"Fluctuating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rise of prices, which for a while the States attempted to control. But in 1778 Congress threw up its hands in despair and voted that "all limitations of prices of gold and silver be taken off," although the States for some time longer continued to endeavor to regulate prices by legislation.* The fluctuating value of the currency increased the opportunities for speculation which war conditions invariably offer, and "immense fortunes were suddenly accumulated." A new financial group rose into prominence composed largely of those who were not accustomed to the use of money and who were consequently inclined ...
— The Fathers of the Constitution - Volume 13 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Max Farrand
... destruction of poor Mrs. Middleton, when, by accident, he met with Miss Hamilton. From this moment ended all his resentment against Mrs. Middleton, and all his attachment to Miss Warmestre: no longer was he inconstant: no longer were his wishes fluctuating: this object fixed them all; and, of all his former habits, none remained, ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... coming from readjustment in the cooerdination of industrial processes themselves. We hear much of standardization and stabilization. An economic technique and the control of fluctuating conditions might do much to increase the efficiency of industry in every way. This idea of the application of scientific procedure to life we see extending to the control of the energies of the human factor. We have already spoken of guarantees that ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... clans, and it was easy to persuade or compel petty chiefs to sign declarations and treaties. But it was not easy to kill the independence of the people, and France virtually abandoned and retook the islands several times, her rule fluctuating ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... sinking. She went down very slowly; there was a horrible gurgling sound of water rushing into her, and her main deck blew up with a loud clap or blast of noise. I could follow the line of her bulwarks fluctuating and waving in the clear dark blue when she was some feet under. A number of whirlpools spun round over her, but the slowness of her foundering was solemnly marked by the gradual descent of the ruins of masts and yards which were attached to the hull by ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... brownish gray of Linda's dress was exactly the color to intensify the darker brown of her eyes. There was a fluctuating red in her olive cheeks, a brilliant red framing her even white teeth. Once dressed so that she was satisfied with the results, Linda immediately forgot her clothes, and ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... of mint oil is extremely fluctuating. Like other unstaple commodities, the value of which depends upon their scarcity or abundance, it never has assumed a constant and standing value, but its price has generally been deranged by speculation and ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... Cambridge, but absolutely so at this weak point was plain to both Dudley and Bradstreet, who forthwith made ready for the change accomplished in 1634, when at least one other child, Dorothy, had come to Anne Bradstreet. Health, always delicate and always fluctuating, was affected more seriously than usual at this time, no date being given, but the period extending over several years, "After some time, I fell into a lingering sickness like a consumption, together with a lameness, ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... altering, and though we ourselves vary and change, there is a supreme spirit of steadfastness in the midst of this huge unrest, and an abiding, unshaken, immovable principle of good guiding this vanishing world of fluctuating atoms, in whose eternal permanence of nature we largely participate, and our tendency toward and aspiration for whose perfect stability is one of the very causes of the progress, and therefore mutability, of our existence. Perhaps the most painful of all the forms ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... shop man in Mr. HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL'S Quinneys' (MURRAY), is undoubtedly a "card," not unrelated, I should say, to Mr. BENNETT'S Machen. He is an entertaining fellow with his enthusiasms, his truculences, his fluctuating standards of honesty. Mr. VACHELL didn't quite get me to believe in Joe's expert knowledge, which indeed seemed to be turned on and off in rather an arbitrary way as the exigencies of the story rather than the development ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... days: the few that remain to me must glide away like their predecessors; and whatever be the infirmities of my body, and the little harassments which, I am led to suspect, do occasionally molest the most fortunate, who link themselves unto the unstable and fluctuating part of creation, which we term women, more especially in an hymeneal capacity—whatever these may be, I have my refuge and my comforter in the golden-souled and dreaming Plato, and the sententious wisdom of the less imaginative Seneca. Nor, when I am reminded of my approaching ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Judiciousness; because its objects, the Kosmos and the celestial bodies, are far more glorious than man, with whose interests alone Prudence is concerned; and also because the celestial objects are eternal and unvarying; while man and his affairs are transitory and ever fluctuating. Hence the great honour paid to Thales, Anaxagoras, and others, who speculated on theories thus magnificent and superhuman, though useless in ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... ridiculous flights of the poets we may add the prodigious stories invented by the Magi, and by the Egyptians also, which were of the same nature, together with the extravagant notions of the multitude at all times, who, from total ignorance of the truth, are always fluctuating in uncertainty. ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... moral judgment respecting the system which makes one man the brute instrument of another's gain, till he knew just how the statistics of sugar and coffee stand. Woe unto us if the fundamental principles which govern human relations have themselves no better foundation than the fluctuating figures of blue-books! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... mass of mediocrity. And so, he had chosen that his life should be a failure—a failure, that is, in the eyes of the world; for himself, he judged otherwise. The truth that could be extracted from words was such a fluctuating, relative truth. Failure! success!—what WAS success, but a clinging fast, unabashed by smile or neglect, to that better part in art, in one's self, that cannot be taken away?—never for a thought's space being untrue to the ideal each ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Hawaiians musical phrasing was arranged to fit the verse of the mele, not to express a musical idea. The cadencing of a musical phrase in Hawaiian song was marked by a peculiarity all its own. It consisted of a prolonged trilling or fluctuating movement called i'i, in which the voice went up and down in a weaving manner, touching the main note that formed the framework of the melody, then springing away from it for some short interval—a half of a step, or even some ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... described by the pen of the royal author. Of the twenty-nine themes, twelve in Europe and seventeen in Asia, the origin is obscure, the etymology doubtful or capricious: the limits were arbitrary and fluctuating; but some particular names, that sound the most strangely to our ear, were derived from the character and attributes of the troops that were maintained at the expense, and for the guard, of the respective divisions. The vanity of the Greek princes most eagerly ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... 11. "The fluctuating variations of Darwinism are quantitative, or plus and minus variations; whereas, the differences between species are qualitative." Growth and development in one species does not produce a new species, which must be of a different kind. Miles Darden, of Tenn., was 90 inches ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... unfortunately, does not exist. Only a sufficiency, therefore, is grown to meet the local demands, and to supply the contiguous Turkish provinces. Three qualities are produced, the prices of which have been for some time fluctuating. Previous to the Christian outbreak the best of these, grown in the district of Trebigne, sold for about 11d. per pound, while the cheapest was to be procured at ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... the doctor who was not ill lifted him on the canvas stretcher. The green-gleaming frame of fluctuating light was passed over the whole of his body. Then the doctor ran to a telephone and called ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... But in the way of Mr. Lincoln's success there stood still other opponents whose antagonism was mischievous, insidious, and unfair both in principle and in detail. Chief in this band appeared Horace Greeley, with a following and an influence fluctuating and difficult to estimate, but considerable. His present political creed was a strange jumble of Democratic and Republican doctrines. No Democrat abused the administration or cried for "peace on almost any terms" louder than he did; yet he still declaimed against slavery, and proposed to ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... electromagnets frequently serve, as already stated, to perform other functions than the producing of motion by attracting or releasing their armatures. They are required to act as impedance coils to present a barrier to the passage of alternating or other rapidly fluctuating currents, and at the same time to allow the comparatively free passage of steady currents. Where it is desired that an electromagnet coil shall possess high impedance, it is usual to employ a laminated ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... hot water for an hour or two each day, the suppurative process will be hastened, and as soon as the pus can be felt at any point, fluctuating, puncture and let it out; then continue the hot bath, with Calendula (Marygold) flowers in the water, keeping the part all ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... hardly have developed the power to force the hand of the council of state, had it not been in union with the third great factor in the commonwealth, that disorganised mass of fluctuating opinion and dissipated voting power which was known as "the people." How came the Populus Romanus to be stirred to action in this cause, with the result that the balance of power projected by Caius Gracchus was again restored? Much of their excitement may have been the result of ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... did not vary a little in its density. Now and then it would thin out mysteriously, revealing to the men a more or less ghostly presentment of their ship. Several times the shadow of the coast itself swam darkly before their eyes through the fluctuating opaque brightness of the great white ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... coeval with the moons, which fact generally places their New Year some time in February, the exact date fluctuating from year to year to the extent of three ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... swell against the rebukes of their superiors, then there is no remedy but the rod and correction. They must be chastised out of their peevishness and lashed into obedience (305). The doctor concludes his treatise with the words always dear to men of fluctuating opinions, 'What I have ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... indeed makes a rather belated appearance at the tag end. Before that we have a vast deal of agreeable adventuring. The scene is set in the period of the Peninsular War; all the characters, lovers, parents and hangers-on, are more or less involved in the fluctuating fortunes of my Lord WELLINGTON. There are spies of both sides, intrigues, abductions and what not. Mr. BAILEY has a pretty touch for such matters; his people move with an air; and, if at times their speech seems a trifle over-burnished, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... partly averted from the baronet's gay party, and her gaze fixed intently upon the stage. Sir Harry could only see half the rose of one cheek, and the soft sweep of golden hair which lightly shaded it; and feasting his fancy on that bit of fluctuating color, entangled in the meshes of a tremulous screen of curls, he settled himself to await ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... elements arrests, Rejects the noxious, and the pure digests; Combines with Heat the fluctuating mass, And gives a while solidity to gas; 40 Organic forms with chemic changes strive, Live but to die, and die but to revive! Immortal matter braves the transient storm, Mounts from the wreck, ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... roaring of the fire filled our ears; and we had scarce reached the passage before the stairs window fell in, a branch of flame shot brandishing through the aperture, and the interior of the pavilion became lit up with that dreadful and fluctuating glare. At the same moment we heard the fall of something heavy and inelastic in the upper story. The whole pavilion, it was plain, had gone alight like a box of matches, and now not only flamed sky-high to land and sea, but threatened with every moment ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... but it stood dismantled; there were evident breaches in its walls, and the fugitives of Opposition, rallying with the hope of success, advanced again to the storm, headed by their great leader, and sustained by the capricious and fluctuating multitude. The premier was harassed by the incessant toil of defence—a toil in which he had scarcely a sharer, and which exposed him to the most remorseless hostility. Yet, if the historian were to choose the moment for his true fame, this was the moment which ought to be chosen. He rose with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... is by some scholars adduced, not without reason, as an argument for the Eastern origin of the Scandinavian. Nor was it uncommon for the Asiatic Scythians, and indeed many of the early warlike tribes fluctuating between the east and west of Europe, to be distinguished by the blue eyes and yellow hair of the north. The physical attributes of a deity, or a hero, are usually to be regarded as those of the race to which he ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Bouldon observed, as keenly as a boa-constrictor, glided swiftly up to the spot where they had driven the ball, and sent it spinning back, till once more Frank and Ernest got it within their power. Thus the game continued fluctuating; but finally, after many a bandy here and there, and many a tussle between the opposing parties, not a few upsets and other catastrophes, it was sent up to Ernest, who struck it a blow which sent it flying along between ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... which the speaker so well filled. In describing the drunkard and the illusions which master him, he showed a keen perception of human nature; and, in every part of his address there was no end of spirited appeal and analysis, mingled with unbounded mirth and pathos, as the fluctuating argument went on. ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... Centuries, each with the crowd of personages that it deemed memorable, have chosen it as their place of honored sepulture, and laid themselves down under its pavement. The inscriptions and devices on the walls are rich with evidences of the fluctuating tastes, fashions, manners, opinions, prejudices, follies, wisdoms of the past, and thus they combine into a more truthful memorial of their dead times than any individual epitaph-maker ever ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... indicated by the term 'tempo rubato', affixed to his writings: a Tempo agitated, broken, interrupted, a movement flexible, yet at the same time abrupt and languishing, and vacillating as the flame under the fluctuating breath by which it is agitated. In his later productions we no longer find this mark. He was convinced that if the performer understood them, he would divine this rule of irregularity. All his compositions should be played with this accentuated and measured swaying and balancing. It ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... on "Renaissance" the great Art revival in England has been noticed; in the Elizabethan oak work of chimney pieces, panelling, and furniture, are to be found varying forms of the free classic style which the Renaissance had brought about. These fluctuating changes in fashion continued in England from the time of Elizabeth until the middle of the eighteenth century, when, as will be shewn presently, a distinct alteration in the design ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... he paid heavily to serve him as his tool and menial,)—where a beautiful Neapolitan danseuse condescended to live as his mistress;—he was a diplomat for himself if not for his country, and kept his finger on the pulse of European politics as well as on the fluctuating fevers of new creeds. But he never troubled himself seriously as to the possible growth of any "movement", or "society", or "crusade"; as experience had taught him that no matter how ardently thinkers may propound theories, and enthusiasts support them, there is always a dense and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... he had given Balachandrika, who came again in the evening, the directions received from the conjurer, and a loving message of encouragement for the princess, he anxiously awaited the morrow, unable to sleep from the thought of the expected happiness, and fluctuating between alternate hopes and fears. In the morning, Vidyeswara, having collected a large troop of followers, went to the palace and announced himself to the doorkeeper, saying, "Tell the king the great conjurer is arrived." Manasara, who had heard of his great skill, ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... permission to proceed to Rome was granted by the consul. In the mean time a truce was asked, a request to which assent was readily expressed by Sylla and the majority; the few, who advocated harsher measures, were men inexperienced in human affairs, which, unstable and fluctuating, are ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... the same on all the other charts. Population fluctuating slightly at the moment, completely static for the past five centuries. A slight decrease in agriculture, matched by an increase in synthetic food production. A slight population movement toward the more urban planets and the more densely populated centers. A trend downward in employment—nonworking ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... remarked that this patient had complained of pain in the back during the previous night, and that there seemed to be a soft spot on his rump. By examining, I found below the bandage which I had put around the patient, a fluctuating mass, immediately beneath the skin and superficial fascia, extending from the tenth dorsal vertebra above, to the coccyx below, and from the crest of the right ilium to ...
— Report on Surgery to the Santa Clara County Medical Society • Joseph Bradford Cox
... more suddenly than it rose. Shun-ti, the last of the house, took refuge behind the Great Wall from the rising tide of Chinese patriotism; and after a tenure of ninety years, or of two centuries of fluctuating dominion, reckoning from the rise of Genghis Khan, the Yuen dynasty came to an ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... early astir; and as their horses danced over the sand, literally throwing the miles behind them, Sir Richard's spirits, which had been somewhat fluctuating, rose with a bound. He whistled gaily as they rode, ever and anon breaking off to conjecture on the nature of the welcome they might reasonably expect to receive; and when he spoke, as he did frequently, of his son-in-law, his prognostications, in striking contrast with his former pessimism, ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... can only be a stepping-stone to the abolition of the law. Who can define "the decencies of controversy?" Everyone has his own criterion in such matters, which is usually unconscious and fluctuating. What shocks one man pleases another. Does not the proverb say that one man's meat is another man's poison? Lord Coleridge reduces Blasphemy to a matter of taste, and de gustibus non est disputandum. According to this view, the prosecution has simply to put ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... Americans against three thousand British, altogether. But the British were in superior force at first; and neither side had its full total in action at any one time, as casualties and reinforcements kept the numbers fluctuating. ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... separation of human races, in the subsequent differentiation and spread of languages, in the separation of men into nationalities, and in the union and splitting of states and empires, we have to deal essentially with the fluctuating manifestations of the same fundamental shaping factor which will determine the distribution of urban districts in the coming years. Every boundary of the ethnographical, linguistic, political, and commercial map—as a little consideration will show—has indeed been traced in the first place by ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... convention at the time, that, however I might then incline to adopt them, I was not certain, but that after considering them, I should vote for their rejection. While the minds of the members were thus fluctuating between various opinions, I spent the evening of that day with Mr. Morris at your lodgings, in the course of which I proposed the plan for the institution of the Council as it now stands, and after conversing on the subject we agreed to bring ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... names may be applied to this definition which I wish to make purposely majestic and fluctuating, or in a word, all- embracing. I should first put there Corneille of the Polyeucte, Cinna, and Horaces. I should put Moliere there, the fullest and most complete poetic genius we have ever had in France. Goethe, the ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... general are believed to be intimately dependent. It does not appear that the subjects or worshippers of such a spiritual potentate form to themselves any very clear notion of the exact relationship in which they stand to him; probably their ideas on the point are vague and fluctuating, and we should err if we attempted to define the relationship with logical precision. All that the people know, or rather imagine, is that somehow they themselves, their cattle, and their crops are mysteriously ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... soon as the wools were shipped. The defence was, that the wool was bought, with the knowledge of both parties, for the purpose of reselling it in the course of the defendant's business; that it was an article of fluctuating value, and not salable until the names of the vessels in which it was shipped should have been declared according to the contract, but that the plaintiff did not declare the names of the vessels as agreed. ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... things eternal?—Powers depart, Possessions vanish, and opinions change, And passions hold a fluctuating seat; But, by the storms of circumstance unshaken, And subject neither to eclipse nor wane, Duty exists; immutably survive For our support, the measures and the forms Which an abstract intelligence supplies; Whose kingdom is where time ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... rights; and I am much deceived if they have not, in so doing, as faithfully consulted the genuine sentiments as the undoubted interests of their constituents. The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... pretty white spray which crests the stormy waves. They dress and dance, dine and take their pleasure, on the day of Waterloo, in the time of cholera or revolution. Finally, their expenses are all the same, but here the contrast comes in. Of this fluctuating fortune, so agreeably flung away, some possess the capital for which the others wait; they have the same tailors, but the bills of the latter are still to pay. Next, if the first, like sieves, take in ideas of all kinds without retaining any, the latter compare them and assimilate all the good. ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... the matter in their own hands and started back for the brig. Nine days later, through forced marches and heroic efforts of his sledge-mates, themselves partially disabled, Kane was carried on board the Advance fluctuating between life and death. Hardly conscious, his mind clouded, and his swollen features barely recognizable, his general condition was such that the surgeon regarded his ultimate ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... immense body of its patrons, summons workmen from all directions, and encourages marriage; as long as labor is abundant, marriage is an excellent thing, the effects of which they are fond of quoting in the interest of machinery; but, the patronage fluctuating, as soon as work and wages are not to be had, they denounce the abuse of marriage, and accuse laborers of improvidence. Political economy—that is, proprietary despotism—can never be in the wrong: it must be ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... to get the L5000 from Mr. Wharton without that terrible personal sacrifice, though he had hardly spoken the truth when he assured his friend that the greater portion of that money would go to him. There were many schemes fluctuating through his brain, and all accompanied by many doubts. If he could get Mr. Wharton's money by giving up his wife, should he consent to give her up? In either case should he stay or should he go? Should he run one further great chance with Bios,—and if so, by ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... some really deserving cases and put them in the way of earning their own livings. Real relief consists, to my mind, of nothing short of the stretching out of a helping hand and lifting some poor soul clean out of that miserable state where one's very existence depends upon the fluctuating charity of one's fellow- creatures. I've seen it, and I know what it means. There's any amount of real misery to be met with in the neighbourhood of the Docks, ay, and all over London, for that matter, if one only chooses to keep one's eyes open. Of course I know that many of ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... the day; but even temperary success implies a certain temporary fitness. In Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakspeare, Cervantes, we are made aware of much that no longer accords with the wisdom or the taste of our day—temporary and immature expressions of fluctuating opinions—but we are also aware of much that is both true and noble now, and will ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... air, Cloud found that the activity, while still high, was not too high, but that it was fluctuating too rapidly. He could not get even five seconds of trustworthy prediction, to say nothing of ten. So he waited, as close as he dared remain to ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... filled. The motion of the boat increased; several members of the party began to feel rather vague and misty, and looked as if they had only just got up. The young gentleman with the spectacles, who had been in a fluctuating state for some time—at one moment bright, and at another dismal, like a revolving light on the sea-coast—rashly announced his wish to propose a toast. After several ineffectual attempts to preserve his perpendicular, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Handel would have sent the steadfast funds up above par and maintained them on an inverted pedal with all the other markets fluctuating iniquitously round them like the sheep that turn every one to his own way in the Messiah. He thought something of the kind ought to have been done, and in the absence of Handel and Dr. Morell we determined to write an oratorio that should attempt to supply the want. ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... and varying predominance of each of these interests from time to time. No intelligible grasp of the principles which underlie the history of bankruptcy legislation in England, and no satisfactory explanation of the fluctuating tendencies which have marked its progress, are possible without bearing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... recollection of these vague conjectures from mens minds. When the war ended, and the independence of the States was acknowledged, Mr. Temple turned his attention from the pursuit of commerce, which was then fluctuating and uncertain, to the settlement of those tracts of land which he had purchased. Aided by a good deal of money, and directed by the suggestions of a strong and practical reason, his enterprise throve to a degree ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Dennison brought up the card of Miss Margaret Clay. Rachael turned it slowly in her hands, pondering, with a quickened heartbeat and a fluctuating color. Magsie had been often a guest in Rachael's house a year ago, but she had not been to see Rachael for a long time now. They were to meet, they were to talk alone together—what about? There was nothing about ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... substantially. The trade deficit has been offset by annual remittances of almost $2 billion from Salvadorans living abroad and by external aid. The US dollar is now the legal tender. Because competitor countries have fluctuating exchange rates, El Salvador must face the challenge of raising ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... European residents of the place were connected with Government. The rest of the population was composed of a heterogeneous mass of natives mingled with a number of Chinese, a few Arabs, and a large fluctuating population of traders from Borneo, Celebes, New Guinea, Siam, and the other innumerable isles of the archipelago. These were more or less connected with prahus laden with the rich and varied merchandise of the eastern seas. As each man in the town ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... and ours were essentially interdependent. At first she used, we well remember, to fix her solemn spirit-like eyes on our faces, to mark the different effects her story produced on her hearers; but ere long she became possessed wholly by the pathos of her own narrative, and with fluctuating features and earnest action of head and hands poured forth her eloquence, as if soliloquising among ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... I speculated in Erie. It is all the time fluctuating. I became convinced that it was on the rise. I went in and the event ...
— Herbert Carter's Legacy • Horatio Alger
... decade of the seventeenth century. The stout Tory squires met together in the "Bell" Tavern, in narrow, dirty King Street, Westminster, to drink October ale, under Dahl's portrait of Queen Anne, and to trouble with their fierce, uncompromising Jacobitism the fluctuating purposes of Harley and the crafty counsels of St. John. The genius of Swift tempered their hot zeal with the cool air of his "advice." Then the wilder spirits seceded, and formed the March Club, which retained all ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... taller than he really was, when not contrasted, as at this time, with the tall, massive frame of another. The lines in her father's face were soft and waving, with a frequent undulating kind of trembling movement passing over them, showing every fluctuating emotion; the eyelids were large and arched, giving to the eyes a peculiar languid beauty which was almost feminine. The brows were finely arched, but were, by the very size of the dreamy lids, raised to a considerable distance from the eyes. Now, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... it necessarily is, will enable us to institute a comparison between the former revolution and the present. And we cannot but see that it was the slow, lingering, fluctuating course of the former revolution, and the repeated intervals in which there was, virtually, no government at all, that gave time for the demoralization of the people, and for the formation of those terrible factions within, and those powerful combinations ...
— Celebration in Baltimore of the Triumph of Liberty in France • William Wirt
... different destinations. Which would be the best choice? The most profitable from an energy standpoint, as far as the ship was concerned, considering the relative values of the cargoes? What about relative spoilage rates as compared with fluctuating markets? ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Egypt, stands at the edge of the desert at the head of a gulf of the same name and at the S. end of the Suez Canal, 75 m. E. of Cairo, with which it is connected by railway; as a trading place, dating back to the times of the Ptolemies, has had a fluctuating prosperity, but since the completion of the canal is growing steadily in importance; is still for the most part an ill-built and ill-kept town; has a large English ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... on the present work. Kolreuter long ago described plants of Verbascum phoeniceum which during two years were sterile with their own pollen, but were easily fertilised by that of four other species; these plants however afterwards became more or less self-fertile in a strangely fluctuating manner. Mr. Scott also found that this species, as well as two of its varieties, were self-sterile, as did Gartner in the case of Verbascum nigrum. So it was, according to this latter author, with two plants of Lobelia fulgens, though the pollen and ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... condition of mind in which their undeclared feelings kept him,—and and he found himself more perplexed and anxious over their apparent uncertainty than he had ever been over some of his greatest financial schemes. Facts and figures can to a certain extent be relied upon, but the fluctuating humours and vagaries of a man and woman in love with each other are beyond the most precise calculations of the skilled mathematician. For it often happens that when they seem to be coldest they are warmest—and cases have been known where they ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... poverty; yet, because of high income inequality, a large proportion of the population remains poor. Gabon depended on timber and manganese until oil was discovered offshore in the early 1970s. The oil sector now accounts for 50% of GDP. Gabon continues to face fluctuating prices for its oil, timber, and manganese exports. Despite the abundance of natural wealth, poor fiscal management hobbles the economy. Devaluation of its currency by 50% in January 1994 sparked a one-time inflationary surge, to 35%; the rate dropped to ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... subdued-looking wife, and who spoke magnanimously of Norton as "a clever fellow, of course, but deplorably casual officially." With such haphazard shifting of pawns on the chess-board is the momentous game of Empire played. Yet long after Dudley Norton's name had been almost forgotten by the overtasked, fluctuating world of Anglo-India, it still remained a household word among the Mahsud Waziris, whose brothers in blood had so treacherously ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... country. Up to the time of its establishment the whole country had suffered enormously from the wretched currency supplied from the State banks. Even in those States where the greatest precaution was taken to insure its redemption all of it was, in time of crisis or panic, fluctuating and much of it worthless. But in other States the case was even worse. I can recall perfectly that through my boyhood and young manhood every merchant and shopkeeper kept on his table what was called a "bank-note detector,'' which, when any money was tendered him, he was obliged to consult ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... the fire-fly! We have seen birthday illuminations in London and in Paris; we have seen the cupola of St Peter's start into pale yellow light, as the deepening shadows of night shrouded all things around; we have seen the Corso, on Moccoletti night, a long fluctuating line of ever renewed light, from the street to the fourth story—an illumination sui generis, and "beautiful exceedingly;" but noise and confusion are around all these as you approach them. But, oh! to plunge suddenly into an atmosphere filled with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... to a solid one will be solid; and reeds shaken with the wind may be turned into brazen pillars that cannot be moved. If we have Christ in our hearts, He will be our consolation first and our stability next. Why should it be that we are spasmodic and fluctuating, and the slaves of ups and downs, like some barometer in stormy weather; now at 'set fair,' and then away down where 'much rain' is written? There is no need for it. Get Christ into your heart, and your mercury will always stand ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... whom united craft and penetration, perceiving he had to act with an ignorant king, and a fluctuating people, incapable of opposing much resistance, replied to Vortigern, "We are, indeed, few in number; but, if you will give us leave, we will send to our country for an additional number of forces, with whom we will fight for you and your subjects." Vortigern ...
— History Of The Britons (Historia Brittonum) • Nennius
... joined by a considerable number of hardy mountaineers, under their respective chiefs and leaders. On the nineteenth day of August, the marquis of Tullibardine erected the pretender's standard at Glensinnan. Some of those, however, on whom Charles principally depended, now stood aloof, either fluctuating in their principles, astonished at the boldness of the undertaking, or startled at the remonstrances of their friends, who did not fail to represent, in aggravated colours, all the danger of embarking in such a desperate enterprise. Had the government acted with proper vigour when they received ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... manufacturing enterprises, joint-stock companies, viceroyalties, and principalities, not drawing more than 1,500,000 francs, the whole forming a capital of about fifty millions; finally, I call those third-rate fortunes, which are composed of a fluctuating capital, dependent upon the will of others, or upon chances which a bankruptcy involves or a false telegram shakes, such as banks, speculations of the day—in fact, all operations under the influence of greater or less mischances, the whole bringing in a real or fictitious capital of ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... culture and trade in all other places, which they succeeded in doing by treaty with the native rulers. These agreed to have all the spice trees in their possessions destroyed. They gave up large though fluctuating revenues, but they gained in return a fixed subsidy, freedom from the constant attacks and harsh oppressions of the Portuguese, and a continuance of their regal power and exclusive authority over their own subjects, which is maintained in all the islands ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... national feeling;[1] he suffered a committee to be appointed in parliament, and the commissioners in London received instructions to protest against the trial and condemnation of the king. But these instructions disclose the timid fluctuating policy of the man by whom they were dictated. It is vain to look in them for those warm and generous sentiments which the case demanded. They are framed with hesitation ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... to the purchaser is not the total cost. During the present period of abnormal and fluctuating trade conditions, an additional sum, which may vary from time to time, is paid to the Publisher by ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... the contrary, so far as the numerical basis of their scheme permitted, they took them into account. And here we find that the Synod was confronted with another difficulty. The territories of tribes were fluctuating quantities. Hence, even if a diocese was the district of a single tribe, with very definite boundaries, no one could be sure that in the course of years its limits would not change. Again I take an example from Ulster. The Synod selected the Carntougher Mountains as ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... loyal but most turbulent subjects in one island, and with about half-a-million ferocious rebels in another requiring usually an army of twenty thousand disciplined soldiers to keep them in a kind of subjugation, with a revenue fluctuating between eight hundred thousand pounds sterling, and the half of that sum, and with a navy of a hundred privateersmen—disclosed to the French envoy a vast plan for regulating the polity and the religion of the civilized world, and for remodelling ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... desire—the innocent, just, and normal desire of my girlhood's heart,—no one to lend a hand, till my heart had broken with slavery and disappointment, and at less than thirty-five all that remained for me was a little barren waiting for its feeble fluctuating pumping to cease. ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... have as man phases as the moon. Adj. changeable, changeful; changing &c. 140; mutable, variable, checkered, ever changing; protean, proteiform|; versatile. unstaid[obs3], inconstant; unsteady, unstable, unfixed, unsettled; fluctuating &c. v.; restless; agitated &c. 315; erratic, fickle; irresolute &c. 605; capricious &c. 608; touch and go; inconsonant, fitful, spasmodic; vibratory; vagrant, wayward; desultory; afloat; alternating; alterable, plastic, mobile; transient &c. 111; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... it, however remote, are deemed to have been lucky; though, if it prove unfortunate, the same train of causes are then called unlucky. There was, however, neither luck nor ill-luck in these trains, because the remote or necessary physical causes did not determine the proximate and fluctuating mental ones. There existed no necessary connexion between these trains, besides the necessity or certainty that some result must be consequent on every train of events growing out of human life and action. These trains must, in all cases, produce some result, that is to say, a result ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... They called him Louis the Pious. And so, indeed, he was, sincerely and even scrupulously pious; but he was still more weak than pious, as weak in heart and character as in mind; as destitute of ruling ideas as of strength of will, fluctuating at the mercy of transitory impressions or surrounding influences or positional embarrassments. The name of Debonnaire is suited to him; it expresses his moral worth and his political incapacity both ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... Manufacturer, who in turn aspires to be "large-acred," and always will, as long as we have a territorial constitution; a better security for the preponderance of the landed interest than any corn law, fixed or fluctuating. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... they generally do by a bitter experience,—they are confronted with an uncertainty that is most detrimental to any business or enterprise. Imagine what our business would be with our measures of weight, length, and capacity all variable! Yet such a condition would be less disastrous than a fluctuating money value when it became fully known ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... by pressure from the seed of the flax plant (Linum usitatissimum). Linseed contains on an average about 33 per cent. of oil, though the amount varies materially, the percentage obtained fluctuating considerably, not being alike on any two successive days. This is partly due to the varying richness of the seed, and partly to the manner in which it is manipulated in extracting the oil, it being a very easy matter to lose a considerable ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... region henceforth clears a broad district of slaves. The few are hurried off by their masters; the many escape to a land of freedom. How signally this process will be accellerated after the first of January, few will yet believe. Let the war simply go on, with fluctuating fortunes, for a year or two longer, and the new slave empire will be nearly denuded of slaves. The process is at once inevitable and irresistible. Whether the able-bodied slaves thus escaping to the loyal ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Remainder of his Life in the Enjoyment of what he has. You know me so well, that I need not tell you, I mean, by the Enjoyment of my Possessions, the making of them useful to the Publick. As the greatest part of my Estate has been hitherto of an unsteady and volatile nature, either tost upon Seas or fluctuating in Funds; it is now fixed and settled in Substantial Acres and Tenements. I have removed it from the Uncertainty of Stocks, Winds and Waves, and disposed of it in a considerable Purchase. This will give me great Opportunity of being charitable in my way, that is, in setting my poor Neighbours ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... nature, and has produced those models which we still admire in arts, eloquence, and manners. The diversity of new scenes and situations, which so many growing states must necessarily pass through, may introduce changes in the fluctuating opinions and manners of men which we can form no conception of; and not only the gracious disposition of Providence, but the visible preparation of causes, seems to indicate strong tendencies ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... resist the Normans [a]. But the terror of the late defeat, and the near neighbourhood of the invaders, increased the confusion inseparable from great revolutions: and every resolution proposed was hasty, fluctuating, tumultuary; disconcerted by fear or faction, ill-planned, and worse executed. [FN [a] Gul. Pictav. p. 205. Order. Vitalis, p. 502. Hoveden, ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... for many miles, regulates the flow, and by a sponge-like action prevents the excess of one year from causing the deficiency of the next. Far away in Egypt, prince, priest, and peasant look southwards with anxious attention for the fluctuating yet certain rise. Gradually the flood begins. The Bahr-el-Ghazal from a channel of stagnant pools and marshes becomes a broad and navigable stream. The Sobat and the Atbara from dry watercourses with occasional pools, in which ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... had apparently altered for the better. His improved finances had sweetened his temper and cast the shining gloss of prosperity over his appearance; and, in a measure at least, time had revived in him the ardent, if fluctuating, emotions of the lover. For three months after her return, he evinced a fervent sentiment for Gabriella, which she, who was staunchly paying the price of her folly, received with an inner shrinking but an outward complaisance. Her feeling for George was quite dead—so dead ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... prevailing wind on the lakes of that region is west, but owing to the avenues formed by the mountains it is frequently impossible to tell the true direction of the currents, as they often vary within short distances and brief differences of time. This is truer in light fluctuating puffs of air than in steady breezes; though the squalls of even the latter are familiarly known to be uncertain and baffling in all mountainous regions and narrow waters. On the present occasion, Hutter himself (as he shoved the ark from her berth at the ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... now what benediction the true hero can dare to utter, what prayer the true hero can dare to pray, through this faltering, fluctuating, martial hero's lips, when, 'that whatsoever god who led him' is failing him, and the flaws of impulse are swaying him to and fro, and darkening ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon |
