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Lesser   Listen
adjective
Lesser  adj.  Less; smaller; inferior. "God made... the lesser light to rule the night." Note: Lesser is used for less, now the compar. of little, in certain special instances in which its employment has become established by custom; as, Lesser Asia (i. e., Asia Minor), the lesser light, and some others; also in poetry, for the sake of the meter, and in prose where its use renders the passage more euphonious. "The more my prayer, the lesser is my grace." "The larger here, and there the lesser lambs." "By the same reason may a man, in the state of nature, punish the lesser breaches of the law."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Lesser" Quotes from Famous Books



... far greater ebb and flow of tide here than at any other coast of the Mediterranean, the sea rising and falling no less than ten feet. This tidal phenomenon extends to the Lesser Syrtis ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... was under Krishna Deva's sway, and several quasi-independent chiefs were his vassals. These were, according to Nuniz, the chief of Seringapatam, and those of Bankapur,[191] Garsopa, Calicut, Bhatkal, and Barkur. The Portuguese treated these lesser chiefs as if they were kings, called them so and sent embassies to them, no ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell

... party—nothing was safe while she was moving. The King had never held up his head since the St. Bartholomew; it was seen that he now was dying, and the Queen-mother took the opportunity of laying hands on the middle party. She arrested Alencon, Montmorency, and Henri of Navarre, together with some lesser chiefs; in the midst of it all Charles IX. died (1574), in misery, leaving the ill-omened crown to Henri of Anjou, King of Poland, his next brother, his mother's favourite, the worst of a bad breed. At the same time the fifth civil war broke out, interesting chiefly because it was during ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre

... established relationships more intimate than their convention hall could have fostered. If they had dissensions, these were counterbalanced by the exchange of amenities. If their points of view diverged in lesser matters, ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... the difference between that happening, as it appealed to us, and as it must appeal to you who merely read of it. It is beyond my powers to convey the sense of the uncanny which the episode created. Yet, even as I think of it, I feel again, though in lesser degree, the chill which seemed to creep through my veins ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... voice was of that peculiar metallic note which carries farther than the owner is aware. It rose, if contradicted, into a sort of continuous trumpet-blast which drowned all other lesser voices. Hester's little garret was two stories above Mr. Gresley's study on the ground floor, but, nevertheless, she often heard confused, anxious parochial buzzings overwhelmed by that sustained high note ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley

... to each family consists of a single lamp, or shallow vessel of lapis ollaris, its form being the lesser segment of a circle. The wick, composed of dry moss rubbed between the hands till it is quite inflammable, is disposed along the edge of the lamp on the straight side, and a greater or smaller quantity lighted, according to the heat required or ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... dangerous: though sometime some such will grow but not continue long: Because they be tainted with deadly wounds, either in the roote or top. (And a tree once throughly tainted is neuer good) And though they get some hold in the earth with some lesser taw, or tawes, which giue some nourishment to the body of the tree: yet the heart being tainted, he will hardly euer thriue; which you may easily discerne by the blackenesse of the boughes at the heart, ...
— A New Orchard And Garden • William Lawson

... nine miles north along the Tennessee. So Grant had to keep in touch with both. He had not ignored the advantage of entrenching. But the best line for entrenching was too far from good water; and he thought he chose the lesser of two evils when he devoted the time that might have been used for digging to drilling instead. His army was raw as an army; many of the men were still rawer recruits; and, as usual, the recruiting authorities had sent him several brand-new battalions, which knew ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood

... twinkling lights of the village less than half a mile ahead, and he glanced over them carefully. There was the saloon. Who could mistake it, with its flamboyant brilliance against the lesser twinkle of the smaller houses? His eyes searched for the lights of Eve's home. He could not see them. Possibly she was in her kitchen, that snug little room, where, up to a year ago, he had many a time taken tea with her. Yes, ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum

... chosen this one as his mother. Her eighty was much nearer to her sixty than old Maisie's. She was no beautiful old shadow, with that strange plenty of perfectly white hair. Time's hand had left hers merely grey, as a set off against the lesser quantity he had spared her. As Dave Wardle had noticed, her teeth had suffered much less than his London Granny's. Altogether, she was marvellously close to what the convict's preconception ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... that the lesser chandelier in church scarcely gave a better light, father bade me take my ABC book, and go to the door to see if I could read it there. I went and began to read: "Our Father." But then they all said: "The lad knows that by heart." Mother ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various

... crossed her course and reaffirmed herself, returned to her starting-point and stole forth again, bearing ever the same horrid burden, brief, persistent, unexaggerated: The Foe! The Foe! In five great ships and twice as many lesser ones—counted at Quarantine Station just before the wires were cut—the Foe was hardly twenty leagues away, while barely that many guns of ours crouched between his eight times twenty and our hundred thousand ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... ground, and cover the sown seed. Nor ought this to seem strange to anyone, that there are in the world those that abstain from swine's flesh on such an account as this; when it is evident that in barbarous nations there are other animals had in greater honor and veneration for lesser reasons, if not altogether ridiculous. For the field-mouse only for its blindness was worshipped as a god among the Egyptians, because they were of an opinion that darkness was before light and that the latter had its birth ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a greater. A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the belief of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... for a sudden assault. The pestilence continued to rage, and the scarcity of food increased to such a degree, that for several weeks no bread was to be been in the settlement. The governor, Mr. Carver, exerted himself with zeal and benevolence to lesser the misery of his people; but with so little effect, that when the spring at length set in, and the captain of the Mayflower prepared to return to England, the little band of settlers was found to be reduced to one half the original number; and these were weakened ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb

... free way with women of a class below his own, and he did not find it easy to relinquish it. When he was with the Lady Eva he felt that under those innocent, loving eyes a man could have no desire for a lesser thing than her love; but when he rode away, the first pretty girl he met on the road he held in chat that ended with a kiss. He was always for kissing a pretty face, and found the habit hard to break, though there were times when he stamped and swore great oaths to himself that he would again ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan

... should shun the company of people tempted to intemperance. "If," he said, "they believe as they profess that Omnipotence condescended to take upon Himself the form of sinful man, and as such die an ignominious death, surely they will not refuse submission to the infinitely lesser condescension, for the temporal and perhaps eternal salvation of a large, erring, and unfortunate class of their fellow creatures! Nor is the condescension very great. In my judgment such of us as have never fallen victims have been spared more from the absence of appetite ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... world knows what Canada has done on the battlefields abroad, fighting with those troops from Australia, New Zealand, India and lesser English territory, to drive the ruthless Germans back and crush the Empire to ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... the more solicitous to leave a land beset with such dangers. Even in the town he does not feel safe. Robbers and murderers walk boldly abroad through the streets; not alone, but in the company of judges who have tried without condemning them; while lesser criminals stand by drinking-bars, hobnobbing with the constables who either hold them in charge, or have just released them, after a mock-hearing before some magistrate, with eyes blind as those of Justice herself—blinded by the ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid

... this Prize told vs that they saw another ship before them that day about noone. Hauing therefore dispatched all things about the Prize aforesaid and left our long boat with Captaine Dauis, taking his lesser boat with vs, we made way after this other ship with all the sayles we could beare, holding on our course due East, and giuing order to Captaine Dauis his ship and the Prize that they should follow vs due East, and that if they had sight of vs the morning following ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt

... of its splendor by this little, ruthless creature, who went into the forest with the axe on his shoulder. That is what you have done to whatever love I may have felt for you, Roderick Duncan. It lies prostrate now, and it has borne down with it, all the lesser verdure, all the little trees and bushes and vines that grew about it, and has left only a bare spot—and the wounded stump. You were ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman

... assistants went on shore, where Dr. Le Garde and Dr. Lesser secured a small house, and in a few hours this had undergone the same transformation and by the same hands as the Cuban hospital. The Red Cross flag was hoisted, Dr. Lesser placed in charge, and scores of our soldiers ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton

... he slipped into a detailed recital of all his lesser worries, the most recent of which was his experience with the Lipscombs, who, after a two months' tenancy of the West End Avenue house, had decamped without paying ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... service, and that sometimes they succeeded. They succeeded better while they could really join in the hymns and the prayers than they did when it came to the sermon. Good Dr. Gill, overruled by one of those lesser demons, whose work is so apparent though so inexplicable in this finite world, had selected for the text of his sermon of gladness the words, "Search and look." And so it happened—it was what did not often happen with him—he must needs repeat those words often, at the beginning ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale

... contests with the devil at their partings; and this is an help to saints: for ordinary saints find afterwards what the vile ones find at first, but when at the opening of hearts, the one finds himself to be as the other, the one is a comfort to the other. The lesser sort of sinners find but little of this, till after they have been some time in profession; but the vile man meets with his at the beginning. Wherefore he, when the other is down, is ready to tell that ...
— The Jerusalem Sinner Saved • John Bunyan

... I have small memory of aught but pleasure. The inquietudes of fear, like lesser Streams Still flowing, still were lost in those of Love: 300 So Love grew mightier from the Pear, and Nature, Fleeing from Pain, shelter'd herself in Joy. The stars above our heads were dim and steady, Like eyes suffus'd ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... beautiful will not carry "chips on her shoulder," looking for slights and insults. If she carries the thought too strongly it becomes catching and someone will take up the idea. She will set into motion lesser vibrations in the minds and bodies of others and the things she imagines ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley

... Mr. Blackwell to read the fifth resolution of the series he submitted, and contended that that covered the whole ground of the resolutions of Mr. Douglass. When it was a question of race, she let the lesser question of sex go. But the white women all go for sex, letting race occupy a minor position. She liked the idea of working women, but she would like to know if it was broad enough to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... of the border between New York and Canada: where the winters were long and piercingly cold, where hunger frequently stalked, where travel was by canoe on the noble St. Lawrence, the swift Ottawa, the Richelieu, the lesser streams and lakes, and by snowshoe or moccasin through the heavy forests; where the Indians rarely failed to torture their captives in manner too horrid to relate; and where the only white people ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin

... powerless, and indeed made furtive by the constant fear of savage reprisals. A great opportunity had come and a great opportunity had been lost. President Li Yuan-hung's personal argument, communicated to the writer, was that in sealing the Mandate dissolving Parliament he had chosen the lesser of two evils, for although South China and the Chinese Navy declared they would defend Parliament to the last, they were far away whilst large armies were echeloned along the railways leading into Peking and daily threatening action. The events of the next year or so must prove ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... sides of the main court, the red chateau was set low on a slight rise of land. The main entrance was flanked by the North Wing and the South Wing, interrupted throughout their length by lesser courts. The domed chapel upreared to the right of the gate was the fourth one to serve the palace. After a period of building lasting ten years it was consecrated in the year 1710. The exquisite white stone edifice is still regarded as an architectural gem. Its interior embellishments were carried ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne

... or suckers, to be scooped up upon the borders of the brook. And once, more in hate than in hunger, the old mother raccoon had the fierce joy of eradicating a nest of weasels, which she found in a pile of rocks. She had a savage antipathy to the weasel tribe, whose blood-lust menaces all the lesser wood-folk, and whose teeth delight to kill, after hunger is sated, for the mere relish of a taste of quivering brain or a spurt of warm blood. The raccoon carried more scars from the victory over the weasels than she had to remind her of the scuffle with ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... Me, him will My Father honour," said the Blessed One. And if God honours His servants, shall not we honour them likewise? We may not, as our forefathers did blindly, though lovingly, worship them as mediators and lesser gods, and pray to them instead of to their Father in heaven to whose throne of grace we may all come boldly through Christ Jesus, or believe that their relics will work miracles in our behalf, thus honouring ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley

... I find my Confidence Has overcome my unhappy Bashfulness; I had an humbler Suit to approach you with; But this unlook'd for Honour Has soon confounded all my lesser aims, As were they not essential to my Being, I durst not name them ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn

... will hear what the voyageurs call the voices of the rapids. Many people never hear them at all. They speak very soft and low and distinct beneath the steady roar and dashing, beneath even the lesser tinklings and gurglings whose quality superimposes them over the louder sounds. They are like the tear-forms swimming across the field of vision, which disappear so quickly when you concentrate your sight to look at them, and ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White

... the parent of many lesser ones,—the aforenamed splinters of injurious remark and accusation, which flew out in the heat of argument, remaining and festering and giving rise to nervous soreness; yet, where there is at the foundation real, genuine love, and a good deal of it, the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... scrambled up from the door-sill and made way for the Trust president. He strode into the room with a quick glance round and a short, harsh "Howdy?" for the lesser members of his corporation. His manner towards Scipio was ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum

... bronzed than she could be by studying medicine, theology, jurisprudence, or political economy, and taking a zealous part in the affairs of her country. Let not the greater and nearer evil be neglected in a prejudiced imagination of a lesser and remoter one. Where do you find an exterior of politeness covering an interior of indifference or guile? a flaming demonstrativeness in front of a soul of ice? a beautiful show of nobleness and happiness, with a haggard reality of weariness ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... said, 'Think how the uplift of God's eagles' wings enlarged their horizon!' Then he seemed to me to have the idea that they might not comprehend, so he made one of those eloquent pauses and went on to say, 'You can all, like Lincoln, rise as he rose from the lesser things of a hard life to see more widely and more surely the duties of life. The eagle-wings of God's uplifting power are for you, for me, for all of us.' ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell

... Anti-Socialist would join issue with a lesser advantage. He would have to show not only that Private Ownership has been serviceable and justifiable in the past—which many Socialists admit quite cheerfully—but that it is the crown and perfection of human methods, which the Socialists flatly deny. Universal ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... it has yet received, is that of the mosaics of the catacombs. Their character is widely different from that of those with which a few centuries afterwards the popes splendidly adorned their favorite churches. But we must leave mosaics, gems, lamps, and all the lesser articles of ornament and of common household use that have been found in the graves, and which bring one often into strange familiarity with the ways and near sympathy with the feelings of those who occupied the now empty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... Steele, Tickell, Philips, Smith, and a crowd of lesser lights, raised my lord each one on a higher pinnacle; and in return the powerful minister was not forgetful of the douceur which well-tuned verses were accustomed to receive. He himself had tried to be a poet, and in 1703 wrote verses for the toasting-cups of the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton

... the old king died, he was so attached to her he gave her twenty cows, in order that she might fatten up on milk after her native fashion; but on Sunna's death, when the establishment of women was divided, Meri fell to N'yamasore's (the queen's) lot. The lesser one, who still retains the name of Kahala, said she was seized in Unyoro by the Waganda, who took her to N'yamasore, but what became of her father and ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke

... a rectilinear figure, of a regular figure, of a triangle, and of an equilateral triangle. AR these terms, therefore, are in this case attended with the same idea; but as they are wont to be applied in a greater or lesser compass, they excite their particular habits, and thereby keep the mind in a readiness to observe, that no conclusion be formed contrary to any ideas, which ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume

... ready to expect great results in the villas and palaces of the millionaires of the earlier half of the sixteenth century when we reflect that they were executed by Bramante, Peruzzi, San Gallo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael with a host of lesser men who would have been great in any other age, and that the ruins of imperial Rome furnished them with models for their designs and an inexhaustible quarry of statues, ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney

... gentlemen at Fair Oaks were astir at an unusually early hour, and immediately after breakfast held a brief conference. It was decided to offer a heavy reward for the apprehension of the murderer of Hugh Mainwaring, while a lesser reward was to be offered for information leading to identification and arrest of the guilty party. Preparations were also to be made for the funeral, which would take place the next day, and which, in accordance ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour

... something about convolutions or a convoluted shape, I think, but that's only part of it. There are connotations of ... of intelligence? No ... ridiculous. How can you have a convoluted intelligence? But a brain is convoluted and to a greater or lesser degree intelligent. The ... um ... the question of degree comes into it, I think. A brain of limited intelligence, then, though damned if I know why I think of it as limited. Challonari ... challonari. It's not English ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan

... the succession to his estate at the age of twenty-three had changed the nature of his ambition. The charm of his manner was such that he sprang at once into the fashion, and became beguiled by his own genial temperament into that lesser but pleasanter kind of ambition which contents itself with social successes and enjoys the present hour. When his circumstances compelled him to eke out his income by literary profits, he slid into the grooves of periodical composition, and resigned all thoughts of the labour required for any ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... theeself up with the notion that I'm going to churn butter for thee more than twice a week." She probably thought me mad, and I was too ignorant to know that to "bring" a small quantity of butter in the enormous churn she used was a simple impossibility: nor, I imagine, was she aware that any machine of lesser dimensions was ever used for the purpose. I got myself a tiny table-churn, and for a little while made a small quantity of fresh butter myself for our daily breakfast supply; but soon weaned of it, and thought it not worth while—nobody cared for it but myself, and I accepted my provision ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... words connected with one another, from genus, from species, from similarity, from difference, from contraries, from accessories, from consequents, from antecedents, from things inconsistent with one another, from causes, from effects, from a comparison with greater, or lesser, or equal things,—there is no topic of argument whatever remaining ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero

... hit one of the larger blocks and smashed like an egg. There was a crash that made all the most violent crashes of his past life seem like the sound of falling dust, and this was followed by a descending series of lesser crashes. A vast wind roared throughout earth and heaven, so that he could scarcely lift his head to look. For a while he was too breathless and astonished even to see where he was or what had happened. And his first movement was to feel his head and ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... for the sight and the savour of heaven, and is humbled With awe that exults in thanksgiving: the towers of the flowers of the trees Shine sweeter than snows that the hand of the season has melted and crumbled, And fair as the foam that is lesser of life than the loveliest of these. But the sense of a life more lustrous with joy and enkindled of glory Than man's was ever or may be, and briefer than joys most brief, Bids man's heart bend and adore, be the man's head golden or hoary, As it ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... and sunburnt on their shoulders. The women, old and young, work as hard as the men, at all kinds of work, and yet with right good-will, for they work for themselves. They often take their dinners with them to the fields, frequently giving the lesser children a piece of bread each, and locking them up in their cottages till they return. This would be thought a hard life in England; but hard as it is, it is better than the degradation of agricultural laborers, in a dear country like England, with six or eight shillings ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... have been also a route up the valley of the Lesser Zab, by Koi-Sinjah and over the great Kandil range into Lajihan. There are said to be Assyrian remains near Koi-Sinjah, at a place called the Bihisht and Jehennen ("the Heaven and Hell") of Nimrud, but no account has been given of them by ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson

... the Viceroy with all his staff at the state entrance of Government House, and he is accompanied through all the rooms, both on his arrival and on his departure; but, as I said before, the Nizam ranks as a Sovereign. In the case of lesser lights the Viceroy advances anything from three to twenty steps. These points may appear very trivial to Europeans, but to Orientals they assume great importance, and, after all, India is a part of Asia. At right angles to the ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... stage-wagon allowed us no time to analyze this painful, ever-recurring feature of the Tyrol. When we next looked up we saw above us, on a wooded crag, a square gray tower, which, once a stronghold, appears, as if exhausted with old age, to be tottering into the midst of lesser ruins. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various

... Image of my self and dearer half, The trouble of thy thoughts this night in sleep Affects me equally; nor can I like This uncouth dream, of evil sprung I fear; Yet evil whence? in thee can harbour none, Created pure. But know that in the Soule 100 Are many lesser Faculties that serve Reason as chief; among these Fansie next Her office holds; of all external things, Which the five watchful Senses represent, She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes, Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, frames All what we affirm ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... the knights take leave of each other that they might depart. The Moor spake to the twain: "For what do ye take me? Am I a lesser or a weaker man than either of ye that Sir Gawain must needs ride with me? I will not have it so. There is no knight so bold but I dare well withstand him. I know well what is unfitting. Now say whither ye ...
— The Romance of Morien • Jessie L. Weston

... blare! The rival Bards, wild-eyed, with windblown hair, And close-hugged harps, advance with fire-winged feet For the green Laureate Laurels to compete; The laurels vacant from the brows of him In whose fine light all lesser lustres dim. Tourney of Troubadours! The laurels lie On crimson velvet cushion couched on high, Whilst Punch, Lord-Warden of his country's fame, Attends the strains to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various

... that "Hilal" is the crescent (waxing or waning) for the first and last two or three nights: during the rest of the lunar month the lesser light is ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... were for a long period pre-eminent. Their marked taste and turn for music may appear more surprising. It is universally recognised and is sufficiently evident to anyone who will look at the faces of the chief orchestras of Europe. Besides a crowd of lesser names they have produced among composers Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and Halevy, and among contemporary performers Rubinstein, Joachim, Hermann Levy, and Lucca. A Jewess is the most popular tragic actress on the contemporary stage, and another Jewess was probably ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... passed. The nights, by election, Bassett spent on the ashen floor of the devil-devil house, beneath the ever- swinging, slow-curing heads. His reason for this was that it was taboo to the lesser sex of woman, and therefore, a refuge for him from Balatta, who grew more persecutingly and perilously loverly as the Southern Cross rode higher in the sky and marked the imminence of her nuptials. His days Bassett spent in a hammock swung under the shade ...
— The Red One • Jack London

... by Origen, but I think that he would have understood it had he lived now. It is not the same thing as the teaching of the Kingdom of God preached by Jesus, yet I do not think that he would have condemned it, for great men understand the thoughts of lesser ones though they themselves fail to be understood. The thoughts and words of Jesus, like those of Origen, were borrowed from his own time and race; they belong to the first century as those of Origen belong to the third. No historical reconstruction can make them adequate for our ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake

... sometimes to be distinguished from the mistress only by her dress and by her labor-coarsened hands; certainly not always by her dirty finger-nails and foul teeth, for though the clean shirt is now generally in Italy, some lesser virtues are still unknown: the nail-brush and tooth-brush are of but infrequent use; the four-pronged fork is still imperfectly understood, and as a nation the Italians may be said to eat ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... infinite spirit of the UNIVERSAL, piercing, moving, and governing all things, hath ordained. Certainly, the things that this king did were marvellous, and would hardly have been undertaken by any one else: and though his father had determined to have invaded the Lesser Asia, it is like that he would have contented himself with some part thereof, and not have discovered the river of Indus, as this man did." ["The Historie of the World," by Sir Walter Raleigh, Knight, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.

... of a burning hall, of the shouts of savage warriors, and of the cries of the womenfolk, among whom I, a ten-year-old boy, was when Harald Fairhair sent the great Jarl Rognvald and his men to make an end of Vemund, my father. For Harald had sworn a great oath to subdue all the lesser kings in the land and rule there alone, like Gorm in Denmark and Eirik in Sweden. So my father's turn came, and as he feasted with his ninety stout courtmen, the jarl landed under cover of the dark and fell on him, surrounding ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler

... change in everything that goes to make up the life and habits of men; and yet Shakespeare's fine strokes of humor have become so fitted to our common speech that the very unconsciousness with which we apply them proves how they tally with our modern emotions and opportunities. Lesser lights burn quite as steadily. Pope and Goldsmith reappear on the lips of people whose knowledge of the "Essay on Man" is of the very haziest character, and whose acquaintance with "She Stoops to Conquer" is confined exclusively to Mr. Abbey's graceful ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)

... near such a shell when it exploded. It rendered him unconscious. He was blind for some time, deaf for two weeks, and suffered from loss of memory for over a month,—and all this without any surgical wound. He thinks the nervous effect produced by the explosions at a distance is due in a lesser degree to the same sort of shock. On one occasion a number of big shells exploded in succession a hundred yards from a trench; and although no one was wounded or suffered any physical injury, such ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood

... the lesser ever does give way before the greater, so now did the anger that had sustained Ombreval go down and vanish before the overwhelming passion of La Boulaye. He grew pale to the lips at the Deputy's threat, and his eyes ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini

... instincts which had straggled down through the centuries from mediaeval ancestors. Her very selfishness—which she was pleased to call Paganism—charmed them: it was one of the divine rights of the woman born to rule men and to create a happiness for one unimagined by lesser women. No man but idealised her, unfanciful as he might be, not so much for her beauty or gifts, or for all combined, as because when she gave herself it would be for the last as it was for the first time. As the ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... have undergone them denounced other Reformers to save themselves; and seventy-three succeeded in escaping by flight. The Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris (pp. 444- 450) does not mention sentences to lesser penalties. In a provincial town, whose history one of its most distinguished inhabitants, M. Boutiot, has lately written from authentic documents and local traditions, at Troyes in fact, in 1542 and 1546, two burgesses, one a clerk and the other a publisher, were sentenced ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... load of care, and feeling the while that he ought to have obtained from Captain Murray the route the prisoners would take, and then have found Drew Forbes and told him, so as to render the attempt at rescue easier, he hurried across the first court, and then into the lesser one to his ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn

... frankly be admitted, moreover, that democracy is not the shortest road to good government nor to economic efficiency. That we recognize this as a people is proved by the drift of our opinion and of the changes in our lesser institutions. Take, for instance, our city government. A few decades ago our cities were so notoriously misgoverned that they were the scandal of the world. Our boards of aldermen or councilmen, representing ward constituencies, with all sorts of local strings tied to them, were clumsy and unwieldy ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs

... regularly oval in some skeletons, as in the Spanish. The obturator notch is also much less elongated in some skeletons than in others. The end of the pubic bone presents the greatest difference; being hardly enlarged in the Bankiva; considerably and gradually enlarged in Cochins, and in a lesser degree in some other breeds; and abruptly enlarged in Bantams. In one Bantam this bone extended very little beyond the extremity of the ischium. The whole pelvis in this latter bird differed widely in its ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... Four hundred years ago; So grandly still he stands, Mid lesser worlds of art, Colossal and apart, Like Memnon breathing songs ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll

... principal part of the structure, formed a couple of lateral galleries. Like nearly all the other great habitations of this quarter, there might be seen at the extremity of the garden, what the owners and occupiers of each called the lesser mansion. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... Boulder Lake. The military had congratulated themselves on what they'd learned. The beam projectors at the lake had a range of much more than seven miles, but this movable, unidentifiable thing carried a lesser armament. From it, men and animals seven miles away were safe. ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... banes of the modern girl and woman. It is very frequent. Probably at least twenty-five per cent, (some say fifty or seventy-five per cent.) of all women suffer with it in a greater or lesser degree. In some cases it is only an annoyance, necessitating the frequent changing of napkins, but in others it causes a great deal of weakness, backache, erosions, itching and burning. It is very resistant to treatment, particularly in girls. The reason ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... good to the person who practises it; it is a vice, although those addicted to it may call it one of the lesser sins. But would it be just or wise to prohibit the growth of tobacco, because smoking it may not ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking

... Bond-street. Over the fire place in the drawing-room were ornaments strongly expressive of the pugnacity of the peer. A long thick bludgeon lay horizontally supported by two brass hooks. Above this was placed parallel one of lesser dimensions, until a pyramid of weapons gradually arose, tapering to ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith

... Cantine de Proz?" I asked, trudging along the stony road, with my eyes held by a huge snow mountain which had suddenly loomed above the green shoulders of lesser hills, like a great white ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... of the two captains to repair at the closing in of the day, and drink their beer together as they watched this or that vessel more or less narrowly avoiding the shoals below. Nor would they commonly retire, unless the weather was dirty, until the sea-coal fire was lit above the town-gate and the lesser lighthouse upon the town-green answered with its six candles. Now, however, though they met here as usual, no salutation was exchanged. On benches as far apart as possible they drank their beer in silence and watched the players. ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... commanders, made himself master of the English Factory at Cossimbazar without firing a shot, and on the 20th of June, 1756, found himself in possession of Fort William, the fortified Factory of Calcutta.[8] The Governor, the commandant[9] of the troops, and some two hundred persons of lesser note, had deserted the Fort almost as soon as it was actually invested, and Holwell, one of the councillors, an ex-surgeon, and the gallant few who stood by him and continued the defence, were captured, and, to the number of 146, cast ...
— Three Frenchmen in Bengal - The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757 • S.C. Hill

... a fair question, and one which demands an answer. There must have been a reason, and a deep-rooted one, for this remarkable reaction and volte-face which has characterized Christianity, and, perhaps to a lesser degree, other both earlier and later cults like those of the Buddhists, the Egyptians, the Aztecs, (1) ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... as the mountain ramparts beyond the river flowing by her door. There was no hitch to speak of. Grandma, being one of a bygone brigade, enforced the almost obsolete rule of a chaperon, and the two evils in this case being represented by Andrew and me, Dawn considered me the lesser, and installed me in the office known by ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin

... friends at Jamestown, the Colony would have perished from starvation or by the arrows of the hostile Indians. And the importance of this Colony to the future United States was so great that we owe to Pocahontas somewhat the same gratitude, though in a lesser degree, that France owes to her Joan ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson

... dragged before the court, in which Isaac, Jacob, and Judah sat as judges. Judah, being the youngest of the judges and the least considerable in dignity, was the first to give a decision, for thus it is prescribed in criminal cases, that the prominent judges overawe not the lesser and influence their decisions unduly. It was the opinion of Judah that the woman was liable to the penalty of death by burning, for she was the daughter of the high priest Shem, and death by fire is the punishment ordained by the law for a high priest's ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... might be made known unto My creatures that there are two worlds." The moon: "O Lord: which of the two worlds is the larger, this world or the world to come?" God: "The world to come is the larger." The moon: "O Lord, Thou didst create two worlds, a greater and a lesser world; Thou didst create the heaven and the earth, the heaven exceeding the earth; Thou didst create fire and water, the water stronger than the fire, because it can quench the fire; and now Thou hast created the sun and the moon, and it is becoming that one of them should be greater than ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... consisted of the vassal kings of Scotland, Cumbria, Wales, Mona, the Hebrides, and other dependent states, the great earls, as of Mercia or East Anglia, and other mighty magnates: the third, of the lesser thanes, who were the especial vassals of the king, or the great landholders, for the possession of land was an essential part of ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... professional critic has generally been a man who professes not to let himself go and who is proud of it. If it were not for the occasional possibility of his being stunned by a book—made unconscious by it,—the professional critic of the lesser sort would never say anything of interest to us at all, and even if he did, being a maimed and defective conscious person, the evidence that he was stunned is likely to be of more significance than anything he may say about the book that stunned him, or about the way he felt when he was ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... helpless hands, replying with a still more terrifying burst of vowels. Bewildered, a little frightened, Mrs. McChesney stood helplessly by. The official laid a none too gentle hand on her shoulder. A little group of lesser officials stood, comic-opera fashion, in the background. And then Emma McChesney's New York training came to her aid. She ignored the voluble interpreter. She remained coolly unruffled by the fusillade of Portuguese. Quietly she opened her hand ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber

... like the lower edges of vast, mighty curtains, swaying and moving, now here, now there, and with all colors, yellow, violet, scarlet, blood red, as if the whole heavens were going to burn up, the thing being so marvelous that had I not seen lesser displays before I should have thought the world were at an end, no less, and have died, I do believe, of terror. As it was I stood in the snow by the barn gazing till my feet were like blocks of ice and I knew not if I were in Track's End or in the moon. Kaiser at first ...
— Track's End • Hayden Carruth

... manufacturing license from Central Coordination definitely abrogated any agreement with, or payment to, any lesser headquarters. Such an agreement or license barred any further negotiation between any lesser headquarters and a manufacturer, relating to the product concerned. Double royalties were prohibited ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole

... are not entirely out of my reach.... I have been trying to muster up my fortitude, and laboring for patience to bear my many trials. Surely, when I could determine to survive Fanny, I can endure poverty and all the lesser ills of life. I dreaded, oh! how I dreaded this time, and now it is arrived I am calmer than I expected to be. I have been very unwell; my constitution is much impaired; the prison walls are decaying, and the prisoner will ere long get free.... Remember that I am ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... The Long-Awaited Woman Tenth Chapter: The Jews and the Romans Eleventh Chapter: Two Davids Come to Beth Twelfth Chapter: Two Lesser Adventures Thirteenth Chapter: About Shadowy Sisters Fourteenth Chapter: This Clay-and-Paint Age Fifteenth Chapter: The Story of the Mother Sixteenth Chapter: "Through Desire for Her." Seventeenth Chapter: The Plan of the Builder Eighteenth Chapter: ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort

... Franciscans, rivals in later times of the monks of Dominic, were always taught to love {14} mankind and be merciful to transgressors. It was the duty of the Preaching Brothers to warn and threaten; it was the joy of the Frati Minori, or Lesser Brothers, to tend the sick and protect the helpless, taking thought for the very birds ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead

... overthrow the government of Altair I. Brutal murder of seventeen law-abiding citizens of the village of Karzan at the third hour before dawn in the second period after his arrival. Desecration of the Temple of our beloved Goddess Zermat, Queen of the Harvest. Conspiracy with the lesser gods to cause the unprecedented drought in the Dermatti section of our fair globe. Obscene exposure of his pouch-marks in a public square. Four separate and distinct charges of jail-break and bribery—" The judge pounded the bench for order—"Espionage with the accursed scum ...
— Letter of the Law • Alan Edward Nourse

... created one of the most dangerous of immediate political difficulties. In calling two nations into a renewed being, it has arrayed them in enmity against each other, and that in the face of a common enemy in whose presence all lesser differences and jealousies ought to be ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... Bulba, and others. This collection firmly established his position as a leading author. At the same time he was at work on several plays. The Vladimir Cross, which was to deal with the higher St. Petersburg functionaries in the same way as the Revizor with the lesser town officials, was never concluded, as Gogol realized the impossibility of placing them on the Russian stage. A few strong scenes were published. The comedy Marriage, finished in 1835, still finds a place in the Russian theatrical repertoire. The Gamblers, his ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol

... the hero of this day's gathering. Who was likely to care a rush about such a lesser light as a secretary charged ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed

... truth on the Persian and Mesopotamian plains, the most exuberant soils in the world with the scantiest population,—it would revivify Asia. It must spread. The peninsula of Arabia, when in action, must always command the peninsula of the Lesser Asia. Asia revivified would act upon Europe. The European comfort, which they call civilisation, is, after all, confined to a very small space: the island of Great Britain, France, and the course of a single river, the Rhine. The greater part of Europe ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... our national character—the want of all ease and simplicity, those essential ingredients of agreeable society, which distinguish these dreary meetings, have been long unfortunately notorious. No nation is so careful of the great, or so indifferent to the lesser, moralities of life as the English; and in no country is society, indebted, perhaps, to polished idleness for its greatest charms, more completely misunderstood. Too busy to watch the feelings of others, and too earnest to moderate our own, that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... were cheered. And whenever the price of the platter was expended, Alaeddin would take another and carry it to the accursed Jew who bought each and every at a pitiful price; and even this he would have minished but, seeing how he had paid a diner for the first, he feared to offer a lesser sum, lest the lad go and sell to some rival in trade and thus lose his usurious gains. Now when all the golden platters were sold, there remained only the silver tray whereupon they stood; and, for that it was large and weighty, Alaeddin brought ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... least possible that this gift was psychic power, and that Christ, as the greatest exponent who has ever appeared upon earth of that power, desired to surround Himself with others who possessed it to a lesser degree? This He would do for two reasons. The first is that a psychic circle is a great source of strength to one who is himself psychic, as is shown continually in our own experience, where, with a sympathetic and helpful surrounding, an atmosphere is created where all the ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle

... to Emerson, in a paper on "The Lesser Hawaiian Gods," "could at times assume the appearance of a handsome young woman, as when Kamapauaa, to his cost, was smitten with her charms when first he saw her with her sisters at Kilauea." Kamapauaa was a gigantic hog, who "could appear as a handsome young man, ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... would only be Cowes ever again—a lesser Cowes; and I thought when you first proposed it that the plan was rather stupid, though I did not want to be uncivil and say so. But I was delighted with Don Gomez de Montesma's amendment, substituting ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... Minor States was threatened. The two great Courts were uniting against the independence of their weaker neighbours. The danger of any popular invasion of kingly rights in the name of German unity had passed away, and the safety of the lesser sovereigns seemed now to lie not in resisting the spirit of constitutional reform but in appealing to it. In proportion as Prussia abandoned itself to Metternich's direction, the Governments of the South-Western States familiarised themselves ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... they rose with a rushing of wings like the voice of a thunder-shower on forest leaves, and incidentally drenched the cat with a deluge of raindrops collected in the leaves as he raced through underneath. A lesser beast, it may be noted, would have climbed a tree, but Hawkley, I think, had convinced his cat of that folly when a man might ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... singers as Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon, Simonides, and others of the soft and cheerful vein, the biting satires of Archilochus, the noble odes of Pindar, the war anthems of Tyrtaeus, and the productions of many of lesser fame. ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... indeed, for human eyes to gaze upon. Young, of medium height and perfectly symmetry of shape, her blonde hair and satin skin and eyes of velvet darkness were but her lesser charms. That which riveted the gaze of every beholder, and drew all eyes to her whereever she passed, was her air of radiant health and happiness, which emanated from her like the perfume ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... several captures, and the frigates of the enemy began an industrious search for him, while all the lesser craft strained every nerve to keep out of his way. On the 20th of February, 1815, when off the coast of South America, he gave chase to two of the enemy's vessels, one of which proved to be the Cyane and the other the Levant. The two together carried 55 guns and 313 men, while ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis

... valves are solely made and instituted lest the blood should pass from the greater into the lesser veins, and either rupture them or cause them to become varicose; lest, instead of advancing from the extreme to the central parts of the body, the blood should rather proceed along the veins from the ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... by no means always, characterises the female as distinguished from the male of the human species, there do go mental qualities which will peculiarly fit her for the labours of the future. It may be, that her lesser possession of the mere muscular and osseous strength, which were the elements of primary importance and which gave dominance in one stage of human growth, and which placed woman at a social disadvantage as compared with her companion, will, under ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner

... succession of well-accomplished visiters. In that society he began to wear off the rugged points of his own character. He saw the advantages of mutual civility, and endeavoured to profit by the models before him. He aimed at what has been called, by Swift, the "lesser morals," and by Cicero, "minores virtutes." His endeavour, though new and late, gave pleasure to all his acquaintance. Men were glad to see that he was willing to be communicative on equal terms and reciprocal complacence. The time was then expected, when he was ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... bitter fear that break men's souls Who lift too high their minds toward heaven, in thought Too godlike grown for worship; but of mood Equal, in good time reverent of time bad, And glad in ill days of the good that were. Nor now too would I fear thee, now misdoubt Lest fate should find thee lesser than thy doom, 250 Chosen if thou be to bear and to be great Haply beyond all women; and the word Speaks thee divine, dear queen, that speaks thee dead, Dead being alive, or quick and dead in one Shall not men call thee living? yet I fear To slay thee timeless with ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... forehead of Sir Walter Scott, the masculine features of George Eliott, and the flattened nose of Thackeray; while amongst the living I recognised James Payn, Walter Besant, the lady known as "Ouida," Robert Louis Stevenson, and several of lesser note. Never before, probably, had such an assemblage of choice spirits gathered ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... their stars! Even this is known in the North, and they exult over it as a just retribution on those who were chiefly instrumental in fomenting revolution. But they forget that it was ever thus, and that our true patriots and bold thinkers who furnish our lesser men, in greater positions, with ideas, are still true and steadfast in the cause they ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones

... be satisfied than only one person's.... Then what is good is not good for me or for you, but is simply good." "It is, indeed, so evident that it is better to secure a greater good for A than a lesser good for B, that it is hard to find any still more evident principle by which to prove this. And if A happens to be some one else, and B to be myself, that cannot affect the question, since it is irrelevant ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... universally possess over the rest of the world. Such a quantity of stones, therefore, was poured like the thickest hail on the fleet, when approaching the shore, that, not daring to enter the harbour, they made off for the main. They then passed over to the lesser Balearian island, which is of a fertile soil, but not equally powerful in men and arms. Here, therefore, they landed, and pitched a camp in a strong position above the harbour; and having made themselves masters ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius

... countrymen for the cause of France, striking the invading enemy with the terrors of a spirit. Just a clear-witted, womanly girl, except that her cause had driven fear from her heart, and occupied all her soul, to the exclusion of lesser things. "Pity she isn't an Englishwoman!" said one of the enemy who was near her after a battle, and he meant it for the most delicate praise. In a few months she changed the face of her country, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... great number of the descendants of each generation fall victims to accident, among those that remain it is still the greater or lesser fitness of the organism that determines the "selection for breeding purposes," and it would be incomprehensible if, in this competition, it were not ultimately, that is, on an average, the best equipped which survive, in the sense of living long ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... migration of the population was tantamount to a removal of the ancient landmarks—that is to say, to a disturbance of the arrangements made by the Tsar. Suppose, for instance, that the Tsar granted to a Boyar or some lesser dignitary an estate on which were settled twenty peasant families, and that afterwards ten of these emigrated to neighbouring proprietors. In this case the recipient might justly complain that he had lost half of his estate—though the amount ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... set steadfastly Deep in Boeotia, past the utmost roar Of seas, beyond Corinthian waves withdrawn, Girt with green vales awake with brooks or still, Towers up mid lesser-browed Boeotian hills— These couched like herds secure beneath its ken— And watches earth's green corners. At mid-noon We of Plataea mark the sun make pause Right over it, and top its crest with pride. Men of Eleusis ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts

... sonnets, nothing more than a not too seriously intended trick to add the excitement of a transcript of real emotion to what was really an academic exercise. If that were indeed so, then Elizabethan poetry is a very much lesser and meaner thing than later ages have thought it. But is it so? Let us look into the matter a little more closely. The unit of all ordinary kinds of writing is the word, and one is not commonly quarrelled with for using words that have belonged to other people. But the unit of the ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... as with bodies, so with souls it is, The greater gives, the lesser doth conceive: That thou hast fathered Love, I tell thee this, And by my pangs beseech thee to believe. Look on his hope divine— Thy hope and mine— Pity his outstretched ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt

... believe that it could give me such pain," murmured Father Damaso in a mournful voice. "But of two evils the lesser." ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal

... fearful that the mind of the spectator, excited and rapt into terror by the contemplation of them, wondered why they did not long ago tumble into the chasm beneath, so slight was their apparent support. Even in the mildest, seasons desolation brooded over the lesser hills and mountains about them; what then must it not have been at the period we are describing? From a hill a little to the right, over which they had to pass, a precipitous headland was visible, against which the mighty heavings of the ocean could be heard ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... John Ingerfield comes wooing, and speaks to her no word of love but only of money, she feels that here at last is a genuine voice that she can trust. Love of the lesser side of life is still left to her. It will be pleasant to be the wealthy mistress of a fine house, to give great receptions, to exchange the secret poverty of home for display and luxury. These things are offered to her on the very terms ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome

... there been room, could the name of an emperor follow that of a subject, though that subject was a patriarch. The only way out of the difficulty, therefore, was to erase John's name, and to substitute the name of the little prince with the date of his coming to the throne; the lesser light must pale before the greater. This was done, but the bronze proved too stubborn to yield completely to the wishes of courtiers, and underneath Michael's name has kept fast hold of the name John to this day. The original date on the gate ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen

... Laplace, being struck by the fact that the "lesser light" did not rule the night to anything like the same extent that the "greater light" ruled the day, set to work to examine the conditions under which it might have been made to do so. The result of his speculations showed that if the moon were removed to such a distance that she took a year ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage

... communicating with the platform on which the ruins of the ancient castle were situated. The wind had arisen, and swept before it the clouds which had formerly obscured the sky. The moon was high, and at the full, and all the lesser satellites of heaven shone forth in cloudless effulgence. The scene which their light presented to Mannering was in the ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... step with me, Madam, behind the curtain, only to hear in what kind of manner my father and my mother debated between themselves, this affair of the breeches,—from which you may form an idea, how they debated all lesser matters. ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne

... looked charming;" "loan" for "lend;" "to get along" instead of "to get on;" "cupalo" instead of "cupola;" "who" for "whom"—as, "who did you see" for "whom did you see;" double negatives, as, "he did not do neither of those things;" "lesser" for "least;" "move" instead of "remove;" "off-set" instead of "set-off," and many other words which are often carelessly used by those who have been better taught, as well as by those who are ignorant of ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young

... calmed and unresponsive to the slower vibrations, but responsive to the quicker ones, a peace and calm pervade one's mind, and it becomes consciously receptive to higher vibrations of vital energy. Immune from the lesser harmonies, one opens himself to the greater ones, which are always seeking avenues of expression. With the greater influx of the One Life, a sense of power steals over one and he becomes conscious of increased vigor ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush

... Augustulus, the last of the Roman Emperors, I cannot but esteem it perfectly Gothic." "I suppose that at first it was like its native country, rude and gross, and at the early importation it was of the lesser kind which they called Viola da Bracchia, and since the Violin." He concludes by expressing his belief that the Hebrews did not sound their "lutes and guitars with the scratch of an horse-tail bow." These opinions of Roger North are for the most part identical with those held by well-known ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart

... dupes to extricate themselves as best they could from the situation into which he had led them. As was the case in 1837, most of the leaders of the rebellion escaped from justice, leaving only the smaller fry in the hands of the authorities. Of the lesser ringleaders nearly one hundred were brought to trial. Two of the French-Canadian judges, one of them being Elzear Bedard, attempted to force the government to try the prisoners in the civil courts, where they would have the benefit of trial by jury; but Sir ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles

... sat there alone in the dim lamp-light, his head bent over his knees, his hands hanging loosely before him, he thought bitterly of the defection of that old friend who had stood by him through so many lesser contests. It was impossible that Bennett should think the schemes of that book feasible! Yet he was one of the honestest of men, and, within a certain range, one of the most clear-headed. As for the others, they had been all against him. Intellectually, their opinion did not matter to him; but ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... acceptance of his own resignation. But the bitter personal controversy which immediately followed between Grant and Johnson, the second attempt to remove Stanton in February, 1868, and the consequent impeachment of the President, totally eclipsed the more distant and lesser controversy between Grant and Stanton, and, doubtless, prevented Grant from taking the action in respect to Stanton's removal which he informed me in Richmond he intended to ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... pool a little less than two hundred feet in depth. Here the force of the falling water is sufficient to move about the fallen blocks of limestone and use them in the excavation of the shale of the bed. At the American Falls the lesser branch of the river, which flows along the American side of Goat Island, pours over the side of the gorge and breaks upon a high talus of limestone blocks which its smaller volume of water is unable to grind to pieces ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... Jesus' is the secret of triumph over the fascinations of the world. And if we will habitually so look, then the sweetness that we shall experience will destroy all the seducing power of lesser and earthly sweetness, and the blessed light of the sun will dim and all but extinguish the deceitful gleams that tempt us into the swamps where we shall be drowned. Turn away, then, from these things; cleave ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... shall be terribly bored by any request that you may make, and shall therefore be compelled to refuse it." He was sometimes liberal, though rarely generous. If he showed that a large disaster touched his heart, he could not conceal the fact that a lesser mishap simply fell upon his irritated nerves; and therefore he might contribute to a stricken city while refusing to listen to ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read



Words linked to "Lesser" :   lesser duckweed, greater, lesser spearwort, lesser yellowlegs, lesser celandine, lesser scaup, lesser panda, Lesser Antilles, lesser yellow trefoil, lesser wintergreen, lesser centaury, lesser bullrush, lesser twayblade, small, little, lesser ape, lesser rhomboid muscle, lesser anteater, lesser rorqual, lesser hemlock, lesser whitethroat, lesser kudu, lesser prairie chicken, Lesser Sunda Islands, lesser knapweed, lesser omentum, lesser peritoneal cavity, lesser burdock, lesser scaup duck, lesser calamint, lesser galangal, to a lesser extent, lesser butterfly orchid



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