"Lowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... present moment, give up even that old establishment.' Gibbons's Misc. Works, i. 328. One of Gibbon's correspondents told him in 1792, that the Wealth of Nations had been condemned by the Inquisition on account of 'the lowness of its style and the looseness of the morals which it inculcates.' Ib. ii. 479. See also post, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... prey to lowness of spirits: at this some dull men have marvelled; but the dull have no misgivings: they go blindly and stupidly on, like a horse in a mill, and have none of the sorrows or joys which ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... with "kadjangs," or dried palm-leaf awnings, having a space in the centre some 8 feet long or more, according to the size of the boat, walled in on each side with the same material, the better to exclude the fierce rays of the sun. Herein sits, or rather lies, the traveller, the lowness of the awning (which is removable) precluding any other position. Boxed up in this manner, but little can be seen of the surrounding country, but as in Sarawak one river is so precisely alike another this is no great loss. In ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... Madden confirms the above, and explains further, as follows: "An excess of water injures the soil by diminishing its temperature in summer and increasing it in winter—a transformation of nature most hurtful to perennials, because the vigor of a plant in spring depends greatly on the lowness of temperature to which it has been subjected during the winter (within certain limits, of course), as the difference of temperature between winter and spring is the exciting cause of the ascent of the sap." In other words, too much water in the ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... there after dinner, watching intently, saying little, and hearing the very least possible, when there approached me one of the most eccentric figures in the country, where God has not made them lacking. He is a mixture of elevation and lowness, of good sense and madness; the notions of good and bad must be mixed up together in strange confusion in his head, for he shows the good qualities that nature has bestowed on him without any ostentation, and the bad ones without the smallest shame. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... would never have been forgiven her; so she went out. I looked after her to go too; but my master said, Come, Pamela, give another specimen, I desire you, to Longman I am sure you must, if you will but speak. Well, sir, said I, since it seems your greatness wants to be justified by my lowness, and I have no desire you should suffer in the sight of your family, I will say, on my bended knees, (and so I kneeled down,) that I have been a very faulty, and a very ungrateful creature to the best of ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... king had a daughter as blooming as his most florid fancies, and with a soul as fervent and imperious as his own. As is usual in such cases, she was the apple of his eye, and was loved by him above all humanity. Among his courtiers was a young man of that fineness of blood and lowness of station common to the conventional heroes of romance who love royal maidens. This royal maiden was well satisfied with her lover, for he was handsome and brave to a degree unsurpassed in all this kingdom; and she loved him with an ardor that had enough ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... beastly back-courts and canals and in stuffy churches—it can't be healthy, you know! And they've no drainage. I only hope I haven't caught something, as it is. I've that kind of sinking feeling, and a general lowness—She says I lunch too heavily—but I swear it's more ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... produces abundance of timber, excellent wine, and all the necessaries of life, and is not deficient in the valuable minerals; and both the sea and the adjoining rivers afford great quantities of fine fish. But owing to the lowness of the situation which was chosen for this city, it was much exposed to inundations of the sea during earthquakes, which are frequent in Chili. On the 8th of July 1730, this city was nearly destroyed by an earthquake and inundation; and experienced ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... denying that she commanded less attention than at first: the audience had lessened, and, judging by appearances, might soon be expected to be decidedly thin. In excessive lowness of spirit, Ethelberta translated these signs with the bias that a lingering echo of her mother's dismal words naturally induced, reading them as conclusive evidence that her adventure had been chimerical in its birth. Yet it was ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... of paying no direct stipend to their clergymen in England has led to a reluctance to contribute good salaries for their support out here, where they must rely solely upon such support; and the lowness of salaries, if not the hardness of the work, has made the Anglican clergy in Australia as a class inferior to their English brethren. Of course the clergy still contains a large proportion of gentlemen within its ranks, but on the score of ability I fancy the ex-Dissenters have the advantage. ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... men. But Gray could see no merit in Rasselas; and Johnson could see no merit in the Bard. Fielding thought Richardson a solemn prig; and Richardson perpetually expressed contempt and disgust for Fielding's lowness. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... course. I was rather hurt, but I made no remark. Whether it was that I showed a lowness of spirits after dinner, in consequence of feeling that I seemed to intrude, I cannot say. But, Maria Jane's Mama said to me on her retiring for the night: in a low distinct voice, and with a look of reproach ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... constitution, the regularity of his habits, sustained through a life of great exertions and vicissitudes, produced a vigor and equanimity which are seldom the accompaniments of a laborious mind or of a distracted life. "I do not remember," he says, "to have felt lowness of spirits one quarter of an hour since I was born." "Ten thousand cares are no more weight to my mind than ten thousand hairs are to my head." "I have never lost a night's sleep in my life." "His face was remarkably fine, his complexion fresh to ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... smoothness showed upon the hewn and polished blocks; but the whole mass of orange and crimson stood out together into the pale, pure Attic air. There it stood, surrounded by lanes and hovels, still perpetuating the great old contrast in Greek history, of magnificence and meanness—of loftiness and lowness—as well in outer life as in inward motive. And, as it were in illustration of that art of which it was the most perfect bloom, and which lasted in perfection but a day of history, I saw it again and again, in sunlight and in shade, in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... on the Concealed Causes of Nervous Debility, Local and General Weakness, Indigestion, Lowness of Spirits, Mental Irritability, and Insanity; with Practical Observations on their Treatment and Cure. By SAMUEL LA'MERT, Consulting Surgeon, 9 Bedford street, Bedford square, London; Matriculated Member of the University of Edinburgh; Honorary Member of the London Hospital Medical Society; ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... Nicholas is not quite sure but what he was right for him, though his language on rather a large scale. Horses running in and out is inexplicable! Why, gents all, which of us WOULDN'T do it, if he had the chance to put the pot on handsome, human nature being what it is, especially considering the lowness of the market odds as you have often and often to be content with. In short, the more you stir it the more it won't exactly remind you of gales from Araby the Blest; than which a more delightful country, only not to be found on any atlas as ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... honour and consideration belonging to such a name till the real Montmorencys or Howards hear something about it, and denounce him, and then such a man would be justly scouted from society, and fall down much lower than the lowness from which he attempted to rise. The attempt to steal away from us and appropriate to the use of a fraction of the Church of England that glorious title of Catholic is proved to be an usurpation by every monument of the past and present—by the coronation oath of your sovereigns—by ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... by a neighbor,—besides being about the only article of luxury, if it could be called such, in possession of the family. As such it had been hardly used, being reserved for state occasions; yet hardly had it left (sic) the the house, when Aunt Rachel began to show signs of extreme lowness of spirits, and bewailed its loss as a privation of a ...
— Timothy Crump's Ward - A Story of American Life • Horatio Alger
... tariffs—the tariffed countries pay the worst wages; and we were to raise ours by having tariffs also. But even that pleasing paralogism did not suffice for the appetite of tariffism in the way of fallacy. The same propaganda which affirmed the lowness of the rate of wages paid in tariffist countries affirmed also the superiority of the rate of wages paid in the United States, whence came much of our imported goods which the tariffists wished to keep out. In ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... establishment, she was altogether intolerant. To such she had but one answer. He or she who complained might leave the place at a moment's notice if it so pleased them. There were always others ready to take their places. The power of making this answer came to her from the lowness of her prices; and it was a power which ...
— La Mere Bauche from Tales of All Countries • Anthony Trollope
... tone-lengths. But it had this advantage over the Greek system, that the position of the signs on the page indicated graphically to the eye the general direction of the melody, as well as giving at least a hint concerning the relative highness or lowness of each individual tone (the so-called diastematic system), and this was a great aid to the eye in singing, just as the relative highness and lowness of notes on the modern staff is of great value in ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... voice that was the harsher for its lowness; "and to you. I did not tell you, but if that man dies you will be the ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... in the ways of the Lord. No matter, if there be but a pilgrim's heart, all shall be well at last; for Omnipotence itself is for us, and then we may boldly ask, 'Who shall be against us?'—(Mason). Constitutional timidity and lowness of spirits, arising from a feeble frame, give a peculiar cast to the views and nature of religious profession, which unfits for hard and perilous service. The difference between Feeble-mind and Fearing seems to be this—the former ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... In a bedroom adjoining, its high-ceilinged vastness as cold as a cathedral to her lowness of stature, sobs dry and terrible were rumbling up from her, only to dash ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... an idea of the youth's station in life, wholly different from that which the whole tenour of the original epitaph warrants. The other poem, too, which I have mentioned, addressed evidently to the same boy, and speaking in similar terms, of the "lowness" of his "lot," is, in the "Hours of Idleness," altogether omitted. That he grew more conscious of his high station, as he approached to manhood, is not improbable; and this wish to sink his early friendship with the young cottager ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... she began to open her eyes, her lowness of spirits left her, the pock dried up, and her appetite returned. Her face was still covered with red spots; but Marian looked at her with more pleasure than ever, from the consideration of the danger she had been in of losing her; while the grateful Bella, on the other ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... about the city, finding something to excite his wonder or admiration at every turn, until the lowness of the western sun admonished him that he had better begin to look out ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... fasting' (Bri. Up. IV, 4, 22).—By virtuous conduct (kalynni) are meant truthfulness, honesty, kindness, liberality, gentleness, absence of covetousness. Confirmatory texts are 'By truth he is to be obtained' (Mu. Up. III, 1, 5) and 'to them belongs that pure Brahman-world' (Pr. Up. I, 16).—That lowness of spirit or want of cheerfulness which results from unfavourable conditions of place or time and the remembrance of causes of sorrow, is denoted by the term 'dejection'; the contrary of this is 'freedom from dejection.' The relevant scriptural passage is 'This ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... have reached your person, no necessity of mine could have made me to have sought so earnestly, and so long, to have cultivated your kindness. As a poet, I cannot but have made some observations on mankind; the lowness of my fortune has not yet brought me to flatter vice; and it is my duty to give testimony to virtue. It is true, your lordship is not of that nature, which either seeks a commendation, or wants it. Your mind has always been above the wretched affectation of popularity. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... of the customs, until the principal could be discharged out of such customs or duties as are appropriated for the payment of this bounty. This premium on the exportation of corn ought not to be granted, except when the lowness of the market price in Great Britain proves that there is a superabundance in the kingdom; otherwise the exporter will find his account in depriving our own labourers of their bread, in order to supply our rivals at an easier ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... were manifested on every hand, and in all its various stages, from the muddy, pale complexion, pale gums, feeble, languid muscular motions, lowness of spirits, and fetid breath, to the dusky, dirty, leaden complexion, swollen features, spongy, purple, livid, fungoid, bleeding gums, loose teeth, oedematous limbs, covered with livid vibices, and petechiae spasmodically flexed, ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... and discriminating colors as in a test for color blindness 24 In finding and checking small visual details such as letters 33 In spelling 33 In school "marks" in English 35 In school "marks" in foreign languages 40 In memorizing for immediate recall 42 In lowness of sensory thresholds 43 In retentiveness 47 In tests of speed and accuracy of association 48 In tests of general information 50 In school "marks" in mathematics 50 In school "marks" (total average) 50 In tests of discrimination ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... lowness &c adj.; debasement, depression, prostration &c (horizontal) 213; depression &c (concave) 252. molehill; lowlands; basement floor, ground floor; rez de chaussee [Fr.]; cellar; hold, bilge; feet, heels. low water; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... neither was confidence to reverence. He fervently desired that we should annihilate ourselves when receiving the Blessed Sacrament, as our Lord annihilated Himself in order to communicate Himself to us, bowing down the heaven of His greatness to accommodate and unite Himself with our lowness. ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... he had endured a good deal of physical fatigue. Standing for so many hours a day wearied him much more than walking would have done, and with bodily exhaustion came at times a lowness of spirits such as he had never felt. His resource against this misery was conversation with Allchin. In Allchin he had a henchman whose sturdy optimism and gross common sense were of the utmost value. The brawny assistant, ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... appeal to you; for with that man it is irksome for me to speak. Were these those frequent journeys and long visits at Lemnos? Was this the lowness of prices ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... of their intrigue, a pearl which cost him six millions of sesterces; and in the civil war, besides other presents, assigned to her, for a trifling consideration, some valuable farms when they were exposed to public auction. Many persons expressing their surprise at the lowness of the price, Cicero wittily remarked, "To let you know the real value of the purchase, between ourselves, Tertia was deducted:" for Servilia was supposed to have prostituted her daughter ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... few years, is probably still too low to admit of it. The inferiority of the quality, indeed, compared with that of the produce of English dairies, is fully equal to that of the price. But this inferiority of quality is, perhaps, rather the effect of this lowness of price, than the cause of it. Though the quality was much better, the greater part of what is brought to market could not, I apprehend, in the present circumstances of the country, be disposed of at a much better price; and the present price, it is probable, would not ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... paid me L.50. on account;—may I trouble you to tender my most respectful assurances to Miss J.; that I hope most sincerely to hear that her indisposition discontinues. Should you no longer want the books, perhaps the bearer may bring them. Will lowness of spirits be received as an apology for this slovenly letter and ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... their usefulness. Excavations have brought to light forty or fifty pieces of the steps of the auditorium, upon some of which the seats are marked by dividing lines and by letters. The podium of the arena shows by its lowness that fights with wild beasts did not take place in it. Until the fourteenth century the interior remained nearly complete, the patriarch having forbidden the removal of stones. At that time the seats were taken to repair ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... bright night, and for all her lowness of spirits Dolly kept looking up at the stars in a manner so bewitching (and SHE knew it!) that Joe was clean out of his senses, and plainly showed that if ever a man were—not to say over head and ears, but over the Monument and the ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... and Pastor, says to the same effect, that "the inaccuracy of diction, the inelegance, poverty, and lowness of expression, which is commonly observed in extempore discourses, will not fail to offend ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... 1,600 sheets. Such intense application, which, however, not greatly exceeds that of many authors, brought on the bodily complaints he has minutely described, with "all the dispiriting symptoms of a nervous illness, commonly called vapours, or lowness of spirits." Bayne, who was of an athletic temperament, imagined he had not paid attention to his diet, to the lowness of his desk, and his habit of sitting with a particular compression of the body; in future all these were to be avoided. He prolonged his ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... man of superior sense forced to hide his light under the bushel of an inferior coat.—Well, from what little I heard, I said to myself, Here now is one with the unprofitable philosophy of disesteem for man. Which disease, in the main, I have observed—excuse me—to spring from a certain lowness, if not sourness, of spirits inseparable from sequestration. Trust me, one had better mix in, and do like others. Sad business, this holding out against having a good time. Life is a pic-nic en costume; one must take a part, assume a character, stand ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... bank on the north-east, so rapidly as to leave but an indistinct impression of its outlines on my mind. At the same instant, the other, a young one, but as tall as a horse, leaped out into the stream, in full sight, and there stood cowering for a moment, or rather its disproportionate lowness behind gave it that appearance, and uttering two or three trumpeting squeaks. I have an indistinct recollection of seeing the old one pause an instant on the top of the bank in the woods, look toward its shivering young, and then dash away again. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... patience and perseverance that alone amounted to genius. Mick was as brilliant as his complexion; gay, irritable, evanescent, and unstable. Mick enjoyed life; his friend only endured it; yet Mick was always complaining of the lowness of his wages and the greatness of his toil; while Devilsdust never murmured, but read and pondered on the rights of labour, and sighed ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... you mean? Does an hypochondriac affection, which causes sadness and lowness in all those who suffer from it, render ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... my young countrymen, who have not opportunity to read the translations of the chief scholars, scattered here and there in learned periodicals, or patience and time to disentangle overlapping and contradictory versions, that they may judge for themselves as to its "lowness" and "want of imagination," and the other well-known charges brought against it before ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... always gibing at Fielding. 'I could not help telling his sister', he observes—a sister, too, whose merits Fielding had praised with his usual generosity—'that I was equally surprised at and concerned for his continuous lowness. Had your brother, said I, been born in a stable or been a runner at a sponging-house we should have thought him a genius,' but now! So another great writer came just in time to be judged by Richardson. A bishop asked him, 'Who is this Yorick,' who has, it seems, been countenanced ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... sporting gentlemen began to get back from the dusty Downs, the average was well kept up; and it was with a distinct rise in the temperature of Liberal hopes and confidence that this stage was reached. On the following day the lowness of the voice in the Old Man was a little more perceptible, and when it got to midnight, he seemed painfully fagged and exhausted. It was, perhaps, because he was in that mood that he made some concessions to the Unionists, which have ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... silly talk, observed their bold demeanor and their vulgar manners, while the impression of weakness, of stupidity, of the lowness and beastiality of humanity made upon his mind by the aged and the mature, was intensified by his observation ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... everything that you and I regard as distinctive of Christianity, 'will be gone and be forgotten.' We believe ourselves to be in possession of an eternal light; the world looks at us and sees that it is like a flickering flame in a dying lamp. Dear brethren, if I think of the lowness of our own religious characters, the small extent to which we influence the society in which we live, of the slow rate at which the Gospel progresses in our land, I can only ask the question, and pray you to lay it to heart, which the old prophet asked long ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Mellstock parish choir were standing in a group in front of Mr. Penny's workshop in the lower village. They were all brightly illuminated, and each was backed up by a shadow as long as a steeple; the lowness of the source of light rendering the brims of their hats of no use at all as a ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... physical strength and somewhat refined elegance of manner,—the fire of his eye, and his fierce courage in battle, gave to Murat rather the character of one of those 'preux chevaliers' so well described by Ariosto and Taro, that, that a Republican soldier. The nobleness of his look soon made the lowness of his birth be forgotten. He was affable, polished, gallant; and in the field of battle twenty men headed by Murat were worth a whole regiment. Once only he showed himself under the influence of fear, and the reader shall see ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... a convulsive leap as he caught sight of the dog, and his intention was to alight upon the frame-work of one of the large grindstones close by his side—one that had just been set in motion, but though he jumped high enough he did not allow for the lowness of the ceiling, against which he struck his head, came down in a sitting position on the grindstone, and was instantly hurled ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... to eighteen. Mr. Hume had succeeded in taking some fish at one of the stock stations; but if I except those speared by the natives, we had since been altogether unsuccessful with the hook, a circumstance which I attribute to the lowness ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... a few miles east of Cape Upstart, in 17 fathoms, having passed two miles from the north side of Holborn Island, in 28 fathoms. The above headland received its name from Captain Cook, and peculiarly deserves it, appearing in fact from the lowness of the land behind, actually to start up out ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... derision among all practical men. No breed or variety of dog has suffered more from the injudicious fads and crazes of those showmen who are not sportsmen also. At one time among a certain class of judges, length and lowness was everything, and soundness, activity, and symmetry simply did not count. As happens to all absurd crazes of this kind when carried to exaggeration, public opinion has proved too much for it, but not before a great deal of harm has been done to a breed which is certainly ornamental, and can ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... and I think it had tan trimmings around the edges of the dog, and perhaps underneath. It was a long, low dog, with very short, strange legs—legs that curved inboard, something like parentheses wrong way (. Indeed, it was made on the plan of a bench for length and lowness. It seemed to be satisfied, but I thought the plan poor, and structurally weak, on account of the distance between the forward supports and those abaft. With age the dog's back was likely to sag; and it seemed to me that it would ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... will have tea in the orchard," she said consolingly, "to make up for the loss of our tea at Four Bridges; that will be pleasanter than having it indoors." The kinder they were to him the more unhappy and uncomfortable Paul felt, and the less chance he saw of carrying out his plan; but his lowness of spirits stood him in good stead here, for his mother and father put it down to the pain he was suffering, and no one questioned the truth of his ...
— Paul the Courageous • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... queer whistling sounded louder up there; but it still conveyed that peculiar sense of something whistling quietly to itself—can you understand? Though, for all the meditative lowness of the note, the horrible, gargantuan quality was distinct—a mighty parody of the human, as if I stood there and listened to the whistling from the lips of a ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... translated into Italian in 1780, and in Spain it had the curious fortune of being suppressed by the Inquisition on account of "the lowness of its style and the looseness of its morals." Sir John Macpherson—Warren Hastings' successor as Governor-General of India—writes Gibbon as if he saw the sentence of the Inquisition posted on the church doors in a Spanish tour he made in 1792;[311] but a change ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... first place, the enforced lowness of prices prevented any breadstuffs or other provisions from being brought into the city. It was a long time before Farnese succeeded in so blockading the Scheldt as to prevent ships laden with eatables from coming in below. Corn and preserved meats might ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... to-day. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space." "To the last he [Shelley] ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... not die of hunger, if they did not die of thirst, in some days, when the gas failed, they would die from want of air, unless the cold had killed them first. Still, important as it was to economize the gas, the excessive lowness of the surrounding temperature obliged them to consume a certain quantity. Strictly speaking, they could do without its light, but not without its heat. Fortunately the caloric generated by ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... here! O, how that word doth play With both our fortunes, differing, like ourselves, Both one; and yet divided, as opposed! I high, thou low: O, this our plight of place Doubly presents the two lets of our love, Local and ceremonial height, and lowness: Both ways, I am too high, and thou too low, Our minds are even yet; O, why should our bodies, That are their slaves, be so without their rule? I'll cast myself down to thee; if I die, I'll ever live ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... adopted was to send Sabinianus, a withered old man of great wealth, but infirm and timid, and from the lowness of his birth far removed from any office of command, to govern the districts of the East; while Ursicinus should be recalled to court, to command the infantry, as successor to Barbatio. And then he, this greedy promoter of revolution, as they called him, being within their reach, could easily ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... of this time are represented by Bishop Hall and Jeremy Taylor, among the clergy, and Selden and Camden among the laymen. The roughness of speech and manners of Elizabeth's time, followed, in the next reign, by a real coarseness and lowness of sentiment, grew rapidly worse under Charles, whose reign was especially prolific in poetry, the tone of which varied from grave to gay, from devotion to licentiousness, from severe solemnity to indecent levity; but no great poet appeared in the crowd. The drama was still ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... "lowness" of satire, in itself and compared with other genres. This tradition, moreover, had at least two sources: the practice of Elizabethan satirists and the critical custom of assigning satire to a middle or low position ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... always take refuge in a cold manner; Sometimes they study manner as they would the small-sword exercise, and exploit it-with equal fervor. Exaggeration of manner is quite as common a refuge for these unfortunates as the other extreme of calmness. They render themselves ridiculous by the lowness of their bows and the vivid picturesqueness of their speech. They, as it were, burst the bounds of the calyx, and the flower opens too wide. Symmetry is lost, graceful outline is destroyed. Many a bashful man, thinking of Tom Titmouse, has become an acrobat in his determination to be lively ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... ear, the highest limit of audibleness is reached by sound-waves estimated at twenty-eight-hundredths of an inch from node to node—equal to 48,000 vibrations per second. The extreme of lowness to which our sense of hearing is susceptible, has been placed at 75 feet from node to node—or 15 vibrations per second. This total range of audibleness covers 12 octaves; running, of course, far above and far below the domain of music. The extreme ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... and quiet afternoon, about three o'clock; but the winter solstice having stealthily come on, the lowness of the sun caused the hour to seem later than it actually was, there being little here to remind an inhabitant that he must unlearn his summer experience of the sky as a dial. In the course of many days ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... small and positively cosy, such as may be found in the house of moderate size belonging to any lady or gentleman of somewhat luxurious habits. English people would probably have chosen a more airy situation for their private abode than the ground floor; but from the lowness of these rooms they are more easily warmed in winter, and from their being vaulted they are cooler in summer. After visiting the private rooms, their guide conducted them up-stairs, when they passed through several fine halls, similar in grandeur to those in ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... there are many who like Your talks on the darkness of light, The shortness of length and the weakness of strength And the one on the lowness of height. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... 41/2 feet only at the sides. The floor space allowed, however, is 10.2 metres by 12.8 metres, giving us about 1,390 square feet for 64 men, or 651 square feet for thirty men. When all allowance is made for the lowness of the sides in the rather wide loft (it seems to be more than 30 feet wide), this worst accommodation at Ruhleben seems, as regards space available, not inferior to that at Knockaloe. Further details would be needed for a ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... a tawny or brown colour; but this is not wholly hereditary. The chief cause is probably the lowness of their habits; for they very seldom wash their persons, or the clothes they wear, their linen excepted. Their alternate exposures to cold and heat, and the smoke surrounding their small camps, perpetually tend to increase those characteristics ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... been the lowness of education and consequent want of principle among the middle classes; and this fault had been found as strongly marked among the Protestants as it had been among the Roman Catholics. Young men ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... you should think I neglected you wilfully; a thought, I'm sure, you never shall have occasion to entertain of me, though the mist of dulness should for ever obscure and envelope my fancy and imagination. I cannot think of coming to Kames, yet I am sufficiently thankful for the invitation; my lowness would have a very bad effect in a cheerful society; it would be like a dead march in the midst of a hornpipe, or a mournful elegy in a ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... respective kingdoms; but they are, notwithstanding, worthy, in their quiet, unobtrusive beauty, of the God who formed them. It is only when the human period begins that we are startled and perplexed by the problem of a lowness not innocent,—an inferiority tantamount to moral deformity. In the period of responsibility, to be low means to be evil; and how, we ask, could a lowness and inferiority resolvable into moral evil have had any place in the decrees of that Judge who ever does what is right, and in ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... of the Royal Exchange. I want Americans to see what can happen if His Imperial Lowness over on the Continent sees fit to send his Zeppelins to England. Not being big enough nor strong enough to injure England vitally, he can take this method of injury, he can injure women and children and maim horses, destroy business and ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... Word was no menacing or dazzling light. He and it were 'full of grace and truth,' perfect Love bending to inferiors and sinners, with hands full of gifts and a heart full of tenderness and the revelation of reality, both as regards God and man. His grace bestows all that our lowness needs, His truth teaches all that our ignorance requires. All our gifts and all our knowledge come from the Incarnate Word, in whom believing we are ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... bartizans are made safe to the most timid of Cockneys by stout wooden banisters, that enable you to stand as securely on a crumbling battlement as on the top of Salisbury plain. We saw the courts and quadrangles, admired the splendid windows, and only wondered at the lowness of the ceilings of some of the principal rooms, as from floor to floor could not have been more than seven feet and a half. There were fountain courts without a fountain; and chapel-yards with no chapel; why should we speak of kitchens, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... But the fields on which the Yorkshire animals pastured were at some distance from the house; this department of the farm business was always left wholly to Reuben; and, with much grumbling and scolding, she took his word for it as to the probable lowness of the sum he should ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ease, and readiness, with which he produced his plays. Notwithstanding his extraordinary expedition, there is a clear and lively simplicity in his wit, that is equally distant from the pedantry of learning, and the lowness of scurrility. As the face of a fine lady, with her hair undressed, may appear in the morning in its brightest glow of beauty; such were the productions of Vanbrugh, adorned with only the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... mentioned is the cardinal fault of the work before us; but it has other faults, of too great magnitude to be passed altogether without notice. There is a debasing lowness and vulgarity in some passages, which we think must be offensive to every reader of delicacy, and which are not, for the most part, redeemed by any vigour or picturesque effect. The venison pasties, we think, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... with this design, than she starched up her behaviour with a double proportion of reserve; and when the company broke up, she observed with a toss of her nose, that Brown was a civil fellow enough, considering the lowness of his original; but that Fortune, though she had mended his circumstances, was incapable to raise his ideas, which were still humble ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... Bronte's Life to me, and oh, how many chords vibrate deep in my soul as I hear of her shyness; her dread of coming in contact with others; her morbid sensitiveness and intense suffering from lowness of spirits; her thirst for knowledge, her consciousness of personal ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... that existence and non-existence give birth the one to (the idea of) the other; that difficulty and ease produce the one (the idea of) the other; that length and shortness fashion out the one the figure of the other; that (the ideas of) height and lowness arise from the contrast of the one with the other; that the musical notes and tones become harmonious through the relation of one with another; and that being before and behind give the idea ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... his wife gently, but firmly, and I could have hugged her. My bump of reverence for the Gothic in all its developments is creditably large, but in my present "lowness of mind," as Molly would say, a long procession of cold, majestic cathedrals would have reduced me to a limp pulp. "No," Molly went on, "I can't help thinking that the churches would be a sort of anticlimax ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... the impossibility of beasts doing the work of the plantations. He endeavoured to prove that the number of these adequate to this purpose could not be supplied with food; and after having made many other observations, which, on account of the lowness of his voice, could not be heard, he concluded by ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... A third document, the aspect of which to a native of Brum was like rivers of water in a thirsty land, was said to have been summarily set aside by reason of the comparative antiquity of the excellent weapon offered, notwithstanding the tempting lowness of ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... should be discontinued, and its tower converted into a beacon, as wrecks were found to happen comparatively seldom upon that island, while hardly a year passed without instances of this kind in the Island of Sanday; for owing to the projecting points of this strangely formed island, the lowness and whiteness of its eastern shores, and the wonderful manner in which the scanty patches of land are intersected with lakes and pools of water, it becomes even in day-light a deception, and has often ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... thought no shame of this capitulation; I was only amazed I had not thought upon the thing and done it earlier; and began to inquire into the causes of the change. These I traced to my lowness of spirits, that back to my late recklessness, and that again to the common, old, public, disconsidered sin of self-indulgence. Instantly the text came in my head, "How can Satan cast out Satan?" What? (I thought) ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... opening that had the Appearance of a Bay or Harbour, lying near the South point North 20 degrees West, distant 3 or 4 Leagues, being in 38 fathoms, a brown Sandy bottom. This Island,* (* It is not an island, but a mountainous peninsula, still called after Mr. Banks, but from the lowness of the land it adjoins, looks like an island. On the north side is the fine harbour of Lyttelton, the port of Christchurch, a town of nearly 40,000 inhabitants. The harbour on the south side, that ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... had made. Mrs. Thacher had lighted an extra candle, and replenished the fire, for the air was chillier since the sun went down. They were all sure of a coming change of weather, and counted various signs, Mrs. Thacher's lowness of spirits among the number, while all three described various minor maladies from which they had suffered during the day, and of which ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... working classes by existing monopolies, and the lowness of wages often engaged my attention; and I have held many meetings with them, and heard their appeals with compassion, and a great desire for a radical change in the system which makes the rich richer, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... clear sounds, except those above mentioned, are formed in the larynx along with the musical height or lowness of note; but receive afterward a variation of tone from the various passages of the mouth: add to these that as the sibilant sounds consist of vibrations slower than those formed by the larynx, so a whistling through the lips consists of vibrations ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... borne as long as mortal could endure the ill-treatment of the insolent Irish upstart whom you have taken to your bed. It is not only the lowness of his birth and the general brutality of his manners which disgust me, and must make me hate him so long as I have the honour to bear the name of Lyndon, which he is unworthy of, but the shameful nature ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hate, like pride. The proud man walks among daggers pointed against him; whereas the humble and the affable, have the people for their guard in dangers. To be humble to our superiors, is duty; to our equals, courtesy; to our inferiors, nobleness: which for all her lowness, carries such a sway that she may command their souls. But we must take heed, we express it not in unworthy actions. For then leaving virtue, it falls into disdained baseness, which is the undoubtable badge of one that will betray society. So far as a man, both in words and deeds, may be free ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various |
