"Vastly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rapid changes are taking place, if not to the extent we desire, yet corresponding in a degree with the gigantic march of emigration and population. Many other reasons might be urged to show that its prospective increase of population will vastly exceed the ratio of its retrospective increase, but these ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... effort. In Hungary this was the period of the great hero, Hunyady, a man of unknown birth and no official rank, who roused his countrymen to repeated effort and led them to repeated victories and defeats against the vastly more ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... a visit to the Tower of London, to call upon Lady JANE GREY—once Queen—and now a guest in that admirable institution. Was graciously received by Her Ladyship, who is now of advanced age. Her Ladyship was vastly amused at the news that had reached her that some chroniclers do insist that she has lost her head. "I have in good sooth lost my teeth," laughed the venerable gentlewoman "but my head is as firmly set upon my shoulders as ever. I do verily believe that it must be some mad piece ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... poured down our throats to steal away our brains; and whereas, the English have learned the most expeditious way or method of drawing an infusion of said Tea, without the expense of wood or trouble of fire, to the benefit and emolument of the East India trade, and, as vastly greater quantities may be used by that method than by that heretofore practiced in this country, and therefore help to support the East India Company ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... was almost ashamed to introduce him to my studio—my work, whether absolutely good or bad, being so vastly superior to his. But his spirits were now quite restored; and he amazed me, on the way, with his light-hearted talk and new projects. So that I began at last to understand how matters lay: that this was not an artist ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... passed, in which he must buzz about the stock. It seemed vastly difficult to veer round to the Sabbath through the web of conversation the spider wove round him. Simeon Samuels' conception of a marine-dealer's stock startled him by its comprehensiveness, and when he was asked to admire an Indian ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... "She would do for a beginning. Don't imagine that none of these easy going girls are worth the attention of a novelist. Sometimes they are vastly more interesting than the bread and butter product of the drawing rooms. It won't do, in your profession, to ignore ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... movable type in 1502 (which invention so vastly facilitated the publication and spreading of the thoughts of the composer), and with the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the noble art of music began a new, unimpeded, and brilliant career among the civilized nations of the world. Dating from ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... is an insipid, pasty-complexioned doll, nine times out of ten, and would be vastly improved in looks and temperament if she were subjected to a course of shower-baths, and compelled to take horse-exercise regularly and earn her bread before she ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... may say that in this country we are prone to think that the perfection of the methods of throwing high explosives in shell is vastly in favor of an unprotected nation like ourselves, because we could easily make it very uncomfortable for any vessels that might attempt to bombard ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... hurtling hail of shot, the explosion of shell, dense volumes of smoke shrouding the combatants, and clouds of dust boiling up on all sides, lent unutterable horror to a scene which, to cold, dispassionate observers, might have seemed sublime. As the vastly superior numbers of the Federals forced our stubborn bands to give back slowly, an order came from General Beauregard for the right of his line, except the reserves, to advance, and recover the long and desperately ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... been no Trafalgar had Napoleon kept his fleet in harbour. The abandonment of the high seas by the German Navy precluded a naval battle, and the defensive strength of harbour defences which kept Nelson outside Toulon had so increased as to make it vastly harder for Jellicoe to penetrate Wilhelmshaven or Kiel. Naval power, which the war proved to be more than ever effective on sea, was shown to be more than ever powerless on shore. The mine and the submarine made the sustained bombardment of land fortifications ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... (1554-1586). Sidney, the ideal gentleman, the Sir Calidore of Spenser's "Legend of Courtesy," is vastly more interesting as a man than as a writer, and the student is recommended to read his biography rather than his books. His life expresses, better than any single literary work, the two ideals of the age,—personal honor and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... that gave them the flavor of a story book, plumb full of princes and heroes. And by the way, Prince was the name of one of them, and he was a genuine hero, as you will see. His mate was called Nelly, and albeit she was as awkward and as angular as the ideal old maid, vastly inferior to Prince, who was a fine-looking chap, yet his admiration for her was unbounded. She cared for him, I'm sure, but she was less demonstrative; more coquettish, I would say, if she hadn't been too homely a beast to think of, in ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... his head well down and his guards well placed. Prescott was straighter, at the outset, and his attitude almost careless, in appearance. Dick had been a clever fighter back in the old High School days. Dodge, since coming to West Point, had vastly improved both in guard and ...
— Dick Prescott's Second Year at West Point - Finding the Glory of the Soldier's Life • H. Irving Hancock
... remained to be seen. As yet, at any rate, the contemplation of Will Blanchard's ruin was good to Grimbal, and the accident of his discovery that Clement Hicks knew some secret facts to his enemy's disadvantage served vastly to quicken the lust for a great revenge. From the first he had determined to drag Clement's secret out of him sooner or later, and had, until his recent offer of the Red House Farm, practised remarkable patience. Since then, however, a flicker of apparent prosperity which ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... since I saw you, you have done a good whole day's work in any one day. You do not very much dislike to work, and still you do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it. This habit of uselessly wasting time is the whole difficulty; and it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your children, that you should break the habit. It is more important to them, because they have longer to live, and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it easier than they can get out after they are in. You are now in need of ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... the floor line and that at the ceiling level being of vastly different temperatures, it follows that an arrangement might be designed whereby the benches might be stepped in three or four rows, and, by ascending, the bather could select any temperature he might choose. Such an arrangement was often employed in the baths of the ancient Romans, and has ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop
... of Pope's, he eagerly availed himself of the occasion offered for learning some new particulars concerning one by whom so much of his time and thoughts had been engaged. "Pray, Sir," began the lady, "did not you write a book about my cousin Pope?" "Yes, Madam;" was the reply. "They tell me 'twas vastly clever. He wrote a great many plays, did not he?" was the next question. "I never heard but of one attempt, Madam;" said Warton, beginning perhaps to expect some discovery, when his hopes were suddenly crushed ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... was evidently vastly amused by the little Bunkers' comments. The four children peered out of the wikiup and saw the party of horsemen dismount. A tall figure, with a waving headdress, came striding toward the children. ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cowboy Jack's • Laura Lee Hope
... greatly ashamed, she made him promise that he would keep the matter secret, and finally declared to him that she herself wished to be his lady and lover, for at that time the word 'mistress' was not yet used. The young page was vastly astonished, thinking that the lady was joking, or wished to deceive him or to have him whipped. However, she soon showed him so many signs of the fire and fever of love, saying to him that she wished to tutor him and make a man of him, that he at last realised that ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... It was vastly entertaining to watch the old rogue's antics as he expressed his astonishment, though knowing as well as I that my cousin was dead and buried, but I kept a ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... exclaimed Aunt Maria. "They are at least as civilized as we. Very probably more so. Of course they are. I must learn whether the women vote, or in any way take part in the government. If so, these Indians are vastly our superiors, and we must sit humbly at ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... had come, and were flourishing here. They were changed vastly from those ancestors of Asia whence they had sprung. An obscure story, this record of primitive America! The Mongoloids were soon so changed that one could fancy the blood of another people had mingled with them. Amerindians, ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... up the stout stick which was his inseparable companion. Henry, a vastly different man from the genial saunterer of a moment ago, poked wildly through the railings. Bill, panic-stricken now and wishing for nothing better than to be back in his cosy cage, shrieked loudly for help. And Freddie ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... than water that runs then: it is frost subdued; it is spring triumphant. No obsolete watercourses now. The larger creeks seek out their abandoned beds, return to the haunts of their youth, and linger fondly there. The muskrat is adrift, but not homeless; his range is vastly extended, and he evidently rejoices in full streams. Through the tunnel of the meadow-mouse the water rushes as through a pipe; and that nest of his, that was so warm and cosy beneath the snowbank in the meadow-bottom, is sodden or afloat. ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... of fourteen the precocious Lady Mary, when on a visit to Wharncliffe Lodge, some thirty miles from Thoresby, made a conquest that was vastly to influence her life. The conquest was no less a person than Edward Wortley Montagu, son of Sidney Wortley Montagu, who was the second son of Edward, first Earl of Sandwich, the famous Admiral of ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... Annapolis, December 23, 1783, he returned to his estate at Mount Vernon, but vastly aided the incipient work of framing the Constitution by correspondence. In May, 1787, he took his seat as President of the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia. He was inaugurated the first President of the United States in April, 1789, after a unanimous election. He was similarly ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... more than is set down for them (Act 3. Sc. 4.). But as a proof that he could not escape it, in the old editions of Romeo and Juliet there is no hint of a great number of the mean conceits and ribaldries now to be found there. In others, the low scenes of Mobs, Plebeians, and Clowns, are vastly shorter than at present: And I have seen one in particular (which seems to have belonged to the Playhouse, by having the parts divided with lines, and the Actors names in the margin) where several of those very passages were added in a written ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... distance of twenty miles from London is the castle of Windsor, a most delightful retreat of the Kings of England, as well as famous for several of their tombs, and for the ceremonial of the Order of the Garter. This river abounds in swans, swimming in flocks: the sight of them, and their noise, are vastly agreeable to the fleets that meet them in their course. It is joined to the city by a bridge of stone, wonderfully built; is never increased by any rains, rising only with the tide, and is everywhere spread ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... Musicals," Mendelssohn, "Songs without Words," Weber, Polonaises, and Field, Nocturnes. But these were merely straws which indicated in which direction Chopin's genius would sweep the field and clear the musical atmosphere. His polonaises and nocturnes are vastly superior to those of Weber and Field; and his poetic preludes, his romantic ballads, his lovely berceuse, his amorous mazurkas, are new types in art which have often been imitated but never equalled. Only in one field did Chopin have a ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... the table just referred to shows, under slavery, where the pecuniary interest of the master will secure his watchful cooeperation with the parent to preserve the life of the infant. But in freedom the same causes act upon the colored race with vastly more destructive effect. The preservation of infant life and health is then left solely to the care, skill, and resources of the parent. The result is that decay of the colored race which we have seen indicated in the census. It is essential to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Bologna Anichino—for so he now called himself—came; and, as Fortune would have it, the very next day, he saw the lady at a festal gathering, and deemed her vastly more beautiful than he had expected: wherefore he waxed most ardently enamoured of her, and resolved never to quit Bologna, until he had gained her love. So, casting about how he should proceed, he could devise no other way but to enter her husband's service, ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Hindoo, miserable as his hovel was, had sources of pride and happiness, to which not only the West Indian slave, but even his master, was a stranger. He was to be sure a peasant; and his industry was subservient to the gratifications of an European lord; but he was, in his own belief, vastly superior to him. He viewed him as one of the lowest cast. He would not on any consideration eat from the same plate. He would not suffer his son to marry the daughter of his master, even if she could bring him all the West Indies as her portion. He would observe, too, that the Hindoo ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... his uncle Dick go on a voyage to the remoter islands of the Eastern seas, and their adventures are told in a truthful and vastly interesting fashion. The descriptions of Mr. Ebony, their black comrade, and of the scenes of savage life, are full ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... With her population vastly increased in Dante's day and her commerce on all seas and on every road and her banking system controlling the markets of Europe and the East, Florence had become such a mighty city that Pope Boniface VIII could say to the Florentine embassy who came to Rome to take ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... exist in space and move about in space. They have size and position, and are separated by distances. We do not perceive them, it is true; but we conceive them after the analogy of the things that we do perceive, and it is not inconceivable that, if our senses were vastly more acute, we might ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... canalisation of Egypt, while vastly improved by the viceroy, was still far from complete. Canals, partial dams, and embankments were attempted; fifty thousand draw-wells carried the water up to a considerable height, but the ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... "our" attitude, for it is a vastly interesting point to note with Hilaire Belloc: "The Catholic understands his opponent, whereas that opponent does not understand him. A similar contrast existed once before in the History of Western mankind, to wit, in the latter days of the Roman Empire. The Catholic understood the ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... keen as the brains of your masters. In swiftness and strength ye surpass them by far, Ye've brave hearts that teach ye to laugh at disasters, Ye vastly outnumber your tyrants in war. Why, then, like cowards stand. Using not brain or hand, Thankful, like dogs, when they throw ye a bone? What right have they to take Things that ye toil to make? Know ye not, boobies, that all is ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... medicinal seeds, leaves, and barks they knew. His mother had been of different type. She had loved and married the picturesque young hunter, and gone to live with him on the section of land taken by his father. She found life, real life, vastly different from her girlhood dreams, but she was one of those changeless, unyielding women who suffer silently, but never rue a bargain, no matter how badly they are cheated. Her only joy in life had been her son. For ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... and Peter junior were both unhappy in vastly different ways. One difference was that Peter junior knew he was unhappy and suspected why. Peter senior had no idea that what he suffered from was unhappiness. He thought that it was indigestion, and he supposed that feeling as he felt was the ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... days. In the Roman Law department, I was on the spot with Stillicidium and similar servitudes, and in Criminal Law I did vastly distinguish myself by polishing off an intricate legal problem about Misters A., B. and C., and certain bicycles, though, as I stated in a postscriptum, not being the practical cyclist, I could not be at all responsible for the accuracy of my solution, and hinted that it was somewhat infra ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... thankful for them. Wasn't I penniless when you took me? and you PRETENDED, at least, to be vastly pleased with your acquisition. But it's no matter whether they get married or not: we can devise a thousand honest ways of making a livelihood. And I wonder, Richard, you can think of bothering your head about our POVERTY in case of your death; as if THAT would be anything compared ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... expressed a something that he had never seen before in human eyes. What manner of soul lay behind them? What was it that through them looked out into this world of evil? Childish innocence and purity, yes; but vastly more. Was it—God Himself? Jose started at his own thought. Through his ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... thither by the two-fold inducement—gold discovery and the assurance of enjoying impartially the benefits of constitutional liberty. They built or bought homes and other property, and by industry and character vastly improved their condition and were the recipients of respect and esteem from ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... hear a certain noble-minded lady utter some indignant words against what I considered a very weighty doctrine of Christianity; but, listening, I soon found that what she supposed the doctrine to contain was something considered vastly unchristian. This may be the case with Percivale, though I never heard him say a word of the kind. I think his difficulty comes mainly from seeing so much suffering in the world, that he cannot imagine the presence and rule of a good God, and therefore lies with religion rather ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... man as brother. But the effect of his death, as in all these other cases, was simply to glorify his life and his cause. The same law worked in his case and in theirs, only on a higher plane, and for a vastly greater object. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... machinery and parts. From a consideration of these facts, and with his usual tendency to upset traditional observances, Edison conceived the bold idea of constructing gigantic rolls which, by the force of momentum, would be capable of crushing individual rocks of vastly greater size than ever before attempted. He reasoned that the advantages thus obtained would be fourfold: a minimum of machinery and parts; greater compactness; a saving of power; and greater economy in mining. As this last-named operation precedes the crushing, let ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... except on a first-class political question on which elections may be won or lost. That at least is the way in which things are managed in England. And there is every reason to fear that under State Socialism the power of officials would be vastly greater than ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... Japanese children are of a national character, and are indulged in by all classes. Others are purely local or exclusive. Among the former are those which belong to the great festival days, which in the old calendar (before 1872) enjoyed vastly more importance than under the new one. Beginning with the first of the year, there are a number of games and sports peculiar to this time. The girls, dressed in their best robes and girdles, with their faces ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... object was to be gained with our small force by encountering one so vastly superior, Major Coke deemed it prudent to retire, and retreating firing, we crossed the bridge and lined the bank on ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... from that time sees the legal formalities of that quickly concluded bargain settled, and the mining village of Copper Princess presenting a vastly different appearance from what it did on the melancholy day when Peveril was its sole occupant. All its houses are now occupied, and from every window cheery lights stream out with the coming of ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... did Mr. Carvel. What must he do but drive her home to Green Street, where Mr. Swain then lived in a little cottage. Mr. Carvel himself lifted her out and kissed her, and handed her to her mother at the gate, who was vastly overcome by the circumstance. The good lady had not then received that fall which made her a cripple for life. "And will you not have my chestnuts, sir, for your kindness?" says little Patty. Whereat my grandfather ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... willingly assented to this; but the wealthy Chevalier d'Orrain as I was called—I did not take the name of St. Martin—was a vastly different person from the poor cadet of the past year. I found myself courted and sought after. I began to find pleasures in life unknown to me before, and in the young man of fashion, who entered the world a year later it was hardly possible to recognise the ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... guidance. You will observe it is the work of a firm in my opinion greatly overrated—Messrs. Lenz, Kamerer, & Co.; and, while you will follow it in style and the disposition of the accessories, you will, I make no doubt, produce, if you take ordinary pains, a picture vastly superior in ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... that I should pass the coming night within the walls of the empty mansion; and, until it was time to retire thither, I amused and edified myself by a friendly chat with the old man and his spouse, both of whom were vastly communicative. At ten o'clock I and my host adjourned to the house, which stood at a very short distance from the lodge. I carried my bag, and my companion bore the blankets already referred to, a candle, and some firewood and matches. The chamber ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... from waves which do not affect ours. There is a vast store of rays, or more correctly waves, beyond the red, and also beyond the violet, which are incompetent to excite our vision; so that could the whole length of the spectrum, visible and invisible, be seen by the same eye, its length would be vastly augmented. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... benevolent instincts such as are found among the civilized nations: far from it. I regard them now, and, fortunately for me, I regarded them then, when, as I have said, I was at their mercy, as beasts of prey, plus a cunning or low kind of intelligence vastly greater than that of the brute; and, for only morality, that respect for the rights of other members of the same family, or tribe, without which even the rudest communities cannot hold together. How, then, could I do this thing, and dwell and travel ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... knew but the debris at its foot was merely the cast-off sweat and exuviae of a stone life's great work-day? Who knew but the vital changes which were going on within its gritty cellular tissue were only imperceptible to us because silent and vastly secular? What was he who stood up before Tis-sa-ack and said, "Thou art dead rock!" save a momentary sojourner in the bosom of a cyclic period whose clock his race had never yet lived long enough to hear strike? What, too, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... The text I give is, with some few variants, that of the vastly better version in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3). Of the 'history' of the ballad the less said the better. The argument is neatly summarised by Mr. Allingham, p. 376 of The Ballad Book ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... you for my last quarter's salary? I am not an expensive man, my dear father, as you know; but we are no chameleons, and fifty pounds (with my little earnings in my profession) would vastly add to the agremens of my ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... American students are, it must be premised, vastly different from those of the old world. Imprimis, our colleges are just well into being. Reaching back into no dim antiquity, their rise and progress are traceable from their beginnings—beginnings not always the greatest. Thus saith the poet doctor ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... we shall not come and see you, and I feel sure we shall not: but, if some sudden freak was to come into our wayward heads, could you at all manage?—Your Mother we should not mind, but I think still it would be so vastly inconvenient.—I am certain we shall not come, and yet you may tell me, when you write, if it would be horribly inconvenient if we did; and do not tell me any lies, but say truly whether you would rather we did ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... fixed upon, in which the sandal was bound to the foot by straps of the same material, with a double thickness of sole. Terence tried these himself, and found them extremely comfortable for walking; and gave orders that one company should be entirely provided with them. As to appearance, they were vastly superior to the cracked and bulged ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... fighting, Abercrombie, who had all the time remained aloof at the saw-mills gave up the ill-judged attempt, and withdrew once more to the landing-place, with the loss of nearly two thousand in killed and wounded. Had not the vastly inferior force of Montcalm prevented him from sallying beyond his trenches, the retreat of the British might have been pushed to a ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... a first-magnitude star, the four were not highly qualified astrogators, to be sure, but they were vastly better spacemen than at the beginning. Inevitably, their attitude toward Calhoun was respectful. He'd been irritable and right. To the young, ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... have suggested that you vastly modify the first visit to hell, and leave out the second visit altogether. Nobody would, or ought to print those things. You are not advanced enough in literature to venture upon a matter requiring so much practice. Let me show you what a man has ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... din and dust and revolution of the place, Mr. Hardy was more than usually alive this morning to the human aspect of the case. His mind easily went back to the time when he himself stood at one of these planers and did just such work as that big Norwegian was doing, only the machines were vastly better and improved now. Mr. Hardy was not ashamed of having come along through the ranks of manual labour. In fact, he always spoke with pride of the work he used to do in that very shop, and he considered ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... and moved thereat, and afterward related that the feelings of devotion caused by those so fervent tears and true contrition remained with him for many days; and that when he wished to humiliate himself or enliven his piety he had only to remember what he had beheld in that Indian woman. For it is vastly different to but talk of contrition for sins, and to contemplate its vivid image and reality in a soul. Another woman came to the confessional and, without noticing the multitude of people in the church, began her confession, and continued ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, - Volume XIII., 1604-1605 • Ed. by Blair and Robertson
... 1900.] The poems were begun, indeed, he thinks, for "a wealthy aristocracy living on the product of their lands," in European Greece; were begun by contemporary court minstrels, but were continued, vastly expanded, and altered to taste by wandering singers and reciting rhapsodists, who amused the holidays of a commercial, expansive, and bustling Ionian democracy. [Footnote: Companion ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... where the water came tumbling and leaping down over stones and shale bed. When at last she arose she had learned one lesson, not in the History she carried. No matter what its disadvantages are, having a home of any kind is vastly preferable to having none. And the casualness of people so driven by the demands of living and money making that they do not take time even to be slightly courteous and kind, no matter how objectionable it may be, still that, even that, is better than their active displeasure. So she ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Ring and the Book, the latter, with its interminable discussions of motive and its curious descriptions of half-forgotten legal and church methods of the seventeenth century. If one-half this long poem of over twenty thousand lines had been cut out, it would have been vastly improved. ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... existence of Mignon, Muriel and Susan. Her eyes began an eager search for the Picture Girl. Muriel was sure to look pretty in evening dress. Mignon's frock made her look older, she decided. She soon spied Muriel, whose gown of white lace was vastly becoming. So was Susan Atwell's dress of old rose and silver. She wondered a trifle wickedly if they had not been surprised to see Constance blossom out in such brave attire. Then she put the thought aside as unworthy ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... will soon get tired of this exhausting struggle, and then those who survive and have been wise will reap the advantage. Now, as to your own affairs, the legal formalities are nearly completed. If you return and spend the winter in New York I can put you in the way of vastly increasing your property, and by such presence and business activity you will disarm all criticism which your ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... always depends in some sense upon science, yet the best philosophy seems generally to have in it some eternal quality of creative imagination. Plato wrote a dialogue about the constitution of the world, the Timaeus, which was highly influential in later Greece, but seems to us, with our vastly superior scientific knowledge, almost nonsensical. Yet when Plato writes about the theory of knowledge or the ultimate meaning of Justice or of Love, no good philosopher can afford to leave him aside: the chief question is whether we can rise to the height ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... autumn. From the first they were greatly superior in number, and at the middle and end of the affair, when they had all reached the field, they were more than two against one.[831] The English, on the other hand, besides the opportunity of attacking before their enemies had completely formed, had a vastly superior artillery and a favorable position, both which advantages they lost after their ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... great cause, such as the demand of prisoners for an extra bucket of water, excited him, and then it rose to a hoarse scream. Avarice was his predominant, almost his only, characteristic. He seemed to think his accommodations were vastly too good for negroes and Yankees, and that when they were admitted within his precincts, they should be thankful, and give as little trouble as possible. With such notions, it was not wonderful that he managed to make the lot of the prisoner an uncomfortable one. In addition ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... great man certainly, and a mysterious man, but a man all the same. Although by this time my skin had become tanned and dark, there was seemingly no end to the amazement it caused the blacks. They timidly touched and felt my body, legs, and arms, and were vastly anxious to know what the covering was I had round my body. In due time, however, the excitement subsided somewhat, and then the newcomers prepared more smoke- signals to their friends on the mainland—this ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... she awoke to find that Dan was hot and restless. Dan, although he had enjoyed himself vastly the day before, had not been treated judiciously. The many sweet-meats that the children had insisted on giving him had upset his baby digestion. He awoke peevish, heavy-eyed, and highly feverish. Netty, who ...
— A Big Temptation • L. T. Meade
... to meet him, and when de Batz suggested that a good talk over old times would be vastly agreeable, the younger man gladly acceded, The two men, though certainly not mistrustful of one another, did not seem to care to reveal to each other the place where they lodged. De Batz at once proposed the avant-scene box of one of the theatres as being the safest ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... diluvium ceased, and the rivers Rhone and Durance assumed approximately their present character, a change of procedure took place. The volume of water rolled down was by no means so great, the inclination of the fall was vastly lessened, consequently the rivers were enabled to do what they had not been able to do in the diluvial period, chew up their food of stone, and reduce it to the condition of mud. This is what the two rivers are engaged upon now, and instead of strewing their embouchures ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... Her ladyship is comforting herself meanwhile by strolling along the shrubbery with Reginald, calling forth all his tender feelings, I suppose, on this distressing occasion. She has been talking a great deal about it to me. She talks vastly well; I am afraid of being ungenerous, or I should say, TOO well to feel so very deeply; but I will not look for her faults; she may be Reginald's wife! Heaven forbid it! but why should I be quicker-sighted ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... his own pleasure and partly to counterbalance his mother's extravagances.—He knew the Stevens-Delestrades. Colette had marked down the handsome boy, and tried the effect on him of her charms, which she never wearied of using. She knew of all Georges's freaks, and was vastly entertained by them. But her sound common sense and the real kindness concealed beneath her frivolity, helped her to see the danger the young idiot was running. And, being well aware that it was beyond her to save him, she ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... unyielding tenacity of our managers, foremen, and operatives had introduced a thousand and one devices for making by machine garments that used to be considered possible only as the product of handwork. This—added to a vastly increased division of labor, the invention, at our instance, of all sorts of machinery for the manufacture of trimmings, and the enormous scale upon which production was carried on by us—had the effect of cheapening the better class of garments prodigiously. We had done ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... of this war? In their vastly different fashions they are Poland and Ireland—the extreme islands of tenacious tradition: the conservators of the Past through a national ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... to try the mysteries of millinery in the city, where a distant relative of her mother was living. Here her uncommon beauty attracted much attention, drawing erelong to her side a wealthy young southerner, who, just freed from the restraints of college life, found it vastly agreeable making love to the fair Helena. Simple-minded, and wholly unused to the ways of the world, she believed each word he said, and when at last he proposed marriage, she not only consented, but also promised to keep it a secret for a time, until he could in a measure ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... be, too clever to live, in fact, too light a weight for a grave age. In The Fancy, which Keats seems to refer to in a letter dated January 13th, 1820, Reynolds appears to have been inspired by Tom Moore's Tom Crib, but if so, he vastly improves on that rather vulgar original. He takes as his motto, with adroit impertinence, some lines of Wordsworth, ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... situation in the spring of 1877 scarcely seemed to warrant the hopes with which the Turks entered on the war. They stood alone confronting a Power which had vastly greater resources in men and treasure. Seeing that the Sultan had recently repudiated a large part of the State debt, and could borrow only at exorbitant rates of interest, it is even now mysterious how his Ministers managed ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... around the world for nothing. He had seen men in that mood before, and he had no hankering for trouble which is vastly easier to start than it is to stop. He paid no attention to Bud. He made his loaves, tucked them into the pan and greased the top with bacon grease saved in a tomato can for such use. He set the pan on a shelf behind the stove, covered it with a clean flour ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... Cartouche, when he became professionally and openly a robber, redounds highly to his credit, and shows that he knew how to take advantage of the occasion, and how much he had improved in the course of a very few years' experience. His courage and ingenuity were vastly admired by his friends; so much so, that, one day, the captain of the band thought fit to compliment him, and vowed that when he (the captain) died, Cartouche should infallibly be called to the command-in-chief. This conversation, so ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... army, for their intrepid conduct during the siege, and upon all other occasions. Even the French general officers, after the termination of the siege, gave the Welsh Fusiliers their unqualified praises for their firmness and courage in repulsing the three attacks made by such vastly superior numbers on the redoubt, and could not be easily convinced that so few men defended it. Captain Saumarez was the second officer in command in the ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... into it under more favourable auspices after the Union of 1840. From that time Canada received a decided impulse in everything that tends to make a country happy and prosperous. Cities, towns and villages sprang up with remarkable activity all over the face of the country, and vastly enlarged the opportunities for that social intercourse which is always an important factor in the education of a new country. At the same time, with the progress of the country in population and wealth, there grew up a spirit of self-reliance which of ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... serves to keep up a free Circulation of Air in a Room, as well as to keep it warm. And for the same Reason, where nothing but Stoves can be got to warm the Wards, the Wynd Stoves, which open into the Room or Ward, are vastly preferable to the ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... to the best advantage, in obtaining such degrees of it, as may enable him to be extensively useful to the Community, feel a reluctance to economical institutions respecting dress. He will not only esteem the ornaments of the mind of vastly higher importance than those of the body, but the general good will also constantly influence his conduct; and he will chearfully encourage every regulation, which ...
— The Olden Time Series: Vol. 2: The Days of the Spinning-Wheel in New England • Various
... dealers will make some deduction from the regular prices on skins from which the heads are removed, it is vastly more profitable to retain ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... lawful when one wins the capital prize. One stretches out his hand in the dark. But some one must win. I win now. The game of masks is a fine one. I am vastly pleased with it. Some day I shall see you without any mask. Come. We must dance. I could talk better if we were ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... himself, with a weighty air as of having given some vastly important and legal pronouncement. And when Helmsley suggested that it was possible Mary might yet marry, he shook his head in ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... noblest works in a language which is ever living because it is dead. Some of his writings, epochmaking when they first appeared, are text-books still familiar in every cultivated household on earth. Yet Barneveld was vastly his superior in practical statesmanship, in law, in the science of government, and above all in force of character, while certainly not his equal in theology, nor making any pretensions to poetry. Although a ripe scholar, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the colony was not of long duration. A certain cherry-cheeked, flaxen-haired Gertrude—the daughter of a rich boer—had taken a liking to the young lieutenant; and he in his turn became vastly fond of her. The consequence was, that they got married. Gertrude's father dying shortly after, the large farm, with its full stock of horses, and Hottentots, broad-tailed sheep, and long-horned oxen, became hers. This was an inducement for her soldier-husband to lay down the ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... useless generalities,—the other, gradually rises to those principles which are really the most common in nature. 'Axioms determined on in argument, can never assist in the discovery of new effects, for the subtlety of nature is vastly superior to that of argument. But axioms properly and regularly abstracted from particulars, easily point out and define NEW PARTICULARS, and impart ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... we address ourselves to putting our own national house in order and making income balance outgo. Our international trade relations, though vastly important, are in point of time and necessity secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy. I favor as a practical policy the putting of first things first. I shall spare no effort to restore world trade by international economic readjustment, ...
