"Circumambient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... easy sentimentality: it involves definite sacrifice in more directions than one; it demands thought, perseverance, supernatural strength, natural strenuousness; it is not a selfish enjoyment of a circumambient atmosphere wrapping humanity, without responsibility or effort of its own: ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... witches of Endor, the frigid flitting of the spirits, but the most superficial meteorologist will expound it you learnedly. Your hand, passive and in a fixed position, heats the air under it, which, becoming lighter, is constantly displaced by the colder circumambient air. Finally, when everybody is wrought up to an exalted expectation of the supernatural, the table begins to oscillate, to move slowly to and fro, to waltz, and even to raise itself partially or wholly off the ground. Sometimes ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... but oh, how imperfect the verb To express to the senses her movement superb! To say that she "sailed in" more clearly might tell Her grace in its buoyant and billowy swell. Her robe was a vague circumambient space, With shadowy boundaries made of point-lace. The rest was but guess-work, and well might defy The power of critical feminine eye To define or describe: 'twere as futile to try The gossamer web of the cirrus to ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... such a shining light upon the Waves, as if the Sea was on fire. And being delivered from the brackish Water, and received into the open Air, those fiery and shining Meteors which fix upon the Masts and Sides of the Ships, and are only nitrous particles condensed by the circumambient Cold, and like that which the Chymists call Phosphorus, or artificial Glow-worm, shine and cast a Light but have no Heat: This gives the Mariners the second Notice that the Storm is rising, for upon the first breaking out of the Wind, the Sea begins to be rough, and the Waves swell and rise, ...
— The Shepherd of Banbury's Rules to Judge of the Changes of the Weather, Grounded on Forty Years' Experience • John Claridge
... sails were filled, and fair the light winds blew As glad to waft him from his native home; And fast the white rocks faded from his view, And soon were lost in circumambient foam; And then, it may be, of his wish to roam Repented he, but in his bosom slept The silent thought, nor from his lips did come One word of wail, whilst others sate and wept, And to the reckless gales ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... Lamp, fades into a fable. Mr. Strachey glorifies the demon that possessed this pitiless, rushing spirit of philanthropy. He gloats over its ravages; its irresistible violence of purpose. It is an evident pleasure to him to be able to detach so wild a figure from the tameness of the circumambient scene, and all his enmity to the period comes out in the closing pages, in which he describes how the fierce philanthropist lived so long that the Victorian Age had its revenge upon her, and reduced ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... for good, in spite of the obvious unpopularity which an incessant critic cannot fail to draw down upon himself. The most pessimistic of us secretly crave a little respite when for half an hour we may forget the circumambient and all-pervading gloom: music, or an entertaining book, or a dear friend lifts the burden from us. And then comes our uncompromising pessimist and chides us for our softness and for letting ourselves be led astray from our ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... I had for my attempt, was the desire to ascertain the ultimate points of contrariety between the Roman and Anglican creeds, and to make them as few as possible. I thought that each creed was obscured and misrepresented by a dominant circumambient "Popery" ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... the pulse is large and full), it must come to pass that if you plunge into a bath of water or of oil when the pulse is strong and full, it ought forthwith to become either smaller or much slower, since the circumambient bath will render it either difficult or impossible for the air to penetrate. In like manner, as all the arteries, those that are deep-seated as well as those that are superficial, are dilated at the same instant and with the same rapidity, how is it possible that air ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... our youth, if thus it be, Of one short joy, one lust, one pleasant dream? Stringing vain words of powers we cannot see, Blind divinations of a will supreme; Lost labour! when the circumambient gloom But hides, if Gods, Gods ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... The new-born clouds all dappled with gold, and streaked with violet; the sun in high spirits; and the pleasant air cooled overnight by the blending circumambient fountains, forever playing all round the reef; the lagoon within, the coral-rimmed basin, into which they poured, subsiding, hereabouts, into ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... hypothalline base. The distinct habits of the two species are represented in Figs. 5 and 7. In the one the distinct sporangia are associated but not crowded; in the other all are massed together in quite aethalioid fashion, forming circumambient, chalky masses of considerable size, 2 or 3 cm., overcrowded, superimposed, where the sporangia are regular in shape and size by reason of mutual pressure. The plasmodium develops in forests and orchards, among decaying leaves, but is inclined to rise as maturity draws near, ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... be born again. He breathed the circumambient air as though he had never breathed it before, and he took a child's pleasure in all the facts of the world. He called his period of insanity six ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... an international tongue must not be a golden treasury of art, a repository of "bigotry and virtue." On its orderly rows of shelves must be immediately accessible the right word for the right place: no superfluity, no disorder, no circumambient margin for effect. Homocea-like, it "touches the spot," and having deadened the ache of incomprehensibility, has done its task. ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... hardly one word is close to the original, though here and there some outline or shadow of a real passage is traceable. What fractional elements, capable of gaining some vestige of meaning when laid together in their cosmic order, I could pick from the circumambient immensity not cosmic, are here for the reader's behoof. Let him skip, if, like myself, he is weary; for the substance of the story is elsewhere given. Or perhaps he has the curiosity to know the speech of birds? ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... ill-conditioned lamps, with wicks that always wanted picking, which burned red and smoked a good deal, and were apt to go out without any obvious cause, leaving strong reminiscences of the whale-fishery in the circumambient air. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to want it!" shrieked Checkleigh. "Oh, bloated plutocrat, purse-proud millionaire, I always happen to want it!" He waved an eloquent hand to the circumambient air. "He has five-franc pieces in his waistcoat pocket—and no Rabbits in his family!" cried Checkleigh. "Now, have you a presentable pair of gloves, Croesus?—Oh, damn your legs, Champneys! Look at these beastly ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... occupy thought when he is walking, provided fatigue has not overtaken him. Mental confidence awake amid the stir seems increased by the exercise of bodily power, and becomes free and fearless as the step rejoicing in the ample scope afforded by the broad green earth and circumambient sky. On the same grounds, I have sometimes marvelled if it might not be the majesty of motion, as one may say, reigning around the seaman's soul, that made his heart so frank in communication, and in action ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... intersected and cut up by straits and seas of ignorance. The author of Ecce Coelum has declared: 'Things die out under the microscope into the same unfathomed and, so far as we can see, unfathomable mystery, into which they die off beyond the range of our most powerful telescope.' This sense of the circumambient unknown has become cardinal with the best spirits of the age. Men have a more rigorous sense of ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... all; More late descends to earth. He sang that hymn, 'Let there be light, and there was light;' and lo! On the void deep came down the seal of God And stamped immortal form. Clear laughed the skies; From circumambient deeps the strong earth brake, Both continent and isle; while downward rolled The sea-surge summoned to his home remote. Then came a second vision to the man There standing 'mid his oxen. Darkness sweet, He sang, of pleasant frondage clothed the vales, And ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... and make Ethel the principal figure: if you make her like, she certainly will be—and other lights will be only minor fires. You may paint her form, but you can't paint her colour; that is what beats us in nature. A line must come right; you can force that into its place, but you can't compel the circumambient air. There is no yellow I know of will make sunshine, and no blue that is a bit like sky. And so with pictures: I think you only get signs of colour, and formulas to stand for it. That brick-dust which we agree to receive as representing a blush, look at ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray |
