"Acme" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... receiving the priestly education of the royal princes, and that he had advanced from grade to grade in the religious mysteries, even to the highest, in which the great truth of the One Supreme, the omniscient, omnipotent God was imparted, as the sublime acme of all human knowledge, thus attributing to Moses before his flight into Midian, an almost modern conception of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... of passion followed when he applied to his father for assistance during a precarious passage through the risks and dangers of an expanding business, and was met with reluctant excuses that seemed the very acme of ingratitude. He hurled forth an indignant reminder of all the services he had performed for the family—services at once degrading and gratuitous; and he demanded if a year's dabbling in such delectable detail were not a sufficient warrant for asking the help that ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... solid state, which was not the case at Ega, when the baskets in which it is contained were well wrapped in leaves. Six degrees further westward, namely, at the foot of the Andes, the dampness of the climate of the Amazonian forest region appears to reach its acme, for Poeppig found at Chinchao that the most refined sugar, in a few days, dissolved into syrup, and the best gunpowder became liquid, even when enclosed in canisters. At St. Paulo refined sugar kept pretty well in tin boxes, and I had no difficulty ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... started a canvass of the big buildings in the theatrical district. After four or five had been searched without result they entered the 30-story Acme Theater building. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... tell you that he does his best work in the wee watches of the morning, after tedious hours of persevering but fruitless effort. Instead of being exhausted by its long hours of persistent endeavor, the mind seems now to rise to the acme of its power, to achieve its supreme accomplishments. Difficulties melt into thin air, profound problems find easy solution. Flights of genius manifest themselves. Yet long before midnight such a ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton
... prepare special brands, generally according to German recipes, and sell them to the delicatessen and the grocery stores. If they were to rely upon me for business, they would soon go bankrupt. To my palate the dill pickle appeals as almost the acme of disagreeableness. ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... on. Who's the little bird?" said Skippy, who had not heard himself described as the acme of suspicion for nothing. ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... the building burning? Why this haste?" Hester raised her eyes to those of the preceptress. Miss Burkham was the acme of all that was cultured and elegant. No imagination was strong enough to picture her, other than deliberate, low-voiced, serene of countenance. Hester who knew more of bluntness than irony, replied fearlessly, "No, there is no fire. I wished ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... acquaintances. If there was any regret in her—any revulsion at the vulgarity of this scene into which she had plunged Jerry Benham—she gave no sign of it. It seemed to me that she was in her element; as though in this adventure, the most unusual she had perhaps ever attempted, she had found the very acme, the climax ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... fashion of the middle ages, when the trouser became a real pantaloon—a pantalon collant, as modern artists call it, and when the full symmetry of the limb was displayed to the utmost advantage. This was, no doubt, the acme of perfection that the garment in question was capable of; and it is to be lamented that the mode has not kept its position in society more universally. For all purposes of ceremonial or ornamental dress, this form should still be rigidly adhered to. Utility ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... more frequently expressed by military metaphors. Even the posts of duty are the "spoils" of office. The State which to Plato was a deliberately harmonised music is to us a deliberate discord, and the acme of politics, whose crowning glory should be a peaceful measure, is by the vulgar not so inaccurately regarded as attained at a General Election, the nomenclature of which positively bristles with bayonets. Seats are won as towns were of old, and, as in the days ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... person makes up his mind that he ought, for good reasons, to deceive somebody, there is no one like him for thorough-paced hypocrisy. When two conscientious people resolve; to deceive one another, on grounds of duty, the acme of duplicity is in a fair way to be reached. John Ashforth and Mary Travers illustrated this proposition. The former had been all his life a good son, and was now a trustworthy partner, to his father, who justly ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... phylogenetic studies. So far as the known record can inform us, the trilobites are exclusively Palaeozoic in distribution, but their course must have begun long before that era, as is shown by the number of distinct types among the genera of the lower Cambrian. The group reached the acme of abundance and relative importance in the Cambrian and Ordovician; then followed a long, slow decline, ending in complete and final disappearance before the end of the Permian. The newly-hatched ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... hours only. Not even a cold grey day can turn Grardmer into a dreary place, but in the most brilliant sunshine this mountain pass is none the less majestic and solemn. One obtains the sense of contrast by slow degrees, so that the mind is prepared for it and in the mood for it. The acme, the culminating point of Vosges scenery is thus reached by a gradually ascending scale of beauty and grandeur from the moment we quit Grardmer, till we stand on the loftiest summit of the Vosges chain, dominating ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... was associated a new and purer spirit of love, an inspired homage for genuine female worth, which was now revered as the acme of human excellence, and, maintained by religion itself under the image of a virgin mother, infused into all hearts a mysterious sense of the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... themselves engaged in operations of reclamation; that they abused their power by despoiling the peasants, and that dishonest farmers made a practice of evading taxes and tribute by settling within the bounds of a manor. These abuses reached their acme during the reigns of Uda and Daigo (888-930), when people living in the vicinity of a manor were ruthlessly robbed and plundered by the intendant and his servants, and when it became habitual