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt's First Inaugural Address • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... so genuine, in fact, that the former are usually fain to make it palatable to their self-love, by assuming that these active and forcible qualities are incompatible with others, which they choose to deem higher and more important. Thus, Hepzibah was well content to acknowledge Phoebe's vastly superior gifts as a shop-keeper'—she listened, with compliant ear, to her suggestion of various methods whereby the influx of trade might be increased, and rendered profitable, without a hazardous outlay of capital. She consented ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that had sunk down and well-nigh vanished under the earth, that lay by the water's edge now, like an idler taking the air, yet giving me strong food for thought, making the name of Combray connote to me not the little town of to-day only, but an historic city vastly different, seizing and holding my imagination by the remote, incomprehensible features which it half-concealed beneath a spangled veil of buttercups. For the buttercups grew past numbering on this spot which they had chosen for their games among the grass, standing singly, in couples, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... vastly agreeable, recounting many anecdotes fresh from Paris, which duly amused the Countess Lanovitch, and somewhat shocked Catrina, who was not advanced or ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... that on this course he next struck Tent Island. Round this island he walked under the impression that it was Inaccessible Island, and at last dug himself a shelter on its lee side. When the moon appeared he judged its bearing well, and as he traveled homeward was vastly surprised to see the real Inaccessible Island appear on his left. 'There can be no doubt that in a blizzard a man has not only to safeguard the circulation in his limbs, but must struggle with a sluggishness of brain and an absence of ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... the vulgar uneducated fellow that beats me. The Melanesians, laugh as you may at it, are naturally gentlemanly and courteous and well-bred. I never saw a "gent" in Melanesia, though not a few downright savages. I vastly prefer ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... And the duke, vastly pleased that the maternal lecture was at an end, leaped from the coach, and escorted his ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... had vastly interested me. I mean that it was quite in my line, detecting a man's secret in his countenance. I was ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... have been incurably prejudiced against truths, which, by other modes of teaching,—by general and indirect instructions,—would probably have been lodged in their minds. And there is another point of view in which vastly more, even their lives, might have been lost, by the Apostles making the direct and specific attacks referred to. I know that you ridicule the idea of their consulting their personal safety. But what right have you to do so? They did, on ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... which did not dovetail as they should. Norman Lloyd represented one of the old families of the city, distinguished by large possessions and college training, and he was the first of his race to engage in trade. His wife came from a vastly different stock, being the daughter of a shoe-manufacturer herself, and the granddaughter of a cobbler who had tapped his neighbor's shoes in his little shop in the L of his humble cottage house. Mrs. Norman Lloyd was innocently unconscious of any reason ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... shelter of the human frame, as a hermit crab watches for a suitable shell in which to make his home. It must be owned that the volume of observances connected with infancy, here presented, is very inadequate; it is certain that a nurse of a century ago would have been familiar with a vastly more extensive array of duties and cautions. As we go back in time and culture, action becomes more restricted. Where the effects of any line of conduct are unknown, adherence to precedent is all-important; every part of the life must be administered ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... man, to refuse to worship him? I utterly protest against every such pretence. As I have an infinitely stronger conviction that Shakespeare was not in intellect Divinely and Unapproachably perfect, than that I can certainly point out in him some definite intellectual defect; as, moreover, I am vastly more sure that Socrates was morally imperfect, than that I am able to censure him rightly; so also, a disputant who concedes to me that Jesus is a mere man, has no right to claim that I will point out some moral flaw ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... Gordon, who was struck at once by the immense ability of the young man. In character, it seems, they were the extremes that meet! These two men, of equally strong personality, had an antagonism of character which, clashing, gave forth a resonance that was vastly inspiriting. ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... general resources to the promotion of learning and research without a claim for immediate marketable results. Our last generation has not only permitted but has encouraged this in all Western countries, and in other countries, such as China and Japan, influenced by the West. The money thus spent is vastly greater than in any equal period before, and the United States, the land of the fullest democratic claims, is also the land of the amplest generosity for scientific ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... lying in a South American port, on the cruise now written of, the seamen belonging to another American frigate informed us that their captain sometimes inflicted, upon his own authority, eighteen and twenty lashes. It is worth while to state that this frigate was vastly admired by the shore ladies for her wonderfully neat appearance. One of her forecastle-men told me that he had used up three jack-knives (charged to him on the books of the purser) in scraping the belaying-pins and ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... time, and the one, perhaps, most appreciable of all which learning has conferred upon the laborer. As each laborer, with the same expenditure of physical force, produces a greater result, of course the aggregate products of the world are vastly increased, although they represent only the same number of laborers that a less quantity would have represented under an ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... her faith is that the water must not merely be hot, not merely have boiled a few moments since, but be actually boiling at the moment it touches the tea. Hence, though servants in England are vastly better trained than with us, this delicate mystery is seldom left to their hands. Tea-making belongs to the drawing-room, and high-born ladies preside at "the bubbling and loud-hissing urn," and see that all due rites ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... Mrs. Lennox's Henrietta tries to discourage the heroine from reading Joseph Andrews by recommending Mrs. Haywood's works, "... 'there is Mrs. Haywood's Novels, did you ever read them? Oh! they are the finest love-sick, passionate stories; I assure you, you'll like them vastly: pray take a volume of Haywood upon my recommendation.'—'Excuse me,' said Henrietta," etc. The ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... first five or even six on the list, with those in the water, after 1 hr. or after 4 hrs., and in a still more marked degree after 7 hrs. or 8 hrs., could not leave the least doubt that the solution had produced a great effect. This was shown not only by the vastly greater number of inflected tentacles, but by the degree or closeness of their inflection, and by that of their blades. Yet each gland on leaf No. 1 (which bore 255 glands, all of which, excepting five, were inflected in 30 m.) could not have received more ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... speedily got ready for action, for in those days it was difficult to sail far without meeting an enemy. It might be one to be captured—snapped up in an instant; it might be one of equal or not of vastly superior size, to be fought bravely, and taken in the end; or, mayhap, one so much larger that it would be necessary to make all sail and run away, a proceeding not very often practised in those days by British naval commanders. It was ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... death in his soul, fill it up, and so equalise the pressure within to the pressure without. For day by day he felt more and more like a bubble filled with darkness, round which whirled the iridescence of his consciousness, and upon which the pressure of the outer world, the outer life, roared vastly. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... life-blood enough to go round among them. Milton's creatures are in a certain way more vital, though less real. Bunyan's characters being traits, the other's are moods. Yet both groups seem to have been cast in a large, elemental mould. Now, Hawthorne is vastly more an adept than either Milton or Bunyan in keeping the creatures of his spirit separate, while maintaining amongst them the bond of a common nature; but besides this bond they are joined by another, by something which continually brings us back to the author himself. It is ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;—but what of that? Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... restraining combs and were flying loose at the temples, and, framing all, was a circle of dusky, flattering fur which lent a look of softness and roundness to the firm, square chin and rose above the brow in a quaint, coquettish peak which was vastly ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... went down Miss Lavendar was carrying in the teapot, and behind her, looking vastly pleased, was Charlotta the Fourth, with a plate ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... remarks were true. Still, Dr. Berg was almost a gentleman compared with Dr. McCalla, and he was vastly more of a scholar and debater, far as he was from being ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... the tables of 1850 and 1860 being compiled with great ability, by the present superintendent, the Hon. J. C. G. Kennedy. I compare first Massachusetts and Maryland, because they are maritime and old States, and both in 1790 had nearly the same population, but, as will be shown hereafter, with vastly superior natural advantages in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... assist—to insure a proper interpretation of his thought—and not merely to try to teach the director his business. The script that opens up a way into the very heart of the character so that the actors and the director may be guided in interpreting it, is certainly vastly superior, in that regard at least, to the scenario which concerns itself chiefly with external action. Motives and the whole inner life of the man, set down clearly and briefly, are in the last degree valuable in ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... have been vastly black when you came out of your hiding-place," said De Malfort. "I should have been sorry to see so much beauty disguised in soot. Perhaps Mrs. Kirkland means to appear in the character of a chimney at our next Court masquerade. She would cause as great a stir as Lady Muskerry, in all her Babylonian ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... last time. 20th, went to La Celle, [Footnote: La Celle St.-Cloud, about four miles from Versailles, where M. de Circourt lived throughout the evening of his life.] and spent some days there with Circourt. ['Henry,' wrote Mrs. Reeve, 'enjoyed his days in the country with M. de Circourt vastly. We thought it unreasonable to go all three, and a maid, to his small house; so Hopie and I careered about the streets, went to a play, and to a dance at the Chinese Embassy!—not very Chinese, as the minister is American, so ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... pithy vaunt," said he—"one that redounds vastly to the credit of your dear Yorkshire friends. But don't fear for me, Lina. I am on my guard against these lamb-like compatriots of yours. Don't make ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... in variety and amount. Great Britain, with its twenty thousand merchant ships aggregating over ten million tons, and its immense import and export trade, finds its harbors vastly more important to-day for the national welfare than in Cromwell's time, when they were used by a scanty mercantile fleet. Since the generation of electricity by water-power and its application to industry, the plunging falls of the Scandinavian Mountains, of the Alps of ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... Ordinarily Miss Ocky would have been vastly entertained by this sketch of Simon's attention being distracted, but she was in no mood for amusement at the moment. Her eyes were hard, and if she deliberately kept her comments pitched on a semi-humorous note, ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... to him more, vastly more, than a mere duty, although from the outset he had looked upon it in that light. It had been a test. Had the outcome been reversed, had he failed, had Brayley worsted him, there was every likelihood that Conniston would have left the range. But now, hand in hand with dawning regeneration, ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... other. But if we leave out of view some hundreds, or if you please, some thousands of theological controversialists, who manage the public discussions, and say and do all that really comes before the public on this subject, it will be found, that there is vastly more religious truth admitted by common consent, among the people of New England, than is generally supposed. This common ground, I shall endeavor briefly to describe. For it is very plain, that the teacher ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... function realised all it comprises, nothing human would remain outside. Such an ultimate fulfilment would differ, of course, from a first satisfaction, just as all that reproduction reproduces differs from the reproductive function itself, and vastly exceeds it. All organs and activities which are inherited, in a sense, grow out of the reproductive process and serve to clothe it; so that when the generative energy is awakened all that can ever be is virtually called up ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... of a man, if handsome, well formed and supple, denotes that you will enjoy life vastly and come into rich possessions. If he is misshapen and sour-visaged, you will meet disappointments and many ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... sight of her problem of keeping Billy a lover, and despite the considerable knowledge and experience arrayed before her mental vision, Mercedes Higgins had spread before her a vastly wider panorama. The old woman had verified her own conclusions, given her new ideas, clinched old ones, and even savagely emphasized the tragic importance of the whole problem. Much Saxon remembered of that mad preachment, much she guessed and felt, and much had been ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... from two causes. First, my natural modesty, which I did not lose. I had much reserve toward men. The other, my vanity. Though the husband provided was a more advantageous match than I merited, yet I did not think him such. The figure which the others made, who had offered to me before, was vastly more engaging. Their rank would have placed me in view. Whatever did not flatter my vanity, was to me insupportable. Yet this very vanity was, I think, of some advantage; it hindered me from falling into such things as cause the ruin of families. I would not do anything ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... sins, or sufferings, the wherewithal to bring out of us our most generous tears. Those he wept once or twice himself when writing were drawn from him by a reflex self-pity that is easily evoked. In genuine pathos, Hugo is vastly his superior. ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... again taken up the pen to write to you, and many beginnings have gone into the waste paper basket (I have one now - for the second time in my life - and feel a big man on the strength of it). And no doubt it requires some decision to break so long a silence. My health is vastly restored, and I am now living patriarchally in this place six hundred feet above the sea on the shoulder of a mountain of 1500. Behind me, the unbroken bush slopes up to the backbone of the island (3 to 4000) without a house, with no inhabitants ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hundred votes," laughed the man, vastly pleased. "Let me promise you something. If I'm elected to Congress, I will do and say everything a new member can to wipe out the ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... nice place to visit, and the old ladies enjoy it vastly, especially Aunt Betsy, who never tires of telling what they have "over to Katy's," and whose capeless shaker hangs often on the hall stand, just as it hangs now, while she, good soul, sits in the pleasant parlor, near ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... we found peaceable if vastly excited Indians. But still naked, but still unwise as to gold and spices, traders and markets. Cambalu, Quinsai and ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... more cheaply than by Sir William Howe that year. Had he displayed anything like the energy of his two elder brothers, Washington, with all his vigilance, firmness, and enterprise, could scarcely have brought off the force, vastly diminished but still a living organism, around which American resistance again crystallised and hardened. As it was, within a month he took the offensive, and recovered a great part of ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... your Highness for the offer; but,' here a note of insolent triumph pierced through the studied courtesy of her manner, 'but I find the climate of Stuttgart agrees vastly well with me, and I need no change. Your Highness must remember how much I am in ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... Alaric's discontent with his salary and the terms of his commission, his raiding marches, his plunder of the capital, shows how vastly different was the beginning of the fifth century from the society of three hundred years before. It is symptomatic of the change, and it could only have been possible at a moment when central government was at last breaking down. But it is utterly ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... were made of. I was truly glad to find two or three old shipmates on board. One of them was Gerrard Delisle, my greatest friend. We had gone afloat at the same time and were exactly the same age and standing, though, I must confess, he was vastly my superior in education and ability. He had all the gallantry and impetuosity of an Irishman, with a warm heart full of generous feelings, and at the same time the polish of a man of the world, not always to be ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... tried discussing the matter with Steve he responded so listlessly and seemed so apathetic about either Miss Coulson or Mary that Beatrice became vastly interested in fall projects of her own, telling Aunt Belle that her theory was correct: It was easier to be disappointed in one's husband than in one's friends, and that Steve was the sort who was never going to be concerned about his wife's disappointment; in fact, he would ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... physician, vastly learned in a day when he and other doctors gravely prescribed herbs or bloodsuckers for witchcraft; but he was less interested in his profession than in what was then called modern science. His most famous work is Religio Medici (Religion of a Physician, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... to render impossible any attempt at a remunerative working of these. With the decrease in the working of minerals greater attention was now paid to the pastoral and agricultural industries, and with the growth of these the value and importance of the neighbouring countries increased vastly. This state of affairs was at length acknowledged by the Court of Spain, and was emphasized in 1776 when Buenos Aires was made the seat of a Viceroyalty, and was thus released from the last shred of supervision on the part ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... Father Daly, celebrated mass in the morning, preached a sermon in the afternoon, and in the evening settled the drunken rows—which were entirely too numerous to recommend to a Protestant youth the religion of which the priest was nevertheless a very favorable representative. His influence was vastly important as a governing power, and he wielded it wisely ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... are women of coarse fibre, who imagine that they vastly increase their own importance by being selfishly exacting in the matter of men's self-sacrificing attentions. They may browbeat the men who are in their power; but, outside of this narrow world of their own, they are held in thorough contempt ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... and ten in actual years," she told him. "Vastly more than that in wisdom. Who's getting ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... function of the deity; magic is without such acknowledgment, without emotion or worship. While it has, on one side, a profounder conception of cosmic force than appears in early religion, it is, on the social side, vastly inferior to the latter, to which it has necessarily yielded in the course of human progress. Nevertheless, if religion in the broadest sense includes all means of bringing man into helpful relations with the supernatural world, then magic is a ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... a small town in France about midway between the ancient and romantic cities of Tours and Poitiers. To-day it is an exceedingly unpretentious and an exceedingly sleepy place; but in the seventeenth century it was in vastly better estate. Then its markets, its shops, its inns, lacked not business. Its churches were thronged with worshipers. Through its narrow streets proud noble and prouder ecclesiastic, thrifty merchant and active artisan, passed and repassed in an unceasing stream. It was rich ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... very neat and agreeable: the Forest of Soignies here and there interposes pleasantly, to give your vehicle a shade; the country, as usual, is vastly fertile and well cultivated. A farmer and the conducteur were my companions in the imperial, and could I have understood their conversation, my dear, you should have had certainly a report of it. The ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pistol wound was superficial. Under different circumstances the way would have been full of beauty. The high desert stretched vastly, far, far, far before, behind, on either side, the parched gauntness of its daytime aspect assuaged and evanescent. For the moon, now risen, although on the wane, shed a light sufficient, whitening the rocks and the scattered ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... unlikely persons to bear about them such distinguishing characteristics as would lead to their arrest by the first youthful police-constable who encountered them? I do not want to be rude, or to indicate any lack of discretion on your part, but, from my point of view, I would vastly prefer not to be furnished with any description of these three persons, nor would I care to have seen them as they entered ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... speculatively up at the projection of logs and earth which made them a partial roof—"along with a lot of other bright ideas, by a gentleman named Charles Fort, who took a lot of pleasure in pricking what he considered to be vastly over-inflated scientific pomposity. He gathered together four book loads of reported incidents of unexplainable happenings which he dared the scientists of his day to explain. And one of his bright suggestions was that such phenomena as the vast artificial earthworks found in Ohio ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... perspective are most pleasing. He does not aim at sentiment. He often reminds us of Gainsborough's best manner; but he is superior to him always, in subject, in composition, and in variety. He has great skill in the transparency and clearness of his tones. We think his pictures would be vastly improved if painted in a lower key. His "Scenery near Crediton, Devonshire," is remarkably good; perhaps the sky and distance is a little out of harmony with the rest. There are three pictures by Mr Mueller, two very effective—"Prayers in the Desert"—but we are more struck with his "Arabs seeking ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... and instead of the snow-covered wood, where he had lost himself the previous night, he saw the most charming arbours covered with all kinds of flowers. Returning to the hall where he had supped, he found a breakfast table, ready prepared. "Indeed, my good fairy," said the merchant aloud, "I am vastly obliged to you for your kind care of me." He then made a hearty breakfast, took his hat, and was going to the stable to pay his horse a visit; but as he passed under one of the arbours, which was loaded with roses, he thought ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... wants to see beauty, one must go to Ranelagh; there it is collected, in one bright constellation. There were two ladies very elegant, at Court,—Lady Salisbury and Lady Talbot; but the observation did not in general hold good that fine feathers make fine birds. I saw many who were vastly richer dressed than your friends, but I will venture to say that I saw none neater or more elegant: which praise I ascribe to the taste of Mrs. Temple and my mantuamaker; for, after having declared that I would not have any foil or tinsel about me, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner |
