"First-hand" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of these texts was coincident with a returning desire to observe nature. Albert, with all his scholasticism, was no contemptible naturalist. He may be said to have begun first-hand plant study in modern times so far as literary records are concerned. His book De vegetabilibus contains excellent observations, and he is worthy of inclusion among the fathers of botany. In his vast treatise De animalibus, hampered as he is by his learning and verbosity, he shows ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... to leave Marseilles before summer; but whether this was the only cause of the long sojourn of the Sand party in the great commercial city, or whether there were others, I have not been able to discover. Happily, we have first-hand information—namely, letters of Chopin and George Sand—to throw a little light on these months of the pianist-composer's life. As to his letters, their main contents consist of business matters—wranglings about terms, abuse of publishers, &c. Here and there, however, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the University of Michigan being thus employed in path-hunting upon a lonely mountain-top in Mexico. Truly, adversity brings us strange bedfellows; but far stranger are the straits into which a man comes who takes up with the study of archaeology at first-hand. But my path-hunting was without result, for nowhere along the edge of the plateau was there a break fit for the descent of any creature save such as had wings. At the end of near an hour the clouds once more lifted; and then I saw Rayburn coming towards me, but with a serious look upon his ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... nothing new in such an effort. In slack ages of poetic inspiration, however, the versifiers have no vision of the world, but only of its pale mirrored reflections in visions dead and gone, and some jolt is needed to bring the poets back to first-hand observation. Such a jolt are the new poets. Spoon River is a medicine, a splendid tonic. But the form of Spoon River is not conditioned by eternal needs, only by temporary ones. Its complete absence of loveliness, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... there in two campaigns, I believe. Appointed colonel of the 10th of the Line in February, 1869, he was stationed at Lorient and at Limoges during the eighteen months before the war with Germany. He busied himself during this period with the preparation of his work, soliciting from all sides first-hand information. It was slow in coming in, due certainly to indifference rather than ill-will. He made several trips to Paris for the purpose of opening the eyes of those in authority to the defective state of the army and the perils of the situation. Vain attempts! 'They take all that ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... in its infancy. Many recent attempts at classification of temperaments rest upon as impressionistic a basis as the popular fourfold division into sanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phlegmatic. Two of the efforts to define temperamental differences rest, however, upon first-hand study of cases. Dr. June E. Downey has devised a series of tests based upon handwriting material for measuring will traits. In her pamphlet The Will Profile she presents an analysis of twelve volitional traits: revision, perseverance, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... more than a free paraphrase of Ambrose. The first book of the Itinerarium contains some additional facts; and the whole of the Latin version is adorned with dowers of rhetoric which are foreign to the style of Ambrose. But it is no longer possible to regard the Itinerarium as a first-hand narrative. Stubbs's edition of the Itinerarium (Rolls Series, 1864), in which the contrary hypothesis is maintained, appeared before Gaston Paris published his ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... singularly unlike a detective—which, I suppose, is how a detective wants to look—was taking the air on the football field when I left the house next morning for a before-breakfast stroll. The sight of him filled me with a desire for first-hand information on the subject of the man Mr MacGinnis supposed me to be and also of Mr MacGinnis himself. I wanted to be assured that my friend Buck, despite appearances, was a placid person whose bark was worse than ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... to have these accounts at first-hand of our son's unalloyed happiness in the last seven months of his life. Countless brave men, gifted and simple, eminent and obscure, have sacrificed their lives in this War, none with more complete self-surrender than Paul Jones. In War as ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... deliver through the medium of an art which he seriously studied and deeply loved. It spoke from the very depths of his being, and the poems in which it found utterance, whatever their purely literary qualities, have at least the value of a first-hand human document, the sincere self-portraiture of ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... to the evening routine of its family in the country, the atmosphere of Government and the Underground still hanging round it. For sundry whiffs of the mysterious city reached the children's nostrils, bringing thrills of some strange, remote reality they had never known at first-hand. They busied themselves at once. While Tim unbuttoned the severe black coat and pulled it off, Judy brought a jacket of dingy tweed from behind a curtain in the corner, and stood on a chair to help the figure put it on. All knew their duties; the performance went ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... As I supposed, it was not there. Roughly I added the totals of the different sheets and compared them, with the 412 millions we had given the public, which was now indelibly, the world over, a matter of record. Again I stopped to congratulate myself on my good fortune in securing this first-hand evidence of the fraud that had been practised ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... had at last beamed upon him, he laid up his lugger, wound up his affairs, and hurried off to Sydney, secretly, to dispose of his prize first-hand. An expert weighed the treasure, scrutinised it shrewdly through a microscope, and handed it back with a casual remark that it was a pretty curio, but that its market value was about half a crown. "It has been exposed to great heat, and may crumble to pieces at a ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... physical optics, e.g. those of P. K. L. Drude, A. Schuster, R. W. Wood, have been written largely on the basis of the general physics of the aether; while the Collected Papers of Lord Rayleigh should be accessible to all who desire a first-hand knowledge of the development of the optical side of the subject. See also MOLECULE, ELECTRICITY, LIGHT and RADIATION. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... for this interest of young life and may often co-operate in the organization and management of such movements. Every church should strive through intelligent representatives to impart religious value and power to such work and should receive through the same channels first-hand information of this form of constructive and preventive philanthropy. He can partly meet the demand through clubs and societies organized in connection with his own church. He can plead for a real ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... that I have discovered on first-hand evidence that there is a strong resolve on the part of most important persons in this town (I will mention no names) to fill the living with the most unsatisfactory, worthless and conservative influence that could possibly be found anywhere. If that influence succeeds I don't ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... own present trenches since January. There was a time when this sector of the line was regarded as a Vale of Rest. Bishops were conducted round with impunity. Members of Parliament came out for the week-end, and returned to their constituents with first-hand information about the horrors of war. Foreign journalists, and sight-seeing parties of munition-workers, picnicked in Bunghole Wood. In the village behind the line, if a chance shell removed tiles from the roof of a house, the owner, greatly incensed, mounted a ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... think I know much about such things. Why don't you go to a furniture store and get what you want first-hand? Second-hand furniture always looks shabby and out of date. However, if Miss Bessie could go with me to pick out things, I wouldn't mind taking a drive into the country to see ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... year of its existence, that is to say, 1884, the Committee on Haunted Houses of the S. P. R. had selected and made an analysis of some sixty-five cases out of hundreds submitted to it, twenty-eight of which rested upon first-hand and superior evidence.[1] It is worthy of remark, in the first place, that these authentic narratives bear no relation whatever to the legendary and sensational ghost-stories that still linger in many English and American magazines, especially ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... at that time the members of the expedition did not understand the conditions of Mercury as they are now known. They had to depend upon the general impression they got from their first-hand investigations; and it is remarkable that the doctor should have guessed ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... cases, and others as to which I have first-hand evidence, there are decided parallels to the Rite of the Hirpi, and to Biblical and ecclesiastical miracles. The savage examples are rites, and appear intended to secure good results in food supplies (Fiji), or general well- being, perhaps by expiation ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... to have overlooked the fact that the admiral himself was in Manila Bay and in Manila City at the time he sent this cablegram. The statements in question were not rumours, they were deliberate expressions of opinion on the part of a man who had first-hand information and ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... remembered that the Lizard is rendered doubly perilous by a sea-covered stack of rocks lying to the southward. Before oil was introduced for the lamps it is said the lantern was lit by coal-fires—a kind of first-hand use of gas. Below the lighthouse is the striking Bumble Rock, and close to this the hollow known as the Lion's Den, formed by a natural sudden subsidence in 1847. This formation was an immediate object-lesson as to the manner in which these remarkable hollows, caverns, and ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... worships success, and he'll get it, like old Pinkerton. Though of course he's met plenty of the bloodthirsty non-combatants he writes about, he takes most of what he says about them second-hand from other people. It's not first-hand observation. If it was, he would have to include among his jingoes and Hun-haters some fighting men too. I know it's entirely against popular convention to say so, but some of the most bloodthirsty fire-eaters I met during the war were among the ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... it at first-hand!—I made the acquaintance of her family in Kazan. But, my dear boy ... this news seems to be upsetting you? Why, I recollect you didn't care for Clara at one time? You were wrong, though! She was a marvellous girl—only what a temper! I was ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... going to write an essay on the geology of the West, for I really have little first-hand knowledge upon that subject, but I would indicate the kind of interest in the country I was most conscious of during my recent trip to the Pacific Coast and beyond. Indeed, quite a geologic fever raged in ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... although he can by careful selection, arrangement, and the regulation of exposure, largely counteract the mechanical tendency, a photograph by its very nature can never take the place of a work of art—the first-hand expression, more or less abstract, of a human mind, or the creative inner vision ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... philosophy of the mystics. Such readers are warned that they will find here nothing but the re-statement of elementary and familiar propositions, and invitations to a discipline immemorially old. Far from presuming to instruct those to whom first-hand information is both accessible and palatable, I write only for the larger class which, repelled by the formidable appearance of more elaborate works on the subject, would yet like to know what is meant by mysticism, and what ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... the feelings of the camel when his proprietor placed that last straw on his back. The incident happened so long ago. If it had occurred in modern times, he would probably have contributed a first-hand report to the Daily Mail. But it is very likely that he felt on that occasion exactly as Fenn felt when, after a night of unparalleled misadventure, he found that somebody had cut off his retreat by latching ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... in this chapter and the next did not fall under my own observation. I derived my knowledge of them from various sources, chiefly from conversations with Bob Power, who had, as will appear, first-hand knowledge. In the third chapter I begin my own personal narrative of the events which led up to the final struggle of Ulster against Home Rule and of the struggle itself. Accidents of one kind or another, the accidents of the ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... the Southern hemisphere, yet many of its native population are more unpolished in appearance than the bush-whackers from beyond Bourke, the Cooper, and the far Paroo. It is an agricultural region, and this in some measure accounts for the slouching appearance of its people. Men cannot wrest a first-hand living from the soil and at the same time cultivate a Piccadilly club-land ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... to be written by a layman who is also a Christian man of business. It is inserted here mainly to challenge inquiry and to provoke thought. The writer has no first-hand acquaintance either with business life or with business methods. He desires simply to chronicle an impression that the level of morality in the business world has been declining in recent years, and that the more thoughtful and candid of Christian ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... purpose, a vitalizing vision either of a personality or an enterprise, to create a fresh enthusiasm, we must turn from the familiar aspects of the subject to a first-hand thought, or view. We need to be freshly introduced, as it were. For this purpose let us renew our thought of the essential task of Home Missions. It is to Christianize our home land-Christianize, shorn of the formal services and forms of activity with which we associate the ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... Ruffiano's invitation; but the night seemed likely to be vacant of employment, the old man seemed solicitous, and I saw no reason for refusing him. Quite apart from that it would, as he suggested, be agreeable and perhaps useful to know at first-hand what an Italian thought of the chances of the rising which must have been imminent when he left his country. So I made arrangements to meet Ruffiano and to dine with him at the same Italian restaurant in the upper room ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... much common sense to accept such reports as final. News from biassed sources is always accepted with reservation, and not fully believed unless confirmed from independent sources. Furthermore, Americans have never lacked for first-hand information from Germany. Direct wireless reports from your country to several stations in America have given us a valuable check on cable reports. German papers come to us regularly, and are continually and extensively quoted. Germany ...
— Plain Words From America • Douglas W. Johnson
... many years' investigation of haunted houses, I have naturally come in contact with numerous people who have had first-hand experiences with the Occult. Nurse Mackenzie is one of these people. I met her for the first time last year at the house of my old friend, Colonel Malcolmson, whose ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... admirable training. For the artist works entirely upon honour. The public knows little or nothing of those merits in the quest of which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. Merits of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap accomplishment which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires—these they can recognise, and these they value. But to those more exquisite refinements of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... will furnish material for both art and nature study lessons. As far as circumstances permit the real trees should be studied, giving the children first-hand experience whether it be much or little. They should test the trees they cut by comparing them with real trees of the same variety. If this is impossible, the best pictures available should be used. (See ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... the exercise of daily affairs; a power of imagination won from having dwelt upon the things of life with intentness, a power of sympathy obtained from seeing the things of others as you meet them day by day; and a first-hand knowledge of the sights and sounds and beauties of Nature, a knowledge of bird and flower, tree and rock, their names and some of their secrets—knowledge accumulated from actual contact with the real physical world. This power of life ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... my way down to the central lake, suppose I was back at breakfast with some record of the place—would I not in that case be thought an even more worthy associate? Then, if Summerlee carried the day and some means of escape were found, we should return to London with first-hand knowledge of the central mystery of the plateau, to which I alone, of all men, would have penetrated. I thought of Gladys, with her "There are heroisms all round us." I seemed to hear her voice as she said it. I thought also of McArdle. What a three column article ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... details are well known to the people of Toulon, and I have heard them myself a score of times during the two stays that I made in that town during 1834 and 1835. Some of the people who related them had them first-hand from ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MURAT—1815 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... denouncing the dance hall and the poolroom and the vile pictures and the loose conduct of the soft-drink places and Electric Park? Haven't we some sort of duty to see that every young person in Delafield has a chance at first-hand, enjoyable, and ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... in charge of Silas Brown at the Mapleton stables. He did not attempt to deny that he had acted as described upon the evening before, but declared that he had no sinister designs, and had simply wished to obtain first-hand information. When confronted with his cravat, he turned very pale, and was utterly unable to account for its presence in the hand of the murdered man. His wet clothing showed that he had been out in the storm of the night before, and his stick, which was a Penang-lawyer weighted ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... education for the Negro, it is necessary, first of all, to review the condition of affairs at the present time in the Southern States. For years I have had something of an opportunity to study the Negro at first-hand; and I feel that I know him pretty well,—him and his needs, his failures and his successes, his desires and the likelihood of their fulfilment. I have studied him and his relations with his white neighbours, ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington
... this more than a quarter of a century, every waking hour of which has been spent in alleviating the stammerer's difficulty—and successfully, too—you have a ground-work of first-hand information that tends toward facts instead of fiction and toward ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... desk and shop or factory poured into the streets to learn the latest, tidings. Around the various polling stations the crowd was thickest. Those electors who had been present at Silas Finn's meeting, the night before, told the story at first-hand to eager groups. Rumours of every sort spread through the mob. The man who had put the famous question was an agent of the Tories. It was a smart party move. Silas Finn had all the time been leading a double life. Depravities without number ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... own intimate group took Constance's attitude. Forced to concede a lively curiosity as to what had become of Rose, they still professed that the way of discretion lay not in gratifying it; at least not at first-hand. When they were in New York, they kept an eye open for a sight of her, on the stage and elsewhere, and an alert ear for news, finding a sort of fearful joy in wondering what they would do if an encounter took place. They were mildly derisive ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... time as authoritative. Recent criticism by Mr. R. H. Forster has rather impaired the credibility of the document. He points out that its professed date is 1593, or more than fifty years after the dissolution of the Priory; and maintains that it is not a first-hand chronicle of events of "the floryshinge tyme" before the suppression of the house, but a compilation based partly on old records and partly on the reminiscences ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... which I had of a court one night. I am rather proud of being able to explain that the late queen held court in the early afternoon and the present king holds court at night; but, lest any envious reader suspect me of knowing the fact at first-hand, I hasten to say that the glimpse I had of the function that night only revealed to me in my cab a royal coach driving out of a palace gate, and showing larger than human, through a thin rain, the blood-red ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... perishable contents, we can frame a fairly adequate notion of the home-life of Neanderthal man. I have already alluded to my excavations in Jersey, and need not enter into fuller details here. But I should like to put on record the opinion borne in upon me by such first-hand experience as I have had that cultural advance in Mousterian days was almost as portentously slow as ever it had been before. The human deposits in the Jersey cave are in some places about ten feet thick, and the fact that they fall into two strata ...
— Progress and History • Various
... story of four eventful years. In all that trying time, each night, no matter how weary he was, he forced himself to set down the events of the day. From these records he wrote a book that by virtue of its first-hand information and its literary art ranks among the most important of the books called forth ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... unconsciously, the exact date on the margin of the proof!" The reader will remember the Doncaster race story; and to other like illustrations of the subject already given, may be added this dream. "Here is a curious case at first-hand" (30th of May 1863). "On Thursday night in last week, being at the office here, I dreamed that I saw a lady in a red shawl with her back towards me (whom I supposed to be E.). On her turning round I found that I didn't know her, and she said 'I am Miss Napier.' All the ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... thought she would want to receive from him, promptly on his return, a first-hand ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... Commission—an assignment that again started him on his travels to industrial centres—he came into contact, for the first time, with the mechanism of framing the great American tariff. And during this period Page was not only forming a first-hand acquaintance with the passing scene, but also with important actors in it. The mere fact that, on the St. Joseph Gazette, he succeeded Eugene Field—"a good fellow named Page is going to take my desk," said the careless ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... means of a case of which I happen to have first-hand knowledge. In Jersey, near the bay of St. Brelade, is a cave, in which we dug down through some twenty feet of accumulated clay and rock-rubbish, presumably the effects of the last throes of the ice-age, and came ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... collecting and editing the various essays of which this book is comprised, has not been altogether easy. Some literary defects and absence of unity are, by the nature of the scheme, inevitable: we hope these are counterbalanced by the collection of first-hand evidence from those in a position to speak authoritatively of the professions which they follow. Experientia docet, and those who desire to investigate the conditions of women's public work in various directions, as well as those who are hesitating ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... first-hand story of what was done and seen and felt on each side in the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimac. The actual experiences on both vessels are pictured, in one case by the commander of the Monitor, then a lieutenant, and the next in ...
— The Monitor and the Merrimac - Both sides of the story • J. L. Worden et al.
... the crew listened in rapt attention, consumed nearer six than two, or even five hours. These men were hungry for authentic first-hand information—being too old to have ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... at the same time, keeping your ears and your eyes open. In order to give color to your roamings, you can write us some articles on 'Social Life and the Color Line in the West Indies' as you happen to see it. First-hand impressions are always valuable, and, perhaps, the fact that you see them through a boy's eyes may give them a certain novelty and freshness. Of course, the articles will probably have to be rewritten in the ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... a body of speculators and investors in mining stocks and securities who desire professional guidance which cannot be based upon first-hand data is creating further demand on the engineer. Opinions in these cases must be formed on casual visits or second-hand information, and a knowledge of men and things generally. Despite the feeling ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... Dr. Bernbaum elaborately endeavours to show that this story is pure fiction. His arguments, in many cases advanced with no little subtlety and precision, do not appear (to me at least) to be convincing. We have much to weigh in the contrary balance: Mrs. Behn's manifest first-hand knowledge of, and extraordinary interest in, colonial life; her reiterated asseverations that every experience detailed in this famous novel is substantially true; the assent of all her contemporaries. It must further be remembered that Aphra was writing in 1688, of a girlhood coloured ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... treats of Christ and His Mission, Future Development of Man and Initiation, Esoteric Training and a Safe Method of Acquiring First-hand Knowledge. ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... the previous year had spent it all in buying whiskey, in gambling, in buying cheap jewelry, and for other useless articles. After spending two hours in such talk, I retired for the evening. Thus ended the first day of my search for first-hand information. ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards
... often a treacherous ease, which leads the man who possesses it into fields where he has no sure footing because he has no first-hand knowledge, and therefore no real power; and against this tendency, so prevalent in this country, the need of concentration must continually be urged. The great majority of men lack the abounding vitality which must find ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... Liberalism relies upon certain vague "principles"; Socialism declares that good intentions and doing what comes first to hand will not suffice. Now Opportunism is essentially benevolent adventure and the doing of first-hand things. ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... use for material his first impulse will be to interview people who have had experience themselves. In this circumstance the speaker becomes the reporter of details of knowledge furnished by others. The value of this is apparent at once. Next to first-hand knowledge, second-hand knowledge will ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... I had my ghost—a first-hand, authenticated article. I would write to the Society for Psychical Research—I would paralyze the Empire with the news! But I would, first of all, put eighty miles of assessed crop land between myself and that dak-bungalow before nightfall. The Society might send ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... master Exquemelin soon regained his health, and at the same time picked up the rudiments of the craft of barber surgeon. He was in all the great exploits of the buccaneers, and writes a clear, entertaining, and apparently perfectly accurate first-hand account of these adventures. He returned to Europe in 1674, and ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... of things which we call Nature is, however, too vast and various to be studied first-hand by any single mind. As knowledge extends there is always a tendency to subdivide the field of investigation. Its various parts are taken up by different minds, and thus receive a greater amount of attention than ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... republican element that was in both colonies might be expected to gain if, at home in England, the Parliamentary party gained. A Royal Governor or a Lord Proprietary's Governor might alike be perplexed by the political turmoil in the mother country. Leonard Calvert felt the need of first-hand consultation with his brother. Leaving Giles Brent in his place, he sailed for England, talked there with Baltimore himself, perplexed and filled with foreboding, and returned to Maryland not greatly ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... indeed, very difficult to judge how far an Athenian Assembly was really taken in by sophistical or dishonest arguments: but it is quite certain that such arguments were continually addressed to it; and the main body of the citizens can scarcely have had that first-hand knowledge of facts, which would enable them to criticize the orator's statements. Again, the oration appealed to the people as a performance, no less than as a piece of reasoning. Ancient political oratory resembled the oratory ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... Carmen again, and to request that she attend with him the formal opening of the new Ames mansion, the great Fifth Avenue palace, for he wanted her vivid, first-hand impressions for his account of the brilliant affair in the Social Era. As reporters, he explained, they would of necessity remain in seclusion, and the girl might disguise to such an extent as to prevent recognition, if she chose. It was business ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... to cover the ground at all systematically, of Central Europe under the early Roman Empire. It does not appear whether, in the course of his official employments, Tacitus had ever been stationed on the frontier either of the Rhine or of the Danube. The treatise bears little or no traces of first-hand knowledge; nor does he mention his authorities, with the single exception of a reference to Caesar's Gallic War. We can hardly doubt that he made free use of the material amassed by Pliny in his Bella Germaniae, ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... words, he gives us to understand that he translated all the kjaempeviser from the original edition of Vedel. It would be rash to say that Borrow was not acquainted with the Danske Viser of 1591, for he does, in one place, quote, whether at first-hand or not, from Vedel's preface. But it requires great faith to accept his own account of his approach to the poems. In Lavengro, at a point which Knapp has dated 1820, Borrow tells with brilliant picturesqueness how he purchased, ...
— Grimhild's Vengeance - Three Ballads • Anonymous
... these latter rooms he saw a trunk, opened, its contents carelessly scattered about the floor. One by one he examined the garments, his heart beating quickly. Not a particle of dust on them; plenty of finger-prints on the trunk. It had been opened this very night—by one familiar, either at first-hand or by instruction. He had come for ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... other hand, these empty heads, still keeping something of their old appearance, now appeared animated by the grand sentiment of maternity—an abstract maternity which seemed to be extending to all the men of the nation—a desire for self-sacrifice, of knowing first-hand the privations of the lowly, and aiding all the ills that ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... enclosed between these covers was written as a series of first-hand impressions during the fall and early winter of 1914 while the writer was on staff service for The Saturday Evening Post in the western theatre of the European War. I tried to write of war as I saw it at the time that I saw it, or immediately afterward, when the memory of what I had seen ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... through the kind cooperation of friends, hit upon a plan which promises to be less onerous to me and more satisfactory to the reader. This is nothing less than to make use of the various manuscripts which I have by me bearing upon the subject, and to add to them the first-hand evidence contributed by those who had the best opportunities of ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... making a sudden decision, he said: "Look, Elshawe, I trust you. I'm going to show you the inside of that ship. I won't show you my engines, but I will prove to you that there are no rocket motors in her. That way, when you write up the story, you'll be able to say that you have first-hand knowledge ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... in the ice for the winter up in Coronation Gulf. After that they started out with dogs and sledge and guides. There's a lot more, but that's the meat of it, Phil. I'm going to leave it to you to learn Celie's language and get the details first-hand from her. But she's a right enough princess, old man. And her Dad's a duke. It's up to you to Americanize 'em. ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... of permanent value as a mere intellectual achievement; as a store of information about Greek literature; and as an original or first-hand statement of what we may call the classical view of artistic criticism. It does not regard poetry as a matter of unanalysed inspiration; it makes no concession to personal whims or fashion or ennui. It tries by rational methods to find out what is ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... proportion of that larger moiety of the material at Westhaven Street which White from his extensive experience of the public patience decided could not possibly "make a book," consisted of notes and discussions upon the first-hand observations Benham had made in this or that part of the world. He began in Russia during the revolutionary trouble of 1906, he went thence to Odessa, and from place to place in Bessarabia and Kieff, where during a pogrom he had his first really illuminating encounter with race and culture prejudice. ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... not Martha—why, therefore, should she tell Martha for the sole satisfaction of having it repeated by Martha in her own tiresome way to each neighbor she met, while she, poor Miss Peters, who had really got the information first-hand—for the baker who served the two families with bread was so absolutely reliable—could only nod her head and ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... this stage, seeing that my oldest cases go back only three years. On one point only I can speak with positiveness, namely, if I cannot answer this question there is no man living who can answer it, because I am the only man alive who can give an opinion on this work that is founded on first-hand knowledge. We learn in this work only by experience, and we draw just conclusions only from quantity of experience. No other man alive has had this experience in sufficient quantity to justify him in forming a conclusion derived from his facts. This is my answer not only to ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... his time and in the growth of untrammeled human individuality. No mere manipulator of sounds and rhythms could have impressed the fastidious nobility of Vienna to the high degree chronicled by contemporary testimony. Beethoven wished to be known as a Tondichter, i.e., a first-hand creator, and his whole work was radically different from the rather cautious and imitative methods which had characterized former composers. It was through the cultivated von Breuning family of Bonn that the young Beethoven became acquainted ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... opportunity of retailing Mr. Pilgrim's conversation to Mrs. Phipps, who, as a victim of Pratt and plethora, could rarely enjoy that pleasure at first-hand. Mrs. Phipps was a woman of decided opinions, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... "That is the legal right. But I can vouch for my evidence, my lord. I received it, you see, at first-hand. This man Borkins engaged both the lad Dollops and myself as new hands for the factory. We therefore had every opportunity of ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... to call attention to the fact that, with one or two exceptions, he has mentioned no pictures that he has not seen. The lists are the result, not of compilation, but of first-hand acquaintance with the works ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... these pamphlets will prove useful to those who have little first-hand knowledge of what his enemies said of Pope and will help to warn the novice of the fatal ease with which we can read "with but a Lust to mis-apply,/ Make Satire a Lampoon, and Fiction, Lye" ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... set of names for the people surrounding her — people whom she vaguely knows are there but of whom or of whose lands she has no first-hand knowledge. The people to the north are "Am-yan'-an," and the northern country is "La'-god." The "Day'-ya" are the eastern people, while "Bar'-lig" is the name of the eastern and southeastern land. "Ab-a-ga'-tan" are the people of the south, ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... do justice to any phase of art without an opportunity of comparison, such as the exposition affords. The retrospective aspects of the exhibition are absorbingly interesting, not so much for the presentation of any eminently great works of art as for the splendid chance for first-hand comparison of different periods. Painting is relatively so new an art that the earliest paintings we know of do not differ materially in a technical sense from our present-day work. Archaeology has disinterred various badly preserved and unpresentable ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... prying newspaperman, eh? There is something I'd rather not tell you, but since you're going to find it out by yourself—trust Jimmy Hale for that—I'd better let you have it first-hand." ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... the college should do thorough, original, first-hand work, cannot be too strongly emphasized. Miss Conant tells us that, "For all scientific work he planned laboratories where students might make their own investigations, a very unusual step for those times." In 1878, when the Physics laboratory was started at Wellesley, ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... like yourself, I developed a great love for life in the wilderness. My father was a mountain ranchman in the Sierra Nevadas, so I had ample opportunity to satisfy my greatest desire—to roam the hills and valleys and to learn first-hand the art of getting along well in the wilderness by utilizing Nature's storehouse. As I have grown older, I have found out that it is the only place where I am permanently happy. Years ago my partner and myself located this mine, along with some others; ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... Aschens who was in command of the small bark de Buys, the undersigned can make Your Honourable Worships no report worth any serious consideration, since his statements and annotations are so misleading that it is evident {Page 100} at first sight that he can never have had any first-hand knowledge or ocular view of the matters referred to by him, seeing that he has hardly ever been nearer to the land than 3 miles off it, at which distance, however, he pretends to have seen a river with a small island before its ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres
... the social elevation of their sex, it appears to the writer that Anglo-Indian ladies fall far short of what they might do. A fair number do interest themselves in their Indian sisters through the lady missionaries and lady doctors, but first-hand knowledge of the lives of Indian women is very rare indeed. Our late revered Queen's interest in India and in the womanhood of India is well known, but her feeling about the duty of Anglo-Indian ladies I have never seen recorded. Speaking at Balmoral to an Indian Christian lady, ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... I been more fearful throughout than of making Nature parallel with my own or with any creed. The only legitimate questions one dare put to Nature are those which concern universal human good and the Divine interpretation of things. These I conceive may be there actually studied at first-hand, and before their purity is soiled by human touch. We have Truth in Nature as it came from God. And it has to be read with the same unbiased mind, the same open eye, the same faith, and the same reverence as all other Revelation. All that is found there, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... than corn! Oh, my friend, say what you please, argue how you like, this crowding together of men and women in unnatural surroundings, this haste to be rich in material things, this attempt to enjoy without production, this removal from first-hand life, is irrational, and the end of it is ruin. If our cities were not recruited constantly with the fresh, clean blood of the country, with boys who still retain some of the power and the vision drawn from the ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... to have had a general feeling that there might be such things, but they did not at the same time believe in them—because they never saw them, and seldom met anyone who had had first-hand experience of them. But as regards the spies, I can speak with personal knowledge in saying that they do exist, and in very large numbers, not only in England, but in ...
— My Adventures as a Spy • Robert Baden-Powell
... revised and enlarged edition of a memoir communicated to the Linnaean Society in 1865, and published in the ninth volume of its Journal. There was an extra impression, but, beyond the circle of naturalists, it can hardly have been much known at first-hand. Even now, when it is made a part of the general Darwinian literature, it is unlikely to be as widely read as the companion volume which we have been reviewing; although it is really a more readable book, and well worthy of far more extended notice at our hands than it can now receive. The ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... only really able man we have," says Eugene sometimes. Snuffles and lisps; and travels in all, as they count, about 25,000 miles, keeping his Majesty in company. Here are some glimpses into the interior, dull but at first-hand, which are worth clipping and condensing from Dubourgay, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... recourse to unpublished papers, to write the history of the succeeding thirty years with substantial correctness. There exist in a published form, apart from documents printed officially, masses of first-hand material of undoubtedly authentic character, such as the great English collection known by the somewhat misleading name of Wellington Despatches, New Series; or again, the collection printed as an appendix ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... briefly dealt with in the pages of Monsignor Perrelli. Doubly strange, and a serious disappointment to the reader, in view of the fact that the two men were contemporaries, and that the learned writer must have enjoyed exceptional facilities for obtaining first-hand knowledge of his subject. Almost inexplicable indeed, when one remembers those maxims which he himself, in the Introduction to his ANTIQUITIES, lays down for the writing of history; when one calls to mind his own gleams of exotic scholarship, those ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... in surrender. "We can't identify them by theorizing, and that brings us down to the business of first-hand investigation. Who's going to bell the ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... statement she sent to the Dialectical Society has already been quoted. She told Mr. Myers that most of her friends were complete disbelievers in Spiritualism, and that they frequently repeated to her rumours to the discredit of Home. But she never heard any first-hand account of any kind of trickery on his part. She considered him a man of open childlike nature, thoroughly honest and truthful, and that in her opinion his utterances in the trance state were much superior in thought and diction to his ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... Moresheth, on the highroad from Gaza to Jerusalem, Micah, who up to this time knew only of the corruption of the classes and the oppression of the masses of Judah, now had first-hand information of the political ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... is an article of minor importance in the Philippine exports, the supply being very limited. It is said that large quantities exist; but as it is only procurable in almost inaccessible mountainous and uncivilized districts, first-hand collectors in the provinces, principally Chinese, have to depend upon the services and goodwill of unsubdued tribes. It is chiefly obtained by barter, and is not a trade which can be worked up systematically. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... a very formal peace-making procedure followed by the Manbos who have been in contact with the Banuons of Masam River, but I never witnessed it, so I can not give any first-hand information as to the details. In the chapter on war will be found such details as have been given to me ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... not only acquired a first-rate and first-hand knowledge of his subject at Wye and at Rothamsted; his own researches have recently extended our knowledge of the micro-organisms in the soil and their influence on fertility. Further, what is very much ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... life may become matter for literature in the essay, quite apart from any story. But the essay, like the story, unless it is to compete at a disadvantage with science and philosophy, must rely upon first-hand personal acquaintance with life, and artistic expression. The more abstract and theoretical it becomes, the more precarious its worth. I do not mean that the essayist may not generalize, but his generalizations should be limited to the scope of his experience of ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... not to offer another subject for hero-worship but to present the man exactly as he was; a review of his chief works, which is intended chiefly as a guide to the best reading; and a critical estimate or appreciation of his writings based partly upon first-hand impressions, partly upon the assumption that an author must deal honestly with life as he finds it and that the business of criticism is, as Emerson said, "not to legislate but to raise the dead." This detailed study of the greater writers ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long |
