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More "Grasp" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... petticoats and fastened them together with a piece of string. And she advanced quietly into the water, taking the greatest care not to disturb it. When she was quite close to some tiny fish, that lay lurking between a couple of pebbles, she thrust down her bare arm, made a wild grasp, and brought her hand up again with nothing in it but sand and gravel. Serge then broke out into noisy laughter which brought her back to the bank, indignant. She told him that he had no business to ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... to understand," he answered, heatedly—"A clever little woman like you who writes books should not want any explanation. You ought to be able to grasp the whole position ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... the party descended. Now and then one of the lads slipped, but there was always a rock or a sapling at hand which they could grasp to steady ...
— Comrades of the Saddle - The Young Rough Riders of the Plains • Frank V. Webster
... fiercely at me that everybody round observ'd it and question'd me about it. I could only say what was so, that he was very drunk. When I got up, he seiz'd my arm as I pass'd him, begging me to shake hands with him. I extricated myself from his grasp and pass'd on; he soon after follow'd and began loudly reproaching me for my cruelty, and asking why I would not shake hands. I was extremely distress'd, but at last told him his own sagacity might explain to him why I never would, and that his conduct to-night did not tend to alter my determination. ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... North, of the free States, where some approximation has been made to securing God-given rights to all inhabitants. I think that it is wrong that the further a State recedes from common right and common justice the more power the oligarchy which controls it shall grasp in their hands; and I desire that this amendment shall be made so that it shall bear down upon that abuse with the crushing power of three-fourths of the ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... I have, chiefly by compression, put the utterance both of mother and of daughter into rather better logical form than they gave it; but the substance of it is thus only the more correctly rendered. Hester was astonished at the grasp and power of her mother. The child may for many years have but little idea of the thought and life within the form and face he knows and loves better than any; but at last the predestined moment arrives, the two minds meet, and ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... do quietly, before giving any general alarm, as that might not prove necessary, and also because I remembered an old Highland wisdom, "Never cry fire, unless you want the heather to catch." Its bearing, as you will grasp is on strifes and feuds set alive, not on the actual burning of heather, which is done to let grass, for the sheep beasts, grow without ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... more usual, if a narrower—sense of the historical method; and here, too, Carlyle was a pioneer. He was among the first in our country to grasp the importance of studying the literature of a nation, as a whole, and from its earliest monuments, its mythological and heroic legends, downwards to the present. The year 1831—a turning-point in the mental ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... was London. I stared out of the window and tried to grasp the tremendous, wonderful fact with all the power of my mind. Somehow or other it did not seem real, but I felt I could make it real by an effort of ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... two feet square, which was being raised to the upper storey of this building, got loose from the ropes and fell, crushing the baron's servant who was behind the cabriolet. A cry of horror shook both the scaffold and the masons; one of them, apparently unable to keep his grasp on a pole, was in danger of death, and seemed to have been touched by the stone as ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... the local Governments should have had some training at headquarters. It is much easier for an intelligent officer who has been so trained, to supply a lack of local knowledge, than for one who has been constantly employed in a particular province to grasp in a sufficiently comprehensive spirit the general interests of the Empire, and duly to appreciate the relative claims of its component parts. Already, among the high officers in the Provinces, there is a considerable disinclination to face ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... and sobbing; she had let go the uniform and tried now to release her son from the iron grasp. She probably did not herself know that she was hitting ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... informed me that the husband of poor Lavinia lies buried in yonder church-yard; and perhaps the very tomb which now glistens by the moonbeam is the one which consecrates his memory! That man was passionately addicted to literature;—he had a strong mind; a wonderful grasp of intellect; but his love of paradox and hypothesis quite ruined his faculties. NICAS happened to discover some glaring errors in his last treatise, and the poor man grew sick at heart in consequence. Nothing short of infallibility and ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... life as dearly as he could. He encouraged his men to arm themselves with their paddles, and defend themselves to the last. He instantly seized hold of Pascoe's wife, and with the assistance of another of his men dragged her from the fellow's grasp. Pascoe at the same time levelled a blow at his head with one of their iron-wood paddles, that sent him reeling backwards, and ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... We grasp one axe-handle to hew the other, and yet if we look askance from the one to the other, we may consider them as apart. Therefore, the superior man governs men according to their nature, with what is proper to them; ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... our dungeon to the queen, and that afternoon, according to promise, Elizabeth gave orders for the release of John and his father. Sir George, of course, was greatly chagrined when his enemies slipped from his grasp; but he dared not show his ill humor in the presence of the queen nor to any one who would be apt to enlighten her Majesty on ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... for France!" he yelled. There was no danger of his not being able to shout this time! And then, before anyone there could collect his senses, the officers of justice saw their prisoner whisked away from out of their very grasp, and John was in France long before the executioner and the chaplain, the jailers and the crowd, had ceased gaping stupidly ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... earth's autumnal taints of various landscape When the first ray of morning tips the trees, And fires the distant rock! I hear its voice When thy hand sends the sound along the gale, Swept from the silver strings or on mine ear Drops the sweet sadness! At my heart I feel Its potent grasp, I melt beneath the touch, When the tale pours upon my sense humane The woes of other times! What art thou, Beauty? Thou art not colour, fancy, sound, nor form— These but the conduits are, whence the soul quaffs The liquor of its heaven. Whate'er thou art, Nature, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... of the army and navy, both in America and Ireland. Chatham now made another speech, in which he expressed great alarm as to the actual state of those two important fortresses, Gibraltar and Minorca; contending that they were not secure from the grasp of France and Spain. He also took occasion again to extol the Americans, and to plead their cause, still justifying their opposition to the mother country. The motion was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Orators have appeared who have rivaled the great masters of antiquity. The doors of the American Parthenon are ever open to invite the humble but aspiring youth to enter and fill the loftiest niche. The highest dignity is within the grasp of all; for the lowly boy, born and reared in our own sweet valley of Cumberland, shall, when the spring comes round again, be clothed by the people with the first of mortal honors—that of guiding for a time the American republic upon her ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... succeeded in eluding the grasp of her pursuer. But, alas! for Mrs. Mudge. In her impetuosity she lost her footing, and fell backward into a pail of water which had been brought up the night before and set in the entry for purposes of ablution. More ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... Youth;—the Heart's high prize, Friendship,—and all that charm'd us in the eyes Of yet unutter'd Love.—So pleasures past, That in thy crystal prism thus glow sublime, Beam on the gloom'd and disappointed Mind When Youth and Health, in the chill'd grasp of Time, Shudder and fade;—and cypress buds we find Ordain'd Life's blighted roses to supply, While but reflected shine the golden ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... hops, denotes thrift, energy and the power to grasp and master almost any business proposition. Hops is a favorable dream to all classes, ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... If we grasp this opportunity to build an age of productive partnership between the less fortunate nations and those that have already achieved a high state of economic advancement, we will make brighter the outlook for a world order based upon security, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower
... time his grasp of things in general soon showed Totski that he now had to deal with a being who was outside the pale of the ordinary rules of traditional behaviour, and who would not only threaten mischief but would undoubtedly carry it out, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Tom's hand; he closed his eyes, but still retained his hold; for in the gates of eternity the black hand and the white hold each other with an equal grasp, and softly murmured some words he had been singing that evening—words of entreaty ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... proud of his fame. He would not marry, would not burden his life with a wife who would be in his way, but then he might make love. He felt so sure of success that he sprang out of bed as though to grasp it on the spot, and he dressed to go and search through the town for rooms to ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... tips of my three longest fingers, my thumb and little finger not having been ordained by nature to meet the cordial grasp of men of this stamp, and having repeated his good-bye, he stalked out of the room in conscious ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... answered Brown, with a face of blank bewilderment. "The only thing I can think of.... Well, I never understood that Dreyfus case. I can always grasp moral evidence easier than the other sorts. I go by a man's eyes and voice, don't you know, and whether his family seems happy, and by what subjects he chooses—and avoids. Well, I was puzzled in the Dreyfus case. Not by the horrible things imputed both ways; ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... windmill, he would assuredly have concluded that a young one had escaped, and was walking in ever-narrowing circuits, round the field. The mist lifted further, and he saw the thing more clearly. Its great red arms swung dark against the sky, gathering the corn in a giant's grasp to feed its ravenous cutters. Round and round the field it went. Each time as it travelled to the distant corners the mouse dropped down to earth; each time as it thundered close at hand, he dashed like lightning up the stalk to look. Sometimes his wife came with him. Closer it drew and ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... back our existence almost to a point. Former time presents us with trains of thoughts gradually diminishing to nothing. But our ideas of futurity are perpetually expanding. Our desires and our hopes, even when modified by our fears, seem to grasp at immensity. This alone would be sufficient to prove the progressiveness of our nature, and that this little earth is but a point from which we start toward a perfection ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... to perform his part of the tragedy, and Lovel stood gazing on the evil of which he had been the active, though unwilling cause, with a dizzy and bewildered eye. He was roused from his trance by the grasp of the mendicant. "Why stand you gazing on your deed?What's doomed is doomedwhat's done is past recalling. But awa, awa, if ye wad save your young blood from a shamefu' deathI see the men out by yonder that are come ower late to part yebut, out and alack! sune eneugh, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... gifted with a natural perspicacity that enabled him, as soon as he heard these remarks, to grasp their spirit. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... this trial by fire! Forsake me not in this hour of extremity, but send Thy ministering angels to strengthen and sustain my spirit, that it faint not with the consuming flesh! And, oh, God! protect Thy persecuted daughter, and save, oh, save her from the grasp of the destroyer! Let not the wicked triumph! my God, let not the wicked triumph! but shield, oh, shield the innocent! Thou art He who canst do wonders; make known Thy power in the rescue and salvation of the afflicted ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... by elderly osteologists pursuing their studies in dinner society, Mrs Podsnap could dispense with her daughter. Mr Podsnap, for his part, on being informed where Georgiana was, swelled with patronage of the Lammles. That they, when unable to lay hold of him, should respectfully grasp at the hem of his mantle; that they, when they could not bask in the glory of him the sun, should take up with the pale reflected light of the watery young moon his daughter; appeared quite natural, becoming, and proper. It gave him a better opinion of the discretion of the Lammles than ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... enjoy at such times as the true and native form of experience; all organs, applications, and expressions of thought they deprecate and call accidental. As some pious souls reject dogma to reach pure faith and suspend prayer to enjoy union, so some mystical logicians drop the world in order to grasp reality. It is an exquisite suicide; but the energy and ideal that sustain such a flight are annihilated by its issue, and the soul drops like a paper balloon consumed by the very flame that wafted it. No thought is found without an organ; none is conceivable ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... first the mucous membrane of one cheek, near the corner of the mouth, as a dark, ragged, sloughing ulcer and spreads for two or three days before the substance of the cheek is infected. If you grasp the cheek between the thumb and finger you can then feel a hard and sensitive lump. The cheek may be eaten through by the third day, though a week generally passes before this happens. There is a burning watery discharge from ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... you a bit of our experience before closing this subject. For several years we were bound hand and foot by the hideous monster—Tobacco. We repeatedly tried to extricate ourselves from his iron grasp, but tried in vain. Resolution upon resolution was made. The plug was frequently thrown away only to be shortly afterward searched for or replaced by another one. How the devil's power ground me beneath his hoof of steel. Awful slavery, terrible ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... myself in the new. Nor did Marshall himself interest me as he had once done. To my eager taste, he had grown just a little trite. My affection for him was as deep and sincere as ever; were I to meet him now I would grasp his hand and hail him with firm, loyal friendship; but I had made friends in the Nouvelle Athenes who interested me passionately, and my thoughts were absorbed by and set on new ideals, which Marshall had failed to find sympathy for, or even to understand. I had introduced him to Degas and ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... steadfastly kept in mind the limitations of the student to whom chemistry is a new science. They have endeavored to present the subject in a clear, well-graded way, passing in a natural and logical manner from principles which are readily understood to those which are more difficult to grasp. The language is simple and as free as possible from unusual and technical phrases. Those which are unavoidable are carefully defined. The outline is made very plain, and the paragraphing is designed to be of real assistance to the student ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... were on the best terms, though she always took her aunt's part vehemently in any little dispute which arose, and sometimes even came to the rescue at the end, and recaptured the vanished sixpences out of the wrongful grasp which he generally laid on them the moment the old lady held out her hand and pronounced the word "game." One knows that size has little to do with strength, or one might have wondered that her little hands should have been able to open his fingers so surely one by one, though ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... answers to all questions! Believe me, you have no soul. So take what you can—a body! You certainly have that, one can see it—well, snatch what it can bring you, since you have not enough will to try for higher things. Grasp what you may, poor weakling. That is the wisdom sitting here for ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... wet with tears, wrung with a grateful grasp, He lightly felt upon his palm the Elder Brother's clasp; And when above the loathsome couch of woe and want bent he, A low voice thrilled his soul, "So have ye done ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... that in the beginning we aimed not at independence. But there is a divinity which shapes our ends. The injustice of England has driven us to arms; and, blinded to her own interest, she has obstinately persisted, till independence is now within our grasp. We have but to reach forth to it, and it is ours. Why, then, should we defer the declaration? If we postpone independence, do we mean to carry on or to give up the war? Do we mean to submit, and consent that we ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... true that he was narrower than he had been. He was a good, honest, religiously-minded lad, but with no great depth or grasp of intellect; Ursula Egremont had been his companion first and then his romance, and the atmosphere of the community in which he lived had been studious and intelligent. His expedition to Redcastle had convinced him that the young lady lived ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... such an extraordinary compliment that it really took me some time before I could grasp the meaning of it. It seemed that according to the social rules of Diamantino, Matto Grosso, no one could be considered fully dressed unless carrying an umbrella. Rain or shine, the people of Diamantino carried their ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... mystery so dear to the imagination of the youthful amateur! In some places the death of the vulpine robber of hen roosts is hailed with delight, and people are to be found even —oh, horror!—willing to grasp in friendship the hand of ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... of my ancestors I lost the right to grieve as a woman, and pledged myself to gird on the armor of manhood. Hitherto I have made it my pride to plan, to reign, to fight like a man. I have always feared that men might say of me that my hand was too weak to grasp the reins of power. But God, who perhaps gave me the head of a man while leaving me the heart of a woman, has punished me for my ambition. He has left me to learn that, alas! I am but a woman—with all ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... his shoulders: very handsome he was in countenance, and had beautiful fair hair. He was well armed; had a fine helmet, and ring armour; a red shield; a superb sword in his belt; and in his hand a gold-mounted spear, the shaft of it so thick that it was a handful to grasp. The man went before the king, saluted him, and asked if the king would ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... that these five cases I have recounted are not exceptional, though some of their sordid details may be specially disagreeable. Give but a moment's attention to the facts that stand out, and at once you will grasp what is wrong. We are demanding too much from these unmarried mothers, and, by leaving the full power of parenthood in their weak hands, are jeopardizing the child's safety; we are also encouraging conditions harmful to society. It is like leaving a loaded gun in the hands of ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... of the study, which was at the moment partly open, he saw the dress of a policeman within, and knew that the body of the dead man was still lying there. But he went by rapidly without a glance within, remembering the look of the man as he had last seen his burly figure, and that grasp of his hand, and those odious words. And now the man was dead,—having destroyed his own life. Surely the man must have known when he uttered those words what it was that he intended to do! When he had made that last appeal about Marie, conscious as he was that every ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... experiments of Dr. Louis Robinson showed that an infant three weeks old could support its own weight for over two minutes, holding on to a horizontal bar. "In many cases no sign of distress is evinced and no cry uttered, until the grasp begins to give way." This persistent grasp probably points back to the time when the baby had to cling to its arboreal mother. The human tail is represented in the adult by a fusion of four or five vertebrae forming the "coccyx" at the end of the backbone, and is normally concealed beneath the ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... as the other advanced, holding the stick in a strong grasp, while he kept his eyes steadily fixed on his opponent. He was cool, but his enemy was enraged, and rage ...
— In A New World - or, Among The Gold Fields Of Australia • Horatio Alger
... from the shotgun. The troubles of the furry little chap were at an end. The kinks would straighten out of its small humped back, and, as a deft turn of the oars brought the boat alongside, the hunter's hand would reach over the edge, grasp the long, slim tail, and fling the body of the sleek little musquash ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... compositions that even if not wholly intended for display are primarily and principally projected for its sake. It is a well-known fact that few, even among gifted players, can sit down to play chamber music and do it justice. This is not because they cannot grasp or understand it; or because their technic is insufficient. It is because their whole violinistic education has been along the line of solo playing; they have literally been brought up, not to play with others, but to be ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... times long past, over which the twilight of uncertainty had already thrown its shadows, and the night of forgetfulness was about to descend for ever. With great solicitude had I long beheld the early history of this venerable and ancient city gradually slipping from our grasp, trembling on the lips of narrative old age, and day by day dropping piecemeal into the tomb. In a little while, thought I, and those revered Dutch burghers, who serve as the tottering monuments of good old ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... wrung And winds and waves a doleful requiem sung? There stood the husband whose protecting arm 'Till now had kept his lov'd ones safe from harm. Remorseless grown, the demon of the storm Swept from his grasp her trembling, fragile form. Vague fear o'er children's lineaments convuls'd, But selfish hands their frenzied cling repuls'd. When death's grim aspect meets the startl'd view To grovelling souls fair mercy bids adieu! And thou, sweet damsel! who ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... adventure had been rewarded even sooner than he could have expected. He felt assured that at last he floated on the stream destined to bear him to the sea. The key to the river system of the south-east portion of the continent was in his grasp, and all former fallacies and fanciful theories were answered for good. The voyage down the Murray, as this river was named, after Sir George Murray, then the bead of the Colonial Department, now continued free from some of the difficulties that had beset them in the Morumbidgee. ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... their principal settlements; that her ports and rivers, instead of affording a shelter to the extensive commerce of China, should at this enlightened period of the world hold out only terror and dismay to the mariner; and that all that she should have acquired from the deadly vicinage and withering grasp of Dutch power and dominion has been the art of more speedily destroying each other, and rendering themselves obnoxious to the rest of mankind. Now that her destinies are transferred to the enlightened heads and liberal hearts of ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... medic brought them down, curling inward, until he stooped and touched them to the ground. When he straightened once again the knife was in his grasp and he ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... which often it is not. Then interpose human Tempers, and Chills, and Heates, and Slyghtes fancied or intended, which make the vext Soul readie to wish it had never existed. How smalle a Thing is a human Heart! you might grasp it in your little Hand; and yet its Strifes and Agonies are enough to distend a Skin that should cover the whole World! But, in the Charities, what Peace! yea, they distill Sweetnesse even from the Unthankfulle, blessing him that gives more than him that receives; ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... disappeared like the crocodile from the Lower Nile. Finally, to conclude this rapidly outlined sketch, all at the present moment happily share the same fate; they are being robbed of their last mysteries; the veil of Isis is fast yielding to the white man's grasp. ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... horse continued to snort and back away from the object Tank Dysart became convinced of its reality. Still mounted, he passed close enough alongside for a grasp at it. The old red-flannel cape and hood disclosed a plump infant about ten months of age, whimpering and cruelly rubbing his eyes with his fists, and now bawling outright with rage; as he chanced to meet the gaze of his rescuer he paused to laugh in a one-sided way, displaying ...
— Who Crosses Storm Mountain? - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... failed him just as he seemed about to grasp it, and he was left wondering why the sound of that one voice had brought him a moment of radiant happiness in the midst of so much horror and pain. Meanwhile the answering voices went on, each time ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... says, "Precisely the same characteristics marked her, the same absolute religious consecration, the same heroic readiness to trample under foot the pains of illness, loneliness, and opposition, the same intellectual grasp of what a great reformatory work demanded."[19] Truly was it said of her that she was "the most useful and distinguished ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... now, however, the general practice to grasp the scrotum in the hand, between the testicles and the belly, and to make an incision in one side of it, near the bottom, of sufficient depth to penetrate through the inner covering of the testicle, and of sufficient length to admit of its escape. The testicle immediately bursts from ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... highly important for us to gain some notion, however imperfect, of the lapse of years. During each of these years, {288} over the whole world, the land and the water has been peopled by hosts of living forms. What an infinite number of generations, which the mind cannot grasp, must have succeeded each other in the long roll of years! Now turn to our richest geological museums, and what ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... sure of what they saw, then undoubtedly snakes have the power to draw birds within their grasp. I remember that my mother told me that while gathering wild strawberries she had on one occasion come upon a bird fluttering about the head of a snake as if held there by a spell. On her appearance, the snake lowered its head and made off, ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... squadrons of cavalry should have been able to ride around his army of 100,000 men and escape unscathed astonished and annoyed McClellan but he utterly failed to grasp the true purpose of this brilliant exploit, and Lee took the utmost care to see that his suspicions were not aroused. Stuart's information had convinced him that the right wing of the Union army was badly exposed and might be attacked with every prospect of success, but to ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... not displeased with his fashion of taking her chastisement, returned his grasp. 'Yes,' she said, 'you couldn't go on as you were. But all the ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... them so profoundly was the thought that a Forsyte should have let go her grasp on life. If one, then ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... terrible lunge, he pierced Buckingham's arm, the sword passing between the two bones. Buckingham, feeling his right arm paralyzed, stretched out his left, seized his sword, which was about falling from his nerveless grasp, and before De Wardes could resume his guard, he thrust him through the breast. De Wardes tottered, his knees gave way beneath him, and leaving his sword still fixed in the duke's arm, he fell into the ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... argument sound and well put, and results have proved its force, since the Salvation Army undoubtedly gets a hold of people that few other forms of religious effort seem able to grasp, at ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... concealed his brilliancy, and now once more the sky is shrouded in murky gloom—an apt emblem this of the over-changing state of man, who at one moment quaffs the inebriating cup of earthly joys, and yet a little, and it is dashed from his grasp; and sickness, sorrow and death are ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... terms of unwonted confidence. Little O'Grady himself was in such a state of irrepressible buoyancy that he left the earth and fairly sailed among the clouds. All this reacted on Dill. For the first time he felt the great commission fully within his grasp and the net profits as safely to be counted upon. He began to warm to his subjects. To him, who had learned a good deal in regard to shipping and the handling of water from lounging about the ports of Marseilles and Leghorn, had fallen the arrival of the first vessel: he would reconstruct ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... me, I think," the girl answered, laughing. "All suddenly—just in a flash. That's the way it must be with inspirations. This is one—I know it. It's all in the air—floating round me. But I shall grasp it soon." ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... To no such terminus does the greatest poet bring—he brings neither cessation nor shelter'd fatness and ease. The touch of him, like Nature, tells in action. Whom he takes he takes with firm sure grasp into live regions previously unattain'd—thenceforward is no rest—they see the space and ineffable sheen that turn the old spots and lights into dead vacuums. Now there shall be a man cohered out ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... that led us into the object's nearest neighborhood. Where direct acquaintance is lacking, 'knowledge about' is the next best thing, and an acquaintance with what actually lies about the 'object, and is most closely related to it, puts such knowledge within our grasp. Ether- waves and your anger, for example, are things in which my thoughts will never PERCTEPTUALLY terminate, but my concepts of them lead me to their very brink, to the chromatic fringes and to the hurtful words and deeds which are their ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... a more truthful idea of the nature of Greek religion and legend from the poems of Keats, and the nearly as beautiful, and, in general grasp of subject, far more powerful, recent work of Morris, than from frigid scholarship, however extensive. Not that the poet's impressions or renderings of things are wholly true, but their truth is vital, not formal. They are like sketches from the life by Reynolds ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... this work make it an invaluable book of reference to every student of Biblical Theology. If we were called to name any living writer who, to Calvin's exegetical tact, unites a large measure of Calvin's grasp of mind and transparent clearness in the department of systematic theology, we should point to this Princeton Professor. He possesses, to use the words of an English critic, the power of seizing and retaining with a rare vigour and tenacity ...
— The Cockatoo's Story • Mrs. George Cupples
... strength of heart and brain, and be the center of some widespread catastrophe; to put his fear in her soul just as it was in his own. How was she ever to comprehend the horror that held him in its cruel grasp, the thousand subtle shades of thought and feeling that had led up to this thing, from the memory of which he revolted! He turned his bloodshot eyes upon her, something of the old light was there along with the new; he had indeed loved her, but the fruit of this love had been rotten. ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... this class is a not inconsiderable of itself. The romance of the armed merchantmen affords material for many a vivid page, and when in its proper place in this volume it is set forth somewhat in detail the reader will grasp—if he has not already done so through perusal of the daily press—the fact that all the glory of naval service in this war has not resided within the turrets of the dreadnought nor on the deck ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... A grasp stronger than ever Austin Lovel's had been, dragged him to his feet, and half led, half pushed him into the nearest chair. He sat there, staring blankly before him. Clarissa had moved away from him, and stood amid the deep shadows ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... prospect did not cheer Gallagher. He tried to grasp Dr. O'Grady's arm as he passed him. But the doctor shook him off impatiently. He even attempted an appeal to Major Kent, quite vainly. The Major was still smarting under the rhetorical denunciation of landlords. He would not at that moment have gone a step ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... by its dense gloom. All at once, while gazing at a frightful creation of my distempered mind, I seemed struck with sudden blindness. I knew a candle was burning in the room but I could not see it, all was so pitchy dark. I lost the sense of feeling, too, for I endeavored to grasp my arm in one hand, but consciousness was gone. I put my hand to my side, my head, but felt nothing, and still I knew my limbs and frame were there. And then the scene would change! I was falling—falling swiftly ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... the first brilliant period of the leadership of the Iberian peoples was drawing to a close, at the other end of Europe, in the land of melancholy steppe and melancholy forest, the Slav turned in his troubled sleep and stretched out his hand to grasp leadership and dominion. Since then almost every nation of Europe has at one time or another sought a place in the movement of expansion; but for the last three centuries the great phenomenon of mankind has been the growth of the ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... small crisis, every time; but she's as afraid as any one else of the great one, and she's moreover, I write it with rapture, afraid of Eliza. Eliza is the one person in our whole community she does fear—and for reasons I perfectly grasp; to which moreover, this extraordinary oddity attaches, that I positively feel I don't fear Eliza in the least (and in fact promise myself before long to show it) and yet don't at all avail by that show of my indifference to danger to ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... week; and then I have the assurance to lecture you for gloomy forebodings, etc.! If you had only not spoken of the deadly fevers in your last letter. In the evening I am always excited, in the loneliness, when I am not tired. Tomorrow, in bright daylight, in the railway carriage, I shall perhaps grasp your possible ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... my infancy at my mother's knee came back to me; Kosinski turned his face to the wall and stood with bowed shoulders. As the words fell from my lips the dying woman clutched my hand convulsively and murmured some words in Russian. Then her grasp loosened. I raised my eyes to her face, and saw that all was over. My strained nerves gave way, and I sobbed convulsively. ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... To grasp the revolver it was necessary to stretch his arm full length, and he tried to do that slowly and imperceptibly, but his anxiety overcame his prudence and he made a movement that the watchful Grizzly detected. Instantly the bear pinned the arm with one paw, placed the other upon Brannan's ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... prayers of those who may derive benefit from our works when we are gone. Our landholders are good men, and will never resume the lands they have given us; and if the lands be sold at auction by Government, or transferred to others, we hope the certificate of the collector will protect us from his grasp.'[15] ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... if, not comprehending me, he supposed that I was backing up what I had said last with more of the same sort. But by the time I had finished he saw what I meant; his countenance altered and looked as if the evil spirit were about to depart from him; he held out his hand, gave mine a great grasp, dropped his head, went on with his work, ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... is not hard to grasp. Conservation is really but doing unto others as we would that others should do unto us—so living that other life also may have a fair chance. It was a child who ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... them but ill, we shall not be far from the truth in saying that our Revolution was a phenomenon equally misunderstood by those who caused it and by those who have described it. At no period of history did men so little grasp the present, so greatly ignore the past, and so poorly ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... means, of course, a continuing rise in prices, a continuing writing off of debt. If labour has any real grasp of its true interests it will not resent this. It will merely insist steadfastly on a proper adjustment of its wages to the new standard. On that point, however, it will be better ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... defy you to cite me a monastic order whose members practice the renouncement of worldly pleasures more absolutely and sincerely than the miser. And his renouncement is truly the more heroic, because he has within his grasp all the delights and enchantments of soul, mind and senses, and possesses the incredible courage to refuse them all. There is strength, there is the triumph ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... when he moved his head, over the surface of his cheeks. He was rather below the medium height, a bit round-shouldered, and so sturdy of limb that his clothes always looked a shade too tight for his arms and legs. As if unable to grasp what is due to the difference of latitudes, he wore a brown bowler hat, a complete suit of a brownish hue, and clumsy black boots. These harbour togs gave to his thick figure an air of stiff and uncouth smartness. A thin silver watch chain looped ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... attention; though had the conditions been different, the boy might not have had the slightest trouble about getting it free. The boat was pitching so furiously, that he could only use one hand, because it was necessary for him to grasp some hold, lest he be tossed overboard, as a bucking bronco hurls an unsuspecting rider from the saddle by a ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... down his battle-axe with such a strong blow that the private's spear was shattered and knocked from his grasp, and he was helpless ...
— Ozma of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... of the injunction, the man strove to grasp him; but Charlie at once let go his hold, and swam a pace back as the man sunk. When he came up he seized him again, ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... I have spoken already. The latter is every way the greater master, never indulging in the exaggerated color of Titian, and attaining far more perfect light; his grasp of nature is more extensive, and his view of her more imaginative, (incidental notices of his landscape will be found in the chapter on Imagination penetrative, of the second volume,) but he is usually too impatient to carry his thoughts as far out, or to ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... Hamlet was indeed advancing. Pinchas made a wild plunge forward, but Kloot's grasp on his ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... back among her pillows, her eyes leveled at the few stars beyond her door, opened to admit any cooling breeze. Her head ached. It was like the computations of astronomers; to a certain extent the human mind could grasp the distances but could not comprehend them. It was more than chance. Chance alone had not brought him to the crumbling ledge. There was a strain of fatalism in Elsa. She was positive that all these things had ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... grasp it, Iff shook it heartily. "Ah," he said blandly, "h' are ye?" Then he dropped the hand, thereby preventing the captain from wrenching it away, and averted his eyes modestly, thereby escaping the ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... propitious and the fruits of such endeavour—are difficult to fathom by all beings other than himself, whether gods or men, since those Vedas are divided into Rik, Yajus, Sman, and Atharvan; and being animated by infinite pity, tenderness, and magnanimity; with a view to enable his devotees to grasp the true meaning of the Vedas, himself composed the Pakartra-sstra. The author of the Stras (Vysa)—who first composed the Stras, the purport of which it is to set forth the arguments establishing the Vednta doctrine, and then the Bhrata-samhit (i.e. the Mahbhrata) in a hundred ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... magnify myself and, at this time of day, scarcely any reason, I am fain to confess that the reverse was the case; and that while no man ever did less to free himself than I did, my adversary retained his grasp to the end, and had surely, but for a strange interposition, effected my ruin. How relief came, and from what quarter, I might defy the most ingenious person, after reading my memoirs to this point, to say; and this ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... dead in the corridor above. A beautiful young woman, dressed in her night-robes, her feet in slippers, hair disordered and her eyes fixed with horror, gazed down at the lifeless shape. The stupor of sleep still held her in its dulling grasp. She could not fully comprehend the tragedy. Her ladies wailed about her, but she heeded them not. It was only when the captain of the military household approached her that she became fully aroused. She pressed her hand ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... stealthily towards the house. It was the work of a moment only to dash forward and seize him, to find himself engaged in a sharp wrestle, to half draw his pistol as he struggled with his captive in the open. But once in the clearer light, he started, his grasp of the stranger relaxed, and he fell back ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... offended me, as it offends me still, and Gaultier had then scarcely attained the full personal charm of his grave, subdued, and reticent style. But another book arrived from the same author, and yet another, and I began to feel the attraction of this new thinker and to grasp slowly his daring and elusive conception of the world. Here, one remarks, is where the stupid people who are slow of understanding have their compensation in the end. For whereas the brilliant person sees so much light at his first effort that he is apt to be content with it, the other is never ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... laughed when the coach gave him a chance on the scrub one afternoon and laughed harder when he at last got a chance to carry the ball and by clever dodging succeeded in making a twenty-yard gain. He slipped out of the grasp of Ned Stillson and nearly eluded big Tom Curwood, who covered Teeny-bits so completely when he finally had him down that ball and runner were almost ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... essential to him in his thorough and practical discussion of the all absorbing questions of the day.[102] This it was well known he could do, in dealing with these questions, not only on their own merits, but with the comprehensive grasp which his enlarged experience, intuitive clearness of perception, and naturally statesmanlike views on grave public questions, ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... he had grown up to be one, unconsciously to himself. 'Your son Ronald's religion, my dear Lady Le Breton,' Archdeacon Luttrell used often to say, 'is, I fear, too purely emotional. He cannot be made to feel sufficiently the necessity for a sound practical grasp of doctrinal Christianity.' To Ronald himself, he might as well have talked about the necessity for a sound practical grasp of doctrinal Buddhism. And if Ronald had really met a devout Buddhist, he would doubtless have found, after half an ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... o' Beauty's alarms, The slender bit Beauty you grasp in your arms, O, gie me the lass that has acres o' charms, O, gie me the lass wi' ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... see Laocoon's torture dignifying pain— A father's love and mortal's agony With an immortal's patience blending:—Vain The struggle: vain against the coiling strain And gripe, and deepening of the dragon's grasp, The old man's clench, the long envenom'd chain Rivets the living links,—the enormous asp Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... she said—"a mother's hand wounded by her son—shall never again grasp yours till you have sworn a solemn oath to put away from you all thoughts of revenge and murder, and not to disgrace your father's name. I have said it, and may his glorified spirit be my witness, and give me strength to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... has made the newspaper profession a life work, has failed to study its weak spots and to note its imperfections; or on the other hand, to grasp its marvelous opportunities for studying the wonderful mystery of the variations of human nature. In the very essence of things therefore, he recognizes the human elements in his own profession and does not hold that the newspaper ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... poet had ever tried to do this kind of work. It seemed eminently fitted for a poet's hand, full of subjects alluring to the penetrative imagination. It needed, of course, some scholarship, for it demanded accuracy in its grasp of the main ideas of the time to be represented; but that being given, immense opportunities remained for pictures of human life, full of colour, thought and passions; for subtle and brilliant representations of the eternal desires and thinkings of human nature as they were governed ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the intellect is characterized by a natural inability to understand life. Certain it is, I think, that science alone cannot grasp its mystery. We must finally appeal to philosophy; we must have recourse to ideal values—to a non-scientific or super-scientific principle. We cannot live intellectually or emotionally upon science alone. Science reveals to us the ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... papers and political correspondence vanished whenever he attempted to produce work that made a more ambitious claim to be considered literature. The clearness of statement, the width of view, the logical form, the firm grasp and profound knowledge which were characteristic of the evidence he gave before the House of {254} Commons Committee in 1766, gave place to a thin and niggling pedantry of style when he turned his pen to the essays and the verses of a man of letters. Yet there were some topics on which he ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... that her ports and rivers, instead of affording a shelter to the extensive commerce of China, should at this enlightened period of the world hold out only terror and dismay to the mariner; and that all that she should have acquired from the deadly vicinage and withering grasp of Dutch power and dominion has been the art of more speedily destroying each other, and rendering themselves obnoxious to the rest of mankind. Now that her destinies are transferred to the enlightened heads and liberal hearts of Englishmen,—now ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... offers another chance to a military leader who has once failed to gather the rich harvest which she has put into his grasp. Yet the German Emperor presents, together with his great General Staff, one of the few instances in history of a Commander-in-Chief so soon being given a splendid opportunity to retrieve such mistakes as those of September 5th ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... idea that had been in Abner's mind since Byers's last visit now took awful shape. Before the unfortunate Byers could collect his senses he felt himself seized in a giant's grasp and forced ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... the midst of the province which—in the very year when I was born—had been swept by the horrors of a famine and pestilence which left whole villages with no other survivor than perhaps two or three wailing children, feeding on garbage torn from the grasp of the ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... fired the shot, Captain Gascoyne? This is the second time I have to thank you for saving my life," said the young man, returning the grasp of the captain's hand. ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... this speech will at once be impressed with the genius which immediately made Mr. Lincoln a power in American politics. His grasp of the subject is so comprehensive, his statement so clear, his reasoning so convincing, his language so strong and eloquent by turns, that the wonderful power he manifested in the discussions and debates of the six succeeding years ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... sure indication that there was greater turmoil behind them. The square foresail had been hauled up, and the crew were in the act of stowing it when the hurricane burst upon her, and she was held in the grasp of the wind. The sea was flattened, and the wild drift flew before the screaming tempest. The captain called out to the men on the foreyard to "hold on for God's sake," as the vessel lurched over so ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... last turn of the path, the driver slackened her grasp, and the horse stopped short before the entrance. His owner, throwing the reins to a groom perched up behind, sprang lightly to the ground amid a crowd of curious observers, whose interest was greatly enhanced by the sight of ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... grope seem to have no grasp in it, and, if a stationary balloon will, in half an hour, not cast a stationary shadow from the setting sun, we have to think of two triangular objects that accurately maintained positions in a line between sun and ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... regards the technical execution of Leonarda, its only obvious weakness is a slight want of vividness in the presentation of the thesis. The hiatuses between the acts leave perhaps too much to the imagination, and the play needs more than a cursory reading for us to grasp the full import of the actions and motives of its personages. Leonarda has not been previously translated into English; though Swedish, French, German and Finnish versions ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... and as everlasting as God. How else could there be everlasting torment for those sinners cast down by God into the Pit on the Last Day to burn for ever and for ever through all eternity? Oh, my friends, your minds are small—too small to grasp eternity. Yet is it given to me, by God's grace, to convey to you an understanding of a ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... into the chasm as drowning men grasp at the nearest thing afloat—a slender branch or bunch ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... in legislation; as the historian Thierry has said of him, "He left nothing undone that could be done by statesmanship for the social amelioration of the country; he had a mind of the most comprehensive grasp, and a genius for the minutest details of administration"; he was a patron of letters, and the founder of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... into answers to the questions that children still ask, still receiving no answer but myth—that is, poetic and subjective hypothesis, containing as much truth as they can receive or their inventors can grasp. ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... stump the feet should grasp it as if the bird really means to stay on it. Two or three wires like those used on the wings hold the tail in place by being driven through the base of it into the body for ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... him heartily by the hand, and said, "How do, my dear boy?" with a cordiality that made poor George's ambassador feel doubly guilty. His hand lay as if dead in the old gentleman's grasp. He felt that he, Dobbin, was more or less the cause of all that had happened. It was he had brought back George to Amelia: it was he had applauded, encouraged, transacted almost the marriage which he was come to reveal to George's father: ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... buffaloe, and was now returning to find his master. They had been obliged to escape so rapidly that captain Clarke lost his compass and umbrella. Chaboneau left his gun, shotpouch, and tomahawk, and the Indian woman had just time to grasp her child, before the net in which it lay at her feet was carried down the current. He now relinquished his intention of going up the river and returned to the camp at Willowrun. Here he found that the party sent this morning for the baggage, had all returned to camp in great ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... a big room that at first seemed to Bert to be completely filled by a misty sea of faces with every eye turned right upon him. He cowered before this curious scrutiny, and but for his father's restraining grasp would probably have attempted a wild dash for the still unclosed door, when he ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... the quiet, small sharp stars, Pierce my spirit with a thrust whose speed Baffles even the grasp of time. Oh that I might reflect them As swiftly, as keenly as they shine. But I am a pool of waters, summer-still, And the stars are mirrored across me; Those stabbing points of the sky Turned to a thread of shaken ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... battles in the Emperor's day, stood together and talked of him, and praised God that Spain had another hero of the Austrian house, to strike terror to the heart of France, to humble England at last, and to grasp what little of the world was not already gathered in the ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... studies. He always began with great enthusiasm and then something happened. For a time he studied French with tremendous eagerness. But he soon found that for a real knowledge of French you need first to get a thorough grasp of Old French and Provencal. But it proved impossible to do anything with these without an absolutely complete command of Latin. This Juggins discovered could only be obtained, in any thorough way, ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... he swung the stone and let it go, while those who watched fled back as if it was cast at them. Down is crashed on the attackers, felling the man whom it struck, and dashing the timber from the grasp of the others, so that one fell with it across his leg and lay howling, while the rest gathered themselves up and got away from under the tower ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... himself from their grasp. "Go!" he replied. "Never! He called me a vagabond. Am I to pocket the insult quietly and walk off with it? You can scarcely expect that. First, I demand ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... Caesar Rodney and Thomas McKean, working power; in James Duane, timid Whigism, halting, but keeping true to the cause; in Joseph Galloway, downright Toryism, seeking control, and at length going to the enemy. The Southern Colonies presented in Thomas Johnson, the grasp of a statesman; in Samuel Chase, activity and boldness; in the Rutledges, wealth and accomplishment; in Christopher Gadsden, the genuine American; and in the Virginia delegation—an illustrious group—in Richard Bland, wisdom; in Edmund Pendleton, practical ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... must be reckoned not among the forces tending to quiet, but among those that aroused anxious care in the first nine years of the reign. And it was a terrible calamity that at last placed victory within their grasp. The blight on the potato first showed itself in 1845—a new, undreamed-of disaster, probably owing to the long succession of unfavourable seasons. And the potato blight meant almost certainly famine in Ireland, where perhaps three-fourths of the population had no food but this root. The food supply ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... as if he moved in a world apart, into which they could never enter, as in a sense he does, is where the difficulty lies. Moreover, evolution balks us because of the inconceivable stretch of time during which it has been at work. It is as impossible for us to grasp geological time as sidereal space. All the standards of measurement furnished us by experience are as inadequate as is a child's cup to measure ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... Governor's hand as if I was taking the Queen's. When I hear her words that she is going to put to rights this country, it is the help of God that has put it in her heart to come to our assistance. In sending her bounty to us I wish an everlasting grasp of her hand, as long as the sun moves and the river flows. I am glad that the truth and all good things have been opened to us. I am thankful for the children for they will prosper. All the children who are sitting here hope ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... Shylock. But Henry Irving took the high view of him. This Jew "feeds fat the ancient grudge" against Antonio—until the law of Portia, more subtle than equitable, interferes to thwart him; but also he avenges the wrongs that his "sacred nation" has suffered. His ideal was right, his grasp of it firm, his execution of it flexible with skill and affluent with intellectual power. If memory carries away a shuddering thought of his baleful gaze upon the doomed Antonio and of his horrid cry of the summons "Come, prepare!" it also retains ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... was no beauty in her face; the black skin, the projecting lips, the heavy features, designated her as belonging to a degraded race. Yet the soul was looking forth from its despised tenement, and eagerly essaying to grasp ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... went to Montgomery. He was getting nervous. The thing was too vast. He could not grasp it. It set his head in a whirl. Harry Cresswell was not a bad man—are there any bad men? He was a man who from the day he first wheedled his black mammy into submission, down to his thirty-sixth year, had seldom known what it was voluntarily to deny himself or curb a desire. To rise when ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... vegetables. But my will passes like an obliterating line over all that we say, over all that we do; and, while Rose anxiously tries to fill the silence, I lie in wait, ready for a word, a sigh, a look that will enable me to go straight to the heart of that soul, which I am eager to grasp even as we take in our hand a mysterious object of which we are ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... if he had any Money about him, 'twas none of his own, and that 'twas certainly conjur'd into his Pockets. No Matter how it came there (said t'other;) but you have above twenty Pounds about you of your own Money: Pray feel. Miles then felt, and pull'd out as much Silver as he could grasp, and laid it down on the Table. Hang this white Pelf; (cry'd his Friend) pay it in Gold, like your self, Come, apply your Hand to another Pocket: He did so, and brought out as many Broad-Pieces as Hand could hold. Now (continu'd his Friend) give the Waiter eight of 'em, and let him take the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... at the wood-pile and he turned his back to the gate while he made the chips fly. But Dorothy had no intention of ignoring him. She paused with a smile so winsome that Jack's heart fluttered and he dropped the axe to grasp her outstretched hand. He squeezed it so hard that Dorothy winced ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... shrieked out frantically in a terror that was pitiable and abject. Her hallucinations seemed to have got entirely beyond the control of reason, and as she crouched, with drawn up knees and quivering arms, among the pillows she looked like some small helpless, distracted mortal in the grasp of the avenging furies. At the moment she seemed to him less his ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... edge of the lake, and having passed the cascade were skirting the river when, with a suddenness that took me completely by surprise, she slipped from my grasp, and with a wild exclamation dashed towards the warm, ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... there were indications that that relentless master, Poverty, had been very busy about his work in the homes of the unfortunate, compelling his victims to sacrifice their dearest possessions to his avaricious grasp. ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... the heart was crushed, even annihilated, by his intellect, which he valued far too highly, and by his vanity, which he dignified into a philosophy of self-sacrifice. He was aiming at what no man can reach, and though he knew his object to be beyond human grasp, he desired all possible credit for having madly dreamed of anything so high. In the sudden revulsion of her strong passion, she almost hated him, she almost felt the power to refute his theories, to destroy his edifice of fantastic morality, and finally to show him ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... depending as it does on the self-determination of the observer, can therefore be improved, and the pupil made attentive, by the educator. Education must accustom him to an exact, rapid, and many-sided attention, so that at the first contact with an object he may grasp it sufficiently and truly, and that it shall not be necessary for him always to be adding to his acquisitions concerning it. The twilight and partialness of intelligence which forces us always to new corrections because a pupil at the very commencement did not give entire ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... came on amain, And exercised below his iron reign; Then upward to the seat of life he goes: Sense fled before him, what he touch'd he froze: Yet could he not his closing eyes withdraw, 840 Though less and less of Emily he saw; So, speechless, for a little space he lay; Then grasp'd the hand he held, and sigh'd ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... enter the houses of which they see but the facades; do they not wish to know how Parisians live and speak and act by their firesides? But time, alas! is lacking for the formation of those intimate friendships which would bring this knowledge within their grasp. French homes are rarely open to birds of passage, and visitors leave us with regret that they have not been able to see more than the surface of our civilization or to recognize by experience the note ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... religious study prescribed at Oxford, and they had engaged from an early period a large share of my attention. Each treatise on the subject, taken by itself, appeared to me to have great argumentative force; but when I tried to grasp them all together in a higher act of thought, I was sensible of a certain confusion, and inability to reconcile their fundamental assumptions. One either formally stated, or virtually assumed, that the deepest basis of all religious knowledge was ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... exist without him. He too had had moments of high-vaulting ambition, in which he had almost felt himself to be the great man required by the country, the one ruler who could gather together in his grasp the reins of government and drive the State coach single-handed safe through its difficulties for the next half-dozen years. There are men who cannot conceive of themselves that anything should be difficult for them, and again others who cannot ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... biscuit, you can form a very faint idea of a mob of native boatmen storming a ship at Jaffa. Of course, the ladders are filled first, then those who have missed the ladders drive bang against the ship, grab a rope or cable, or anything they can grasp, and run up the iron, slippery side of the ship as a ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... has neither sail nor mast. There are oars, but no one is using them. They lie athwart the tholes, their blades dipping in the water, with no hand upon the grasp. ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... frustrated. When she made such attempts with Vere she was met half way. The girl understood with swiftness even those things with which she was not specially in sympathy. Her father's mind had slipped away, ever so gracefully, from all which it did not love. Vere's could grasp even an unloved subject. There was mental grit in her—Artois knew it. In all her work until her sixteenth year Vere had consulted her mother. Nothing of her child till then was ever hidden from Hermione, except those things which the human being ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... how these rich deposits had failed to attract the attention of his captors, but he soon settled upon the conclusion that they had no knowledge of mines or mining, and were ignorant of the riches that were almost in their grasp. ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger
... and gave me a hearty grasp of the hand. He was so agitated that he could not speak—choking with joyful emotion, as if he had been Jeanne's father, ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... rate, it was clear enough that she and Tom were on the best terms, though she always took her aunt's part vehemently in any little dispute which arose, and sometimes even came to the rescue at the end, and recaptured the vanished sixpences out of the wrongful grasp which he generally laid on them the moment the old lady held out her hand and pronounced the word "game." One knows that size has little to do with strength, or one might have wondered that her little hands should have been able to open his fingers so ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... my head, and a ray of hope crept into the darkness of my heart; for when men fall they grasp at feathers. Then, I spoke for the ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... this animal similar to that of other mammals, this could not be accomplished, as the insertion of a body, such as the trunk, so far into the pharynx as to enable the constrictor muscles of that organ to grasp it, would at once give rise to a paroxysm of coughing; or, were the trunk merely inserted into the mouth, it would be requisite that this cavity be kept constantly filled with water, at the same time that ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... something in all this that he failed to grasp. In any case, the frightful danger that threatened Rose Andre dominated the whole situation; and Rnine was not the man to despise this threat and to persist out of vanity in a perilous course. Rose Andre's ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... jerked her arm from Miss Annabel's grasp, her eyes and cheeks blazing. "Anna Baldwin is crazy about him herself!" she cried violently. "And she's made a fool of herself more times than I can tell! And his father is far better than your father ever was, or mine either!" She stopped as some one looked at her in passing. "I shall just ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... entertainment. The Governor, coming up to our little group, said, in cheerful tones, "I am going to see if I can recognize the one who wrote the book." And in pursuance of this announcement, easily selected me, and with kindly tones and hearty grasp of the hand, spoke many words of comfort, which are still carefully held in my ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... the fray. No weapon had she, not even a teapot, but she ran bravely in, knelt behind one of the ruffians, and when an opportunity came, seized him by the foot, bringing him down to the floor with a thud. Quickly another foot was in Betty's deadly grasp, and another man fell, leaving only one assailant standing, whom Hamilton soon routed. The two men on the floor attempted to rise, but Betty clung to their feet, and George's ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... 1275). The mendicants did not live up to their doctrine for a single generation. In the middle of the century Bonaventura had to reprove the Franciscans for their greed of property, their litigation and efforts to grasp legacies, and for the splendor and luxury of their buildings.[2200] The two great orders of friars became an available power by virtue of their hold on the tastes and faiths of the people. They became the militia of the pope ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... continual movement of all her limbs; but, nevertheless, the knife wounded her. It wounded her in several places about the arm, covering them both with blood;—but still she hung on. So close was her grasp in her agony, that, as she afterwards found, she cut the skin of her own hands with her own nails. Had the man's hair been less thick or strong, or her own tenacity less steadfast, he would have murdered her before any interruption could ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... him, did you?' she screamed again, and stooping she picked up the bar and raised it above his head. Roland well understood the murder in the old miscreant's eyes, and leaping forward seized the weapon, wrenched it from her grasp, and flung it ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... pressing forward, with what purpose he could hardly have said, when he felt the sinewy grasp of McGuire ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... what happened! I got my exchange all right: it is on that account I have eight days' leave; but next Monday, November 21st, before midday, I must report to my new regiment. But this regiment, the 257th Infantry, is in garrison at Verdun!... You grasp it?" ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... those who promulgate them, and an archbishop owes it to himself to blaspheme against reason and freedom in superlatives of malignant unction. Rousseau's reply (Nov. 18, 1762) is a masterpiece of dignity and uprightness. Turning to it from the mandate which was its provocative, we seem to grasp the hand of a man, after being chased by a nightmare of masked figures. Rousseau never showed the substantial quality of his character more surely and unmistakably than in controversy. He had such gravity, such austere self-command, such closeness of grip. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... bribe to the Company's treasury, and insisted that the Rajah should instantly comply with the demands of the English government. The Rajah, after the fashion of his countrymen, shuffled, solicited, and pleaded poverty. The grasp of Hastings was not to be so eluded. He added to the requisition another ten thousand pounds as a fine for delay, and sent troops to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... feet in length, an inch and a quarter broad, and half an inch thick. At the end a double slip of melon shell, three and a half inches long, crossing diagonally, serves as a handle, and when used, the end rests against the palm of the right hand, the three last fingers grasp the stick, and the forefinger and thumb loosely retain the spear. With the aid of the powerful leverage of the throwing-stick a spear can be thrown to a distance varying according to its weight from 30 to 80 yards, and with considerable precision; still, if observed ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... rust-yellow. He saw where, to the right, this uneven flow of stone ended in a blunt wall. Leftward, from the hollow that lay at his feet, mounted a gradual slow-swelling slope to a great height topped by leaning, cracked, and ruined crags. Not for some time did he grasp the wonder of that acclivity. It was no less than a mountain-side, glistening in the sun like polished granite, with cedar-trees springing as if by magic out of the denuded surface. Winds had swept it clear of weathered shale, and rains had ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... senses not being absolutely reliable, knowledge acquired by means of them is not absolutely reliable either. So the ultimate difference between the Asiatic saint and the European man of science is, that while the former believes all knowledge to be directly within the grasp of the soul, under certain conditions, the latter, on the other hand, denies that any knowledge can be absolute, being all obtained indirectly through a medium not absolutely reliable. The reasoning, by which ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... and I seized and closed on my assailant. Roland now came up, a candle in his hand; and at that sight my antagonist, who was no other than Peacock, slipped from me and made a rush at the stairs. But the Captain caught him with his grasp of iron. Fearing nothing for Roland in a contest with any single foe, and all my thoughts bent on the rescue of her whose voice again broke on my ear, I had already (before the light of the candle ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... survives, Naked, mad, starved, scourged, spurned, frozen, fallen, deflowered, Souls and bodies as by fangs of beasts devoured, Sounds that hell would hear not, sights no thought could shape, Limbs that feel as flame the ravenous grasp of rape, Filth of raging crime and shame that crime enjoys, Age made one with youth in torture, girls with boys, These, and worse if aught be worse than these things are, Prove thee ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... hand to Uncle Ben. "Let me congratulate you," he said heartily, "and forgive me if your story really sounded so wonderful I couldn't quite grasp it. Now let me ask you something more. Have you had any reason for keeping this a secret, other than your fear of confessing that you violated a few bigoted and idiotic mining rules—which, after all, are binding only upon sentiment—and which ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... light she snatched up my crop, which lay on the table, and struck the rascal full across the eyes, again and again and again, following him as he stepped backward. Her defense was magnificent. But, as fate determined to have it, Steinbock finally succeeded in wresting the stick from her grasp. He was wild with pain and chagrin. It was then I awoke to the fact that ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... own personal infallibility, their attitude towards those who see that the old views are no longer tenable is an attitude of anger and alarm. This is the usual temper of the odium theologicum. It would, if it could, grasp the thumbscrew and the rack of mediaeval Inquisitors, and would, in the last resource, hand over all opponents to the scaffold or the stake. Those whose intellects have thus been petrified by custom and advancing years are, of all others, the most hopeless to deal with. They have made ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... bony hand, which locked up everything in its grasp; to bring down the towering altitude of that olden tyranny, whose head was lifted to the clouds; to strike from the soul its clanking chains and set the suffering nations free; to champion the inborn ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... and then a peaceful hour. The crowns have fallen, but hearts still beat side by side. They have no longer a kingdom, but they are together, they can speak with looks one to another, they can seek to comfort one another with smiles, they can cheer each other up with a passing grasp of the hand, that escapes the eye of the sentries! We only suffer half what we bear in common with others, and every thing seems lighter, when there is a second one ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... brought about this wondrous conquest! the poor tool of this astounding triumph! Shall the sword say, This is the battle I won! Yonder the enemy I overthrow! Bow to me, ye lords of earth, and worshippers of mighty acts? Not so! Nay, but the sword is honoured in the hero's grasp, and if it break not, it is accounted trusty. This, then, this little I may claim, that I was trusty! Trusty in a heroic encounter! Trusty in a battle with earth's terror! Oh! but this must not be said. This is to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... brilliant or original in the early sermons or addresses of the young missionary—nothing of those wondrous displays of word-painting, imagination, and dramatic power which have made his brother, Dr. T. De Witt Talmage, famous. But there was a mental grasp, a force and a fire which often induced the remark that he was too good to be sent to the heathen, there being many at that time who labored under the mistake that a missionary did not require ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... and yet running full ahead into what had proven a danger spot. It would have mattered nothing had he realized this. He had not been long enough in such games to value precaution. To reach her side as quickly as possible was the only idea he could grasp now. At the top of the second flight he called her name. He received ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... the case was almost exactly opposite. It was a waste of time trying to teach her mathematics, she had not sufficient brain power to grasp them, and if she succeeded in learning a proposition by heart like a parrot, it was only to collapse into helpless tears and protestations when the letters were altered, and, as it seemed to her, the whole ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... was so strong against the Chevalier, that common justice required his arrest; and, meanwhile, until he cleared himself, he should be kept in not dishonourable durance, and every regard had for his name, and the services of his honourable grandfather. With this assurance, and with a warm grasp of the hand, the Prince left old General de Magny that night; and the veteran retired to rest almost consoled, and confident in ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... he has stolen. The obvious reason is that from time immemorial simple theft has been punished with due, when not with undue, severity, while the comparatively recent crime of fraudulent bankruptcy has as yet been brought very imperfectly within the grasp of penal law. Again, no man of clear moral discernment can doubt that he who consciously and willingly imbrutes himself by intoxication is more blameworthy than he who sells alcoholic liquors without knowing whether they are ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... green pine-needles, so thin and fine in their crisscross network, showed clearly against the blue sky. She looked in vain for birds. Then her gaze went wonderingly to the lofty fringed rim of the great amphitheater, and as she studied it she began to grasp its remoteness, how far away it was in the rarefied atmosphere. A black eagle, sweeping along, looked of tiny size, and yet he was far under the heights above. How pleasant she fancied it to be up there! And drowsy fancy lulled her ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... in company with a Portuguese schooner; this circumstance clearly shewing the kind of intercourse carried on between Brazil and the mother country by connivance of the authorities. Though both vessels were within my grasp I did not molest them, in consequence of having received private information of a decree passed by the supreme military council at Rio de Janeiro on the 26th of October, from the tenor of which decree, had I made further captures from ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... for the manuring of the different crops mentioned will be found effective. It is, however, not intended that they should be slavishly followed, for useful substitutions may be made in the formulae given, if the nature of the various fertilisers is understood and an intelligent grasp is obtained of the principles of manuring enunciated in ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... recollection of him that night was of his careful attentiveness to everything said by our own colonel on the science of present-day war—the understanding deference paid by a splendid young leader to the knowledge and grasp and fine character of a very ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... two she stood quite still, her senses strained to grasp the meaning, the purport of the present situation—this madman on the watch outside—the young Count, key in hand, swaggering up to the back door at ten o'clock, when most folk would be at supper in the barn, her father gone, ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... swiftly and came around the desk to grasp the cadet's hands in both of his. "I'm proud of you, my boy. It took real strength of character to make that decision. I'm sure you will never regret it, though there'll be moments when it will hurt to the pit of your soul, especially the first ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... grim ones. Designed, as epitaphs are, to arrest and hold in their momentary grasp the wandering attention and languid interest of the passer-by, they must hit him hard and at once, and this they can only do by striking some very responsive chord, and no chords are so immediately responsive ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... "Your grasp of the situation does you credit." Transley's manner was that of a man prepared to meet trouble ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... to strike. One glance at the state of affairs was enough. Damase's back was turned toward him. With a swift spring, that startled the others as if he had fallen through the roof, he darted forward, and ere the French-Canadian's fist could reach its mark a resistless grasp was laid upon his collar, and, swung clear off his feet, he was flung staggering across the room as though he ...
— The Young Woodsman - Life in the Forests of Canada • J. McDonald Oxley
... again his anxiety got the better of him. He caught her hands in his own and held them with a grasp that ...
— A Little Traitor to the South - A War Time Comedy With a Tragic Interlude • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... that the human mind is united to the body, but also the nature of the union between mind and body. However, no one will be able to grasp this adequately or distinctly, unless he first has adequate knowledge of the nature of our body. The propositions we have advanced hitherto have been entirely general, applying not more to men than to other individual things, all of which, ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... question, or to feel that it was not one with which they as legislators were called upon immediately to deal. The Secretary himself, and Mr. Olmsted, then connected with the Sanitary Commission, alone seemed to grasp it, and to see the necessity of immediate action. It is doubtful if any member of the Cabinet, except Mr. Chase, took then any interest in the enterprise, though it has since been fostered by the Secretary of War. At the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... us consider what this wonderful instrument, the brain, is capable of in its higher developments. In Mr. Galton's interesting work on "Hereditary Genius," he remarks on the enormous difference between the intellectual power and grasp of the well-trained mathematician or man of science, and the average Englishman. The number of marks obtained by high wranglers, is often more than thirty times as great as that of the men at the ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... of international chess, which the American mind never seems able to grasp, are instinctively known by the man in the street in Europe. Every one has learned the gambits: they do not have to be explained, nor their importance demonstrated. The American can profitably study those maps so liberally displayed in ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... as the audience was over, the struggle was, who should be most attentive to the colonel. He was surrounded, congratulated, embraced, and pulled about. Each of his old comrades wished to carry him off, and his hands were not enough to grasp all those extended to him. General Savary, who that very evening had added to the fright of Marshal Moncey, by being astonished that any one could have the audacity to brave the Emperor, extended his arm ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Scandinavian dialect verses are not widely popular, they are at least comparatively fresh and original; and to those readers who can readily grasp the patois, as well as to those who are compelled to struggle painfully through its labyrinths, this volume ...
— The Norsk Nightingale - Being the Lyrics of a "Lumberyack" • William F. Kirk
... rolled above his horizon. Young, noble, wealthy, handsome, valiant, he saw no threatening phantom in the future, and caught eagerly at the golden opportunity, which the present placed within his grasp, of winning fresh laurels on a wider and more fruitful field than any in which he had hitherto been a reaper. The campaign about to take place was likely to be an imposing, if not an important one, and could not fail to be attractive to a noble ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the successful advance of Prussian troops through Schleswig, and the indefinite hope is cherished that somehow, even in spite of the apparent policy of the Government, the war will result in rescuing the duchy entirely from the Danish grasp. Thus, temporarily at least, the popular mind is again diverted from internal politics; and perhaps the Government was moved as much by a desire to effect this diversion as by any other motive. The decided schism between Prussia and Austria on the one hand, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the Duke of Richmond then moved for returns of the army and navy, both in America and Ireland. Chatham now made another speech, in which he expressed great alarm as to the actual state of those two important fortresses, Gibraltar and Minorca; contending that they were not secure from the grasp of France and Spain. He also took occasion again to extol the Americans, and to plead their cause, still justifying their opposition to the mother country. The motion ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... determined not to allow any obstacle to impede his progress. "The inhabitants of Frankfort, he was well aware, wished to stretch out only a finger to him, but he must have the whole hand in order to have something to grasp." At the head of the army, he closely followed the deputies as they carried back his answer, and in order of battle awaited, near Saxenhausen, the decision ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... the four last things. True thoughts of death are not hard for children to grasp, to their unspoiled faith it is a simple and joyful thing to go to God. Later on the dreary pageantry and the averted face of the world from that which is indeed its doom obscure the Christian idea, and the mind slips back to pagan ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... that lovely girl to forget them so soon again, he had been searching for them too long not to prize them now. He had thought he was anchoring at despair, and now that a star broke through the clouded heavens, beckoning him on, was he mad to scorn the hope that lay within his grasp? No, indeed, and that very night, under the immediate impulse of his new-born emotions, Guy ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... purposes will be carried through, because they will be purposes in accordance with the divine mind, and nothing has power to shake him. So he that grasps the hand of God can say, not because of his grasp, but because of the Hand that he holds, 'The Lord is at my right hand; I shall not be greatly moved. By Thy favour Thou hast made our mountain to stand strong.' And again, in another analogous but yet diversified ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... high tower, in a certain little town in northern Italy, where much history has been made of late; and, since the owner of the eyes was likewise the possessor of a very well-ordered mind and a gift of lucid exposition, I found myself able to grasp the main elements of the extraordinarily complex strategic problem with which the chiefs of the Italian army have had to grapple. As I looked and listened I felt that the chapter which Italy is contributing to the record of the greatest war of all time is one of which she will ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... in his grasp. She had turned from his pleading glance, but when he ceased, she raised her head and struggled to speak. A smile, beautiful, holy in its beauty, appeared struggling with tears, and a faint flush had risen to her cheek, but voice she had none, and for one moment she concealed her face on ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... to introduce the Rev. Mr. James B. Orson, of Michigan." Mr. Orson took Clementina's hand into a dry, rough grasp, while he peered into her face with small, shy eyes. The vice-consul added with a kind of official formality, "Mr. Orson is the half-nephew of Mr. Lander," and then Clementina now knew whom it was that he resembled. "He has come to Venice," ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sound sleep. However, he had no sooner laid eyes upon Seth Rawbon than, with a yell of fear, he sprang with a powerful leap through the doorway, leaving his blanket in the hands of those who sought to grasp him. ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... to induce her to confess may possibly have originated in no impure or sinister motive, but it is difficult altogether to dismiss from the mind the suspicion that her wealth was her great misfortune; and that to secure it within their grasp her own household were passive, if not active, agents in her destruction. Any thing more childish or absurd than the evidence against her—as, for instance, that she joyned in killing Henry Mitton because he refused a penny to Old Demdike—it would not be easy, even from the records of witch ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... Patty, entirely unmoved by this criticism; for she knew that she was vacillating and sometimes undecided, as compared to Patty's quick-witted grasp of a ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... strangers might be. We spoke of the hostages, and he at once said that it was an excellent idea. The English and French were very cruel—if now they chose to bombard. ... "If a man throws a penny into the sea," he said, "he loses the penny. It isn't the pocket-book that's hurt." I did not quite grasp this proverb, but remarked that after all they were civilians and had done nothing. "That is true," he said, "but the English and French have been very unjust to our civilians. They force us to another injustice—c'est ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... "Don't put him out till you feed him all he's got coming." Thereupon he succeeded in extracting Mr. Trimmer from the grasp of Mr. Johnson and forced the former back upon a chair, where he began to fan him with a towel in ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... soon find that the Government cannot take care of the people. The people must support the Government. Everything cannot be regulated by law. The factors entering into this problem are substantially infinite and beyond the intellectual grasp of any human being. Perhaps nothing in the world will convince the laboring man how little can be accomplished by law until there is opportunity of trying. To discuss the question will do good, so I am in favor of its discussion. To ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... foul tales and ill things in the king's house, but I hope in the Most High that He will cause their malice to recoil upon their own heads. As for the king's menace of slaying me, I am in the grip of his hand; so let not the king occupy his mind with my slaughter, because I am like the sparrow in the grasp of the fowler; if he will, he cutteth his throat, and if he will, he letteth him go. As for the delaying of my death, 'tis not from the king, but from Him in whose hand is my life; for, by Allah, O king, an the Almighty willed my slaughter, thou couldst not postpone ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... battery was, and if they don't, it'll be in one of 'em down thar 'til judgment, an' it'll sort of ease our minds a bit." He stopped and waited as a man who had delivered his message. The old Colonel had risen and taken the paper, and now held it with a firm grasp, as if it might blow away with the rising wind. He did not say a word, but his hand shook a little as he proceeded to fold it carefully, and there was a burning gleam in his deep-set eyes, back under his bushy, ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... no symptom of anybody coming to claim the little girl, who stood very quietly at his side, one hand holding the dog fast by his ear, and the other still lying in Oliver's grasp. The boy hopped on one foot across the narrow alley, and looked up with bright, eager eyes into the ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... dapper, in spite of the fact that his standing collar was a size or two too large; in spite, too, of the tiny, well-trimmed goatee. He looked like a faun in trouble. With a shadow of distress crossing his face, he gave ground and backed away, the lamp tipping perilously in his grasp. Joe sprang forward and rescued it, setting it ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... Verdun salient. As we write they are still there; for German attacks surge all round the trenches on the heights of the Meuse, and, though here and there the line has been dented, Verdun, that sleepy old town down by the river, is still French, still beyond the grasp of the Kaiser. ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... Heights always affected him this way. He liked, more than anything else, to soar aloft on his Wings of Steel. And he liked the sensation when he leaped from one platform toward the swinging trapeze bar, aiming to grasp it in his hands and swing in a great arc to the other little elevated place, close under the ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... was in countenance, and had beautiful fair hair. He was well armed; had a fine helmet, and ring armour; a red shield; a superb sword in his belt; and in his hand a gold-mounted spear, the shaft of it so thick that it was a handful to grasp. The man went before the king, saluted him, and asked if the ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... in South Carolina in the autumn of 1862 is in strong contrast, because of its firm grasp upon fact, with the attitude of the Brown faction in Georgia. An extended history of the Confederate movement—one of those vast histories that delight the recluse and scare away the man of the world—would labor to build up images of what might be called the ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... by the inflammation traveling up the womb, and along the Fallopian tubes to the ovaries, whose covering is rendered thick and dense, so that the ovum cannot escape, or if it does, the fimbriated end of the tube is so agglutinated that it cannot grasp the ovum. ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... dwelling upon this. As time went on she and her mistress, drawn together by one common interest, became really attached to each other; the baby's crumpled red hand, which could just hold one of Biddy's fingers, kept her a willing prisoner in its feeble yet mighty grasp, and all went on well. For Mrs Roy was not disappointed in her hope of finding her little nurse a support and comfort, and valued her opinion highly with regard to the baby's ailments; true, it was ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... trained in metaphysics, and there was lots I couldn't quite grasp, but I did feel it was inspiring. And she speaks so readily. I do think you ought to have got ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... somewhat abruptly, placing his feet on the mantelpiece, and tilting his chair back till it stood at an angle that caused us to rivet our attention upon it with hopeful interest. "I don't think we scribbling fellows ever fully grasp how much we owe to 'the poor.' Where would our angelic heroines and our noble-hearted heroes be if it were not for 'the poor'? We want to show that the dear girl is as good as she is beautiful. What do we do? We put a basket full of chickens ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... seems in her grasp, her heart is lighter, her spirit does not quail. She is tasting perhaps a shred of the martyrs' joy, when they suffered in the cause of right, she is battling down that weaker nature and ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... the Syracusans now knew no bounds. Relieved from all fear for the safety of their city they began to take a loftier view of the struggle, and to grasp the full compass and grandeur of the issues involved. It was no mere feud between two rival states, but a great national conflict, which was to end in the downfall of a wide-spread usurpation, and the deliverance of a hundred ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... 'Indian Charley,' one of the escaped prisoners, who, it will be remembered, was drummed out of his tribe and sentenced by the courts for the murder of a white settler last spring. Small outlying settlements will rejoice when this body of hardened desperate men are once more in the grasp of ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... from under the tree. No fall was given, and their feet remained on the board till the ropes drew tight. The bodies swayed back and forth, and while thus swinging, the hands of two came together with a firm grasp till the muscles ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... to me; but before his mouth could open there sounded suddenly from the hollow way in the mountain behind us a mighty bray. "Ah, the little angel!" Pablo cried. "Hearken to him, senor, calling to me." And so moved was Pablo by this evidence of El Sabio's affection that only my firm grasp upon his arm restrained him from attempting a dash through the guards to where the creature was penned in by the ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... because he loved his mother. I never heard the Grinder's real name. He and his mother were Queery and Drolly, contemptuously so called, and they answered to these names. I remember Cree best as a battered old weaver, who bent forward as he walked, with his arms hanging limp as if ready to grasp the shafts of the barrow behind which it was his life to totter uphill and downhill, a rope of yarn suspended round his shaking neck, and fastened to the shafts, assisting him to bear the yoke and slowly strangling him. By and by there came a time when the ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... born with his hands clenched; he dies with his hands wide open. Entering life he desires to grasp everything; leaving the world, all that ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... This place, as you say, is dismal. I wish you good evening!" saying which, Mr. Chichester turned away. But in that same instant, swift and lithe as a panther, Barnabas leapt, and dropping his stick, caught that slender, jewelled hand, bent it, twisted it, and wrenched the weapon from its grasp. Mr. Chichester stood motionless, white-lipped and silent, but a devil looked out ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... to hear the earnest reply that Benjamin meditated, the youth extricated himself from the vigorous grasp of the steward, and entered ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... geographers—and they are inordinately fond of artichokes. [Footnote: Kaunitz's own words. Kotmayr, "Austrian Plutarch," vol. xi.] Now their fondness for this vegetable is as dangerous to Austria as the too loving grasp of her northern allies, who with their friendly hands not only close their ports against us, but lay the weight of their favors so heavily upon our heads as to force us down upon our knees before them. What ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... condition known as cadaveric spasm. The muscular contraction passes immediately into rigor mortis, or death-stiffening, and the object remains grasped by the dead hand until the rigidity passes off. In this case the hand was perfectly rigid, but it did not grasp the hair at all. The little tress lay in the palm quite loosely and the hand was only partially closed. Obviously the hair had been placed in it after death. The other two facts had reference to the condition of the hair itself. Now, when a lock of hair is torn from the head, ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... laws Will be acknowledged, And kings will tremble At the power of Spain; And should a tyrant grasp The sceptre of opprobrium, From his infamous hand We ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... the words were light, The hands upheld were small and white,— Such hands as strong men love to grasp And crush in ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
... man," repeated Armitage gravely. "I am alive, and yet I am dead, Oscar; do you grasp the idea? You were a good friend when we were lads together in the great forest. If I should want you ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... force others to adopt, as rules for public conduct, the exact code in which he personally believes, and which he certainly follows. His mental processes are often crude, yet he has much native shrewdness and the ability to grasp situations as they arise. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... a couple of ponies, to carry them to the Festival of the Saint of Capel Garmon. The ponies were very wild, and could not be caught. The man, irritated, pursued the nimble creatures. His wife was by his side, and now he thought he had them in his power, but just at the moment he was about to grasp their manes, off they wildly galloped, and the man, in anger, finding that they had again eluded him, threw the bridle after them, and, sad to say, the bit struck the wife, and as this was of iron they both knew that their marriage contract ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... to him—though he concealed it—to see how tenaciously her feminine egotism held to the idea that she was the important person. And, when women of experience thus deluded themselves, it was not at all strange that this girl should be unable to grasp the essential truth as to the relations of men and women—that, while a woman who makes her sex her profession must give to a man, to some man, a dominant place in her life, a man need give a woman—at least, ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... gratified, and my ardent affections find an object to fix them. Every thing material must change; happiness and this fluctating principle is not compatible. Eternity, immateriality, and happiness,—what are ye? How shall I grasp the mighty and fleeting ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... and capture of the French king at Pavia (24 Feb., 1525) was hailed by Henry with great delight. The crown of France was now, he thought, within his grasp. On Saturday, the 11th March, a triumph was made in the city to celebrate "the takynge of the Frenche kyng in Bataill by Themporer and his alies."(1129) Bonfires were lighted at different places, one being in Saint Paul's Churchyard near the house where lay the foreign ambassadors. The Chamberlain ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... fluctuating interests, the transition from one situation to another, the hours, months, years spent in one fond pursuit after another; that it is, in a word, the length of our common journey and the quantity of events crowded into it, that, baffling the grasp of our actual perception, make it slide from our memory, and dwindle into nothing in its own perspective. It is too mighty for us, and we say it is nothing! It is a speck in our fancy, and yet what canvas would be big enough to hold its striking groups, its endless subjects! It is light ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... which she leaned, unconscious of all except that she was to see her in whom England itself seemed to have been incarnated—the woman who, as perhaps no other earthly sovereign in the world at that time, or before her, had her people in a grasp that was not one of merely regal power. Even far away in Derbyshire—even in the little country manor from which the girl came, the aroma of that tremendous presence penetrated—of the woman whom men loved ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... at her silently a moment, then continued "Yes, you love life—the sunlight, the thoughts, the arts, the luxuries—everything that is beautiful, like yourself. Then, Mademoiselle Charlotte, all these are in your hands; why do you not grasp them?" ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... instruction only in reading, writing, and arithmetic, to which he added surveying later, the clearness and elegance of his style become a matter of surprise. His epistolary correspondence is a model to all who would attain excellence in the art; and his grasp of thought and practical view of government and science, are unsurpassed by any statesman. Of the large number of notable extracts we might collect from his writings, we have space for a few ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... he Birting stretch'd, Plac'd the hilt within his grasp: "Strong of hand and valiant stand, That thy foes before ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... postulated by the Californians is very noticeable and helps to explain their motive for killing the divine bird. The notion of the life of a species as distinct from that of an individual, easy and obvious as it seems to us, appears to be one which the Californian savage cannot grasp. He is unable to conceive the life of the species otherwise than as an individual life, and therefore as exposed to the same dangers and calamities which menace and finally destroy the life of the individual. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... leaning, perchance, over the side of the vessel, and looking down on the troubled water, my mind grows troubled also with agitated thoughts, I start from the insidious posture. I find something to tug—to haul. A rope is thrown to me, and I am saved! Or I seize the rudder—I grasp its handle, grown smooth by its frequent intercourse with the human palm—and, believe me, there is a magic in its touch that brings me back instantly to the actual world of man's wants and of man's energies. I feel my feet press firm upon the boarded deck; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... the same, though the features were changed. Unaltered in expression, but wan, and the kind blue eyes large upon lean brows, her aspect was that of one who had been half caught away and still shook faintly in the relaxing invisible grasp. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... piece of hard wood, pointed and shaped very much like a miner's pick, the longer or handle-end being rounded and carved, to give a firmer grasp; another dreadful weapon, intended for close combat, is made out of hard wood, from two to three feet long, straight and with the handle rounded and carved for the grasp, which has an immense pointed knob at the end; the bwirri, is also a weapon of hard wood about two ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... be imagined when he found that the victim whom he had already considered in his grasp was snatched from him in the very moment of his triumph. He felt nearly as much incensed at Mrs. McGuire as at Phil, but against the former he had no remedy. Over the stalwart Irishwoman neither he nor the padrone had any jurisdiction, and he was compelled ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... I see Thee face to face, Here would I touch and handle things unseen Here grasp with firmer hand th' eternal grace And all my weariness ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... inspectors to set right everything which is wrong. No experience seems to damp the faith of our public in these instrumentalities. The English Liberals in the middle of this century seemed to have full grasp of the principle of liberty, and to be fixed and established in favor of non-interference. Since they have come to power, however, they have adopted the old instrumentalities, and have greatly multiplied them since they have had a great number of reforms to ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... amused myself with looking upon them, and as often as I laid hold upon a piece of stuff, it powdered in my hands like dust dispread. Presently I saw some chests and opening one of them, found it full of gold in bags; so I laid hold upon the bags, but they crumbled away in my grasp, whilst the gold abode unchanged. I carried off of it what I could carry and said to myself, 'Were my brothers with me, they might take of this gold their fill and possess themselves of these hoards which have ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... bent and kissed her, and his cheek felt the tears upon hers. He reached for her hand, with an instinct to strengthen her. But when he had it within his its firm and vital grasp sent a thrill of ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... many sad and lonely people in the world that no one need ever feel any lack of a purpose in life, and she advised me not to look at charity from a general standpoint, but to narrow it down till it came within my own grasp. ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... to me. This is Bet. I'm right here beside you!" Bet repeated the sentence over and over until at last the sick brain seemed to grasp the idea and the girl quieted down, and even ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... I so tall to reach the pole, Or grasp the ocean with my span, I must be measur'd by my soul: The mind's the standard ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... the schools, the philosophy of the profoundest theorists, been overthrown by the simple demonstrations of practical facts? For a thousand years the world was in pursuit of the giant power that lay hidden in heated vapor, the steam that came floating up from boiling water. That power eluded the grasp and baffled the research of human genius, which was looking so earnestly after it, until ingenuity gave it up, and philosophy pronounced it a delusion. Not far from the beginning of the present century, practical experiment began to develop the mysterious ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... is black, and full of blood; His eye-balls farther out than when he lived, Staring full ghastly, like a strangled man; His hair uprear'd—his nostrils stretch'd with struggling, His hands abroad display'd, as one who grasp'd And tugg'd for life, and was by strength subdued. HENRY ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... increasing interest in the gallantry with which Pitt almost alone fought the ablest Opposition that had ever been ranged within the walls of Westminster, and inflamed by the sight of power almost within their grasp. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... culture; that is, her mind was passively rather than actively engaged in such directions, until later. At the normal school she led a class which has had a proud intellectual record as teachers and workers. She was the easy victor in every contest; with an inclusive grasp, an incisive analysis, instant generalization, a very tenacious and ready memory, and unusual talent for every effort of study, she took and held the first place as a matter of course until she graduated, when she gave the valedictory address. This valedictory ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... the violet robe of the Counsellor seemed almost austere. His lineless face was so fresh in color that it looked youthful, though of singular gravity and refined asceticism. Yet men of force were drawn to him because of his strength, his broad grasp of duty, and ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... and classic verse, especially, are his delights. He has no affectation. His tastes are all his own—his opinions all genuine. He is, indeed, a man of very varied attainment, as well as great grasp of intellect. Yet, as you see, he likes his opposites sometimes. Miss Harz," and he laid his hand proudly on ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... I take all back about your nice appreciation of character. I now grasp the whole truth—your attention wandered sufficiently from your dinner to observe that she wore a brown dress, and the one fact about the thrush that has impressed you is that it is brown. 'Here be truths' which leave nothing more ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... as a whole, there breaks from it such lightness of fancy, such richness of invention, such variety and vividness of color, nay, even the ripple of mirthfulness,—for Nature has its humorous side also,—that we lose our grasp of its completeness in wonder at its details, and our sense of its unity is clouded by its marvellous fertility. There may seem to be an irreverence in thus characterizing the Creative Thought by epithets which we derive from the exercise of our own mental faculties; but it is nevertheless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... ourselves at this point what the Incarnation means, because our estimate of Blessed Mary as the chosen instrument of God's grace will be influenced by our estimate of that which she was chosen to do. One feels the failure to grasp her position in the work of our redemption often displays a weak hold upon that which is the very heart of God's work—the fact of God made man. The moment of the Annunciation is the moment of the Incarnation: God in His ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... was recognized by me as being a decided victory, though not so complete as I had hoped for, nor nearly so complete as I now think was within the easy grasp of the commanding officer at Corinth. Since the war it is known that the result, as it was, was a crushing blow to the enemy, and felt by him much more than it was appreciated at the North. The battle relieved me from any further ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... said the Sub-Prior, gently extricating his garment from the anxious grasp of Dame Elspeth, "the Refectioner has with him the Abbot's plate and drinking cups; and I pray you to believe that whatever is short in your entertainment will be deemed amply made up in ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... has some charms for me," he replied smilingly, as though to indicate that sainthood was not yet quite within his grasp. ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... narrative, had recognised the psychological truth of the plain story of his wavering conviction and had learned its lessons of self-distrust. There is only one Man with whom it was always high-water; all others have ebbs and flows in their religious life, and variations in their grasp of truth. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... now little cultivated; once the scene of high civilisation when Nineveh ruled it; it passed from Assyrian hands successively to Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, and Arab; now, after many vicissitudes, it is in the deathly grasp of Turkish rule. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... seized you, not knowing whose life I was striving to save at the risk of losing my own. Isn't that worth some sort of return? Isn't it worth even the sacrifice of a whim? Louise, don't look at me that way. Is it possible that you don't grasp—" He hesitated and turned his face toward the parlor whence came again the cough, hollow and distressing. The sound died away, echoing down the hall, and a hen clucked on the porch ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... greatest come to congratulate Hector on the speech. Everybody in the county was talking about him that night, they said. Hector received these people in his old-fashioned-statesman manner, though I noticed that already he shook hands like a candidate. He would grasp the caller's hand quickly and decidedly, instead of letting the other do the gripping. And I could see that all those who came in, even hard-headed men twice his age, treated him deferentially, with the ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... a stir and a cry from two floors below. Sylvia Graham had broken from the grasp of her terrified aunt, and now came up the sharp ascent like a deer, her eyes ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... "representative men of the denominations" to rally the strength of their denominations to sustain this work at their call? We utter no prophecy of the future; it is not needed. Events transpire in these days faster than our minds are prepared to grasp them. Let us heed the admonition to "watch!" and, with reliance upon God, prepare for "those things which are coming on ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... the instant to grasp the meaning of this piece of eloquent information, invited the urchin to repeat it, which he did with the sly unction of one proud of his secret. Mary laughed to herself. Some girls would have ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... to sit there all day, you young folk?" he called out hastily.—"Oh, here you are, little ones;—glad to see you, my lad;" and he gave Tom's hand a warm grasp, and touched Lucy's white face ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan
... from his long sleep, confused and bewildered. So vivid had been his dream that it was some time before he could grasp his surroundings and come back to ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... left, while the summit soars up out of our sight into the sky. "The effect is gained by majesty and simplicity of form, in the contrast and disproportion between the stature of man and the immensity of his handiwork: the eye fails to take it in; it is even difficult for the mind to grasp it. We see, we may touch hundreds of courses formed of blocks, two hundred cubic feet in size,... and thousands of others scarcely less in bulk, and wo are at a loss to know what force has moved, transported, and raised so great a number of colossal stones, how many men were needed for the work, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... without the least indication on my part, in his hard lean grasp, and shook it kindly, but familiarly, peering with a stern sort of curiosity into my face as he continued to hold it. His ill-fitting, glossy black cloth, ungainly presence, and sharp, dark, vulpine features had in them, as I said before, the vulgarity of a Glasgow artisan in his ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... beautiful, like flights of birds, O monarch, flying away from trees. Then Dhananjaya, having afflicted them thus, with great speed struck hundreds and thousands of them with sharp shafts. And he cut off their heads and also hands with weapons in their grasp, by means of his broad-headed arrows. And he felled on the ground, with his shafts, their thighs, resembling the trunks of elephants. And some were wounded on their backs, arms and eyes. And thus Dhananjaya deprived his foes of diverse limbs, and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... have caught their cry in time. The world had narrowed down to a pin prick, but if only she had come a scant two days ago, she would have bent his eye to this tiny aperture as to the small end of a telescope as she did now and made him see big enough to grasp the ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... who threw half naked. Fair hope had he who held the dice, after his fellow had cried his number. Then the quarrel rose suddenly from the silence. One called across the table to his companion, "You cheat, and throw not fairly. Grasp not the dice so tightly in your hand, but shake them forth upon the board. My count is yet before yours. If you still have pennies in your pouch bring them out, for I will meet you to your wish." Thus the dicers wrangled, and ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... of paper—or is it a ghostly communication from the world of spirits? You look startled enough for me to suppose anything, and it spun away from your grasp very suddenly. Oh," he added, as he glanced it through, "rather ghostly, I must confess, or would be if one were inclined that way; but I imagined your nerves were stronger. Did the pronoun ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... not be forgotten that for twenty years she had been the personal friend and favourite of Anne of Austria, and for ten years she had suffered persecution and privation on that account. Exiled, proscribed, and threatened with imprisonment, she had narrowly escaped Richelieu's grasp by disguising herself in male attire, and in that garb traversing France and Spain on horseback, had succeeded in eluding his pursuit, and after many adventures in safely reaching Madrid. Philip IV. not only heaped every ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... instant Boldwood sprang upon him, and held him by the neck. Troy felt Boldwood's grasp slowly tightening. The move ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... said; however, at last they began to pat their stomachs, and then we knew that all was right. Accordingly we advanced to meet them, patting our stomachs with one hand, and holding out the other to grasp theirs. They were of a brownish copper colour, well formed and athletic, with long shaggy hair—their only clothing being a piece of skin thrown over one shoulder. In such a climate as that of Terra del Fuego, their ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... and horrible. If any one is afraid of ghosts he ought to be afraid, too, of me, and of those lights and of the sky, seeing that, if you come to reflect, all that is no less fantastic and beyond our grasp than apparitions from the other world. Prince Hamlet did not kill himself because he was afraid of the visions that might haunt his dreams after death. I like that famous soliloquy of his, but, to be candid, it never touched my soul. I will confess to you as a ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Faith is different from, and superior to, reason. Faith is a spiritual extension of the vision—a moral sense that reaches out toward the throne of God and takes hold of verities that the mind cannot grasp. It is like "the blind leading the blind" for a higher critic, however honest, to rely on purely intellectual methods to convey truths that are ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... feeling as if I was looking into kind eyes that I had seen close to me forever in the old convent in France, and as I spoke I could not help it that I raised my arm in its covering of a man's tweed and let my woman's fingers grasp one of the long fingers on my shoulder and cling to it as I had done other long fingers just like them that had guided my first footsteps down the sunny garden paths of the old Chateau ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... persisted in; but the broad facts are already before the public mind. After three years of war the air offensive, the only possible decisive blow, is still merely talked of. Not once nor twice only have the Western Allies had victory within their grasp—and failed to grip it. The British cavalry generals wasted the great invention of the tanks as a careless child breaks a toy. At least equally remarkable is the dragging inadaptability of European statecraft. Everywhere the failure of ministers and statesmen to rise to the urgent definite necessities ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... solving the problems of old Exham. How was he to do this if he was not big enough to cope with his own circumstance? And was he going to miss the continuation of the Manning line because he had failed to grasp opportunity in ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... to a certain extent the victim of his occupation; and the formalities of the Senate were ever tightening their grasp on Sumner's mode of life. One afternoon, as he was leaving Dr. Howe's garden at South Boston, the doctor's youngest daughter ran out from the house, and called to him, "Good-bye, Mr. Sumner." His back was ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... little doubt as to the correctness of this latter surmise, as he threw the door open and stepped into the room, his first action being to grasp the electric switch ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... marvellous, truly, was her aspect, that I forgot all else but it, and stood entranced, marvelling, forgetful of myself and purpose. The flash of a knife in the air and a fearful oath brought me to my senses to know that I was in the grasp of the man ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... rate at Paris—I can introduce her to such society as she will like—and thus, securing for her all the chance for happiness, which depends on me, I shall die in peace, persuaded that the felicity which has hitherto cheated my expectation, will not always elude my grasp. No poor tempest-tossed mariner ever more earnestly longed ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... photoplay company. If he can be interested in your story, the script is half sold. This being true, it follows that your synopsis must be clear, interesting, and as brief as you can possibly make it, while still giving all the important points of the story. He must grasp your plot, if not in a nutshell, at least in just as few words as it can be compressed into in order to make its development perfectly clear. You must therefore outline it, so that he may be able to see plainly the possibilities ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... pearls. The ocean, not to be behindhand with the earth, yielded up her mighty whales, that Mr. Gathergold might sell their oil, and make a profit on it. Be the original commodity what it might, it was gold within his grasp. It might be said of him, as of Midas in the fable, that whatever he touched with his finger immediately glistened, and grew yellow, and was changed at once into sterling metal, or, which suited him still better, into piles of coin. And, when Mr. Gathergold had become so very rich ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... at one end of this leafy domicile and the next instant catching the evicted caterpillar "on a fly" at the other. Grasping her prey with her legs and jaws, in another moment the wriggling body is passive in her grasp, subdued by the potent anaesthetic of her sting—a hypodermic injection which instantly produces the semblance of death in its insect victim, reducing all the vital functions to the point of dissolution, and then holds them suspended—literally prolongs life, it would sometimes seem, even ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... slow necessity of death: The tranquil spirit fails beneath its grasp, Without a groan, almost without a fear, 470 Resigned in peace to the necessity, Calm as a voyager to some distant land, And full of wonder, full of hope as he. The deadly germs of languor and disease Waste in the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... something had so terrified her, that it would be cruelty to force her out into the streets. Every now and then she let drop another word or two on the subject of her fright; her poor disconnected brain seemed unable to grasp anything as a whole; something would float across it and be lost. Marie had grown apt at gathering together these cobweb strands, and disentangling them, but now even her ingenuity was at fault, and the number was the only point which ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... two men's hands parted, after this perfunctory grasp, and the Commander passed on, she ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... though not exactly dignified carriage. His complexion remained as pale and his eyes as blue as before. The pallor flushed and the blue sparkled as he made a few final and long strides towards me. The grasp of the hand he gave me was powerful, but broken into sudden almost quivering relaxations and compressions. I could not help fancying also that he was using some little effort to keep his eyes steady upon ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... said Vaninka, holding her back with a grasp of almost masculine strength. "Let us stay until the house falls in on them, so that we may be certain that not one of ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Jacques—how he must suffer! Hark to that low, sickening thud! 'Tis the accursed soap dropping from his nerveless grasp. Hist to that sound—like unto a death rattle! It is the water gurgling in the tub. And what means that low, poignant, smothered gasp? It is the last convulsive cry of Jacques descending into the depths. All is ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... declare Jack Rover duly elected captain of Company C for the ensuing term," said Captain Dale. "Captain Rover, if you will come forward, I shall be glad to shake hands with you," he added. And then, as Jack walked to the platform to grasp the instructor's hand, there was a great ...
— The Rover Boys Under Canvas - or The Mystery of the Wrecked Submarine • Arthur M. Winfield
... make him less anxious for the completion of the marriage between Catherine and Prince Henry. Henry VII. was equally averse from the consummation of the match. Now that he was scheming with Charles's other grandfather, the Emperor Maximilian, to wrest the government of Castile from Ferdinand's grasp, the alliance of the King of Aragon had lost its attraction, and it was possible that the Prince of Wales might find elsewhere a more desirable bride. Henry's marriage with Catherine was to have been accomplished when he completed the age of fourteen; but ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... at first to understand. She looked puzzled and bewildered, and did not seem to grasp the full import ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... has reduced law and order to a somewhat low ebb. I at first thought of coming here to await my chance of shooting this man—his name, by the way, is Frederick Conyngham; but circumstances placed a better vengeance within my grasp—one that will last longer.' ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... exceeded all my previous experience; fingers were dismembered as readily as twigs, and blood was poured out like water. Many of the warriors would cut two gashes nearly the entire length of their arm; then, separating the skin from the flesh at one end, would grasp it in their other hand, and rip it asunder to the shoulder. Others would carve various devices upon their breasts and shoulders, and raise the skin in the same manner to make the scars show to advantage after the wound was ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... present. Among his more important works are two complete services, a scene for barytone solo, male chorus, and orchestra, called "Ticonderoga," and a powerful Christmas anthem. Warren has written also various operettas, in which he shows a particular grasp of instrumentation, and an ability to give new turns of expression to his songs, while keeping them smooth and singable. An unpublished short song of his, "When the Birds Go North," is a remarkably beautiful work, showing an aptitude ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... their own food. He has almost entirely reorganized the life of our valley, along these lines, and I daresay he cannot at all realize himself the prodigious change from hopelessness and slow death to energy and forward-looking activity which his intelligent grasp of the situation has brought to this ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... a long way round, however, for my word about my dim first move toward "The Portrait," which was exactly my grasp of a single character—an acquisition I had made, moreover, after a fashion not here to be retraced. Enough that I was, as seemed to me, in complete possession of it, that I had been so for a long time, that this had made it familiar ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... upon the man who had destroyed her brother's peace? Faithful to Lilian should she go, or faithless stay? He took the guitar himself and fingered the strings, making fewer chords than discords; her own fingers wandered to correct him; their hands met; the guitar slipped down unheeded; the grasp grew closer, grew warmer—ah, Helen, was it Lilian of whom you thought, whom you would save?—and then an arm was around her; shining eyes, only half guessed in the glimmer that the phosphorescent swells ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... basic principles of our Nation, for we know that if we despise our own government we have no future. We recall in special times when we have stood briefly, but magnificently, united. In those times no prize was beyond our grasp. ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... said, "that I was a shipowner and a merchant. That is true. But these are troubled times. A revolution has had the land in its grasp. Times are bad, and this vast land is now convulsed with the birth throes of democracy. Money is hard to come by, and much needed, for General Washington's troops were farmers called away from their harvesting or sowing. The period of healing, for them and for the land, ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... above all, when it must be conceded that the increase of the cost of living caused by such tariff becomes a burden upon those with moderate means and the poor, the employed and unemployed, the sick and well, and the young and old, and that it constitutes a tax which with relentless grasp is fastened upon the clothing of every man, woman, and child in the land, reasons are suggested why the removal or reduction of this duty should be included in a revision ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... faithful. What other people had done, she, by following the old copybook rules of the honest policy, the early rising, the power of knowledge, the infinite capacity of taking pains that was genius, could do, too. She had been the toy of chance too long. She would grasp chance, now, and make it serve her. The perseverance that Anna brought to her hospital work, that Josephine exercised in her studies, Susan, lacking a gift, lacking special training, would seriously devote to the business of ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... swing across one side of his cage. He caught the long line in his teeth at a point not far from the rail; then, wriggling with great effort to an upright position, his back braced against the rail, he put his chin over the swing and worked toward one end. He tightened the grasp of his chin on the swing, and with tremendous exertion, working the lower end of his spine against the railing, he began gradually to ascend the side of his cage. The labor was so great that he was compelled to pause at intervals, and his breathing was hard and painful; ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... been discovered by the Federal cavalry, and in such circumstances the more officers that understood the intention of the general-in-chief the better. Men who have been honoured with their leader's confidence, and who grasp the purpose of the efforts they are called upon to make, will co-operate, if not more cordially, at least more intelligently, than those who are impelled by the ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... poop, and, bending over, attempted to seize some of the half-drowned people who were floating about. Once he caught a little child by the clothes; but before he could secure it a wave carried it out of his grasp, and its shrieks were hushed in the roar of the waters. At nine o'clock, on the second morning of the wreck the tide had so far ebbed that the deck was clear, and, coming down from the rigging, the battered and shivering survivors began to think of getting breakfast. A provident sailor ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... terror clinging to spars and shrouds, unable to move. Over heeled the stout ship. The masts like willow-wands bent, and then, snapping in two, were carried away to leeward. The lower yards dipped in the water, and most of those upon them were torn away from their grasp, while others were hurled to a distance from the ship. For a few minutes she lay helplessly on her beam-ends, then happily feeling the power of her helm, which was put up, the canvas at the same time being ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... the fresh blood, the giver of the wound comes up, and provokes his adversary to fury, and buries his shining hunting spear in his opposite shoulder. His companions attest their delight in an encouraging shout, and in their right hands endeavour to grasp the conquering right hand; and with wonder they behold the huge beast as he lies upon a large space of ground, and they do not deem it safe as yet to touch him; but yet they, each of them, stain their weapons with his blood. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... still more essential factor in its economic welfare. Whether we have a farseeing and wise diplomacy and are not recklessly plunged into unnecessary wars, and whether our foreign policies are based upon an intelligent grasp of present-day world conditions and a clear view of the potentialities of the future, or are governed by a temporary and timid expediency or by narrow views befitting an infant nation, are questions in the alternative consideration ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... you!" he exclaimed, in a low voice, which seemed struggling in the grasp of something which might or might not be stronger than itself. "You don't know how glad I am to stand by you, and ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... remaining passengers sought shelter from the encroaching dangers, by retreating to the passage, on the lee side of the boat, that leads from the after to the forward deck, as if to be as far as possible from the grasp of death. It may not be improper here to remark, that the destruction of the boat, and loss of life, was, doubtless, much more rapid than it otherwise would have been, from the circumstance of the boat heeling to windward, and the deck, which was nearly ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... filled with listeners. People came thirty, forty and fifty miles in buggies and wagons to shake hands with the pioneer suffragist. Grizzly-headed opposers succumbed to Miss Anthony's logic and came up to grasp her hand and say God bless her, and proved the depth of their fervor by generous financial aid to the cause she so ably represents. It is seldom that the beginner of a great reform lives to see such fruitage of her labors as does she. People often descant upon the indifference of women ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... has simply disappeared like the crocodile from the Lower Nile. Finally, to conclude this rapidly outlined sketch, all at the present moment happily share the same fate; they are being robbed of their last mysteries; the veil of Isis is fast yielding to the white man's grasp. ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... his hand and was gratified to encounter a man's grasp. "So you're Edward Courtlandt? Now, what do you think of that! Why, your father was the best sportsman I ever met. Square as they make 'em. Not a kink anywhere in his make-up. He used to come to the bouts in his plug hat and ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... thirsted for more of Christ, and now have no longing for Him—awake to the danger in which you stand of letting all your spiritual wealth slip through your fingers; behold the treasures, yet unreached, within your grasp, and seek to garner and realise them. Gather up the broken pieces which remain over, lest everything ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... world, in which entire races come and go, some of them leaving a ruin or two, and perhaps an odd indecipherable inscription here and there! The world was fortunate indeed to grasp, from the obliterated and forgotten past, Hebraism and Hellenism—the moral and the beautiful; from which man's craving for goodness has resulted in Christianity; and from which his impulses of sweetness and brightness and loveliness have developed the Renascence! ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... Have ye seen when Spring's arrowy summons goes right to the aim, And some mountain, the last to withstand her, that held (he alone, While the vale laughed in freedom and flowers) on a broad bust of stone A year's snow bound about for a breastplate,—leaves grasp of the sheet? Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his feet, And there fronts you, stark, black, but alive yet, your mountain of old, {110} With his rents, the successive bequeathings of ages untold— Yea, each harm got in fighting your battles, each furrow ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... the position of the German troops in Courland placed them advantageously for taking the Russian line of defenses, of which the fortress of Kovno represented the northern end in the flank in this carrying out of an important part of the vast encircling movement which took all Poland in its grasp. They were a constant threat to the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Kingdom" in her hand, felt that some source of power and happiness which she had not realized had slipped from her grasp, yet might still be hers. So many disconnected, half-childish thoughts came with the words—historic names of women whom men had loved devotedly, who had kept them as their friends and lovers even when they themselves ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... in their places when wanted. There is another side to this quaint custom, which is often of inestimable advantage to a busy man. A host, who feels that everything necessary has been said, and wishes to free himself from further attendance, may grasp his own cup and invite his guest to drink. The same results follow, and the guest has no alternative but to rise and take his leave. In ancient days visitors left their shoes outside the front door, a custom which is still practised by the ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... the actors of these events themselves understood them but ill, we shall not be far from the truth in saying that our Revolution was a phenomenon equally misunderstood by those who caused it and by those who have described it. At no period of history did men so little grasp the present, so greatly ignore the past, and so poorly divine ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... the sick man. Loosening the grasp of his hand, he carried him to a little mound at the foot ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... utterly destroy his army. He proved too slow, however, and Lee and his beaten Confederate soldiers escaped. President Lincoln was inexpressibly grieved at this, and in the first bitterness of his disappointment sat down and wrote General Meade a letter. Lee "was within your easy grasp," he told him, "and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. ... Your golden opportunity is gone and I am ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... silken skirts, trod out the red heart of it neatly with her daintily shod foot. Just then the other lady, she of the gray-green gown, came from within the shelter of the Temple, and stood between the white pillars of the colonnade. Dick's grasp tightened on the handle of the hunting-crop lying ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... His grasp squeezed hers in fond response. "Why, it won't do me any harm," he agreed. His tone was light. He released his hand and took up a cup of tea, and his tone went deep. "Mind you, I'm glad about it," he said, and stirred the spoon ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... connected therewith. There is scarcely an act in the Indian's life that does not involve some ceremonial performance or is not in itself a religious act, sometimes so complicated that much time and study are required to grasp even a part of its real meaning, for his myriad deities must all be propitiated lest some dire ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... and began what promised to be a long shrill wawl, if it had not been stopped. How it was stopped, the trembling, sickening mother herself did not know. She only knew that a strong hand wrenched the child from her grasp in the black darkness, and that all was still, unless, as she then and ever after had a shuddering apprehension, there was something of a slight gurgle which reached her strained ear. Her own involuntary moan was stopped almost ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... hand. The clammy coldness of his grasp startled her. "Do you still wonder why I followed you?" he asked. The words were so faintly uttered that she could barely hear them. Heavy drops of perspiration stood on his forehead; his face faded to a gray and ghastly whiteness—he ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... roam—the more possible the idea seemed. Ham had said my father was not a money-making man. He was in financial difficulties, too. Grandfather had died and there was a heap of money just beyond my mother's grasp. My father had become a stumbling-block in her path—in my path. He it was who ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... Child! Forbear! As if goaded by invisible spirits, the sun-steeds of time bear onward the light car of our destiny; and nothing remains for us but, with calm self-possession, firmly to grasp the reins, and now right, now left, to steer the wheels here from the precipice and there from the rock. Whither he is hasting, who knows? Does any one consider ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... a butterfly and, catching her, held her in his hands and feasted his eyes upon her prettiness. But as he held her so, the pollen rubbed off her wings and she fluttered, a pitiable thing, weakly from his grasp. ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... the Christian inhabitants of Spain and Portugal against the Moors, who had formerly expelled their ancestors from the greatest part of the peninsula, and with whom they had waged an incessant war of several centuries in recovering the country from their grasp. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... shine with a silver thread of humor, worked too intimately into the whole warp and woof to be extracted without injuring both the solid material and the tinsel. To appreciate the point and delicacy of their finest wit, you must read the whole story and grasp the entire ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... and, taking the reins, swung himself into the saddle with the ease of the cavalry mount, though with the old-fashioned grasp at the cantle, with the ends of the reins ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... little fellow, who might easily have stood under my arm stretched level with my shoulder, could he be the hero of Marengo! the Dictator of France who held all Europe trembling in his grasp! I think that I had heretofore had an unconscious feeling that greatness of stature meant greatness of heart and mind and courage, and I had gloried in my inches. Now I was almost ashamed of them, for this little man coming rapidly ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... become justified, provided they show that, in regard to a philosophy as "unhealthy and unprofitable" as Schopenhauer's, not proofs but quips and sallies alone are suitable. While perusing such passages, the reader will grasp the full meaning of Schopenhauer's solemn utterance to the effect that, where optimism is not merely the idle prattle of those beneath whose flat brows words and only words are stored, it seemed to him not merely an absurd but a vicious attitude of mind, and one full ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... throbbed hard; but the muscles of his arms and chest held firm as the crowbar they guided, and slowly, reluctantly, sullenly, the rock went over on its side. He dropped the crowbar from his stiffening grasp and drew himself up, flinging his shoulders back and panting ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... the snortingest supper of the season to-night. It isn't every day your shack is honoured by a bride. Mr. Bailey, this is my wife, since ten o'clock A. M." He introduced a blushing, happy girl, evidently in the grasp of many emotions. "We'll stay ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... crowded houses of Gravesend and the monstrous red-brick pile on the Essex shore the ship is surrendered fairly to the grasp of the river. That hint of loneliness, that soul of the sea which had accompanied her as far as the Lower Hope Reach, abandons her at the turn of the first bend above. The salt, acrid flavour is gone out of the air, together with a sense of unlimited ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... whole law. What are we without it?—poor, vile, selfish animals; our very virtues themselves, so exclusively virtues on our own behalf as to be well nigh as hateful as our vices. Nothing so opens and improves the heart, nothing so widens the grasp of the affections, nothing half so effectually brings us out of our crust of self, as a happy, well-regulated love for ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... this one hour Shall grasp the world with clearer power Than in a year's monotony. The songs the tender spirits sing thee, The lovely images they bring thee Are not an idle magic play. Thou shalt enjoy the daintiest savor, Then feast thy taste ...
— Faust • Goethe
... to one still higher. But the quantity of the universe is not thereby determined, and we cannot affirm that this regress proceeds in infinitum. Such an affirmation would anticipate the members of the series which have not yet been reached, and represent the number of them as beyond the grasp of any empirical synthesis; it would consequently determine the cosmical quantity prior to the regress (although only in a negative manner)—which is impossible. For the world is not given in its totality in any intuition: consequently, its quantity cannot ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... love to hear their stern deeds sung by innocent lips; and right well, to listen to the strain that tells how the heart of "lady-bright" is won by noble daring. But what means that sudden break in the song, and the confused sweep of the strings, as though the lute had slipped from its owner's grasp; while the masculine paraphernalia which we had just discovered disappears altogether behind that most impervious and curiosity-mocking screen? No great harm done, or that light laugh had not escaped the lips so suddenly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... last words of the letter, a dozen times over to her and she seemed to take hold of them as a drowning man would grasp a board that floated by him—then without movement, with her eyes shut, she seemed to be sleeping, but every once in a while she appeared ...
— Paula the Waldensian • Eva Lecomte
... worker—some unethical promoter willing to stoop to devious methods—might pass at any moment and grasp the possibilities, have Miss Francis signed up before I'd even got the deal straight in my mind. How could he miss, seeing this lawn? Splendid, magnificent, beautiful. No one would ever call this stuff devilgrass—angelgrass ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... a beetle-browed look as he sat down between Auerbach and me, but at least he was cooeperative to the extent that he placed both his hands on top of the table. If Auerbach and I reached for them, we would be permitted to grasp them. ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... witnesses, has repeatedly seen this done with his eyes—in private houses, for instance, where there could be no machinery—and he himself and his brother have held by the legs of a table to prevent the motion—the medium sitting some yards away—and that table has been wrenched from their grasp and lifted into the air. My husband's sister, who has admirable sense and excessive scepticism on all matters of the kind, was present the other day at the house of a friend of ours in Paris, where ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... coloring a still deeper scarlet from the knowledge that he was blushing, and that they were all looking at him, Derrick barely touched the tips of the little fingers held out to him. Then thinking that this perhaps seemed rude, he made another attempt to grasp the offered hand more heartily, but it was so quickly withdrawn that this time he did not touch it at all, whereupon everybody ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... partly across the canoe, which was floating past the heap on which I had taken refuge, and only a few yards from where I was standing. I immediately plucked a long stick from the brush-heap, and swam near enough to the lad for him to grasp one end of the pole, bidding him leave the canoe, which I told him would be carried over the dam to a certainty, and him with it, if he did not abandon his hold. He, with apparent reluctance, followed my directions, but I had a hard struggle to regain my former place of refuge, with the boy's ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... 'utterances' have been corrupted. But, leaving you to discuss that point, if you like, with my uncle here, I must deny that the mistake, supposing it one, makes any thing in relation to our present discussion. You say that the Apostles did well and naturally to inculcate a light grasp on the world, on the supposition that it was about to pass away; and therefore, I suppose, you (under a similar impression) would do the same; if so, ought you not still to do it? for can it make any conceivable difference to the wisdom or the folly of such exhortations, whether ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... enough. They proposed sending a man to me who was neither a musician nor a singer. If I could make my meaning clear enough for him to understand, it was likely the girl from a little Western town could grasp it. ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... not have a chance to use his rifle again. The wolves seemed to rush him from all sides, and a huge gray fellow leaped against him, knocking the rifle from the lad's grasp and rolling him over and over, half ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... Queen only excepted) wish'd for two Kings of Babylon. At last, their Horses being tired, and both their Lances broke, Zadig made use of the following Stratagem, which his Antagonist wasn't any ways appriz'd of. He got artfully behind him, and shooting with a Spring on his Horses Buttocks, grasp'd him close, threw him headlong on the Sand, then jump'd into his Seat, and wheel'd round Prince Hottam, while he lay sprawling on the Ground. All the Spectators in general, with loud Acclamations, cried out, Victory! Victory! in favour of the Champion in white. Hottam, incens'd to the last ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... at this time on the question of preparedness. No matter what the character of the information is that you are receiving, I have it from all sources that there is no enthusiasm on the "hill" for preparedness, and that the country itself is indifferent because of its apparent inability to grasp the importance and full significance of this question. This indifference arises out of two things: first, the attitude of the pacifists whose feelings have been nurtured by the preachings of Mr. Bryan; second, ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... Asiatic character is further illustrated during the afternoon in the case of a caravan leader whom I meet on an unridable stretch of road. "Bin! bin!" says this person, as soon as his mental faculties grasp the idea that the bicycle is something to ride on. "Mimlcin, deyil; fenna yole; duz yolo lazim " (impossible; bad road; good road necessary), I reply, airing my limited stock of Turkish. Nothing daunted by this answer, the man blandly requests me to turn about and follow his ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... of surpassing interest, not merely as a service to native criticism but as a revelation of Holliday's ability to follow through a sustained intellectual task with the same grasp and grace that he afterward showed in the memoir of Kilmer in which his heart was so deeply engaged. Of a truth, Mr. Holliday's success in putting himself within Tarkington's dashing checked kuppenheimers is a fine achievement of projected psychology. ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... it in setting it down, so that some of the fat was spilled upon the table-cloth. Mrs. Jackson seized her and slapped her hard, several times, on both sides of her head. The frightened child tried to escape, as soon as she was released from her grasp, but, being ordered to remain and wait upon table, she stood behind her mistress, carefully suppressing her sobs, though unable to keep back the tears that trickled down her cheeks. The traveller was hungry; but this sight was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... I can't tell you. What was once very clear to me has for the most part become vague and formless. When my mind tries to grasp it, it slips away. It was another life to this, quite a different life; and there was a great story in it of which I think what we have been going through is either a sequel or a prologue. I see, or saw, cities and temples with people moving about them, George and ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... was somewhat moth-eaten, and the odd hat would have seemed very much out of date if it had not recalled such precious memories. But Napoleon liked to recall that eventful day when he had managed to grasp victory when apparently beaten. After the manoeuvres he solemnly laid the corner-stone of a monument to the memory of Desaix and the other brave men who ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... hoarse and swift, checked the forward movement of the engineers. He plunged to his knees before the rope and reached clutchingly, as if he wanted to grasp ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... a single and fixed resolve, finger by finger, sinew by sinew; something that was at once he and not he—at once within and without him;—the shutting of some miniature valve in his brain, which a single manly thought should suffice to open—and the grasp of an external fate ineluctable as gravity. To any man there may come at times a consciousness that there blows, through all the articulations of his body, the wind of a spirit not wholly his; that his mind rebels; that another girds him ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... wonders I seemed to see, even the Road by which souls travel from There to Here and from Here to There, and the Gates that were burned away, and the City of the Mansions that descended, were but signs and symbols of mysteries which as yet we cannot grasp ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... hands round the thick neck, bore him to his knees and bent back his head over the rail. There was a convulsive struggle, a hard flinging of arms, a straining wrestle, and then Willetts was in a dreadful position. Shefford held him in iron grasp. ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... every natural longing to be and to have, took in all the more of what was possible; for God had given her this glorious insight, this imagination, wherewith we fill up life's scanty outline, and grasp at all that might be, or that elsewhere, is. In her, as in us all, it was often—nay, daily—a discontent; yet a noble discontent, and curbed with a grand, unconscious patience. She scoured her knives; she shuffled along the streets on hasty errands; she went up and down the house in ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... corridor that their prisoner might stretch his legs. Some evening papers from Rome were handed into the carriage. Rossi put out his hand to pay for them, and to his surprise it was seized with an eager grasp. The newsman, who was also carrying a tray of coffee, was a huge creature, with a white apron and ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... come," he cried, seizing that boastful man by the arm, in such a grasp that Rais turned pale with alarm. "I can't stop here. Let's git away. Sure it's divls they must ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... him; in fact, we did swear by him, for ten long years he was our oracle. Never shall we forget the first, the only time our faith was shaken. We gazed upon and loved his honest face; we reciprocated the firm pressure of his manly grasp; our eyes descended in admiration even unto the ground on which he stood, and there, upon that very ground—the ground whose upward growth of five feet eight seemed Heaven's boast, an "honest man"—we saw what struck us sightless to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... these sweeps. (J. Ind. Arch. II. 607.) Ibn Batuta puts a much larger number of men to each. It will be seen from his account below that great ropes were attached to the oars to pull by, the bulk of timber being too large to grasp; as in the old French galleys wooden manettes or grips, were attached to the oar for ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... The world lay at his feet. He would use it well; he would do all things honourably. Ease, travel, a political career, wide influence, the possession of beautiful things—in a very short time they would all be in his grasp; for Melrose was near his end. Some difficulty first, but not too much; the struggle ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sorceress!" cried the seneschal, and, with a grasp like that of Hercules, he seized the cow by the tail and dragged her out of ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... moment could think of nothing further to say. The thing was incomprehensible to her, appalling, yet strangely touching. This twenty-year-old girl, groping her way toward safety, that refuge of the middle-aged, as eagerly as other young things grasp at happiness, at romance!—She recalled phrases spoken by another startled mother to another girl quite as headstrong: "You are only a child! He is twice your age! You ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... brooding over a certain idea for her wedding-dress, which she had altogether failed in the attempt to convey to her London couturiere; and it had come into her head to try whether Mary might not grasp her idea, and help her to make it intelligible. Mary listened and thought, questioned, and desired explanations—at length, begged she would allow her to ponder the thing a little: she could hardly at once venture ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... through their local Assemblies, had the right to will away their land to England. Spain, at least, could not say them nay; but none the less she longed to see her flag float once more over the western districts which had slipped from her grasp. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... Beneath him the depths. Not a point of support. He thinks of the gloomy adventures of the corpse in the limitless shadow. The bottomless cold paralyzes him. His hands contract convulsively; they close, and grasp nothingness. Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, gusts, useless stars! What is to be done? The desperate man gives up; he is weary, he chooses the alternative of death; he resists not; he lets himself go; he abandons his grip; and ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... shared her disappointment. On the contrary, he assured her they were making splendid progress, and he was delighted with her grasp of detail and her knowledge of business essentials. At his word all Nuevo Pueblo bowed and scraped to her, she was treated with impressive formality, and even the military guards at the various headquarters presented arms when she passed. The general's official business ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... Clarke's own explanation of nothing. Indeed, is not the human mind obliged by its very nature to join limited quantities to other quantities, which it can only conceive as limited, in order to form to itself a sort of confused idea of something beyond its own grasp, without ever reaching the point of infinity, which eludes every attempt at definition? Then it would appear that it is an abstraction, a mere ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... in the melee; and between temper and dread he was hardly controllable, and bearing hard against the curb in a wild desire to rush off. In fact, I fully expected at any moment to be shaken from my grasp, as, oddly enough, even in that time of peril, I recalled the gymnastic sport of giant strides of my schooldays, and held on; but I was certain we were now too late, and that it was only a matter of moments ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... doubts from the minds of the South Americans. For the downfall of Spain was now patent to all, as well as her impotence, not only to maintain communication with her colonies, but to move hand or foot to free herself from the grasp of ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... the society!" Mrs. Swiggs replies with a languishing sigh, mistaking the head of the cat for her Milton, and apologizing for her error as that venerable animal, having got well squeezed, sputters and springs from her grasp, shaking his head, "elected solely on ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... and firm of purpose, she intently watched its coming on, until it was very near; then, with a touch unshipped her sculls, and crept aft in the boat, between kneeling and crouching. Once, she let the body evade her, not being sure of her grasp. Twice, and she had seized ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... post-office the bishop of Wyoming met him and greeted him. His lonely heart throbbed at the warm, firm grasp of this friend's hand. The bishop saw his eyes glow suddenly, as if tears were close. But none came, and no word more open than, "I'm glad ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... slowly over this sad ruin, however, a horrible and startling spectacle came in view. Two bodies were seen, within a few feet of the surface of the water, one grasped in the arms of the other, in the gripe of despair. The man held in the grasp, was kept beneath the water solely by the death-lock of his companion, who was himself held where he floated, by the circumstance that one of his feet was entangled in a rope. The struggle could not have been long over, ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... with mind the bulk of Humanity who were still without the spark, yet so feebly burned the light all through the Atlantean days that few could be said to have attained to the powers of abstract thought. On the other hand the functioning of the mind on concrete things came well within their grasp, and as we have seen it was in the practical concerns of their every-day life, especially when their psychic faculties were directed towards the same objects, that they achieved such ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... our friends, the critics, would grasp this simple truth, and leave off clamoring for the impossible, and being shocked because they do not get it. When a new book is written, the high-class critic opens it with feelings of faint hope, ...
— Dreams - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... with a merchant ship's gun. He is invulnerable in everything. His words, like Jupiter's bolts, come down upon you in such fury that your escape is as likely as that of a gnat thrown into a caldron of flaming oil. Hercules crushing an infant in his grasp is a difficult task compared to the ease with which this giant talker grasps and crushes his opponent. In every mode of hostility he meets you as Goliath met David—with lips of scorn and words of contempt—to presume to stand before him in contradiction. Your logic is weak; ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... the immensity of such a thought—"the first time since the world was made." I think the next sensation was one of extreme happiness; it seemed such a privilege to be allowed to hold the initial Christmas service. I had to grasp this idea very tight to keep down the terrible home-sickness which I felt all day for almost the first time. There are moments when no advantages or privileges can repress what Aytoun calls "the deep, unutterable woe which ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... of war o'er our forest is scowling, Soft peace spreads her wings and flies weeping away, The infants affrighted cling close to their mothers, The youths grasp their swords, and for combat prepare; While beauty weeps fathers, and lovers, and brothers, Who are gone ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... wish every word he uttered had been written down": but he does not quote a single sentence of all the poet said;[G] and a writer in the "Quarterly Review" expresses his belief that "nothing is too high for the grasp of his conversation, nothing too low: it glanced from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, with a speed and a splendor, an ease and a power, that almost seemed inspired." (Nor did I ever find him incoherent, as some have pretended; but I agree with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... as he did, was that he might embarrass the government, and take advantage of some favourable crisis to drive a profitable bargain; or that, during some convulsion that would be likely to lead to a change, the expiring executive would be glad to grasp at his offer, and thereby a claim would be established on the country, which the United States would not readily relinquish. The policy of the British government suffering the Mexican republic to be bullied out of this province would be very questionable indeed, ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... a just one," said Jaska softly. "'Apparently,' indeed! You will note now that, though men of the Gens of Dalis swarm all about the aircars, and even clamber atop them, no more are dying in the grasp of those tentacles? Is Dalis arranging a treacherous ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... by a hundred years of almost constant warfare with the English and with the savage nations on their frontiers, saw as clearly as the Governor that the key of French dominion hung inside the walls of Quebec, and that for an enemy to grasp it was to lose all they valued as subjects of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... in having a woman stand before him in the defensive, stating her case. Upon her first appearance he had concealed his surprise and rallied nobly to the courtesies of the occasion; it was sufficient that he was in the presence of the fair. Having heard enough to get the facts of her adventure and grasp her present situation, it was hardly in him to play the part of the unconvinced and give her a hearing through the corroborating details—it was too inquisitorial for him. Suspicion? He would have felt vitally impeached. He could not stand judicially; he would have ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... committed on the pilgrims and on the sacred shrines venerated by all Christendom. Such stories, which lost nothing in the telling, aroused a storm of indignation throughout Europe and awakened the desire to rescue the Holy Land from the grasp ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... that persistence in this course must surely lead to a violent separation from the mother-country, and it is interesting to note in this, the first instance when he was called upon to consider a political question of great magnitude, his clearness of vision and grasp of mind. In what he wrote there is no trace of the ambitious schemer, no threatening nor blustering, no undue despondency nor excited hopes. But there is a calm understanding of all the conditions, an entire freedom ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... burned and reviled by the great foe to liberty—the foe that strangled it before Egypt's theocracy, aye! before the day of sun-worshippers invoking their round, burning god, riding naked in the blue. Baruch pondered these things, and had almost lost his grasp on time and space when something ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... bright afternoon when love was first revealed to me. Ah, what a different love was this which was firing my blood, and making dizzy my brain! That child-love had softened my heart in its deep distress, and widened my soul. This new and mighty passion in whose grasp I was, this irresistible power that had seized and possessed my entire being, wrought my soul in quite a different sort, concentrating and narrowing my horizon till the human life outside the circle of our love seemed far, far away, as though I were gazing through the wrong end of a ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... sings out Pappy, 'there's the biggest little hoss ever you saw! Don't look at him—any of you fellahs that wants a yellah dawg to win a cheap race with! He ain't in that class. Step forwahd, you breeders, an' grasp a golden opportunity! Send the best brood mares you've got to this little hoss . . . he's a giant! You hear me—a giant! Ed Tumble, I'm talkin' to you! I'm talkin' to you, Bill Masters—an' Harry Scott there . . . an' Judge Dillon . . . an' all you big breeders! ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... of those officers who seemed never to grasp an order at first hand. Even when it came in writing, clear, brief, and explicit, he often required explanations. "I don't think I understand, sir," he began, but Warren ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... 'I need you,' went across the continent, and brought the ready response, 'coming on the wings of the wind.' It was Judge St. Claire who wrote to Harold, for Jerrie's nerveless fingers could not grasp the pen, and she could only dictate what she wished the ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... her threat would hold true. At every leap Barnacle made, he seemed about to tear the rope from her grasp. ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... fashion of clumsy wrestlers. The thud of hard fists against yielding flesh was a new and terrifying experience. Pegrani was game, though, and he flailed about with his powerful arms, endeavoring to get his opponent in his grasp. Sidestepping to avoid one of his rushes, Blaine brought up a terrible uppercut that ended flush upon the Llott's jaw. His head snapped back and his knees gave way beneath him. Down he went in a flabby heap. Suddenly ashamed, the young ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... quite mixed with Colston's line, still pressed on, and between Hooker's headquarters and his elated foe there was scarce an organized regiment. Hooker's fatal inability to grasp the situation, and his ordering an advance of all troops on Howard's left as far as the Second Corps, had made him almost defenceless. The troops which should have been available to stem this adverse tide were blindly ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... a long stick and Grandfather Goosey-Gander held it out, so the little boy duck could grasp it in his bill, but the stick broke, and every one said it was too bad! Then, just as Jimmie was almost to the edge of the falls, if Nurse Jane Fuzzy-Wuzzy didn't call out: "Stand aside, everybody! I am a good swimmer and I will ...
— Lulu, Alice and Jimmie Wibblewobble • Howard R. Garis
... rushed to the shore and plunged into the water. He stood there on the end of the high spring-board, conspicuous against the blue sky, with his eyes fixed upon the swimmer. He saw the struggle in the water, saw the frantic arms clutch at Garry, watched him as he extricated himself from that insane grasp, saw him catch the struggling figure with the "neck grip" as the only means of saving both lives, and watched him as he swam toward shore with his now almost unconscious burden. What he thought, how he felt, no human being knew. He stood motionless like a statue until ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... the lower courts.[364] Miss Hulett had reason to expect that since she was unmarried, this decision would not prejudice her case. Just on the threshold of her chosen profession, the rewards of youthful aspirations and earnest study apparently within her grasp, her dismay may be imagined when no response whatever was vouchsafed her petition. A fainter heart would have accepted the situation. To battle successfully with old prejudices, entrenched in the strongholds of the law, required not only marked ability, but also a courage which ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... wanted me to," said the man. "I'll make up for lost time now." As he spoke he grasped the hand which extended from George's right sleeve and as George at that same moment turned quickly away, the astonished handshaker stood holding in his grasp an arm which had apparently come from the sleeve of ...
— Go Ahead Boys and the Racing Motorboat • Ross Kay
... located in Rondebosch, a suburb about nine miles from Capetown. In the open country that he loves, and in an environment that breathed the romance and performance of England's greatest empire-builder, I caught something of the man's kindling vision and realized his ripe grasp ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... down the drawing-room, studying her taste in the least details. He admired Mme de Langeais herself in the objects of her choosing; they revealed her life before he could grasp her personality and ideas. About an hour later the Duchess came noiselessly out of her chamber. Montriveau turned, saw her flit like a shadow across the room, and trembled. She came up to him, not with a bourgeoise's enquiry, "How do I look?" She ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... got my exchange all right: it is on that account I have eight days' leave; but next Monday, November 21st, before midday, I must report to my new regiment. But this regiment, the 257th Infantry, is in garrison at Verdun!... You grasp it?" ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... was received with such warm acclamation, is inferior to those that followed. He seems to have been partly aware of this himself, and speaks of the "concise and superficial narrative from Commodus to Alexander." But the whole volume lacks the grasp and easy mastery which distinguish its successors. No doubt the subject-matter was comparatively meagre and ungrateful. The century between Commodus and Diocletian was one long spasm of anarchy and violence, which was, as Niebuhr said, incapable ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... on the bank and, occasionally, a shot was fired over his head. He felt sure, however, that he was still unseen; and determined to float quietly, till the course of the current changed, and brought him back to the side from which he started. He felt the Sikh's grasp relaxing, and threw his arms round the ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... to the Romanists of his day, who corrupted religion in order that the public "might be more generally accommodated." Bunyan's phraseology is homely, but Bunyan's celestializing imagination kept his "familiar grasp of things divine" from being an irreverent pawing of things divine. Mr. Spurgeon's nature works on a low level of influence. Deficient in imagination, and with a mind coarse and unspiritualized, though religiously impressed, he animalizes his creed in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Grinder, and was about to bring the cane down with all force when Tom caught it from behind and wrenched it from his grasp. ...
— The Rover Boys In The Mountains • Arthur M. Winfield
... so long and arduous as this. Strange it seemed to them, after going so far, and doing and suffering so much, that they should end the campaign where they had begun it. Yet they had done much: wrenching the larger and richer half of Spain out of the grasp of the French, and changing their possession of the country to a mere ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... has happened to you?" he exclaimed. "For a long time I tried to teach you with all my patience, and you were not even able to grasp the letters, but now that I had given you up as hopeless, you have not only learnt how to spell, but even to read. How did ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri
... trail of every cloud. If you should see a fellow man with trouble's flag unfurled, And lookin' like he didn't have a friend in all the world, Go up and slap him on the back and holler, "How'd you do?" And grasp his hand so warm he'll know he has a friend in you, An' ask him what's a-hurtin' him, and laugh his cares away, An' tell him that the darkest hour is just before the day. Don't talk in graveyard palaver, but say it right out loud, That God will ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... little fellow, about as big as I am. You could soon manage poor Francois; he would be a mere child in the grasp of such ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... dark, brother," answered she, withdrawing her hand somewhat hastily from his grasp. "You must look your last at me by the ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... would not make him keep opening his eyes to look at things he could not see; and every other moment would start and grasp tight hold of her, as some fresh pang of terror shot ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... seems to bid us rest content with what we have won. That is, he bids us leave superstition, with all its brood of lies and wrongs, in possession of the schools, the universities, the churches, the hospitals, the workhouses, and every other institution. He bids us leave it with its large grasp on the private and public life of the community, and go on with our constructive work in face of all this overwhelming frustration. No doubt he means well, but we are not foolish enough to take his advice. We tell Dr. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... hotel, and went into a darkened room with a cement floor which had the thick dampness of an interior saturated with spilled acid wine. There he found a man, not different from those outside, who, incapable of understanding English, managed to grasp the fact that Lee wished to see Daniel Randon immediately. The proprietor assented, and urged them up a stair. "I won't have you wait out here," Lee told Savina; "it will be only for an hour or so." The room into which they were ushered had, at least, the advantage of bareness: there ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and that is to spend some time over a desert island or Robinson Crusoe stage. Some children can do without it, but all enjoy it, and the duller children find it difficult to imagine a time when "you could buy it in a shop" does not fit all difficulties. They can easily grasp the idea of sailing away to a land "where no man had ever been before," and playing at desert island has always ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... boy, whom Mary hoped would win, drove a pig into a corner, and as the crowd watched he managed to grasp it by a fore and hind leg and held it close ...
— A Day at the County Fair • Alice Hale Burnett
... the blow—but just then there came on a blast, a horrible roaring wind bearing night upon its wings, snow, and sleet, and hail. Bagg says he had the fellow by the throat quite fast, as he thought, but suddenly he became bewildered, and knew not where he was; and the man seemed to melt away from his grasp, and the wind howled more and more, and the night poured down darker and darker; the snow and the sleet thicker and more blinding. "Lord have mercy upon ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... enterprising young men to "go West." Many a tract thus bought for fifty dollars has turned out to be a soil upon which princely fortunes have grown. A tract of forty acres represents to-day in Chicago or Minneapolis an amount of wealth difficult for the imagination to grasp. ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... foretelling an eclipse. It was a study of the nature of the heavens, an attempt to penetrate the construction of the material universe. So with geometry. It might begin as an investigation of the relations of particular triangles, squares, and oblongs, but it developed into an attempt to grasp the nature of space relations and to understand them as depending on simple common principles. This is to say that in the hands of the Greeks these subjects first became sciences. But a still greater ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... fearfully at this unexpected plan of Sam Brewster's, and her grasp on the soup ladle relaxed so that it fell to the floor with a ringing echo. But she paid no attention to it: she stood with mouth open staring at the master of ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... took my hand into his slender, but very powerful grasp, that man had the impertinence to laugh into my eyes at my parent's double-entendre, which he had intended ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... quality; yet behold him now waging a contest in which a man wastes money, time, comfort, and self-respect, that he may wrest from real sorrow and discomfiture the shadow of a happiness which he cannot grasp when he has reached it. There is much wisdom in the opinion expressed by a certain fox concerning grapes hanging out of distance; but it is a wisdom seldom acquired till the limbs are too stiff to stretch for an effort—till there is scarce a tooth left in the mumbling ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... her, so to speak. His genius must not be hidden from her.... Perhaps he had formed a very exaggerated estimate of Sofya Matveyevna, but he had already chosen her. He could not exist without a woman. He saw clearly from her face that she hardly understood him, and could not grasp even the most essential part. "Ce n'est rien, nous attendrons, and meanwhile she can feel it intuitively.... My friend, I need nothing but your heart!" he exclaimed, interrupting his narrative, ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... wooden apron of the cab, stretching out her hands instinctively as if to grasp the space, the airy darkness of the ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... his followers reached the cluster of merchantmen, they found their torches so far burned out as to be useless. Failure stared them in the face then, when success was almost within their grasp. Jones, however, was not to be balked of his prey. Running his boat ashore, he hastened to a neighboring house, where he demanded candles. With these he returned, led his men aboard a large ship from which the crew fled, and deliberately built a fire ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... actual case of any two species, or even of any two races, is adduced—and one is asked, have these two originally descended from the same parent womb? I believe it is because we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps. The mind cannot grasp the full meaning of the term of a million or hundred million years, and cannot consequently add up and perceive the full effects of small successive variations accumulated during almost infinitely many generations. The difficulty is the ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... had had three weeks—and in a neighbourhood not a quarter of a mile from the avenue. It was three weeks since Skiddles had disappeared. That this dog was Skiddles was of course most improbable, and yet the philanthropist was ready to grasp at any clue which might lead to ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... to entrap his dim chilly affections had somewhat lowered his estimate of female delicacy; and possessing the flattering assurance that no fair hand was held too high for his grasp, should he choose to claim it, he had grown rather arrogant. Of coquetry he was entirely innocent; it seemed too contemptible even for mere sport, and he scorned the thought of feeding his ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... his wings, shook the small black boy's grasp from his tail, and with a mighty swoop alighted on the roof of the very last car as it passed; and in a moment more Jericho Bob's Thanksgiving dinner had vanished, like a beautiful dream, ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... two men. Manston was the taller, but there was in Edward much hard tough muscle which the delicate flesh of the steward lacked. They flew together like the jaws of a gin. In a minute they were both on the floor, rolling over and over, locked in each other's grasp as tightly as if they had been one organic being at war with itself—Edward trying to secure Manston's arms with a small thong he had drawn from his pocket, Manston trying ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... which, in the full-grown animal, are eighteen inches in length; and they are armed with sharp and powerful claws five inches long, and so extremely sharp, that they cut into the flesh like knives. He can also use them separately like fingers, so that he can grasp a dry clod of earth and crumble it to dust as a human being could do with his hand. He can also, with them, dig into the ground; and when the weight of his body is not too great, they enable him to climb trees, although not with the speed of ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... give me your knife." Patsy at once responded by placing his hunting-knife in Doug's left hand. Dic saw his imminent danger and with his right hand clasped Doug's left wrist in a grasp that could not be loosened. After several futile attempts to free his wrist, Doug tossed the knife over to his right side. It fell a few inches beyond his reach, and he tried to grasp it. Rita saw that very soon ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... her head, but except for this she did not move, and it was a relief when after a few disjointed remarks his voice died away. She was moved to pity, but for a few moments she had quivered in the grasp of another emotion. It was obvious that Dick did not altogether know what he was saying, but he had shown her plainly the place she had in his mind, and she knew she would not like ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... dispense with the higher instincts of the industrious, laborious, and useful bee, but whether the superior creature could content itself with the insipid and objectless pursuits of the lower one. The mind requires more to fill it in proportion to the largeness of its grasp: hope not, therefore, that you could find either their peace or their satisfaction in the purse-netting, embroidering lives of your thoughtless companions. Even to them, be sure, hours of deep weariness must come: no human being, whatever her degree on the scale of mind, is capable of being entirely ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... seat during the violent throes and tossings to and fro of the wagon, was even more difficult; for Mr. Poletiss's mildness of voice was surpassed by his mildness of manner, and he was far too timid to grasp at the side of the wagon by placing his arm behind the fair Miss Morkin, lest it should be supposed that he was assuming the privileged position of a partner in a valse. Mr. Poletiss, therefore, whenever they jolted through ruts or brooks, held on to his hay hassock, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... and controls us, for the most part unconsciously and without protest on our part. We are in the main its willing adherents. The imagination of the most radically-minded cannot transcend any great part of the ideas and customs transmitted to him. When once we grasp this truth, we shall, according to our mood, humbly congratulate ourselves that ... we are permitted to stand on the giant's shoulders, and enjoy an outlook that would be quite hidden to us, if we ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... Charley,' one of the escaped prisoners, who, it will be remembered, was drummed out of his tribe and sentenced by the courts for the murder of a white settler last spring. Small outlying settlements will rejoice when this body of hardened desperate men are once more in the grasp of the law." ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... with the utmost clearness and the utmost naturalness: simply that! When you have accomplished so much, you have accomplished good style. In no sense is style of the nature of embroidery, an ornament superimposed: this is what the beginner fails to grasp; she somehow cannot rid herself of the superstition that after the meaning is precisely expressed, something further remains to ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... He was of a restless temperament, which showed itself in continual self-imposed changes. He would not, or could not, permit his reputation to grow steadily, by residing long in one place, but as soon as fame was within his grasp, he sacrificed the work of years by removing to an entirely new ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... hold of her hand; and she let it remain in his grasp; but her quiescence did not mean yielding, and ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... not! Duane—I—" Pain made her faint; her grasp on his arm tightened convulsively; with a supreme effort she struck the flask out of his hand and ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... turned back to the sick man. Loosening the grasp of his hand, he carried him to a little mound at ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... about the settlement of the public. He told them in words that he was ready to lose his life for the honor of the senate, but desired them to consider what was for their advantage, without any regard to what was most agreeable to them; for that those who grasp at government will stand in need of weapons and soldiers to guard them, unless they will set up without any preparation for it, and so fall into danger. And when the senate replied that they would bring in weapons in abundance, and money, and ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... word-drills is to secure instantaneous automatic word recognition with rapidity and promptness as the foundations of success; while the sentence drills, if properly conducted, will train pupils to grasp instantly the total meaning of ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... could tell what awaited him. If the man could change like this, might he not take on some shape too hideous to bear in the silence? St. George stood still, suddenly clenching his hands, trying to reach out through the dark and to grasp—himself, the self that seemed slipping away from him. But was he mad already, he wondered angrily, and hurried back to the far flickering light, stumbling, panting, not daring to look at the figure on the floor, ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... of New England was a result of the aggregate efforts of a busy multitude, each in his narrow circle toiling for himself, to gather competence or wealth. The expansion of New France was the achievement of a gigantic ambition striving to grasp a continent. It was a vain attempt. Long and valiantly her chiefs upheld their cause, leading to battle a vassal population, warlike as themselves. Borne down by numbers from without, wasted by corruption from within, New France fell at last; and out of her fall ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... matter—none at all. I was simply bored. This I attribute to two things: first, my preponderating interest in the romantic side of things; secondly (and this bears with it a strong moral), the feeling that the knowledge lay always within my grasp kept me from that curiosity which so oft consumes those who think it is hidden away ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... no less a person than "Old Batterbones" himself; and from the manner in which he shook his prisoner, he seemed determined to make good his title to the sobriquet the boys had given him. The person who held Sandy in his grasp was the farmer's foreman, who fully sympathized with his employer in his views ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... rested slightly against his shoulder; her breath fanned his cheek; her eyes, soft and lustrous, sought his. But he looked away gloomy and defiant, and she felt his grasp tighten vise-like around her. "I shall not affect any concealment of the feelings which she has recognized so often, nor shall I ask any favors," he thought. "There," he said, as he placed her in his boat, "you are safe enough now. Now go aft while ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... influence, as the criticisms had no influence on his theory of heredity. Critics and physiologists attacked him ofttimes with an arsenal of irrefutable arguments. It did not do any good. They affirmed in vain that the theory of heredity is not proved by any science, and above all it is difficult to grasp it and show it by facts; they pointed in vain that physiology cannot be fantastical and its laws cannot depend on the free conception of an author. Zola listened, continued to write, and in the last volume he gave a genealogical tree of the family of Rougon-Macquart, with such ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... life. The ears listen, and want more: the eyes are gratified with gazing, and desire yet further; the nostrils are filled with the sweet odours of flower and sap. The touch, too, has its pleasures, dallying with leaf and flower. Can you not almost grasp the odour-laden air and hold it in the ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... have been his to say in his daily walks and from the pulpit of his Salem, had he not been thus hampered, confined, and dominated. Hitherto he had hardly gained a single soul from under Mr. Fenwick's grasp,—had indeed on the balance lost his grasp on souls, and was beginning to be aware that this was so because of the cabbages and the peaches. He told himself that though he had not hankered after these flesh-pots, ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... merchant has locked his office-door and gone fishing! The American temperament needs at this moment nothing so much as that wholesome training of semi-rural life which reared Hampden and Cromwell to assume at one grasp the sovereignty of England, and which has ever since served as the foundation of England's greatest ability. The best thoughts and purposes seem ordained to come to human beings beneath the open sky, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... made a quick rush forward. For a moment Bessie did not know what to do. She wondered if, when it came to the test, she would really be able to use the knife; to try to cut or stab this man. He was getting nearer each moment, and, just as she was almost within his grasp she darted back and aimed a blow at ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Long Lake - Bessie King in Summer Camp • Jane L. Stewart
... against the bulkhead by the impact but managed to stay on his feet. Desperately he tore the paralo-ray rifle from his shoulder, but before he could level it, Astro was upon him, wrenching it out of his grasp. Pushing Ross away, he calmly broke it in two and threw the pieces to one side. Then he faced the ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... sets, the cubes, the prisms, and the rods, cause the child to move about and to handle and carry objects which are difficult for him to grasp with his little hand. Again, by their use, he repeats the training of the eye to the recognition of differences of size between similar objects. The exercise would seem easier, from the sensory point of view, than the other with ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... made answer in his turn—"Mother has just been here. She was crying. She said—'Bo[u], the parting is for long. Never again will the mother be seen. Grow up, Bo[u]; grow up to be a fine man.' Then she cried more than ever." A hand seemed to grasp the heart of Sampei—"Mother here, Bo[u]chan!" Surely the child could not lie, even make up the story at this age, so fitting into his own uneasy vision. Continued the little fellow mid his tears—"It was not ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... his father's grasp, and who knew that his father would certainly search him, to find out what he had brought to sell, thought it most prudent to produce the diamond cross. His father could but just see its lustre by the light of a dim lamp, which hung over their heads in the gloomy ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... himself from her grasp, but he was powerless. Nevertheless he got a little nearer to the door. Forrest came swiftly across the room. Engleton struck at him with a chair, but the blow ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... utilized for seats, and conveyances drawn up outside of windows and filled with listeners. People came thirty, forty and fifty miles in buggies and wagons to shake hands with the pioneer suffragist. Grizzly-headed opposers succumbed to Miss Anthony's logic and came up to grasp her hand and say God bless her, and proved the depth of their fervor by generous financial aid to the cause she so ably represents. It is seldom that the beginner of a great reform lives to see such ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... cordial words in so strong and musical a voice—all felt at once they were in the presence of the natural leader of the county. The enthusiasm of the hunting-field burst forth. They gave him three ringing cheers, and jostled their horses forward, that they might grasp his hand. ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... knew of the ampulla the answer would have been intelligible to her. As it was, her face betrayed nothing. "I guess I'll hurry on over alone, then," she added. She extended a hand to each of us. Her grasp was warm and friendly and frank. "So long, and—and ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... towards the American colonies as a whole. They came dangerously near repeating, in their feeling towards their younger brethren on the Ohio, the very blunder committed in reference to themselves by their elder brethren in Britain. For some time they seemed, like the British, unable to grasp the grandeur of their race's imperial destiny. They hesitated to throw themselves with hearty enthusiasm into the task of building a nation with a continent as its base. They rather shrank from the idea as implying a lesser weight of ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... like the fingers of one's hand. But what a hand was this hand of the ant-eater! When it has got hold of anything you have to cut it off to make it let go! It is of this hand that the traveler, Emile Carrey, has so justly observed: "The tiger himself would perish in its grasp." ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... his judgment had been grievously at fault in the whole Russian campaign. They said that he had sat idle during a long day when the fortunes of his empire might have been settled at Bautzen. They said that, overcome by physical weariness, he had failed to grasp his great opportunity after the victory at Dresden. They said that Leipsic and the battles that preceded it showed that he had lost the ability to see things with a soldier's eye. They declared that he made pictures and ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... large a part in the history of his own country and of which he talks so often and with so little restraint. The ignorance of Englishmen of America is another matter which will be referred to in its place. For the present, what is to be desired is that the American should get some elementary grasp of the character of Great Britain and ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... to destroy our enemies. The shouts continued long after the general had gone, and even I was satisfied. I saw that it was the truth, that the Prussians, Austrians, and Russians, who had talked so much of the deliverance of the people, had profited by the first opportunity to grasp everything, that those grand words about liberty, which had served to excite their young men against us in 1813, and all the promises of constitutions which they had made, had been set aside and broken. I looked ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... and grumble like other people; if he would not take things so quietly; if he would resist and struggle, I believe he might fight the battle and win it yet. I think he will get over the crisis, but what of that if there is no rallying? He is letting life go because he will not grasp it hard, I suppose for the reason that he has no strong ties to bind him to it. He has either such a poor opinion of his deserts, or such a trust in Providence, that he considers whatever is is best, and does not exert himself to alter the course of events ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... not struck with the Novelty or Beauty of the Sight, but with that rude kind of Magnificence which appears in many of these stupendous Works of Nature. Our Imagination loves to be filled with an Object, or to grasp at any thing that is too big for its Capacity. We are flung into a pleasing Astonishment at such unbounded Views, and feel a delightful Stillness and Amazement in the Soul at the Apprehension[s] of them. The Mind of Man naturally ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... autocratic Hohenzollern cast upon the shoulders of others the burden of his own failure to grasp the evolution in political thinking [25] which had taken place in Europe, since 1789. Unfortunately for the future of the German people he was able to ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... had she, not even a teapot, but she ran bravely in, knelt behind one of the ruffians, and when an opportunity came, seized him by the foot, bringing him down to the floor with a thud. Quickly another foot was in Betty's deadly grasp, and another man fell, leaving only one assailant standing, whom Hamilton soon routed. The two men on the floor attempted to rise, but Betty clung to their feet, and George's ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... shuddered. Her lips moved,—she seemed to be praying; in fact, she thought she was about to die, for she felt the bush beginning to give way. With the agility which danger gives to youth, Calyste slid down to the ledge below the bush, where he was able to grasp the marquise and hold her, although at the risk of their both sliding down into the sea. As he held her, he saw that she had fainted; but in that aerial spot he could fancy her all his, and his first emotion was ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... forget them so soon again, he had been searching for them too long not to prize them now. He had thought he was anchoring at despair, and now that a star broke through the clouded heavens, beckoning him on, was he mad to scorn the hope that lay within his grasp? No, indeed, and that very night, under the immediate impulse of his new-born emotions, Guy Elersley ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... politely and moved a step or two away. But Zora, struck by a solution of the mystery which had not occurred to her, as one cannot grasp all the ways and customs of gaming establishments in ten minutes, rushed back to the other table. She arrived just in time to hear the croupier asking whom the louis on seventeen belonged to. The number ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... deprived her of the last vestige of dignity and self-assertion. She relapsed into the mental condition of a juvenile culprit undergoing correction. Now that she was caught, she no longer thought of her offense as venial. The grasp of her captor seemed to put an end to all possible hairsplitting on that point, and prove that it was nothing more nor less than stealing, and a sense of guilt left her without any moral support against her fright. She was only conscious of utter humiliation, and ...
— Hooking Watermelons - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... much!" she burst out furiously, springing from her seat, and being dragged back by his iron grasp of her hands. "Let me go, sir! I have had insults enough—and in my own house—with no ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... warmly returned the archdeacon's grasp, but he said little. His heart was too full for speaking, and he could not express the gratitude which he felt. Dr. Grantly understood him as well as though he ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... we do this we shall find that in the last resort it is because we do not believe in the Spirit as a FORMING power. We have, indeed, advanced to the conception of it as executive power, which will work to a prescribed pattern, but we have yet to grasp the conception of it as versed in the art of design, and capable of elaborating schemes of construction, which will not only be complete in themselves, but also in perfect harmony with one another. When we advance to the conception of the Spirit as containing in itself the ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... from her grasp when she opened it, and flung it against the wall with a jarring crash, while a fine powder that stung the skin unbearably drove into her face. For a few moments she could see nothing but a whirling haze, and then, as her ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... attention and study of the most godly and profound. Here, for the first time, it was being read by a company of poor Indians just emerging from paganism. But they were sharp and keen, and able to grasp a new truth; and so when the verse first opened before them with its wondrous meaning, great ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... His confidence, moreover, communicated itself to her. She saw that he did not jerk or saw on the reins at first, but, bracing his large powerful frame, drew steadily back, and that the horses yielded somewhat to his masterful grasp. ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... souls, that strangers are nearest to us. Why must we pass them in silence? We know not, but must resign ourselves to it. When two trains are rushing by upon the iron rails and thou seest a well-known eye that would recognize thee, stretch out thy hand and try to grasp the hand of a friend, and perhaps thou wilt understand why man passes man in ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... at him with feelings of repulsion, the apparition changes. We are on the lake, and I am remonstrating with Paul, who pays no heed to my words. I speak more plainly and grasp his arm! Paul rises and pushes ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... presence of mind, but he sought in vain to urge the Shawnees in pursuit. Superstition held them in a firm grasp. It was true that Early had been slain by a bullet, but a mystic power was taking the boat away. The hand of Manitou was against them and they would return to the country north of the Ohio. They started at once, and Wyatt, raging, was compelled to go with them, since he did ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... crimson lips. There was so much magnetism in her beauty, such a heaven in the unconquered warmth of her impetuous being, that Selwyn gripped the arms of his chair to help to restrain the mad impulse to grasp her in his arms and smother those lips and the flushed, satin cheeks in a ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... frenzy of the lust of blood upon me, I seized some one and drove my revolver heavily into his skull. I threw another man to the floor from behind, and was then seized as in a grasp of a vice. I turned about and struggled fiercely, and together my assailant and I rocked and rolled from point to point. Neither of us had any weapon, it appeared, and all that we could do was to struggle in that ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... that he is, to eat young birds when he has still a bushel of corn and nuts in his old wall—cannot find a footing on those delicate branches. Neither can the crow find a resting place from which to steal the young; and the hawk's legs are not long enough to reach down and grasp them, should he perchance venture near the house and hover an instant ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... a sudden jerk and pulled himself from his uncle's grasp. Then he started to run from the ...
— From Farm to Fortune - or Nat Nason's Strange Experience • Horatio Alger Jr.
... some time, visit all; how by the weakness which precluded them from assuming those independent shapes which require the plastic force of higher powers, they became associated with the scenes among which they were cherished, and clove to them with earnest grasp; and how the fervid expressions which that combination prompted, were accepted by generous friends as indicating faculties 'beyond the reaches of my soul,' and induced them to encourage me by genial prophecies which, with unwearied ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... should only have been met with a similar or lesser weapon, seemed to have no effect upon the moral sense of my enemy, for he whipped out his revolver ere I scarce had touched the floor by his side, but an uppercut from my long-sword sent it flying from his grasp before ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... it," said Bond. "I admire some of your things so much. Your instinct for realities, your sturdy central grasp—" ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... their mother see her elder son Come a fair bridegroom to his Cretan home. For Idas wrenched from off the dead man's tomb A jutting slab, to hurl it at the man Who had slain his brother. Then did Zeus bring aid, And struck the marble fabric from his grasp, And with red lightning burned his frame to dust. So doth he fight with odds who dares provoke The Tyndarids, mighty sons of mighty sire. Now farewell, Leda's children: prosper aye The songs I sing. What minstrel loves not well The Tyndarids, and Helen, ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... faith—strikingly anticipates the last conclusions of science. Further, a fervent belief in the end proposed, a conviction of success, is by no means essential. Far more important is a humble willingness to try the method, give it a chance. That which reason may not grasp, the deeper mind may seize upon and realize; always provided that the intellect does not set up resistances. This is found to be true in medical practice, and religious teachers have always declared ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... boy had learned his lesson of discontent from Trampas with a thoroughness past all unteaching. This petty triumph of evil seemed scarce of the size to count as any victory over the Virginian. But all men grasp at straws. Since that first moment, when in the Medicine Bow saloon the Virginian had shut the mouth of Trampas by a word, the man had been trying to get even without risk; and at each successive clash of his weapon with the Virginian's, he had ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... dollars, flowed into the treasury of the United States Sanitary Commission. The chief women who inaugurated the several great Fairs at New York, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and administered these vast movements, were not behind the ablest men in the land in their grasp and comprehension of the business in hand, and often in comparison with the men associated with them, exhibited a finer scope, a better spirit and a more victorious faith. But for the women of America, ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... cliffs in the most amazing way, and not an opening in the rocky wall to be seen. "You mustn't be afraid," said my sweet little guide, assuringly: "it won't hurt;" and she gave me her hand, that—perhaps I shouldn't tell—trembled a little, and directly its mate stole into my grasp. ...
— Harper's Young People, April 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... entrances, the other being from the top of the platform where the cannon rested. Koku had seen him about to throw something into one of the ammunition cases, and had grappled with him. There was a fight, and, in spite of the giant's strength, the man had slipped away, leaving part of his garments in the grasp ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... the railway track below, and finally back to the lower platform. Then Mr. Smith got possession of the weapon which his assailant had been wielding, and the last hope of his enemy seemed to vanish with the loss of that, for, freeing himself from the grasp of the man whom he had thought a few minutes before was entirely in his power, he disappeared in the darkness, and fled up the track in such haste that he did not even stop for his hat, which was found by some one upon the platform next ...
— The Story of a Dark Plot - or Tyranny on the Frontier • A.L.O. C. and W.W. Smith
... until the captain comes in; and you had best tell me your name. 'Twill do you no good to sulk," he said, taking the coat from her reluctant grasp. But Betty only set her lips more firmly. She resolved not to speak, no ...
— A Little Maid of Old Philadelphia • Alice Turner Curtis
... of such great happiness. Her breast heaved tumultuously, her face was very pale, at each step her knees threatened to give way under her, and when her father drew her fondly to his side she was forced to grasp the arm of his chair tightly, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... the Sabines, too! the white marble glistening in the obscurity, until the rounded shape of the maiden seems to elude the strong grasp of the Roman! ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... we recognised the reed-covered habitations of our Kabomba friends, the whole population apparently turning out to welcome us. The chief men, and those who had accompanied Stanley to the camp, hurried forward to grasp his hands, while the rest stood at a distance, gazing at the strange animals which our horses appeared to them; indeed, those only who had been to the camp had ever seen a horse before. Our first inquiries were, ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... it seems G.W. Smith did not press to the front, as was expected, but understood his orders to remain and guard the crossing of the river. Huger lost his way and did not come up until the opportunity to grasp the key to the situation was lost, and then it was discovered there was a mistake or misunderstanding in regard to his and Longstreet's seniority. Still Huger waived his rank reluctantly and allowed Longstreet and Hill to still ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... coalition; the majority voted against a coalition with the Cadets. But with the Cadets left out, there proved to be, among the bourgeoisie, no serious counter-agencies for the coalition. Tseretelli explained this in detail to the conference. If the conference did not grasp it, so much the worse for the conference. Behind the backs of the conference, negotiations were carried on without concealment with the Cadets, whom they had repudiated, and it was decided that the Cadets should not appear as Cadets, but as "Social workers." Pressed hard on both right and left, ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... the Grinder's real name. He and his mother were Queery and Drolly, contemptuously so called, and they answered to these names. I remember Cree best as a battered old weaver, who bent forward as he walked, with his arms hanging limp as if ready to grasp the shafts of the barrow behind which it was his life to totter uphill and downhill, a rope of yarn suspended round his shaking neck, and fastened to the shafts, assisting him to bear the yoke and slowly strangling him. By and by there came a time when the ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... apparent that only immediate victory could save Philadelphia from the grasp of the British general whose situation gave him the option of either taking possession of that place or endeavoring to bring on another engagement. If, therefore, a battle must certainly be risked to save the capital it would be ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... Nadia staggered to their feet as the private car lunged ahead in the grasp of the big engine, increasing speed with every wheel-turn. Mechanically, and as one man, they rushed to the rear platform. The mock cannon stood where it had been thrust; but in the camp street a handful of men were wrestling madly with the pipe fuse-carrier, breaking it, wrenching ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... senses assembled and righted at the first conscious grasp of this argument, as a laboring, buffeted ship rights when its shifted cargo is flung back to place by the shock of a mighty surge. Nature was on guard again in a moment, straining and tense in its sentry over the habitation of a soul so nearly deserted but a minute ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... filled with pure radioactives. It hovered over the leech until, rising to the bait, it had followed. Antaeus had left his mother, the Earth, and was losing his strength in the air. The operator was allowing the spaceship to run fast enough to keep out of the leech's grasp, but close ...
— The Leech • Phillips Barbee
... blows. Affairs in Jugo-Slavia, in Hungary, in Greece, in Albania, in Czecho-Slovakia, in Poland, and in Russia, were not quiet. Greece and Turkey were hideously at war. Nor were the South and Central American republics free from unrest. Russia was reaching out its evil White hands to grasp and weld again into a vast unhappy whole its former constituent republics of Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia, Tauride, and White Russia. There seemed every chance that it would shortly succeed in doing so. The nations growled everywhere like sullen dogs on fragile ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... and springing suddenly to his feet, "some day you shall know all,—yes, some day, if I live, when that name shall be high in the world; yes, when the world is at my feet!" He stretched his right hand as if to grasp the space, and his whole face was lighted with a fierce enthusiasm. The glow died away, and with a slight return of his scornful smile he said: "Dreams yet; dreams! And now, look at this paper." And he drew out a memorandum, scrawled over ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... were quite enough to distinguish me from the regular salt who, with a sunburnt cheek, wide step, and rolling gait, swings his bronzed and toughened hands athwart-ships, half opened, as though just ready to grasp a rope. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... of a desperate struggle. A bush had been rolled upon and crushed by heavy bodies. On the ground was blood as on the stones and leaves. The blade Legget still clutched was red, and the wrist of the hand which held it showed a dark, discolored band, where it had felt the relentless grasp of Wetzel's steel grip. The dead man's buckskin coat was cut into ribbons. On his broad face a demoniacal expression had set in eternal rigidity; the animal terror of death was frozen in his wide staring eyes. The outlaw chief had died as he had ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... fine clothes. A true nobleman is not forever boasting of his nobility for fear that his rank may not be recognized. The loudest boasts of patriotism do not come from the true possessors of the genuine spirit. Patriotism is not sectional nor local, it comprehends in its grasp ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... sun, tried in vain to force into it; the eye, too, that flashed and leapt as never is seen in our country of humid fogs, stifling the inborn heat and blearing the vision; and those arms that entwined him so as the vine holds the olive in its grasp, as if it would give the juice which fires and inebriates, for the oil that calms, and fattens, and sustains? All over that lithe body which enabled her, when he saw her first in the land of her fathers, to bound and flee as if she had wings, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... Rose, where have you been?" demanded an eager chorus. The tears had rushed to Miss Thorley's eyes also and when she discovered that, she discovered also that the hand with which she would have wiped them away was held fast in the firm grasp of Jerry Longworthy. How it had found its way there she never knew. She snatched it from him, her face aflame, and there were no longer ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... and the three sisters who take care of me are grim, hard-visaged, harder-hearted spinsters, not to be mollified by propitiation, or by the smooth tongue of the flatterer. The cup is very sweet, and it seems almost within my grasp; but between that chalice of delight and the lips that thirst for ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... exemplifiable natures; so that any experience whatsoever must tap the realm of essence, and throw the light of attention on one of its constituent forms. This is, if you will, a trivial achievement; what would be really a surprising feat, and hardly to be credited, would be that the human mind should grasp the constitution of nature; that is, should discover which is the particular essence, or the particular system of essences, which actual existence illustrates. In the matter of physics, truly, we are reduced to skimming the surface, since ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... quite simple, but it will serve to show you how you may with practice learn to take the thought in the Latin order, and to grasp the writer's meaning. All that now remains for you to do is to write out a translation in good English, using short coordinate sentences, each complete in itself, in place of the more involved structure of the original. The following version by the late Professor ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... and EQUAL LAWS, of endless progression in glory and happiness; shall they be arrested in their high career, and from the freeborn sons of God, be degraded into the slaves of man? Maddening at the accursed thought, they grasp their avenging firelocks, and drawing their sights along the death-charged tubes, they long for the coming up of the British thousands. Three times the British thousands came up; and three times the dauntless yeomen, waiting their near approach, received them in storms ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... mine, you know," he said, his fingers closing round my wrist with a grasp as weak as a very young child's.—"She is my wife, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... no doubt at all that, had he made me duke, I should have contributed a daring and courage to his service that would have made his power far weightier than it is. The man who would make his way to vast dominions and a kingdom ought to trample under foot all the obstacles in his path, and boldly grasp the very sharpest thorns, whatever reluctance his weak flesh may feel; such a man, if he would open out his path to fortune, should seize his dagger or his sword and strike out with his eyes shut; he should not shrink from bathing his hands in the blood of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... with a crescendo intensity. A forcible tug by the other player resulted in the abrupt loss of his kite. It headed toward me, dancing in the wind. My helpful assistant, the cactus plant, again secured the kite string in the necessary loop by which I could grasp it. I presented my second trophy ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... ideal inspector is, of course, a help and not a hindrance to the teacher, acting as a propagator of new ideas and bringing into touch with one another, workers who are widely separated. But the reach of most inspectors far exceeds their grasp.] ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... Tom Fillot, blowing a whistle with all his might, as he drew his cutlass, and made a cut at a dark shadow which leaped on deck; and before Mark could grasp what it all meant, other shadowy figures rushed up from below, made a desperate charge, and a moment later he, Tom Fillot, and Dick Bannock, with Stepney, were driven down into the cabin, while the body of the big black was hurled upon them, and the ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... mythic elements that surrounded her like a white fog from the northern seas out of which she loomed like a portent, are rapidly disappearing, and are replaced by the outlines of ordinary humanity, with more than the ordinary human measure of firmness, resolution, and energetic grasp of the facts of her position ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... ugly nauseous elf, Who judging only from its wretched self, Feebly attempted, petulant and vain, The "Origin of Evil" to explain. A mighty Genius at this elf displeas'd, With a strong critick grasp the urchin squeez'd. For thirty years its coward spleen it kept, Till in the duat the mighty Genius slept; Then stunk and fretted in expiring snuff, And blink'd at JOHNSON with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... future. It may seem that, for an American statesman, he had an unusual grasp of European politics. This is easily explained by the fact that he had been talking with the bootblack at ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... seldom yet been dressed to her satisfaction: she was now brooding over a certain idea for her wedding-dress, which she had altogether failed in the attempt to convey to her London couturiere; and it had come into her head to try whether Mary might not grasp her idea, and help her to make it intelligible. Mary listened and thought, questioned, and desired explanations—at length, begged she would allow her to ponder the thing a little: she could hardly at once venture to say anything. Hesper laughed, and said she was taking a small matter ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... privation of daily living, strenuous enough to overcome and rectify the impulses which make for greed and self-indulgence, should be able, even under untoward conditions, to lift up and transfigure those who are really within its grasp and set them in marked contrast to those who are merely playing a game with it or using it for gain. But what has happened to these wretched girls? Why has this beneficent current cast them upon the shores of death and destruction when it should have carried them into the ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... our publishers would grasp the great truth that praise of their own wares needs (to say the least of it) most careful handling. What they, or some anonymous admirer, say on the cover of The Worn Doorstep (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is that they should ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... music thou comest, like moonlight; and far,— Resonant bar upon bar,— The vibrating lyre Of the spirit responds with melodious fire, As thy fluttering fingers now grasp it and ardently shake, With laughter and ache, The chords of existence, the instrument star-sprung, Whose frame is of clay, so ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... thoughts. It will always be, however, an additional delight to the greater part of the human race to see how here and there the greatest of all heavenly tools is found unawares by the happy hand that can wield it, no one knowing who has put it there ready for his triumphant grasp when the ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... thrilled him to the core. He had felt a touch of the same sensation when the good old lady let him look at the pictures in her family album, and pointed to one of her baby boy; although at the time he could not fully grasp the idea that appealed so dimly to ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... with Colston's line, still pressed on, and between Hooker's headquarters and his elated foe there was scarce an organized regiment. Hooker's fatal inability to grasp the situation, and his ordering an advance of all troops on Howard's left as far as the Second Corps, had made him almost defenceless. The troops which should have been available to stem this adverse tide were blindly groping in the woods, two miles ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... quaint half-breed girl of yesterday. There was nothing of the native about her now, for her lithe young figure was drawn up to its height, and her head, upon which the long, black braids were coiled, was tipped back in a haughty poise. She had flung her hands out to grasp the table edge behind her, forgetful of her shawl, which drooped traitorously and showed such rounded lines as her ordinary dress scarce hinted at. This was no Indian maid, the soldier vowed; no ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... all secrets of the river, he today only saw one, this one touched his soul. He saw: this water ran and ran, incessantly it ran, and was nevertheless always there, was always at all times the same and yet new in every moment! Great be he who would grasp this, understand this! He understood and grasped it not, only felt some idea of it stirring, a ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... considerably in a century or so; but at its swiftest it still takes generations to change. The gentlemen who used to sit in conferences and diets, and divide up the world ever and again before the nineteenth century, never realised this. It is only within the last hundred years that mankind has begun to grasp the fact that one of the first laws of political stability is to draw your political boundaries along the lines of the ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... moreover, that this is done intentionally, and not left to a mere accident, as in the case of the apples. And in science, as in common life, our confidence in a law is in exact proportion to the absence of variation in the result of our experimental verifications. For instance, if you let go your grasp of an article you may have in your hand, it will immediately fall to the ground. That is a very common verification of one of the best established laws of nature—that of gravitation. The method by which men of science establish the existence of that law is exactly ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... second officer, purser, and steward, who were hardly able to move him, so powerfully was he made. One of his sandals suddenly fell into the bay. He had seized hold of the rail of the gangway, and the leather sandal dropped into the water with a slight splash. His grasp of the rail being broken, he was gradually being pushed, limping, to the dock. His one bare foot and his half-exposed and shapely body caused a gale of laughter from the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... than a moment at a time the terrible fatigue which a new hand like myself is obliged to endure day after day; the disgust at foul smells, the revulsion at miserable food soaked in grease, the misery of a straw mattress, a sheetless bed with blankets whose acrid odour is stifling. The mind cannot grasp what it means to be frantic with pain in the shoulders and back before nine in the morning, and to watch the clock creep around to six before one has a right to drop into the chair that has stood near one all day long. Yet it is not until the system ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... contours of her face, and that her legs were more like yellow satin than white. Her foot would have given Du Maurier inspiration for a brown Trilby. It was long, high-arched, perfect; the toes, never having known shoes, natural and capable of grasp, and the ankle delicate, yet strong. Her father she believed to have been a French official who had stayed only a brief period in Bora-Bora, her mother's island, and whose very name was forgotten by her. She had not seen her mother since her first ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... she is a very remarkable person. Her face is pretty, but they do not say of her, "Ah, what a pretty woman!" They say: "Madame de K.? Ah! to be sure, a fine woman!" Do you perceive the difference? it is easy to grasp it. That which charms in her is less what one sees than what one guesses at. Ah! to be sure, a fine woman! That is what is said after dinner when we have dined at her house, and when her husband, who unfortunately is in bad health and does not smoke, has gone to fetch cigars from his desk. ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... deliberately put a pistol to the old man's head. "Now, if this is not butchery, I don't know what is!" I heard John exclaim; and without a moment's hesitation, he snatched at the pistol and tried to wrest it from Basil's grasp. I could not see exactly what passed, but there was a moment's struggle, then a report, and the ball lodged in John's breast. Oh, the agony of that moment! words cannot paint, nor thought realise ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... learn how to stand, how to rest on her left foot with the right partly in front, then how to hold her violin, how it should rest on her shoulder and how to grasp and support it. Hold it perfectly still for ten minutes. Then lay it down for a few moments' rest. Take it up again and hold it firm. With demure patience she bent her small fingers over the strings as if to ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... over, the other men in the car came crowding to the assistance of the chief actors in the scrimmage. But the danger was past. The leader was unconscious, and the other, badly beaten and cursing horribly, was helpless in the grasp of the victors. Train men, rushing in, took charge of the prisoners and trussed them ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... stories of a kind so poetic, so delicate, or so potentially valuable that the material is in danger of losing future beauty to the pupils through its present crude handling. Mother Goose is a hardy old lady, and will not suffer from the grasp of the seven-year-old; and the familiar fables and tales of the "Goldilocks" variety have a firmness of surface which does not let the glamour rub off; but stories in which there is a hint of the beauty just beyond the palpable—or of a dignity suggestive of developed literature—are ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... spot, a singular picture presented itself to their eyes. Jan lay upon the ground, close in by the roots of some bushes which he was holding tightly in his grasp. From one of his wrists extended a stout thong, or rheim, which passed through among the bushes to the distance of several feet; and, fast to its other end, was the ourebi fawn, dead, and terribly ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... wetting it, which accounted for her always what we youths used to call mopping it, after she had piddled. The cunt looked twice as big as Charlotte's, but the prick-hole seemed to me smaller; and whether my finger or my prick was in it, seemed to grasp it tightly. My prepuce used to give me then at times pain just before, or when I spent in Charlotte; in Mary I scarcely seemed to feel it, and afterwards a quiet sort of grinding of her cunt, prolonged my pleasure until my penis left it. I was so new to the work, that all ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... he could pull himself together and get a firmer grasp of things than he had at present! The commercial instinct was strong within him, and he had a genius for figures, but insomnia and the state of his nerves seemed to have deprived him of half his powers. He envied his wife her gentle breathing and her deep sleep; and ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... speaking Rebecca had relinquished her grasp on his arm and ran toward the cupboard, and neither her father nor mother gave much thought to her anxious question. The venison was just ready to serve, and Mrs. Weston hurried from the fireplace to the table, on which Rebecca had now placed the dishes, while Mr. Weston and Anna talked happily ...
— A Little Maid of Old Maine • Alice Turner Curtis
... wished to bring it about that we should understand an infinite number of other entities, it would be necessary for him to give us a greater understanding, but not a more universal idea of entity than that which we have already, in order to grasp such infinite entities. We have shown that will is a universal entity or idea, whereby we explain all particular volitions—in other words, that which is ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... stoutest fighters were drawn from the Chitawan Brahmans, who had never forgiven us for snatching the cup of power from their lips just when they saw the inheritance of the Moghul Empire within their grasp. First and foremost of them all was the late Mr. Tilak, a pillar of Hindu orthodoxy, who knew both in his speeches and in his Mahratta organ, the Kesari, i.e. "The Lion," how to play on religious as well as on racial sentiment. He first took the field ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... people. This is merely the beginning of the development of the sixth sense, and probably with the majority of clairvoyants it goes no further than etheric and lower astral sight. In other words, they are able to raise the consciousness only to a grade of matter a little beyond the grasp of ordinary vision, while the properly developed, trained clairvoyant raises his ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers
... of you to come. Do you remember me, Berkeley?' said the invalid, feebly stretching out a thin hand, which Jack instinctively took and held gently in his own strong grasp. ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... of order in the parts gives the whole its significance. This quick grasp of the whole is like the click of the kaleidoscope which throws the tumbling, distorted bits into a design. The conduct of practical life on the mental plane is the process also of art on the plane of ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... can ever recapture a crowd once it has escaped your grasp? And all assemblies are crowds alike. No, eloquence is a bit; and if the bit breaks, the audience runs away, and rushes on till it has thrown the orator. Hearers naturally dislike the speaker, which is a fact not as clearly understood as it ought to be. Instinctively he pulls ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... kissed her, and his cheek felt the tears upon hers. He reached for her hand, with an instinct to strengthen her. But when he had it within his its firm and vital grasp sent a thrill of ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... peculiar manner. Also, he was talking that way. Consequently, and what with the distress of being dismissed from the McKaye service in such cavalier fashion, the general manager decided to twist out from under that terrible grasp ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... was wonderfully agile and like an eel she squirmed out of his grasp, and wielding her ungainly weapon with her left hand, she again sprayed the water on ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... she must grasp the nation's prize— A pure, proud home, earth's paradise. The joints must go, but, never till Woman exerts her potent will And ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... towards his prey; and as Concini, absorbed in his occupation, still read on, he felt the grasp of a strong hand upon his arm, and on looking up he saw the Captain of the Guard standing at his side. Before he had time to inquire the meaning of this affront, De Vitry had already uttered the ominous words, "I arrest you ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... had been thrown over his head, and this now trailed in the dust Several of the cowboys, clapping spurs to their ponies, set off either to throw more ropes about the escaping beast, or else to grasp the ...
— Cowboy Dave • Frank V. Webster
... by the cord and reached his home. This help had come from a friendly spider who saw his plight from her perch at the top of the spire, and, weaving a web of extra thickness, she made one end fast to a jag of rock while the other fell within his grasp—for she, like all other of the brute tribe, liked the gentle cave-dwellers better than the remorseless hunters. Hence the name of ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... too subtle for Hamilton to grasp while yet his brain was fogged by the intricacies of his business affairs. He gazed on his wife in puzzled fashion for a few seconds, then abandoned the problem as one altogether beyond his solving. To clear up a vague suspicion ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... were a sorrow!—" she said, quickly withdrawing her left hand from Sulpice's warm grasp. "But it is worse: it is a financial worry, yes, financial," she said brusquely, on observing that Vaudrey's face ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... always known the favorite of the duke, And, as I know, our lady's treacherous lord! Oh, Holy Mother, that to villain hawks Our dove should fall a prey! poor gentle dear! Now if I had their throats within my grasp— No matter—if my master be himself, Nor time nor place shall bind up his revenge. He's not a man to spend his wrath in noise, But when his mind is made, with even pace He walks up to the deed and does his will. In fancy I can see him to the end— The duke, perchance, already ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... other States, are seen both the product and the monument of his labors, less conspicuous, but not less real, than if embodied in codes and institutes bearing his name; yet that, bred as he was to the common law, his great powers, opened and liberalized by its study and practice, enabled him to grasp readily, and wield with entire ease, those systems of equity, applicable to the transactions of the land or the sea, which, in recent times, have so much meliorated and improved the administration of justice in ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... to the protection of the interior of the Confederacy and the security of Chattanooga, rather than indulge in schemes of conquest north of the Cumberland River. While he still held on in Middle Tennessee his grasp was so much loosened that only slight effort would be necessary to push him back into Georgia, and thus give to the mountain region of East Tennessee an opportunity to prove its loyalty ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... truly, that from the very first I did not so delude myself. Some of my Baltimore friends would fain have persuaded me that, in the utter absence of criminating evidence, I should not be detained long; I forbore to argue, but my opinion remained always the same. I had heard how tenacious was the grasp of Federal officials, unless loosened by more golden oil than I could then command. I had heard, too, how slowly aid or intercession from the free outer world could penetrate these mock-bastilles, and how reluctantly the authorities would grant the supreme favor of a hearing, or trial, to ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... with a natural perspicacity that enabled him, as soon as he heard these remarks, to grasp their spirit. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... citizens for indemnification and submissive acquiescence in national indignity. It would have encouraged in these lawless men a spirit of insolence and rapine most dangerous to the lives and property of our citizens at Punta Arenas, and probably emboldened them to grasp at the treasures and valuable merchandise continually passing over the Nicaragua route. It certainly would have been most satisfactory to me if the objects of the Cyane's mission could have been consummated without any act of public force, but the arrogant contumacy of the offenders ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... Arabs; from a sedate and proud bearing, they had become the wildest examples of the most savage disciples of Nimrod. Excited by enthusiasm, they shook their naked blades aloft till the steel trembled in their grasp, and away they dashed over rocks, through thorny bush, across ravines, up and down steep inclinations, engaging in a mimic hunt, and going through the various acts supposed to occur in the attack of a furious elephant. ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... fierce blaze at the rate of three hundred and sixty-six miles per second! Three hundred and sixty-six miles per second! When a railroad-train moves at the rate of a mile per minute, we regard it as extraordinary speed; but three hundred and sixty-six miles per second! The mind fails to grasp it. ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... to London. Richard consulted his friends apart. He expressed his approbation of the articles, but bade them secretly be assured that no consideration should induce him to abandon them on their trial, and that he would grasp the first opportunity of being revenged on his and their enemies—"for there were some among them whom he would flay alive; whom he would never spare for all the gold in the land." Northumberland was then sworn to the observance of the conditions. He took his oath on the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... legs are cut free, peel around back of pelvis, loosening skin to base of tail. Set the specimen upon its head end and, with thumb and finger nails of left hand, grasp skin about the base of tail while with right hand strip ...
— Taxidermy • Leon Luther Pray
... letter to Dean Swift, in which he says, "The Earl of Oxford was removed on Tuesday; the Queen died on Sunday. What a world this is, and how does fortune banter us!" In other {48} words, Bolingbroke tells Swift that full success seemed within his grasp on Tuesday, and was suddenly torn away from him on Sunday. But the most characteristic part of the letter is a passage which throws a very blaze of light over the unconquerable levity of the man. "I have lost all by the death of the Queen but my spirit; and, I protest to you, I feel that increase ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... to the entrance, and called up an order to have the gun lowered by a shore-line; which was done, the coast guardsmen on the cliffs fending the line clear of the bushes, and so passing it from one to another until it dangled over the ledge within grasp. The Commandant, as the taller, reached up for the gun, took it, and examined it by the light of the lantern which ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... surprised. This grasp of technical lore on the part of a total outsider was as unexpected as ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... influence her more than my words. She made an effort to grasp the new idea. Her hands shifted the damp cloth hesitatingly from one to the other, exactly as they had shifted the little travelling-bag on the night when I first saw her. Slowly the purpose of my words ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... hostages, and he at once said that it was an excellent idea. The English and French were very cruel—if now they chose to bombard. ... "If a man throws a penny into the sea," he said, "he loses the penny. It isn't the pocket-book that's hurt." I did not quite grasp this proverb, but remarked that after all they were civilians and had done nothing. "That is true," he said, "but the English and French have been very unjust to our civilians. They force us to ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... back, but the hot steed Furiously reared, and flung them to the plain In dust and shame; only Ardjuna held His seat awhile, and, bidding loose the chains, Lashed the black flank, and shook the bit, and held The proud jaws fast with grasp of master-hand, So that in storms of wrath and rage and fear The savage stallion circled once the plain Half-tamed; but sudden turned with naked teeth, Gripped by the foot Ardjuna, tore him down, And would have slain him, but the grooms ran in, Fettering the maddened beast. Then all men ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... the Boston Post has said of Mrs. Burnett: "She has a beauty of imagination and a spiritual insight into the meditations of childhood which are within the grasp of no other writer for children,"—and these five volumes would indeed be difficult to match in child literature. The new edition is from new plates, with all the original illustrations by Reginald B. Birch, is ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... Greatness of Soul as we said just now Liberality does to Munificence, with the difference that is of being about a small amount of the same thing: this state having reference to small honour, as Greatness of Soul to great honour; a man may, of course, grasp at honour either more than he should or less; now he that exceeds in his grasping at it is called ambitious, he that falls short unambitious, he that is just as he should be has no proper name: nor in fact have the states, except that the disposition of the ambitious ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... State. He said: "Mr. Speaker, Georgia wants peace, but she would not for the sake of peace yield any of her own or the nation's rights. A new career of prosperity is now before her; new prospects, bright and fair, open to her vision and lie ready for her grasp, and she fully appreciates her position. She has at length begun to avail herself of her advantages by forming a great commercial line between the Atlantic and the West. She is embarking in enterprises of intense importance, and is beginning to provide manufactures for her ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... for the seizure of the Chinese treasure; he had attacked the train in the plains of Gobi; the car is assaulted, pillaged, ransacked; the gold and precious stones, to the value of fifteen millions, are torn from the grasp of the Celestials, who yield after a courageous defence. As to the passengers, another two minutes of sleep would have settled ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... pointers have been operated automatically, from the running parts of the press allowed to remain in an elevated or nearly upright position, and through the sheet until the fingers or nippers of the cylinder arrive in proper position to grasp the sheet, at which time the pointers are drawn down and the sheet released, so that it may be connected with the cylinder, and related with the same in order to receive the impression. This improvement ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... ballets of the Alhambra, and the fireworks of the Crystal Palace, and Mr. Chesterton's Daily News articles, have their place in life. But how a serious social student can think of curing the thoughtlessness of our generation by strained paradoxes; of giving people a sane grasp of social problems by literary sleight-of-hand; of settling important questions by a reckless shower of rocket-metaphors and inaccurate 'facts,' and the substitution of imagination for judgment, I ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the pulse. Grasp the wrist of a friend, pressing with three fingers over the radius. Press three fingers over the radius in your own wrist, ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... to welcome Sperry with a warm grasp of the hand and an outburst of—"Oh! I'm glad you are here; it seems like a special Providence," was so strange and unusual a performance that it is no wonder Alice, moving toward the buckboard to add her own greeting to her husband's, was lost in ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... be all the information you get—not that they would not tell, but they cannot grasp the idea that you wish to know—until, possibly, just as you are turning to depart, your informant, in a single word and with the most evident non-appreciation of its value, drops the simple key ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... or three minutes, Edith stood as motionless as the statue of a saint which receives the adoration of a worshipper; and when she recovered herself sufficiently to withdraw her hands from Henry's grasp, she could at first only faintly articulate, "I have taken a strange step, Mr Morton—a step," she continued with more coherence, as her ideas arranged themselves in consequence of a strong effort, "that perhaps may expose me to censure in your eyes—But I have long permitted you to use ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... if such considerations as these were laid before any American soldier who still smarted under that taunt in London streets, his good American sense, which is our best possession, would grasp and accept the thing in its true proportions. He wouldn't want to blot an Empire out because a handful of muckers called him names. Of this I am perfectly sure, because in Paris streets it was my happy lot four months after the Armistice ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... does not leave me with a sense of artistic satisfaction. It lacks structure. It is not a roundly conceived whole: it is but a row of fragments. Were it otherwise, Whistler could never have written so perfectly the little letters. For no man who can finely grasp a big theme can play exquisitely round ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... very usefully just then, but somehow she could not turn the passion on. And a horrid sense of incompetency and failure began to steal over her—an awful foreboding of defeat. What could she do to seize the slippery opportunity and grasp the doubtful prize? How could she land the big golden fish which she foolishly fancied she had at the end of her line? Never had she felt so ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... madness by his jealousy, the Count rushed to the apartment of the Countess. "False and faithless, false and faithless!" he cried in hoarse rage, and clutching her in his iron grasp, lifted her in the air and hurled her through the casement ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... nature of Art and the artist's life Milly had no better conception than when she first fell in love with Jack Bragdon. She knew nothing of the artist's despairs and triumphs, his tireless labor to grasp the unseen, his rare and exalted joys, his strange valuation of life,—in short the blind, unconscious purpose of Art in the terrestrial scheme of things. Nor perhaps did John Bragdon at twenty-eight. The crust of bourgeois standards is so thick in American life that it takes a rare ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... of his hands, the one that was not bandaged, and she laid her soft cheek against it, and held her breath to listen. Perhaps even now behind that quiet face the spirit had departed beyond her grasp. ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... said I, "if you will have it, you shall!" and with that I wrenched the pistol from his grasp and struck him a blow over the head that sent him down without ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... quite grasp this idea, but hoped that we would not find the pension too dear at a dollar and fifty-seven and a half cents a day each, with a little extra for the salon and the balcony. "The English people all please themselves ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
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