"Possessed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... good fortune with something of the same cheerful philosophy with which he had seen difficulty loom up in his path a few months ago. But to-night, on his way home from Mr. Bullsom's suburban residence, a different mood possessed him. Usually a self-contained and somewhat gravely minded person, to-night the blood went tingling through his veins with a new and unaccustomed warmth. He carried himself blithely, the cool night air was so grateful and sweet to him that he had no mind even to smoke. There ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the sake of an ideal, for those experiments which must be undertaken with vigor and boldness in order to secure didactic value in failure as well as in success, society must depend upon the individual possessed with money, and also distinguished by earnest and unselfish purpose. Such experiments enable the nation to use the Referendum method in its public affairs. Each social experiment is thus tested by a few people, given wide publicity, that it may be observed and discussed by the bulk of the citizens ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... Parliament for Cambridgeshire; died in 1787. His principal works were "A Free Enquiry into the Origin of Evil," and "A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion." Boswell writes of him: "Jenyns was possessed of lively talents, and a style eminently pure and 'easy', and could very happily play with a light subject, either in prose or verse; but when he speculated on that most difficult and excruciating question, 'The Origin ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... the government. These tribes—indeed, it may be said this tribe (the Stockbridges); for of the Munsees there probably remain not more than a half a dozen souls—were formerly an intelligent, prosperous people, not a whit behind the most advanced of the race, possessed of good farms, well instructed, and industrious. Unfortunately for them, though much to the advantage of the government, which acquired thereby a valuable tract of country for white settlement, they removed, in 1857, to their present place ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker
... more manly and looking fresh, rosy and self-possessed, entered the drawing room elegantly dressed in the uniform of an aide-de-camp and was duly conducted to pay his respects to the aunt and then brought ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... long handle over fire, turning it over occasionally until cakes are baked. The cake, when baked, is a delicious, thin, rich wafer, about the size of half a common soda cracker. I have never eaten these Christmas cakes at any place excepting at Aunt Sarah's. The wafer iron she possessed was brought by her Grandmother from Germany. The waffle or wafer irons might be obtained ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... (Figs. 433 and 434), and especially after the death of that prince, the taste for frivolities made immense progress, and the style of dress in ordinary use seemed day by day to lose the few traces of dignity which it had previously possessed. ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... This possessed him with the idea that, perhaps, Peg Sliderskew had been apprehended for the robbery, and that Mr Squeers, being with her at the time, had been apprehended also, on suspicion of being a confederate. If this were so, the fact must be known to Gride; and to Gride's house he ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... unfairness of the war methods employed against us. I leave that to abler men. I shall only add that these waifs were in a pitiful position, as they had been driven from their homes and stripped of pretty nearly everything they possessed. ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... to and over the nearly vacant floor, the centre of all eyes, few of which had witnessed such a spectacle before. The music went on with its measured rise and fall, sweet and simple, and youth and maiden possessed with it, seemed to abandon themselves utterly to it, and were controlled and informed by it; with one impulse, one motion, and one grace, each contributing an exact proportion, they glided, circling; and while the maiden ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... of the "Snug Harbor" and the feasts some day to be enjoyed there. Alas! The colonel's words had changed all that. For her there would be no "Harbor," ever; but for him, her beloved grandpa, it was still possible. A great fear suddenly possessed her. What if the captain should get so very, very hungry, that he would be tempted beyond resistance, and forsake her after all! She felt the suspicion unworthy, yet it had come, and as the blind man pushed his plate aside, unable to swallow the unpalatable porridge, she resolved ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... these they had picked men whom they paid high wages, and whom they changed frequently. You might easily pick out these pacemakers, for they worked under the eye of the bosses, and they worked like men possessed. This was called "speeding up the gang," and if any man could not keep up with the pace, there were hundreds outside begging ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... old clothes, and Mrs. Cartier chose out the shabbiest skirt she possessed, for they were preparing for a day of hard work on the beach. But, to their surprise, when they came down to breakfast, Ellenor wore a pretty gown of dark red stuff. She explained, carelessly, that indeed she would not make herself ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... woman about forty years of age, her face a little thin and worn, a good deal of gray in her dark hair. She had been nursing her husband for two years, and the strain had begun to tell. Nevertheless, he soon saw that she was a woman of refinement, possessed of a keen intelligence. ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... reason of this, and found that he was fully possessed with the notion that Fins are wizards, and especially have power over winds and storms. I tried to reason with him about it, but he had the best of all arguments, that from experience, at hand, and was not to be moved. He had been to the Sandwich ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... afraid, yet he hesitated, not quite clear in his own mind what he had better do. I might be a spy, and I might not; he possessed no doubt a moment before, yet the very boldness of my words had already half convinced him there might be some mistake. Should he call to the men on the steps yonder, denounce me, and turn me over to the guard? That was the ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... my proceedings. Mine own familiar friend, I verily believe, would have passed me by on the other side, I cut so queer a figure. As usual on these occasions, I had sent forward my portmanteau, this time to Maros Vasarhely; but everything else I possessed I carried round about me and my horse somehow, and I am not a man "who ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... more familiarly styled, Pepe, was a young fellow of some twenty-five years—tall, thin, and muscular. His black eyes, deeply set under bushy eyebrows, had all the appearance of eyes that could sparkle; besides, his whole countenance possessed the configuration of one who had been born for a life of activity. On the contrary, however—whether from a malady or some other cause—the man appeared as somnolent and immobile as if both his visage and body were carved out of marble. In ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... As they possessed magnificent telescopes, far surpassing any on Earth, their guests were able to survey, not only the Solar System, but the other systems far beyond its limits as no others of their kind had ever been able to do before. They ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... can attain, than does oral speech in its own high development. The use of artificial speech is also necessarily confined to the oral language acquired by the interlocutors and throws away the advantage of universality possessed by signs. ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... high plateau, yet I felt myself to be alone with the immensity that properly belongs to plains alone. I saw the stars, and remembered how I had looked up at them on just such a night when I was close to the Pacific, bereft of friends and possessed with solitude. There was no noise; it was full darkness. The woods before and behind me made a square frame of silence, and I was enchased here in the clearing, thinking of ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... Ages. One is sometimes tempted to describe him as a great mediaeval ecclesiastic astray in the nineteenth century and heroically striving to remodel modern life in harmony with his temperamental needs. His imagination was possessed with the romantic vision of the greatness of the Mediaeval Church—of its splendour and pomp and dignity, and of its power over the hearts and lives of its members; and the Oxford movement was in its essence ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... possessed by certain fungi cannot be said to be of distinct utility, their phosphorescence is a noteworthy phenomenon. That decaying wood often emits this phosphorescent light has been widely observed, especially in wooded districts. It is due to the presence of the mycelium of one of the ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... commissioned ranks which was filled by the promotion of Sergeant C. R. Field—a trainee under the Australian Universal Military Service scheme. Casualties amongst the non-commissioned officers were replaced by the appointment and promotion of men who showed themselves possessed of the necessary qualifications. In a few instances promotion was declined by the individual. Various reasons were given for this step. Some individuals lacked ambition, others were reluctant to accept responsibility, and again others preferred to retain the close company of the friends ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... things were of great importance: they must be light in weight, must be possessed of great powers of endurance, and also must be brave and resolute. At each station, as the time approached for the express to arrive, the relay horse was saddled and in waiting. As the rider dashed in he jumped from his horse, and with but ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... days before this event Farragut, in spite of forts and batteries, iron-clads and torpedoes, had possessed himself of Mobile Bay and closed that Gulf port which had been so useful a mouth to the hungry stomach of the Confederacy. No efficient blockade of it had ever been possible. Through it military, industrial, and domestic supplies ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... we still have among us (possessed of a Charter giving them a monopoly, and, therefore, making them in "The New Age" phrase "black-leg proof") are confined, of course, to the privileged wealthier classes. The two great ones with which we are all familiar are those of the ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... days the great crowd of strangers flocking to Paris, and the almost universal ignorance of the science of heraldry, are beginning to bring the title of prince into fashion. There are no real princes but those possessed of principalities, to whom belongs the title of highness. The disdain shown by the French nobility for the title of prince, and the reasons which caused Louis XIV. to give supremacy to the title of duke, have prevented Frenchmen from claiming ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... execution in order to witness the pangs of despair; he invited peasants to his house and told them laughable stories, that he might pick up from their faces the essence of comic expression.[4] A mania for truth—alike in great and little things—possessed him. ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... beyond this: Mark the massive forehead, the severe eye, the cool, self-possessed mien of this American. The air of one accustomed to rule. Listen to his philosophic conversation. One of America's greatest statesmen. No doubt he has a certain prospect of becoming President. President! It must be so; and that accounts for the attention paid by the American Embassador. He, ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... Gambia. The other wrote by John Leo,[B] a Moor, born at Granada, in Spain, before the Moors were totally expelled from that kingdom. He resided in Africa; but being on a voyage from Tripoli to Tunis, was taken by some Italian Corsairs, who finding him possessed of several Arabian books, besides his own manuscripts, apprehended him to be a man of learning, and as such presented him to Pope Leo the Tenth. This Pope encouraging him, he embraced the Romish religion, and his description ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet
... and no one had ever been able to tell her, but she would not have had them removed for any consideration whatever. The other contents of her jewel-case were a large green malachite brooch in the shape of a Maltese cross, a tiny silver pig, and a broken gold safety-pin; but no child ever possessed treasures more ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... her in perplexity, not knowing quite how to deal with the subject he himself had started. Truth to tell his nerves had been put distinctly "on edge" by Seaton's cool, calculating and seemingly callous assertion as to the powers he possessed to destroy, if he chose, a nation,—and all sorts of uncomfortable scraps of scientific information gleaned from books and treatises suggested themselves vividly to his mind at this particular moment when he would rather have forgotten them. As, for example—"A pound weight ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... Alternating fascinations possessed Bedient, as the elevator carried them upward.... These were his real playmates, these people of pictures and statues. He had come a long way through different lights and darkness to find them. He did not know their ways of play, but well knew he should like them when he learned, and that ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... he clearly looked older than his years. Some days in the course of our lessons he would suddenly be at a loss for some word and look vacant and ashamed. His people at home counted him a crank. He had become possessed of a theory. He believed that in each age some one dominant idea is manifested in every human society in all parts of the world; and though it may take different shapes under different degrees of civilisation, it is at bottom one and the same; nor is such idea taken from one by ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... consisted of a few domestics, and an old governess who was retained in that capacity rather from known worthiness of character and attachment to the family, than from any knowledge or acquirements she possessed, that befitted her for such an office. There was besides a little orphan girl, a niece of the lady's, who had been bred up with them from the time she was five years of age. From the disadvantages under which they laboured, ...
— The Flower Basket - A Fairy Tale • Unknown
... exhibits above referred to are strictly commercial in character, and conducted in the interests of the exhibitors, and consequently may not command the prestige possessed by the Chicago Institute. Nevertheless they are important educational factors in their special localities and are a great convenience to all connected with the building trades. Every large commercial centre should be thus supplied. ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 06, June 1895 - Renaissance Panels from Perugia • Various
... her room to take off her street clothes and to get herself into garments as suitable as she possessed for one of those noisome tasks that are done a dozen times a day by the bath nurses in the receiving department of a charity hospital. When she returned, Susan too was in her chemise and ready to begin the search for the man, if man there was left ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... covered with timber & were extensive, level and beatifull. in my walk which was about 6 miles I passed a small rivulet of clear water making down from the hills, which on tasting, I discovered to be in a small degree brackish. it possessed less of the glauber salt, or alumn, than those little streams from the hills usually do.- in a little pond of water fromed by this rivulet where it entered the bottom, I heard the frogs crying for the first time this season; ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... Their national history, during a period of four hundred years, is recorded on their monuments; and, though not very intelligible in its details, it affords irrefragable proof that their country was always in a flourishing condition, and possessed a considerable commerce with other nations. The Egyptians, however, had as great an aversion to foreign traders as to shepherds; and it was long before they undertook any work for improving their commercial communications. At length, however, the canal, which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... days, before he was so entirely possessed of this insane desire for riches, King Midas had shown a great taste for flowers. He had planted a garden, in which grew the biggest and beautifulest and sweetest roses that any mortal ever saw or smelled. These roses were still growing ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... before as a possible career for himself. They had moved in a circle where politics and politicians held a first place—a circle removed above the glamour of art, and wherein Bohemianism was not reckoned an attraction. She knew that behind his listlessness of manner he possessed a certain steady energy, perfect self-command, and that combination of self-confidence and indifference which usually attains success in the world. She was ambitious not only for herself but for him, and she was shrewd ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... "go about," and who insisted upon going about, and changing her dress two or three times a day, and receiving imaginary visitors, and ordering her faithful nurse up and down under the names of half-a-dozen servants she no longer possessed, were beyond her comprehension. ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... fifty yards when Casey yelled and brought him back at a run. Casey was rummaging in the car, throwing things about with a recklessness which ill-became an agent of the self-possessed Mack Nolan. ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... sate stupefied by the unexpected blow; he had no power, if he had possessed the will, to offer the slightest resistance to the fury of the enraged Franciscans, who, in the true spirit of ignorance, had ever hated him for his acquirements. With a deep sigh for the fate of the young man, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... was to appear at the head of the requisitions, the governor of Pennsylvania alone [Mifflin] enjoyed the name of republican. His opinions of the secretary of the treasury, and of his systems, were known to be unfavorable. The secretary of this state [Dallas] possessed great influence in the popular society of Philadelphia, which in its turn influenced those of other states; of course he merited attention. It appears that these men, with others unknown to me, were balancing to decide on their party. Two or three days before the proclamation ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... felt as if the earth had given way under him. There was not a soul near who believed him; they brought his father's history against him, and moreover he had been at the races, and had been betting, though in fact he had won, and not lost, and the 201. he had become possessed of was his capital, besides the little he could ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Generous Giver of Water. As bidden, so had he obeyed and flown straight without halt or rest to bow before his mighty relative, and taste of his wonderful well, the like of which not even his father had, who possessed ...
— In the Time That Was • James Frederic Thorne
... haste, the exposure, the horror of the crime he had failed to avert, had undermined his hitherto excellent constitution, and the symptoms of a serious illness were beginning to make themselves manifest. But he, like his indomitable master, possessed a great fund of energy and willpower. He saw that if he was to save Abner Fairbrother (and now that Mrs. Fairbrother was dead, his old master was all the world to him) he must make Fairbrother's alibi good by carrying on the deception as planned by the latter, and ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... Hero, after performing, in a short but brilliant and well-filled life, a series of naval exploits unexampled in any age of the world. None of the sons of Fame ever possessed greater zeal to promote the honour and interest of his King and Country; none ever served them with more devotedness and glory, or with more successful and important results. His character will for ever cast a lustre ...
— The Death of Lord Nelson • William Beatty
... to avow precisely the opposite reason, viz. that he desires the vulgar not to understand him, but only the select few to whom he gives private explanations. I confess I believe the Evangelist rather than the modern Divine. I cannot conceive how so strange a notion could ever have possessed the companions of Jesus, if it had not been true. If really this parabolical method had been peculiarly intelligible, what could make them imagine the contrary? Unless they found it very obscure themselves, whence came the ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... from the other, what each gave, or relinquished of its individual instincts and customs. We must take and judge them as they come before us, as forming one single nation, imbued with the same ideas, influenced in all their acts by the same civilization, and possessed of such strongly marked characteristics that only in the last days of their existence do we find any appreciable change. In the course of the ages they had to submit to the invasions and domination of some dozen different races, of whom some—Assyrians and Chaldaeans—were descended ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... course, the cut of the uniform which effected this transformation. It not only showed off a man's figure, but it often showed it up—and that is the first and biggest step towards a man improving it. Sometimes it gave a man a figure who before possessed merely elongation with practically no width. But the days of khaki are over—thank God for the cause, but aesthetically it's a pity. We have returned to the drab and shoddy days of dress before the war, and men look more shoddy ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... seeing that the other character possessed my whole heart. She was not intellectual; no one would have said of her, for example, that she would one day blossom into a second Emily Bronte; that to future generations her wild moorland village would be the Haworth of the ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... was patent and must have already impressed many Americans. Our own Gettysburg was the final bid for decision of a South which had long been victorious on the battlefield, which still possessed the armies that seemed the better organized and the generals whose campaigns had been wonderfully successful. But it was the bid for decision of a Confederacy which was outnumbered in men, in resources, in the ultimate powers of endurance, ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... and happy memories, that I was not wise enough to guess at once who the man must be that made these miraculous stanzas. I can only plead in my own excuse that I did not live a generation later than my day, and that I had no means of divining that a work-a-day friend possessed immortal qualities. Everybody now in this late evening knows who that poet was, and loves him. I knew and loved him then, when I had no thought that he was a poet. Even if it had been given me to make a wild guess at the authorship of these poems, and my guess had chanced all unwitting to ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... individual shapes of persons and occurrences, single, unreflected traits, of which he makes his picture. And his aim is nothing more than the presentation to posterity of an image of events as clear as that which he himself possessed in virtue of personal observation, or lifelike descriptions. Reflections are none of his business, for he lives in the spirit of his subject; he has not attained an elevation above it. If, as in Caesar's ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... peel, and even less agreeable things, rained down from the galleries. Tom and Jerry were in all their glory. I looked round the boxes, and soon saw the charming Arthurine, apparently perfectly comfortable, chatting with old Moreland as gravely, and looking as demure and self-possessed, as if she had been a married ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... of the power which the Jews possessed of impressing their religious ideas, and particularly their observance of the sabbath day, upon their conquerors. They did so with the Romans. We find such writers as Cicero, Horace, Juvenal and others remarking upon the sabbath, and, indeed, in ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... domestic comforts, of life. In a sense at least, it was laid out with its streets straight. Nor was it the only city of such a kind in the Mesopotamian region. Asshur and Nineveh, both of them somewhat earlier in date than Babylon, possessed similar features. These towns, or at least Babylon, seem to have been known to Greek travellers, and probably suggested to them the adornment of their Hellenic homes with similar streets. The germ of Greek town-planning came from ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... possessed by none else, to the exclusive advantage of a journal of his own was yet more inviting; and the opportunity soon offering itself, he became the purchaser of the "Independent Gazetteer," a paper already established. This ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... them. Father Medicis traded in all sorts of trumpery. He sold complete sets of furniture from twelve francs up to five thousand; he bought everything, and knew how to dispose of it again, at a profit. Proudhon's bank of exchange was nothing in comparison with the system practiced by Medicis, who possessed the genius of traffic to a degree at which the ablest of his religion had never before arrived. His shop was a fairy region where you found anything you wished for. Every product of nature, every creation of art; whatever issued from the bowels of the ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... tourist known to have well-filled pockets. So you can suppose the rest. If I have a criticism for Mrs. LOWNDES' otherwise admirable handling of the affair it is that she depends too much on the involuntary eavesdropper; before long, indeed, I was forced to conclude either that Lily possessed a miraculous sense of overhearing, or that the acoustic properties of the lonely house rendered it conspicuously unsuited for the maturing of felonious little plans. But this is a trifle compared with the delights of such a feast of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... a few moments to gather up the few things he possessed and put them in his pack. Then he went out and took down his tent. Indian Joe had already gone, and he followed in his trail. An hour later McTabb appeared at the door of his cabin, summoned by Billy's ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... found much cause to be content. He possessed, if not all he hoped for—at least he had Patsy, all to himself, and that by her own choosing and good will. What signified a few conditions to the bargain? He never could have dared to ask her, and she had asked him. Therefore she had a right ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... burial- place. I tried to stiffen him up, telling him to let the old ghost divulge the secret himself, than whom nobody else knew it better, seeing that he had resided there upwards of a century. But Ahuna was old school. He possessed no iota of scepticism. The more Hiwilani frightened him, the more he rolled on the floor and the ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... interest. It seemed to us only natural that, after so strange and romantic a beginning to your acquaintance, Thirza should regard you with more than ordinary interest. To her you would be a sort of hero of romance. We watched you closely then, and found that in addition to your bravery you possessed all the qualities that we could desire. You were modest, frank, and natural. So far from making much of the service you had rendered us, you were always unwilling to speak of it; and when that could not be avoided, you made as ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... fraudulent conjuring tricks. The due performance of ceremonial observances was treated as of far more vital importance than the practice of the Christian virtues. The images of the Saints had virtually come to be regarded not as symbols, but as idols possessed of various degrees of power, the assistance of one and the same saint proving more or less efficacious according to the shrine favoured by ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Tamara. She answered in a voice her old playmate had never dreamed she possessed—so concentrated and full of passion. In their English lives they were so accustomed to controlling every feeling into a level commonplace that if they had had time to think, both would have ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... amendment confronts us with the declaration that nothing was surrendered by implication—that everything was reserved unless expressly delegated to the United States or prohibited to the States? Here is an attribute which they certainly possessed—which nobody denies, or can deny, that they did possess—and of which Mr. Everett says no mention is made in the Constitution. In what conceivable way, then, was it ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... to spare when Ned ceased paddling a few feet above and to the right of the whirlpool, and allowed the canoe to drift down stream broadside. But he was wonderfully cool headed and self-possessed, as, with deft fingers he unwrapped the ball of cord and coiled it between his knees. Then he twisted one end about his left hand, and with the right seized the ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... meeting and make a speech in the principal ports of the world. She had guaranteed to circuit the globe and to be back in London within a hundred days, to speak in at least five languages, and to get herself arrested at least three times en route.... Of course! Isabel Joy had possessed a very fair share of the newspapers on the day before the stone-laying, but Edward Henry had naturally had too many preoccupations to follow her exploits. After all, his momentary forgetfulness was ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... had done, and asked herself if there was not even now a chance of somehow saving her father. The face which he had raised to the window as he left home smote her heart. Not a word of kindness had she spoken to him since Friday night. Oh, what inconceivable cruelty had possessed her, that she let him go this morning without even having touched his hand! Could her mind endure this? Was she not now and then near to delirium? Once she went to the window, and, to her horror, could see nothing; a blue and red mist hovered before her eyes. It left her, ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... morning— Manning acting Le Brun's passions (punchified at the time), and Charles Lamb (punchified also) roaring aloud and swearing, while the tears ran down his cheeks, that it required more genius than even Shakespeare possessed to personate them so well; Charles Lloyd the while (not punchified) praying and entreating them to go to bed, and not disturb his wife by the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... They amount to nothing but hypocrisy, or ridiculous nonsense. Does a man's standing, in these days, depend on his conduct! By no means. Let us introduce an example. Suppose there were two individuals of equal talents, and both possessed an equal education. Their moral characters are the same. But one of them falls in possession of an immense fortune, while the other is poor indeed. Now will public conduct place them on an equality? No. ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... fulfilling some process in order that activity may go on, stands the static character of an end which is imposed from without the activity. It is always conceived of as fixed; it is something to be attained and possessed. When one has such a notion, activity is a mere unavoidable means to something else; it is not significant or important on its own account. As compared with the end it is but a necessary evil; something which must ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... imposture. He must walk down-hill delicately, like Agag. To-morrow Harvey, the Garland Town cobbler, would repair the damage with a couple of stitches, at the cost of one penny: and the Commandant reflected with a melancholy smile that he possessed ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... great-hearted man kept talking to try to lure Sedgwick's mind away from the thoughts that possessed him, and which made his heart heavy and his ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... obdurate, kindle the tardily inflammable? Only for a day, and only in cases of extreme urgency, is an appeal to emotion of value for the gain of a day. Thus it was that she never forced her voice, though her feelings might be at heat and she possessed ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... theories now in vogue in regard to the origin of religion. The first is that of Christian theists as taught in the Old and New Testament Scriptures, viz., that the human race in its first ancestry, and again in the few survivors of the Deluge, possessed the knowledge of the true God. It is not necessary to suppose that they had a full and mature conception of Him, or that that conception excluded the idea of other gods. No one would maintain that Adam or Noah comprehended the nature of the Infinite as ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... heart and set to reasoning. If my hand were to guard my head it must find some other way of it. My thoughts turned to powder and shot, to the musket and the pistol. Here was a weapon which needed only a stout nerve, a good eye, and a steady hand; one of these I possessed to the full, and the others were not beyond my attainment. There lived an armourer in the Gallowgate, one Weir, with whom I began to spend my leisure. There was an alley by the Molendinar Burn, close to the archery butts, where he would let me practise ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... recently become possessed of a curious printed fragment, which is worth notice on several accounts, and will be especially interesting to persons who, like myself, are lovers of our early ballad poetry. It is part of an unknown edition of the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... was now well-nigh turned in favour of the Saxons; and the confusion of the Normans, as the cry of "The Duke is dead!" reached, and circled round, the host, would have been irrecoverable, had Harold possessed a cavalry fit to press the advantage gained, or had not William himself rushed into the midst of the fugitives, throwing his helmet back on his neck, showing his face, all animated with fierce valour and disdainful wrath, while ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... employed some time by the Queen, and had a certain degree of influence over her; but that did not last long. Comte Augustus de la Marck likewise endeavoured to negotiate for the King's advantage with the leaders of the factious. M. de Fontanges, Archbishop of Toulouse, possessed also the Queen's confidence; but none of the endeavours which were made on the spot produced any, beneficial result. The Empress Catherine II. also conveyed her opinion upon the situation of Louis XVI. to the Queen, and her Majesty made me read a few lines in the Empress's ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... strength the two lads possessed to lift the heavy body from the dugout to the blanket, then each taking a forward end of the blanket, they drew it gently after them sled-wise up to the lean-to, avoiding rough places as much as possible. There, they had to exert themselves to the limit of their ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... called upon to touch the fund which he had decided should remain intact. In other words, the father's injunction, "Guard and save every kopeck," had become a hard and fast rule of the son's. Yet the youth had no particular attachment to money for money's sake; he was not possessed with the true instinct for hoarding and niggardliness. Rather, before his eyes there floated ever a vision of life and its amenities and advantages—a vision of carriages and an elegantly furnished house and recherche dinners; and ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... But, as I have already observed, your jesters, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, are fat, round, and unwieldy—so that it was no small source of self-gratulation with our king that, in Hop-Frog (this was the fool's name), he possessed a triplicate ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... condemned his enemies to hell. Among the elect may be seen the portrait in profile of Pope Clement VI. with the tiara on his head, who reduced the Jubilee from a hundred to fifty years, was a friend of the Florentines, and possessed some of their paintings which he valued highly. Here also is Maestro Dino del Garbo, then a most excellent physician, clothed after the manner of the doctors of that day with a red cap on his head lined with miniver, while an angel holds him by the hand. There are also many other ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... frankness. The idea, the personal idea that he had had to put out of his mind so often in operating in hospital cases,—that it made little difference whether, indeed, it might be a great deal wiser if the operation turned out fatally,—possessed his mind. Could she be realizing that, too, in her obstinate ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... on his throne when he found he could not resume that absolute power he had possessed before his abdication at Fontainebleau. He was obliged to submit to the curb of a representative government, but we may well believe that he only yielded, with a mental reservation that as soon as victory should return to his standards and his army be reorganised he would send the representatives ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... interstices were large and frequent; still, with the aid of some old condemned paulins obtained from the quartermaster, the walls were covered and the necessity for chinking obviated. This method of covering the holes in the side walls also possessed the advantage of permitting some little light to penetrate to the interior of the house, and avoided the necessity of constructing a window, for which, by the way, no glass could have been obtained. Next a good large fire-place and chimney were built in one corner ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... must be very cynical, or very blase, or wholly possessed by some other uncomfortable quality, who does not feel much cheered and invigorated by morning sunbeams pouring into a strange bed-room, and awakening him to new scenes and unexperienced sensations. Horace Graham was neither cynical nor ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... on earth should she speak to me about Miss Warrington, Henry's sister? I have not noticed her closely, but she is a quiet enough female, I believe, though possessed of an irritating habit of constantly pressing quite unnecessary ash-trays ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... various ministries were on duty twenty-four hours at a stretch. They slept rolled up in blankets on the floors; they obtained their meals where and when they could and paid for them themselves, and made themselves extremely useful. If you possessed sufficient influence to obtain a motor-car, a boy scout was generally detailed to sit beside the driver and open the door and act as a sort of orderly. I had one. His name was Joseph. He was most picturesque. He wore a sombrero with a cherry-coloured ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... to show they were drunk and on a spree. One, a tall, fair-haired lad in a clean blue coat, was standing over the others. His face with its fine straight nose would have been handsome had it not been for his thin, compressed, twitching lips and dull, gloomy, fixed eyes. Evidently possessed by some idea, he stood over those who were singing, and solemnly and jerkily flourished above their heads his white arm with the sleeve turned up to the elbow, trying unnaturally to spread out his dirty fingers. The sleeve of his coat kept slipping ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... of John Baptist, he who did come from the caves of the mountains with the garment of a wolf, the beard of a lion and the voice of a bear. Jerusalem turned out to hear the man. Possessed of a devil was he. Aye, and the hair of his mother be white like the cap of snow that sits on Hermon's head. Verily a foolish son bringeth down his mother's hair in sorrow. If the Rabbis are not able to teach the Law, shall one wild from the desert be able? For attending to business ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... was being accomplished, even his craven heart awoke to a kind of criminal remorse. Now anxiety for the issue made him wish the act undone, or frustrated; now he asked himself if there were no more certain and less perilous way. So intent was his eagerness that a strange kind of lucidity possessed him. He felt as if he beheld and heard what was passing in the chamber of sickness, which he had ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... water, or by carriage. The first of these I at once discarded, as both slow and tedious; the choice consequently lay between the remaining two methods: with regard to economy of time I decided upon the latter. But here a difficulty arose. The man who possessed a monopoly of carriages, for some reason best known to himself, demurred at my proceeding, declaring the road to be impassable. He farther brought a Turkish courier to back his statement, who at any rate deserved credit, on the tell-a-good-one-and-stick-to-it ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... Phoenicians as far as Cape Nun, and c. 520 B.C. Hanno, a Carthaginian, explored the coast as far, perhaps, as the Bight of Benin, certainly as far as Sierra Leone. A vague knowledge of the Niger regions was also possessed by the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... this minister the orator described "the true interests of the nation neglected, her honor and credit lost, her trade insulted, her merchants plundered, and her sailors murdered, and all these things overlooked for fear only his administration should be endangered. Suppose this man possessed of great wealth, the plunder of the nation, with a Parliament of his own choosing, most of their seats purchased, and their votes bought at the expense of the public treasure. In such a Parliament let us suppose ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... GRAND-DUKE OF TUSCANY, April 7, 1658:—A John Hosier, master of a ship called The Lady, had been swindled in April 1656 by an Italian named Guiseppe Armani, who has moreover possessed himself fraudulently of 6000 pieces of eight belonging to one Thomas Clutterbuck. There is a suit against Armani at Leghorn; but Hosier, after going to great expenses, is deterred from appearing there by threats of personal violence. "We therefore request your ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... she pursued her intricate calculations after her ninetieth and ninety-first years, and repeatedly told me how she rejoiced to find that she had the same readiness and facility in comprehending and developing these extremely difficult formulae which she possessed when young. Often, also, she said how grateful she was to the Almighty Father who had allowed her to retain her faculties unimpaired to so great an age. God was indeed loving and merciful to her; not only did He spare her this calamity, but also the weary trial of long-continued ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... way to Paris, paid a tribute to his merit by visiting him, and placing at his disposal all the information he himself possessed of the geography ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne |
