"Excursive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... regions of eternal day; Creation's various wonders to explore, A radiant sea of light, without a shore! Then, too, that spark of intellectual fire Which burn'd thro' life, and never shall expire, Which, oft' on earth deplored its bounded view, And still from sphere to sphere excursive flew, The mind, upborne on intuition's wings, Thro' Truth's bright regions, momentary, springs, And, piercing at one view the maze of fate, Smiles at the ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... seemed to exult in having such important antagonists. He talked with greater volubility than ever, and soon drowned them with declamation on the subject of taxes, poor's rates, and the national debt. Master Simon endeavoured to brush along in his usual excursive manner, which had always answered amazingly well with the villagers; but the radical was one of those pestilent fellows that pin a man down to facts, and, indeed, he had two or three pamphlets in his ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... curious instance in what manner the censors of books clipped the wings of genius when it was found too daring or excursive. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Hercules cult, show the results of these early habits of work. It must always be noticed, however, that in his mature art he is master of his vast hoard of material. There is never, as in the Culex and Ciris, a display of irrelevant facts, a yielding to the temptation of being excursive and episodic. Wherever the work had received the final touch, the composition shows ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... intention to confine our remarks to the work above mentioned, we shall deem no apology necessary for the somewhat excursive nature of this article, which would not answer our present purpose, if we were obliged to follow the costive details of the venerable FRANCIS GLISSON, whose villanous bad style, and execrable latin, are only to be excused ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... of some strange adventures Had gone before him, and his wars and loves; And as romantic heads are pretty painters, And, above all, an Englishwoman's roves[kq] Into the excursive, breaking the indentures Of sober reason, wheresoe'er it moves, He found himself extremely in the fashion, Which serves our thinking people for ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... to the heath; Dancing in mirky night, o'er fen and lake, He glows, to draw you downward to your death, In his bewitch'd, low, marshy, willow brake! What though far off, from some dark dell espied, 95 His glimmering mazes cheer the excursive sight, Yet turn, ye wanderers, turn your steps aside, Nor trust the guidance of that faithless light; For watchful, lurking, 'mid the unrustling reed, At those mirk hours the wily monster lies, 100 And listens oft to hear the passing ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... and he has nothing else to give. Among benches he may be powerful; but seated on a chair he is quite another person. On the other hand, we may affirm, that one of the best companions is a man who, to the accuracy and research of a profession, has joined a free excursive acquaintance with various learning, and caught from it the spirit of ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... than I expected." His frequent references to history, his allusions to various kinds of knowledge, and his images selected from art and nature, with his observations on the operations of the mind and the modes of life, show an intelligence perpetually on the wing, excursive, vigorous, and diligent, eager to pursue knowledge, and attentive to retain it. From this curiosity arose the desire of travelling, to which he alludes in his verses to Jervas, and which, though he never found ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... nothing edifying in such an edifice. From that piece of monotony to the prawn is already a good step; and how far above that is the seal! how do we surpass them both, as well as the seastar, the crab, and the lobster, my trustiest cousin, in our excursive irregularities, which defy all the mathematicians in the world to find an expression for their law. But coz, pray where did you get those two gorgeous teeth? the incomparable couple cut a grand and gloomy figure there across the chasm ... of your unfathomable mouth, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... sleeves to his shoulders, and pervade all parts of the house in an apron of coarse green baize; moreover, he was more strongly tempted on Saturdays than on other days (it being a busy time), to make excursive bolts into the neighbouring alleys when he answered the door, and there to play at leap-frog and other sports with vagrant lads, until pursued and brought back by the hair of his head or the lobe of his ear; thus he ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... a student of Trinity College, Dublin, and he remained there until 1748, when he took his Bachelor's degree. These five years do not appear to have been spent in strenuous industry in the beaten paths of academic routine. Like so many other men of great gifts, Burke in his youth was desultory and excursive. He roamed at large over the varied heights that tempt our curiosity, as the dawn of intelligence first lights them up one after another with bewitching visions and illusive magic. "All my studies," Burke wrote in 1746, when he was in the midst of them, "have rather proceeded from ...
— Burke • John Morley
... during one of our long excursive talks, "ondoubted, the ways an' the motives of Injuns is past the white man's findin' out. He's shore a myst'ry, the Injun is! an' where the paleface forever fails of his s'lootion is that the latter ropes at this problem in copper-colour from the standp'int of ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... the Basin way of proceeding to get a nail put in the horse's shoe meant a day of widely excursive incident and pleasure, in which the main or stated object was cast far from our poetical vision. ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... mid-day, and the time necessary for accomplishing the ascent with the prospect of returning by daylight, was too limited; so, with reluctance, I gave up the idea. The season at which I visited Gavarnie was, indeed, too late (it was the 9th of October,) to admit of being very excursive, for long days and steady weather are absolutely necessary to enable one to do justice to mountain-scenery. I resolved, however, to remain within the Circus as long as I could, and, after descending to the Pont de Neige, from whose blue depths ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... glance off; wheel about, face about; turn to the right about, face to the right about; waddle &c. (oscillate) 314; go out of one's way &c. (perform a circuit) 629; lose one's way. Adj. deviating &c. v.; aberrant, errant; excursive, discursive; devious, desultory, loose; rambling; stray, erratic, vagrant, undirected, circuitous, indirect, zigzag; crab-like. Adv. astray from, round about, wide of the mark; to the right about; all manner of ways; circuitously &c. 629. obliquely, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... painted by themselves, because they would have their lives, like the walls that encircle their town houses, impervious to the curious excursive eye; they have not been painted by themselves, because, secondly, the power of depicting graphically what they are in the daily habit of seeing, is not in them, not having been cultivated by study and practice; and thirdly, not being stimulated to literary activity ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... In those excursive reveries, fed by hope and winged with dream, which scour the glens and scale the peaks of the land of thought, this nook of hypothesis must some time be discovered. And, brought to light, it has much to interest and to please; but it ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... same year. On this occasion he selected a subject very congenial to his own turn of thought and favorite study, the influence of Italian upon English literature. He had previously gained another prize for an English essay on the philosophical writings of Cicero. This essay is perhaps too excursive from the prescribed subject; but his mind was so deeply imbued with the higher philosophy, especially that of Plato, with which he was very conversant, that he could not be expected to dwell much on the praises of ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... became excursive, discretionary, almost capricious; but in every phase and form it continued to be beneficent. In 1808 he founded a prize in Glasgow College, as an acknowledgment of "the many favors that learned body had ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... ranikaboo liar on earth, an' I don't mind him nor his fabrications, none whatever. He's one of these yere amiable gents who's merely aimin' to entertain you an' elevate your moods; an' carryin' out sech plans, he sort o' spreads himse'f, an' gets excursive in conversation, castin' loose from facts as vain things onworthy of him. Thar used to be jest sech a mendacious party who camps 'round Wolfville for a while—if I don't misrecollect, he gets plugged standin' up a through stage, final—who is ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... prepared for professions, and marriage is not considered as the grand feature in their lives; whilst women, on the contrary, have no other scheme to sharpen their faculties. It is not business, extensive plans, or any of the excursive flights of ambition, that engross their attention; no, their thoughts are not employed in rearing such noble structures. To rise in the world, and have the liberty of running from pleasure to pleasure, they must marry advantageously, and to this object their time is sacrificed, ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... of design and composition. As, in his daily prayers, the Mussulman of Fez or Delhi still turns his face towards the temple of Mecca, the historian's eye shall be always fixed on the city of Constantinople. The excursive line may embrace the wilds of Arabia and Tartary, but the circle will be ultimately reduced to the decreasing limit of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... air softened into a bland and delightful temperature. Dolphins began to play about us; the nautilus came floating by, like a fairy ship, with its mimic sail and rainbow tints; and flying-fish, from time to time, made their short excursive flights, and occasionally fell upon the deck. The cloaks and overcoats in which we had hitherto wrapped ourselves, and moped about the vessel, were thrown aside; for a summer warmth had succeeded to the late wintry chills. Sails were stretched as awnings over the ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving |
