"Palpable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... explain it thus:—Mr Carlyle is evidently a writer of strong religious feelings. Marry, when he would exhibit them to the world, he is under the necessity of borrowing a creed from some one else. His own philosophy has nothing palpable enough for ordinary vision; nothing, as we remember, but vague infinities and eternities, with an "everlasting yes," and an "everlasting no." As the choice lay quite open to him, there was no reason why he should not select the very hottest creed he could any ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... am pausing too long over details. Let me hurry on. I remember the disappointment with which Sullivan's cantata "Kenilworth" was received at the Festival of 1867. The then young composer had made such a very "palpable hit" by his "Tempest" music that great things were expected from the new cantata he composed for Birmingham. But "Kenilworth" fell very flat, and nothing afterwards happened to stir it up into a success. Indeed, the work may almost be said ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... with which these dead Mound-Builders are supposed to have been acquainted, not a palpable trace remains. The tale of its existence is told by a single mound in Wisconsin, which the most ardent supporter of the mastodon theory must acknowledge to be far from a facsimile, and two carvings and an inscribed tablet, the three latter the finds ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... behind me now. There was nothing ahead of the sloop's fixed bowsprit. We were driving into a curtain of blackness that had been let down from the sky to the sea. It is seldom that there is not some little light playing over the surface of the water. This night a palpable cloud had settled upon the face of the waters and I could not even see the foam on the crests of the waves, save where they ran past ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... townspeople that all was at an end between Adele and Reuben,—clear that she had fallen away from the old favor in which she once stood at the parsonage; and Miss Eliza, by her adroit hints, and without any palpable violation of truth, found means of associating these results with certain suspicious circumstances which had come to light respecting the poor girl's character,—circumstances for which she herself (Miss Eliza was kind enough to say) was not altogether ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... reversing the frozen bread placed before the fire to thaw. 'We'll eat Shookum before the trip is over. What d'ye say, Ruth?' The Indian woman settled the coffee with a piece of ice, glanced from Malemute Kid to her husband, then at the dogs, but vouchsafed no reply. It was such a palpable truism that none was necessary. Two hundred miles of unbroken trail in prospect, with a scant six days' grub for themselves and none for the dogs, could admit no other alternative. The two men and the woman grouped about the fire and began their meager meal. The dogs lay in their harnesses ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... though it is not a delight, to come in contact with a mind like Mr. Hughes'; it is so definite, so hard and firm and palpable. You feel sure that it rests somewhere on the eternal verities. It is never agnostic. It has none of the malaise of the twentieth century. Mr. Justice Brandeis, when Mr. Hughes was governor of New York and a reformer and progressive, said ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... new stopping-place, my Whig friend would jump out with eager anticipations that here his majority would be made too palpable for denial; after him would quickly stride his long-legged, long-headed rival; and in a moment both were hard at it with ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... somewhere. The "painted quid" had done its work more thoroughly than Willon and the welsher had intended; they had meant that the opiate should be just sufficient to make the favorite off his speed, but not to make effects so palpable as these. It was, however, so deftly prepared that under examination no trace could be found of it, and the result of veterinary investigation, while it left unremoved the conviction that the horse ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... shadow, a tremor of wakening flower-life, half pearl, half palest pink, yet more than either. Upon the immediate foreground it rippled into defined points of blossom, which already twinkled through all the dull foliage; in the middle distance it faded; afar off it trembled as a palpable haze of light under the impalpable reeling of the summer air. A week or less would see the annual miracle peformed again and witness that spacious and solemn region in all the amethystine glories of the ling. Fiercely hot grew the day, and ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... twilight obtained there, in part a reflected glow from the entrance hall, partly thin and diffused rays escaping from Maitland's study. So it was that the first few steps upward took the girl into darkness so close and unrelieved as to seem almost palpable. ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... Or is it that, while the sane can exercise but a very limited power over the insane, there is no limit to the influence which the insane can gain over one another? Living in a world of their own, where delusions pass for palpable facts, where the logical faculty accepts the wildest visions as of equal significance with actual realities, these dreamers have a calculus of their own which includes the symbols in use among the sane, but comprehends besides a notation which these latter attach no meaning to, reject, ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... in the House of Commons on the smallness of the recognition, the Prime Minister replied that Nelson's glory did not depend upon the rank to which he might be raised in the peerage; a truism too palpable and inapplicable for serious utterance, the question before the House being, not the measure of Nelson's glory, but that of the national acknowledgment. As Hood justly said, "All remunerations should be proportionate to the service done to the public;" and if that cannot always be attained absolutely, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... This palpable suggestion—borne out by what he remembered of the other domestic details—that the house had been planned with reference to sudden foray or escape reawakened his former uneasy reflections. Zeenie, who had been watching ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... late Horace Vernon was a modern villa of prosperous appearance; but, on this sunny September morning, a palpable atmosphere of gloom seemed to overlie it. This made itself perceptible even to the toughened and unimpressionable nerves of Inspector Dunbar. As he mounted the five steps leading up to the door, glancing meanwhile at the lowered blinds at the windows, he wondered if, failing these ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... purified, rectified, and, instead of taking itself for another, definitively apprehends itself as such? Why on the part of man this transcendental confession of society, when society itself was there, present, visible, palpable, willing, and acting,—when, in short, it was known as ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... lines. Its luxury is greater than that of its London competitor. It has an eager, willing porter and a delightful landlord. You do what you like in it and there are books to read. One of these books was an English guide-book. I read it. It was full of lies, so gross and palpable that I told my host how abominably it traduced his country, and advised him first to beat the book well and then to burn it over a slow fire. It said that the people were superstitious—it is false. They have no taboo about days; ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... bedroom, where there was simply everything to be done; Georgiana followed her, after having made up the fires, and, while helping to unpack boxes, offered gossamer hints—fluffy, scarcely palpable, elusive things—to her mistress that her real ambition had always been to be a lady's-maid, and to be served at meals by the third, or possibly the fourth, house-maid. And the hall of Wilbraham Hall was abandoned for a space to silence ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... face fiercely, snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will, in drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship's course to be slightly ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... of this building was indeed the first public and palpable evidence that the era of political and religious liberty for the Waldenses, inaugurated by the edict of emancipation, dated February 17th, 1848, was really to be enjoyed by them. Its foundations were laid on the 29th October, 1851, by a solemn ceremonial. Delegates from the table of the Vaudois ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold
... of doing fine ornamental work are only to be reached by a perpetual discipline of the hand as well as of the fancy; discipline as attentive and painful as that which a juggler has to put himself through, to overcome the more palpable difficulties of his profession. The execution of the best artists is always a splendid tour-de-force, and much that in painting is supposed to be dependent on material is indeed only a lovely and quite inimitable legerdemain. Now, when powers of fancy, stimulated by this triumphant precision ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... not a bad summary of the palpable injustice and fraud of slavery, giving—as it does—to the lazy and idle, the comforts which God designed should be given solely to the honest laborer. But ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... of the Rolls, and obtained liberal access to the children; but I found that my visits kept Mabel in a continual state of longing and fretting for me, while the ingenious forms of petty insult that were devised against me and used in the children's presence would soon become palpable to them and cause continual pain. So, after a painful struggle with myself, I resolved to give up the right of seeing them, feeling that thus only could I save them from constantly recurring conflict, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... antiquaries, but to the people themselves. Without any political bearing—for the political absorption of Normandy by France was remarkably speedy—the feelings and memories of the days of independence have lingered on in a way which is the more remarkable as there is no palpable distinction of language, such as distinguishes Bretons, Basques, or even the speakers of the Tongue of Oc. But in everything but actual speech the old impress remains, and the result is that in Normandy, above all in Lower Normandy, the English historical traveller finds himself more thoroughly ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... stuff to work upon, which very likely was the case; but now that the poems have been so much examined, nobody (that has an ear) can get over the modernity of the modulations, and the recent cast of the ideas and phraseology, corroborated by such palpable pillage of Pope and Dryden. Still the boy remains a prodigy, by whatever means he procured or produced the edifice erected; and still It will be found inexplicable how he found time or materials for operating ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... helplessly concrete young person, and all forms of the abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts. I do not remember that Thoreau spoke of his books or of himself at all, and when he began to speak of John Brown, it was not the warm, palpable, loving, fearful old man of my conception, but a sort of John Brown type, a John Brown ideal, a John Brown principle, which we were somehow (with long pauses between the vague, orphic phrases) to cherish, and to nourish ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sympathies that lie most latent in our nature. Its sigh is the spirit that moves over the ocean, and arouses the Anadyomene into life. Therefore is it that MIND produces affections deeper than those of external form; therefore it is that women are worshippers of glory, which is the palpable and visible representative of a genius whose operations they cannot always comprehend. Genius has so much in common with love, the imagination that animates one is so much the property of the other, that there is ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fools most abound, did one ever read of more monstrous, palpable folly? In any country, save this, would a poet who chose to write four crack-brained verses, comparing an angel to a dove, and a little boy to a reed, and calling upon the chief magistrate, in the name of the angel, or dove (the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the gallery. Although the Engineer had undoubtedly established a strong lead, yet his wiry foe, running well within himself, hung persistently on his track, and was a long way from beaten off. During the next hundred yards it was palpable that Beauchamp was slowly but steadily diminishing the gap between them, and thence up to the marquees he closed rapidly on his leader. Thirty yards from the winning-post Lionel made his effort, fairly collared his antagonist about ten yards from home, and, leaving him ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... descends to his daughter Jacqueline, a damsel of seventeen. Little need to trace the career of the fair and ill-starred Jacqueline. Few chapters of historical romance have drawn more frequent tears. The favorite heroine of ballad and drama, to Netherlanders she is endued with the palpable form and perpetual existence of the Iphigenias, Mary Stuarts, Joans of Arc, or other consecrated individualities. Exhausted and broken-hearted, after thirteen years of conflict with her own kinsmen, consoled for the cowardice and brutality of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... other worlds to conquer, and we fear that some astronomers will lament that they have little prospect of discovering anything fresh in a sphere to which our giant telescopes have been so often directed, but this is founded on a palpable misconception. Certain objects, such as comets for example, do not require great power, and the revelation of new meteor showers is entirely a question for the naked eye. In fact, it may be confidently asserted that observations undertaken with energy and persistency will, if rightly directed, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day, forever refresh our recollections ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... make laws, and another power to resist them. The sages, whose memory will always be reverenced, have given us a practical, and, as they hoped, a permanent constitutional compact. The Father of his Country did not affix his revered name to so palpable an absurdity. Nor did the States, when they severally ratified it, do so under the impression that a veto on the laws of the United States was reserved to them, or that they could exercise it by application. ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... assurances. This is the furthest extreme to which the empire of existing facts over principles can well be imagined to go. It lies at the root of every discussion upon the limits which separate lawful compromise or accommodation from palpable hypocrisy. ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... and slender minarets of a vast oriental city. Masses of luxuriant foliage seemed to overhang the clear blue water, and to be reflected in its depths, while the white walls above just caught the first flush of the rising sun. Never was the illusion of summer in winter, of life in death, more palpable or more perfect. One almost instinctively glanced around to assure himself, by the sight of familiar objects, that it was not a dream; but as his eyes turned again to the north-west across the dim blue lake, the vast tremulous outlines of the mirage still ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... great deal about me, to my disgust, though it was in very laudatory terms. When he attacked Pompey's perfidy to me, he was listened to in profound silence on the part of my enemies. Pompey answered him boldly with a palpable allusion to Crassus, and said outright that "he would take better precautions to protect his life than Africanus had done, whom C. Carbo had assassinated."[457] Accordingly, important events appear to me to be in the ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... what you are going to say, slave; for I know the men of your nation. Take care, if the accusation you are making by way of revenge is not supported by visible, palpable, and positive proofs, you shall be punished as ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Sunday.—I was about to read Lupin a sermon on smoking (which he indulges in violently) and billiards, but he put on his hat and walked out. Carrie then read ME a long sermon on the palpable inadvisability of treating Lupin as if he were a mere child. I felt she was somewhat right, so in the evening I offered him a cigar. He seemed pleased, but, after a few whiffs, said: "This is a good old tup'ny—try one ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... true, a simple objection to the second method. It may be said to assume that one and the same being can exist in different places at the same time, and yet be complete in each of them. Although, from an empirical point of view, this is the most palpable impossibility—nay, absurdity—it is nevertheless perfectly true of the thing-in-itself. The impossibility and the absurdity of it, empirically, are only due to the forms which phenomena assume, in accordance with ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... all, transparent. We saw into the depth of it, but dimly, as we would see into the green recesses of a tropic ocean. It possessed the same liquid quality. Finally the illusion overcame us completely. We bathed in the shadows as though they were palpable, and ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... the commentaries, the Sutras, the Brahmanas, and even later works, in order to exhaust all the sources from which information can be derived. He must not despise the tradition of the Brahmans, even where their misconceptions and the causes of their misconceptions are palpable. To know what a passage cannot mean is frequently the key to its real meaning; and whatever reasons may be pleaded for declining a careful perusal of the traditional interpretations of Yaska or Sayana, they can all be traced back to an ill-concealed argumentum paupertatis. Not a corner ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... then, of the first condition of continued existence in this world, is (a) the development of a Will so powerful as to overcome the hereditary (in a Darwinian sense) tendencies of the atoms composing the "gross" and palpable animal frame, to hurry on at a particular period in a certain course of Kosmic change; and (b) to so weaken the concrete action of that animal frame as to make it more amenable to the power of the Will. To defeat an army, you must demoralize ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... consideration of the judges who pronounce on Mr. McLanahan's case; and we are willing to hope that, in their knowledge and integrity, he will find certain resources against injustice, and a reparation of all injury to which he may have been groundlessly exposed. A final and palpable failure on their part, which we have no reason to apprehend, might make the case proper for the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... to me in a vision, or rather an obsession, infinitely more present, more visible and palpable than this night that we were living in. The light with the red shade hung just over my head on my right hand; the blond walls were round me; they shut me in alone with the wounded man who lay stretched before me on the bed. And ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... to show the madness of their declaration of the pretended rights of man,—the childish, futility of some of their maxims, the gross and stupid absurdity and the palpable falsity of others, and the mischievous tendency of all such declarations to the well-being of men and of citizens and to the safety and prosperity of every just commonwealth. He was prepared to show, that, in their conduct, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the Cincinnati Convention, and the importance of conciliating the "Young American" wing, and the Filibustering division of the Democratic party, had great influence in producing this recognition, there can be no sort of doubt. But a still more palpable reason why this Government gave its sanction to the Rivas-Walker Government is, that PADRE VIJIL, the second Minister sent here, is a ROMAN CATHOLIC PRIEST, and a shrewd Spaniard—better understands the influences ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... real existences; the palpable beings of reason!—Beside what influence have I in the world, except over my friends and family? And shall I renounce this little influence, this only power of doing good, in order to gratify my own passions, by making myself the outcast of that family and of that world to whom it is my ambition ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... satirical characters suggested by "Poetaster," and fashioned to convey the satire of his reply. The absurdity of placing Horace in the court of a Norman king is the result. But Dekker's play is not without its palpable hits at the arrogance, the literary pride, and self-righteousness of Jonson-Horace, whose "ningle" or pal, the absurd Asinius Bubo, has recently been shown to figure forth, in all likelihood, Jonson's friend, the poet Drayton. Slight and hastily adapted ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... misfortune it is," said he in reply to the secretary for foreign affairs, "that the British should have so well grounded a pretext for their palpable infractions, and what a disgraceful part, out of the choice of difficulties before ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... directions, from the Altay mountains, From Thibet, from the four winding and far-flowing rivers of China, From the southern peninsulas and the demi-continental islands, from Malaysia, These and whatever belongs to them palpable show forth to me, and are seiz'd by me, And I am seiz'd by them, and friendlily held by them, Till as here them all I chant, Libertad! for themselves and ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... a little distance from him on the end of a sofa. She was bowed as if deeply thinking; and when she heard these words her head only sank a little more, as if a palpable weight had been laid upon her. She understood ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... sheep-fold), the fierce and impious Saxons, a race hateful both to God and men, to repel the invasions of the northern nations. Nothing was ever so pernicious to our country, nothing was ever so unlucky. What palpable darkness must have enveloped their minds-darkness desperate and cruel! Those very people whom, when absent, they dreaded more than death itself, were invited to reside, as one may say, under the selfsame roof. Foolish are the princes, as it is ...
— On The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) • Gildas
... stated as a paradox' (Mr. Stephen observes) 'that, whereas in France the most palpable evils arose from the excessive power of the central government, and in England the most palpable evils arose from the feebleness of the central government, the French reformers demanded more government, and the English ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... tell you, are not fancies of mine but conclusions I have drawn from facts which are at last becoming very plain and palpable, at least to us on this side of the water. If they are not becoming plain in Great Britain, it is because their papers are not serving them with the truth. Our own papers were prejudiced enough in all conscience ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... prisoner, Brandon unfolded to his brother his cherished scheme of marrying Lucy to Lord Mauleverer. Notwithstanding the constancy of the earl's attentions to the heiress, the honest squire had never dreamed of their palpable object; and he was overpowered with surprise when he ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the Union, increase this security. Does it, in fine, consist in the greater obstacles opposed to the concert and accomplishment of the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority? Here, again, the extent of the Union gives it the most palpable advantage. ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... a profound impression even as a youth on all who knew him. Aside from the palpable marks of his power, there was an indomitable hauteur, a mysterious, self-wrapped air as of one constantly communing with the invisible, an unconscious assertion of mastery about him, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... elements of family life, and to show that the development of individual character and happiness in the church and state, in time and in eternity, starts with, and depends upon, home-training and nurture. The author, in presenting it to the public, is fully conscious of its many palpable imperfections; yet, as it is his first effort, and as it was prepared amid the multiplied perplexities and interruptions of his professional life, he confidently expects that it will be received with charitable ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... suggested itself was that he should go to Dullah and sit there and eat fruit; but he discarded the idea directly as too palpable a way of watching. He felt that the Malay would suspect him directly, as he was not a man who was in the habit of ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... prisoner. To say that I was mortified by the advantage he had obtained over me would not express my feelings in the least. To think that I, George Fairfax, who had the reputation of being so difficult a man to trick, should have allowed myself to fall into such a palpable trap, seemed sufficiently incredible as to be almost a matter for laughter rather than rage. There was worse, however, behind. Miss Kitwater had been so trustful of my capability for bringing the matter to a successful conclusion, that I dared not ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... Unhappily, as poor Hannah afterwards thought, no umbrella could be found. Her own had been lent to a friend the preceding evening, and the mother would have held herself most culpably extravagant to uncase hers without a most palpable necessity. Miss Polly was preparing to go out unsheltered, when the officious Tom interfered, and asked her if he could do what she wanted. At first she refused his offer, but, the mother's importunities to stay at home becoming more clamorous, she consented ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... Sweynheym and Pannartz. 1469. Folio. EDITIO PRINCEPS. A fine copy, in three thin volumes. The margins, however, are not free from ms. notes, and there are palpable evidences of a slight truncation. Yet it is a fine copy: measuring fifteen inches and very nearly three quarters, by eleven inches one ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... and truly it's just an all-round compromise. A man does a couple of days' work, and earns by that the right of idling all the more shamelessly afterwards. And that I should be let in for this sort of thing! Dear boy, you know how few palpable results, naturally, an officer can show in time of peace; but still it's too much that one should do one's duty with no possible chance of any kudos. Old man, it's too bad! I can't stand it. I know ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... States has a mission, besides developing the principles of the brotherhood of man into a living, palpable force, it seems to me that it is to blaze the way to universal arbitration among the nations, and bring them into more complete amity than ever before existed. It is known to the world that we do not covet the territory of our ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... hairbrush with its back encrusted with diamonds. But though Ouida was violent and weak where Mrs. Oliphant might have been mild and strong, her own triumphs were her own. She had a real power of expressing the senses through her style; of conveying the very heat of blue skies or the bursting of palpable pomegranates. And just as Mrs. Oliphant transfused her more timid Victorian tales with a true and intense faith in the Christian mystery—so Ouida, with infinite fury and infinite confusion of thought, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... would go to work in a more direct way, and with gross and palpable artifice, which yet the credulous Timon was too blind to see, would affect to admire and praise something that Timon possessed, a bargain that he had bought, or some late purchase, which was sure to draw from this yielding and soft-hearted lord a gift of the thing ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... was a work of art, very firmly and gracefully fastened with sticking-plaster. But it peeled off at last—and with it the whole of the Count's and Dr. Fortescue-Langley's distinction. The man stood revealed, a very palpable man-servant. ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... little indeed was known about the wind beyond the palpable facts of its existence, its varied condition, and its tremendous power; and men's observations in regard to it did not extend much beyond the noting of those peculiar and obvious aspects of the sky which experience taught them to regard as evidences of approaching ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... be said." He spoke in a changed voice, calm and clear, and she stared at him in palpable surprise. She had expected an outburst of reproach, of beseechings, of protestation. She had braced herself to meet it, and she felt the reaction. She was hardly capable of coping with seeming indifference. It touched her pride. She missed the tribute of the ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... fiends tempting him to his ruin; and whenever patriotism half-defeated appeared to yield the ground, the image of his Julia—his Julia, never to be won by any indirection, never to be deceived by any sophistry, never to be deluded into smiling for one moment on a traitor—rose clear and palpable before him and the mists were dispersed instantly, and the foes of his better judgment scattered to the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... to the skin, which was soft and delicate, like a woman's. Neither were there signs of any preparation having been previously applied. I have often seen conjurers and others handle red-hot coals and iron, but there were always palpable signs of burning.'[11] ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... the attribution of these characteristics of universality and necessity, becomes, amongst those who loudly insist upon the palpable nature of the distinction we are now examining, a matter of controversy; and there are a class of scientific truths, of which it is debated whether they are contingent or necessary. The only test that they belong to the latter order is, the impossibility of conceiving ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... imparting specks of vivid cheerfulness, in contrast with the quiet depth of the prevailing tint. Of all this scene, the slumbering river has a dream- picture in its bosom. Which, after all, was the most real,—the picture, or the original?—the objects palpable to our grosser senses, or their apotheosis in the stream beneath? Surely the disembodied images stand in closer relation to the soul. But both the original and the reflection had here an ideal charm; and, had it been a thought more wild, I could have fancied ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of volcanoes are to be found more or less palpable signs of upheaval and depression of land. The range of islands south of Sumatra, a part of the south coast of Java and of the islands east of it, the west and east end of Timor, portions of all the Moluccas, the Ke and Aru Islands, Waigiou, and the whole ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... much mischief. As regards the greater truths, men oftener err by seeking them at the bottom than at the top; Truth lies in the huge abysses where wisdom is sought—not in the palpable palaces where she is found. The ancients were not always right in hiding the goddess in a well; witness the light which Bacon has thrown upon philosophy; witness the principles of our divine faith—that moral mechanism by which the simplicity of a child may overbalance ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... income for years, cost her many a pang. But she was a far-seeing woman, and had I dare say, while accepting my offer, a delightful vision of helping me to live up to the duties of my position. I can only say that she soon began to impress the importance of this upon me by hints more or less palpable; and it was not long before she was to all intents and purposes the real house-keeper. It was still, to be sure, I that ordered the dinners and engaged the servants, but even in these minor details I was alive to her suggestions; while in the matter of the general direction of what went on, her ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... inexpressibly strange tenant, a tenant of the darkness. He was on a plain and on a hill, and he was not. He was palpable, yet vanished. He was a shadow accruing to the night. After the disappearance of day into the vast of silent obscurity, he became in lugubrious accord with all around him. By his mere presence he increased the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... the answer. "The evidence I have secured is much more palpable. I have it here." He produced a little wallet of red morocco bearing the initial "S" surmounted by a coronet. Opening it, he selected from it some papers, speaking the while. "I thought it as well before I left last night to make an examination of the body. This is what I found, ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... in the North Briton?—The Athenaeum of Saturday, May 17, contains a very interesting article on the recently published Correspondence of Horace Walpole with Mason, in which certain very palpable hits are made as to the identity of Mason and Junius. In the course of the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... has read of in old-world annals that isn't to be imagined on proper occasion kneeling before the lamp-decked Confession beneath the altar of Santa Maria Maggiore. One sees after all, however, even among the most palpable realities, very much what the play of one's imagination projects there; and I present my remarks simply as a reminder that one's constant excursions into these places are not the least interesting episodes of one's ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... rather, if truth is so hard of attainment, how precious are the results which the consent of the wisest and most experienced among the healers of men agrees in accepting. Think what folly it is to cast them aside in favor of palpable impositions stolen from the records of forgotten charlatanism, or of fantastic speculations spun from the squinting brains of theorists as wild as ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... have reached the Princess. These facts were so plainly in evidence that the girl was afraid to speak lest some chance word would form the connecting link between the detective's mind and the seemingly palpable facts. At last she looked up, the colour coming and going in her cheeks, as Lord Donal had so ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... foreign to the national character." [Sismondi, vol. 3, p. 265.] Who, employing these instruments, depopulated Spain? THE INQUISITION. "To calculate," says Liorente, secretary to the Holy office, "the number of victims of the Inquisition were to give palpable proof of the most powerful and active causes of the depopulation of Spain; for, if to several millions of inhabitants of which the Inquisitorial system has deprived this kingdom by the total expulsion of the Jews, the ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880
... as intensely in her feelings; her quick imagination tutored her looks and words, taught her the spells to weave about shorn giants. And for a few days she and Amherst lost themselves in this self-evoked cloud of passion, both clinging fast to the visible, the palpable in their relation, as if conscious already that its finer ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... some measure of irony in thus calling forth an intangible happiness where so much real sorrow prevails; a justice that may well be ideal in the bosom of an injustice, alas! only too material; a love that eludes the grasp in the midst of palpable hatred and callousness. The moment may seem but ill-chosen for leisurely search, in the hidden recess of man's heart, for motives of peace and tranquillity; occasions for gladness, uplifting, and love; reasons for wonder and gratitude—seeing that the vast ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... then, been induced to alter your opinion; you have had some proofs of their truth?" The major drew from his pocket a handful of gold. "Most palpable proofs," said he, "as you ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... would have been hard to say what look there was, cold, attentive, and sinister, as of a man maturing plans, which still brooded over the unconscious guest; it was here, it was there, it was nowhere; it was now so little that Herrick chid himself for an idle fancy; and anon it was so gross and palpable that you could say every hair on the man's ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... is excellent example Necessity's offspring One has to feel strong in a delicate position Our love and labour are constantly on trial Perhaps inspire him, if he would let her breathe Person in another world beyond this world of blood Practical for having an addiction to the palpable Screams of an uninjured lady Selfishness and icy inaccessibility to emotion She had a thirsting mind She had to be the hypocrite or else—leap Silence was doing the work of a scourge Smile she had in reserve for serviceable persons Snatch ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... awarded for mutiny, and proved clearly, that to allow the master of a ship to enter port in petticoats was mutiny of the worst type. He then sent them below for their clothing. They were gone such a long time that it was palpable to the meanest intellect that they did not intend to bring it. Meantime the harbour widened out ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... noted for piety, he had been led by training, and afterwards by personal experience, to view this matter from a very different standpoint from that of Sir Richard. He made no reply, however, but, turning round the corner of the Home of Industry, entered a narrow street which bore palpable evidence of being the abode of deepest poverty. From the faces and garments of the inhabitants it was also evidently associated with ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... back in thought to modern times and went into the church, that church of five low naves and many restorations, that product of most diverse fancies. It is painted in lugubrious white, and its pillars have false bases in a palpable imitation of veined red marble. Its pure and early form, the Latin cross, is gone, its fine old stalls are hidden in a gallery, and at the altar Corinthian columns desecrate its ancient Romanesque. Yet in spite of the incongruities ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... life. In half an hour he had realised that he was no more in love with Mrs. Goddard than he was with Mrs. Ambrose, and he was trying to explain to himself how it was that he had ever believed in such a palpable absurdity. Love was doubtless blind, he thought, but he was surely not so blind as to overlook the evidences of Mrs. Goddard's age. All the dreams of that morning faded away before the sight of her face, and so deep is ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... dined with Horne Tooke. He is a clear-headed old man, as every man must needs be who attends to the real import of words, but there is a sort of charlatanry in his manner that did not please me. He makes such a mystery out of plain and palpable things, and never tells you any thing without first exciting, and detaining your curiosity. But it were a bad heart that could not pardon worse faults than these in the author of "The Diversions ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... equal degree. Again, the general fact that those species which mimic others are rare, while those which are imitated are abundant, is in no way explained by either of these theories, any more than is the frequent occurrence of some palpable mode of protection in the imitated species. "Reversion to an ancestral type" no way explains why the imitator and the imitated always inhabit the very same district, whereas allied forms of every degree of nearness and remoteness generally inhabit different countries, and often different ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... The Marquis had been very bad, and had had one and another doctor with him almost continually; but Mrs. Walker could not take upon herself to say that "it was dangerous." She thought it was "in'ard." Mrs. Walkers always do think that it is "in'ard" when there is nothing palpable outward. At any rate his lordship had not been out of bed and had taken nothing but tapioca and brandy. There was very little more than this to be learned at the police court. The case might be serious, but the superintendent hoped otherwise. The superintendent did not think that the Dean ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... cloth-yard shaft her width of chest. Hers were the "pulchrae clunes, breve caput, arduaque cervix," of the Roman bard. There was no redundancy of flesh, 'tis true; her flanks might, to please some tastes, have been rounder, and her shoulders fuller; but look at the nerve and sinew, palpable through the veined limbs! She was built more for strength than beauty, and yet she was beautiful. Look at that elegant little head; those thin, tapering ears, closely placed together; that broad, snorting nostril, which seems to snuff the gale with disdain; that ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... no effort whatever to reconcile them. He was an industrious collector of information, and gathered an enormous quantity, some of it very useful; he recorded with the like complacency authentic incidents of the highest importance and palpable fabrications or irrelevant trivialities; and it never entered his head to sift evidence or to exercise a little ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... in the solitude of her chamber, whilst Mr. Carlyle touched upon ways and means to Lady Mount Severn. Isabel was little more than a child, and as a child she reasoned, looking neither far nor deep: the shallow palpable aspect of affairs alone presenting itself to her view. That Mr. Carlyle was not of rank equal to her own, she scarcely remembered; East Lynne seemed a very fair settlement in life, and in point of size, beauty and importance, it was far superior to the house she was now in. She forgot that ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... palpable, and from hate of the old enemy, the whole assemblage broke into an uproar of acclamation. Only the Emperor kept his gravity. Leaning heavily on the golden cone at the right of his chair, his chin depressed, his ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... natives," for gazing downhill against the lights of the street and stores at its base they could see people rushing outdoors in palpable agitation. ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... have been, one would have thought, to make everything that he did faultless and strong, no less than lovely. But of all men, deserving to be called "great," Fra Angelico permits to himself the least pardonable faults, and the most palpable follies. There is evidently within him a sense of grace, and power of invention, as great as Ghiberti's:—we are in the habit of attributing those high qualities to his religious enthusiasm; but, if they were produced by that ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... hearts held the same seldom-voiced but deeply rooted love for the same things; the great, sun-washed spaces winnowed by the clean winds, the rosy dawns, violet dusks and nights when the earth scents hung heavy, almost palpable, clinging to the nostrils, the living things of fur and feather bright of eye and wary of habit. But most of all unconsciously they loved and cherished the feeling of room, of space in which to live ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... She had not seen them since she entered the darkness below. At first she had been unable to see anything, for the darkness was not merely absence of light but had a positive, palpable quality, it enshrouded her as by heavy folds of black velvet that suffocated her, but, as she climbed, the air became lighter ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... wit Lambent yet bland, like summer lightning; Venomless rapier-point, whose "hit" Was palpable, yet painless. Brightening E'en, party conflict with a touch Of old-world grace fight could not ruffle! Faith, GRANVILLE, we shall miss thee much Where kites and crows ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... does apprehend is colour and the coloured thing, and those other qualities (viz. extension, &c.), which inhere in the thing together with colour. Nor does feeling do so; for it has for its objects things palpable. Nor have the ear and the other senses mere Being for their object; but they relate to what is distinguished by a special sound or taste or smell. Hence there is not any source of knowledge causing us to apprehend mere Being. If moreover ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... clemency, and the laws of a mild government are, for the most part, enforced with exactness; but a new and precarious authority, which neither imposes on the understanding nor interests the heart, which is supported only by a palpable and unadorned tyranny, is in its nature severe, and it becomes the common cause of the people to counteract the measures of a despotism which they are unable to resist.—This (as I have before had occasion to observe) renders the condition of the ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... was silent, for it seemed to him that Boots was mad, or near it. But at that threat, so terrible to him, so terrible to the Polytechnic, so terrible to Booty, and so palpable a sign of his madness, he gave in. He said it was all right, only he didn't know what on earth he was to say ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... to adjust this question on the basis of discriminating between amusements must result in failure. It always has, and it always will. This basis is secure only in a question between an innocent amusement, and one involving a palpable violation of the law of God. The advocate of any particular amusement is, on this ground, shut up to the necessity of proving that what he approves and practices is absolutely pure, and incapable of perversion. The moment it is admitted that ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... palpable to deceive anyone. It is that God is the sum of all created things. Nature and God are one, so that whoever touches a leaf or a stone touches God. That is of course to degrade the glory of the incorruptible Deity and, in an effort to ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... the spirit of dusk with dreams in its hair. But Maudlin was the pale gold wonder of the dawn, a creature of ethereal light, a vision of melting stars and wakening flowers. And she delighted in making seem cheap the palpable prettiness of this, or too robust the fuller beauty of that, or dim and dull the elusive charm of such-an-one. She would have scorned to set her beauty to compete with those who were not beautiful, even as a proved knight would scorn to joust with an unskilled ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... turn next, and her rather broad piece of peel twisted itself into a most palpable E. She looked at it for a moment as if rather taken aback, then ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... Luther—I mean among the cultivated classes of our day—and that very largely because in Erasmus there is no quick sensibility to religious emotion as there is in Luther, and no inconvenient fervour. The faults are there—coarse, plain, palpable— and perhaps more than enough has been made of them. Let us remember, as to his violence, that he was following the fashion of the day; that he was fighting for his life; that when a man is at death-grips with a tiger he may be pardoned if he ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... once experienced when, as a boy, I went exploring some Devonshire caverns and clumsily allowed my candle to fall and become extinguished in a pool of water. It seemed to press upon me, to become palpable to the touch, to so closely wrap me about that my very breathing became impeded. And oh, how frightfully hot and close it was! The air was absolutely stagnant, and the slight draught created by the uneasy motion ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... palpable resemblance between the subject just quitted and that most characteristic product of the Middle Ages—the miracle play. It may be observed at the outset that instruction in those days, when reading was the privilege of the few, was ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... Alternately flushing and paling, with a hysteric smile hovering round her small reserved mouth, the unfortunate gentlewoman was fain to turn to the window to keep her countenance until it was concluded. She did not ask him to repeat it, nor did she again subject herself to this palpable serenade, but a few days afterwards, as she was idly striking the keys in the interval of a music lesson, one of her little pupils broke out, "Why, Mrs. Martin, if yo ain't a pickin' out that pow'ful pretty tune that ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... this—that more or less clearly, they all felt that they were standing between two worlds; and the ruins of an older age; upon the threshold of a new one. To Byron's mind, the decay and rottenness of the old was, perhaps, the most palpable; to Shelley's, the possible glory of the new. Wordsworth declared—a little too noisily, we think, as if he had been the first to discover the truth—the dignity and divineness of the most simple ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... some years ago published a very able essay in the "Christian Review," the title of which was, "Sin a Nature, and that Nature Guilt." This title is a sufficient refutation of the essay. A man could not utter a more palpable contradiction, if he said, "The sun solid, and that solid fluid," or, "The earth black, and that ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... thought with myself, as I stood and enjoyed the sight, what a palpable and eloquent, though undesigned and silent, refutation that is, of all such Northern chimeras. If poisons are mixed with articles of food or medicine by the negroes with any noticeable frequency, the sign of a negro compounding medicines ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... leader,—that of betraying his party, in order to gratify his spite. He of course became the prey of intriguers and sycophants,—of persons who understand the art of managing minds which are at once arbitrary and weak, by allowing them to retain unity of will amid the most palpable inconsistencies of opinion, so that inconstancy to principle shall not weaken force of purpose, nor the emphasis be at all abated with which they may bless to-day what yesterday they cursed. Thus the abhorrer of traitors has now become their tool. Thus ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... perhaps memorizing it verbatim under the impression that by so doing he is learning; he does not examine or reflect upon it, and often even accepts as facts what are explicitly stated to be mere expressions of opinion. Thus palpable mistakes, or even typographical errors, which a careful student should detect at once, are often accepted and believed. It is for this reason that it is so easy to deceive most people, at least for part ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... posed as victims of my violence; with this record against me of threatening the man whom I would be accused of having slain an hour later; with my two only friends compelled to give evidence which would make me out as artfully plotting murder under the shield of a palpable invention—for who ever heard of any one notifying the police that he was going to shoot a dog?—with no family connection or previous good character to build a defence upon: where would have been my chance of escape? What stronger ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... a broader and simpler distinction between the two cases. The mistake, the gross, palpable mistake, which these gentlemen fall into in making this comparison, lies at the threshold. The House of Commons, in its discretion, used to grant, and sometimes now grants, supplies to the King. The American Congress, in its ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar |
