, action taken by the Vatican gave the opponents of Home Rule a useful weapon. The Ne Temere decree, promulgated in the year 1908, laid down ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... together by stout copper wire, the shape being exactly that of the printing frame. The other end of the bamboos are tied with stout string to a piece of cardboard tube, postal tube, which slips over the lens. The length of the bamboos depends upon the focus of the lens and the amount of reduction. It will sometimes be found convenient to have the bamboo in two lengths; thus, supposing we want as a general rule 36 inches, two pieces, 24 inches each, should be obtained, and by fastening these together in the middle by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions: the house hasn't altered; this is the first time it has been in focus. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... complete failure. For this I had only my own smattering and desultory habit of mind to blame and also a vivid troublesome sense of the beauty of it all. The charm of the prismatic fringe round the edges made juggling with the lens too tempting, and a clear persistent focus was never attained. Considered (oddly enough) by my mates as the pattern of a diligent scholar, I was in reality as idle as the idlest of them, which is saying much; though I confess that my dilettantism was ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... chemistry and astronomy, all measurements being applied to the heavenly bodies. Their main service was found in accurate records of data. Kepler maintained "that every planet moved in an ellipse of which the sun occupied one focus." He also held "that the square of the periodic time of any planet is proportional to the cube of its mean distance from the sun," and "that the area swept by the radius vector from the planet to the sun is proportional to the time."[4] He was ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Public Works Department) and I have to make an important measurement in connexion with the Apothegm of the Bilateral which runs to-night precisely through this spot. My fingers now mark exactly the concentric of the secondary focus whence the Radius Vector should be drawn, but I find that (like a fool) I have left my Double Refractor in the cafe hard by. I dare not go for fear of losing the place I have marked; yet I can get no ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... its title and function, no colours could paint to the imagination anything more venerable. In that light the mind of an inquirer, subdued by such an awful image as that of the virtue and wisdom of a whole people collected into one focus, would pause and hesitate in condemning things even of the very worst aspect. Instead of blameable, they would appear only mysterious. But no name, no power, no function, no artificial institution whatsoever, can make the men of whom any system of authority is composed, any other ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... seventeenth century, grew in numerical and in real strength, until, in its latter part, the "Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge" had already become famous, and had acquired a claim upon the veneration of Englishmen, which it has ever since retained, as the principal focus of scientific activity in our islands, and the chief champion of the cause ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Ramaka, or Rakama, whose name appears on his monuments. But compromise with treason has rarely a tranquillizing effect; and Pinetem's concession to the prejudices which formed the stock-in-trade of his opponents only exasperated them and urged them to greater efforts. The focus of the conspiracy passed from the Oasis to Thebes, which had grown disaffected because Pinetem had removed the seat of government to Tanis in the Delta, which was the birthplace of his grandfather, Herhor. So threatening had become the general aspect of affairs, that the king thought it ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... girl, had fought with the mammoth waves as with inveterate beasts seeking to stifle her in icy embraces. A mere atom plunged in their depths as in cavernous and boundless darkness, she had struggled with an ocean the whole of the focus of which were leagued against her, possessed all the time with a foolish and trivial remembrance of child hood, the vision of a little gray kitten, with a weight about its neck, striving to beat its way up through clear waters, sending out ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... the king was the vice-king. Yet they had seen their beloved viceroy, Iturrigaray, deposed by a conspiracy of Spanish shop-keepers, which had organized itself in that focus of Mexican trade, the Parian. All this was bewildering to the nation. All New Spain was astonished to see a power sufficiently potent to arrest the vice-king emanate from such a quarter. And not only had they witnessed this, but they had ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... Little Sister, and an hour later the same child in a cemetery three miles in the country where I used mounted butterflies from my cases, and potted plants carried from my conservatory, for a graveyard scene. The time was early November, but God granted sunshine that day, and short focus blurred the background. At four o'clock I was at the schoolhouse, and in the best-lighted room with five or six models, I was working on the spelling bee scenes. By six I was in the darkroom developing and drying these plates, every one of which was good enough to use. ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... pour out abuse. He was working himself up to a passion that would justify murder. The weapon in his hand swept wildly back and forth. Presently it would focus down to a deadly concentration in which all motion ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... the half-length of a youthful warrior, clad in steel, save the beautifully-formed head, which was covered only by his own luxuriant raven curls. In a better light it could not have been placed, particularly in the evening; the rays, condensed and softened, seemed to gather up their power into one focus, and throw such an almost supernatural glow on the half face, give such an extraordinary appearance of life to the whole figure, that a casual visitant to that chamber might well fancy it was no picture ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... was in a trance. Her eyes were steadily regarding something quite beyond their focus. Her lips were parted, and her face was lighted by the kindling furor of the explorer, the ardent, stirring disquiet of the adventurer. Suddenly she clasped her ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... as this fact was gathered by the redskins. The experiments had been satisfactory and they were prepared to venture upon the more dangerous and decisive one—the one which they intended should bring matters to a focus. ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... length, by thought and action rather than by time. "A counted number of pulses only," says Pater, "is given to us of a variegated, aromatic, life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen by the finest senses? How can we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits, for habit is relation to a stereotyped world:... while all melts under our feet, we may well catch ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... No longer will you see the antichthon of Plato, the focus of Philolaues, the spheres of Aristotle, or the seven heavens of the Jews with the great waters above the ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... justify this encouragement of smiling rather than tearful children; I do not wish to pay for tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal largely in the opposite commodity. A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life. ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... or, if thou'rt she, Ah, then, from Thee Let Bride and Bridegroom learn what kisses be! In what veil'd hymn Or mystic dance Would he that were thy Priest advance Thine earthly praise, thy glory limn? Say, should the feet that feel thy thought In double-center'd circuit run, In that compulsive focus, Nought, In this a furnace like the sun; And might some note of thy renown And high behest Thus in enigma be expressed: 'There lies the crown Which all thy longing cures. Refuse it, Mortal, that it may be yours! It is a Spirit, though it seems red gold; And ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... than colour, diactinic lenses, multiplication of impressions, or anything else. And when it is remembered that the law of an ordinary convex lens is, the farther the object from the lens the nearer the focus, and, vice versa, the nearer the object the farther the focus, it becomes evident that by such an instrument distant objects must be made to appear near, and near objects distant, and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... prompts such random desires. Feeling is diffused over the whole surface of the body; but light is focalized in the eye; sound in the ear. The organization of a sense or a pleasure seems diluted and imperfect, unless it is gathered by some machinery into one focus, or local centre. And thus it is that a general state of pleasurable feeling sometimes seems too superficially diffused, and one has a craving to intensify or brighten it by concentration through some sufficient stimulant. I, for my part, have tried every thing in this world except 'bang,' ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... New England gave its distinctive character to the American colonies, and finally to the nation. New England influences still breathe from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the great lakes to Mexico; and Boston, still the focus of the New England idea, ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... assured by Count von Beust, who travelled in Bavaria last year, that their progress among the lower classes is astonishing, considering the short period these emissaries have laboured. To any one looking on the map of the Continent, and acquainted with the spirit of our times, this impious focus of illumination ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... sand-hills of Cape Cod over our larboard quarter, and before us the wide waters of Massachusetts Bay, with here and there a sail gliding over its smooth surface. As we drew in toward the mouth of the harbor, as toward a focus, the vessels began to multiply, until the bay seemed alive with sails gliding about in all directions; some on the wind, and others before it, as they were bound to or from the emporium of trade and centre of the bay. It was a stirring sight for us, who had been months ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... roused and never crippled, carried the universal civilization to its height. Nature herself set the boundaries of the river and the mountain to the confines of the several states—the smallness of each concentrated power into a focus—the number of all heightened emulation to a fever. The Greek cities had therefore, above all other nations, the advantage of a perpetual collision of mind—a perpetual intercourse with numerous neighbours, with ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... characteristics; it has contemplated the radiant image of the supreme beauty—still it is not philosophy which has restored for humanity the idea of God. Its lights mingled with darkness remained widely scattered, and without any focus powerful enough to give them strength for enlightening the world. To seek God, and consequently to know Him already in a certain measure; but to remain always before the altar of a God glimpsed only by an elite ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... events of life is a constant theme of speculation among the pragmatics; no petty detail is overlooked in the possibility of its portentous consequences. Walter Shandy's hyperbolic philosophy turned about such a focus, the exaltation of insignificant trifles into mainsprings of action. Shandy bristles with ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... unemployment and limit dependence on foreign countries, the government is encouraging the replacement of expatriate workers with local people, i.e., the process of Omanization. Training in information technology, business management, and English support this objective. Industrial development plans focus on gas resources. ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Anthracite Creek, in southwestern Colorado, and at the Placer Mountains, near Santa Fe, New Mexico, Cretaceous lignites into anthracite; those from Queen Charlotte's Island and southwestern Colorado are as bright, hard, and valuable as any from Pennsylvania. At a little distance from the focus of volcanic action, the Cretaceous coals of southwestern Colorado have been made bituminous and coking, while at the Placer Mountains the same stratum may be seen in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... but for an hour. The wise man will be he who quickest lights his candle; the wisest he who never lets it out. Tomorrow, the next moment, he, a poor, darkened, blurred soul, may need it again to focus the Image better, to take a mote off the lens, to clear the mirror from a breath with which the world has ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... greatest refinement of design and execution, and the aid of sculpture, both in relief and in the round, was invoked to give splendor and significance to the monument. The statue of the deity was the focus of internal interest, while externally, groups of statues representing the Olympian deities or the mythical exploits of gods, demigods, and heroes, adorned the gables. Relief carvings in the friezes and metopes commemorated the favorite national ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... books burned in public by order of the state, his library locked up by the Jesuits, and himself exiled by public clamor. For seventeen years he works calmly upon the demonstration of the great principles that planets revolve in ellipses, with the sun at one focus; that a line connecting the center of the earth with the center of the sun passes over equal spaces in equal times, and that the squares of the times of revolution of the planets above the sun are proportioned to the cubes by their mean distances from the sun. This boy with no chance became ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular, compact and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downward and inward, to one common focus. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... come in front of the bench where Father Denfili told his beads. The prelate turned to the old General of San Ambrogio with deference. "Is it not so, Father?" he asked. But Father Denfili raised his sightless eyes as if he sought to focus them upon the group before him. Father Ramoni, laughingly dissenting, suddenly felt his joy congealing into a cold fear that bound his heart. He turned away angrily, then recovered himself in time. Father Denfili was no longer on the bench ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... public speaking, the controversial and illustrated press, the circulation of pamphlets and handbills, parades and mass-meetings, and the generous use of placards, cartoons, and other devices designed to attract and focus attention. Plans are laid, arguments are formulated, and (p. 095) leadership in public appeal is assumed by the members of the Government, led by the premier, and, on the other side, by the men who are the recognized leaders ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... only on money-getting. And yet the Clarendon Press makes money, and the University can depend upon it for handsome subsidies. It may well depend upon it for much more. As the Bank of England—to which in its system of government it may be likened—is the focus of all the other banks, private or joint-stock, in the kingdom, and the treasure-house, not only of the nation's gold, but of its commercial honor, so the Clarendon Press—traditionally careful in its selections and munificent in its rewards—might ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... as he could focus his sight upon them, these "shadows," without any light to cast them, moved in distorted guise there on the deck with a motion that was somehow rhythmical—a great movement as of ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... behind the big tree across the street. I'm sure he's watching the Foger house, and when Andy came to the door that time, I happened to look around and saw that man focus a pair of opera glasses on him ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... through his mind what marvel that it was well-nigh out of the question for Walter King to focus his attention on algebra, Latin, history, and physics. X Y seemed of very little consequence, and as for the Punic Wars they were so far away as to be hazy beyond any reality ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... charge galvanic tingled through the cable, At the polar focus of the wire electric Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us Called himself ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... opposite. He was as interested in Dorothy Marteen's admirers as any fond father could be; and yet his eyes turned with strange, fascinated jealousy to the older woman's loveliness. Suddenly he drew in the focus of his glasses. A face had come within the rim of his observation—the face of a man sitting in the row in front of him. That man, too, had his glasses turned toward the group on the other side of the diamond horseshoe, and ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... of the spiritual force is not the spiritual force at all, only a bland deception. If you only focus on what you can see directly, than you chase after only the representation and not the object desired. If a bird is flying through the sky at noontime, casting a shadow on the ground below him, and a man comes along, and in ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... pried his thoughts away from aborigines and heat, and tried to focus his mind elsewhere. He didn't understand psionic processes, he thought; but then, nobody did, really, as far as he knew. But ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... answered Cyrillon with a passionate gesture, "To gather the straying thoughts of men into one burning focus—and turn THAT ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the lamp shone from behind him, and he wondered if the picture had been condemned to hang with its face to the wall because it typified the existent rather than the past. He looked more closely, and drew back step by step, until he was in the proper focus to bring out every expression in the lovely face. In the picture he saw each moment a greater resemblance to Jeanne. The eyes, the hair, the sweetness of the mouth, the smile, brought to him a vision of Jeanne herself. ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... comes in—without a worldly training, indeed, you cannot tell the one from the other. But the past masters of the social art proclaim that "The Season" is dead, and we bow our heads in reverence. Yes, it is vanished, that focus of futilities, that wonderful Season, that phantasmagoria of absurdities, of abortive ambitions, over which a hundred humourists have made merry: it is dead, with its splendours and jubilations and processions—dead as the ropes of roses in ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... aera as contemporary with Croesus and Solon (B.C. 570,) about a century after Psammeticus (Psamethik 1st) threw Egypt open to the restless Greek.[FN233] From Africa too the Fable would in early ages migrate eastwards and make for itself a new home in the second great focus of civilisation formed by the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. The late Mr. George Smith found amongst the cuneiforms fragmentary Beast-fables, such as dialogues between the Ox and the Horse, the Eagle and the Sun. In after centuries, when the conquests of Macedonian Alexander completed what Sesostris ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... its practical activity to-morrow abundantly fulfil its high purpose; may its renown as a seat of true learning, a centre of free inquiry, a focus of intellectual light, increase year by year, until men wander hither from all parts of the earth, as of old they sought ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... have done it by placing a foot rule on a table and taking that in the picture, but a more scientific and accurate method has been devised by Bertillon. His camera lens is always used at a fixed height from the ground and forms its image on the plate at an exact focus. The print made from the negative is mounted on a card in a space of definite size, along the edges of which a metric scale is printed. In the way he has worked it out the distance between any two points in the picture can be determined. With a ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... shop on the corner is the political and social focus of the neighbourhood. I shall never forget the pallid and ghastly countenance of the newsdealer when the rumour first went the rounds that "Hampy" was elected. Every evening a little gathering of local sages meets in the ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... we should attend to it that we get—as far as possible—what rest we need, and take all the rest we get in the best way. We cannot expect to fulfill these conditions all at once, but we can aim steadily to do so, and by getting every day a stronger focus and a steadier aim we can gain so greatly in fulfilling the standards of a healthy mind in a healthy body, and so much of our individual dust will be laid, that I may fairly promise a happy astonishment at the view of ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... Brigade and one regiment of Mississippians. Kershaw stood to the right of the fort and Anderson, of Jenkins' Division, on the left, supported by the other two brigades then present of Jenkins'. The battle was to focus around the fort until that was taken or silenced, then Kershaw was to storm the works on the right, carry them, charge the second line of entrenchment, in which were posted the reserves and recent Tennessee recruits. Jenkins, with Anderson's Brigade on his right and next ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... bovine survivors had rudely told the truth about it, without affecting the intelligent. One's own time had not been exempt. Even since 1870 friends by scores had fallen victims to it. Within five-and-twenty years, a new library had grown out of it. Harvard College was a focus of the study; France supported hospitals for it; England published magazines of it. Nothing was easier than to take one's mind in one's hand, and ask one's psychological friends what they made of it, and ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... French history, the two focus points are the stoniest of Joan of Arc and Bastille Day. Both furnish abundance of colorful detail and incident upon which to build the pupils' conceptions of the spirit and ideals of the French people. In the case of Bastille Day, correlation ...
— The French Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... to calculate the orbit of a body moving under a central force, and showed that if the force varied as the inverse square of the distance, the orbit would be an ellipse with the centre of force in one focus. The great discovery, which made the writing of his "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" possible, was that the attraction between two spheres is the same as it would be if we supposed each sphere condensed to a point at its centre. The book was published ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... fashion, and the immediate requirements of her social position. Her life was faithful to its first impulse. Devoted to the improvement of the condition of the people, she was the moving spring of the charitable development of this great city. Her house, without any pedantic effort, had become the focus of a refined society, who, though obliged to show themselves for the moment in the great carnival, wear their masks, blow their trumpets, and pelt the multitude with sugarplums, were glad to find a ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... type (similarly sterile) by its pragmatic treatment of the problem of knowledge. As the views of knowledge, reality and truth imputed to humanism have been those so far most fiercely attacked, it is in regard to these ideas that a sharpening of focus seems most urgently required. I proceed therefore to bring the views which I impute to humanism in these respects into focus as briefly as ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... Canal Zone. It is hoped that the report which this mission will furnish will point out a way whereby the modicum of assistance which the United States may properly lend the Ecuadorian Government may be made effective in ridding the west coast of South America of a focus of contagion to the future commercial current passing ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... professor of physiology at Berlin University and physician to the imperial household, found himself, when the war broke out, in the very focus of the madness which seized the flower of his nation. Not merely did he refuse to share that madness. Yet more daring, he openly resisted it. In reply to the manifesto of the 93 intellectuals, published ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... the Creek Battery, and up into the main town. They halted him at the door of a handsome building, greatly dilapidated by round-shot and shell. This was the naval library, the highest spot in Sebastopol, a centre and focus of danger, but just now occupied by the ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... object is best attained in the spherical bulb; but it is also attained in a cylindrical vessel with one or two straight filaments coinciding with its axis, and possibly also in parabolical or spherical bulbs with the refractory body or bodies placed in the focus or foci of the same; though the latter is not probable, as the electrified atoms should in all cases rebound normally from the surface they strike, unless the speed were excessive, in which case they would probably follow the general law of reflection. ...
— Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High - Frequency • Nikola Tesla
... was, Lanyard was well satisfied that he now held the true focus of this conspiracy, a secret of the first consequence, far too momentous to the designs of England to be entrusted, though couched in the most cryptic cipher ever mind of man devised, even to cables or mails ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... axis is simply that of a body turning entirely round upon its own centre. The only centre around which the moon performs a revolution is very far from its own proper axis, being situated at the centre of the earth, the focus of its orbit, and as it has no other rotating motion around the earth, it cannot revolve on ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... He did not know that by perpetually feeling on my bosom the facets of the beloved jewel which had long lain warm upon hers—the cross which had received the last kiss from her lips—I had been able to focus all the scattered rays of thought—I had been able to vitalise memory till it became an actual presence. He did not know that out of my sorrow had been born at last a strange kind of happiness—the happiness that springs from loving a memory—living with a memory—till it becomes ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... that, apart from the polar compression, the shape seemed as if the spheroid were irregularly squeezed; so that though not broken by projection or indentation, the limb did not present the regular quasi-circular curvature exhibited in the focus of our telescopes. Also, between the inner ring and the planet, with a power of 500, I discerned what appeared to be a dark purplish ring, semi-transparent, so that through it the bright surface of Saturn might be discerned as through a veil. Mercury shone ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... usual in an English country town, and this flame was fanned by the unwearied ministerings of a chosen band of Nonconformist clergymen, amongst whom Joseph Alleine was the most conspicuous. No better focus for a revolt could have been chosen, for no city valued so highly those liberties and that creed ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I frankly confess absurd in the highest degree." (Italics ours). After admitting ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... and he stepped in. Sinking back he tried to relax, to get his stomach to stop complaining, but he couldn't fight the feeling of almost physical illness sweeping over him. He closed his eyes and sank back, trying to drive the ever-plaguing thoughts from his mind, trying to focus on something pleasant, almost hoping that his long-starved conscience might give a final gasp or two and die altogether. But deep in his mind he knew that his screaming conscience was almost the only thing ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... you've got talking hysterics, if there is such a thing," Kent interrupted harshly. "You don't know half what you're saying. You've had a hard day, and you're all tired out, and everything looks outa focus. I know—I've seen men like that sometimes when some trouble hit 'em hard and unexpected. What you want is sleep; not poetry about killing people. A man, in the shape you are in, takes to whisky. You're taking to graveyard poetry—and, if you ask me, that's worse ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... defect of the eye, depending upon some irregularity of the cornea or the lens, in which light rays in different meridians are not brought to the same focus. It is to a certain extent hereditary, but plays an insignificant role. It is an undesirable trait, but cannot be considered ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... we take refuge in generalizations. A common theme is the difficulties of raising children. We can all commiserate with each other about the problems of the generation gap for it is "safer" to talk about parenthood than about marriage. If the talk does focus on marriage, such topics as working wives or overworked husbands or the sharing of household tasks can be ...
— Marriage Enrichment Retreats - Story of a Quaker Project • David Mace
... Court with all the forms it had acquired under Louis XIV.; dignity alone was wanting. As to gaiety, there was none. Versailles was not the place at which to seek for assemblies where French spirit and grace were displayed. The focus of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... to focus attention on the pointed remarks Miss Lois Daggett was making, caught occasional snatches of their conversation. Fanny had never liked Lois Daggett; but in her new role of minister's wife, it was her foreordained duty to love everybody and ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... once stated on paper, there is no difficulty in keeping it up. That it presents an odd, unsubstantial, whimsical, new thing: a sort of previously unthought-of Power going about. That it will concentrate into one focus all that is done in the paper. That it sets up a creature which isn't the Spectator, and isn't Isaac Bickerstaff, and isn't anything of that kind: but in which people will be perfectly willing to believe, and which is just mysterious and quaint ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... wide moorlands, dotted with innumerable lakelets, with noble mountain groups rising over the wild boggy lowlands. To the student of metamorphism the geology of this area is of very high interest. The botanist finds himself once again, as in Kerry, in a focus of the southern flora already discussed. As stated above, Connemara contributes to the list of Pyrenean plants three Heaths, of which St. Dabeoc's Heath is the loveliest of the British representatives of the order. Here we may also ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... to thermo-electric pyrometers in that a thermo-couple is employed. The heat rays given out by the hot body fall on a concave mirror and are brought to a focus at a point at which is placed the junction of a thermo-couple. The temperature readings are obtained from an indicator similar to that used ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... said before, we think that a good lens requires no "actinic" focus to find. In a properly constructed lens the chemical and visual foci are identical; and we would ourselves not be troubled with the use of one in which they differed. Our advertising columns will point out to you where such a lens man be procured. We believe, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... or morbidly long sight: in this affection, the organ, instead of being spherical, is too flat from front to back, and is often altogether too small, so that the retina is brought too forward for the focus of the humours; consequently a convex glass is required for clear vision of near objects, and frequently even of distant ones. This state occurs congenitally, or at a very early age, often in several children of the same family, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... of them, he is sure to disgust the rest; if he select particular men from among them all, it is a hazard that he disgusts them all. Those who are left out, however divided before, will soon run into a body of opposition, which, being a collection of many discontents into one focus, will without doubt be hot and violent enough. Faction will make its cries resound through the nation, as if the whole were in an uproar, when by far the majority, and much the better part, will seem for awhile, as it were, annihilated by the ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... which, Sir Richard straightened his bowed shoulders somewhat and his sallow cheek flushed. "Here at last I may serve you somewhat, Martin," said he and, turning his back to the sun, he set the instrument to his eye and began moving the three vanes to and fro until he had the proper focus and might obtain the sun's altitude; whereby he had presently found our present position, the which he duly pricked upon the chart. He now showed me how, by standing out on direct course instead of following the tortuous windings of the coast, we could shorten our passage by very ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... President. He was made welcome, of course, and the varied mechanism explained to him. As the crowning "treat," he was given a peer through the celebrated instrument. It was leveled at the moon, or, rather, arranged to have that orb in its focus at the time. The visitor was appalled, as well as wondering at the view, and slowly withdrew by the trap-door. But when the astronomer resumed his observations and calculations he was interrupted by the same sedate and absorbed caller. He returned, perplexed, as, on glancing up at the moon with ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... eyes are able to see life in focus, as it were, though it has appeared to men of less harmonious ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... misshapen, or unlovely, can resist their magic. That is because those arts can accomplish their function in the choice and development of some special situation, which lifts or glorifies a character, in itself not poetical. To realise this situation, to define, in a chill and empty atmosphere, the focus where rays, in themselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to burn, the artist may have, indeed, to employ the most cunning detail, to complicate and refine upon thought and passion a thousand-fold. Let us take a brilliant ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... in this unity of plot that the Amadis series differs from its predecessors—the Arthurian romances, and those of the paladins of Charlemagne, which are detached adventures, each complete in itself, and not bearing to any common focus.—Amadis de Gaul ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... city and the face slid out of focus; the vision faded like a darkened magic-lantern, and the grayness moved ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak
... choked-up feelings, a sort of moral leakage. It might be said of Coleridge, in the phrase which he used of Nelson, that he was "heart-starved." Tied for life to a woman with whom he had not one essential sympathy, the whole of his nature was put out of focus; and perhaps nothing but "the joy of grief," and the terrible and fettering power of luxuriating over his own sorrows, and tracing them to first principles, outside himself or in the depths of his sub- consciousness, gave him the courage to ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... has alone sufficed to render it famous. The passage concerning the starry heavens and the moral law as the two transcendently overwhelming phenomena of the universe is, perhaps, more frequently quoted than any other written by a German author. This is the treatise which forms the central focus of Kant's thinking. It stands midway between the "Critique of Pure Reason" and the "Critique of Judgment." Herein Kant takes up the position of a vindicator of the truth of Christianity, approaching his proof of its validity and authority by first establishing positive affirmations ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... of which she stood was dimly lighted by a solitary candle at the farther extremity; but Ellen was exposed to the glare of the three lamps, held by Hugh, his wife, and the servant-girl. Their combined rays seemed to form a focus exactly at the point where they reached her; and the beholders, had any been sufficiently calm, might have watched her features in their agitated workings and frequent change of expression, as perfectly as by the broad light of day. Terror had at first ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ancient chamber, and make one think of the groups that must formerly have gathered there—of all the wet boot-soles, the trickling doublets, the stiffened fingers, the rheumatic shanks, that must have been presented to such an incomparable focus of heat. To-day, I am afraid, these mighty hearths are for ever cold; justice is probably administered with the aid of a modern calorifere, and the walls of the palace are perforated with regurgitating tubes. Behind and above the gallery that surmounts the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... Fluent elokventa, fluanta. Fluid fluajxo. Fluid flua. Flute fluto. Flutter flugeti, flirti. Flux alfluo. Fly flugi. Fly musxo. Fly away forflugi. Foal cxevalido—ino. Foam sxauxmi. Foam sxauxmo—ajxo. Foam (sea) marsxauxmo. Focus fokuso. Fodder furagxo. Foetid malbonodora. Foe kontrauxulo, malamiko. Fog nebulo. Foil (weapon) rapiro, skermilo. Fold faldi. Fold (sheep) sxafejo. Folding-screen ventosxirmilo. Foliage foliaro. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... disheartened statesman had written and forwarded on May fourteenth a second letter, of the same tenor as the first. This measure likewise had failed of effect, for the messenger had been stopped at Bastia, now the focus of Salicetti's influence, and the letter ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... some idea of social progress. We are still childishly pleased when we see the further subdivision of labor going on, because the quantity of the output is increased thereby, and we apparently are unable to take our attention away from the product long enough to really focus it upon the producer. Theoretically, "the division of labor" makes men more interdependent and human by drawing them together into a unity of purpose. "If a number of people decide to build a road, and one digs, ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... were the only beauty of Miss Mary Blanchet's face. She had not good sight, for all their brightness. When any one talked with her at some little distance across a room, or even across a broad table, he could easily see by the irresponsive look of the eyes—the eyes which never quite found a common focus with his even during the most animated interchange of thought—that Miss Blanchet had short sight. But Miss Blanchet always frankly and firmly declined to put on spectacles. "I have only my eyes to boast of, my dear," she said to all her female advisers, "and I am not going to cover ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... amazement. It had not occurred to her that this girl was married—there seemed nothing of the wife about her. And that she should be the neighbor whom Anne had pictured as a commonplace Four Winds housewife! Anne could not quickly adjust her mental focus to this astonishing change. ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and readable by every educated man. The 'View' itself has been in a later edition eclipsed by the later 'History of the English Criminal Law.' In point of style it is perhaps better than its successor, because more concentrated to a single focus. Although I do not profess to be a competent critic of the law, a few words will explain the sense in which I take it ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... kernel is that vast sleepy interior of China. Few people, even in Shanghai, know what it means; so that to the stay-at-home European pardon for ignorance of existing conditions so much out of his focus ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... repeatedly focus above the level of the other man's eyes, you make the impression that you are an idealist rather than a practical person. What you say will not seem to him to apply directly to his case. He will not feel the personal, or man-to-man contact ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... to see what is going on in another room. The focus may be altered in range so that the faces of those in the room may be recognized and the act of passing money or signing cheques, for instance, may be detected. The instrument is fashioned somewhat after the cytoscope of the doctors, with which ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... Angelique arranged them ready for use. They gave her a spoonful and raised her on pillows, and she rested drowsily again, grateful for the damp wind which made the others shiver. Angelique's sweet fixed gaze, with an unconscious focus of vital power, dwelt on the sick girl; she felt the yearning pity which mothers feel. And this, or the glamour of dim light, made her oval face and dark hair so beautiful that Rice looked at her; and Peggy, coming from the ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... armaments had done their work. "Let us now glance at the times as they are, and see how the business of life is transacted. Manhattan Island has something over 2,500,000 inhabitants, and is surrounded by a belt of population, several miles wide, of 12,000,000 more, of which it is the focus, so that the entire city contains more than 14,500,000 souls. The several hundred square miles of land and water forming greater New York are perfectly united by numerous bridges, tunnels, and electric ferries, while the city's great natural advantages have been enhanced and beautified by every ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... conductor for the magician's will. It directs the flow of his thought and concentrates it upon a given point in space or an object. It is, magically, what the sights of a rifle are to a sportsman. It enables him to focus his powers with exact precision upon the mark against which, or upon which, his will is directed. Apart from this there is no power, per se, in the Wand itself, any more than there is in a lightning conductor without the electric storm. Ergo, the Wand is the conductor, in the magician's hand, ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... desideratum. But when you collect one thing you always incidentally collect others. The fisherman who casts his net for shad usually secures a few other fish, and once in a while a turtle, which enlarges the mesh to suit, and gives sweet liberty to the shad. To focus exclusively on dollars is to secure jealousy, fear, vanity, and a vaulting ambition that may claw its way through the mesh and let your dollars slip ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... independence, and a place in the federation; but Monaco and Mantone smiled at so arrogant a pretension. Rocco-Bruno was not the strongest, and was reduced to silence: from that moment, however, Rocco-Bruno was marked out to the two national conventions as a focus of sedition. The republic was finally proclaimed under the title of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... depending from it like the beard of some fiery gulleted ogre—the strings of glass left by the withdrawal of the wand. The heat three feet away was enough to make sand melt and run like water, but I was not unpleasantly warm. This was because I stood at the focus of three tin pipes, thru which streams of cold air, fan-impelled, beat upon me. Without this cooling agent it would be impossible for men to work so close to the heat ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... for their lives, yet their authority was eventually superseded, and they were compelled to bow to the storm by retiring from their seats of government. One common spirit pervaded the United Provinces of America, though it was more rampant in some colonies than others. The grand focus of rebellion was still at Massachusets Bay, where, towards the close of the year, in the course of predatory hostility, the town of Falmouth was cannonaded and totally destroyed, in revenge for some offence relative to supplies, and on the refusal of its inhabitants ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... it was away up in the north- west, on one of the higher reaches of the Enyong Creek, and a two days' journey for her by water. The lads lived at a town called Ikpe, an old slave centre, that had been in league with Aro, and the focus of the trade of a wide and populous area. It was a "closed" market, no Calabar ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... objective, f, the thin glass cover. It will be easily seen that the ray of light, h, from the mirror or condenser above the stage will enter the slide and thence be refracted to the silvered surface of the illuminator, r, whence it is reflected at a corresponding angle to the object in the focus of the objective. A shield to prevent unnecessary light from entering the objective can be made of any material at hand, by taking a strip one inch long and three-fourths of an inch wide and turning up one end. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... fruits of his reflections were bitter. He viewed the events of the night in truer focus; he saw that by his flight he had sealed his fate—had voluntarily outlawed himself. It became frightfully evident to him that he dared not seek to draw from his bank, that he dared not touch even his modest Post Office account. With the exception ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... excitement over Irish affairs and for a while I wondered how any one could think that Irish affairs mattered in the least. Fresh from my wanderings over a huge continent Ireland seemed to me a small place. It took me a week to get my mind into focus again. Then I began once more to see the Home Rule question as it should be seen. South America and Ascher's web of international credit ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... a little better, but he was still shaken, and his head ached violently. Little snatches of undefined memory tried to creep into his consciousness, but he couldn't quite bring them into focus. He turned toward the rail, and saw Min-ta ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... weeks before, he had been placed by some intelligent friend at Mrs. Clanfrizzle's establishment, with the express direction to mark and thoroughly digest as much as he could of the habits and customs of the circle about him, which he was rightly informed was the very focus of good breeding and haut ton; but on no account, unless driven thereto by the pressure of sickness, or the wants of nature, to trust himself with speech, which, in his then uninformed state, he was assured ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... retrace his steps, and that at the imminent hazard of being captured. He carried habitually a small dark lantern, and had thought of so disposing of it in the lower branches of this very elm, as to form a focus of it, but hesitated about doing that which might prove a guide to his enemies as well as to himself. If Margery would take charge of this lantern, he could hope to reap its advantages without incurring the hazard of ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... was the great focus of railroad and steamboat communication, and situated as it was, at the confluence of the Dussel and Rhine rivers, much of the transit trade of the Rhine was carried ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... eyes repeatedly focus above the level of the other man's eyes, you make the impression that you are an idealist rather than a practical person. What you say will not seem to him to apply directly to his case. He will not feel the personal, or man-to-man ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... influence over all with whom he came in contact. He was strong, self-contained and deliberate in speech, and having been an industrious student and an acute thinker all his life, his opinions always commanded attention and respect. It so happened that his services brought him into the very focus of events on more than one occasion. It so happened also that I was more or less intimate with him to the time of his death, from the date of my entry into the Military Academy, where I had the good fortune to receive his instruction in mathematics. I first met him in the field, while I was serving ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... face waved into focus before Frankie's blinking eyes. What was Milt trying to do? Frankie heard the tolling count—six, seven, eight. Milt wasn't even going to help him up. Sick and bewildered, Frankie struggled to his feet. Nappy came driving in. Frankie back-pedalled and took the vicious ...
— Vital Ingredient • Gerald Vance
... my desk, I have a calendar, and the sheet that faces me is that for the first week in March, 1916. It says "Concentration. Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus. Alexander G. Bell." That is the whole matter in a nutshell, but the only use the motto has been to me has been to permit me to look at it and think about it when I ought to be thinking of the story ...
— Goat-Feathers • Ellis Parker Butler
... of all fine tendencies, is likewise their centre or focus out of which they start again, with some chance of fulfilment;—and we may judge in how many directions Friedrich was willing to expand himself, by the multifarious kinds he was inviting, and negotiating for. Academicians,—and not Maupertuis only, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... concern on my account; if this were not the evening of my birthday, and you the only friend who remembered it; if confession were not good for the soul, though harder than sin to some people, of whom I am one—well, if all reasons were not at this instant converged into a focus, and burning me rather violently, in that region where the seat of emotion is supposed to lie, I should keep my trouble to myself. Yes, I have fifty times had it on my mind to tell you the whole story. But who can be certain that his best friend will not smile—or, what is worse, cherish ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... admirable. But when the exercises had been duly gone through, then arose the original and powerful minds, to take full advantage of what had been gained by all the practising, and to concentrate and bring to a focus all the hints and lessons of art which had been gradually accumulating. Then the sustained strength and richness of the Faery Queen became possible; contemporary with it, the grandeur and force of English prose began in Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity; and then, in the splendid ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... graces into its focus. It draws Charity, followed by her lovely train, her forbearance with faults, her forgiveness of injuries, her pity for errors, her compassion for want. It draws Repentance, with her holy sorrows, her pious resolutions, her self-distrust. ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... beside her, she stood there in the red glow, straining eyes and memory to focus both on a past that receded and seemed to dwindle to a point ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... this performance. The Leopard Woman, watching, at last had to close her eyes in order to escape the hypnotic quality of it. In spite of herself her senses swam in the rhythmic monotony. All outside the focus of the dancers turned gray—goom, zup! goom, zup!—was it never to end? And then it seemed to her that it never would end, that thus it would go on forever, and that so it was just and right. The men were tireless. The sweat glistened on their bodies, but their eyes gleamed fanatically. ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... Booneville and Harrodsburg and Nashville in Kentucky were on 'Dark and bloody ground,' so ought the place where we now are standing be called the dark and bloody ground of the Missouri River, for this indeed was a focus of trouble and danger, even before the river trade made ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... reflectors are fixed in the same holder; one a concave mirror, the other a plane one. The former brings the rays of light to a point or focus while the latter simply passes the beam of light along just as it received it, viz., as a parallel beam ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... light was shed on the subject in a study which the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency had asked the National Academy of Sciences to undertake. Previous studies had tended to focus very largely on radioactive fallout from a nuclear war; an important aspect of this new study was its inquiry into all possible consequences, including the effects of large-scale nuclear detonations on the ozone layer which helps ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
... individual; it was merely that he was too much occupied with what he counted his work—with his theories first, then his writing of them, then the endless defending of them, to care to see beyond the focus of his short-sighted eyes. Vavasor was a gentlemanly fellow, and that went a long way with him. He did not oppose him, and that went another long way: of all things he could not bear to be opposed in what he so plainly saw ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... the profile of an Indian chieftain, lounged in the window embrasure, the light streaking his hair, gray and brown, and silhouetting his brow, nose, and projecting chin. He alone was the illuminated focus of this picture which, after a half-century, is brilliantly burnt into my memory. His pupils were mere wraiths floating in a misty dream, with malicious white points of light for eyes. And I felt like a disembodied being in this ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular, compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... knowledge of chemistry, of botany, of zoology, of geology, of mechanics, of electricity, of mathematics, to reconstruct and develop a large part of the agricultural, mechanical, and domestic life of the race. But how much of it is brought to a focus along lines of practical work? In cities of the South like Atlanta, how many coloured mechanical engineers are there? or how many machinists? how many civil engineers? how many architects? how many house decorators? In the whole State of Georgia, where eighty per cent. of the ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington
... The salt-cellar was the focus of the old-time board. In earlier days, in England, to be seated above or below the salt plainly spoke the social standing of a guest. The "standing salt" was often the handsomest furnishing of the table, the richest piece of family plate. Comfort Starr, of Boston, ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... substance. I have lifted up the curtain and flooded it with the light of day. You shall have the fact for your senses. Tomorrow I shall explain it all. I shall deliver my greatest lecture; in which my whole Me has come to a focus. It is not spiritualism nor sophistry. It is concrete fact and common sense. The subject of my lecture tomorrow ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... transcended their own and dwarfed their activities. There was no bitterness in Mrs. Wilcox; there was not even criticism; she was lovable, and no ungracious or uncharitable word had passed her lips. Yet she and daily life were out of focus: one or the other must show blurred. And at lunch she seemed more out of focus than usual, and nearer the line that divides life from a life that may be of ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... with space for a large family between the jambs, and the hollow of the chimney ample enough to show one of the smaller constellations at the top of it in a clear night. A seat on the brick or stone floor before one of these kitchen fire-places is to me the focus of the home comforts of the house, and I always make for it mechanically. As the darkness drew on, several agricultural laborers drifted in, one after the other, until the broad, deep pavement of the hearth was lined by a row of them, quite fresh from their work. They were quiet, sober-looking ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... whole surface of the body; but light is focalized in the eye; sound in the ear. The organization of a sense or a pleasure seems diluted and imperfect, unless it is gathered by some machinery into one focus, or local centre. And thus it is that a general state of pleasurable feeling sometimes seems too superficially diffused, and one has a craving to intensify or brighten it by concentration through some sufficient stimulant. I, for ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... as the doctor adjusted the focus for him. Each filament was covered with countless tiny spheres that isolated and insulated the nerve from contact. That's why he couldn't feel anything. The spherical microbes did look like bubbles. As yet they didn't seem to have attacked the ...
— Bolden's Pets • F. L. Wallace
... of the shield length, forming to the eye an elongated rectangle, in the center of which is the knob. The remaining quarter of the shield is hyperbolic in form with a small lozenge-shaped protrusion at the focus. The upper edge of the shield is not quite straight, an ornamental effect being produced by slight curves. In the center of the upper edge is a very small projection or sometimes a round incision, that might serve as ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... dependants on my own family, suddenly enriched. I knew Mrs. Bradfort had a large six thousand a year, besides her own dwelling-house, which stood in Wall Street, a part of the commercial emporium that was just beginning to be the focus of banking, and all other monied operations, and which even then promised to become a fortune of itself. It is true, that old Daniel M'Cormick still held his levees on his venerable stoop, where all the heavy men in town used to congregate, and joke, and buy and sell, and abuse Boney; and that ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... nutritive processes to hurried growth of the overstimulated brain. The result is a type of child with a puny body and an excitable brain,—the neurotic. The young eye, for example, is too flat (hypermetropic)—made to focus only on objects at a distance. Close application to print, or even to weaving mats or folding bits of paper accurately, causes an overstrain on the eye, which not only results in the chronic condition ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... north there will be seen a wonderful volcanic tract. So vast, in fact, that Professor Johnstrup has termed it the Fire Focus of the North. To the north-east, again, is found a large lake, called 'Myvata,' or 'Midge Lake,' with a volcanic range of mountains which stretch from north to south; the most famous of these are 'Leivhnukr,' and 'Krafla,' which, after years of quiescence, ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... flitted in to the number of half a dozen or more, by turns, subordinate sinners, under-graduates, younger than some of the chosen phalanx, but not less obscene in their appearance, though indeed not so much beholden to the plastering focus; yet unpropt by stays, squalid, loose in attire, sluggish-haired, uner-petticoated only as the former, eyes half-opened, winking and pinking, mispatched, yawning, stretching, as if from the unworn-off effects of the midnight ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... seated on a camp-stool by the side of the entrance gate to her house, was looking anxiously around her. Close by stood Ingold, with one eye tightly screwed up, and an old-fashioned telescope in her hand, trying in vain to adjust the focus. ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... kisses be! In what veil'd hymn Or mystic dance Would he that were thy Priest advance Thine earthly praise, thy glory limn? Say, should the feet that feel thy thought In double-center'd circuit run, In that compulsive focus, Nought, In this a furnace like the sun; And might some note of thy renown And high behest Thus in enigma be expressed: 'There lies the crown Which all thy longing cures. Refuse it, Mortal, that it may be yours! It is a Spirit, though it seems red gold; ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... can last no longer. Every day which passes enhances the dangers of the country. The Assembly, which ought to be the firmest support of order, has become a focus of conspiracies. The patriotism of three hundred of its members has been unable to check its fatal tendencies. Instead of making laws in the public interest it forges arms for civil war; it attacks the power which I hold directly from the People, it encourages all bad passions, ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... he reached it than he observed a boat approaching the shore. Putting down his gun and knapsack, he took out his telescope, and that he might steady it, stretched himself on the side of the sand-hill. Having adjusted the focus, he directed it towards the boat. She came nearer and nearer. He saw that she contained several people, who seemed to have the ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... bearing on its bosom a flotilla of barks from Catalonia and Valencia. Farther up is seen the bridge of boats which traverses the water. The principal object of this prospect, however, is the Golden Tower, where the beams of the setting sun seem to be concentrated as in the focus, so that it appears built of pure gold, and probably from that circumstance received the name which it now bears. Cold, cold must the heart be which can remain insensible to the beauties of this magic scene, to do justice to which the pencil of Claude himself ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... "simply wants her mind clearing; all is more or less confused at present. She grasps nothing distinctly; and yet she is often very near a clear perception. But it is with her mind as with a telescope: it is near the right focus for seeing things clearly, but simply it wants the adjustment which would bring it to the point of unclouded vision, and then, when that adjustment has been reached, it wants to be kept fixed at the right focus. I cannot but hope that we may be able ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... the columns erected by nature in thousands from the first epochs of the formation of the globe. The basalt pillars, fitted one into the other, measured from forty to fifty feet in height, and the water, calm in spite of the tumult outside, washing their base. The brilliant focus of light, pointed out by the engineer, touched every point of rock, and flooded the walls with light. By reflection the water reproduced the brilliant sparkles, so that the boat appeared to be ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... glance at his wrist watch as he talked, but in that glance, without pause or fumble of focus, with swift certainty of correlation, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... love had swallowed up the world, and left nothing visible beneath the sun, save itself. But the passion of Nina and her lover was that of more complicated natures and more mature years: it was made up of a thousand feelings, each naturally severed from each, but compelled into one focus by the mighty concentration of love; their talk was of the world; it was from the world that they drew the aliment which sustained it; it was of the future they spoke and thought; of its dreams and imagined glories they made themselves a home and altar; their ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... want a piece of work well and thoroughly done, pick a busy man. The man of leisure postpones and procrastinates, and is ever making preparations and "getting things in shape"; but the ability to focus on a thing and do it is the talent of the man seemingly o'erwhelmed with work. Women in point lace and diamonds, club habitues and "remittance men"—those with all the time there is—can never be entrusted to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... should retain an independent and separate existence. For this reason, therefore, I consider the existence of Cracow as a state, having been thus secured by general treaty—whatever the complaints the three Powers had made that Cracow was the focus of disturbances; that revolutionary intrigues there found a centre and a means of organization; that there arose from that small state insurrection against the three surrounding Powers; that it was impossible to ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... theory, in the present state of our knowledge; it was proposed by Lavoisier, who imagines the focus of heat, or fireplace to warm the body, to be in the lungs: others, however, have thought it more consonant to facts, to suppose, that, instead of the oxygen uniting with carbon and hydrogen in the lungs, and there giving out its heat, the oxygen is absorbed by the blood, and unites with these ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... right so far, that it is possible by just a touch to convert the noblest sentiment into commonplace. No more than a touch is necessary. The parabolic mirror will reflect the star to a perfect focus. The elliptical mirror, varying from the parabola by less than the breadth of a hair, throws an image which is useless. But Mr. Cardew was far more wrong than he was right. He did not take into account that what his wife said and what she felt might not ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... Heathcote. He learned how to take his meals on the wing, as it were, to run for trains, to snatch two hours' sleep anywhere between midnight and morning, and to be jostled by rude crowds that failed to recognize his superiority. The full-backed light overcoat, during its brief existence the focus of so much attention, was lost in a dinner rush and never reappeared. But, above all, Mr. Heathcote had upon his hands the care of the helpless, miserable lackey, and never did a sick baby require more attention. ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... passed in insignificant skirmishes, now determined to withdraw his small posts, to allow the discontented to gather to a head. On the morning of the 4th it was reported that the insurrection had its focus in the Quartiers St. Antoine, St. Denis, and St. Martin, and that several barricades were in progress. The General deferred his attack until two o'clock, when the various brigades of troops acted in concert. The barricades were attacked in the first instance by artillery, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... more and more difficult. The old markets, some of the types of which still exist in various parts of Paris, were built of masonry and wood. They were massive structures into which the air and light penetrated with difficulty, and which consequently formed a dangerous focus of infection for those who occupied them, and for the inhabitants of the neighboring houses. So the introduction of iron into the construction of markets will bring about a genuine revolution whose influence ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... I was irresistibly reminded of what I had read of nebular convulsions. A thin cloud overspread the area of the reef and the adjacent sea—the dust, as I could not but fancy, of earlier explosions. And a little apart, there was yet another focus of centrifugal and centripetal flight, where, hard by the deafening line of breakers, her sails (all but the tattered topsail) snugly furled down, and the red rag that marks Old England on the seas ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Europe have various centres for their Christmas rejoicing. In Spain and Italy the crib is often the focus of the festival in the home as well as the church. In England—after the old tradition—, in rural France, and among the southern Slavs, the centre is the great log solemnly brought in and kindled on the hearth, while in Germany, one need hardly say, the light-laden tree is the supreme ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... his hands were full of arrears of business, and the excitement respecting Mr. Smith necessarily occupied him. Pending the arrival of letters from the Rector, every tongue was in commotion, and the reading-room was a focus of debate and centre of intelligence. So many letters, either in assault or defence, were addressed to the editor of the Pursuivant, that only a supplement as big as the Times could have contained them. Every poor person who had not had every demand supplied from the charities was ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... people, as once in his first phase of faith he had been in enforcing persecution and injustice upon them. By now, Newman may have gained his second sight. Whatever was the shortsightedness of Francis Newman's spiritual focus, there can be no manner of doubt that he was an earnest seeker after Truth, though his methods of search were sorely to be regretted, in so far as doctrinal theory was concerned, as in his judgments on his ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... the book, which has faults of construction, superficialities as to incident, and with some crudity of plot, it was, in the main, a study of character. There was focus, there was illumination in the book, to what degree I will not try to say; and the attempt to fasten the mind of the reader upon the central figure, and to present that central figure in many aspects, safeguarded the narrative from the charge of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... study is arranged and administered, and the teacher employed. The child is major, and all else is subsidiary. In the general scheme even the teacher takes secondary place. Teachers may come and go, but the child remains as the focus of all plans and purposes. The teacher is secured for the child, and not the child for the teacher. Taxpayers, boards of education, parents, and teachers are all active in the interests of the child; and ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... all the people I really cared for, that sitting altogether round the fire seemed quite as sensible as sulking by one's self in a corner the other end of the room, that the fire made a cheerful and convenient focus for family and friends. They pointed out to me how a stove, blocking up the centre of the room, with a dingy looking fluepipe wandering round the ceiling, would enable us to sit ranged round the walls, like patients in a hospital waiting-room, and ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... elevated to the low rail about the stove, his pipe in mouth, his coat off, and his waistcoat unbuttoned. At the sight of his homely, jolly countenance, Bob experienced a pleasant sensation of slipping back from an environment slightly off-focus to the normal, accustomed and real. Nevertheless, at the first opportunity, he tested his new doubts by ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... in acknowledgment, and rolled his cigar from corner to corner of his mouth. "Oh, I've lost a lot more in my time, Judge, but with a squint in my eye! But I'm doing this with no astigmatism. I've got the focus." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of deep metallic mirrors, known under the name of parabolic mirrors, has been found effectual to the purposes required. When a lamp is placed in the focus of such a mirror, all the rays which emanate from it are reflected from the polished surface, and converge in one direction: their original divergence is destroyed, and they form, as they issue from the apparatus, a cylinder of ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... Parker was eager to hunt for a vortex of the battle where, he held, the primary decision must have been lost and won and the fighting would have been most intense; while the action on all the other parts of the line must have been contingent upon the results at this "tactical center." This "focus" could not have been to the north or west of Paris, because the great bodies of French troops are to the east; nor was it on the battle line nearest Paris, for everything we saw today in and behind the zone of operations testified to the contrary. In all the actions we have so far observed, ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... I'll look.—Thanks. Your eyes require a different focus from mine. Yes. What I expected," said the professor, handing back the glass. "Have another look at your sand heap; it will repay observation; it is one of the milestones of the caravan roads, only they are not placed at regular distances. Have you ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... singly or in clumps form a striking feature amongst the thin sparse scrub. . . . The younger ones resemble nothing so much as large funeral plumes. Their outlines seen under a blazing sun are indistinct, and they give to the whole scene a curious effect of being 'out of focus.'" ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... tale should be judicious, clear, succinct; The language plain, and incidents well linked; Tell not as new what everybody knows, And new or old still hasten to a close; There centring in a focus round and neat, Let all your rays of information meet. What neither yields us profit nor delight Is like a nurse's lullaby at night; Guy Earl of Warwick and fair Elenore, Or giant-killing Jack would ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... made it almost an insult to the Janseniuses to identify with Henrietta the person he had seen. Jane suggested dragging the canal, but was silenced by an indignant "sh-sh-sh," accompanied by apprehensive and sympathetic glances at the bereaved parents. She was displaced from the focus of attention by the appearance of the two policemen who had been sent to the chalet. Smilash was between them, apparently a prisoner. At a distance, he seemed to have suffered some frightful injury to his head, but when he was brought into the midst of the company it appeared ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... chair placed in the focus of the gathering, which sat in a semicircle. Standing by it, one of his lean hands resting upon the back, he surveyed them, disgust in his glance, a sneer curling his lip, so terrible and brutal of aspect despite his frailness that more than one of those ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... time of the commonwealth, Brambletye was the focus of many a cavalier conspiracy. "From its not being a place of any strength or notice, it was imagined that Brambletye might better escape the keen and jealous watchfulness, which kept the protector's eye ever fixed upon the strong holds and defensible mansions of the nobility and gentry; while ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... problems of the family find a focus in the purpose of preparing persons for social living. The family justifies its cost to society in the contribution which it makes in trained and motived lives. As a religious family its first duty is to prepare the ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... unconscious that he spoke. At the same instant the stunned eyes found their focus—and found her beside his stirrup, leaning wide from her seat in sweet concern, one gloved hand resting on ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... hours of it, and the less subtle beaux had better learned to focus their pseudo-passionate glances elsewhere, for eleven o'clock found Isabelle and Amory sitting on the couch in the little den off the reading-room up-stairs. She was conscious that they were a handsome pair, and seemed to belong distinctively ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... chance influence of trifles upon the greater events of life is a constant theme of speculation among the pragmatics; no petty detail is overlooked in the possibility of its portentous consequences. Walter Shandy's hyperbolic philosophy turned about such a focus, the exaltation of insignificant trifles into mainsprings of action. Shandy ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... when it capitulated to the French. The university was founded in 1436 by Henry VI. of England. During the Wars of Religion, Caen embraced the reform; in the succeeding century its prosperity was shattered by the revocation of the edict of Nantes (1685). In 1793 the city was the focus of the Girondist movement against ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... what may have been the subject that had originally vexed her, it was the invariable experience that those legs became the focus to which her excited wrath was drawn, and then, indeed, it must be owned, she was exceedingly hard to deal with. She would recall in bitter phrases the fact that he had married her with other and honester legs, and she would plainly ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... this enlargement of nerve contact somehow a gain. Our bared nerves are played upon by a thousand wires. Nature, no doubt, has a method of hardening or deadening them to these shocks; but nevertheless, every person who reads is a focus for the excitements, the ills, the troubles, of all the world. In addition to his local pleasures and annoyances, he is in a manner compelled to be a sharer in the universal uneasiness. It might be worth while to inquire what effect this exciting accumulation of the news of the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... religion is salvation because it starts from what God is. Everything in it of human benefit and satisfaction is a bye-product flowing from the fact that it gives to men a focus for their devotion and attention not in themselves but in God. Its main motive is not self- but God-regarding. It draws men out of the entanglement into which they fall through temporising with their ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... the accommodation of all travelers. Each one of you who reaches the lower end of this valley should take the Mountain Trolley and spend a season at those schools. They occupy some of the grandest buildings in the world. Focus your glasses and ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... But when the focus of Greek intellectual activity shifted to Athens, the leading minds [70] concentrated their attention upon ethical problems. Forsaking the study of the macrocosm for that of the microcosm, they lost the key to the thought of the great Ephesian, which, I imagine, is more intelligible ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... hour at which it is at its best and happiest, seizing upon its most telling presentment—and all this before he begins even mentally to compose its salient features on the square of his canvas. You can turn, if you choose, your camera skyward and focus the top of a steeple and only that. It is true, but it is uninteresting, or rather unintelligible, until you focus also the church door, and the gathering groups, and the overgrown pathway that ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... Civil Servant woo the panegyrics of Society, And hanker after posthumous applause, It MAY happen that possession of a prodigal variety Of talents will invalidate his cause. He must learn to put a tether on his cerebral agility, And focus all his energies of aim On ONE isolated idol, or the Curse of Versatility Will drag him from the ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... Minister of Munitions, but the course of events is tending in this direction and the new War Minister, General Polivanoff, commands the confidence of the Duma and nation generally. The War Office has become the focus of the new national organizing movement of which all existing public bodies are being ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... diplomatists and intermediaries and men on whose attitude great issues might depend. A man like Mr. Macdonald, not a workman nor a formal or real representative of workmen, was followed everywhere by the limelight; while the millions of workmen who worked and fought were out of focus and therefore looked like a fog. Just as such figures give a fictitious impression of unity between the crowds fighting for different flags and frontiers, so there are similar figures giving a fictitious unity to the crowds following different creeds. There ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... do not, except incidentally and indirectly, owe their command of our sympathies to the bare power of evoking reactions in a series of ocular envelopes or auditory canals. Their power lies in their freightage of association, in their tactical position at the focus of converging experience, in the number and vigor of the occasions in which they have crossed and re-crossed the palpitating thoroughfares of life. ... Sense-impressions are poetically valuable only in the measure of their power ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... But—" Billy nodded toward the body of the instructor, then spun hastily as a sound came from the rear of the shed, the Thor gun coming to focus. A trap door was rising there. Three natives were looking up ...
— Be It Ever Thus • Robert Moore Williams
... was not exactly a Paradise yet, though it is in a fair way of becoming one. It is a spot of some fifty acres reclaimed from the scrubbiest part of Wormwood Scrubbs, and made the focus of a club of working men, of whom I am very proud indeed to be one. Indeed, I do not see why throughout the remainder of this article I should not use the first person plural. I will. Well, then, we ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... ‘Kriegspiel.’ Groome at once struck up an acquaintance with the gipsies at the fair. It occurred also that Mr. Sanderson, after Groome had left Ipswich School, used to go and stay at Monk Soham Rectory every summer for fishing; and this tended to focus Groome’s interest in Romany matters. At Göttingen, where he afterwards went, he found himself in a kind of Romany atmosphere, for, owing perhaps to Benfey’s having been a Göttingen man, Romany matters were still somewhat rife ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... was some animal approaching in his direction. He had up till then forgotten his binoculars, but he was now wide awake and, looking first to his rifle, he got out his glasses and twisted them into focus upon the moving object in the distance. A startled exclamation rose to his lips as the field-glasses covered the moving spot; it was a man. Yes running, stumbling, crouching and at times almost crawling the object which he saw was ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... time, thinking, or rather trying to think, for he felt like one vainly endeavouring to get the focus of a stereoscopic picture. His mind kept going away from him. He knew himself able to think, yet he could not think. It was a revelation to him of our helplessness with our own being, of our absolute ignorance of the modes in which our nature works—of what it is, and what ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... minimum; let us pass to Guyenne; here it is, this figure like a calf walking on one leg. Of course, you will not be astonished to find discontent in Guyenne; it is an old focus for revolt, and will be enchanted to rise. They can furnish 8,000 soldiers; that is not much, but they are well trained. Then we have Bearn and Navarre; you see these two compartments, which look like an ape on the back of an elephant—they may furnish about 16,000. Let us count now—10,000 ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... stared at him and then shifted his uncertain gaze to the figure approaching him. He was able to focus her more clearly as she stopped to reply to the proprietor of the place, who had hastened to meet her with every mark of respect. Men at the tables she passed smiled at her and murmured respectful greetings, to which she replied with little nods of ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... compensators and stabilizers adjusted to the effects of the blast. The machine turned back to its lustrous silver color and there was a low hum as it righted itself gracefully then swung around, into the center of the clearing to get a better focus on them. ...
— The Happy Man • Gerald Wilburn Page
... of overwork. Physically inactive, his mind was never barren but issued in an immense output: several books every year besides editing and articles: there were even two years in which no fewer than six books were published. To focus his attention on the deepest matters, it was vital to escape from the net of work ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... (later, Kinnasrin), in which it lay, and the centre of that hellenized region, now a vast field of ruins, which stretches W. to the Orontes. Khalep-Beroea, we may infer, remained a native town and a focus of Aramaic influence, a fact which will explain the speedy oblivion of its Macedonian name and the permanent revival of its ancient title, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... physical force they had just witnessed. He at once suppressed the memory of stories he had heard of "physical mediums" and their dangerous phenomena; for if these were true, and either his aunt or himself was unwittingly a physical medium, it meant that they were simply aiding to focus the forces of a haunted house already charged to the brim. It was like walking with unprotected lamps among uncovered stores ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... far as they immediately develop from piety and exert an influence upon it. That which makes an act religious is always feeling as a point of indifference between knowing and doing, between receptive and forthgoing activity, as the center and junction of all the powers of the soul, as the very focus of personality. And as feeling in general is the middle point in the life of the soul, so, again, the religious feeling is the root of all genuine feeling. What sort of a feeling, then, is piety? Schleiermacher answers: A ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... the refracting power of lenses is modified by their convexity or concavity. The more convex a lens is, the shorter the distance from the refracting medium, where the different refracted rays converge to a focus. To adapt the eye to view objects at different distances, requires a change in the refracting power of some of the transparent ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... upon her knees, at the window, and prayed for strength, wisdom, and courage. She could realise absolutely nothing. She had thought so much and so continuously, that all mental vision was out of focus and had become a blur. Even his dear face had faded and was hidden from her when she frantically strove to recall it to her mental view. Only the actual fact remained clear, that in a few short minutes she would be taken ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... B, is a scale engraved on glass, and may be purchased of any optical instrument maker, though it may be necessary to send the eye-piece to have it properly fitted. When resting on the diaphragm it is in focus for the upper lens, so that on looking through the microscope, the scale is clearly seen in whatever position the instrument may be as regards the object being looked at. Suppose this to be a small button of gold on a shallow, flat watch-glass, on the stage of the microscope. Bring the button ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... in life when everything is out of focus, when events take on the measure, not of what they really are, but of the mental state of the people affected by them. Such a time had now come to the mistress of the Trellis House. For a while Mrs. Otway saw everything, heard everything, read everything, through a mist of aching pain and of that ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... great invisible force of Nature is for ever working. Whatever ideal is held in the mind becomes woven into the life through the tireless working of the sub-conscious mind. Only set your attention upon high and lofty achievement, and you will focus all the invisible inward forces of Nature upon its accomplishment. In course of time you will reap as you sow. If you will direct your attention into the right channel, backing it up with energetic, conscious action, your sub-conscious will help you day and night, ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... and the white devotees of the game outnumber the colored five to one. Among the patrons of the policy-shops which, despite police raids and surveillance, still flourish in the district, of which the Post Office may be considered the focus, may be seen lawyers, journalists, advertising agents, book-keepers, mechanics, liquor-dealers, bar-tenders, peddlers, insurance agents, etc. Gamblers, as a class, are very superstitious, and the white policy-player is hardly less so than his colored brother. The ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... valiantly covering the sudden breach, talking inconsequently in a language which Tommy could not even recognize as his own. And the Colonel was seconding his efforts, while Major Burton sat frowning at the end of his cigar as if he were trying to focus his sight upon something infinitesimal and elusive. No one looked at Monck, in fact everyone seemed studiously to avoid doing so. Even his brother seemed lost in meditation with his eyes fixed immovably ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... steadily-growing pull of his mindless enemy in the distant sky. Floating and kicking his way over to the Tele-screen, he quickly switched the instrument on. Rotating the control dials, he brought the blinding white image of the onrushing solar disk into perfect focus. Automatically he adjusted the two superimposed polaroid filters until the proper amount of light was transmitted to his viewing screen. They really built ships and filters these days, he reflected wryly. Now if they could only form a rescue ...
— Rescue Squad • Thomas J. O'Hara
... not see a few that stand out clear and golden, sharp-cut against the sky-line of memory? Years that we wish we could live again, so that we might revel in every full-blooded hour. For we so seldom get the proper focus on things until we look at them through the clarifying telescope of Time; and then one realizes with a pang that he can't back-track into the past and take his old place in the ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... opulent, powerful, passionate, unruly Ghent—was now the focus of discord, the centre from whence radiated not the light and warmth of reasonable and intelligent liberty, but the bale-fires of murderous licence and savage anarchy. The second city of the Netherlands, one of the wealthiest and most powerful cities of Christendom, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... called an object-glass, and at its lower extremity a second glass called ocular, to which the eye of the observer is applied. The rays from the luminous object traverse the first glass, and by refraction form an image upside down at its focus. This image is looked at with the ocular, which magnifies it. The tube of the field-glass is, therefore, closed at each extremity by the ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... metropolis even in the modern sense; not merely an emporium of commerce, but a focus where the intellectual and religious treasures of various countries were concentrated and worked up, and transmitted to all the nations that desired them. I have resisted the temptation to lay the scene of my story ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... denunciation of this use of their forum. The building is called in print this year, (1768,) the Town-House, the State-House, the Court-House, and the Parliament- House. It may be properly termed the political focus of the Province, and it then bore to Massachusetts a similar relation to that which Faneuil Hall now bears to Boston. The goodly and venerable structure that still looks down on State Street and the Merchants' Exchange has little in it to attract the common eye, much less a classic taste; but there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... and almost last adherent of his family, said, that there was not a vice or crime of which he was not guilty; as for his foes, they scorned to harm him even when in their power. In the year 1745 he came down from the Highlands of Scotland, which had long been a focus of rebellion. He was attended by certain clans of the Highlands, desperadoes used to free-bootery from their infancy, and, consequently, to the use of arms, and possessed of a certain species of discipline; with these he defeated at Prestonpans a body of men ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... do what I can," said Wentworth with a smile, reflecting as he walked off what a strange blurring of the focus of life there is when, everything being concentrated on to one particular purpose, whether it be a bazaar, an election, or the giving of a ball, all the human beings one encounters are considered from the point of view ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... fact is I am an engineer (section D of the Public Works Department) and I have to make an important measurement in connexion with the Apothegm of the Bilateral which runs to-night precisely through this spot. My fingers now mark exactly the concentric of the secondary focus whence the Radius Vector should be drawn, but I find that (like a fool) I have left my Double Refractor in the cafe hard by. I dare not go for fear of losing the place I have marked; yet I can get no further ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... himself they were still at the corner, his feet were tied up in a jacket, he was suffering horribly, yet seemed unable to focus it; but seeing the red and yellow reaper standing close beside his head, some memory soaked his face with ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... if any of us could have kept the direction except by such an obvious and continuous landmark as the sea to our left. It hardly seemed worth while to focus my mind, but I did it occasionally just by way of testing myself. Schwartz still threw away his gold coins, and once, in one of my rare intervals of looking about me, I saw Denton picking them up. ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... Hyle (v. the Naasene Document) in His Infinite Perfections, who manifested all things, who was concealed in all things and who was above all things. An ideal Church or Community of "Spiritual" men, conscious of the whole Man in each of its members, could focus within itself, without any robbery, all the energies of the Universe, and by concentrating and applying them in a certain manner could give birth to the whole order within the consciousness of the called and chosen candidate, who thus became a "Self-Knowing," "Self-Fathered," "Fore-Fathered" ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... the sweet-faced young woman, still carrying the little child who was so like her, and thus entered the large and pleasant living-room of the old house. In the embrasure of one broad window, seeming to focus all the light which streamed in freely through the thin, parted curtains, sat a woman in a gown of soft white wool, made with artistic simplicity. Her face had the same soft cream tint as her gown, and the hair, turned back in loose waves from her broad ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... morning in geography, and Eileen, with a prim "Oui, ma mere," rose and sailed with drooping eyelashes to the other end of the schoolroom, and courtesied herself out of the door, knowing herself the focus of envy and humorously conscious of her goodness. She had learned to love this soothing sensation of goodness, as she sat in her blue pelerine on a hard tabouret before her desk, her hands folded in front of her, her little feet demurely crossed. The sweeping courtesy of entrance ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... kill time in those days? There was a studio on Alvarado Street; it stood close to the post-office, in what may be generously denominated as the busiest part of the town. The studio was the focus of life and hope and love; some work was also supposed to be done there. It was the headquarters of the idle and the hungry, and the seeker after consolation in all its varied forms. Choice family groceries were retailed three times a day in the ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... patients merely appeared in the nature of a make weight, in a very short time, to everyone's profound relief, the group had been taken. . . . Vane, who had been sitting on the ground, with his legs tucked under him to keep them in focus, silently suffering an acute attack of cramp, rose and stretched himself. On the lawn, tennis had started again; and she could see various officers dotted about the ground in basket chairs. He was turning away, with the idea ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... Germany received a check. A blood-stained revolution at Belgrade ousted the pro-Austrian Obrenovitch, and put in its place the rival family of the Karageorgevitch. Under the new dynasty Servia escaped from Austrian tutelage, and became an independent focus of Slav life in close touch with Russia. The change was illustrated in 1908, when Austria took advantage of the revolution in Turkey, led by the Young Turks, to annex formally the occupied territories of Bosnia and the ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... WILLIAM BOLLAND, Knt.: and, a few years before his death, one of the Barons of his Majesty's Exchequer. He died in his 68th year. He was an admirable man in all respects. I leave those who composed the domestic circle of which he was the delightful focus, to expatiate upon that worth and excellence of which they were ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... to sleep while this unseen judge weighs and balances, collects related facts, looks first at one side of the question and then at the other, and finally sends up into consciousness a decision full of conviction, a decision that has been formulated so far from the focus of attention that it seems to be something altogether ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... humility displeases. During these terrible transitions, which induce fierce distraction, Job himself would become irritable, insanely furious, and choleric. A man in such a state regards himself as the focus of all miseries. When recovered, he feels chastened, becomes urbane and ludicrously amiable, he conjures up fictitious delights from all things which, but yesterday, possessed for him such awful portentous aspects. His men he regards with love and friendship; whatever is trite he views with ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... later he had rung the bell; and as a man opened the door, showing a easy and well-lighted lobby within, the fear aura no longer touched Paul Harley. Out from the doorway came hominess and that air of security and peace which had seemed to characterize the house when viewed from outside. The focus of menace, therefore, lay not inside the house of Sir Charles but without. It was very curious. In the next instant came ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... tiger and leopard the arms come in for fearful punishment. It is the way of carnivorous beasts to attack each other head to head and mouth to mouth, and this same instinct leads these animals to focus their initial attacks upon the heads and faces ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... Murray, of Albemarle Street, London, the most eminent publisher that we have, is about to establish a daily journal of the first importance. With his great influence and connections, there is no doubt that he will succeed in his endeavour to make it the focus of the information of the whole world. Among other places at which he wishes to have correspondents is the Rhine, and he has applied to me for my advice upon this point. It has struck me that Coblentz is a very good situation for intelligence. Its proximity ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... special type of arc light. It is adapted for use in a lighthouse dioptric lantern, and hence its arc has to be maintained in the same position, in the focus of the lenses. The lamps are so constructed as to feed both carbons instead of only one, thereby securing ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... very commencement, the Eumenides stands on the very summit of tragical elevation: all the past is here, as it were, concentrated into a focus. Orestes has become the mere passive instrument of fate; and free agency is transferred to the more elevated sphere of the gods. Pallas is properly the principal character. That opposition between the most ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... and he wondered if the picture had been condemned to hang with its face to the wall because it typified the existent rather than the past. He looked more closely, and drew back step by step, until he was in the proper focus to bring out every expression in the lovely face. In the picture he saw each moment a greater resemblance to Jeanne. The eyes, the hair, the sweetness of the mouth, the smile, brought to him a vision of Jeanne herself. ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus." EMERSON. ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... 'identity' is not 'lost,' for you are God's child, and that child can never be deprived of her birthright, nor of any good thing necessary to her happiness or well-being. Neither have you 'been deprived of your only friend,' nor has she been swept beyond the focus of your love, or you of hers. The bond that existed between you can never be broken, for it was, and still is, the reflection of divine Love that is omnipresent. I am looking forward to our reunion, and shall think of you often as the ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... 1841, and thus referred to his visit:—"I write this from Dickens's study, the focus from which so many luminous things have radiated. The raven croaks in the garden, and the ceaseless roar ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... the clergy, who are paramount there. A population of some sixty thousand has seventy-two churches, some of them very large. It is the focus of the church-party, whose steady powerful resistance to reform is one of the causes of the unhappy political state of the country. As is usual in cathedral-towns, the morality of the people is rather lower than elsewhere. I have said already that the revenues of the Mexican Church ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... to this great gallery of "the portraits of the family of God" with a pleasure as natural as it is reverent and believing. True to our plan in these expositions, however, we shall not attempt to comment upon it in the least degree fully or in detail. Our aim will be rather to collect and focus together some main elements of its teaching, particularly in regard of their applicability to ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... the claims of the poet must fascinate one with their implications. The two aspects of human life, the physical and the ideal, focus in the poet, and the result is the harmony which is art. The fact is of profound philosophical significance, surely, for union of the apparent contradictions of the sensual and the spiritual can only mean that idealism is of the essence of the universe. What is the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... are imbedded in "drama" (or at least in narrative), and the total effect is more pleasing to present-day readers since we escape, or seem to escape, from the cool universality of humble life to a focus on an individual grief. To end on a grim note of generalized "doom," would have given the poem a temporary success such as it deserved; and it must be acknowledged that the knell-like sound of "No more ... No more" (lines 20, 21) echoed and re-echoed for decades ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... part, the "Royal Society for the improvement of Natural Knowledge" had already become famous, and had acquired a claim upon the veneration of Englishmen, which it has ever since retained, as the principal focus of scientific activity in our islands, and the chief champion of the cause ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... basileus and autocrat[o]r). From this time there were two Bulgarias—eastern and western. The eastern half was now little more than a Byzantine province, and the western became the centre of national life and the focus of ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... the same time stuffing tobacco into the bowl of the corn-cob, "it is for this very reason that chapter forty-two of my book must prove to be the hub of the whole, and the whole, Mr. Knox, I am egotist enough to believe, shall establish a new focus for thought, an intellectual Rome bestriding and uniting the ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... world's least developed countries, the Lao People's Armed Forces (LPAF) is small, poorly funded, and ineffectively resourced; its mission focus is border and internal security, primarily in countering ethnic Hmong insurgent groups; together with the Lao People's Revolutionary Party and the government, the Lao People's Army (LPA) is the third pillar of state machinery, and as such is expected to suppress political and civil unrest ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... to a few perfectly simple relations of life has infinite worth—the same worth as the religion and morality of extensive knowledge and of an existence rich in the compass of its relations and actions. This inner focus, this simple region of the claims of subjective freedom, the home of volition, resolution, and action, the abstract sphere of conscience—that which comprises the responsibility and moral value of the individual—remains untouched and is quite shut out from the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... stay on this problem," he concluded his brief summary. "But somewhere there's fifty colonists in trouble because this whole thing is out of focus. I'm not a full E, and maybe their lives are more important than my ambition to do a solo job. Certainly more important. Then, trivial as it is, we'd be playing right into Gunderson's hands if we've sent out a boy to do a ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... mainly in 1904, were very modest and were never fully carried out. They were only intended to make an impression on the outer world and to appease the continually growing body of supporters of the reform party, especially numerous in South China. The south remained, nevertheless, a focus of hostility to the Manchus. After his failure in 1898, K'ang Yo-wei went to Europe, and no longer played any important political part. His place was soon taken by a young Chinese physician who had been living abroad, Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... now, he would probably slight for the time being his building bridges, and skimp his work on Mona Lisa, and write a book—an exultant book about common people. He would focus and express democracy as only the great and true aristocrat or genius or artist will ever do it. A great society must be expressed as a vision or expectation before men can see it together, and go to work on it together, and make it a fact. What makes a society great is that it is full ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... or opening in the foliage of a large tree that over-topped its fellows in the distance. In the centre of this rift I perceived a white spot, but could not, at first, distinguish what it was. Adjusting the focus of the telescope, I again looked, and now made it out ...
— Short-Stories • Various
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