to elude the payment of taxes by making spurious assignments of lands to influential ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of delicious coolness, there so coveted, that a cavalier issued on horseback from the gates of the castle, which was then at the acme of its pride and strength. Numerous retainers stood on either side by the drawbridge their heads bared to the evening sun, until the horseman should have passed, but he went forth unattended; and the men resumed their caps, and swung to the drawbridge, as he ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... to be infected with Bob's enthusiasm. The scheme, which had at first appeared to me as the very acme of fool-hardiness, now, under the influence of Bob's eloquence, gradually assumed an appearance of reasonableness, and a promising prospect of success, which was very fascinating. Nevertheless, I could not but remember that the proposed voyage would take ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... in the Verplanck mansion was high of ceiling, a spacious, stately room, and its quaint, straight-backed chairs, stuffed ottomans, and carved mahogany sofas were the acme of elegance of those days. The highly polished floor had received extra attention from Pompey and his assistants, while the mirrors shone brightly and reflected the candles of the brass sconces on either side ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these" (Levit. 19:18; Mark 12:29-31). Thus his instinct for God and his instinct for the essential carry him to the very centre and acme of Moses' law. At the same time he can use the Old Testament in an efficient way for dialectic, when an "argumentum ad hominem" best meets the case (Mark ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... her lovely stockings, the fine quality of her cambric handkerchiefs, the delicate scent which clung to them, the glossy braids of her ever exquisitely arranged hair, and the very set of that perfectly plain sailor hat with its band of white ribbon, were all the acme of perfection. Oh, they all betokened wealth and taste, taste and wealth. No wonder the girls worshiped Gwin. She never boasted of her wealth, she never brought it prominently forward; but for all that it pervaded her from ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... were, as all thy royal line have been, Yet none of those who went before have reached The acme of Sardanapalus, who 10 Has placed his joy ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... human admiration. Its glints speedily dim in the air. To be gobbled up by some hungry fish is the ordinary fate of the species. Possibly splendour is bestowed upon the shrimp as a means by which certain fish distinguish a particularly choice dainty, and the fish show the very acme of admiration by "wolfing" it. Thus are the examples of high ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... which the term will bear, in which it is, perhaps, just. It may be said with truth that man is always susceptible of improvement, or that there never has been, or will be, a period of his history, in which he can be said to have reached his possible acme of perfection. Yet it does not by any means follow from this, that our efforts to improve man will always succeed, or even that he will ever make, in the greatest number of ages, any extraordinary strides towards perfection. The only inference that ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... (Fig. 57) have teeth resembling the coulter of a plow twisted or bent into various shapes. The Acme is a good example of this class of harrow. It cuts, turns and pulverizes the surface soil somewhat after the manner of the plow. It prepares a fine mulch and leaves an excellent seed bed. It is an excellent harrow to finish off with after ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... of the one-eyed Chinaman, who sat complacently smiling at the visitors, consisted of a loose blouse, blue trousers tucked into grey socks, and a pair of those native, thick-soled slippers which suggest to a Western critic the acme of discomfort. A raven, black as a bird of ebony, perched upon the Chinaman's shoulder, head a-tilt, surveying the newcomers with a beady, glittering left eye which strangely resembled the beady, glittering right eye of the Chinaman. For, singular, uncanny circumstance, this was ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... — N. summit, summity^; top, peak, vertex, apex, zenith, pinnacle, acme, culmination, meridian, utmost height, ne plus utra, height, pitch, maximum, climax, culminating point, crowning point, turning point; turn of the tide, fountain head; water shed, water parting; sky, pole. tip, tip top; crest, crow's nest, cap, truck, nib; end &c 67; crown, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... soldier, this is the immortal climax of the senses. This is the acme of the flesh, the one superb tiger who has devoured all living flesh, and now paces backwards and forwards in the cage of its own infinite, glaring with blind, fierce, absorbed eyes at that ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... The acme of all constructions, in which strength, beauty, and capacity for ornamentation are blended, is the Hammer Beam Truss. Here the hammer beam projects inwardly farther than in the preceding figure, and has a deeper bracket (B), and this also extends down ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... Hibernicized, and in one comprehensive second drop into a chair, "smooth her wrinkled front" and side curls, shake out her rumpled draperies, and rise from an instant's searching of the Scriptures with features expressive of the very acme of Christian peace and benediction. "Mrs. General" was a pet-name the lady had won from a wifely and lovable trait that prompted her to aggrandize her placid lord above his deserts. Him she ever addressed (in public), and of him she ever spoke, as "the general," irrespective ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... this view; it merely reflects the current notions of Oriental peoples in antiquity. What is strange and anomalous is the fact that the Oriental dreamings thus expressed could have been supposed to represent the acme of scientific knowledge. Yet such a hold had these writings taken upon the Western world that not even a Galileo dared contradict them openly; and when the church fathers gravely declared the heliocentric ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... partner in the brokerage firm of Bray, Parkinson & Co., and is president of the Free Gold Mining Company. Brooks is manager of the Acme Advertisers, and secretary of Free Gold. Bray and Parkinson are stockholders, and Wagstaff is a stockholder and also manager of the Free Gold properties in B. C. All ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... sauntering carelessly down the steps. He had removed the cigar and was whistling very softly, unconsciously, as one who is deep in some quandary, but to Masterson it seemed the acme of studious carelessness to ignore his own presence; it seemed insolent as the mocking glance through the window, and it decided him. His shoulders unconsciously squared as he ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... cottons and woollens, and its increased duties on all forms of manufactured iron, (the tariff of 1824 which increased duties considerably), and the tariff of 1828, imposing an average of 50 per cent. duties, and in which the protective movement reached its acme (omitting, of course, the present McKinley Bill with its 60 per cent. average duty). In 1832, consequently, a great reaction in sentiment took place, and the "Compromise Tariff" was passed and duties were lowered. From this period, the advocacy of a high ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... easily disgusted himself, and he does not much mind other people being so. He says what he thinks, and you have got to lump it. Sometimes he is good-natured enough, and even brave. There is an admirable sketch of a good-natured cad in one of Mrs. Walford's novels, who is the acme of kind indelicacy. The cad is dreadful to live with, because he is always making one ashamed, and ashamed of being ashamed, because many of the things he does do not really matter very much. Then, when he is out of sight and hearing, you cannot trust ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... has no Political System; yet it is controlled by the very Acme of System. Each Individual of their vast population is guided by "The Light Within" and ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... extraordinary than the subsequent neglect into which, for above half a century after his death, he fell.[2] Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, Condorcet, Turgot, and the Encyclopedists, were then at the acme of their reputation; and their doctrines as to the natural innocence of man, and the universal moulding of human character by political institutions, not of political institutions by human character, were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... slower-footed thought Can overtake the rapture of the sense, To thrust between ourselves and what we feel, Have something in them secretly divine. 30 Vainly the eye, once schooled to serve the brain, With pains deliberate studies to renew The ideal vision: second-thoughts are prose; For beauty's acme hath a term as brief As the wave's poise before it break in pearl, Our own breath dims the mirror of the sense, Looking too long and closely: at a flash We snatch the essential grace of meaning out, And that first passion beggars all behind, Heirs of a tamer transport prepossessed. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... thus reach the very acme of Nature's ideal so far as we men can discern it, they, at the same time and in so doing, touch the very foundations of Nature as well. Mathematicians have discovered that there is no such thing as a perfectly straight line, and that curvature is a fundamental property ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... came at last, no one seemed happier or more eager than Len Haley. An instinctive fear seemed to possess the lad that his uncle would be prowling about the mountains and apprehend him when he least expected it; hence, to go flying away to Baltimore in a big automobile was to him the acme ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... confidently, and remarked: "I have nothing more to learn—if your knowledge is the acme of ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... the widow of Palass Poucette. She looked very fresh and friendly indeed, and she was the very acme of neatness. If she was not handsome, she certainly had a true and sweet comeliness of her own, due to the deep rose-colour of her cheeks, the ivory whiteness round the lustrous brown eyes, the regular shining teeth which showed so much when she smiled, and the look half laughing, half ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... doctrines, whose abstract systems did not harmonize with those of his priest, was more loathed than a corrupter of youth; more abhorred than an assassin; more hated than an oppressor; was held in greater contempt than a robber; was punished with greater rigor than the seducer of innocence. The acme of all wickedness, was to despise that which the priest was desirous should be looked upon as sacred. The celebrated Gordon says, "the most abominable of heresies, is to believe there is any other god than the clergy." The civil laws concurred to aid this confusion of ideas; they inflicted ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... At the acme of his agony, his eyes still closed, he heard an exquisite voice saying, "Are you asleep, Gwynplaine?" He opened his eyes with a start, and sat up. Dea was standing in the half-open doorway. Her ineffable ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... and here does all else that has been affirmed find its proper centre and unity. Christianity is the great unity. In it, as was intimated at the outset, are all the chief elements of organic influence. It is itself the very acme of completeness, and it tends to all symmetry and finish. It is at once conservative and progressive, balancing perfectly the impelling and restraining forces; by a felicitous adjustment of the centripetal and centrifugal, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... Charles thought, the very height and acme of impudence, and yet what could he do? What could he say? He was foiled by the downright ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... crack player throws with such force and accuracy as to split a bait top. This is the acme of the game and the crowning glory of the player. Often the bait consists of toothless, battered wrecks, but this does not lessen ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... consider this the very acme of humor, for he fairly hooted at us. He was so much amused that it was some moments before he ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... feet, confined the waist, exposed the chest, loaded the limbs, and even enslaved the understanding. But these societies had been more successful in pulling down than in building up, and blinded with excess of zeal were hurrying us onward to a goal which might or might not be the acme of sanitative dress, but was certainly the zero of artistic excellence. The cause of this was not far to seek. We were inventing a new science, that of dress, and were without rules to guide us. So long as ladies had to choose between Paris fashions and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... long time; often not caring one straw about our success, after pocketing the fee of successful "humbuggery." One is no sooner gone, than we are beset by another, with something altogether different, and of course the acme of perfection. ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... forenoon, when the principal street of the neighboring town was just at its acme of life and bustle, a stranger of very distinguished figure was seen on the sidewalk. His port as well as his garments betokened nothing short of nobility. He wore a richly-embroidered plum-colored coat, ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... many obvious improbabilities will be endured, as belonging to the groundwork of the story rather than to the drama itself, in the first scenes, which would disturb or disentrance us from all illusion in the acme of our excitement; as for instance, Lear's division of his kingdom, and the ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... unendurable. But even considering physical pain only, all must admit that this depends greatly on the mental condition of the sufferer. Only during consciousness does it exist, and only in the most highly-organized men does it reach its acme. The Author has been assured that lower races of men appear less keenly sensitive to physical pain than do more cultivated and refined human beings. Thus only in man can there really be any intense degree of suffering, because only in ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... the perfectly groomed New York woman on the sidewalk, with figure and carriage such as outclasses the women of every other large city in the world, was there in numbers quite as great as formerly; the Western woman, who had come on to take New York by storm, or who imagined the acme of human existence was in New York cafe life, with all of its vulgar display and raucous manners, ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... turned suddenly round and caught him in the act, exclaiming, "Who are you?" The mob which gathered round applauded to the very echo, and thought it the most capital joke they had ever heard, the very acme of wit, the very essence of humour. Another circumstance of a similar kind gave an additional fillip to the phrase, and infused new life and vigour into it just as it was dying away. The scene occurred in the chief criminal court of the kingdom. A prisoner stood at the bar; the offence ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... myself. Withdrawing from my narrow quarters I hastened down to them and added one more white face to the three I found congregated in the doorway. In the diabolical ingenuity we had seen displayed, crime had reached its acme and the cup of human depravity seemed full. When we had regained in some measure our self-possession, we all advanced for a closer look at the murderous object dangling before us. We found it to be a heavy leaden weight painted on its ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... of his evolution toward the acme of powerful expression. It is cast in a mould essentially heroic; it has its moods of tenderness, of insistent sweetness, but these are incidental: the governing mood is signified in the tremendous exordium with which the work opens, and which is sustained, with few deviations, throughout ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... all his preconceived notions, this marriage ought to have been the acme of uncle Wellington's felicity. But he soon found that it was not without its drawbacks. On the following morning Mr. Todd was informed of the marriage. He had no special objection to it, or interest in ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... that has been done since Bell opened up the way, the telephone remains the acme of electrical marvels. No other thing does so much with so little energy. No other thing is more enswathed in the unknown. Not even the gray-haired pioneers who have lived with the telephone since its birth, can understand their protege. ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... reputable use. No person would consider vulgarisms reputable. When a person says "I hain't got none," he has reached about the acme of vulgarisms, the language of the illiterate. Grammar has been disregarded; a word has been used which is not a word; and another word has no reason for its appearance in the sentence. Yet sometimes this expression is heard; ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... As he spoke he sucked in his breath with that snakelike hissing sound which is the acme of politeness, in Japan—"that my humble breath may not blow upon you"—and spread wide his hands. "They are extremely low persons and dared lay hands upon ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... draw and paint for him some of his surgical cases. I accepted his offer without hesitation, and, burning to distinguish myself as an anatomical expert with the brush, I gave instruction to our family butcher to send me, as a model to study from, a kidney, which was to be the acme of goriness and as repulsive in appearance as possible. Of this piece of uncooked meat I made a quite pre-Raphaelite study in water-colours, but so realistic was the result that the effect it had upon me ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... be the acme of art thus to put the barrier of the taboo upon all intellectual avenues which might lead to the discovery of my imposture. What better guarantee of its perpetuity than to ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... provinces. That policy, of which the inner history has still to be written, had a great deal more to be said in its favour than would now be admitted, and only the unexpected genius and success of Abdurrahman has made the contrary policy that was pursued appear the acme of sound sense and high statesmanship. When Lord Ripon reached Bombay at the end of May, the fate of Afghanistan was still in the crucible. Even Abdurrahman, who had received kind treatment in the persons of his ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... in a time when the bicycle marked the acme of progress and Bryan could be a hero, in a flat-roofed Texas town, whose intellectual glory was a Baptist college and whose answer to arguments, "ropes and revolvers," Brann wrote for only three years, and wrote as Shakespeare wrote, unmindful ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Ficus family in various tropical countries I have visited, but these I think were more curious than any I had ever seen. One hardly knew where they began and where they ended, for they all seemed joined together, and roots and branches seemed one and the same thing. It was the acme of vegetable confusion. Even the river could not stop their progress, and we were constantly gliding between their roots and branches. The growth of ferns, orchids and parasites on the branches and roots of these trees was luxuriant ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... all kinds, and improvised a regular marine establishment; and raised nine new battalions of sepoys, and a numerous corps of native artillery. In the meantime the army under Colonel Leslie was marching towards the acme of action. In his progress he was directed to conciliate and captivate the goodwill of the rulers and people in every district through which his line of inarch lay; but at the same time he was to fight his way where he could not win it by conciliation. Leslie had to engage with a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... these efforts have resulted, in past time, in the production of our best varieties, so they may, in future, in something far better than we yet have. There is no probability that any of our fruits have reached the acme ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... becomes feminine, the woman masculine in shape and character. The sexual contrast not having reached realization in the plan of Nature, each human being remained one-sided, never reached its supplement, never touched the acme of its existence. In her work, "The Moral Education of the Young in Relation to Sex," Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell says: "The sexual impulse exists as an indispensable condition of life, and as the basis of society. It ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... error of making it cheap and sensational. A title which offends against good taste must not be used, no matter how desirable it may appear in the matter of attractiveness. The newspaper caption writer who headed an account of a hanging "Jerked to Jesus!" attained the acme of attractiveness, but he also committed an unpardonable sin against good taste. The short story writer seldom descends to such depths of sensationalism: his chief offense consists in the use of double titles, connected by the ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... round table, two lounges, and some easy-chairs; and in the second, which was somewhat smaller, most of the space was occupied by the bed. Mother Fetu drew attention to a crystal lamp with gilt chains, which hung from the ceiling. To her this lamp was the veritable acme of luxury. ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... is addressed as 'Sir,' the person of whom something is known as 'Dear Sir.' 'My Dear Sir' accompanies a rather better acquaintance; 'Dear Mr. Brown' marks an approach to intimacy; while 'Dear Brown' signifies the acme of friendship and of camaraderie. Here, again, there may be a temporary pause before passing from 'Sir' to 'Dear Sir,' and so forth, but in general the transitions are sufficiently well emphasized to be ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... in her day was looked upon as the ne plus ultra in naval architecture, the very acme of marine engineering. The highest speed she developed was eight and one-half knots or about nine and three-quarters miles an hour. She covered the passage from Liverpool to Boston in fourteen and one-half days, which was then regarded ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... situation in its uncoloured reality. There arose within him a certain sense of shame that he had given so much and received, as yet, nothing in kind. He had passed that period of youth when a stolen kiss seems the acme of love's adventure. Such a theft on his part, irrespective of its consequences, would have left ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... her gowns the acme of elegance and feminine grace; her wit, her eyes, her lips, the toast of the town. Her songs, a second printing of which is being clamored for, are being read over the Three Kingdoms, with a letter from his Royal Majesty, ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... a rough and ready man, and he had little liking for male humans of the George Lerton type. Lerton always dressed in the acme of fashion, running considerably to fads in clothes, appearing almost effeminate at times. And yet it was said in financial circles that Lerton was far from being effeminate when it came to a business deal. There had been whispers about his dark methods, and ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... contrast with the womenfolk about her, she was regarded as the most beautiful of her sex. Her manner, reserved to the point of stiffness, and paralyzing, as it did, the glibbest masculine tongue among them, was also looked upon as the acme of perfection and all that was desirable in young ladyhood; each individual humbly admitting that while he never before had met a real lady, he knew one when he ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... as a revengeful, bloodthirsty man, who was steeled to endurance and delighted in deeds of cruelty. To find him a man capable of feelings and affections, with a heart open to the wants, and responsive to the ties of social life, was amazing. But the surprise reached its acme, when I found him whiling away a part of the tedium of his long winter evenings in relating tales and legends for the amusement of the lodge circle. These fictions were sometimes employed, I observed, to convey instruction, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... Probably the acme of this depravity was reached when the young gentlemen began shooting the pendants off the chandelier; then the servants hastily decamped and left the rogues to do ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... a great pleasure to people of a sociable nature, and its obligations have a most refining influence. The generous consideration of others reaches its acme when one is constantly entertaining little circles of friends, with no thought but to ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... watched their movements while handling them. At the great guns their wonder was redoubled. They approached them with every mark of the profoundest reverence and awe, but forbore to examine them minutely. There were two large mirrors in the cabin, and here was the acme of their amazement. Too-wit was the first to approach them, and he had got in the middle of the cabin, with his face to one and his back to the other, before he fairly perceived them. Upon raising his eyes and seeing his reflected self in the glass, I ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the reforms proposed, the distresses of the army approached their acme, and its dissolution was threatened. Early in February, the commissaries gave notice that the country, to a great distance, was actually exhausted; and that it would be impracticable to obtain supplies for the army longer than to the end of that month. ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... mind a strange idea—that she was a woman and therefore of all creatures or things in the world the farthest removed from him. She looked away, and found her gaze returning, fascinated, as if she were a bird and he a snake. The man was of huge frame, a giant whose every move suggested the acme of physical power. He was an animal—a gorilla with a shock of light instead of black hair, of pale instead of black skin. His features might have been hewn and hammered out with coarse, dull, broken chisels. And upon his face, in the lines and cords, in the huge caverns where his eyes hid, ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... aparejo, which was cinched by a wide grass-bandage. This band was drawn as tightly as possible, to such an extent that the poor brute grunted and groaned under the apparently painful operation, and when fastened he seemed to be cut in two. This always appeared to be the very acme of cruelty to the uninitiated, but it is the secret of successful packing; the firmer the saddle, the more comfortably the mule can travel, with less risk of being chafed and bruised. The aparejo is furnished ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... that baptism in the desert, with the only drop of water they had to drink, seemed to me the very acme of religious fervor and sacred self-sacrifice. I wonder what I should think of the book were I to read it now, which Heaven forefend! The really powerful impression made upon my imagination and feelings at this period, however, was by ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... interests and humble her adversary, England—could look on with neutral eyes at her awful struggles, could keep America calmly aloof from all her entanglements. Not so Mr. Jefferson. Such a return for her services seemed to him but the acme of selfishness and ingratitude. It was not bad statesmanship that made him bear so long with the blunders, the impertinences, the fatuity of Monsieur Genet; it was the remembrance of all the benefits showered upon us by the country which that charlatan represented. ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... approached it in point of popularity. In American literature, Weems stood first. To Weems are we indebted for the hatchet tale, the story of the colt that was broken and killed in the process, and all those other fine romances of Washington's youth. Weems' literary style reveals the very acme of that vicious quality of untruth to be found in the old-time Sunday-school books. Weems mustered all the "Little Willie" stories he could find, and attached to them Washington's name, claiming to write for "the Betterment of the Young," as if in dealing with the young we should carefully conceal ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... impression of a snaky, hissing sound-sensation as the idea unfolded of the dirk slipping through the flimsy fabric of the shift, cast on the bunker cot to remain the silent evidence of the tragedy. The very acme of touches came in the punctuation[8] of the concluding lines—pauses that emphasize with so much ingenuity the very question that lends the speculatively mournful cadence ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... cabin, were a quantity of coarse flour, meal, sugar, coffee, salt and tea. It may be said, that in one respect they were like modern campers out, except that they took the wrong season of the year for what so many boys consider the acme of enjoyment. ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... was an accomplice. The connivance of Doctor Walker was suggested by his love for Louise. The man was unscrupulous, and with the girl as a bait, Paul Armstrong soon had him fast. The plan was apparently the acme of simplicity: a small town in the west, an attack of heart disease, a body from a medical college dissecting-room shipped in a trunk to Doctor Walker by a colleague in San Francisco, and palmed off for the supposed dead ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... expected, opposes all innovation in language. "If the new word is well received, small is the glory; if rejected, it raises laughter."[20] This only marks the penury of his feelings in this species of adventure. The great legislator of words, who lived when his own language was at its acme, seems undecided, yet pleaded for this liberty. "Shall that which the Romans allowed to Caecilius and to Plautus be refused to Virgil and Varius?" The answer to the question might not be favourable to the inquirer. While a language is forming, writers are applauded for extending its limits; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... came the blind the house was dark again. He drew a long breath. 'Another ten minutes,' he thought, 'then I'll go in and shut up. By Jove! The limes are beginning to smell already!' And, the better to take in that acme of his well-being, he tilted the swing, lifted his feet from the ground, and swung himself toward the scented blossoms. He wanted to whelm his senses in their perfume, and closed his eyes. But instead of the domestic vision he expected, the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the most profound thinkers of that or of any other age. It is one of those marvels that we should recall of which we have a right to be proud; but in our pride we should not fail to ascertain why the Almighty should start us as a nation at the very acme of humanity—redeemed, educated, and made grand by the influences of a divine Christianity. Those men were not mere colonists, nor were they limited in their patriotism. "No pent-up Utica" could confine their patriotism, for those men grasped the fundamental principle of human rights. Nay, they ...
— 'America for Americans!' - The Typical American, Thanksgiving Sermon • John Philip Newman
... refinement as had been their lives. Seeking always to be in harmony with the great rhythm of the universe, they were ever prepared to enter the unknown. The "Last Tea of Rikiu" will stand forth forever as the acme of tragic grandeur. ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... I feared was going to be ill, and I have reason to thank Heaven that I am provided with the constitution that I have, for it is certain that I need it. On Sunday night a violent storm cooled the atmosphere, and on Monday morning the nurse was good enough to forgive me, and came back: so that the acme of my trial did not last too long. On Tuesday the children were removed to the country, and though the physician and my own observation assured me that F—— required sea-bathing, it is an unspeakable relief to me to see her out of the city, and to find this place healthy and pleasant for them. ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... uncommonly sharp eyes that Miss Phipps's leniency would some day come to an end, and that she would then find herself in the position of being obliged either to speak French or not to speak at all. To a born chatterbox the latter alternative seemed the acme of misery, so it behoved her to prepare for speech before the dread verdict was given, which she did in a manner astonishing to her companions. Of French grammar she had the poorest opinion, but she was sharp as a magpie to pick up the phrases of others and store them for her ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... poise which betrays his different origin. And in the Rasika Priya it is once again his courtly aura which determines his new role. A blend of prince and cowherd, Krishna ousts from poetry the courtly lovers who previously had seemed the acme of romance. Adoration of God acquires the grace and charm of courtly loving, passionate sensuality all the refinement and nobility of a spiritual religion. It is out of all these varied texts that the Krishna of Indian ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... that Lake. In another the dead person himself is thus addressed: "Hail, thou who hast endured the Suffering, such as indeed thou hadst never suffered before; thou hast become god from man!" (3) Ecstacy was the acme of the religious life; and, what is especially interesting to us, Salvation or the divine nature was open to all men—to all, that is, who should go through the necessary stages of preparation ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... and tobacco. The manner in which they use this latter is curious, and worthy of notice. Not satisfied with the ordinary "cutty" of the whites, they inhale it in volumes through a bamboo cane. The effect is a profound stupefaction, which appears to be their acme of enjoyment. On the morning of the 5th, taking with them their younger brother, John Jardine, and their two guides, Harricome and Monuwah, and the five fresh horses, in addition to their own, the Brothers started to return to the cattle party, who were anxiously awaiting their return on the ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... dishonour in one-half of the country, why not in the whole of it? If it would be a damning sin for us to admit another Slave State into the Union, why is it not a damning sin to permit a Slave State to remain in the Union? Would it not be the acme of effrontery for a man, in amicable alliance with fifteen pickpockets, to profess scruples of conscience in regard to admitting another pilfering rogue to the fraternity? "Thou that sayest, A man should not steal, dost thou steal," or consent, in any instance, to stealing? "If the Lord be ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... head-quarters of painting, sculpture, and architecture then, where art is at her acme, and from a people polished into brilliancy, perhaps a little into weakness, we drove through the celebrated vale of Arno; thick hedges on each side us, which in spring must have been covered with blossoms and fragrant with perfume; ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... strong similarity to the same subject at Varallo, is by far the best. Ferrari never painted anything at once truer to life and nobler in tragic style than the fainting Virgin. Her face expresses the very acme of martyrdom—not exaggerated nor spasmodic, but real and sublime—in the suffering of a stately matron. In points like this Ferrari cannot be surpassed. Raphael could scarcely have done better; besides, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... acme; and then end. Fassmann, a fellow not without sarcasm and sharpness, as you may still see, has one evening provoked Gundling to the transcendent pitch,—till words are weak, and only action will answer. Gundling, driven to the exploding point, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... point of this experience is simply this: I secured an education that seemed to me to promise the acme of utility. In one way, it has fulfilled that promise far beyond my wildest expectations, but that way was very different from the one that I had anticipated. The technical knowledge that I gained during those four strenuous years, I apply now only as a means of recreation. So far as enabling ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... reprint, but as these are long quarto lines, let us multiply them by some three to get the equivalent of the "skipping octosyllables." There will remain fifty to a hundred and fifty, with, in the prose, some extra matter not in the verse. But the acme of the contrast is reached in these words of the prose, which answer to some forty lines of the poet's watering-out. "Great was the joy that they made each other that night, for long had each suffered for the other. And when the day came, they ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... this shrubbery?" said Miss Carter. "The children are all quite happy. Every one who comes to the Rectory is happy, and you can hear by the shouts of the village children that they are in the very acme of bliss. Shall we walk down here and talk together? I have always been so amazed at your remaining on at ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... and never so happy as when annoying others. A fight appeared to be the acme of pleasure with him, and it was seldom that he could be seen without some trace of a mix-up on his face in the shape of scratches, or a suspicious hue ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... tribe, drawn up in military order, mounted on great horses, riding bareback, their rifles held aloft in their right hands, the left hand grasping the flowing mane, their naked bodies hideously adorned with paint, their long scalp-locks braided and trimmed with plumes and quills. They were the very acme of grandeur in a warfare as splendid as it was barbaric. And I, who live to write these lines, account myself most fortunate that ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... he,—her opinion unconsulted, her sanction unimplored, should have formed,—and with her own near relation,—this indissoluble tie, and having formed it should have attempted to conceal the fact from her when known to so many others,—appeared to her the acme of ingratitude, perfidy, and insult. She felt the injury like a weak disappointed woman, she resented it like a queen ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Tonogen is the acme of chemical perfection, both as a tonic and as a beverage. It is the captured and crystalized outcome of years of scientific observation focussed upon the true ingredients of healthy blood cells as viewed from both the theoretical and practical biological ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... of joy, Tuned by angelic fingers, rose the strains Of vocal concord and mellifluence, As swelled in chorus those seraphic throats In falling cadence and ecstatic flight, Surpassing heaven's grandest melody In all that appertains to choral song! The acme of celestial harmony Which angel ears discerned with glad surprise; But sweeter than that song, the glad refrain Wafted from angel tongues innumerable, To earth and the inhabitants thereof, "Peace! Peace on Earth, the Deity's ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... entrance into the country. A few skins and horns, and some cattle, make up the remainder of the exports. English goods, sugar, tea, and coffee are the articles received in exchange. All the natives of these parts soon become remarkably fond of coffee. The acme of respectability among the Bechuanas is the possession of cattle and a wagon. It is remarkable that, though these latter require frequent repairs, none of the Bechuanas have ever learned to mend them. Forges and tools have been at their service, and teachers willing to aid them, but, beyond ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... the acme of delight, and for ever after the jingle of horse-bells was to recall it to her mind. The sight of the gay red trappings, the trot of the muffled hoofs, the easy motion of the sleigh slipping over the white road, and above all, Isabel, clad in purple and seated beside her, a figure of ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... Jersey and Guernsey have resorted to it. Medical students generally complete their education at Paris, where it is commonly considered in France, that, both in theory and practice, the various branches of this faculty have nearly attained the acme of perfection. The students, who amount to just five hundred, are under the care of twenty-six professors, many of them men of distinguished talents. The Abbe de la Rue fills the chair of history; M. Lamouroux, that of the natural ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... elected to write more pastorali, but to censure the individual work because it is not of a type to which its author never had the remotest intention of making it conform, and to which except for something like a miracle it was impossible that it should even approach, is the acme of critical fatuity. Judged in accordance with the intention of the author the Amyntas is no inconsiderable achievement for a young writer, and compared with other works belonging to the same tradition it occupies a highly respectable place. With Tasso's Aminta and Fletcher's ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... you thus have assumed a disguise? You are already a great noble, but your fortunes have not yet reached their acme. You will one day be Marechal de France, and the dignity will be conferred upon you on the other side of the Rhone. Beauty has great influence over you; but with those whom you seek to please your purse has even more charms ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... world could e'er cause me to tremble While trusting my all in a heart such as this, Too fond to deceive me; too true to dissemble— 'Twere a foretaste of Heaven, the acme of bliss. ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... ecclesiastic once underlined word for word the whole "Imitatio Christi;" in the same way I might underline your "Lohengrin" note for note. In that case, however, I should like to begin at the end; that is, at the duet between Elsa and Lohengrin in the third act, which to my thinking is the acme of the beautiful and ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... and furnished what was thought the acme of a propagator, and tanks of elaborate workmanship, and made of the finest material down to the commonest wood, were made so a circulation of hot water was kept up over as large an area as the necessity of ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... house, where he had been born and sheltered, had never seemed to him so warm, and rich, and cosy, as during this last pilgrimage to his father's room. It was not his taste; but in its own substantial, lincrusta way it was the acme of comfort and security. And the night was so dark and windy; the grave so cold ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... be used must be determined wholly by the character of the land and the purposes for which it is to be fitted. Lands that are hard and cloddy may be reduced by the use of the disk or Acme harrows, shown in Fig. 86; but those that are friable and mellow may not need such heavy and vigorous tools. On these mellower lands, the spring-tooth harrow, types of which are shown in Fig. 87, may follow ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... "being in love," "infatuation," and "love." Being in love is, as just indicated, a pathological, morbid phenomenon. The person who is in love is not in a normal condition. He can see nothing, he cannot be argued with, as far as his love is concerned. She is the acme of perfection, physical, mental, and spiritual; nobody can be compared with her. And, of course, the man is anxiously eager to marry the object of his love—unless insuperable obstacles are in the way; for instance, if the ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... nor to them did it occur that their quarry might be crouching near, hunting as well as hunted. Not that the pair of ruffians who had been thus hired would have hesitated for that thought, as I imagine. For it is strange, yet certain, that the zenith of courage and the acme of villainy can alike be bought for the price of a lady's glove. Among such outcasts as those from whom Bauer drew his recruits the murder of a man is held serious only when the police are by, and death at the hands of him they seek to ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... their dream and cleared the way to the throne for Victoria. Leopold continued to hold the property, and it became a generation later the asylum of Louis Philippe. To an ordinary mind the miseries of any one condemned to make this lovely spot his home are not apt to present themselves as the acme of despair. A sensation of relief and lulling repose would be more reasonably expected, especially after so stormy a career as that of Louis. The change from restless and capricious Paris to dewy shades and luxurious halls in the heart of changeless and impregnable England ought, on common ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... ever since it had been put in. That hot and cold water should run together for one's cleansing without the trouble of fetching them in heavy buckets from a far-away kitchen, had seemed to Arethusa the acme of luxury when she had first glimpsed the new bath-room ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... fight, or (save in the treatment of prisoners) be more brutal or less brutal when fought between two little savage tribes, than when fought between two colossal groups of Christian nations, civilized to the highest point. War is the acme of the endeavor of man. Each side determines that it will win at all costs and at all hazards; that nobody's comfort, happiness, or safety shall receive the slightest consideration; that everybody's strength and courage must be worked to the limit by night as well as by day, ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... the Place de Greve. Frantic Patriots pick up the grape-shots; bear them, still hot (or seemingly so), to the Hotel-de-Ville:—Paris, you perceive, is to be burnt! Flesselles is 'pale to the very lips' for the roar of the multitude grows deep. Paris wholly has got to the acme of its frenzy; whirled, all ways, by panic madness. At every street-barricade, there whirls simmering, a minor whirlpool,—strengthening the barricade, since God knows what is coming; and all minor whirlpools play distractedly into that grand Fire-Mahlstrom ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle |
