"Slowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Protestant, to give them better intelligence. But don't you begin to be impatient for the events of all our West Indian expeditions? The Duke,(596) who is now the soul of the Regency, and who on all hands is allowed to make a great figure there, is much dissatisfied at the slowness of General Braddock, who does not march as if he was at all impatient to be scalped. It is said for him, that he has had bad guides, that the roads are exceedingly difficult, and that it was necessary ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... this calm, resting over sea and sky, may have helped us through the catastrophe. The only irritation I felt was at the slowness of it all, between the moment we knew we were lost and the moment when the vessel went down. Yet every moment between was used to a nicety, almost as if Captain Macnaughten had been preparing for the test. He commanded us, crew and passengers alike. Four stokers ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Sir Michael Seymour learned these facts, he thwarted Lord Elgin as much as he could in the naval operations, especially in the Peiho. This Lord Elgin and Mr. Oliphant declared; and the admiral admitted that his slowness to cany out the plenipotentiary's requisitions arose partly from disapproval of the policy that functionary was sent out to enforce. In fact, Sir Michael knew that he would be backed by a tory admiralty, at the head of which was such a thorough-going party man as Sir J. Pakington, in adopting their ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... sudden descent on Firtop Farm and his interview with the farmer so racily that his mother laughed gently, and even Kate, for all her anxiety, smiled. In the middle of the meal the belated telegram arrived, giving Smith an opportunity for poking fun at official slowness. ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... up," sad glad voices swelled: "So the tree falls and lies as it's felled. Be thy bands loosed, O sleeper, long held In sweet sleep whose end is not sweet. Be the slackness girt and the softness quelled And the slowness fleet." ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... in her material history, and gifted with foresight that distinguished him from all else in her scheme, his own evolution gathered thereby that speed which is so perplexing a contrast to the inconceivable slowness of the orbing of stars and the building of continents. He has used his powers of prescience for his own ends; but, fanciful as the thought is, might it happen that through his control of elemental forces ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... with a deliberate slowness, steadily. Nevertheless, it was hot work. The sun rose over the bank and shone on him through the limbs of the uprooted tree. His hat was on the ground alongside of him. The sweat ran down his face, streaking it and wilting his collar flat. The scrap of gun metal ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... the outlines of a bottle bulging out from his buttoned coat, and distinctly heard, as he moved to and fro, the gurgling sound of liquid in agitation. He was smiling in self-approval, and when I reproved him for his slowness, he quoted Habakkuk v. 5, 'Hurry no man's cattle,' adding that his authority was the Revised Version. As we went rattling along the road, his tricks were fantastic in the extreme. At a point about two miles from Lerwick, I saw, a little in ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... large and massive. The boat-body between the retractable wheels added weight to the structure, and when Bell gave it the gun it seemed to pick up speed with an irritating slowness, and to roll and lurch very heavily when it did begin to approach flying speed. The run was long before the tail came up. It was longer before the joltings lessened and the plane began to rise slowly, with the solid steadiness ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... us as a people, and we have not done well by him. We did not help him to find his work. We did not consider his slowness, nor the weariness of his flesh, the sickness he came with, nor the impoverishment of his line. We are not finding their work for his children. We have sent them home from school because they were not clean. We complain that they waste what ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... "as slowness of motion seems to be of etiquette with the people of Hindustan, the disbursing of the money took up so much time that when M. Law was come down as far Rajmehal, he ...
— Three Frenchmen in Bengal - The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757 • S.C. Hill
... theory of nitrification is now very complete. Nitrification in soils and waters is found to be strictly limited to the range of temperature within which the vital activity of living ferments is confined. Thus nitrification proceeds with extreme slowness near the freezing-point, and increases in activity with a rise in temperature till 37 deg. is reached; the action then diminishes, and ceases altogether at 55 deg.. Nitrification is also dependent on the presence ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... the notes and left them with Mr. Hardie; the bills he took to his desk to note them on the back of the receipt. Whilst he was writing this with his usual slowness and precision, poor Dodd's heart overflowed. "It is my children's fortune, ye see: I don't look on a sixpence of it as mine: that it is what made me so particular. It belongs to my little Julia, bless her:—she is a rosebud if ever there was one; and oh! such a heart; and so ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... rolled in a ball and dry slowly; so a fire may blaze or smoulder. Thus it is with Karma, the works that fill out the life-span. By an insight into the mental forms and forces which make up Karma, there comes a knowledge of the rapidity or slowness of their development, and of the time when the debt ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... gate, and not twenty feet from it, almost in the spot where he had killed his bull, and wiping the sword blade in a fold of Cogan's cape, which he was now holding loosely. He was looking up at the Rocas and seemed at first not to hear the cries. He turned—slowly, with horrible slowness, Cogan thought, when he recalled how fast he could move when ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... second day of March, the two British plenipotentiaries met those of the allies in the town-house at Utrecht; where the lord privy seal addressed himself to them in a short speech, "That the negotiation had now continued fourteen months with great slowness, which had proved very injurious to the interests of the allies: That the Queen had stayed thus long, and stopped the finishing of her own peace, rather than leave her allies in any uncertainty: That she hoped they would ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... Strange the slowness with which Darke draws nigh! Can he still be in dread of the unearthly? No, or he would not be there. It may be that sure of his victim, he but delays the last blow, scheming some new horror before he ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... impatient fretting against unbearable slowness and delay, sea—sickness, general discomfort and humiliating self—revelation are the master values of ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... the sensitive simplicity of the man, the innate courtesy so out of harmony with her experience among men. What, after all, was there about him that a woman should treat with scant consideration, impatience, the toleration of contempt? His clumsy manner? His awkwardness? His very slowness to exact anything for himself? Or had it been the half-sneering, half-humourous attitude of her husband toward him which ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... filled them in with the slowness and the accuracy of a child. He was never told anything, but he discovered for himself that his father and mother did not love each other, and that his mother was lovable. He discovered that Mr. Elliot had dubbed him Rickie because ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... Bunker Hill. Putnam had enjoined the men to aim at the officers; so Israel aimed between the golden epaulettes, as, in the wilderness, he had aimed between the branching antlers. With dogged disdain of their foes, the English grenadiers marched up the hill with sullen slowness; thus furnishing still surer aims to the muskets which bristled on the redoubt. Modest Israel was used to aver, that considering his practice in the woods, he could hardly be regarded as an inexperienced marksman; hinting, that every shot which the epauletted ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... are Shakespeare's countrymen and the most direct and rightful heirs of his glorious achievements. How is the disturbing fact to be accounted for? Is it possible that it is attributable to some decay in us of the imagination—to a growing slowness on our part to appreciate works of imagination? When one reflects on the simple mechanical contrivances which satisfied the theatrical audiences, not only of Shakespeare's own day, but of the eighteenth century, during which Shakespeare was repeatedly performed; ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... add immensely to the requirements of the sick and wounded. The demand for provisions must vastly increase, and the increase will be followed by a great rise in prices. That an immense army cannot exist on the resources of an enemy's territory is plain, especially when the slowness of advance in a struggle for fortified positions is taken into account. Communications by sea will be interrupted at the very outbreak of war. In this respect England is in incomparably the ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... transport. Hitherto the bulk of the carrying-work had been done by the much-abused camel, the ideal animal for the job, for he thrives where a horse will starve, and he need not be watered more than once every three days, or even less often, if necessary. His only drawback is his comparative slowness of gait. He can do his steady two and a half miles an hour for ever and ever, but if an army suddenly takes it into its head to advance twenty miles the camel must somehow go with it, and some quicker form of transport must be organised behind to ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... as diphtheria and quinsy, are well known and justly dreaded; and although many a child's life has been sacrificed to the slowness of its guardians to procure medical advice and the health-restoring antitoxin, yet on the whole the public conscience is awake to this duty. Far otherwise is it with chronic diseases of the tonsils: they may be riddled ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... the present break off my arduous work of educating the Press. We shall resume our studies later on; but just now I am tired of playing the preceptor; and the eager thirst of my pupils for improvement does not console me for the slowness of their progress. Besides, I must reserve space to gratify my own vanity and do justice to the six artists who acted my play, by placing on record the hitherto unchronicled success of the first representation. It ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... a glacier is potent to remove anything against which it can fairly abut; and this power, notwithstanding the slowness of the motion, manifests itself at the end of the Morteratsch glacier. A hillock, bearing pine-trees, was in front of the glacier when Mr. Hirst and myself inspected its end; and this hillock is being bodily removed by the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... sustain life, not to suffice it until it was grown to manhood or womanhood, and when the bottle was half-emptied the mother returned it to me. How much time all this occupied I do not know, but the child took the milk with extreme slowness. I may say that it took the milk drop by drop. A great deal of time ...
— The Water Goats and Other Troubles • Ellis Parker Butler
... analogy: In many transformations of matter, indeed, in most of the more complex ones of the organic world, the concurrent energy transformation is of such slowness and of such low intensity that it appears nonexisting, and can be discovered and measured only by the delicate experiments devised by science. Furthermore, the energy may appear in different forms. Thus the 293,000 ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... answer. This is the question that millions of weary, longing, waiting souls, dissatisfied with their false religions, and craving for that soul rest which only can be found in the hearty acceptance of the glorious Gospel of the Son of God, are asking. I tried to apologise for the slowness of the advancement of the Redeemer's kingdom, and the apathy of those who, while acknowledging the brotherhood of humanity, so often forget that they are ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... this event Nelson joins the fleet under Sir Hyde Parker, at Yarmouth Relations between him and Parker Nelson's disapproval of the plans for the expedition Evident change in his general disposition Anecdote of Nelson and the turbot The fleet collected off the Skaw Parker's slowness and Nelson's impatience Alarming reports of the Danes' preparations Nelson's attitude and counsels Accuracy of his judgment of the conditions Tact and discretion in his dealings with Parker His letter to Parker upon the general situation Parker's indecision Nelson's plans adopted The fleet passes ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... with a rather irritating slowness, for which perhaps the excellence of Cicely's buffet arrangements was partly responsible. The great drawing-room seemed to grow larger and more oppressive as the human wave receded, and the hostess fled at last with some relief to the narrower limits of ...
— When William Came • Saki
... answer till he came up, and then, with his usual slowness of delivery, he replied to his master's repeated enquiries, "Na, I haena fund Miss Clara, but I hae fund something ye wad be wae ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... accustomed time of spectres issuing from their graves, Mr. Carew repaired there a little before the time, and, stripping to his shirt, lay down upon the gentleman's grave. Soon after, hearing the bellman approach, he raised himself up with a solemn slowness; which the bellman beholding, by the glimmering light of the moon through some thick clouds, he was harrowed up (as Shakspeare expresses it) with fear and wonder, and an universal palsy seized every limb; but, as nature most commonly dictates flight in all such cases, he retreated with ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... rent or investments or pensions would presently be very busy thinking how they were going to get food when the butcher and baker insisted upon cash. It would be only with comparative slowness that the bulk of men would realise that a fabric of confidence and confident assumptions had vanished; that cheques and bank notes and token money and every sort of bond and scrip were worthless, that employers had nothing to pay with, shopkeepers no means of procuring stock, that metallic money ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... Bible should be made. The work was entrusted to a body of about fifty scholars, who divided themselves into six groups, among which the various books of the Bible were apportioned. The resulting translation, proceeding with the inevitable slowness, was completed in 1611, and then rather rapidly superseded all other English versions for both public and private use. This King James Bible is universally accepted as the chief masterpiece of English ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... instance of the slowness with which science advances, that almost the whole scientific portion of seamanship has grown up since the middle of the seventeenth century, though America had been reached in 1492, and India in 1496; and thus the world had been nearly rounded before what would now be regarded as the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... of the Seventeenth Century, when the influence of French classicism was in the ascendant, this study is not concerned. In the period which has just been surveyed three points are noteworthy: the character of the English critics, the slowness with which the classical theories penetrated English thought, and the modifications which they underwent in the process. Gregory Smith calls attention to the influence of Sidney and Daniel in establishing "the ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... Chabray has already set forth, with that 'written answer,' which the Twelve She-deputies returned in to seek. Slim sylph, she has set forth, through the black muddy country: she has much to tell, her poor nerves so flurried; and travels, as indeed to-day on this road all persons do, with extreme slowness. President Mounier has not come, nor the Acceptance pure and simple; though six hours with their events have come; though courier on courier reports that Lafayette is coming. Coming, with war or with peace? It is time ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... little flat spaces, then broken boulders to clamber over, then steep, rugged climbs, when they grasped the rough rocks with both hands and moved on with painful slowness. It seemed to the girl that they had been climbing for long, tedious hours since they had slipped out of their saddles; though to him she said nothing, locking her lips stubbornly, she knew that at last she was tired, very tired, that an end of this laborious ascent must come ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... much on picks," Sam returned, with a slowness that well counterfeited indifference. "I was visiting a lady last evening, which is a kind of prospecting ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... a grave and weighty slowness upon him, contrasting strongly with his daughter's levity: 'I beg the favour of your explaining—ha—what it is you mean.' 'I mean, papa,' said Fanny, 'that if Mrs General should happen to have ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... dissemble, to sin." And what are these passages? In the first, Confucius applauds the modesty of an officer who, after boldly bringing up the rear on the occasion of a retreat, refused all praise for his gallant behaviour, attributing his position rather to the slowness of his horse. In the second, an unwelcome visitor calling on Confucius, the Master sent out to say he was sick, at the same time seizing his harpsichord and singing to it, "in order that Pei might hear him." Dr Legge lays no stress on the last half of this story—though ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... lands. For instance, it is stated that in England, due to the many requirements of law and custom, it takes on an average eight years, and in some cases even longer, to close a coal lease after the terms have been agreed upon. The slowness of exploration and development on the great land grants in the United States, and on the tracts of the large timber companies, also illustrates the retarding effect of private ownership. It is partly this situation that is ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... and the two stumbled and groped their way down the lane at a pace whose slowness ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... his fifth year he had declared that guns were not 'dreadful things.' They were good if put to the proper uses. I do not think that there was ever much real 'effeminacy' to be knocked out of him. It is too harsh a word for the slowness with which a massive and not very flexible character rouses itself to action. His health was good, except for a trifling ailment which made him for some time pass for a delicate child. But the delicacy soon passed off and for the ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... with exaggerated slowness, as though speaking to an idiot, "was that yesterday, when those infernal reporters were badgering me, I really thought that some of Professor Chalmers' students had gotten together and given the Valley Times an exaggerated story about his insane maunderings ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... of steps in a dance, the more beautiful it is; and requires the more attention in the performer to exactness and delicacy; for slowness and neatness being in the character of simplicity, afford the spectator both leisure and distinctness for his examination: whereas dances of intricate evolutions, or quick motions, in their confusion and hurry, allow no clearness, or ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... the time being, than most of the other attributes"; and that natural selection cannot develop any one superiority when animals are equally preserved by "other superiorities." But as natural selection will simultaneously eliminate tendencies to slowness, blindness, deafness, stupidity, &c., it must favour and improve many points simultaneously, although no one of them may be of greater importance than the rest. Of course the more complicated the evolution the slower it will be; but time is ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... philanthropists, the gift of not being able to classify the people with whom she was dealing, but of continuing to regard them as a multitude of individualized souls as distinct and considerable as herself. That makes no doubt for slowness and "inefficiency" and complexity in organization, but it does make for understandings. And now, through a little talk with Susan Burnet about her sister's attitude upon the dispute, she was able to take the whole ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the clear stars. The merchants or Captain Sang would sometimes glance and smile upon us, or pass a merry word or two and give us the go-by again; but the most part of the time they were deep in herring and chintzes and linen, or in computations of the slowness of the passage, and left us to our own concerns, which were very little important ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... already brought the war to a close is to be regretted, but let those who criticise the slowness of his movements weigh well all the disadvantages against ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... an equally strong desire to write his name on the marvellous little creature, and each in turn sat down before it and moved his awkward hands with nearly equal slowness over the keys, ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... rough, peculiar soldiering of the frontier. He it was to whom the simple-minded young officer had owed promotion after promotion. General Michael had fixed upon Agar as his last hope—his last chance of doing something brilliant in this deathly country, which moved with a slowness that nearly ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... his squad, and none too soon; for the men, startled by Mr. Isidore's sudden onslaught of authority and the explosive language in which he ordered them hither and thither, cursing one for his slowness with the measuring-tape, taking another by the shoulders and pushing him into position, began to show signs of mutiny. Mr. Julius Bamberger mopped a perspiring brow as he ran ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... upon the borders of Epping Forest, in the village of Chigwell, about twelve miles from London, a house of public entertainment called the Maypole, kept by John Willet, a large-headed man with a fat face, of profound obstinacy and slowness of apprehension, combined with a very strong reliance upon ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... was likewise ignored by Miss Berta, who proceeded with dignified slowness to drop her valentines one by one into the caldron. Bea, with lingering care, deposited her contribution on the very top. One slid over the edge, and in rescuing it she disturbed a fold of the portiere. A glimpse within set her ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... hand that seemed limp with discouragement, he reached into his pocket for his cigarette-case. As he drew it out, the lackadaisical fingers failed to hold it firmly enough, and it clattered to the floor behind his chair. With the weary slowness of despondence, he dragged himself to his feet and went behind his chair to pick up the cigarette-case. But, before he bent over it, and while he was looking fully and directly at it, his desk suddenly vanished. One moment it was there, ...
— The Einstein See-Saw • Miles John Breuer
... have been an especially troublesome one. As styles changed in England, these important articles of dress (often costing in tobacco the equivalent of one hundred dollars) had to be sent to London to be made over. Between the slowness of ships and the slowness of wig-makers, it must often have happened that even such careful dressers as the fastidious Secretary himself would be wearing wigs that would scarcely pass muster at the Court of St. ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... of suitable furniture was not easy. The old stall, with two shelves loaded with books attached to them by chains, and a desk and seat for the use of the reader, was manifestly no longer adequate, when books could be produced by the rapidity of a printing-press, instead of by the slowness of a writer's hand. And yet, as we shall see, ancient ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... slow to anger," says the proverb, "is better than the mighty, and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city." Great as was his self-control in other matters, nowhere did Mr. Lincoln's slowness to anger and nobility of spirit show itself more than in his dealings with the generals of the Civil War. He had been elected President. Congress had given him power far exceeding that which any President had ever exercised before. As President he was also Commander-in-Chief ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... significant luke-warmness reacted upon PREMIER. He spoke with unusual slowness, further developing tendency of recent growth to drop his voice ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... yours was partly the cause of our slowness. He was always wanting to have the orders for fire and blood in neat formal despatches, signed by me, and copied by clerks. However, I hope you are satisfied now, with the butcheries ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... have it in for me," Johnson continued with his unalterable and ponderous slowness. "You do ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... of June 15th, the loud report of a cannon told the inhabitants of Boulogne that he intended to start. At seven o'clock he and Romain stepped into the gallery and the balloon was released. With majestic slowness they rose into the air and sailed out over the sea; but a moment later the wind, that had so long been his enemy, drove them back. The crowd watched with great anxiety. Twenty-seven minutes after starting, the balloon, at a height of ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... across the frozen lake; but she knew in truth that such departure was as dependent on the submission of his will to hers as was her going in the more natural way by boat the next day, for the track of her snow-shoes and the slowness of her journey upon them would always keep her ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... of the spieler is to look after the wall-flowers. He seeks the girl who sits alone against the wall; he dances with her and brings other partners to her. It would not do for a place to get the reputation of slowness. The girls go back to those dance halls where they have had ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... Grant, with whom they fared no better. Then they tried Vice-President Hamlin who was certainly dissatisfied with the slowness with which Lincoln moved in the direction of abolition. But Hamlin would not be a candidate ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... The intellectual slowness of which I have spoken continued through all these years. I had left the dame's school, where the rule of long division proved my pons asinorum, and went to a man's school, where I earned my schooling by making the fires and sweeping the schoolroom, and here I learned some Latin and the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... of agriculture gains ground still more decidedly upon population, because though agriculture, except in a few provinces, advances slowly, population advances still more slowly, and even with increasing slowness, its growth being kept down, not by poverty, which ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... win confidence in Mr. Lincoln, it would be one of the most cheerful days and events in my life. Perhaps, elephant-like, Mr. Lincoln slowly, cautiously but surely feels his way across a bridge leading over a precipice. Perhaps so; only his slowness is marked with blood and disasters. But the most discouraging and distressing is his cortege, his official and unofficial friends. Mars Stanton, Neptune Welles, are good and reliable, but have no decided preponderance. Astrea-Themis-Bates ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... afternoon the train broke corral, and for the first time I realized the slowness of our progress, and the long trip before us. Under the most favorable circumstances we could not make over ten miles a day and more often at the beginning three, five ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... The slowness of these proceedings drove the English wild with impatience. Winchester had hoped to bring the trial to an end before the campaign; to have forced a confession from the prisoner, and have dishonored King Charles. This blow struck, he would ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... after beholding "many peoples and cities;" but of the settled Parisian, who keeps his appointed place, and lives on his own floor like the oyster on his rock, a curious vestige of the credulity, the slowness, and the ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... might, at any rate, attach to the question; and some did attach, that was clear, even if warbled through an air of Cherubini's and accompanied on the flute. Perhaps they were not idiots, and only seemed to be such from the slowness of apprehension naturally connected with deafness. That I saw them but seldom, arose from their peculiar position in the family. Their father had no private fortune; his income from the church was very slender; and, though considerably increased by the allowance made for ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the rheostat up gradually to more power, advancing it with cautious slowness to avoid any chance of a repetition of the previous accident. The green radiance streaming from the tubes in every direction began to throb with an electric force that the two men could feel pulsing through their ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... enormous variety of habitats, stations, climates, available foods, environing media, etc., animals and plants have had to endure, as the existing species were forced to change their place of abode. And although these changes have taken place with extreme slowness ... their reality, necessitated by various causes, has none the less induced the species affected by them slowly to change their manner of life and their habitual actions. Through the effects of the second and third of the laws cited above, these induced activity-changes ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... without much difficulty, though with great slowness. You will fancy they might have gone fast enough, their retreat being thus secured for them. But there were many obstacles to prevent a rapid advance. Each lateral passage they came to—and there were numbers ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... cannon was about twelve feet. These dimensions are a proof of a slight improvement in this branch of military science, which was, nevertheless, still in its infancy. The awkwardness of artillery at this period may be judged of by its slowness of fire. At the siege of Zeteuel, in 1407, five "bombards," as the heavy pieces of ordnance were then called, were able to discharge only forty shot in the course of a day; and it is noticed as a remarkable circumstance at the siege of Albahar, that two batteries discharged ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... probably that the slowness of promotion in time of peace, in both the army and navy of the United States, caused many officers to resign and seek, with increased rank, new fortunes ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... seated at his ease, free from all bodily complaints, and with rapt attention, should recite the text without too much slowness, without a labouring voice, without being fast or quick, quietly, with sufficient energy, without confusing the letters and words together, in a sweet intonation and with such accent and emphasis as would ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... was a fellow of decidedly quick parts, and in one forenoon made such a clearing in our garden that I was delighted. Bed after bed appeared to view, all cleared and dressed out with such celerity that I was quite ashamed of my own slowness, until, on examination, I discovered that he had, with great impartiality, pulled up ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... when she had eaten and drunk, he began to apologize for his slowness in permitting ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... wide difference, however, in the actual impression, between passing through the details of existence in daily and hourly engagements, which, from their variety, produce an illusion of slowness and a vague idea of almost interminable continuance, and looking at expended years after their termination, or at successive lives in the perspective of history. In the latter case, events appear crowded ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... distractions as these that this winter at length drew to an end, while my prospects of getting to Germany gradually grew more hopeful, though with a slowness that sorely tried my patience. I had kept up a continuous correspondence with Dresden respecting Rienzi, and in the worthy chorus-master Fischer I at last found an honest man who was favourably disposed to me. He sent me ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... any diminution of his exasperating slowness. "What I want to tell you is that I'm after you. Not now, when the strike's on, but some time later I'm goin' to get you an' give you ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... a one-horse fly pace, had made its way with comfortable jaunting slowness from Riversford to St. Rest, its stout, heavy-faced driver being altogether unconscious that his fare was no less a personage than Miss Vancourt, the lady of the Manor. When a small, girlish person, clad in a plain, close-fitting garb ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... their walk, strolling on with the slowness of unaccustomed holiday-makers from one path to another—through budding shrubberies, past grass-banks sprinkled with lilac crocuses, and under rocks on which the forsythia lay like sudden sunshine. Everything about her seemed new and miraculously ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... counting-houses; for their gods had been cast down; commerce was at a standstill. There were many, therefore, who hated the French, and cherished a secret love of those bluff British captains—so like themselves in build, and thought, and slowness of speech—who would thrash their wooden brigs through the shallow seas, despite decrees and threats and sloops-of-war, so long as they could lay them alongside the granaries of the Vistula. Lately the very tolls had been collected by a French customs service, and the wholesale smuggling, ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... certain absence, which some of your friends may have experienced, when you have not on a sudden made recognition of them in a casual street-meeting, and did I not strengthen your excuse for this slowness of recognition, by further accounting morally for the present engagement of your mind in worthy objects? Did I not, in your person, make the handsomest apology for absent-of-mind people that was ever made? If these things be not so, I never knew what I wrote or meant ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Laertes is the more odious in this, that the success of his plot depends on the generous confidence of his victim. Polonius is handled in the same way with special reference to Hamlet. His thinking is marked by slowness and insincerity, and when he comes in contact with the rapid current of Hamlet's mind he is benumbed; he can only mutter, "If this is madness, there is method in it." What little portable wisdom was given to him in the ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... had began to lower and as the sailors advanced with snail-like slowness the heavy white fog settled down, filling the canyon with its white opaqueness. You could not see five feet in front, and the moisture beaded itself upon the eyebrows and mustaches ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... with provoking slowness. "Timor is a large island, and a fine island, but not so large or so fine as Java. The Dutch have possessions in some part of it, as well as the Portuguese, and a good many of my countrymen are found there. It produces, too, a clever race of little horses—very ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... had outlined was followed out to the letter, with additions made as they occurred to the ingenious minds of the editor or of his clever young reporters who took an immense delight in running under the guise of news items, bits of reminder, gentle gibes at slowness, bland comments on ignorance of the commercial value of beauty, mild jokes at letting children do men's work. It was all so good-natured that no one took offence, and at the same time no one who read the Star had the opportunity to forget ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... for the letter, unfolded it deliberately, and read it once, twice, three times, with a judicial slowness, which the other, who was now curiously ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... bought up by the Congested Districts Board. Under the Wyndham Act there are in progress reductions of annual charges, ranging from 10 to 40 per cent., on holdings adjacent to those where either the landlord is recalcitrant and refuses to sell or where the slowness of administration has delayed progress and secured no sale, and, as a result, dissatisfaction reigns among the less ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... in the car dreamily smoking, his hat drawn low over his brows, when an acquaintance passing through the car stopped with a word of greeting. Ordinarily Haney would have been glad of his company, but he made a place for him at this time with grudging slowness. ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... came in with some subordinates, and commanded that the prisoners be conducted to the jail-yard. The King was overjoyed—it would be a blessed thing to see the blue sky and breathe the fresh air once more. He fretted and chafed at the slowness of the officers, but his turn came at last, and he was released from his staple and ordered to follow the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fixed twenty years ago are not less dear, and they are by no means touched with despair, though they have not yet found the fulfilment which I would then have prophesied for them. Events have not wholly played them false; events have not halted, though they have marched with a slowness that might affect a younger observer as marking time. They who were then mindful of the poor have not forgotten them, and what is better the poor have not often forgotten themselves in violences such as offered me the material of tragedy ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... they went on to meet Olmar, who because of the slowness of his multitude preferred awaiting the enemy to attacking it; for the vessels of the Ruthenians seemed disorganized, and, owing to their size, not so well able to row. But not even did the force of his multitudes avail him. For the extraordinary masses of the Ruthenians ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... the perfect enjoyment was not to be marred by any speech. Only a grunt of satisfaction or a deep sigh of pleasure was now and then to be heard, as the smoke curled upwards from the little paper sticks. Each man competed with his neighbour in the slowness of his respiration, each man wanted to be the last to lay down his cigarette and go about his work. And then the Doctor said in ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... A few minutes can make no difference one way or the other. Ould Sir Colin used to say that there were more battles lost by over-haste than by slowness. What's the high bank running along on the ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ship's course, all yawing being out of the question with his scrupulous decorum at the helm. Once or twice I have got the better of him, and touched him off into a kind of compromised explosion, like that of damp fireworks, that splutter and simmer a little, and then go out with painful slowness and occasional relapses. But his fuse is always of the unwillingest, and you must blow your match, and touch him off again and again with the same joke. Or rather, you must magnetize him many times to get him en rapport with a jest. This ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... in art, science, laws, customs, and language, which must have required a vast period before the time of Mena. And this conclusion is forced upon us all the more invincibly when we consider the slow growth of ideas in the earlier stages of civilization as compared with the later—a slowness of growth which has kept the natives of many parts of the world in that earliest civilization to this hour. To this we must add the fact that Egyptian civilization was especially immobile: its development into castes is but one among many evidences that it was the very ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... mechanically, for a string in her brain seemed to be pulled by a persistent knocking at the door. With great slowness the door opened and a tall human being came towards her, holding out her arm ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... the same labored slowness, "comes before gen'leman. An' the regrets—will be yours. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... his eyes twinkling, and speaking with exasperating slowness, "do you happen to remember an eventful night on Pine Island, when Roy went ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... having hitherto seen them hanging lazily by their claws to boughs, I was surprised at the rapidity of their movements. I have often heard people assert that the sloth spends his torpid existence in a perpetual state of pain, from the peculiar sighing noise he makes, and the slowness of his movements when placed on the ground. In the first place, I cannot believe that God has created any animal to pass an existence of pain. The fact is, that the sloth is formed to live in trees, to climb, and to feed on leaves, and not to walk on the ground. Though he cannot ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... be found than that of watching the slow and cautious progress of ancient painting and sculpture in connexion with Christianity. The slowness is indeed remarkable, when we reflect upon the high perfection which these arts had generally attained even during the reigns of the first emperors. Christianity dealt far differently with painting and sculpture, than with architecture. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... the journey occupied four days, and the slowness of her progress gave opportunity for some striking displays of popular feeling. In one place, numbers of people were seen standing by the way-side who presented to her various little gifts; for which Beddingfield ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... weakness by avoiding the sight of her. He would neither seek an opportunity of being in her company nor avoid it. To convince himself of his power of self-control, he lingered over every piece of business this afternoon; he forced every movement into unnatural slowness and deliberation; and it was consequently past eight o'clock before he reached Mr. Hale's. Then there were business arrangements to be transacted in the study with Mr. Bell; and the latter kept on, sitting ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell |
