"Rapidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... consumptives. The poorly nourished offer a good soil for the tubercle bacilli in consequence of their weakness. The tissue offers little or no resistance to the growth of the bacilli, these propagate and destroy the powerless and yielding organism with fearful rapidity. ...
— Prof. Koch's Method to Cure Tuberculosis Popularly Treated • Max Birnbaum
... reel together. One of them held a crimson ball, and, keeping time to the music flung it high into the air; while the other leaped high from the ground, and caught the ball as it fell. Then they flung the ball with lightning rapidity from hand to hand, so that it seemed a mere streak of crimson shooting backward and forward; and all the time the dance went gaily on, while the whole company of the Phaeacians kept up a merry din, beating time to the music with ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... was a thing devoutly to be wished. It is astonishing how quickly, though how gradually, ideas of such a nature will be developed when entertainment has once been given to them. The Devil makes himself at home with great rapidity when the hall door has been opened to him. A month or two back, before her ladyship went to Koenigsgraaf, she certainly would not have ventured to express a direct wish for the young man's death, however frequently her thoughts might have travelled in that direction. And certainly ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... keep it cool in summer and protect it against the winter cold, two most desirable objects in connection with the manipulation of champagne. Here an endless chain of a new pattern enables wine in bottle to be lowered and raised with great rapidity to or from the cellars beneath—lofty and capacious excavations of two stories, the lowest of which is reached by a flight of ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... a wild tradition, which would not, perhaps, be wholly out of character with the dark thread of this tale, were we in accordance with certain of our brethren, who seem to think a novel like a bundle of wood, the more faggots it contains the greater its value, allowed by the rapidity of our ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of St Thomas been such ardent defenders of the doctrine of grace, had been entrapped into making common cause with the Jesuits. The latter, availing themselves of the confusion and ignorance introduced by the Reformation, had disseminated their principles with great rapidity, and become masters of the popular belief; while the poor Dominicans found themselves in the predicament of either being denounced as Calvinists, and treated as the Jansenists then were, or of falling into the use of a common language with the Jesuits. What other course was open to them ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... Study of Celtic Literature'): 'The Germanic [Anglo-Saxon and 'Danish'] genius has steadiness as its main basis, with commonness and humdrum for its defect, fidelity to nature for its excellence. The Norman genius, talent for affairs as its main basis, with strenuousness and clear rapidity for its excellence, hardness and insolence for its defect.' The Germanic (Anglo-Saxon and 'Danish') element explains, then, why uneducated Englishmen of all times have been thick-headed, unpleasantly self-assertive, and unimaginative, but sturdy fighters; ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... I want to consult you at once. Please look in in the course of the day, and stop to dinner if you possibly can. Yours truly. ALLAN ARMADALE." Having read this composition aloud with unconcealed admiration of his own rapidity of literary execution, Allan addressed the letter to Mr. Darch, and rang the bell. "Here, Richard, take this at once, and wait for an answer. And, I say, if there's any news stirring in the town, pick it up and bring it back with you. See how I manage my servants!" ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... tremulous oscillations appeared rapidly to change, and still more rapidly to increase in amplitude; then the great shove of the destructive shock arrived, in some places rather before, in some a little after, the moment of loudest sound, and it died away suddenly (i.e., with extreme rapidity) into tremors again, but differing in direction from that ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... becomes more and more unconscious, the nearer it approaches the point at which all consciousness ceases, the course of time itself seems to increase in rapidity. In childhood all the things and circumstances of life are novel; and that is sufficient to awake us to the full consciousness of existence: hence, at that age, the day seems of such immense length. The same thing happens when we are traveling: one month ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... thing. Bradley said that it would certainly produce a revolution in navigation, and make men wholly independent of steamers and other vessels when they desired to travel upon water with rapidity. Bradley intimated that the day would come when a man would mount a water perambulator and go drifting off to India, sliding over the bounding billows of the dark blue sea as serenely as if he were walking ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... had sprinkled a paper of lettuce-seed in the open border of the garden, and on the same day you had sown a lot of lettuce in the hot-beds against the brick wall, where all the sunshine falls: would you refuse your crisp, tempting, forced salad, because it had reached perfection so rapidity?" ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... was well watered and manured with all these by-products of human life, and it grew to full size and height with a rapidity that could not have been attained under ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... dark streets in which the Jews and traders harboured.... Benham's first intervention was on behalf of a crouching and yelping bundle of humanity that was being dragged about and kicked at a street corner. The bundle resolved itself into a filthy little old man, and made off with extraordinary rapidity, while Benham remonstrated with the kickers. Benham's tallness, his very Gentile face, his good clothes, and an air of tense authority about him had its effect, and the kickers shuffled off with remarks that were partly apologies. But Benham's ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... the publisher, speaking with rapidity, "your contract is all here—only needs signing. I won't keep you more than a moment—write your name here. Miss Sniggins will you please witness this so help you God how's ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... into new lines of thought, but even to find a mystic mode of expression. This term is evidently a portion of a language wholly differing from our own. It is at once a noun, adjective, and verb, and, in the full flood of his eloquence, it changes from the one to the other with astounding rapidity. ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... the spectacle of their ancient capital in his hands would induce them at once to treat for peace. The decision was welcome to the army. The general wish of the soldiers was to get the matter over, and to be off home again. The obstinacy with which the Russians fought, the rapidity with which they marched, the intense animosity that had been excited among the peasants by the cruel treatment to which they had been exposed, the recklessness with which they threw away their lives so that they could but take vengeance for their sufferings, the ferocity with which ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... strangest of feathered creatures; they frequent the sides of mountain streams where they feed upon aquatic insects and small fish. Although they do not have webbed feet, they swim on or under water with the greatest of ease and rapidity, using their wings as paddles. They have a thrush-like bill and the teetering habits of the Sandpiper, and they are said to be one of the sweetest of songsters. They nest among the rocks along the banks of ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... thirty brave fellows were ordered to explore the dangerous pass: and Marion, though but a young lieutenant, had the honor to be appointed their leader. At the head of his command he advanced with rapidity, while the army moved on to support him. But scarcely had they entered the gloomy defile, when, from behind the rocks and trees, a sheet of fire suddenly blazed forth, which killed twenty-one of his men! With the remainder, he faced about and pushed back with all speed; ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... another. They met in narrow streets and spoke to each other with grave dignity. They spoke in four languages, and English was the one used least. From the remoter parts of the place, the slums, if such a polished town has slums, came the sound of typewriters worked with extreme rapidity. The manual labourers, in this as in every civilised community, are kept out of sight. Only the sound of their toil is allowed to remind the other classes of their happier lot. Some of the citizens—I took them to be men of very high standing, privy counsellors or magistrates—held cigars ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... at a loss to know (probably from our want of beards) of what sex we were, which having understood, they burst into the most immoderate fits of laughter, talking to each other at the same time with such rapidity and vociferation as I had never before heard. After nearly an hour's conversation by signs and gestures, they repeated several times the word whurra, which signifies, begone, and walked away from us to the head ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay • Watkin Tench
... does not always, or usually, imply power; but Douglas was consummately fit for the sort of struggling by which things are in fact accomplished at Washington. Whatever the matter in hand, his mind always moved with lightning rapidity to positive views. He was never without a clear purpose, and he had the skill and the temper to manage men. He knew how to conciliate opponents, to impress the thoughtful, to threaten the timid, to button-hole and flatter and cajole. He breathed ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... sight and hearing are alike based on the appreciation of frequencies of different rapidity; brightness and colour in light are equivalent to loudness and pitch in sound, but in sound we have no equivalent to perception of form or situation in space; it gives us no knowledge of the existence of objects when situated at great distances, ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... its largest creditors were in the greatest darkness concerning it. Some one has truly said that in a great commercial city men are known only by their enterprises and their successes; that their antecedents become lost in the magnitude and rapidity with which events revolve. This is particularly so with us. The firm of Topman & Gusher had fixed itself in Pearl Street, and gone quietly into business without friends, acquaintances, or endorsers; and in a single year had secured both credit and ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... despair, and even the abbe disheartened. Since Maurice had written to them, events had progressed with fearful rapidity. ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... war superior to others by the union of efforts, the secrecy of operations, and the rapidity with which every wheel may be moved by one sovereign will. This superiority, however, is amply compensated to free governments by the ardent attachment of their citizens, and the general confidence, which enables them to make exertions beyond their force, and expend in one ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... out of his mind, and is now confined in room number seventeen of the Oboukhoff Hospital. He never answers any questions, but he constantly mutters with unusual rapidity: "Three, seven, ace! ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... the accounts he had received, and hating at all times any popular demonstration, his lordship resolved without inquiry or preparation immediately to disperse them. The Riot Act was read with the rapidity with which grace is sometimes said at the head of a public table—a ceremony of which none but the performer and his immediate friends are conscious. The people were fired on and sabred. The indignant spirit of Gerard resisted; ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... describe in good prose the pictures that pass before his eye; but what is required of the man who stays at home and spins out his thoughts as the spider spins his thread? He must take means to preserve his own freshness, or he grows more and more unreadable with a rapidity which lands him at last among the helpless, hopeless dullards; if he persists in expending the last remnants of his ideas, he may at last be reduced to such extremities that he will be forced to fill up his allotted space by describing ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... eager to believe. And the knowledge instantly repaired his shattered nerves. Before the intrusion of the lawyer, Collins, made dizzy by the multiplicity of incriminating circumstances so adroitly unfolded by the detective, overcome by the rapidity of Britz's blows, was an abject creature ready to surrender his soul. All the enchantment had suddenly passed out of his life, for, to one of his disposition, a liberal income is as necessary as water to a parched plant. Deprived of his fortune, existence wasn't worth while. But with the certainty ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... arm of coincidence throws the Slifers into Mercedes's Cornish garden a little too heavily. The author does not strain the muscles of coincidence's arm to bring them into relation. Then the long arm of coincidence rolled up its sleeves and set to work with a rapidity ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... dusk crept in, and now that Ellen had, to some extent, modified her opinions regarding Harlan, there was nothing to hinder the growing of a delightful, outdoor companionship that made the hours pass with miraculous rapidity for the two young fire tenders. Past hardships and hunger were forgotten up there on the Lookout. The evenings became hours of confidences when they discussed their plans, their dreams, their budding philosophies of life. They came to know each other's moods and each other's thoughts and that magic ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... they resolved to build a new Theological College, elected a Building Committee to collect the money, and raised the sum required so rapidly that in 1892 they were able to open Comenius Hall at Bethlehem, free of debt. Meanwhile the number of new congregations was increasing with some rapidity. At the end of fifty years of Home Rule the Moravians in North America had one hundred and two congregations; and of these no fewer than sixty-four were established since the separation of the Provinces. The moral is obvious. As soon as the Americans obtained Home Rule they more than doubled ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... noise overhead. Lizards—maybe even rats—could move about the beams, hidden by the age-browned manta strips. But surely this was too late in the season for a lizard to be so lively by night when the temperature dropped with the rapidity of a weight plunging earth-ward. ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... delivered himself with emphatic rapidity, and now paused a moment. Gwendolen was motionless, looking at her hands, which lay over each other on her lap, till the deep-toned, long-drawn "But," with which he resumed, had a startling effect, and made her look at ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... meaning, both the verb and the noun hurry are continually used for haste and hasten. Hurry implies not only haste, but haste with confusion, flurry; while haste implies only rapidity of action, an eager desire to make progress, and, unlike hurry, is not incompatible with deliberation and dignity. It is often wise to hasten in the affairs of life; but, as it is never wise to proceed without forethought and method, ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... sack of 1527, with the Connetable de Bourbon, or with the Emperor Charles V. All the bastions, that of the Belvedere excepted, point towards the sea-coast, which was perpetually harried and terrified by Turkish or Barbary pirates. These would appear with lightning-like rapidity in more than one place at a time, and carry off as many unfortunate men, women, and children as they could collect.... To prevent the recurrence of such disasters the sea-coast was lined with watch-towers, the guns of which could warn the ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... ceiling, "circumstances change. It would once have been thought vile that a machine should be allowed to do the work of a skilled man, and the thought that a machine might do the work with more precision and greater rapidity would ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... trial, casting indeed many a glance on the immediate scene of action, from beneath his thick and shadowy eyebrows, which concealed the sinister gaze from observation. He shunned the face of day; but in his own dark haunts, and with his hellish colleagues, plans were formed and acted on, with a rapidity which, to minds less matured in ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... filling up. The losses due to war and pestilence, said no less an authority than Darwin, are soon made up. There is something terrifying in what the very modern science of geography has to tell us about the rapidity with which the remaining part of the earth's surface, available for the nourishment of man, is being exhausted. What problems will face the Rational Social Will in the ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... those who refused baptism were to be expelled from the organized communities, an edict which meant virtual banishment from their old homes and confiscation of their property. Further, no Tinguian in native dress was to be allowed to enter the towns. "Conversions" increased with amazing rapidity, but when it was learned that many of the new converts still practiced their old customs, the governor had the apostates seized and imprisoned. The hostile attitude of Pennarubia encouraged adventurers from ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... forbade her to conceal the truth. Indeed, what better way was there to destroy the unhappy passion of Charles, than to convince him of its hopelessness? These thoughts flashed through her mind with the rapidity of lightning—and trembling with the agitation and novelty of her situation, she answered in ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... us during the march towards evening; they were on their way from the desert to the Atbara river, some miles distant upon the west. Veritable thunder we now heard for the first time in Africa, and a cloud rose with great rapidity from the horizon. A cloud was a wonder that we had not enjoyed for months, but as this increased both in size and density, accompanied by a gust of cool wind, we were led to expect a still greater wonder—RAIN! Hardly had we halted for the night, when down it came ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... of time. Each person's experience will have told him that in estimating the distance of a past event by a mere retrospective sense of duration, he is liable to extraordinary fluctuations of judgment. Sometimes when the clock strikes we are surprised at the rapidity of the hour. At other times the timepiece seems rather to have lagged behind its usual pace. And what is true of a short interval is still more true of longer intervals, as months and years. The understanding of these ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... suspended impurities, which, when the substance is partly neutralised with the formation of salts of the sulphonic acids, are brought into true solution and hence penetrate the pelt with greater rapidity. ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser
... strait my father alone preserved his coolness; the warlike spirit of the old frontiersman was roused in an instant. With lightning-like rapidity he had unhitched his team and so disposed them with our horses and the wagon as to form a sort of square, the horses and mules were tied together and to the wagon, thus avoiding the danger of their being stampeded. Inside this square we placed ourselves, and levelling our ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... darkness of paganism. I travelled with sixteen dogs and four Indian companions, and there was not the least vestige of a road. This is the one great drawback; and any party of hunters, traders, or missionaries, wishing to travel with any rapidity, must send one of their number on ahead of the dog trains to mark out the path with his great snow shoes as he strides along. The skill and endurance with which this work is performed, is marvellous and almost incredible to those who ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... such incredible rapidity that he seemed to be evaporating through the gaping wound in the nape ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... fashion. I have seen exalted ladies in this position at Madrid, and it is very common in the antechambers of the Court and the palace of the Princess of the Asturias. The Spanish women sit in church in the same way, and the rapidity with which they can change this posture to a kneeling or a standing one is ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... nothing to reproach each other with. And now suffer me to sing a song to you on the lute." He stretched out his hand, and took down from the wall a forgotten and half-strung lute, which was hanging there; and, with surprising skill and rapidity, having put it in a state fit for use, he struck some chords, and raised this song to the low melancholy tones ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... still first favourite. 'He is the genuine representative of the English style of singing,' writes our critic, 'and in popular songs is the adored idol of the public. One cannot deny him great power of voice and rapidity of execution, but a more abominable style it is difficult to conceive.... The most striking feature to a foreigner in English theatres is the natural coarseness and brutality of the audiences. The consequence ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Had the rebellion already spread to the eastern regions? No one could say. The only agent which fears neither cold nor heat, which can neither be stopped by the rigors of winter nor the heat of summer, and which flies with the rapidity of lightning—the electric current—was prevented from traversing the steppes, and it was no longer possible to warn the Grand Duke, shut up in Irkutsk, of the danger threatening him from the treason of ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... whose volatile nature seemed fairly bubbling over on this beautiful day. And indeed it was a day to call forth all the latent energies of the most phlegmatic person. The very air tingled with life that the sunshine coaxed into being, and the gentle wind further fanned it to rapidity of action. "Oh, I do feel so ...
— The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale • Laura Lee Hope
... original spirit and opened up a new path, over which he shed a light that was to guide posterity, Titian was of a grander and more equable genius, leaning at first, indeed, upon Giorgione's example, but expanding with such force and rapidity as to place him in advance of his companion, on an eminence to which no later craftsman was able to climb.... He moderated the fire of Giorgione, whose strength lay in fanciful movement and a mysterious artifice in disposing ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... transmutations in which my volitional activity principally takes part is that represented by the operation of the forces of Gravitation and Cohesion; the system which influences my visual sensations is a quite different series. The changes in this latter series, by their greater rapidity, enable me to anticipate the other series, and for this and other reasons I employ these sensations to signalise and symbolise the transmutations proceeding in the series with which I am more immediately related as an active ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... long to seek, for presently flames began to shoot up, a sight we were by now well accustomed to, though not in this purely trading quarter of the city. The fire, started with savage disregard in the very centre of the most densely populated street of the Chinese city, spread with terrible rapidity. Soon both sides of Ch'ien Men great street, just on the other side of the Tartar Wall, were enveloped in raging flames, and a lurid light, growing ever brighter and brighter, turned the dark ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... shell in his weapon, with amazing rapidity—to no avail. The cylinder had flung around like a wheel, but the sounds were those ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... greatest judicial intellects of the kingdom: aware of the boundless confidence in his powers reposed by his clients, the great interests entrusted to him, and the heavy pecuniary sacrifices by which his exertions had been secured. Relying with a just confidence on his extraordinary rapidity in mastering all kinds of cases almost as soon as they could be brought under his notice, and also on the desire universally manifested by both the bench and the bar to consult the convenience and facilitate the business arrangements of one, himself so courteous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... for this was indeed Bolingbroke's position, should have been imitated to such perfection by a mere novice, that accomplished critics like Chesterfield and Warburton should have mistaken the copy for a firstrate original. It is, however, to be remembered that the very boldness and sweeping rapidity of Bolingbroke's prose rendered it more fit for imitation than if its merits had been those of delicacy or subtlety; and we must remember that the imitator was no pigmy, but himself one of the giants. What is certain is that the study of Bolingbroke which preceded this ...
— Burke • John Morley
... also not impossible that there was a time when the western [213] or Celtic princes made themselves masters of Greece, of Egypt and a good part of Asia, and that their cult remained in those countries. When one considers with what rapidity the Huns, the Saracens and the Tartars gained possession of a great part of our continent one will be the less surprised at this; and it is confirmed by the great number of words in the Greek and German tongues which ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... Vernon was awakened by something licking his face. The pup, having shown his contempt for bandages by biting them to ribbons, was standing on his hind legs and licking his benefactor's nose, while his tail was wagging with the rapidity of the flag of an expert signaller. The hardy little animal had made ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... school-mate of Ellen in the grammar-school. He had left to go to work when she had entered the high-school. His name was Dixon. He was wiry and alert, with a restless sparkle of bright eyes in a grimy face, and he cut the leather with lightning-like rapidity. Dixon had always thought Ellen the most beautiful girl in Rowe. He looked after Andrew with a sharp pain of sympathy when he went away with the roll of newspaper ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and servants. I kept on good terms with my employers, for the very natural reason that they saw me attend to my business and theirs, with a hearty cheerfulness that went to work promptly in whatever was to be done, and executed its tasks with steady fortitude, neatness, and rapidity. But, even with them, I had my sulks—my humors—my stubborn fits of sullenness, that seemed anxious to provoke opposition, and awaken wrath. These, however, they considerately forgave in consideration of my real usefulness: and as they perceived that whatever might have been the unpleasantness ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... universal people the means of speedy and accurate intelligence, and so stormed at once the castles of the terrible Giant Doubt and Giant Despair. He has saved time, shortened the hours of toil, accumulated and intensified thought by the rapidity and terseness of electric messages. He has celebrated treaties. Go to the uttermost parts of the earth; go beneath the deep sea; to the land where snows are eternal, or to the tropical realms where the orange blooms in the air of mid-winter, and you will find ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... which was a miniature United States made of sand, with its Eastern elevations, its great central plains, and its high Western ranges. A thread of blue worsted, put in place by the young world-builders, simulated the Mississippi, while cities (in the guise of white buttons) sprang up with a rapidity unknown even in the great West. The practice-teaching class is always of especial interest and significance, as over ninety per cent of Hampton's students devote themselves to teaching as their life mission. A dozen ...
— The American Missionary—Volume 39, No. 07, July, 1885 • Various
... Perhaps this trait in his character also explains how it was that 'he signalised himself by strange descriptions and burlesque sallies of humour in the pulpit,' and that his works exhibit 'great fire and rapidity in their style.'[68] At all events he lived to be seventy-six, which is some consolation to those who seek to impart originality to their ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... semiquavers to demisemiquavers, as in this example, or from these to the next in degree—that would be doubling the velocity of the shake all at once, which would be a skip, not a graduation; but you can imagine between a semiquaver and a demisemiquaver intermediate degrees of rapidity, quicker than the one, and slower than the other of these characters; you are therefore to increase in velocity by the same degrees in practising the shake, as in loudness when you make a swell. You must attentively and assiduously ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... was pretty thoroughly discussed by the boys, one and another suggesting improvements, Benjamin evidently satisfied that swimming at less speed in the usual way was preferable to these artificial paddles and increased rapidity. But their interest was awakened anew when Benjamin informed them that he had another invention that he proposed to try at a ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... that important events seldom occur singly; and they seem indeed often to follow each other with startling rapidity, like the sharpest flashes of lightning and the loudest peals of thunder from the dark clouds of a summer shower. On arriving in New York, the Wyllyses found that Tallman Taylor had been taken suddenly and dangerously ill, during the previous night, the consequence of a stroke of the sun; having ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... The rapidity with which the water went down and the walls went up as we cut into the plateau gave a vivid impression of descending into the very bowels of the earth, and this impression seemed daily to intensify. On Monday, August 19th, the same conditions prevailed, ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... himself. Those old-timers were rather womanish, some of them, he thought. All a man had to do was to keep his head, and he was all right. Any man who was a man could travel alone. But it was surprising, the rapidity with which his cheeks and nose were freezing. And he had not thought his fingers could go lifeless in so short a time. Lifeless they were, for he could scarcely make them move together to grip a twig, and they seemed remote from his body and from him. When he touched a twig, he had ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... the human brain refuses to receive communication from its peripheries, and the rapidity of thought becomes so slow that it can be measured by minutes. The stage of consciousness on which life's drama is solitarily played for every human being is too circumscribed to expand all at once for the reception of a strange and unexpected image. Such moments follow ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... hurries on life with an unnatural and unhealthy rapidity. We arrive at puberty too soon; the passions are developed too early; in the male, they acquire an impetuosity approaching to madness; females become mothers too early, and too frequently; and, finally, the system becomes prematurely exhausted and destroyed, and we become diseased and ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... uttered when a terrific blow on the eye, struck with the rapidity of lightning, shot him to the earth, where he lay for about half a minute, apparently insensible. He then got up, and after shaking his head, as if to rid himself of a sense of confusion and stupor, looked at Dalton for ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... utmost Caesar's abilities and the disciplined valor of his legions. The Gauls nearly succeeded in undoing all the work of six years, in destroying the Roman army and in throwing off the Roman yoke. In this campaign, more conspicuously than ever before, Caesar's success was due to the unexampled rapidity of his movements. So perfect had become the training of his troops and their confidence in his ability to win under all circumstances, that after a campaign of incredible exertions they triumphed over the countless hosts of their gallant ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... just as some unconscious pedestrian is passing astern of them they wake up, and without a preliminary yawn, or even a warning shake of the tail like the more chivalrous rattlesnake, they at once discharge their feet at him with a rapidity and effect that are quite surprising if the range be not too long. Usually this occurs in Merchant-street, below Montgomery, and the damage is merely nominal; some worthless Italian fisherman, market ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... gained as reports of disaster and wilful acts followed with increasing rapidity. The sinking of American vessels disclosed a ruthlessness of method that was gravely condemned in President Wilson's message of armed-neutrality, only to be followed by acts of more wilful import—finally evoking ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... inheritance of intrinsic worth, and the senatorial aristocracy had guided the state not primarily by virtue of hereditary right, but by virtue of the highest of all rights of representation—the right of the excellent, as contrasted with the ordinary, man—it sank in this epoch (and with specially great rapidity after the end of the Hannibalic war) from its original high position, as the aggregate of those in the community who were most experienced in counsel and action, down to an order of lords filling up its ranks by hereditary succession, and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the ZX-2 wallow in her death throes, writhe in the fiery doom that had struck her in seconds, that was devouring her with awful rapidity while thousands of men, blanched and trembling, gazed on helplessly. He saw her plunge, a blazing inferno, into ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... It was almost as if he had been waiting for that desperate appeal. He caught up the native garment and flung it over Phil's shoulders. He dragged the beard down over his face and secured the chuddah about his head. He did it all with incredible rapidity and a strength that would ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the new temperance movement increased and spread with a marvelous rapidity. The incidents attendant on the progress of the "Crusade" were often of a novel and exciting character. Such an interference with their business was not to be tolerated by the liquor men; and they soon began to organize ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... electrical wire, foretells that enemies will disturb your plans, which have given you much anxiety in forming. To dream that you can send a package or yourself out over a wire with the same rapidity that a message can be sent, denotes you will finally overcome obstacles and be able to use your enemies' ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... poor enunciation is too rapid talking. A fairly slow delivery is preferable not only because the words can be more easily understood, but also because it gives a debater the appearance of being more careful and accurate in his reasoning. Great rapidity in speech may be due to nervousness or inexperience; whatever its cause, it is usually fatal ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... miles S. S. E. from Kom. I am disposed to think that Contarini has slumpt his journey on the present occasion; as it is hardly to be believed a person in the weak state he describes himself could have travelled with so much rapidity. Besides, so far as we can learn from his journal, he travelled always with the same set of horses. Indeed the sequel immediately justifies this suspicion, as the subsequent dates are more distant than the travelling days of the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... and the dry leaves rustle with the whir of their wings the air is vocal with their cheery call. In excess of joy and vivacity, they run, leap, scream, chase each other through the air, diving and sweeping among the trees with perilous rapidity. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... and even haughty, I was really in a state of most terrible anxiety. I fixed my eyes intently upon the spare but sinewy chief, and without moving a muscle allowed him to throw his spears first. The formidable weapons came whizzing through the air with extraordinary rapidity one after the other; but long experience of the weapon and my own nimbleness enabled me to avoid them. But no sooner had I stepped back into position for the third time than, with lightning dexterity, ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... remarkable thing about M. Thiers was the unusual care he took to prepare himself fully before writing or speaking. He had every subject clearly and fully in his own mind before he put pen to paper, and when he began to write, he did so with extraordinary rapidity; nor would he write any account of anything, either in a newspaper or in his history, till he had visited localities, conversed with eye-witnesses, and picked up ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... which he came amongst them carried them along. They had already been excited and startled at all his comings and goings—by the fierceness and rapidity of his movements; and more felt than seen in his rushes, he appeared formidable—busied with matters of life and death that brooked no delay. At his first word he heard them drop into the bunker one after ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... she thought, she had not aged at all, in nothing but the fading of that face of hers and her head producing white hairs with such horrible rapidity. Her body, her breast, her arms, her neck retained the same alabaster hue, the same adorable brilliancy, the mark of a fine and beautiful race. She touched herself in search of consolation with feverish hands, and encountered the same softness and freshness. That ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... apparatus on the principle which we have just described, were: (1) That according to this system the electric current is continuously traversing the coils of the armature, and the machine is kept in motion not by a series of intermittent impulses succeeding one another with greater or less rapidity, but by a constantly acting force producing a more uniform effect. (2) The annular form of the revolving armature contributes (together with the preceding method of continuous magnetization) to give regularity to its motion and at the same time reduces the loss of motive power, through ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... that mysterious way with which secrets flash through an office with lightninglike rapidity, a hint of Starratt's brush with Ford was illuminating ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... gurgling, just dimpling, imposing silence, suits with solitude, and leads to meditation; a brisker current, which wantons in little eddies over a bright sandy bottom, or babbles among pebbles, spreads cheerfulness all around; a greater rapidity, and more agitation, to a certain degree are animating; but in excess, instead of wakening, they alarm the senses; the roar and the rage of a torrent, its force, its violence, its impetuosity, tend to inspire terror; that terror, which, ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... Gavroche took himself off, or, to describe it more exactly, fluttered away in the direction whence he had come with a flight like that of an escaped bird. He plunged back into the gloom as though he made a hole in it, with the rigid rapidity of a projectile; the alley of l'Homme Arme became silent and solitary once more; in a twinkling, that strange child, who had about him something of the shadow and of the dream, had buried himself in the mists of the rows ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... sleeping, hours, in fact, the function of ideation is in continual, if not continuous, activity. Trains of thought, as we call them, succeed one another without intermission, even when the starting of new trains by fresh sense-impressions is as far as possible prevented. The rapidity and the intensity of this ideational process are obviously dependent upon physiological conditions. The widest differences in these respects are constitutional in men of different temperaments; and are observable in oneself, under varying ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... a strong work ethic, mastery of high technology, and a comparatively small defense allocation (1% of GDP) helped Japan advance with extraordinary rapidity to the rank of second most technologically powerful economy in the world after the US and the third-largest economy in the world after the US and China, measured on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis. One notable characteristic of the economy has been how manufacturers, ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... free government developed here, and urging our people on with unexampled rapidity in the career of wealth and greatness, have always been subjects of alarm to monarchs and aristocracies—of pleasure and hope to the people. It has, of course, been the object of the former to blacken us in every conceivable way, and to make us detestable in the ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... an example of luxury and elegance. Grand dinners, concerts, official entertainments succeeded one another with startling rapidity. Josephine, who was wildly fond of dress, was glad of an excuse to indulge her extravagant tastes. The Emperor's three sisters lived like real princesses, rivalling one another in magnificence. Princes Joseph and Louis displayed the ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... ranch went steadily on, and there were few interruptions to the daily course of events. But one day a small black cloud appeared on the western horizon, and grew larger with amazing rapidity. Soon it had so increased in size that it obscured the sun, and a gloomy twilight settled ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... others were. It was not dramatic enough to excite me. Many parts of it were tedious. It seemed to me to be too much spun out, and its minuteness of detail wearied me. There was no great plot and no grand characters; nothing heroic, no rapidity of movement; nothing to keep me from laying the book down when the dinner-bell rang, or when the time came to go to bed. I did not then see the great artistic excellence of the book, and I did not care for a description of obscure people in the Midland Counties of England,—which, by the way, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... Aleck came in to dress. It was late and he was in a hurry, for he knew he had a rival, a man named Jim Johnson, and he did not want Johnson to get to the widow's home ahead of him. He washed up and donned his clothing with rapidity, and never noticed that anything was wrong ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht • Edward Stratemeyer
... prevent Lysander from resuming, by the number and rapidity of your interrogatories. Revert ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... how long he would have to work and wait for that. He knew that things in Calvinton moved slowly; but he knew also that its silent and subconscious judgments sometimes crystallised with incredible rapidity and hardness. Was it possible that he was already classified in the group that came near but did not enter, an inhabitant but not a real burgher, a half-way citizen and a lifelong new-comer? That would be rough; he would not like growing old ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... indeed they have a plentiful harvest—I think what you call flagrancy was never more in fashion. Drinking is at the highest wine-mark; and gaming joined with it so violent, that at the last Newmarket meeting, in the rapidity of both, a bank-bill was thrown down, and nobody immediately claiming it, they agreed to give it to a man that was ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... the walls constantly gained height as the torrent cut down its bed till both together, with the rapidity of our movement, fairly made one dizzy. In turning a bend we saw back through a gulch the summit of the Kaibab's huge cliffs, the total height above our heads being over five thousand feet; a sublime vista. The immediate walls of Marble Canyon were here about 3500 feet, not all vertical but rising ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... minutes after the scene of confusion produced in the salons of M. Danglars by the unexpected appearance of the brigade of soldiers, and by the disclosure which had followed, the mansion was deserted with as much rapidity as if a case of plague or of cholera morbus had broken out among the guests. In a few minutes, through all the doors, down all the staircases, by every exit, every one hastened to retire, or rather to fly; for ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... soldier of the time was the finest in the world. He was splendidly drilled, absolutely obedient to orders, and filled with implicit confidence in his king and his comrades. He had been taught to march with extraordinary rapidity, and at the same time to manoeuvre with the regularity and perfection of a machine; and could be trusted, in all emergencies, to do everything that man ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... Jadwin was completely master of the market. His wealth increased with such rapidity that at no time was he able even to approximate the gains that accrued to him because of his corner. It was more than twenty million, and less than fifty million. That was all ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... every filament, at the death of a single one of her sons in the field. As only the feeble, the aged, bided at home, their number after each battle became larger in proportion to the whole than before. Thus the nation, more and more, with ever-increasing rapidity, declined in bodily, and of course spiritual, quality, until the end was reached, and Nature swallowed up the weaklings whole; and thus war, which to the modern state is at worst the blockhead and ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel |
