"Shifting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... false image of what has been the result of our subjecting it to a jet of fervent, though nowise brilliant, thought to-night. It has become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the shifting "without haste, but without rest" of the land and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms assumed by living beings, we have observed nothing but the natural product of the forces originally possessed by the ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... straightened, but without turning, and the fear that the other had heard her curt dismissal of the florist showed in the quick shifting of her look. When she spoke again, her voice was all gentleness. "Yes, my dear ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... they lingered, watching the busy scene with its shifting figures. Then they stepped into the elevator and were shot up to the street level. The hands of the clock stood at eleven when at last ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... concentrated my thoughts on Venice; I stimulated my imagination with poetic memories, and strove to feel myself present in Venice, as I had felt myself present in Prague. But in vain. I was only colouring the Canaletto engravings that hung in my old bedroom at home; the picture was a shifting one, my mind wandering uncertainly in search of more vivid images; I could see no accident of form or shadow without conscious labour after the necessary conditions. It was all prosaic effort, not rapt passivity, such as I ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... apologist and expositor a hundred years later, the great Burke, as above all things a revolution within the pale of the law or the constitution. They represented the philosophic adjustment of popular ideas to the political changes wrought by shifting circumstances, as distinguished from the biblical or Hebraic method of adjusting such ideas, which had prevailed in the ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... and she told herself that of late she had wept too often. She sat very still, her head bowed upon her listless arm, while the moments passed, bearing with them pictures seen through unshed tears. She was living over the days of the Three-Notched Road, and she beheld each shifting scene by the light of a passion that she believed to be unreasonable, unnatural, secret, and without hope. Her uncle's voice came to her from the hall below. "Jacqueline, Jacqueline!" She arose, bathed ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... he replied, shifting his position a little, "that the five years which have dealt so hardly with me, have left you five ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... hardship to the client, if thus liable to new allegations and suggestions, for which he came unprepared, from a reliance that those publicly given were all against which he need arm himself, and that, if those were disproved, he was cleared; while the desultory and shifting charges of the managers put him out in every method of defence, by making it impossible to him to discern where he might be ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... and cut off the light from the moving object. He adjusted the mechanism so that there were 46 exposures a second, the film remaining stationary during the momentary time of exposure, after which it was carried forward far enough to bring a new surface into the proper position. The time of the shifting was about one-tenth of that allowed for exposure, so that the actual time of exposure was about the one-fiftieth of a second. The film moved, reckoning shiftings and stoppages for exposures, at an average speed of a little more than a foot per second, so that a length ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... God there is!—over space, over time, While the human will rocks, like a reed, to and fro, Lives the will of the holy—a purpose sublime, A thought woven over creation below; Changing and shifting the all we inherit, But changeless through all one ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... produced; but Mary Stuart in Scotland (1864) had marked a step backward, and now Ibsen had once more shot far ahead of his rival. When we have admitted some want of clearness in the symbolism which runs through Brand, and some shifting of the point of view in the two last acts, an incoherency and a turbidity which are natural in the treatment of so colossal a theme, there is very little but praise to be given to a poem which is as manifold in its emotion and ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... did, counter to much that was strong and dominant in his own nature; and, while he disliked it in the learning of it, unknown to himself he was learning to like it. It was a placing of his destiny in another's hands, a shifting of the responsibilities of existence. This in itself was compensation, for it is always easier to lean upon another than ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... himself forward, and dead and living lie in Beltran's arms, while the strong convulsion of his heart rends up a hollow groan from its emptiness. And Vivia draws aside the curtain, and the gentle wind brings in the sweet earthy scent of fresh furrows lately wet with showers, and the ever-shifting procession of the silent stars unveil themselves of gauzy cloud, and glance sadly down with their abiding eyes upon these ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... to speak impressively, "the year the Colonies made their Declaration of Independence. The procession began over there at the Presidio," I pointed to the north. "A brown-robed friar carrying an image of St. Francis led the little company of men, women and children over the shifting sand-dunes to this very spot where a rude church had been erected. Its sides were of mud plastered over a palisade wall of willow poles and its ceiling a leaky roof of tule rushes but it was the beginning of a great undertaking and Father Palou elevated the cross and blessed the site ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray
... to me, uncle; until some splendid genius shall have taken account of the obvious inequality of intellects and the general sense of humanity, the word God will be constantly arraigned, and Society will rest on shifting sands. The secret of the various moral zones through which man passes will be discovered by the analysis of the animal type as a whole. That animal type has hitherto been studied with reference only to its differences, not to its similitudes; in its organic manifestations, ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... them until she had three and a half feet of water in her hold. A portion of her diminished crew was sent to the pumps, while every officer, man and boy, was employed in fishing the masts and spars, knotting and splicing the rigging, and shifting the sails. The two ships lay close together, drifting with the tide. The prize was won, but it was a question whether she would be kept. They were close in with the French coast; and should any other of the enemy's ships be in the neighbourhood, it was certain that they would be sent ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... on a laurel tree—a cloudlet on the sky Borne by the breeze—a panorama shifting on the eye; A zig-zag lightning-flash amid the elemental strife— Yea! each and all are emblems of man's transitory life! Brightness dawns on us at our birth—the dear small world of home, A tiny paradise from which our wishes never roam, Till boyhood's widening ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... transpired that the keeper wanted rabbits for commerce. The couples that speedily met fate in the nets were insufficient. He required fifteen couple. M. rolled over a white scut with obvious neatness and dispatch, and in shifting over to another hedgerow he shot a jay and gloried in its splendour. The keeper, however, moderated any secret intentions there might have been as to the plumage by one sentence: "That's another for the vermin book. I ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... weather, when we found him shifting pack on a steep trail, that I observed certain of his belongings done up in green canvas bags, the veritable "green bag" of English novels. It seemed so incongruous a reminder in this untenanted West that I dropped down beside the trail overlooking the ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... and assured. Two guards, irritated by the oaths and raillery of the workingmen, examined all who entered the gate, handling them roughly and swearing at them. A policeman and a thin-legged man with a red face and alert eyes stood at one side. The mother, shifting the rod resting on her shoulders, with a pail suspended from either end of it, watched the man from the corner of her eye. She divined ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... passage across the bar of the Douro, and its shifting sands, are well known. The care and skill required to navigate a vessel with safety into the Douro, even during the summer, may give an idea of what the perils of this dangerous bar must be during the winter ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... starry sphere with swift ascent The wizard soars, then pounces from the sky, And strikes the young Rogero, who, intent Upon Gradasso, deems no danger nigh. Beneath the wizard's blow the warrior bent, Which made some deal his generous courser ply; And when to smite the shifting foe he turned, Him in the sky, and ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... represent individual moods. The first, in E minor, consists of a slow melody, almost stationary, while against the long tones a chord accompaniment softly pulsates, the harmonies shifting chromatically. ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... words are printed in italics. The line breaks in the manuscript are indicated by shilling marks (/). In the manuscript many of the "Theca" numbers have been written over older numbers (indicating, no doubt, ashifting of the books to different shelves). Most of the older numbers are illegible, and only the newer, more legible numbers are printed. The occasional use of brackets in the manuscript (as in Numbers 120, 121, 157, 166, 167, and 238) makes ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... woman's heart beat in sympathetic understanding; there met his, two lips which had never said an unkind word. He pushed on with a new zest, reaching home about dawn. And over his young wife's joy at his safe return, he forgot the shifting moods of his night-journey. ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... tennis court, which was his usual afternoon occupation, he had spent the time in arranging his rooms, shifting the furniture, rehanging the pictures, paying especial care to the disposition of his Oriental curios, his recent purchases, his last enthusiasms in this land of languor. Reggie collected Buddhas, ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... though he was oblivious of most that was going on in the court-room, memory and fancy were keenly alert, and he rapidly lived over again many episodes of his past life. The dead and gone years rose up before him like the scenes of a rapidly-shifting panorama, even as the past is said to arise before the mental vision of those lying on beds of pain, just before the great mystery of the grave is unfolded to their view. Subjects and scenes long forgotten or seldom remembered presented ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... grounds, Mr. Deputy?" asked Rnine. "Mathias de Gorne has committed no offence against the law. There's nothing criminal in trampling the soil around a well, in shifting the position of a revolver that doesn't belong to you, in firing three shots or in walking backwards to one's father's house. What can we ask of him? The sixty thousand francs? I presume that this is not M. Vignal's intention ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... as restless as they. He was in continual dread that some of the treacherous animals would steal up behind him and fasten their teeth so securely in him that they could not be shaken off. This uneasiness caused him ever to be shifting his position, now on one side the fire, now on the other—springing suddenly upward as though he already felt the ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... business is at a stand, sir, I presume; I suppose you have nothing to do.' And so the dialogue went on; the shoemaker confining himself to his duty, and the clergyman talking only of shoes: in varied and constantly-shifting colloquy, till the perverse and wicked pertinacity of the latter discouraged the former; and the shoemaker and his brother took up their hats, 'to shake off the dust of their feet,' and turn away to a more ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... time, and if possible to obtain the opportunity of shifting the money from the place where she had first put it into another and safer one. "I want to be able," she thought, "to swear that I have no money with me in this house. If I can only get it into my apron I will drop it outside the door into the snowbank. ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... familiar with it to make a set at once. Usually, there are four bags to a set, but any number of persons from two to eight can play at bean-bags. Each player holds two, flinging to his opponent the one in his right hand, and rapidly shifting the one in his left to the right, so as to leave the left hand free to catch the bag which is thrown at him. A set of these bags would be a nice present for some of you little girls to make for your small brothers; and there are various ways of ornamenting the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... of limited Hebrew faith might need repentance, because His created children proved sinful; but the New Testament tells us of "the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." God is not the shifting vane on the spire, but the corner-stone of living ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... use adobe, or sun-dried brick, houses would start to crumble in a few years, and they would be pulled down and the rubble shoved aside to make room for a new house. The village has been rising on its own ruins, probably shifting back and forth from one end of ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... night the hours lost in the day. A long-continued irregularity of income, also, disposed him to make the most of any favourable moment; and when a few rouleaus of gold brought the means of enjoyment, the Champagne and Tokay began to flow. This course is unhappily no novelty in the shifting life of genius, overworked and ill-rewarded, and seeking to throw off its cares in the pursuits and excitements of vulgar existence. It is necessary to know the composer as a man of pleasure, in order to understand certain allusions in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... scorns the people's trust in the Temple as utterly as he had scorned their trust (it is the same word) in the Baals or in Egypt and Assyria. The change in the pivot of their false confidence is to be marked. So much at least had Deuteronomy effected—shifting their trust from foreign gods and states to something founded by their own God, yet leaving it material, and unable to restrain them from bringing along with it their ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... probability of Anjou's marriage with Elizabeth was, in truth, a leading motive with Orange for his close alliance with the Duke. The political structure, according to which he had selected the French Prince as protector of the Netherlands, was sagaciously planned; but unfortunately its foundation was the shifting sandbank of female and royal coquetry. Those who judge only by the result, will be quick to censure a policy which might have had very different issue. They who place themselves in the period anterior to Anjou's visit to England, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sun during the Arctic summer is reflected by the atmosphere, and produces that mellow, golden, rapturous light that hangs like a veil of enchantment over the land of Mizora for six months in the year. It was followed by six months of the shifting iridescence of ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... with Nature's own hand painted, Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion; A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change, as is false woman's fashion; An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; A man in hue, all 'hues' in his controlling, Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... no hurry to take advantage of her aunt's permission. She sat quietly in the warm and pleasant arbor, holding her doll-baby, with the afternoon sun sifting through the young leaves, and making over them a shifting dapple like golden water, and felt no inclination to stir. The spring languor was over even her young limbs; the sweet twitter of birds, the gathering bird-like flutter of leaves before a soft swell of air, ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... came in, as come in she must, what would be the result? All had premonitions of strange shifting of destinies. As it was yesterday so it was to-day in that gracious shrine of immutability. But every one knew in his heart that as it was to-day so would it not be to-morrow. The very word "war" seemed as out of ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... opened a chink of the rude door of the hut in order to look out. "I see that the keel of the boat is all fast and the planking beside it. The coral rock shelters it just now; but if the wind goes on shifting I fear it will stand ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... resulted from the confusion of the one with empty word-spinning and of the other with hide-bound pedantry. Again, much of the modern rhythmical complexity strongly resembles, in essence, the machine-made experiments of mediaeval times; and the peculiarly fashionable trick of shifting identical chords up and down the scale—the clothes'-peg conception of harmony, so to speak—is a mere throw-back still farther, to Hucbald and the diaphony of a thousand years ago. And the insistence, now so common, on the ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... fellow, who, with his flaxen locks and blue eyes, was a very cherub in plumpness and the clearness of his brow, came toddling out of the door of the house, struggling with a basin of yellow corn, which, shifting about in his arms, he just managed to keep possession of till he reached old Sylvester's knee. This was little Sam Peabody, the youngest of the Peabodys, and as he looked up into his grandfather's face you could not fail to see, though ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... marvellous view, rich forest, terraces, gardens, and water he abandoned for Versailles; the dullest and most ungrateful of all places, without prospect, without wood, without water, without soil; for the ground is all shifting sand or swamp, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... with pale blue sky reflections; or (after a drought), low, grey, luminous throughout its surface, you might think, were it not that the metallic sheen, the vacillating sparkles of where the sun, smiting down, frets it into a shifting mass of scintillating facets, gives you the impression that this other luminousness of silvery water must be dull and dead. And, looking up the river, it gradually disappears, its place marked only, against the all-pervading pale blue haze, by the brownish ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... even to this day, in the eyes of any but the least imaginative, with potentialities for strange happenings.[A] It is that great bight of Morecambe; that vast of brown and white shallows, deserted, silent, mysterious, and treacherous with its dreaded shifting sands; fringed in the inland distance by the Cumbrian hills, blue and misty; bordered outwards by the Irish sea, cold and grey. And in a corner of that waste, the islet, small and green and secure, with its ancient Peel, ruinous even as the noble abbey of which it was ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... of contemporaneous volcanic rocks of successive geological periods, to show that igneous causes have been in activity in all past ages of the world. They have been perpetually shifting the places where they have broken out at the earth's surface, and we can sometimes prove that those areas which are now the great theatres of volcanic action were in a state of perfect tranquillity at remote geological epochs, and that, ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... do you say? rather yours! You appear to have a happy knack of shifting blame from your own shoulders. And do you fancy that they've nothing else to do than to trouble their heads about ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... less than the shifting scene of the world, is often a great subject of surprise. King Louis, on his way back to France, had staid some days at Rome; and there, in a conversation with the pope, he had almost promised him a new crusade to repair the disasters of that from which he had found it so difficult to get out. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... foote, right up & downe, and made many of the Indeans to clime into trees for their saftie; it tooke of y^e borded roofe of a house which belonged to the plantation at Manamet, and floted it to another place, the posts still standing in y^e ground; and if it had continued long without y^e shifting of y^e wind, it is like it would have drouned some parte of y^e cuntrie. It blew downe many hundered thowsands of trees, turning up the stronger by the roots, and breaking the hiegher pine trees of in the midle, ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... years; but these people do not want their houses to stand for many years, because they are not like the Baganda who chose a country and stay there always. The Congo tribes move their villages after a few years and live somewhere else. So villages are always shifting, and nothing they make is wanted to last long. Some weave mats and baskets out of palm-leaves or reeds; others make pottery; others make iron-headed spears and hoes for their fields, but only a few things that ...
— People of Africa • Edith A. How
... student of the present and the past. Here we are only concerned to ask how far the uniformity, the universality, and the permanence of a belief in magic, compared with the endless variety and the shifting character of religious creeds, raises a presumption that the former represents a ruder and earlier phase of the human mind, through which all the races of mankind have passed or are passing on their way to religion ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... was not still; it kept shifting and rolling and dancing up and down, so Kuterastan made four great posts—colored black, blue, yellow, and white—to support it. Then he directed Stenatlihan to sing a song. She sang, "The world is made and will ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... essentially more intense (that is as a matter of the marked and featured, the terrible and the touching, as compared with the paleness of the conned page in general,) than I persuade myself, with so little difficulty, that I found the more numerous and more shifting, though properly doubtless less inspiring, constituents of the Pension Fezandie. Fantastic and all "subjective" that I should attribute a part of their interest, or that of the scene spreading round them, to any competent perception, in the small-boy mind, that the general ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... any further, or my pages will equal in extent those of the gentleman already named. Indeed, to follow that most confused of thinkers, and crooked of disputants, through all his perverse pages; to expose his habitual paltry evasive dodging,—his shifting equivocations,—his misapplications of Scripture,—his unworthy insinuations,—his plaintive puerilities of thought and sentiment;—would require a thick volume.—If Mr. Jowett does not deny the Personality of ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... vapors,—Naples and the adjoining villages at its base gleaming in the distance like a fringe of pearls on a regal mantle. Nearer by, the picturesque rocky shores of the island of Capri seem to pulsate through the dreamy, shifting mists that veil its sides; and the sea shimmers and glitters like the neck of a peacock with an iridescent mingling of colors: the whole air is a glorifying medium, rich ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... essay on "The First Journey I Ever Made," he says that while other great travelers have felt in childhood an inborn propensity to go out into the world to see the regions beyond, he had the intensest desire to climb upward—so that without shifting his horizon, he could yet extend it, and take in a far wider sweep of vision. "I envied every bird," he goes on, "that sat singing on the topmost bough of the great, century-old cherry tree; the weathercock on our barn seemed to me to whirl in a higher region ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... fact that specialization makes it possible for the various officers and workers to become the foremost men in their respective offices. Specialization of an industry becomes effective only when each man continues at a given job or work. Shifting men about the plant is harmful, excepting in so far as it may be good to promote men from position to position to fit the development of the men and the industry. The plant can be wrecked by changing men from position to position without changing the product. ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... special morning, around the small plank platform occupied by Yann and Sylvestre, the shifting outer world had an appearance of deep meditation, as though this were an altar recently raised; and the sheaves of sun-rays, which darted like arrows under the sacred arch, spread in a long glimmering stream over the motionless waves, as over a marble floor. Then, ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... returned, emphasized by the vanished music. Lucrezia scarcely breathed. Her face was flushed, for she was struggling against an impulse to laugh, which almost overmastered her. After a minute she heard the dog's short bark again, then a man's foot shifting on the terrace, then suddenly a noise of breathing above her head close to her hair. With a little scream she shrank back and looked up. A man's face was gazing down at her. It was a very brown and very masculine face, roughened by wind ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... fiery shock and dazzling pain before The orient splendour of the face of Death, As a great light beside a shadowy sea; And in a high will's strenuous exercise, Where the warmed spirit finds its fullest strength And is no more afraid, and in the stroke Of azure lightning when the hidden essence And shifting meaning of man's spiritual worth And mystical significance in time Are instantly distilled to one clear drop Which ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... were those little party-colored flags exchanging, with their curious devices of stripes and squares and triangles, their combinations and figures in numberless variety, as they were waved up and down and to and fro in rapid, ever-shifting pantomime? The steep bank was covered with a swaying, restless mass of blue-uniformed men, too distant to be distinctly discriminated, yet certainly numbering thousands. 'Reserves!' a dozen voices cried at once, and the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... more peculiar kind beset this path of inquiry, of which it will suffice to instance one illustration—proper names, those fixed points in history around which the achievements or sufferings of its heroes cluster, are constantly shifting in the Assyrian nomenclature; both men and gods being designated, not by a word composed of certain fixed sounds or signs, but by all the various expressions equivalent to it in meaning, whether consisting ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... of sovereign authority, and not of subordinate Territorial legislation. Were it otherwise, then indeed would the equality of the States in the Territories be destroyed, and the rights of property in slaves would depend not upon the guaranties of the Constitution, but upon the shifting majorities of an irresponsible Territorial legislature. Such a doctrine, from its intrinsic unsoundness, can not long influence any considerable portion of our people, much less can it afford a good reason for a dissolution of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... wane in intensity: its character did not change. The themes, once announced, were rigid and unalterable; the music had always to be more or less like "a tune tied to a post." Dramatic changes of mood had no place. So later, a voice had to be found for shifting, complex, theatrically conflicting moods—states of mind characteristic of the modern and not of the bewigged world. When Haydn was still young the problem composers were more or less at random trying to solve was the creation of a ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... what was said and what was done, the workings of passion, the spells of magic, are brought before us with the same absolute truth and vividness.—Shakspeare excelled in the openings of his plays: that of MACBETH is the most striking of any. The wildness of the scenery, the sudden shifting of the situations and characters, the bustle, the expectations excited, are equally extraordinary. From the first entrance of the Witches and the description of them when ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... —Why, the sailor said, shifting his partially chewed plug. I seen queer things too, ups and downs. I seen a crocodile bite the fluke of an anchor same ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... of the square butte, four Indians in greasy, gray Stetsons with flat crowns nodded with grim satisfaction, and then made baste to point the toes of their moccasins down to where their unkempt ponies stood waiting. They were too far away to, see the shifting of rifles to the laps of the riders, or perhaps they would not have felt quite so satisfied with the steady advance of the four who had taken the right-hand fork of the trail. They could not even tell just which four men made up the party. They did not greatly care, ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... and their gigantic towers with their sun-tipped spires?—But he suffered from their lies, and he could not forget them. He attributed them to the race, their greatness to themselves. He was wrong. Greatness and weaknesses belong equally to the race whose great, shifting thought flows like the greatest river of music and poetry at which Europe comes to drink.—And in what other people would he have found the simple purity which now made it possible for him ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... from their summer travels and made their iglus secure against the storms of the coming winter. So, with caches full of fish, and houses packed with trade goods after a successful season at the southern camps, they must wait until the shifting ice pack settles and the winter hunting begins. Such enforced inaction is irksome to the Eskimo, who does not partake of the stolidity of the Indian, but like a nervous child must be continually employed or amused. So this festival, which is ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... gleaming hill, Or forests rose, or lapse of water welled. Sometimes she sat with lifted eye, And marked the dark storm in the western sky; 60 Sometimes she looked, and scarce her breath would draw, As fearful things, not to be told, she saw; And sometimes, like a vision of the air, On wings of shifting light she floated here and there. In the breeze her garments flew, Of the brightest skiey blue, Lucid as the tints of morn, When Summer trills his pipe of corn: Her tresses to each wing descending fall, Or, lifted by the wind, 70 Stream loose and unconfined, Like golden threads, beneath her ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... never the same face for five minutes. Its very form changed as the roads turned. The swing of your stride put in play a vast, mysterious scene-shifting that disturbed the sky. Moving through it you stood still in the heart of an immense being that moved. Standing still you were moved, you were drawn nearer and nearer to its ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... our communities all over this country coming apart. And we feel the common ground shifting from under us. The PTA, the town hall meeting, the ball park—it's hard for a lot of overworked parents to find the time and space for those things that strengthen the bonds of trust ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... reopened later on. If not it will always be a matter of regret not only for France but for Valentine Thompson's own sake that she did not concentrate on this useful enterprise; it would have been a definite monument in the center of her shifting activities. ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... faction of the Huntleys. The same year he was ordered north again to quell Aboyn and the Gordons, which he routed at the bridge of Dee. He commanded two regiments of the covenanters under general Lesly for England 1640, and led the van of the army for England. But shifting sides 1643, he offered to raise forces for the king, came from court, and set up the king's standard at Dumfries. From thence he went to the north and joined M'Donald with a number of bloody Irishes, where they plundered and wasted the country ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... every-day life is reality in fragments,—the Alps split into paving-stones,—Achilles with a cold in the head. Seen in due connection, they make up the reality; but their prominence as they occur is casual and shifting, and the result dependent on the spectator's power of discerning, amid the endless series in which they are involved, more or less ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... and a stray squall coming now and again, which made us more alert trimming the sails, and taking in and letting out canvas as occasion arose. It was no use, however, trying to drive the brig to the eastward any longer with this wind shifting about, humour her as we might; so the skipper altered her course again more to the south, although we were then as far down as we ought ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson
... I cannot help shifting at the great objects of our letters. We never converse on a less topic than a kingdom. We are a kind of citizens of the world, and battles and revolutions are the common incidents of our neighbourhood. But that is and must be the case of distant correspondences: ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... out of his cave among the icebergs one day and saw a boat moving through the strip of water which had been uncovered by the shifting of the summer ice. ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum
... of skaters whirl and attitudinize, the uncleared interspaces of snow-covered, impracticable ice given up to miscellaneous loafers. Even so it is with the wide area of the Egyptian Hall when the ball is in full swing. The waltzers clear four or five ever-shifting rings for themselves, in each of which a dozen to twenty couples go round and round, colliding, jostling and (righteously enough) eliminating the vagrant do-nothings who in aimless perambulation are for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... through all its shifting scenes; now laughed, now sighed, now felt the hot blush of shame as he listened to the atrocious mockery of everything which, from the time he had been an infant on his mother's knee, he had been taught to regard as good and pure. He was ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... neighborhood of the two countries the relations which exist between Mexico and the United States are just cause for gratification. We have a common boundary of over 1,500 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific. Much of it is marked only by the shifting waters of the Rio Grande. Many thousands of Mexicans are residing upon our side of the line and it is estimated that over 40,000 Americans are resident in Mexican territory and that American investments in Mexico amount to over seven hundred million dollars. The extraordinary ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... the left bank, back half a mile from the river and standing five or six miles apart from one another, are Cossack villages. In olden times most of these villages were situated on the banks of the river; but the Terek, shifting northward from the mountains year by year, washed away those banks, and now there remain only the ruins of the old villages and of the gardens of pear and plum trees and poplars, all overgrown with blackberry bushes and wild vines. No one lives there now, and one only sees ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... the troubled waters of the old world, with the shape and lineaments of the new. The Church then, as now, might be called peremptory and stern, resolute, overbearing, and relentless; and heretics were shifting, changeable, reserved, and deceitful, ever courting civil power, and never agreeing together, except by its aid; and the civil power was ever aiming at comprehensions, trying to put the invisible out of view, and substituting expediency for faith. What was the use of continuing ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... whose terms of service have expired, or are soon to expire, we desire to speak of the shifting scenes now acting in the nation's tragedy. This war of slavery against freedom did not begin with the first shot at Sumter, it did not begin when the slaveocracy broke up the Charleston Convention, in order to secure ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... their overwhelming growth during past years was one of the conspicuous phenomena in the business life of the nation. I love to watch their operations spread over the map, and I love to watch the growth of American cities, the shifting of their shopping centers, the consequent vicissitudes, the decline of some houses, the rise of others. American Jews of German origin are playing a foremost part in the retail business of the country, large or small, and our people, Russian and Galician Jews, also are making themselves felt in ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... of fifty pairs of plates, after being thus used, was connected with a volta-electrometer (711.), so that by quickly shifting the wires of communication, the current of the whole of the battery, or of any portion of it, could be made to pass through the instrument for given portions of time in succession. The whole of the battery evolved 0.9 of a cubic inch of oxygen and hydrogen ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... more vigorous intellect and ardent imagination, no such dreary prospect could present itself. The thunderous noise and shifting panorama of the streets, the interminable desert of brick houses, and even the smoke-laden atmosphere only served to exhilarate her mind. These things continually reminded her that she was now where she had long wished to ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... soul; and rapturous Fancy shed Her golden lights, and tints of rosy red. But ah! few days had pass'd, ere the bright vision fled! When evening ting'd the lake's ethereal blue, And her deep shades irregularly threw; Their shifting sail dropt gently from the cove, Down by St. Herbert's consecrated grove; [e] Whence erst the chanted hymn, the taper'd rite Amus'd the fisher's solitary night: And still the mitred window, richly wreath'd, A sacred calm thro' the brown foliage ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... for his visitor to open. Trimmer was not in a hurry. He eyed the man across the table calmly, his small, shifting ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... she begins where the child is and sets about attaching to this native tendency the work in nature study, geography, or history. When she discovers a constructive tendency in the child, she at once uses this in shifting from analytic to synthetic exercises in the school order. If he enjoys making things, he will be glad of an opportunity to make devices, or problems, ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... tired, dreamy state habitual only with debutantes, a state equivalent to the glow of a noble soul after several long highballs. Her mind floated vaguely on the bosom of her music; her partners changed with the unreality of phantoms under the colorful shifting dusk, and to her present coma it seemed as if days had passed since the dance began. She had talked on many fragmentary subjects with many men. She had been kissed once and made love to six times. Earlier in the evening different under-graduates had danced with her, but now, ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... sweet puddings, freezing in rich cream. But the sun had sunk behind the moor where the broom was only budding, and the last sea-mew had flown to its scaur, and the smouldering whins had leaped up into the first yellow flame of the bonfires, and the more shifting, fantastic, brilliant banners of the aurora borealis shot across the frosty sky, before the first faint shout announced that Staneholme and his lady had come home. With his wife behind him on his bay, with pistols at his saddle-bow, and "Jock" on "the long-tailed yad" at his back, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... sighed Beef McNaughton, shifting his huge bulk atop of the jit "College years are ended, we're chucked into the world, to make good, or fail! Butch and I have not decided on our work yet. We may accept jobs as bank or railroad presidents, or maybe run for President of the U.S.A., provided ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... man at the wheel, shifting the spokes with both hands like a squirrel in a cage, it seemed to Teddy, who was looking at him from the break of the poop, where he had taken up his station by Captain Lennard's orders so that he might the more easily see all that was ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... fiercely by. And every now and then, from a fried-fish or hardware shop, would come out a man in a dirty apron to take the sun and contemplate the scene, not finding in it, seemingly, anything that in any way depressed his spirit. Amongst the constant, crawling, shifting stream of passengers were seen women carrying food wrapped up in newspaper, or with bundles beneath their shawls. The faces of these women were generally either very red and coarse or of a sort of bluish-white; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... they tread on. But those who walk in epos, drama, or romance, see through the labouring months the young moons wax and wane, and watch the night from evening unto morning star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting can note the shifting day with all its gold and shadow. For them, as for us, the flowers bloom and wither, and the Earth, that Green- tressed Goddess as Coleridge calls her, alters her raiment for their pleasure. The statue is concentrated to one moment of perfection. The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... consider myself as stationed here, not to deliver occasional and shifting opinions to serve present purposes of particular national interest, but to administer with indifference that justice which the Law of Nations holds out, without distinction, to independent states, some happening to be neutral, and ...
— The Laws Of War, Affecting Commerce And Shipping • H. Byerley Thomson
... the primal dew ere the sun has lipped the pearl? Have you seen a summer fly, with tinted wings of shifting light, glance in the liquid noontide air? Have you marked a shooting star, or watched a young gazelle at play? Then you have seen nothing fresher, nothing brighter, nothing wilder, nothing lighter, than the girl who stands before you! She was infinitely ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... experienced particularly heavy losses in driving the French from positions near the villages of Oeuvy and Montepreux, while the French suffered most heavily in the neighborhoods of Gourgancon and Corroy. Very little entrenching was done by either side, as both armies were constantly shifting, and the few trenches which were constructed had evidently ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... a favor to ask of you, Mr. Bradley," said O'Hara, shifting from one foot to another and as confused as ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... realized what her plight meant from the wrecking and salvage viewpoint. In those shifting sands, winnowed constantly by the rushing currents of the sound, digging her out might be a Gargantuan task, working her free ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... time he was studying with increasing interest the shifting spectacle of American life. The openings of the West especially caught his imagination, and when the chance came to travel on what was then the frontier, the trans-Mississippi territories, he was quick to accept it. As guest of one of the ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... inhabitants, whoever they might be, had not thought fit to put in an appearance, so I was left to my own devices. My first attempt to "rush" Pornic up the steep sand-banks showed me that I had fallen into a trap exactly on the same model as that which the ant-lion sets for its prey. At each step the shifting sand poured down from above in tons, and rattled on the drip-boards of the holes like small shot. A couple of ineffectual charges sent us both rolling down to the bottom, half choked with the torrents of sand; and I was constrained to turn ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... do I see thee, with the glass in either hand? Fickle God! with double measure wouldst thou count the shifting sand? "This one flows for parted lovers—slowly drops each tiny bead— That is for the days of dalliance, and it melts with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... would have seemed very far from insane, had it not been for his large black eyes, shifting and glittering in ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... fragrance seemed to blow with her shifting senses. The dry, sweet, tangy canyon smells returned to her—of fresh-cut timber, of wood smoke, of the cabin fire with its steaming pots, of flowers and earth, and of the wet stones, of the redolent pines and the ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... some great factory. There was a huge engine in the wall which was in full play, with wheels and cylinders resembling our own steam-engines, except that it was richly ornamented with precious stones and metals, and appeared to emanate a pale phosphorescent atmosphere of shifting light. Many of the children were at some mysterious work on this machinery, others were seated before tables. I was not allowed to linger long enough to examine into the nature of their employment. Not one young voice was heard—not one young face ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... know about that," said Hamilton doubtfully, "but when I get thoroughly sick of myself, and wish I was dead, I sometimes stave off putting a shot through my silly head by getting a pencil and paper, and shifting my thoughts out of the beastly world I know, into—well, it's hard to explain. But I get sort of notions, don't you see, and they seem to run best in verse. I write 'em when the fit's on me, and I burn 'em when the fit's through; and you'll hardly think it, ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... Conspicuous in the shifting throng was a sharp-faced boy, ostensibly selling newspapers, but with a keen eye upon the arriving vehicles. Suddenly he darted to the curb, where an electric coupe had just drawn up. A man alighted heavily, and turned to assist a ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... made in a rocket at the time it is charged, or bored out after it is charged? How do cases charged with composition impart motion to wheels, and other pieces of fireworks? What is understood by the rocket principle? What is the rocket stick and its use? Is the centre of gravity fixed, or is it shifting in the flight of rockets? How are rockets discharged? What is the head of a rocket? What is usually put in the head? Are all rockets furnished with a head? What is understood by the furniture of a rocket? How are the serpents, stars, fire-rain, etc., forming the furniture ...
— James Cutbush - An American Chemist, 1788-1823 • Edgar F. Smith
... very difficult to know what to do," said the Rector, shifting uneasily upon the hearthrug, and plunging his hands into the depths of his pockets. "If you could name anybody you would like to refer it to—but ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... being far enough from the hedge to get a clear view into the recess if anything attracted his notice. Why the shepherd hated rabbits was because the sheep would not feed where they had worn their runs in the grass. Not the least movement was possible now—not even that little shifting which makes a position just endurable: the heat seemed to increase; the thought of Ulysses could hardly restrain the almost irresistible ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies |
