"Speculation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mutual passion never occurred to me. I could not be blind to the essential distinctions that subsist among men. I could expatiate, like others, on the futility of ribbons and titles, and on the dignity that was annexed to skill and virtue; but these, for the most part, were the incoherences of speculation, and in no degree influenced the stream of my actions and practical sentiments. The barrier that existed in the present case I deemed insurmountable. This was not even the subject of doubt. In disclosing the truth, I should be conceived to be soliciting my lady's mercy and ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... pessimism may quite conceivably be in the right on't. It is quite conceivable that, having made the best that can possibly be made of life, a world-weary race might decide that the best was not good enough, and deliberately turn away from it. But that is a contingency, a speculation, which no sane man would allow to affect his action here and now, or to impair his loyalty to his comrades in the great ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... were not successful in the tavern speculation at Llandeilo, and followed their father into North Wales. The second he apprenticed to a milliner, the other two lived with him till the day of his death. He settled at Denbigh in a small house which he was enabled ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... incapable of expressing. She had been so built by nature that the carriage of her head and limbs was good to behold. She acquired a harmony of movement which caused her to lose no shade of grace and spirit. Her eyes were full of thought, of speculation, and intentness. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 'This speculation may, perhaps, be thought more subtle than the grossness of real life will easily admit. Let it, however, be remembered, that the efficacy of ignorance has been long tried, and has not produced the consequence expected. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... washed off the deck, I found near me a topmast, which had probably been carried away and cut adrift from some craft ahead of us. I clung on to it, and was picked up a day or two afterwards by a vessel which had to touch at Walfish Bay on her way to the Cape. Finding a party settled there on a whaling speculation, I agreed to remain. However, after some time, as few whales were to be caught, I determined to go on to the Cape. Just as I was about to sail, I received an invitation from a gentleman—Mr Ramsay—about to start into the interior on a hunting and trading expedition, to accompany ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... back the tears; the brooding over the two sombre mysteries—Death and Life (and which is the darker?); the sense of fate driving life on—the fate of a temperament that restlessly longs for new impressions and intense emotions, without the vigor of action that cuts the Gordian knot of fancy and speculation with the swift sword-stroke of ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... conquest was completed;—thereby, in these his seemingly so aimless rambles, planting new standards, founding new habitable colonies, in the immeasurable circumambient realm of Nothingness and Night! Wise man was he who counselled that Speculation should have free course, and look fearlessly towards all the thirty-two points of the compass, whithersoever ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... for sad speculation here! Who had he been? Had he swept on, leaving that bit of his kilt as evidence of his passing? Had he been one of those who had come through the attack, gloriously, to victory, so that he could look back upon that day so long as he lived? Or was he dead—perhaps within a hundred yards of where ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... Then after appointing some prudent regulations to prevent this liberty of prophesying from encroaching on the province of the regular ministry of the church, or degenerating into a school for the encouragement of rash speculation instead of ministering to the comfort and godly edifying of the brethren, directions are given that the ministers of the landward parishes adjacent to every important town, together with the readers within six miles, should assist those ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... suitors but they had been refused one after another for reasons she could hardly have explained. For years now Tom Teerswell had been her escort. Whether or not Caroline Wynn would every marry him was a perennial subject of speculation among their friends and it usually ended in the verdict that she could not afford it—that it was ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... time the office opened the queue reached from the Opera House steps nearly to the tramway Haltestelle, and much speculation was going on as to how many would be sent empty away. Inch by inch we moved forward, mounted the steps one by one, and came within the relative warmth of the vestibule. At last the weary waiting-time was over; the young ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 12, 1919 • Various
... was evidently a Belfast Irishman, and the barrister forced himself to find amusement in speculating how such an individual came to speak Italian fluently. Speculation on this abstruse problem, however, yielded to keen interest in Mr. ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... Mr. Stackpole's faculties for observation of the motives and actions of his fellows had been sheathed. Still, disuse had not altogether dulled them. Constant introspection had not destroyed his gift for speculation. It was rusted, but still workable. He had read aright Squire Jonas' stupefaction, the watchmaker's ludicrous alarm. He now read aright the chill which the very sight of his altered mien—cheerful and sprightly where they had expected grim aloofness—had ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... government money. Others were started for the purpose of issuing paper money with which the bank officials might speculate. Others, of course, were founded with an honest purpose. But they all issued paper money, which the people borrowed on very poor security and used in speculation. ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... forward. Even in our finances, which are confessedly our weakest point, we doubt if the experience of any other nation will enable us to form a true conception of our future. We shall have, beyond question, the ordinary collapse of speculation that follows a sudden expansion of paper currency. We shall have that shivering and expectant period when the sails flap and the ship trembles ere it takes the wind on the new tack. But it is no idle boast to say that there never was a country with such resources as ours. ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... the individual who, in the hope of gain, furnished the funds to bring Angelique to Paris for exhibition, as soon as he perceived that the speculation was a failure, left the girl and her parents in that city, dependent on the charity of strangers for daily support, and for the means of returning to their humble home.—Enquete, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... the same when the ship is not moving? I never heard any one connect this noise with the danger of boiler explosion, in the event of the ship sinking with her boilers under a high pressure of steam, which was no doubt the true explanation of this precaution. But this is perhaps speculation; some people may have known it quite well, for from the time we came on deck until boat 13 got away, I heard very little conversation of any kind among the passengers. It is not the slightest exaggeration to say that no signs of alarm were exhibited by any one: ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... and perhaps a deeper sense, however, the prime condition of true sociality is something else, namely, the exclusively human gift of articulate speech. To what extent, then, must our novice pay attention to the history of language? Speculation about its far-off origins is now-a-days rather out of fashion. Moreover, language is no longer supposed to provide, by itself at any rate, and apart from other clues, a key to the endless riddles of racial descent. What is most needed, then, is rather some elementary instruction concerning ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... advance and recede in turn. This idea would go to prove that no open sea exists there; the ice covers the whole of the Polar Ocean, and moves north and south correspondingly. This is, however, only speculation, but as the Tegethoff is said to have been drifted by the wind, which must have been southerly, and therefore northerly on the other side, the fact will not militate against ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... They daren't take her back to any of their own places; they know better. They haven't left the country with her. What remains? They've bribed or got over some mug of an outsider to be their accomplice, and a bad speculation he'll find it, too." ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... page 14.) And this was written amid all the heavings which preceded the bursting of the volcano. It followed, after statesmen had, one after another, seen the elements of that disruption. The probability of the severance of the North and South has been a speculation to which the older of us have long been familiar. And now [1864] who would venture to predict the time of the close of that sad war? (First edition.) Now [1865] that it has come to an end Americans taunt Europeans with their want of foresight in ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... upon which all Christian persuasion is built. For without these be laid down in the lowest and deepest part of the heart, all exhortations to an holy and righteous life are weak and ineffectual, all consolations are empty and vain. In a word, religion is but an airy speculation, that hath no consistence but in the imaginations of men,—it is a house upon sand, that can abide no blast of temptation, no wave of misery, but must straightway fall to the ground. From whence is it, I pray you, that the persuasions of the gospel have so little power upon men,—that the plain ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... simple, intelligible, affecting. Hence are his views broad, impressive, popular; no trivial details, no wire-woven developments, no subtle distinctions and drawing of fine lines about the boundaries of ideas, no speculation, no ingenuity; all is elemental, comprehensive, intense, practical, unqualified, undoubting. It is not of the small things of minor and instrumental politics he comes to speak, or men come to hear. It is not to speak or to hear about permitting an Athenian citizen ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... the worst of talking to a lawyer," she said severely: "his legal mind takes such cut-and-dried views. Granted that it is a speculation, it seems a promising one; and nothing venture, nothing have. I don't know how you feel, Die, but I am quite willing to do my share." Then Dinah, who was in quite a flutter of excitement and pleasure, looked at her adviser in a ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... same. He was always thinking of Hope Wayne, and befooling himself with the mask of art, actually hiding himself from himself: and not perceiving that when a man's sole thought by day and night is a certain woman, and an endless speculation about the quality of her feeling for another man, he is simply a lover thinking of his ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... training in the interests of furthering their military efficiency. No one of them was a born writer. There is no such thing. Nor did any one of them owe his abilities as a writer to any other person. Writers are self-made. But it is a reasonable speculation that history might never have heard of the greater number of these men had they not worked sedulously to become proficient with the pen as well as with the sword. Granting that they had other sound military qualities in the beginning, an acquired ability ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... what I may not accomplish in that way? Prosperity cannot shine down fear of the future, it only throws it into darker relief. Myself I am afraid of the future—it is unknown, and to me what is unknown is not magnificent, but terrible. The present is enough for me. I do not like speculation, and I never ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... Eleanor Stringham from an overdose of chloral, occurring at the end of a rather uneventful season, excited a certain amount of unobtrusive speculation. Clovis, who perhaps exaggerated the importance of curry in the ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... them till they would seem to be uncountable, and wondering what might be the thoughts of those who abode there. But those who abode there were few in number, and their thoughts were hardly worthy of Nina's speculation. The windows of kings' palaces look out from many chambers. The windows of the Hradschin look out, as we are told, from a thousand. But the rooms within have seldom many tenants, nor the tenants, perhaps, many ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... received the intelligence. He listened to Mr. Medler's statement of the case with the calmest air of deliberation, seemed indeed to be thinking so deeply that it was as if his thoughts had wandered away from the subject in hand to some theme which allowed of more profound speculation. ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... a keen sense of humour and traces of lost beauty, who always brought a bundle of old rags and clothes to pick down, had made friends with her almost immediately. She proved a source of great amusement to Margaret. The woman's occupation had caused her much speculation. ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... Egypt, to others again from Phoenicia. They have been systematized into Bactrians, and Scythians, and Philistines—into Goths, and into Celts; and tracked by investigations as ingenious as they are futile, beyond the banks of the Danube to their settlements in the Peloponnese. No erudition and no speculation can, however, succeed in proving their existence in any part of the world prior ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Gare du Nord," added the concierge, entirely aware that she was contributing a fact to Kendal's mental speculation, and wishing it had a greater intrinsic value. But Kendal merely raised his eyebrows in polite acknowledgment of unimportant information. "En effet!" he said, and went away. Nevertheless he could not help reflecting that Gare du Nord probably meant Calais, and Calais ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... owners of slaves, and it is perhaps in this way that the animal stories of the two races became in a measure blended. The discussion of this subject cannot be pursued here, but it is an interesting one. It offers a wide field for both speculation ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... when he returned suffered herself to be put back into the phaeton, and driven off on the return journey like an idiot or a tired child. Compared with what she was now, her condition of the morning seemed positively natural. She sat white and cold and silent, and there was no speculation in her eyes. Poor Dick flailed and flailed at the pony, and once tried to whistle, but his courage was going down; huge clouds of despair gathered together in his soul, and from time to time their darkness was divided by a piercing flash of longing ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not in a critical speculation but in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... image of sensuous, soulless Nature, such as the Materialist had conceived it. Secondly, the image of Intellect, obstinately separating all its inquiries from the belief in the spiritual essence and destiny of man, and incurring all kinds of perplexity and resorting to all kinds of visionary speculation before it settles at last into the simple faith which unites the philosopher and the infant. And thirdly, the image of the erring but pure-thoughted Visionary, seeking overmuch on this earth to separate soul from ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Kaspar Hauser. That he was of good family seemed probable; that he was of distinguished birth, not impossible; that he was the dangerous rival of a candidate for a greatly coveted position in one of the northern states of Europe was a favorite speculation of some of the more romantic young persons. There was no dramatic ending to this story,—at least none is remembered ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... pieces streamed from her lovely surprised mouth, and her lifted hands. And her eyes—I could have sworn—were the living eyes of Jack Harkaway! Had she a brother, I wondered. Yet my mind was too dazzled and confused with her nearness to pursue the speculation. ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... brain and heart in the effort, but he has learned a more excellent way, as the Psalmist had, who said, 'When I thought, in order to know this, it was too painful for me, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I.' Prayer will do more for clearing mysteries than speculation, however acute, and it will change the aspect of the mysteries which it does not clear from being awful to being solemn—veils covering depths of love, not clouds ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... have given occasion for wilder speculation than that of Votan. He was the culture hero of the Tzendals, a branch of the Maya race, whose home was in Chiapas and Tabasco. Even the usually cautious Humboldt suggested that his name might be a form of Odin or Buddha! As for more imaginative writers, they have made not the least ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... nominally the buying of breadstuffs for exportation, was really one of speculation upon the New York market as affected by the European markets,—a species of brokerage, which, ostensibly and in the eyes of the world attended by great risk, was really a thing of specifically safe and certain profits, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... exchanged with the sealers. It appeared that there had been much speculation as to what sort of a craft we were; visits of ships, other than those sent down specially to convey their oil to New Zealand, being practically unknown. For a while they suspected the 'Aurora' of being an ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... physician, whose province it is to cure diseases, be able to do so, though he be a person of great genius, who bestows less time on the hidden and intricate method of nature, and adapting his means thereto, than on curious and subtle speculation." ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... economy and money taxes led to a need for more coinage. As metal was scarce and minting very expensive, iron coins were introduced, silver became more and more common as means of exchange, and paper money was issued. As the relative value of these moneys changed with supply and demand, speculation became a flourishing business which led to further enrichment of people in business. Even the government became more money-minded: costs of operations and even of wars were carefully calculated in order to achieve savings; financial specialists were appointed by the government, just as ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... from making any more of it, and he was no sooner in his own den watching for customers than Lucy vanished from his mind altogether. He thought much more of Purcell himself, with much vengeful chuckling and speculation. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to Dade, as it was to Betty, who had spoken but little to him in a week, that Calumet was filled with speculation and impatience over the temporary inaction. The work of repairing the buildings was all done. There was nothing now to do except to await the appearance of some cattle. The repair work had all been done to that end, and it was inevitable that ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... I fell into a speculation concerning the mixture of the two elements in man's nature. The life of an individual is usually, it seemed to me, a series of RESULTS, the processes leading to which are not often visible, or observed when they are so. Each act ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... exceptions, Lords, That our superfluous Lacquies, and our Pesants, Who in vnnecessarie action swarme About our Squares of Battaile, were enow To purge this field of such a hilding Foe; Though we vpon this Mountaines Basis by, Tooke stand for idle speculation: But that our Honours must not. What's to say? A very little little let vs doe, And all is done: then let the Trumpets sound The Tucket Sonuance, and the Note to mount: For our approach shall so much dare the field, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... a large experience in all sorts of speculation. When old he gave this counsel to one of his proteges: "Do not speculate. I have always speculated on assured information, and that has cost me so many millions;" and he named his losses. We may believe that in this ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... in with passionate faith Dr. Channing's fervid insistence on the presence in human nature, even under its most degraded types, of germs, at least, of endless spiritual development. But it was the characteristic of her own mind that it tended not to protracted speculation, but to immediate, embodied action."[16] Her work for the insane was the expression of the deep faith in humanity she had been ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... undertook the settlement of the townships of Conway, Gage, Burton, Sunbury and New-town has been referred to in these pages as "The Canada Company," but its proper name was "The St. John's River Society." The original promoters of the gigantic land speculation—for such we must call it—set on foot at Montreal in 1764, were chiefly army officers serving in Canada, hence the name, "The Canada Company." When, however, it was determined to enlarge the association ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... dropped one by one, as if they had been weighted with the gladness that apparently brought them to her lips. The Duchess meant to have the full benefit of her headache, and her speculation was fully successful. The General, poor man, was really distressed by the lady's simulated distress. Like Crillon listening to the story of the Crucifixion, he was ready to draw his sword against the vapors. How could a ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... one's mental energies to speculation as to what is going on behind the noncommittal fronts of any row of houses in any great city the imaginative mind ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... from day to day and from year to year, in the moment as it passed; but I remember no touch of speculation or curiosity as to how or why things existed as they did. The house, the arrangements, the servants, the meal-times, the occupations were all simply accepted as they were, just the will of my parents taking shape. I never thought of interrogating or altering anything. Life ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... This speculation proved so advantageous to that body, in a pecuniary sense, that it was soon followed up by sending out sixty more, for whom larger prices were paid than for the first consignment; the amount paid on the average for the first one hundred being 120 pounds of tobacco apiece for each, then ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interest." Between two such men controversies were certain to arise. In May, 1792, Jefferson wrote that Hamilton had introduced speculation and a dangerous construction of the constitution; and Hamilton wrote that Jefferson was at the head of a hostile faction dangerous to the Union. Washington attempted to make himself an arbiter of this quarrel, but was unable to reconcile the two men. They both urged him ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... with affection but with kindness. He gave her many precious things, as the Indian calls the bright-coloured pebbles, shell beads, base turquoises, crystals, etc., with which he decorates his body. He liked to see his daughter shine among the daughters of the tribe. With him it was speculation, not affection; but Mitsha knew nothing of this, and felt that in case her parent should ever be borne back to this house dead, and placed on the floor before her covered with gore, she must feel just as Okoya felt now. And yet the dead man was only his grandparent. No, it ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... Abandoning speculation as useless and taking my chance of being murdered where I lay, for after all Billali's followers were singularly like the men with whom we had been fighting and for aught I knew might be animated by identical objects—I just went to sleep, as I ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... the relationship of the Bryophyta on the one hand to the Thallophyta and on the other to the Pteridophyta lies even more in the region of speculation, on slender grounds without much hope of decisive evidence. In a general sense we may regard the Bryophyta as derived from an algal ancestry, without being able to suggest the nature of the ancestral forms or the geological period ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... bullet through his brain than to put that organ to any violent exertion. Up to him, but he sometimes fancied that he saw it coming. At such times he would philosophize over himself and fate, until he had exhausted those two great subjects, and then, in a quiet and gentlemanly way, he would drown speculation in the traditional dram. He never drank anything but "Old Rye," and he flattered himself that he did so only when he pleased. If he somewhat misapprehended his relation with old rye, it was perhaps no wonder; for in his semi-occasional encounters with this gentlemanly ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... of the afternoon dragged by in a monotony of idle speculation. Trent listened to the gathered newspapermen discussing the coming experiment at dusk, accompanied them as Dr. Mathieson, the head of the project, conducted them on a tour of the project, to the launching site, and then back to ...
— The Monster • S. M. Tenneshaw
... of lime, and the manner of its production in such vast quantities was long a subject of speculation among geologists. Some light seemed to be thrown upon the subject a few years ago, when it was observed, that the detritus of coral reefs in the present tropical seas gave a powder, undistinguishable, when dried, from ordinary chalk. It then appeared ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... rights of spiritual authority; and the learned among them were forward to question the supremacy of Rome in many things, and to argue against what other people, more religiously inclined, would have admitted without controversy. That spirit of speculation, to which the Irish Four Masters partly ascribed the introduction of Protestantism into England, was rampant in the schools of these northern nations, when a superior civilization gave rise to the erection of universities ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... fully would take up a long chapter. We can only glance at the chief forces then at work. Firstly, Germany, after the year 1873, passed through a severe and prolonged economic crisis. It was largely due to the fever of speculation induced by the incoming of the French milliards into a land where gold had been none too plentiful. Despite the efforts of the German Government to hold back a large part of the war indemnity for purposes of military defence ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... in 1711 on the model of the East India Company to trade in the Pacific; and on the conclusion of the Treaty of Utrecht it was given the monopoly of the English trade with the Spanish coasts of America. The grant of certain privileges by Government led to wild speculation in its shares which gave rise to the famous South ...
— Anson's Voyage Round the World - The Text Reduced • Richard Walter
... couple of these animals which were carried to Cuyaba sold for a pound of gold. There was a plague of rats in the settlement, and they were purchased as a speculation, which proved an excellent one. Their first kittens produced thirty oilavas each; the new generation were worth twenty; and the price gradually fell as the inhabitants were stocked with these beautiful ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... the people in schemes of money-making proved a great support to the war policy of the government. We saw the reproduction among us of the same causes and the same effects which prevailed in England during her prolonged contest with Napoleon. Money was superabundant, speculation was rife, the government was a lavish buyer, a prodigal consumer. Every man who could work was employed at high wages; every man who had commodities to sell was sure of high prices. The whole community came to regard the prevalent prosperity as the outgrowth of the war. The ranks of the army ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... local eyesore; I returned to a sizable crowd viewing an impressive phenomenon. The homely levity had vanished; no one shouted jovial advice. Opinions and comments passed in whispers accompanied by furtive glances toward the lawn, as though it were sentient and might be offended by rude speculation. As we pushed through the bystanders I was suddenly aware of their cautious avoidance of contact with the grass itself. The nearest onlookers stood a respectful yard back and when unbalanced by the push of ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... given by the great Hudson and Master Juet of the country they had discovered excited not a little talk and speculation among the good people of Holland. Letters patent were granted by Government to an association of merchants, called the West India Company, for the exclusive trade on Hudson River, on which they erected a trading-house called Fort Aurania, or Orange, from whence ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... vice which were given. The Bodhisattva Mahamati (apparently Manjusri) proceeded to propound a series of more abstruse questions which are answered at considerable length. The Lankavatara represents a mature phase of speculation and not only criticizes the Sankhya, Pasupata and other Hindu schools, but is conscious of the growing resemblance of Mahayanism to Brahmanic philosophy and tries to explain it. It contains a prophecy about Nagarjuna and another which mentions the Guptas, and it appears to ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... other lovers in other lands, married and single, crossing our paths. And there was the Young Doctor, diffident and reticent, who had his heart set on the girl, and the contest furnished us with a deathless theme for speculation. And here at Milan came this letter—just a note forwarded from Paris—telling us that the Gilded Youth could "stand and wait" no longer; he was going to hit back. He had quit the Ambulance service for aviation. And ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... or on diplomatic offices. Born a Catholic, he became a Protestant, deliberately enough; wrote books on controversial subjects, against his old party, before he had taken orders in the Church of England; besides a strange, morbid speculation on the innocence of suicide. He used his lawyer's training for dubious enough purposes, advising the Earl of Somerset in the dark business of his divorce and re-marriage. And, in a mournful pause in the midst of many harrowing concerns, he writes to a friend: 'When I must shipwreck, I would fain ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... which they are members. There plainly is wanting a less general and nearer object of benevolence for the bulk of men than that of their country. Therefore the Scripture, not being a book of theory and speculation, but a plain rule of life for mankind, has with the utmost possible propriety put the principle of virtue upon the love of our neighbour, which is that part of the universe, that part of mankind, that part of our country, which comes ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... group and the central one comes a gap, a space typical of that unknown time in history when conjecture alone permits speculation, and the story is taken up again with the first of the central groups, wherein stands a figure of Vanity, glass in hand, symbolizing the compelling motive of so much in human endeavor. To her left, in enormous contrast, are primitive man and woman, treated with great realism, these two carrying ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... every known variety and flavor can be produced within the limits of one flat and well-watered field. Few now expect to make a fortune by cutting arid land up into twenty-feet lots, but notwithstanding the extravagance of recent speculation, the value of arable land has steadily appreciated, and is not likely to recede, for the return from it, either in fruits, vegetables, or grain, is demonstrated to be beyond the experience of ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... the people was all the more effective because it was an effluence from the mind of a statesman who, of all other statesmen of the country, was deemed the most practical, and the least deluded by any misguiding lights of fancy and abstract speculation. ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... state bordering on religious hysteria. Quite determined to be true to Christ, they had been demoralized by the strain of facing constant hostility. They had begun to take excessive interest in unfulfilled prophecy and eschatological speculation. The result was that individuals had become careless as to the performance of ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... One of the most eminent American theologians, Bishop Brent, wrote in an article on "Speculation and Prophecy": "In Dr. Sarolea's volume, 'The Anglo-German Problem,' published in 1912, there is a power of precognition so startling that one can understand a sceptic of the twenty-first century raising serious doubts as to whether parts ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... he has in his portfolio; "Though to tell you the truth, Frank," said he, "there are great doubts of its success." The offer was accepted, and, like bargains wrung from Goldsmith in times of emergency, turned out a golden speculation to the bookseller. ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... not been led to consideration or inquiry upon the subject, this may be deemed a mere speculation; but those who are even slightly acquainted with the real state of things, will, I believe agree with me that if men, respectable and in earnest and moderately informed, would only set about the matter, they would soon be astonished at the ease and rapidity with which they would accumulate ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... my sight! let the earth hide thee! Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold; Thou hast no speculation in those eyes ...
— Macbeth • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... had a good many admirers. Peter never knew why your grandfather opposed the marriage, for afterward he took Mr. and Mrs. Burrows to live with him and they were all good friends up to the day of your father's death. But this is ancient history and speculation on subjects we do not understand is sure to prove unsatisfactory. I wouldn't worry over your grandfather's troubles, my dear. Try ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... Speculation had not turned out as profitable as those who had come to practice it had expected. Outside of the anxiety of Jerry Boyle and others to get possession of the apparently worthless piece of land upon which Dr. Slavens had filed, there were no offers for the relinquishment of homesteads. That ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... Mitla. At Palenque, as at Mitla, the oldest work is the most artistic and admirable. Over this feature of the monuments, and the manifest signs of their difference in age, the attention of investigators has lingered in speculation. They find in them a significance which is stated as follows by Brasseur de Bourbourg: "Among the edifices forgotten by time in the forests of Mexico and Central America, we find architectural characteristics so different from each other, that ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... are set in motion when those possibilities are realised in action. In both epic and drama men are seen, not in their subjective moods, but in their objective struggles; not in the detachment of the life of speculation and imagination, but in vital association and relation with society in its order and institutions. With many differences, both of spirit and form, the epic and the drama are at one in portraying men in that ultimate and decisive stage which determines individual character and gives ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... with this world's good, and their belief that it is best. 'His own farm,' as the original puts it emphatically, holds one man by the solid delight of possessing acres that he can walk over and till; his merchandise draws another, by the excitement of speculation and the lust of acquiring. It is not only the hurry and fever of a great commercial city, but the quiet and leisure of country life, which shut out taste for God's feast. Strange preference of toil and risk of loss to abundance, repose, and joy! Savages barter gold ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... and came to terms with his uncle. On the one side, Joseph gave up all that he possessed, and assigned to his nephew his contingent interest in the tontine, already quite a hopeful speculation. On the other, Morris agreed to harbour his uncle and Miss Hazeltine (who had come to grief with the rest), and to pay to each of them one pound a month as pocket-money. The allowance was amply sufficient ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seemed to have been of a serious cast of mind, which led to speculation, criticism, and the cultivation of the exact sciences. From Ferrara came Savonarola, the fanatical prophet who appeared during the moral blight which characterized the age of the Borgias, and Lucretia must frequently have recalled ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... this wonderful country where men have time and will for speculation such thoughts may be natural. Can they be found ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... into a speculation concerning the nature and origin of those agreeable emotions which are so generally produced by the sight of objects that suggest the ideas of decay and desolation. It is happy for us, that, by the alchemy of poetry, we are able to turn some of our misfortunes into sources of melancholy pleasure, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... says Warton, "ecclesiastics and schoolmen presumed to dictate to kings and to give rules for administering states, drawn from the narrow circle of speculation, and conceived amid the pedantries of a cloister. It was probably recommended to Occleve's notice by having been translated into English by John Trevisa, a celebrated translator ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... in the course of four years. I hope this house will be the dower of my daughter. It is an excellent speculation, and I have to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... in 1819. He published the mature result nine years afterwards in his famous work, Animal Embryology: Observation and Reflection (not translated). This classic work still remains a model of careful observation united to profound philosophic speculation. The first part appeared in 1828, the second in 1837. The book proved to be the foundation on which the whole science of embryology has built down to our own day. It so far surpassed its predecessors, and Pander in particular, that ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... he was sufficiently duped. Or they might have started legitimately from outside New York, and be going toward the city now. Since the ultimate destination was New York, and they had made no attempt to hide that from him, it was useless to speculate—for at best it could be only speculation. He had decided that once before! The man at his side felt again over the scarf to see ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... rocks of some lonely shore, or on the sands, with mouth a-wash and dead hands playing idly with the lapping water. Wife and family mourned as for one dead. And after the first nine days' wonder, even in Parliament House and Law Courts, for lack of food speculation as to his fate languished and died. A successor filled ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... as the sun went out of sight behind the hills in Baldwin. The fish were worthless, but I thought I must have something to show for the day spent. After exhibiting them to mother and sister, and hearing the comments as to their ugliness, and much speculation as to what their horns were for, I gave them to Mr. Lambard, who said that pouts were the best of fish after they ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... be done was to listen to every sound without, in the hope of catching something else than the roaring of the wind, and to give the rein to speculation ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to the extreme limit of imprudence. 'Sphere of influence,' 'part in the world,' 'national prestige,'—there are no such things; or if there be, they are not worth fighting for." What England would have been, had she so reasoned, is matter for speculation; that the world would have been poorer may be ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... penny of it is there left. Sir Rowland ventured it in a speculation, and all is lost—Oh! blister my tongue, I've let out the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... Mariolatry. One may be sure, too, that the bourgeois capitalist and the student of the schools, each from his own point of view, watched the Virgin with anxious interest. The bourgeois had put an enormous share of, his capital into what was in fact an economical speculation, not unlike the South Sea Scheme, or the railway system of our own time; except that in one case the energy was devoted to shortening the road to Heaven; in the other, to shortening the road to Paris; but no serious schoolman could have felt entirely ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... examined these pictures and commented on them; and on Saturdays it was a matter of the keenest speculation what the following week would bring them. Lizzie preferred exciting scenes of murder and arson, while Annie was moved more by leavetakings and declarations of unalterable affection. These differences of taste often gave rise to little bickerings, and last week there had been much prophesying as ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... Department in the matter, though not a very great deal. A number of the half-breeds, though a small, a very, very small proportion of the whole, are restless vagabonds, who squat upon lands with no intention of remaining permanently, but only with the object of speculation by selling their scrip, leaving the neighbourhood, taking up another lot, and receiving in like manner disposable scrip again. But the officers of the North-West must know that the half-breed people, in general, are constant-working, and are desirous ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... looked for in corners and out-of-the-way places, and not in the broad acres—the scythe has taken them there. By the wayside on the banks of the lane, near the gateway—look, too, in uninteresting places behind incomplete buildings on the mounds cast up from abandoned foundations where speculation has been and gone. There weeds that would not have found resting-place elsewhere grow unchecked, and uncommon species and unusually large growths appear. Like everything else that is looked for, they are found under unlikely conditions. At the back of ponds, ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... would reflect on the characters of Mary and of Richard; Mary must have parents, of course, and one would make them talk in Scottish. Probably she already had a lover; how should she behave to that lover? There is plenty of room for speculation in that problem. As to Dick, is he to be a Lothario, or a lover pour le bon motif? What are his distinguished family to think of the love affair, which would certainly ensue in fiction, though in real life nobody thought of it at all? Are we to end happily, with ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... girl," continued Denison thoughtfully. "I have known Mrs. Woods for some time. She wanted to invest, but I told her frankly that this is, after all, a speculation. We may not be able to swing so big a proposition, but, if not, no one can say we have taken a dollar of ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... Speculation as to the animal in the cave. Determined to explore the mystery of the "hole" in the hill. Trip to the hills. Difficulty in finding the "hole." Accidental discovery of a rock. The "hole" found. Indication that it was made by man. Why plants flourish around holes and stones. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... their ascendancy, made their whole system of government subservient to the propagation of the Christian faith. It is not necessary here to draw deductions from this striking contrast. It is purely a matter of speculation whether this difference was due to religious causes or to the idiosyncrasies of the different nations; but the fact remains, and gives a peculiar interest to the history of the Portuguese in the East, as connected with the history of the extension ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... pilotage of the worthy Gabriel Requa, braved the perils of the Tappan Sea. Alas! Gabriel and the "Farmer's Daughter" slept in peace. Two steamboats now splashed and paddled up daily to the little rural port of Tarrytown. The spirit of speculation and improvement had seized even upon that once quiet and unambitious little dorp. The whole neighborhood was laid out into town lots. Instead of the little tavern below the hill, where the farmers used ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... the truths which the error thus prolonged has hindered from coming to the birth. A strenuous disputant has recently asserted against me that 'the region of the might have been lies beyond the limits of sane speculation.'[12] It in surely extending optimism too far to insist on carrying it back right through the ages. To me at any rate the history of mankind is a huge pis-aller, just as our present society is; a prodigious wasteful experiment, from ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... ordeal; ring; litmus paper, curcuma paper[obs3], turmeric paper; test tube; analytical instruments &c. 633. empiricism, rule of thumb. feeler; trial balloon, pilot balloon, messenger balloon; pilot engine; scout; straw to show the wind. speculation, random shot, leap in the dark. analyzer, analyst, assayist[obs3]; adventurer; experimenter, experimentist[obs3], experimentalist; scientist, engineer, technician. subject, experimentee[obs3], guinea pig, experimental animal. [experimental method] protocol, experimental method, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... with discursions of which the chief use is to give some clever person or other a chance to say smart things. When all else fails, moreover, the club can always fall back upon allegory. Commentators on the poets have always found much field for ingenious quibbling and sounding speculation in the line of allegory. Let a poem be but considered an allegory, and there is no limit to the changes which may be rung upon it, not even Mrs. Malaprop's banks of the Nile restraining the creature's headstrong ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... voices, higher and lower, mournful and joyful, within a single human soul. It is like the struggle between the two principles in the Epistle to the Romans. It is like the question and answer of 'The Two Voices' of our modern poet.... Every speculation and thought of the human heart is heard and expressed and recognized in turn. The conflicts, which in other parts of the Bible are confined to a single verse or a single chapter, are here expanded into a whole book." And after quoting a few of the darker ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... emotions which were called up by the consideration of the commercial and geographical importance of the prospect before me. I no longer felt any doubt that the lake at my feet gave birth to that interesting river the source of which has been the subject of so much speculation and the object of so many explorers. The Arab's tale was proved to the letter. This is a far more extensive lake than the Tanganyika: so broad, you could not see across it, and so long that nobody ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... "I have left an assembly filled with all the great names of haut-ton in London, and where little but names were to be found, to seek relief from the ennui that overpowered me, in a cider cellar! and have found there more food for speculation than in the vapid circles of ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... bit out of date. It does not pay nowadays, fiddling about over small things. I don't mean anything personal, Guv'nor. My boss says if I take his tip, and stick to big things, I can make big money!" I said I thought the very idea of speculation most horrifying. Lupin said "It is not speculation, it's a dead cert." I advised him, at all events, not to continue the pony and cart; but he replied: "I made 200 pounds in one day; now suppose I only make 200 pounds in a month, or put it at 100 pounds a month, which is ridiculously low—why, ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... be exerted, whatever may be its ultimate source. If a lack of freedom in method and in choice of subject is one reason for the sophistication of our short story, then the editorial policy of American magazines is a legitimate field for speculation. ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Bessieres, Marmont, Lavalette, but to a resolute government this would but have blackened his desertion of Kleber and the army of the Pyramids. The adventure appears more desperate than Caesar's; but speculation, anxiety, even hope, awaited Napoleon at Paris. Moreau was no Pompey. The sequence of dates is interesting. On the night of August 22nd, 1799, Bonaparte went on board the frigate; five weeks later, having just missed Nelson, he reached Ajaccio; on October 9th ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... Bannaventa, whilst old maps and itineraries are equally silent, the Professor seemingly rests satisfied with his own mere conjecture, that there may have been another Bannaventa, which was probably situated in the regions of the lower Severn. Surely a speculation of this kind may ...
— Bolougne-Sur-Mer - St. Patrick's Native Town • Reverend William Canon Fleming
... Dr. Frank Hewlitt Cannon, took a short leave of absence from Mayo Clinic to fly to the senator's campaign headquarters, there was a flurry of speculation about the possibility of his being appointed Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, but the flurry didn't amount to much. If President Cannon wanted to appoint his brother, that was all ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... continually arose from the depths of our talk, and expanded, like the one the fisherman released from the copper vessel, until they blotted everything bright from our vision. Insensibly, we yielded to the occult force that swayed us, and indulged in gloomy speculation. We had talked some time upon the proneness of the human mind to mysticism, and the almost universal love of the terrible, when Hammond suddenly said to me. "What do you consider to be the ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... magnesium sulphate), and common salt (sodium chloride). The potash beds represent the last stage in the evaporation of the waters of a great closed basin, and the peculiar climatic and topographic conditions which caused their formation have been the subject of much speculation. This subject is further treated in the discussion of common salt beds ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... dissipated the romantic theory that foreign emissaries had been employed by the relatives of the deceased to put him out of the way in order to secure his wealth; and so that glittering edifice of speculation fell ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... and worship, the teachers of Christianity were fast winning the world over to a new faith. The two systems came into deadly antagonism. Christianity triumphed. The gifted and beautiful Hypatia, almost the last representative of the old system of speculation and belief, was torn to pieces in the streets of Alexandria by a mob of fanatic Christian monks (A.D. 415). Finally the Roman emperor Justinian forbade the pagan philosophers to teach their doctrines (A.D. 529). This imperial edict closed forever the Greek schools, in ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... room the scene before them was none too pleasing. The congratulatory crowd being too large for Dick alone, his five partners were holding separate little receptions for groups, relating how Dick, Dave and Greg had captured Tip Scammon. Such speculation there was as to who Tip's unrecognized companion could have been the night before. As Fred stepped into the big room he was conscious of many unfriendly glances that were sent ...
— The High School Freshmen - Dick & Co.'s First Year Pranks and Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... of Rothschilds has found out how to gain millions by negotiating, out of the pockets of the public, loan after loan for the despots, to oppress the blind-folded nations, a sort of speculation has gained ground in the Old World, worthy of the execration of humanity—I mean the speculation in loan shares;—the paper commerce called stock-jobbing. It is the shame-brand upon our century's brow, that such a commerce ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... conclusions about the attachments of men of his age, he had no illusion about the possibly ideal character of an intimacy with William Grove's wife; she, as well, had illuminated that beyond any obscurity of motive or ultimate result. Lee's mind shifted to a speculation about the cause of their—their accident. No conscious act, no desire, of his had brought it on them; and it was evident that no conscious wish of hers had materialized their unrestrainable kisses. Savina's ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... want to see things others do not. And if you even do see more than those who are not so fortunate and who have to remain at home, still you are so ignorant in comparison with those who have lived here for years and to whom the whole of Africa is a speculation in land or railroads, it makes you feel like such a faker and as if it were better to turn correspondent for the N. Y. Herald, Paris edition, and send back the names of those who are staying at the hotels. That is really all you can speak with authority about. When you have Gordon and Stanley dishes ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... reducible to ordinary terms of expression. The young chap had run wild because his head still wobbled on his shoulders and because his isolation was beginning to scratch his nerves. But for Kitty to run wild with him offered a blank wall to speculation. (As if he could solve the riddle when Kitty herself could not!) So he determined to shut himself up in his study and shuffle the chrysoprase. Something might come of it. Looking backward, he recognized the salient, at no time had he been quite sure of Kitty. She seemed ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... of landscape. Like Indiana, Valentine is a story of the affections; like Indiana, it is a domestic tragedy, of which the girl-heroine is the victim of a pernicious system that makes of marriage, in the first instance, a mere commercial speculation. Indeed, the extreme painfulness of the story would render the whole too repulsive but for the charm of the setting, which relieves it not a little, and a good deal of humor in the treatment of the minor characters, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... hunters, others which live as shepherds and still others more highly developed which grow crops either in or near the nest as is the case with the fungus growing ants. This striking similarity between the development of ants and man offers ground for much speculation. ...
— An Elementary Study of Insects • Leonard Haseman
... things could not last, but while it did it gave rise to much speculation. Many men bought up tickets, good for some time, believing the bottom prices had been reached when the fall had by no means ended. It was odd to stand outside an office and listen to the crowd. Some would hold on and say, "I'll chance it till to-morrow." Then ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... was a cheerful line of speculation! I was deep in it when, above the regular shots of the fellow in the funk hole nearest me, came a rattle of pistol explosions some distance away. "One of the runners," I thought. "Hope he was as lucky as I." Munson told ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... ships were the true and sure gold-mines. All eyes looked and all hearts yearned for the sea. Their thoughts flew to their bonny little ship. Was she safe? How that question agitated every one, and what intense speculation there was as to the way ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... fingers, and looked at the objects immediately before her with no curve in her face disturbed, and yet with an ineffable protest in her air against all people with unpleasant manners. For the moment he lost the sense of his wound in a sudden speculation about this new form of feminine impassibility revealing itself in the sylph-like frame which he had once interpreted as the sign of a ready intelligent sensitiveness. His mind glancing back to Laure while he looked at Rosamond, he said inwardly, "Would she kill me ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... into this not very profound or novel speculation through a sort of wish to know how far three fine French churches of which we wish to speak a few words are respectively known to Englishmen in general. These are the Norman cathedrals of Bayeux and Coutances, both of them still ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... when he went down again, Mrs. Clough was talking to a sharp-looking lad, of apparently sixteen or seventeen years, who stood at the door leading into the shop, and who glanced at Collingwood with keen interest and speculation. ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... was settled. Robert Palmer, governed by kindly feeling rather than hard sense, overlooked his friend's weakness for speculation, rather ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... Vitativeness, Hope and Self-esteem; large Destructiveness and Acquisitiveness. Such a combination gives a strong tendency to suicide in cases of financial loss. We marry him to a wife exactly like himself, and one day he comes home and informs her that an unlucky speculation has carried away their fortune, and he has resolved upon suicide. His wife, being a person "who, under any combination of circumstances, thinks, feels and acts" exactly as he does, raises no objection. "All right, my love. You take arsenic, ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... and chief of the Scottish school, born in Kincardineshire, and bred for the Scotch Church, in which he held office as a clergyman for a time; was roused to philosophical speculation by the appearance in 1730 of David Hume's "Treatise on Human Nature," and became professor of Philosophy in Aberdeen in 1752, and in Glasgow in 1763, where the year after he published his "Inquiry into the Human Mind," which was followed in course of time by his "Philosophy of the Intellectual ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... here below which serve as issues to the unknown, which seem to facilitate the egress of speculation, and at which hypothesis snatches. Conjecture has its compelle intrare. In passing by certain places and before certain objects one cannot help stopping—a prey to dreams into the realms of which the mind enters. In the invisible there are dark portals ajar. No one ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... case again and placing it carefully in my bosom, I turned my thoughts to my new prospects; and whilst collecting together a few of my more treasured valuables to take with me, and packing the remainder away in a place of safety, I suffered myself to indulge in much pleasant speculation upon my immediate future. ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... owns quite a tract. I asked about getting all the land he had, and he said he preferred not to put a price on it, but that it would add considerably to the sum total. He said I would not need it, anyhow, as there is plenty of open range for the stock. He was holding it, he told me, for speculation and had never made any use of it in running his stock, except as they ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... why I don't talk, Congressman," he said pleasantly. "The Senator doesn't trust too many people. If he did, there might be too much money made out of land speculation. Senator Langdon doesn't happen to be one of those Senators who care for that ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... superfluous lackeys and our peasants, Who in unnecessary action swarm About our squares of battle, were enow To purge this field of such a hilding foe, Though we upon this mountain's basis by Took stand for idle speculation, But that our honours must not. What's to say? A very little little let us do, And all is done. Then let the trumpets sound The tucket sonance and the note to mount; For our approach shall so much dare the field That England shall crouch ...
— The Life of King Henry V • William Shakespeare [Tudor edition] |
