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Elemental   Listen
adjective
Elemental  adj.  
1.
Pertaining to the elements, first principles, and primary ingredients, or to the four supposed elements of the material world; as, elemental air. "Elemental strife."
2.
Pertaining to rudiments or first principles; rudimentary; elementary. "The elemental rules of erudition."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Elemental" Quotes from Famous Books



... made was that of commanding power. He must have been full of healthy and majestic manhood. Women and children were attracted to him, as the weak are attracted by the strong. In the storm on the lake, his spirit so rose above the elemental rage—as if upborne with delight by the sublime scene—that his companions forgot their fears, and in the remembrance it appeared to them that the sea and wind grew calm at his word. His strength seemed to impart itself to the weak, his health to the sick. The stories of marvel which ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... sounds hollow beneath a heavy tread, reminding one unpleasantly that but a thin crust covers the fiery abyss which might break through at any moment. With the exception of Vesuvius, this is the only surviving remnant of the fierce elemental forces which have devastated this coast in every direction. The whole region is one mass of craters of various sizes and ages, some far older than Vesuvius, and others of comparatively recent origin. They are all craters of eruption and not of elevation; and in their formation ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... Bonaparte had ever read a remarkable report of the Spanish Governor Carondelet, he must have divined that there was something elemental and irresistible in this down-the-river-pressure of the people of the West. "A carbine and a little maize in a sack are enough for an American to wander about in the forests alone for a whole month. With his carbine, he kills the wild cattle and deer ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson

... so close to his lips. Conny shrank back perceptibly. Some elemental instinct of the female pushed its way through her broad-minded modern philosophy and made her shudder at the double embrace. She controlled herself at once and again bowed her beautiful head to his. But Percy did not ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... of locks and canals, where everything depends on keeping the gates shut, and so holding the upper waters at their level; but the system under which the young republican American is born trusts the whole unimpeded tide of life to the great elemental influences, as the vast rivers of the continent settle their own level in obedience to the laws that govern the planet and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... intricate and imbecilic steps of the day he performed in flawless sequence. Under his masterly guidance the feet of the least rhythmic were suddenly endowed with deftness and grace. One swayed with him as naturally as with an elemental force. He danced politely and almost wordlessly unless first addressed, according to the code of his kind. His touch was firm, yet remote. The dance concluded, he conducted his partner to her seat, bowed stiffly from the waist, heels ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber

... immediately on the audience. Their character consists in the imaginative disconnected from the good; they are the shadowy obscure and fearfully anomalous of physical nature, the lawless of human nature,—elemental avengers without ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... the Bijou Palace, a gripping drama of mother-love, of a clean-limbed young American type wrongfully accused of a crime and taking the burden of it upon his own shoulders for the sake of the girl he had come to love; of the tense play of elemental forces in the great West, the regeneration of a shallow society girl when brought to adversity by the ruin of her old father; of the lovers reunited in ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson

... quick movement to throw himself on Segrave. The elemental instinct of self-defense, of avenging a terrible insult by physical violence, rose within him, whispering of strength and power, of the freedom, muscle-giving life of the country as against the enervating, weakening influence of ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy

... Veering, Mov'd by the zephyr's swell. Here nurs'd he thoughts to genius only known, When nought was heard around But sooth'd the rest profound Of rural beauty on her mountain throne. Nor less he lov'd (rude nature's child) The elemental conflict wild; When, fold on fold, above was pil'd The watery swathe, careering on the wind. Such scenes he saw With solemn awe, As in the presence of the Eternal Mind. Fix'd he gaz'd, Tranc'd and rais'd, Sublimely rapt in awful ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... from the mountain there rushed down A furious storm of wind, then heavy showers Of snow fell, covering all the earth with whiteness, And making desolate the prospect round. Keen blew the blast, and pinching was the cold; And to escape the elemental wrath, Leader and soldier, in the caverned rock Scooped out by mouldering time, took shelter, there Continuing three long days. Three lingering days Still fell the snow, and still the tempest raged, And man and beast grew ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... elemental harmony brings forth And rears all life, and, when life's term is o'er, It sweeps the breathing myriads from the earth, And whelms and hides them to be ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... the beginning. Life demands something more from us than acquiescence. And now in a roomful of machine minders he was to learn a wider lesson, to make the acquaintance of another factor in life, a factor as elemental as the loss of things dear to us, ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... from the remainder an overwhelming majority come to an untimely end within the first few days of life. Each has countless enemies which prey upon him, and these have scarcely devoured him before they themselves become the prey of some stronger creature. Until Mr. Darwin gave us his elemental idea it was taken for granted that it was a matter of pure accident which survived and which yielded in the struggle and cares of life. It was Darwin who showed us that in this tremendous struggle against those of his own kind ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker

... him, menacingly, until the two men stood almost touching, and for a moment it seemed to Janet as if the agent of the Clarendon were ready to strike Ditmar. She held her breath, her blood ran faster,—the conflict between these two made an elemental appeal. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... reaction to persons—seeking to dominate. We will take these up in order, beginning with the most elemental. ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... to them from a camp-fire in the shelter of the wagons. There were, Tom guessed, about four of them. Their words came clear through the velvet night. They talked the casual elemental topics common to ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine

... cataract of a wintry river; Now pausing on the edge of the riven wave; Now leaving far behind the bursting mass That fell, convulsing ocean: safely fled— As if that frail and wasted human form, 350 Had been an elemental god. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... and a fair flock of children in sanctuary, while he rushes to the battle-field: the churchmen might receive their queenly charge with music: the Danes riot in their unguarded camp with drinking-snatches, and old-country-staves: a storm might occur, with elemental crash: the succeeding silence of nature, and distant coming on of the patriot troops at midnight; their war-songs and marches nearer and nearer; the invaders surprised in their camp and in their cups; ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... of illumination, like that which comes to a dying man, in which his mind runs back over his long life and sees something of profound meaning in the elemental sorrow moving side by side with magnificent courage. Then follows the fight with the firedrake, in which Beowulf, wrapped in fire and smoke, is helped by the heroism of Wiglaf, one of his companions. The dragon is slain, but the fire has entered Beowulf's lungs and he knows that Wyrd is ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... ceased. A slow, placid smile—and yet, not quite a smile—it was rather an elemental content, a gratified drifting into the warm current of the stream of this world's being—spread over the woman's face; the man's long arm wrapped around his wealth, at once protecting and defiant; his head flung back against the world, ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... O'Grady was the first to reveal in a noble manner. He had the spirit of an ancient epic poet. He is a comrade of Homer, his birth delayed in time perhaps that he might renew for a sophisticated people the elemental simplicity and hardihood men had when the world was young and manhood was prized more than any of its parts, more than thought or beauty or feeling. He has created for us or rediscovered one figure which looms in the imagination as a high ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady

... without impairing its own self-respect and incurring the contempt of the rest of mankind. Yet, during these eighteen months not one thing has been done.... Never in the country's history has there been a more stupendous instance of folly than this crowning folly of waiting eighteen months after the elemental crash of nations took place before even making a start in an effort—and an utterly inefficient and insufficient effort-for some kind of preparation to ward off ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland

... inhabitants of southern Babylonia raised a native dynasty to the throne, liberated themselves from the yoke of the Zoroastrian Medes, and instituted an empire with several large capitals, where they built mighty temples and introduced the worship of the heavenly bodies in contradistinction to the elemental worship of the Magian Medes. The record of Babylonian kings is full of obscurity, even in the light of recent archaeological discoveries. We can trace, however, a gradual expansion of Babylonian dominion, even to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various

... pre-rational and monstrous often peeped out behind their serenity, as it does beneath the human soul, and there was certainly no lack of wildness and mystic horror in their apparitions. The ideal must needs betray those elemental forces on which, after all, it rests; but reason exists to exorcise their madness and win them over to a steady expression of themselves and of ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... evening was, and when first morn. Again, God said, Let there be firmament Amid the waters, and let it divide The waters from the waters; and God made The firmament, expanse of liquid, pure, Transparent, elemental air, diffused In circuit to the uttermost convex Of this great round; partition firm and sure, The waters underneath from those above Dividing: for as earth, so he the world Built on circumfluous waters calm, in wide Crystalline ocean, and the loud misrule Of Chaos far ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... and they were grand morality. They were, at the same time, customary phrases of the unfleshed in folly. They struck Fleetwood with a curious reminder of the puking inexperienced, whom he had seen subsequently plunge suicidally. He had a sharp vision of the attractive forces of the game; and his elemental nature exulted in siding with the stronger against a pretender to the superhuman. For Woodseer had spoken a trifle loftily, as quite above temptation. To see a forewarned philosopher lured to try the swim on those tides, pulled along the current, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... strength and vigor, Harry was very weary. But less from his long night's vigil than from the emotions that had torn him and left his heart heavy with the necessity of covering always this strong, elemental love that smoldered, waiting in abeyance until it ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine

... the romance of the forests with the romance of a man's heart, making a story that is big and elemental, while not lacking in sweetness and tenderness. It is an epic of the life of the lumbermen in the great forests of the Northwest, permeated in every line by out-of-door freshness and the glory of the labor of the struggle with nature. ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips

... Has the time come for the 20th century to uncover before a master work? A book as big, as elemental, as original as though the art of fiction began to-day."—Springfield Republican. (Entire ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... she! Beautiful as morning on the summer sea, Yet terrible as is the elemental gold That cleaves the tempest and in angles clings About its cloudy temples.—Manifold The dreams of daring in her fearless gaze, Fixed on the future's days; And round her brow, a strand of astral beads, Her soul's resplendent deeds; And ...
— An Ode • Madison J. Cawein

... slavery, remove intemperance, banish war and licentiousness, but they will have frightful reproduction in the elemental discord of our natures; for that which is "in us will be revealed." Man indicates his condition by the institutions he creates; they are the issues of the life he lives at the time, the outward sign ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... was unhappy! Ah, the dreadful days of cold rain mingled with sleet, when the world outside was more than impossible, and the house inside was a horror. The natives kept themselves alive by going about constantly working, dumb and elemental. But ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... the creation of images by force of imagination, and in pressing them on others as a "collective hallucination"; others, such as the moving of solid articles, either by an astral hand projected to draw them towards her, or by using an Elemental; others by reading in the Astral Light, and so on. But the proof of the reality of her mission from those whom she spoke of as Masters lay not in these comparatively trivial physical and mental phenomena, but in the splendour of her heroic endurance, the depth of her knowledge, the selflessness ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant

... They have not our culture, and whatsoever they borrow from us is only skin-deep. Beneath the varnish they are their elemental selves—lazy, cruel, treacherous and unscrupulous. No, no. Each race must keep to itself. Our strength in India depends on our exclusiveness—upon keeping ourselves apart and above as superior beings. So long ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie

... That was the keynote of the excesses of the French Revolution, for nothing arouses the fury of the unclean so much as cleanliness, and a man has been killed before now for daring to wash his hands. And it is this elemental love of destroying that has raged through Belgium in the last few months, for though destruction has been the policy of their commanders, the German soldier has done it for love. No order could ever comprehend the ingenious detail of much that we saw, for ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar

... shone as a portly abbot ruling over peaceful friars, but he was not born to ride a revolutionary whirlwind, nor to evoke order out of chaos. Past and Present were contending with each other in fierce elemental strife within his domain. A world was in dying agony, another world was coming, full-armed, into existence within the hand-breadth of time and of space where he played his little part, but he dreamed not of it. He passed away like a shadow, and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... It is not necessary to suppose that the Medes ever apostatized altogether from the worship of Ormazd, or formally surrendered their Dualistic faith. But, practically, the Magian doctrines and the Magian usages—elemental worship, divination with the sacred rods, dream expounding, incantations at the fire-altars, sacrifices whereat a Magus officiated—seem to have prevailed; the new predominated over the old; backed by the power of an organized hierarchy, Magism over-laid the primitive Arian creed, and, as time ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson

... situation of different individuals? But there are great wants, pertaining to every human being, into which all lesser ones run. There are things in a house that every one, high or low, rich or poor, ought, according to his means, to seek. I think I shall class them according to the elemental division of the old philosophers: Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. These form the groundwork of this need-be,—the sine-qua-nons of ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... of the age and country. With regard to the second, both parties were agreed in the belief of an intermediate state of purgation for the venial sins of the faithful; and whether their souls were purified by elemental fire was a doubtful point, which in a few years might be conveniently settled on the spot by the disputants. The claims of supremacy appeared of a more weighty and substantial kind; yet by the Orientals the Roman bishop ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... Hellenic view that the government of a state must be swayed by the body of men that enforces criminal responsibility in political matters. This vital power was still retained by the Comitia when criminal justice was concerned with those elemental facts which are the condition of the existence of a state. The people still took cognisance of treason in all its degrees—a conception which to the Roman mind embraced almost every possible form of ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... dominated the community, but he had never before come in actual contact with their arbitrary power, he had never before been faced by the overmastering weapon of their material possessions, the sheer weight of their wealth. It stirred him to revolt, elemental and bitter; every instinct rose against the despotic power ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... Through such a scene we recover the atmosphere of the Arabian Nights, and indeed look back into almost limitless antiquity. Possibly, could we follow the story which is thus related, we might discover that this also drew its elemental incidents from sources as old as the times ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various

... fixed upon the little vessel that was to convey him; yet it was painful to contemplate our very existence as depending upon her safety; to consider that a rough sea, a hidden rock, or the violence of elemental strife, might in one fatal moment precipitate us, with the little bark that had all our hopes on board, to the lowest abyss of misery. In the well-known ability and undoubted exertions of her commander however, under God, all placed their dependance; and from that principle, when she sailed, ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins

... society the ideal of wholeness has lost its force. Therefore its different sections have become detached and resolved into their elemental character of forces. Labour is a force; so also is Capital; so are the Government and the People; so are Man and Woman. It is said that when the forces lying latent in even a handful of dust are liberated from their bond of unity, they can lift the buildings ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... swift along the night Pass'd thy proud keel! nor shall I let go by Lightly of that drear hour the memory, When wet and chilly on thy deck I stood, Unbonnetted, and gazed upon the flood, Even till it seemed a pleasant thing to die,— To be resolv'd into th' elemental wave, Or take my portion with the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb

... the earlier observers were moved with wonder at the seeming contrast between the ancient and the present order of nature. The elemental forces seemed to have been grander and more energetic in primeval times. Upheaved and contorted, rifted and fissured, pierced by dykes of molten matter or worn away over vast areas by aqueous action, the older rocks appeared to bear witness to a state of things ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... American Revolution. "We hold these truths to be self-evident": it was the fanaticism of truism. But though Carlyle had no real respect for liberty, he had a real reverence for anarchy. He admired elemental energy. The violence which repelled most men from the Revolution was the one thing that attracted him to it. While a Whig like Macaulay respected the Girondists but deplored the Mountain, a Tory like ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton

... again, but in a different manner, Gaston Isbel had the fact flung at him that other men must suffer, perhaps die, for his hate. And the very soul of the old rancher apparently rose in Passionate revolt against the blind, headlong, elemental strength of his nature. So it seemed to Jean, who, in love and pity that hourly grew, saw through his father. Was it too late? Alas! Gaston Isbel could never be turned back! Yet something was altering ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey

... preposterousness of Mr. Jones' method is incredible. In the natural order of things, children would be taught a careful 'high standard' articulation as a part of their elemental training, when in their pliant age they are mastering the co-ordinations which are so difficult to acquire later. Then when they have been educated to speak correctly, their variation from that full pronunciation is a natural carelessness, and has the grace of ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges

... unlovely to her. She preferred the twitter and twaddle of Priscilla's workroom to the intense realities of an existence always verging on eternity. She dared to contrast those large, heroic fishers, with their immovable principles and their constant fight with all the elemental forces for their daily bread, with Roland Tresham; and to decide that Roland's delicate beauty, pretty, persuasive manners, and fashionable clothing were vastly superior attributes. So she was ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... suddenly slacked and he caught at its sagging loop to gave the anchor from loosening. He fired twice again at the balloon bag, and Pauline, clinging to his shoulder saw the monster that had held her a slave to its elemental power, that, like some winged gorgon had held her captive in the labyrinth of air, crumple and wither and fall at the prick of a bullet; saw it collapse into a mass of tangled leather and rope and slide in final ruin down the ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard

... first. It was a scene of mountain storm, painted as in an elemental fury. Inky pine branches slashed and hurled upward, downward, and across a tortured gray sky. A cloud-rack tore the void like a Valkyrie's cry made visible. One huge talon of lightning clutched at the ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa

... be seeming calm above, but no!— There is a pulse below which ceases not, A subterranean working, fiery hot, Deep in the million-hearted bosom, though Earthquakes unlock not the prodigious show Of elemental conflict; and this spot Nurses most quiet bones which lie and rot, And here the humblest weeds take root and grow. There is a calm upon the mighty sea, Yet are its depths alive and full of being, Enormous bulks that ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald

... and with the same, an elemental passion took possession of my mind; ousted all else. I had been anxious about the sheet, had thought John foolhardy. Now I didn't care. I could have cried out aloud for joy as the brave old craft rose to the seas with a marvellous easy motion and the waves ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... things that had come to him in that vast gulf of nocturnal thinking was some vivid self-examination. At last he got to that. He had been dragged down to very elemental things indeed by the manifest completeness of Lady Harman's return to her husband. He had had at last to look at himself starkly for the male he was, to go beneath the gentlemanly airs, the refined and elegant virilities of his habitual poses. Either this thing was ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... walked, erect, swift, purposeful, his moccasins falling always with the precision of a wild animal upon the best footing among the loose rocks, stubs of sage-roots, or patches of deep dust and sand beside the wagon-road, his sharp, high-featured face set in the stony calm which may hide a tumult of elemental passions beneath and give ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... frontier, and generally among those who spend their lives in, or on the borders of, the wilderness, life is reduced to its elemental conditions. The passions and emotions of these grim hunters of the mountains, and wild rough-riders of the plains, are simpler and stranger than those of people dwelling in more complicated states ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt

... "dream-visions" which William Sharp experienced shortly before his last illness, is headed "Elemental Symbolism," and was recorded by him ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... find that sacrifice and prayer are the resource of the pious and enlightened portion of the community, while magic is the refuge of the superstitious and ignorant. But when, still later, the conception of the elemental forces as personal agents is giving way to the recognition of natural law; then magic, based as it implicitly is on the idea of a necessary and invariable sequence of cause and effect, independent of personal will, reappears from the obscurity and discredit into ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... linguistic attainments of Marquette and his sincerity, one must credit this first example of eloquence and poetry of the western Indians, cultivated of life amid the elemental forces of the water, earth, and sky. [Footnote: It was of these same prairies, rivers, and skies, these same elemental ever-present forces, that Abraham Lincoln learned the simple, rugged eloquence that made him the most powerful soul that valley has known.] A beautiful ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... unregretted as unseen; or if the apathy be ever shaken off, even for an instant, it is only by what is gross, or what is extraordinary; and yet it is not in the broad and fierce manifestations of the elemental energies, not in the clash of the hail, nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the highest characters of the sublime are developed. God is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still, ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty

... in Maryland and Virginia (including the present West Virginia). Sometimes they would make an extended circuit through North Carolina, South Carolina, and even Georgia, everywhere bearing witness to the truth of the gospel and seeking to carry the most elemental forms of the Christian religion, preaching and prayer, to the primitive frontiersmen marooned along the outer fringe of white settlements. These arduous journeys in the cause of piety place this type of pioneer of the Old Southwest in alleviating contrast to the often relentless ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson

... were to supply teachers for these schools, were established by the Government. The authorities were now inclined to look upon the general Russian schools as the most effective agencies of "fusion," and put their greatest trust in the elemental process of Russification which had begun to sweep over the upper ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... magnetically attracting to himself a force sufficient to blot out Dewetsdorp in the presence of a bewildered enemy, who, though in overwhelming numbers, was feebly strung out in lengths without breadth. The British Army had still to learn, not only in the Free State, but also elsewhere, the elemental fact in geometry that neither one straight line nor two, nor under certain conditions even three, can enclose ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited

... critical part when a great flash of lightning leaped in at the broken window, stunning both of us and prostrating the girl. The candle went black out, leaving us in total darkness. When I recovered from the shock, the noise and elemental din were such that I could distinguish nothing. I waited a moment or two and then spoke. I received no answer. Half maddened, I got up and struck a fresh light, and looked around me. The traitor, the doubly-dyed villain had gone, he had taken the horse, and there was not ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera

... deep-rooted heart of humanity sweeps the living hail and thunder of the armies of the earth. These are the warp and first substance of the nations, divided not by dynasties but by climates, strong by unalterable privilege or weak by elemental fault, ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook

... Huron, like an offended and capricious mistress, seemed to be determined, at last, on fury, and threw herself into the most extravagant attitudes. I again had my tent pitched, and sat down quietly to wait till the tempest should subside; but up to a late hour at night the elemental war continued, and, committing myself to the Divine mercy, I put out my candle and retired ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... poetry all the spiritual aspiration and the eager search for knowledge of his time. He explored all domains of thought, and he enriched his verse with the fruit of his studies. All the great elemental forces are found in his poems: he is the laureate of love and sorrow, of grief and aspiration. Throughout his verse runs the great natural law that the man who is not pure in heart can never see the glory of the ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch

... fury, but met with superior force the crowd melts away, dissolving into its smaller groups and then into its individual elements. A crowd of the sort described constitutes one type of the incomplete group. It is a chance assembly, moved by a common purpose but coalescing only temporarily, guided by elemental impulses, and readily breaking up without permanent achievement other than ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... him to have also an elemental cunning which would dissuade him from violent measures so long as we were in Quebec. I resolved, therefore, not to avoid him, but ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert

... authority, their heavy, clumsy dress, their horrible huts, their stupid beards. . . . On the other hand, if we suppose that you work for long, long years, your whole life, that in the end some practical results are obtained, yet what are they, your results, what can they do against such elemental forces as wholesale ignorance, hunger, cold, degeneration? A drop in the ocean! Other methods of struggle are needed, strong, bold, rapid! If one really wants to be of use one must get out of the ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... the nerve to handle both, were frankly unconventional. Touched later by the black magic of development, bringing brick buildings, prohibition, picture shows, real-estate boosters, speculation and attendant evils or benefits as one chooses to classify them, they became neither elemental nor ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman

... monograph published some years ago: "His coloring reminds me at times of Grieg, but when I tracked the resemblance to its lair, I found only Scotch, as Grieg's grand-folk were Greggs, and from Scotland. It is all Northern music with something elemental in it, and absolutely free from the heavy, languorous odors of the South or ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... done in the open air. When the lulls of the rain-storms would intervene, some unusually cleanly emigrant would climb to the deck, with a bucket of slops, to toss into the sea. No experience seemed sufficient to instruct some of these ignorant people in the simplest, and most elemental principles of ocean-life. Spite of all lectures on the subject, several would continue to shun the leeward side of the vessel, with their slops. One morning, when it was blowing very fresh, a simple fellow pitched over a gallon or two of something to windward. Instantly it flew ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... for rain,' said he on one occasion, when the collect had been read; 'and for other elemental influence with humble confidence. For if it be true, as the Roman annalists relate, that their augurs could, by certain rites and imprecations, produce thunder-storms—if it be certain that thunder and lightning were successfully ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... a right to ask this question in the here or in the hereafter,—in this world or in any world in which he may find himself? If the All-wise wishes to satisfy his reasonable and reasoning creatures, it will not be by a display of elemental convulsions, but by the still small voice, which treats with him as a dependent entitled to know the meaning of his existence, and if there was anything wrong in his adjustment to the moral and spiritual conditions ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... With all these symbols the name of HERMES is indissolubly connected. His are the Wings of Courage, the Rod of Science, and the Helmet of Secrecy. And his, too, is the Sword of Power, the strong and steadfast Will, by which the elemental forces are overcome and controlled, and the monsters of the abyss bound in obedience,—those spiritual dragons and chimeras that ravage the hopes of humanity and would fain devour the "King's Daughter." For Hermes—Archangel, Messenger of Heaven, and slayer of Argos the hundred-eyed ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... revolution. I do not believe he did. But he wanted his chance, that outburst of popular resentment which would bring him to the front, with the excitement, the sense of power that would come from the response of the nation when his angry voice translated into words its elemental passion. ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous

... I am a simple man, and always prefer to reduce things to elemental simplicity. I raise no opposition, but I express my opinion. Nature is one ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay

... play of water. Energy himself is presented as a nude male, typically American, standing in his stirrups astride a snorting charger - an exultant super-horse needing no rein - commanding with grandly elemental gesture of extended arms, the passage of the Canal. Growing from his shoulders, winged figures of Fame and Valor with trumpet, sword and laurel, forming a crest above his controlling head, acclaim his triumph. The Fountain embodies the mood of joyous, exultant power and exactly expresses the ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James

... concrete whole of religious consciousness, is, and will always remain, the primary way to the secret of religion—religion in its "first intention"—as the experience of time-duration is the only possible way to the elemental meaning of time. It has in recent years in many quarters become the fashion to call this "interior insight," this appreciation of religion from within, "mysticism"; and to assume that here in mysticism we come upon the very essence of religion. This conclusion, however, is as narrow ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... a liar in the lightning of heaven over the telegraphic wires. Let us get over our surprise. The lie is human altogether, not elemental at all. The operator has his private object to carry, the partisan his political end to serve, the government itself flatters the people it fears with incorrect accounts of military movements and fortified posts and the numbers of dead and wounded on either side. Kinglake ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... communications, have concentrated, altered or at least disguised the fundamental geographical simplicity of this descending hierarchy from mountain-hamlet to ocean-metropolis; but it is useful for the student constantly to recover the elemental and naturalist-like point of view even in the greatest cities. At times we all see London as still fundamentally an agglomeration of villages, with their surviving patches of common, around a mediaeval seaport; or we discern even in the utmost magnificence of Paris, say its ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes

... state, and indeed all the assumed foundations of society—are, as I have already suggested, rarely the result of reasoned consideration, but of unthinking absorption from the social environment in which we live. Consequently, they have about them a quality of "elemental certitude", and we especially resent doubt or criticism cast upon them. So long, however, as we revere the whisperings of the herd, we are obviously unable to examine them dispassionately and to consider to what extent they are suited ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson

... active elements attract our special notice; we admire the massive mountains which overhang and dominate the lowlands covered with the settlements of man. So also in the domain of history we are attracted by epochs at which the elemental forces, whose joint action or tempered antagonism has produced states and kingdoms, rise in sudden war against each other, and amidst the surging sea of troubles upheave into the light new formations, which give to subsequent ages their special character. Such a ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... thoroughly anglicized Welsh of Cornwall. Otherwise, the infusion of new blood into the English race on this side of the Atlantic has been chiefly from three sources—German, Irish, and Norse; and these three sources represent the elemental parts of the composite English stock in about the same proportions in which they were originally combined,—mainly Teutonic, largely Celtic, and with a Scandinavian admixture. The descendant of the German becomes as much ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt

... that the harmless Mexican ritual was supplemented with the blood of human sacrifices, which drenched the altars of their war-god, Huitzilopochtli, and the tearing out of the hearts of the victims on the summit of the Teocali may be regarded as a direct survival of the elemental-worship of their Turanian ancestors ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot

... relaxed against him, mingling in to him. And he let himself go from past and future, was reduced to the moment with her. In which he took her and was with her and there was nothing beyond, they were together in an elemental embrace beyond their superficial foreignness. But in the morning he was uneasy again. She was still foreign and unknown to him. Only, within the fear was pride, belief in himself as mate for her. And she, everything forgotten in her new hour of coming to life, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... Eevning was, and when first Morn. 260 Again, God said, let ther be Firmament Amid the Waters, and let it divide The Waters from the Waters: and God made The Firmament, expanse of liquid, pure, Transparent, Elemental Air, diffus'd In circuit to the uttermost convex Of this great Round: partition firm and sure, The Waters underneath from those above Dividing: for as Earth, so hee the World Built on circumfluous Waters calme, in wide 270 Crystallin Ocean, and the loud misrule Of Chaos ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... mineralogic aspect of positivism—or Iron that strove to break away from Sulphur and Oxygen, and be real, homogeneous Iron—failing, inasmuch as elemental iron exists ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... that sentence, that nothing exists in thought which is not in sensation, is not the whole truth. Manas, the sixth sense, adds to the sensations its own pure elemental nature. What is that nature that you find thus added? It is the establishment of a relation, that is really what the mind adds. All thinking is the "establishment of relations," and the more closely you look into that phrase, the more you will ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant

... red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of nature! Are you well up ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Thy laws in Nature's works appear;— I own myself corrupt and weak, Yet will I pray, for thou wilt hear! Thou, who canst guide the wandering star Through trackless realms of AEther's space; Who calm'st the elemental war, Whose hand from pole to pole I trace: Thou, who in wisdom placed me here, Who, when thou wilt, can take me hence, Ah! whilst I tread this earthly sphere, Extend to me thy wide defence. To Thee, my God, to Thee I call! Whatever ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore

... their civilization and in their instruction. Gentlemen, we ask nothing that would unsex ourselves. We do not expect to do man's work; we can never pass the limits which nature herself has set. But we ask for justice; we ask for removal of unnatural restrictions that are contrary to the elemental spirit of the civil law; we do not ask for rights, but for permission to assume our ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... anything to believe. That's neither here nor there. But—Enoch, if anybody should cut my right hand off—Enoch"—Her voice fell brokenly. She was a New England woman, accustomed neither to analyze nor talk. She could only suffer in the elemental way of dumb things who sometimes need a language of the heart. One thing she knew. The man was hers; and if she reft herself away from ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown

... the Kentucky Hills is in Charles Neville Buck's novels. In interpreting its elemental life, and its big-boned and big-hearted people, he takes his place ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... Beethoven's "large and artless forms" rather than that of formal lyric poetry. He had heard Von Buelow conduct the Peabody Orchestra in a symphony based on one of Uhland's poems, in which only the simple elemental words were retained, "leaving all else to his hearers' imaginations." This served as a model for ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... limited straitly, the making of it becomes a struggle of genius against material conditions; and its successful accomplishment is comparable with the perfect presentment by a great poet of some well-worn elemental truth in a sonnet—of which the triumphant beauty comes less from the integral concept than from the exquisite felicity of expression that gives freshness to a hackneyed subject treated in accordance with severely ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier

... theoretical, or sentimental world. In this respect commercial life is more favorable to naturalness and virility; while a fair amount of manual labor is conducive to sanity, mental poise, and sound judgment as to the facts of life. The minister must have an elemental knowledge of and respect for objective reality; and he ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben

... the secret of all prevailing romance: it is the secret of all stories of adventure and chivalry of the simpler and more primitive order; and in one aspect it is true that R. L. Stevenson loved and clung to the primitive and elemental, if it may not be said, as one distinguished writer has said, that he even loved savagery in itself. But hardly could it be seriously held, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... manner, putting in a tired word or two now and then. She admitted that one or two was by way of being precious bits. "Rather precious in an elemental way," she would say. "Of course I am trying to develop the psychology of the line." ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... abode— Thus, long imprison'd in a rugged way Where Phoebus' daughters never aim'd to stray, The Muse, that tuned to barbarous sounds her string, Now spreads, like Daedalus, a bolder wing; The verse begins in softer strains to flow, 410 Replete with sad variety of woe. As yet, amid this elemental war, Where Desolation in his gloomy car Triumphant rages round the starless void, And Fate on every billow seems to ride; Nor toil, nor hazard, nor distress appear To sink the seamen with unmanly fear. Though their firm hearts ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... after he had decided upon the use of nickel and iron as the elemental metals for his storage battery, Edison established a chemical plant at Silver Lake, New Jersey, a few miles from the Orange laboratory, on land purchased some time previously. This place was the scene of the further experiments to develop the various chemical forms of nickel and iron, and to determine ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... some sense in that. What man does not enjoy being admired while he does things? In fact Jane had hit upon a great elemental truth when she suggested this. From that moment ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche

... fugitive slave law; for it gave occasion for 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'" Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had been mistress of a station on the Underground Railroad at Cincinnati, the storm-center of the West, and out of her experience she has transmitted to the world a knowledge of the elemental and tragic human experiences of the slaves which would otherwise have been restricted to a select few. The mistress of a similar station in eastern Indiana, though she held novel reading a deadly sin, said: "'Uncle Tom's Cabin' is not a novel, it is a record of facts. I myself have listened ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy

... ELEMENTS OR UNITS OF THE BODY.— Physiologists agree that the whole organism consists of a multitude of elemental parts, which are to a great extent independent of one another. Each organ, says Claude Bernard, has its proper life, its autonomy; it can develop and reproduce itself independently of the adjoining tissues. A great German authority, Virchow, ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler

... replied, 'perhaps you are right from the common-sense point of view. Nevertheless, I know that Price did not die by any human agency. It is too ghastly; I can still see that green shadow hovering above his body on the couch. The huge shadow, the Elemental, the spirit of Ombos—whatever you like to call it—was there in that room with Price. It was there in a form that could be seen and felt. It is something more substantial than an ordinary shadow ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips

... have stepped down from their pedestals and put on our livery. We cannot always master them, neither can we always master our servant, the horse, but we have put a bridle on the wildest natural agencies. The mob of elemental forces is as noisy and turbulent as ever, but the standing army of civilization keeps it well under, ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... of romance, of chivalry, of deep religious feeling, and yet seems like the childhood of modernity. Is it the fault of crudity in pictorial art, or the fault of romances that we look upon those distant people as more elemental than we, and thus feel for them the indulgent compassion that a child excites? However it is, theirs is to us a simple time of primitive emotion and romance, and the tapestries they have ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... big fists were clenched so savagely that the knuckles stood out white from the brown tan of the flesh. "This is a man's country. It's new—close to nature. What he wants he takes—if he's strong enough. I'm elemental. I—" ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine

... There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse. The water itself, that dances, and sings, and slakes the wonderful thirst—symbol and picture of that draught for which the woman of Samaria made her prayer to Jesus—this lovely ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... dogma. The oracle is dumb, and the end of it all is rather like a prayer. At one moment Shelley toys with the dreary sublimity of the Stoic notion of world-cycles. The world in the Stoic cosmogony followed its destined course, until at last the elemental fire consumed it in the secular blaze, which became for mediaeval Christianity the Dies irae. And then once more it rose from the conflagration to repeat its own history again, and yet again, and for ever with an ineluctable fidelity. That ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... East it welled and whitened; the darkness trembled into light; and the stars were extinguished like the street-lamps of a human city. The whiteness brightened into silver; the silver warmed into gold, and the gold kindled into pure and living fire; and the face of the East was barred with elemental scarlet. The day drew its first long breath, steady and chill; and for leagues around the woods sighed and shivered. And then, at one bound the sun had floated up; and her startled eyes received day's first arrow, and quailed under ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... leader had now appeared. Toussaint l'Ouverture, though probably not of pure negro blood, was born at Breda in the north of Hayti in 1746. His mental gifts were formidable; and when sharpened by education and by long contact with whites, they enabled him to play upon the elemental passions of his kindred, to organize them, to lead them to the fight, to cure their wounds, and to overawe their discontent. A barbarian in his outbursts of passion, and a European in organizing power, he became a zealot in the Republican cause. A quarrel with another masterful negro, Jean Francois, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... elemental war, But straws to show its course. Ye toiled, and won, Or lost; your people bled—yet slow and far The mighty cause of man ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... had screamed and the rain had beaten against the windows, so that even here in the heart of great, hand-made London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of life and to recognise the presence of those great elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilisation, like untamed beasts in a cage. As evening drew in, the storm grew higher and louder, and the wind cried and sobbed like a child in ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... blue-eyed prophet!—thou, to whom The earliest world-day light that ever flowed, Through Casa Guidi Windows chanced to come! Now shake the glittering nimbus of thy hair, And be God's witness that the elemental New springs of life are gushing everywhere To cleanse the watercourses, and prevent all Concrete obstructions which infest the air! That earth's alive, and gentle or ungentle Motions within her, signify but growth!— The ground swells ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... personally loathed this way of thinking, and how radically false, hollow and disgusting it seemed to me then, and seems to me now.' The crash of 1848 came like a thunderbolt, and 'history seemed to have come to life again with all its wild elemental forces.' For the first time he was aware of actual war within a small distance, and the settlement of great questions by sheer force. 'How well I remember my own feelings, which were, I think, the feelings of the great ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... trade, the violence and turbulence which accompanied the movement—all of these were the signs of a great movement by the class of the unskilled, which had finally risen in rebellion. This movement, rising as an elemental protest against oppression and degradation, could be but feebly restrained by any considerations of expediency and prudence; nor, of course, could it be restrained by any lessons from experience. But, ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman

... This elemental struggle was to resolve itself into one between Aryan and non-Aryan—the Slav and the Finn; and this again into one between the various members of the Slavonic family; then a life-and-death struggle with Asiatic barbarism in its worst form (the Mongol), with Tatar and Turk always remaining ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele

... the elemental instinct of self-preservation that swayed the men and determined their actions. Oh, there was plenty of sympathy for me, and for Holy Joe and Newman; there was rage on our account; but underlying the sympathy and rage was a very terrible fear. It was a fear of death, a fear ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer

... marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter. It is true the pomp and the pageantry are swept away, but the essential elements remain,—the day and the night, the mountain and the valley, the elemental play and succession and the perpetual presence of the infinite sky. In winter the stars seem to have rekindled their fires, the moon achieves a fuller triumph, and the heavens wear a look of a more exalted simplicity. ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs

... prostitute beauty to the needs of magazinedom. What was it you quoted me the other day?—Oh, yes, 'Man, the latest of the ephemera.' Well, what do you, the latest of the ephemera, want with fame? If you got it, it would be poison to you. You are too simple, too elemental, and too rational, by my faith, to prosper on such pap. I hope you never do sell a line to the magazines. Beauty is the only master to serve. Serve her and damn the multitude! Success! What in hell's success if it isn't right there in your Stevenson ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... knew all beauty—when they thought The air chimed like a stricken lyre, The elemental birds were wrought, The golden birds ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various

... neither of interest nor significance. Naturally, the judge takes account of nothing but deeds; to religion, which probes more deeply, the intent is of importance; to the psychologist, however, who attempts to penetrate still further, the elemental germinative processes of volition are ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... There are four kinds of Sacrifices: the loka Sacrifice, the Sacrifice of special rites, the eternal domestic Sacrifice, and the Sacrifice consisting in the gratification derived by man from his enjoyment of the five elemental substances and their compounds. It is from these four kinds of Sacrifice that the universe has sprung. Kapardin constructed that bow using as materials the first and the fourth kinds of Sacrifices. The ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... but he could not have set down his reasons in so many words. As for the little lad "Betty"—was not the affection they lavished upon him that which manhood ever owes to the weak and helpless. Search London over and you will not find elemental goodness in a shape more worthy than it was to be found in the caves—nor can we forego a moment's reflection upon the cant which ever preaches the vice of the poor and so rarely stops to ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton

... to these questions would all go to show that at the time when religion was the great controlling and organising force in conduct, the prime elemental dogmas were accepted with the most vivid conviction of reality. I do not pretend that the common people followed all the inferences which the intellectual subtlety of the master-spirits of theology drew so industriously from the simple premisses of scripture and tradition. But assuredly dogma ...
— On Compromise • John Morley

... Such an elemental fury can not last long. Having torn up the ponderous trees, overturned rocks, and cleaned out the stream, the cyclone seemed to mount upward and leave the earth entirely, probably to descend some miles away and continue its work ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis

... it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... revolt already germinating within us; and although we were against slavery, our sympathies were with the South. We were natural as well as political democrats, and even when the mob was in the wrong, I always became one of it. How finely elemental, how responsive to the best and the worst, is the mob when the ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... have long cherished an affection for that elemental type of tale which Americans call the 'dime novel' and which we know as the 'shocker'—the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities, and march just inside the borders of the possible. During an illness last winter I exhausted my store of those aids to cheerfulness, ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan

... tradition, man's "power over nature" is currently postulated as the characteristic fact of industrial productivity. This industrial power over nature is taken to include man's power over the life of the beasts and over all the elemental forces. A line is in this way drawn between mankind ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... investigation before endeavoring to demonstrate the remedy by means of which this number might be increased, so as finally to include all earnest souls. An immature statement would impair the authority of the more elemental truth he had sought to establish; but he hoped in a subsequent volume to complete the exposition of this last step ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant

... "quiet" for "whist," if you want the full sense. Then you may indeed foot it featly, and sweet spirits bear the burden for you—with watch in the night, and call in early morning. The vis viva in elemental transformation follows—"Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made." Then, giving rest after labour, it "fetches dew from the still vext Bermoothes, and, with a charm joined to their suffered labour, leaves men asleep." Snatching away the feast of the cruel, it seems ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... no Puritan. She had been out in the world, she had come up against the elemental in life, she had learned that God in His wisdom had peopled the earth with saints and sinners,—and she was tolerant of both! In a word, she was broad-minded. She had been an observer rather than a participant in the passing show. She had absorbed ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon

... Loge looks after them in mingled irony and contempt. "There they hasten to their end, who fancy themselves so firmly established in being. I am almost ashamed to have anything to do with them...." And he revolves in his mind a scheme for turning into elemental fire again and burning them all up, those blind gods. He is nonchalantly adding himself to their train, when from the Rhine below rises the lament of the Rhine-daughters, begging that their gold may be given back to them. Wotan pauses with his ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall

... rock masses without calling up some gigantic upheaval of all nature's vast play of forces; earthquakes, fire, volcano, flood, wind, sand spouts of enormous height and velocity, one after the other all these elemental storms must have rocked and heaved and rent and tortured the earth and after all had passed by, the hurricane of volcanic fire and missiles must have scattered the debris of high mountains twisted into lumps of matter, varying in size from a sky ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon

... painting, in the romantic poetry of this century with us, the same stages are manifest. Age parallels age. Tennyson in artistic technique is Virgilian, we are aware of the style; but both Virgil and Tennyson remain classic in matter, in universality, and the elemental in man. Browning in substance is Euripidean, being individualistic, psychologic, problematic, with special pleading; classicism had departed from him, and left not even the style behind. The great opposition lies in the subject of interest. Is it to know ourselves in ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... bolted. The power of the Night penetrates even into the luxurious apartments of kings, even into the cellars of the slums. But if it is potent in these, how much more is it potent in its free unrestricted domain, the open country. He who sleeps under the stars is bathed in the elemental forces which in houses only creep to us through keyholes. I may say from experience that he who has slept out of doors every day for a month, nay even for a week, is at the end of that time a new man. He ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... means an environment of month-long nights and concentrated summers, in which all feelings are intensified, and love and dread and gratitude and longing are nearer and deeper than in milder and more temperate regions, where elemental opposites are, as it were, ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun

... first read the poem is not only an effort, but is to most people, at all events, an unsuccessful effort. What is true of 'Hudibras' is true also, though in an inconceivably smaller degree, of those great works of imagination which deal with the elemental facts of human character and human passion. Yet even on these, time does, though lightly, lay his hand. Wherever what may be called "historic sympathy" is required, there will be some diminution ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... ritual of his profession. Notwithstanding his evident and expressed desire to return to a haven of peace and luxury, he was far too conscientious a criminal to violate the soundest—it may well be said, the elemental—law of his craft, by pleading guilty ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon

... a blinding glare from the arcs, a confusion of voices, a wilderness of scenery and "props" all combined to create an impression quite the reverse of what he had expected. Here, he felt, was something very different from the theater, something bigger, yet more elemental, in which vast sums were expended daily to amuse a vaster indeed, a world-wide, audience. He sat down upon a box, and inspected the ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks

... would call a professor, and taught rhetoric for his support, which was a lucrative and honorable calling. He became a master of words. From words he ascended to definitions, and like all true inquirers began to love the definite, the precise. He wanted a basis to stand upon. He sought certitudes,—elemental truths which sophistry could not cover up. Then the Manicheans could no longer satisfy him. He had doubts, difficulties, which no Manichean could explain, not even Dr. Faustus of Mileve, the great oracle and leader of the sect,—a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... as we find them to-day. The spirit of liberty was weak at first, but her demands grew apace with her strength. Neither by the generosity of princes, nor by the wisdom of legislation, were the ordinary English rights of free citizenship enlarged and established. Nor are the first and elemental principles of free government which we find springing up on English soil after the conquests, and whose history in the re-establishment of political liberty we shall trace through countless struggles and repressions, the original of that divine idea of freedom which it ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... much to bear the elemental commission of Nature, as the military warrant of Congress, swarthy Paul darted hither and thither; hovering like a thundercloud off the crowded harbors; then, beaten off by an adverse wind, discharging his lightnings on uncompanioned vessels, whose solitude made ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville

... these names: mercurius means that which makes bodies liquid, sulfur, that which makes them combustible, sal, that which makes them fixed and rigid. From these are compounded the four elements, each of which is ruled by elemental spirits—earth by gnomes or pygmies, water by undines or nymphs, air by sylphs, fire by salamanders (cf. with this, and with Paracelsus's theory of the world as a whole, Faust's two monologues in Goethe's drama); which are to be ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg



Words linked to "Elemental" :   elementary, element, basic, elements, primary



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