"Drift" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sadly. "Years to come can bring us nothing so good or so dear as the past. Every new year will drift us farther." ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... boat for running before the wind Jack had never seen before. The sea stood up round about them like a deep snow-drift, although it was almost calm. But they hadn't gone very far before a nasty piping began in the air. The birds shrieked and made for land, and the sea rose like a black wall ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... flatly. "Those men from the castle are still hunting drift out there. I don't think anyone knows ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... from Cambridge, February 2, 1799, Elizabeth Woodcock dismounted from her horse, which ran away, leaving her in a violent snowstorm. She was soon overwhelmed by an enormous drift six feet high. The sensation of hunger ceased after the first day and that of thirst predominated, which she quenched by sucking snow. She was discovered on the 10th of February, and although suffering from extensive gangrene ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... scornfully, "you thought I couldn't find you out—you thought I couldn't see your drift. Have a better opinion of my powers of penetration next time, Sir Everard. My poor father, impoverished in purse, broken in health, sensitive in spirit, chooses to hide his wounds—chooses not to wear his heart on his sleeve for the Devonshire daws ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... Trunk-Hose, the two Promontories forming the two Slops, &c. &c.—Now we all know, continued he, that King George the First made a Promise of that important Pass to the King of Spain:—So that the whole Drift of the Romance, according to my Sense of Things, is merely to vindicate the King and the Parliament in that Transaction, which made so much ...
— A Political Romance • Laurence Sterne
... near the rivers the boys will attend only on stormy days. The men are also taken away from the farms too early in the fall to gather crops, and return too late in the spring to get the best results from the farm work. The irregular character of the employment reacts on the men and they tend to drift to the cities during the summer, although many find employment in berry picking about Norfolk. Another result has been to make farm labor very scarce. This naturally causes some complaint. I do not say that the ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... mustn't drift away from him. I remember so many things that tie us together, here in this strange, stormy city. What happy times we used to have! He'll understand better by and by, ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... git your drift, gents, - You 'low the boy sha'n't stay; This is a white man's country; You're Dimocrats, you say; And whereas, and seein', and wherefore, The times bein' all out o' j'int, The nigger has got to mosey From the limits o' ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... Vidura had finished what he had to say, Pritha's son Arjuna, well skilled in the science of Profit, and conversant also with the truths of both Virtue and Profit, urged on (by the drift of Yudhishthira's question), said ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... for the concert had developed. The piano in the chapel proving out of order, the elevator man proved to have been a piano tuner. He tuned it with a bone forceps. Strange places, hospitals, into which drift men from every walk of life, to find a haven and peace within their quiet walls. Old Tony had sung, in his youth, in the opera at Milan. A pretty young nurse went around the corridors muttering bits of "Orphant Annie" to herself. ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... him. On the instant, the Duke gave a solution to Constance' aims, explaining everything to the King. He also—for he dreaded what the King might do—said 'twas possible she was not of sound mind. His Majesty saw the Duke's drift and declared that death should not come upon her, but she should be imprisoned. This satisfied the Duke, for he was seriously afraid for the young ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... all day they had been slowly toiling against the tide; and long since Piero had summoned to his aid a trusted gondolier who had been ordered to follow them at a little distance, and who, at a sign from the gastaldo, had silently left his bark to drift and taken his place at the other end of the gondola in which the fugitives were making ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... able to cope with the fierce brute life and terrible climate of their day are axes of chipped stone and similar tools and weapons dropped on the gravelly banks of new rivers which the glaciers upheaved. Such an ax was dug up out of the glacier terrace, as the bank of this drift is called, in the valley of the ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... environment when he cannot leave it. To an extent which no other animal has ever approached, man is the arbiter of his own destiny. A hypothetical ass may stand helpless between two equidistant bales of hay, but no human being is ever so helpless a sport of his environment. As it is, he may drift or he may rove as he pleases. To one man the current may be stronger than to another. There may be now and then a child so feeble-minded as to be unable to decide the course of its own life. It will not be long before society will see to it that such a life leaves ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... "Don't you worry about us, miss. We aren't complaining. We can't do the part he does. He does all the buying and selling—and—correspondence—and the like of that. But come, it's pretty near noon. I reckon we'd better drift along to Mrs. Finnegan's. The first table is bad enough ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... first, understand my drift; then when he gathers my meaning, he shakes his head almost in a joking ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... personal things about the clothes and habits of each child, general familiar things like autos and wagons and horses on the street, coal going down the hole in the sidewalk, the squabbling of sparrows in the dirt, the drift of snow on the roofs,—perhaps we shall learn to use such thought-out phrases or refrains like blocks for building many stories. If we could work out some such technique as this, we could keep the intimacy, the flexibility, the waywardness of ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... not give hot for cold, nor my heart for a smile or two. I can't help admiring her, and I do hope she will be—happy—ah!—whoever she fancies. But, if I am never to command her, I won't carry a willow at my mast-head, and drift away from reason and manhood, and my duty to ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... not exposing his ignorance of the real Henley's business, might induce the girl to explain the situation; but no leading question presented itself. He thought he could be happy if he could but divert the conversation from its present awkward drift. ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... could not bring myself to, and declared they were sweet nourishing food. When the weather allowed us to fish, we were delivered from these hardships; but some of our mischievous crew set the boat a-drift, so that she was lost: after which we contrived wicker boats, covered with sea-lions skins, which did well enough near shore, but we durst not venture in them out into the bay, and consequently were worse ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... as to how she was to carry out her resolution; she pondered over it through much of the night. She was painfully anxious to make Elsmere understand without a scene, without a definite proposal and a definite rejection. It was no use letting things drift. Something brusque and marked there must be. She ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... close as thou canst to the water-lily's roots, and loosen them from the mud and reeds. This done, fasten thy claws into the roots and rise with them to the surface. Let the water flow all over the flower, and drift with the current until thou comest to a mountain ash tree on the left bank. There is near it a large stone. Stop there and say: 'From a crab into a man, from a water-lily into a maiden,' and ye both will be restored to ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... her eyes, with a heavy questioning look, but dropped them again without in the least comprehending the drift of Salina's thoughts. ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... flavored. In 1884 this Mr. Playfair sent some of these nuts to England, but we have just discovered them so to speak. They will probably grow in our tropical possessions and we must not overlook the fact that after all there is a distinct drift in our agriculture towards the development of that part of the globe which has been so overlooked by horticulturists in the past. It is not at all impossible that some of you who are here in this audience today will buy that Playfairia ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... Declaration of Independence, only to be jeered as a wild enthusiast. He would not retreat a single inch from the straight path of liberty and justice. He refused to purchase peace at the price of freedom. He would not drift with the current of the public opinion of his day. His course was up-stream; his battle against the tide. He undertook to create a right public sentiment on the question of freedom, a task as great as it was difficult. Garrison thundered ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... is found to be erroneous) or to repudiate a principle (even when it is proved to be false and pernicious) involves a political upheaval akin to a revolution. It is easier to continue to stand on an obsolete platform and watch a nation drift to disaster than to abandon the platform and endanger the party organization—euphemistically termed for the occasion "national unity." An excellent case in point is the pathetic devotion of successive Governments to the voluntary ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... door burst open as before a tremendous kick, and Pete, fierce and wild-eyed, and green with the drift of the salt foam caked thick on his face, stepped over the threshold with the unconscious body of Kate in his arms and the idiot boy peering ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... Pride and Humility, Bluebeard and Fatima, Prose and Poetry, Riches and Poverty, Youth and Crabbed Age— Oh, sorrowful procession! All so wretched, when perhaps all might have been so happy if they had only paired differently! I halted a moment to let the weird shapes drift by. As the last of the train melted into the darkness, my vagabond fancy went wandering back to the theatre and the play I had seen—Romeo and Juliet. Taking a lighter tint, but still of the same sober color, my ...
— A Midnight Fantasy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... The drift of the music seemed sadder than before, and there was a little silence when the last words floated away into the blackened rafters, a silence broken by one ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... lovely in the extreme. The mountains on each side are gently rounded, and, as usual, covered over with tree foliage, except where the red soil is exposed by recent grass-burnings. Quartz rocks jut out, and much drift of that material has been carried down by the gullies into the bottom. These gullies being in compact clay, the water has but little power of erosion, so they are worn deep but narrow. Some fragments of titaniferous iron ore, with haematite changed by heat, and ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... about the book. From you I shall get the friendliest judgment that the circumstances admit of, and if you are dissatisfied I shall know what to look for from others. The last two hundred pages are the most interesting. The drift of the whole is that Carlyle was by far the most remarkable man of his time—that five hundred years hence he will be the only one of us all whose name will be so much as remembered, while perhaps he may be one who will have reshaped in a permanent form the religious belief ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Some of them tried to surround two sailors who were gathering shell fish, but the sailors were too nimble for them. An officer with a small armed party went in pursuit, but as soon as the savages saw them they put off from the shore in a canoe, leaving their fire, and close to it a piece of drift wood and some fish bones. And at night again some of the natives attempted to approach the Runnymede, but on being fired at they took themselves off. The natives appeared to be quite naked and black, and of a robust frame, with perfectly straight hair. This day also a spring ...
— The Wreck on the Andamans • Joseph Darvall
... drift around by there if it ain't too much out of your way, and see if he's got a man on the ranch," Lone suggested. "But you better not touch anything in the house, Swan. The coroner'll likely appoint somebody to look around and see if he's got any folks to send his stuff to. Just feed any stock that's ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... of some demon who gloats over human anguish, but according to a benevolent and wonderfully patient law of evolution. Many members of the class we are considering do not really attain an intelligent appreciation of this fact at all, but drift through their astral interlude in the same aimless manner in which they have spent the physical portion of their lives. Thus in Kamaloka, exactly as on earth, there are the few who comprehend something of their position and know how ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... the canoe and go to their assistance would be dangerous in the extreme, as, should she drift away, Robin would be unable by himself to paddle her back. I could not, however, resist the temptation of sending Bouncer, and one pat on the back while I pointed to the top of the rock was sufficient to make him leap on to it and ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... the limestone rock comes near the surface. It is true that chestnut groves, and sometimes extensive forests, are found on hills and ridges overlying limestone, but a careful examination of the soil among the trees will show that it is a drift deposit containing little or no lime. I find in Pennsylvania the chestnut tree grows from the banks of the Susquehanna River to the tops ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... In[^a]l[)i]'s daughter brought out a small box filled with papers of various kinds, both Cherokee and English. The work of examining these was a tedious business, as each paper had to be opened out and enough of it read to get the general drift of the contents, after which the several classes were arranged in separate piles. While in the midst of this work she brought out another box nearly as large as a small trunk, and on setting it down there was revealed to the astonished gaze such a mass of material as it had not seemed possible could ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... loomed—a grey, narrow strip—before me, while on my right the restless, dark blue sea had the air of being ceaselessly planed by thousands of invisible carpenters; so regularly did the stress of a wind as moist and sweet and warm as the breath of a healthy woman cause ever-rustling curls of foam to drift towards the beach. Also, careening on to its port quarter under a full set of bellying sails, a Turkish felucca was gliding towards Sukhum; and, as it held on its course, it put me in mind of a certain pompous engineer of the town ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... in his Mail a Report from the Expert in charge of Shaft No. 13 in the Skiddykadoo Fields showing that the Assay ran $42.16 and the Main Lateral had been opened as far as the Mezzanine Drift, which meant that the $1 Shares would be selling around ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... "I like the old hyena. I've frazzled out leather on his hide that cost more than he did, but I never went after him right. He certainly can drift when he has to. What's the news, Sheila? All well ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... pump-trees, intent only on a place to nest. They wage war against robins and wrens, pick quarrels with swallows, and seem to deliberate for days over the policy of taking forcible possession of one of the mud-houses of the latter. But as the season advances they drift more into the background. Schemes of conquest which they at first seemed bent upon are abandoned, and the settle down very quietly in their old ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... communication, but we do not communicate again. In the winter time, this island, which, strange as it may appear to you, does not change its position many hundred miles in the course of centuries, is enclosed with the icebergs in the north: when the spring appears, we are disengaged, and then drift a degree or two to the southward, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... Government has set in motion, or whether we analyse those deep national movements of social and moral reform which are being carried on by native reformers and patriots." All Indian current opinion is unanimous with the Parsee and the Bengali that a great movement is in progress. The drift from the old moorings is a constant theme of discourse. Let Sir Alfred Lyall, once head of the United Provinces, speak for the most competent European observers. "There may be grounds for anticipating," he says, "that a solid universal peace and the ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... a fool not to have understood the drift of your conversation before it reached this point," Walter said, hotly. "I had rather never own a mill than get it as you propose; and as for evil companions,' I am proud to have been allowed ...
— Neal, the Miller - A Son of Liberty • James Otis
... religion makes wild beasts civil, superstition makes wise men beasts and fools; and the discreetest that are, if they give way to it, are no better than dizzards; nay more, if that of Plotinus be true, is unus religionis scopus, ut ei quem colimus similes fiamus, that is the drift of religion to make us like him whom we worship: what shall be the end of idolaters, but to degenerate into stocks and stones? of such as worship these heathen gods, for dii gentium daemonia, [6545]but to become devils themselves? 'Tis therefore exitiosus ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... since known that she was attached to the person of, and warmly personally attached to, the unfortunate Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales,—then only unfortunate; so that I can now guess at the drift of much sad and passionate talk with indignant lips and tearful eyes, of which the meaning was then of course incomprehensible to me, but which I can now partly interpret by the subsequent history of that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... drift, sir," replied Wolsey; "you would tell me I am not welcome. Well, then, his eminence Cardinal Campeggio and myself must take up our lodging at some hostel in the town, for it is necessary ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... have you no mind of my weight of passion, and the holy dispensation, and the drift of heifers I am giving, and ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... present to consciousness, as when we are walking, or when we are sitting behind a horse whose movement we see. And so when the sense of our own movement becomes indistinct, as in a railway carriage, we naturally drift into the illusion that objects, such as trees, telegraph posts, and so on, are moving, when they are perfectly still. Under the same circumstances, we are apt to suppose that a train which is just shooting ahead of us is ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... brother-in-law. We may have our doubts in regard to the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, for we have no absolute standard by which to judge of Shakespeare's style, but the "style, the matter, and the drift" of "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret" are so essentially Hawthornish that a person experienced in judging of such matters should not hesitate long in deciding that it belongs in the same category with "Fanshawe" and "The Dolliver Romance." It is even possible to determine, ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... carried out of the harbour, where their mainmasts were cut away, while the cables of the smaller vessels were chopped through, so that they might drift wherever the tide might ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... quite happy, Sylvestre, and I owe my happiness to you, to her, and to others. I have done nothing myself to deserve happiness beyond letting myself drift on the current of life. Whenever I tried to row a stroke the boat nearly upset. Everything that others tried to do for me succeeded. I can't get over it. Just think of it yourself. I owed my introduction to Jeanne to Monsieur Flamaran, who drove me to call on her father; ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... sections per mile of track, but whether they had lands to sell or not they were vitally interested in the settlement of the regions through which they ran. Each encouraged immigration and colonization. Their literature, scattered over Europe, was one factor in the heavy drift of population that started after 1878. Six new Western States were created in the ten years ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... land unknown, What water—of the still unfrozen spring, In the loose marsh or solitary lake, Where the fresh fountain from the bottom boils. These check his fearful steps; and down he sinks Beneath the shelter of the shapeless drift, Thinking o'er all the bitterness of death, Mixed with the tender anguish nature shoots Through the wrung bosom of the dying man— His wife, his children, and his friends unseen. In vain for him th' officious wife prepares The fire ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... the beginning of a fourteen days' spell we had of rolling about in the sweltering calms of the Doldrums; and then, when we at last managed to drift cross the Line, we had another fortnight's stagnation before we met the south-east trades, only a couple of degrees or ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... with a rattle of wheels and a drift of trail-dust even before Peter and his cool amending eyes arrived at the shack to "stoke up" as he expresses it. I tried to make Peter believe that nothing was wrong, and cavorted about with Bobs, and was able to laugh when Dinkie got some of the new marmalade in his hair, and explained how we'd ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... its summit I had an extensive view of the low land stretching away to the northward, and forming the western side of the channel. It appeared so cut up with creeks as to form a mass of islands and mud flats, which appeared from the quantity of drift timber, to be frequently overflowed, and partially so apparently at high spring tides. The farthest high land I saw bore west ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... a small thing, a tag of ragged stuff looped about a length of splintered sapling. Ross climbed stiffly over the welter of drift caught on the sand spit and pulled it loose, recognizing the string even before he touched it. That square knot was of McNeil's tying, and as Murdock sat down weakly in the sand and mud, nervously fingering the twisted cord, staring vacantly ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... her frank tone, her confiding look, seemed to please Warwick; he sat a moment looking into the brown depths of the water, and let the boat drift, with no sound but the musical drip ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... every lesson seemed to tell. He had watched her development with pride and brooding tenderness. And her eyes had always sparkled with deep joy at his slightest word of praise. For the first time it had occurred to him as an immediate possibility that she might marry and their lives drift apart. ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... Ciphering fatality on each unwrinkled bark Across the sunken stain That every season's gathered streaming rain Has deepened to a darker grain. You of this fatal sign unconscious lift Your branches still, each tree her lofty tent; Still light and twilight drift Between, and lie in wan pools silver sprent. But comes a day, a step, a voice, and now The repeated stroke, the noosed and tethered bough, The sundered trunk upon the enormous wain Bound kinglike with chain ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... tired girls and needed no urging to seek rest on their cots as the sun sunk behind the hills on the opposite side of the lake. The move "bedward" was almost simultaneous and the drift toward slumberland not far behind. They had one complete day undisturbed with anything of a mysterious or startling nature, and it was quite a relief to find it possible to seek a night's repose after eight or nine hours of diligent work without being confronted ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... Gong-donkey, and correct cards. Again, a great set towards the races, though not so great a set as on Wednesday. Much packing going on too, upstairs at the gun- smith's, the wax-chandler's, and the serious stationer's; for there will be a heavy drift of Lunatics and Keepers to London by the afternoon train. The course as pretty as ever; the great pincushion as like a pincushion, but not nearly so full of pins; whole rows of pins wanting. On the great event of the day, ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... were certainly not any further away from the wreckage for which he was aiming than they had been to start with. And, reasoning upon this, the conclusion forced upon him was that, after all, he had merely succeeded in retarding their own drift to leeward; while to actually force his unwieldy raft to windward and thus reach the desired flotsam, was quite ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... confident you were lurking among the trees not far off, and since Wa-on-mon sometimes spoke pretty loud, I fancied you would catch the drift of our conversation." ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... Photography; Wooden Cloth; The Phylloxera; Falling Rents; Boston Civilization; Psychic Blundering; Beecher's Mediumship; A Scientific Cataract; Obstreperous and Pragmatic Vulgarity; Hygiene; Quinine; Life and Death; Dorothea L. Dix; The Drift of Catholicism, Juggernaut The Principal Methods of Studying the Brain ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... stranger, will fling down every precaution, and build a fate for us of which we never dream? Of what avail for us to erect our sand-castle when every chance blast of air may blow it into nothing, and drift another into form that we have no power to move? Life hinges upon hazard, and at every turn wisdom is mocked by it, and energy swept aside by it, as the battled dykes are worn away, and the granite walls beaten down by the fickle ocean waves, which, never two ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... that—what? And, sure enough, the piece opens a good deal as I'd planned; only instead of me bein' alone when I pushes the button, hanged if two young chappies that had come up in the elevator with me don't drift along to the same apartment door. We swap sort of foolish grins, and when Hortense fin'ly shows up everyone of us does a bashful sidestep to let the others go first. So Hortense opens on what looks like a revolvin' wedge. But that don't ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... destroying or changing it. The object's quality passed to the word at the same time that the word's relations enveloped the object; and thus a new weight and significance was added to sound, previously nothing but a dull music. A conflict at once established itself between the drift proper to the verbal medium and that proper to the designated things; a conflict which the whole history of language and thought has embodied and which continues ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... life of the convent, of London and its gayeties, of the Massachusetts coast with its gray fogs and open, drift-wood fires, came the return to her own country. There, with her father, she rode over his plantations among the wild cattle, or with her mother and sister sat in the patio and read novels in three languages, ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... The whole drift of their institution is contrary to that of the wise legislators of all countries, who aimed at improving instincts into morals, and at grafting the virtues on the stock of the natural affections. They, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... at all for the present. I have abandoned my intentions and my dates. I mean to drift for a little while. I have ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... buoy, reinforced by a couple of spars, was thrown out on to the surface of the ocean. The end of the line was solidly struck beneath, and only submitted to the ebb and flow of the surges, so that it would not drift much. ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... of which, we came suddenly on it at 8 A. M., thus having been thrown four hours out of our reckoning since sun-set the night before. Many ships, by not heaving-to at all, or not doing so in time, the night previous to making the reef, drift too far to the northward during the night, miss the passage they were endeavouring to make, and are compelled to run along the reef in search of another; for there is no getting back to the southward against wind and current. This neglect throws many a vessel up to the ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... Stella's also. He did not think Everard would find it a very easy task to restore her confidence. Perhaps he would not attempt to do so. Perhaps he was too engrossed with the service of his goddess to care that he and his wife should drift asunder. And yet—the memory of the morning on which he had first seen those streaks of grey in his brother's hair came upon him, and an unwilling sensation of pity softened his severity. Perhaps he had been drawn in in spite of himself. ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... feel the life of the wood and the meadow Thrilling the pulses that own kindred with fibres that lift Bud and blade to the sunward, within the inscrutable shadow, Deep in the oak's chill core, under the gathering drift. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... attracting your grand attention. But, I love to think: I have so many little ethereal friends that flock around me when I sit down to think, they are all my ideals, you know." She continued, clasping her hands enthusiastically, "In that little world of thought, where I drift so often in the day, there is none of that coldness nor selfishness that characterizes your material world. We are all equal, and we love one another so much! I don't know when it fascinated me first, but it seems so natural to ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... through a chill January twilight. Swathed in furs she put in a morning tobogganing on the country-club hill; even tried skiing, to sail through the air for a glorious moment and then land in a tangled laughing bundle on a soft snow-drift. She liked all the winter sports, except an afternoon spent snow-shoeing over a glaring plain under pale yellow sunshine, but she soon realized that these things were for children—that she was being humored and that ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... West needs girls.... Yes, I've heerd of Al. An old Arizona cattle-man in a sheep country! Thet's bad.... Now I'm wonderin'—if I'd drift down there an' ask him for a job ridin' for ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... opened, and a swirl of spray from the breakers on the rocks came in with my host, who set a great armful of drift wood on the floor, closed it, and ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... his culture, how easy his relapse into barbarism, he need only open his windows upon an empty lot. This tempting space, this unguarded bit of the universe, brings out all the savage within him. Ashes and old boots, broken glass, worn-out tin pans, and newspapers whose moment is over, alike drift naturally into that unfortunate spot. The lot under my window had suffered at the hands of lawless men,—not to say women,—for it offered the eternal oblivion of "over the back fence" to no less than ten kitchens with their ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... large or handsome as New York, but had my lot been cast in a Wilderness I hope I should not repine, such never was my nature, and they who exchange their independence for the sweet name of Wife must be prepared to find all is not gold that glitters, nor I would not expect like you to drift down the stream of Life unfettered and serene as a Summer cloud, such is not my fate, but come what may will always find in me a resigned and prayerful Spirit, and hoping this finds you as well as it leaves me, I remain, my ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... despite himself, entertaining the question:—Was this woman whom he had been assessing and wavering over, more masculino, conceivably likely to reject him on his merits? Might she not say to him:—"I have seen your drift, and found you too pleasant an acquaintance to condemn offhand. But now that you force me to ask myself the question, 'Can I love you?' you leave me no choice but to answer, 'I can't.'" And he was beginning ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... banish hope and let the mind Drift like a feather. I have had my share Of what the world calls trial. Once a fire Came in the darkness, when the city lay In a still sea of slumber, stretching out Great lurid arms which stained the firmament; And when I woke the room was full of sparks, And red tongues smote the lattice. Then ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... and energy for such small returns! Evidently the vital order is only an episode, a transient or secondary phase of matter in the process of sidereal evolution. Astronomic space is strewn with dead worlds, as a New England field is with drift boulders. That life has touched and tarried here and there upon them can hardly be doubted, but if it is anything more than a passing incident, an infant crying in the night, a flush of color upon the cheek, a flower blooming by the wayside, ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... no wish to prevent it. Munition manufacturers were not alone in urging the race to destruction, physical and financial. The leaders were for it. It was policy. A boiling pot will boil, a nurtured seed will grow. There was no escape from the avowed goal. A slow drift to the inevitable, a thunderbolt forged, the awful push toward the vortex! What men and nations ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... rich from dull poverty, could not so easily forget the village church and the village social standards; those who, having inherited wealth, or migrated from the East where wealth was old, understood more of the savoir faire of the game; and those who, being newly born into wealth and seeing the drift toward a smarter American life, were beginning to wish they might shine in it—these last the very young people. The latter were just beginning to dream of dances at Kinsley's, a stated Kirmess, and summer diversions of the European kind, but they had not arrived as yet. The ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... reasonableness—though this also may be undertaken with the hope of success. In developing as it has done, the Library in the United States of America has not been simply obeying some law of its own being; it has been following the whole stream of American development. You can call it a drift if you like; but the Library has not been simply drifting. The swimmer in a rapid stream may give up all effort and submit to be borne along by the current, or he may try to get somewhere. In so doing, he may battle with the current and achieve nothing ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... the continent could not offer strong, continued resistance to commercial aggression, carried on under the peaceful form of municipal regulation. It was generally thought that the new states could never unite, but instead would drift farther apart. ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... French battalions nearest the flanks kept edging outwards, the ones on the right towards their own right and the ones on the left towards their own left, to prevent themselves from being overlapped by the long red line of fire and steel when the two fronts closed. But this drift outwards, while not enough to reach Wolfe's flanks, was quite enough to make a fatal gap in Montcalm's centre. Thus the British, at the final moment, took the French on both the outer and both the inner flanks as ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... are born in a house of snow. Early in the winter Mrs. Bear finds a sheltered place where the snow will drift over her. There she goes to sleep, and the snow drifts and drifts over her until she is buried deep. You might think she would be cold, but she isn't, for the snow keeps her warm. Her breath melts a little hole up through ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... unparalleled in her history. The Palace, instead of being a hall of justice, was the abode of debauchery and gambling; and the mad revellers, whom a cynical fate had placed at the head of affairs, allowed the ship of state to drift upon the rocks. Even the fine palace within the city gave too little scope for the diversion of the Intendant and his confederates, and, accordingly, a rustic chateau was built near the high hill of Charlesbourg. Here they paused when tired of ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... be afraid that we should drift away into a discussion of realism in Art. So, to recall the conversation to the point at issue, I ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... succeeded another in changeless iteration. The lake was a solid floor of gray ice as far as one could see. Along the shore between the breakwaters the ice lay piled in high waves, with circles of clear, shining glass beyond. A persistent drift from the north and east, day after day, lifted the sheets of surface ice and slid them over the inner ledges. At night the lake cracked and boomed like a battery of powerful guns, one report starting another until the shore resounded with the noise. The perpetual groaning of the laboring ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... solve the problem of man's origin, where can we stop? Can we find any point in his history where we can say, Here his natural history ends, and his supernatural history begins? Does his natural history end with the pre-glacial man, with the cave man, or the river-drift man, with the low-browed, long-jawed fossil man of Java,—Pithecanthropus erectus, described by Du Bois? Where shall we stop on his trail? I had almost said "step on his tail," for we undoubtedly, if we go back far enough, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... a son who wanted to go east was temporarily demented. It was an absurd plan. "Why, it's against the drift of things. You can't make a living back east. Hang onto your land and you'll come out all right. The place for a young man ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... time vsd this late found shift, Fearing least some should vndermine their drift, They did agree, but through the wall agreed, That both should hast vnto the groue with speed, And in that arbour where they first did meet, With semblant loue each should the other greet, The match concluded, and the time set downe, ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... of recalling to Thorpe the essentials of the situation. He had allowed the talk to drift to a point where it became almost affable. He sat upright with a sudden determination, and put his feet firmly on the floor, and knitted his brows ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... numerous villages and hamlets my way now leads, my next objective point being Ki-ngan-foo. At first a country of curious red buttes, terraced rice-fields, and reservoirs of mountain-drift water, serving the double purpose of fish-ponds and irrigating reservoirs, it develops later into a more mountainous region, where the bicycle quickly degenerates into a thing more ornamental ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... cut in cold and sharp. "Usually you influence me; but sometimes you can't; I say this: Nell will drift into your arms as surely as the leaf falls. It will not hurt her—will be best for her. Remember, she is yours for ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... my old college chum walk in the office door. He looked handsomer than ever and greeted me very cordially, with just a touch of the old condescension in his manner. I was, of course, delighted to see him. We talked over old days freely and familiarly. Finally I saw the drift of his visit. He represented to me that he had invested largely, at the advice of some friends, in the lands of the great North-West, but had lost a great deal by the speculation. In his despair, the first friend he thought of was myself. He got around ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... Patricia suddenly remembered that there was to be strawberry shortcake for supper. Oh, dear, if only Custard had chosen any other day to drift across her path! A sent-to-bed bed-supper meant simply bread and milk. Patricia wondered if Dr. Vail would mind about not having custard as much as she did about not having strawberry shortcake. She decided that when she was grown up and had little girls ...
— Patricia • Emilia Elliott
... expelled. He then complained that somehow England always got the better of Spain; witness Nootka Sound, Hayti, and Corsica. In spite of Bute's assurance that he came to end these jealousies, Godoy continued to drift on the tide of events. "No plan is prepared," wrote Bute on 11th July, "no measures are taken. The accident of the day seems to determine everything, and happy do the Ministers feel when the day is passed." He therefore advised that Godoy should ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... man with such devout expressions as heretic might venture. I tried to turn him from the coming evil to the present necessity. I counselled with him whether it might not be safer to take in sail and drift along. But from this he dissented. Time enough to take in sail when we knew what shore we were coming to. He had no kedge or grapple or cord, indeed, that would pretend to hold this boat against this gale. We would beach her, if it pleased the Virgin; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... to be planning equally threatening moves against the Queen's Empire in Asia. We do not know enough of what then went on between the German and Russian Chancellors to assert that they formed a definite agreement to harry British interests in those continents; but, judging from the general drift of Bismarck's diplomacy and from the "nagging" to which England was thenceforth subjected for two years, it seems highly probable that the policy ratified at Skiernevice aimed at marking time in European affairs and striding onwards in other continents at ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... BRUIN Come from that image: body and soul are gone. You have thrown your arms about a drift of leaves Or bole of an ash tree changed ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... many respects the most phenomenal of all the Montana gulches. The ground was so rich that as high as $180 in gold was taken from one pan of dirt; and from a plat of ground four feet by ten feet, between drift timbers, $1,100 worth of gold was extracted in twenty-four hours. At the junction of Montana Gulch—a side gulch—with Confederate, the ground was very rich, the output at that ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... such a perilous experience. While the winter began in 1912 with the advent of March, now in 1913 it came on definitely in early February. Autumn was a term which applied to a few brilliant days which would suddenly intervene in the dense rack of drift-snow. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... attempted by his father, and at starting the ground current blew favourably from the W.S.W. He, however, allowed his balloon to rise to too high an altitude, where he must have been taken aback by a contrary drift; for, on descending again through a shower of snow, he found himself no further than Ben Howth, as yet only ten miles on his long journey. Profiting by his mistake, he thenceforward, by skilful regulation, kept his balloon within due limits, and successfully maintained ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... can be said that it is possible to talk of it in terms of evolution or inevitable progress. A perpetual tendency to touch fewer and fewer things might—one feels, be a mere brute unconscious tendency, like that of a species to produce fewer and fewer children. This drift may be really evolutionary, ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton |
