"Reconstruct" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Rossettis in London in 1871, but was not impressed by them nor they by me. I met Matthew Arnold in New York and heard his lecture on Emerson. My books are, in a way, a record of my life—that part of it that came to flower and fruit in my mind. You could reconstruct my days pretty well from those volumes. A writer who gleans his literary harvest in the fields and woods reaps mainly where he has sown himself. He is a husbandman whose crop springs from the seed of ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... thought. The purpose of "Things to Think About" is to awaken the inquiring attitude. It is at this point of the lesson that the child is given the opportunity he prizes so highly of telling what he has seen, heard, or done. Here he meets with the new problems which compel him to reconstruct his experiences. The printed questions, which map out the main features in the development of the lesson, should be discussed freely. Care should be taken to avoid mechanical answers. It is much better to leave questions unsettled, or to leave the subject with several ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... while she conversed, trying to reconstruct, out of that woman's face, the childish features he dimly remembered. They were effaced. He could see what Keith had meant when he described her as "tailor-made." There was something clear-cut ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Theaetetus, gathers up the sceptical tendencies of his age, and compares them. But he does not seek to reconstruct out of them a theory of knowledge. The time at which such a theory could be framed had not yet arrived. For there was no measure of experience with which the ideas swarming in men's minds could be compared; the meaning of the word 'science' ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... the ship Thames, moored at Carron Wharf, near Tower Bridge. Also a piece of "throw line" similar to that twisted round the body was missing. Also that Duncan, the last time he was seen alive, had declared his intention of taking a bathe. These facts made it easy for the sailor police to reconstruct ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... crystal clear water of the old Roman baths, which King Louis tried to spoil but couldn't, swam back and forth in a golden net of sunshine. We two children of the twentieth century amused ourselves in attempting to reconstruct the baths as they must have looked in the first century; and the glimmering columns under the green water, now lost to the eye, now seen again, white and elusive as mermaids playing hide and seek, ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... seen, and we cannot lay too much stress upon the fact, what the Committee of Resistance wished was to prevent the shedding of blood as much as possible. To construct barricades, to let them be destroyed, and to reconstruct them at other points, to avoid the army, and to wear it out, to wage in Paris the war of the desert, always retreating, never yielding, to take time for an ally, to add days to days; on the one hand to give the people time to understand ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... consumed by the building frenzy, the passion for marble, the boastful desire to build and leave his monument of glory to future generations. After the Caesars and the Popes had come the Italian Government, which was no sooner master of the city than it wished to reconstruct it, make it more splendid, more huge than it had ever been before. It was the fatal suggestion of the soil itself—the blood of Augustus rushing to the brain of these last-comers and urging them to a mad desire to make the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... across at Margaret, and endeavored to recall her as she impressed him that first afternoon, when she knocked defiantly at the workshop door to inquire if he wanted any pans and pails; but he was totally unable to reconstruct that crude little figure with the glossy black head, all eyes and beak, like a ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... on account of the breakers (arrecifes) and the Mulas and Mulattas. The great mole, constructed with wood, and very useful to commerce, was damaged in discharging pieces of artillery. It is entirely destroyed, and it was undecided whether it would be best to reconstruct it with masonry, according to the project of Don Luis de Bassecourt, or to open the bar of Guaurabo by dredging it. The great disadvantage of Puerto de Casilda is the want of fresh water, which vessels have to procure at the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... us as a man who took life with the greatest earnestness. We see plainly from his features, if we know how to reconstruct them, that he bore within him intimate knowledge which he knew that words could only indicate, not express. Out of such a temper of mind arose his celebrated utterance, "All things fleet away," which Plutarch explains thus: "We do not dip twice into the same wave, nor can we touch twice ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... that strange evening, or, at least that part of it with which I had to do. For many other incidents occurred during the hours that followed, events which the confidences of the others who were present at that dinner have fortunately enabled me to reconstruct ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... sentiment was a seed, the promise and potency of kindlier times. With the close of the long struggle other questions arose; got the people's ears; fixed the attention of the leaders. Scant notice could emancipation extort from men who had to repair the ravages of an exhausting war, reconstruct shattered fortunes, restore civil society in parts tumbling into ruinous disorder. The instinct of self-preservation was altogether too masterful for the moral starveling. It succumbed to circumstances, content to obtain an occasional sermon, an annual address, a few ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... is the work of three hands. It was originally built by Casson; the most notable characters in the voicing are due to Thynne; and it remained for Mr. Hope-Jones to entirely reconstruct it with his electric action, stop-keys, double touch, pizzicato touch and some of his new stops. The console is movable, connected with the organ by a cable about one inch thick, containing about 1,000 wires, enabling the player to hear the organ ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... Good-Night. When I go back to town some one will say: 'I think that stranger must have gone away.' And 'Surely!' some one else will then reply. Meanwhile, within the dark of London, I Shall, with my forehead resting on my hand, Not cease remembering your distant land; Endeavouring to reconstruct aright How some treed hill has looked in evening light; Or be imagining the blue of skies Now as in heaven, now as in your eyes; Or in my mind confusing looks or words Of yours with dawnlight, or the song of birds: Not able to resist, not even keep Myself from hovering near ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... music at her feet. Yet I knew I could trace the almost obliterated sculpture only because I had already seen it defined in perfect beauty. A deep crack ran across the marble; it was weathered and stained by many rains, and little ferns grew in the crevices, but I could reconstruct every line from my own knowledge. And how? The Parvati of Ranipur differed in many important details. She stood, bending forward, wheras this sweet Lady sat. Her attendants were small satyr-like spirits of the wilds, piping and ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... had conquered so easily at first and taken for her chum. Of course remonstrances, moral lectures, scoldings, wouldn't accomplish anything. What the situation called for was a second conquest; a reassertion of her moral dominance over the girl. She would have to reconstruct the relation which, since the first week of their tour, she had, in her apathy, allowed to lapse. But that apathy had become too strong to break. She couldn't rouse herself from it. And, failing that, she kept silent; let Dolly go ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... things looked bright for him. His patient did not need him, but K. was anxious to find Joe; so he telephoned the gas office and got a day off. The sordid little tragedy was easy to reconstruct, except that, like Joe, K. did not believe in the innocence of the excursion to Schwitter's. His spirit was heavy with the conviction that he had saved Wilson to make Sidney ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the field of Vicksburg engrossing. The siege of a small city presents a comparatively simple and compact military problem which is, therefore, comprehensible to the civilian mind, and in addition to this the Vicksburg battlefield is splendidly preserved and marked, so that the visitor may easily reconstruct the conflict. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... More by his son-in-law in the sixteenth century, and Walton's handful in the seventeenth, are far from what the present age regards as scientific biography. The preservation of official records makes it possible for the modern scholar to reconstruct with considerable fullness the careers of public men; but in the case of Shakespeare, as of others of his profession, we must needs be content with a few scrappy documents, supplemented by oral traditions of varying ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... these regions, to reconstruct these factories, raw materials are not now sufficient; we need means of transportation. Now the enemy has destroyed our railroad tracks, our railroad equipment, and our rolling stock, which in the first month of the war, in 1914, was reduced by 50,000 cars, has undergone the wear and tear ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... Francesco; not the view from the summit; not the straw mementoes; not the Mino relief in the church; but the Roman arena. The excavators have made of this a very complete place. One can stand at the top of the steps and reconstruct it all—the audience, the performance, the performers. A very little time spent on building would be needed to restore the amphitheatre to its original form. Beyond it are baths, and in a hollow the remains of a temple with the altar where it ever was; and then one walks a little farther and is ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... aspect of things had changed very greatly. I no longer doubted at all the enormous possibilities of the substance, but I began to have doubts about the gun-carriage and the patent boots. We set to work at once to reconstruct his laboratory and proceed with our experiments. Cavor talked more on my level than he had ever done before, when it came to the question of how we should ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... the chief part is played by perverse psychic mechanisms. It is the business of psychoanalysis to straighten these out, and from the bisexual constitution, which is regarded as common to every one, to bring into the foreground the heterosexual elements, and so to reconstruct a normal personality, developing new sexual ideals from the patient's own latent and subconscious nature. Sadger has especially occupied himself with the psychoanalytic treatment of homosexuality and claims many successes.[253] Sadger admits that there are many limits to the success of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Hence the failure is not in the principle, but in the lack of virtue on our part to apply it. The question now is, have we the wisdom and conscience, from the present upheavings of our political system to reconstruct a government on the one enduring basis which never yet has been tried—Equal ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... lying there, trying to reconstruct the events of the preceding day. His brain was lethargic and confused. Something terrible had happened, but what it was he could not for a long time recollect. Then suddenly there came before his eyes that ghastly closing ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... human nature are what they have become by the indirect influences of long ages, and we can no more reconstruct the one than we can change the other. We can no more mend men by theories than we can by coercion—to which, by-the-bye, almost all these theorists look longingly as their final hope and mainstay. We must teach men to mend their own matters, of their own reason, and ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... whether public or private, are so closely allied to architecture that the majority of observers can reconstruct nations and individuals, in their habits and ways of life, from the remains of public monuments or the relics of a home. Archaeology is to social nature what comparative anatomy is to organized nature. A mosaic tells the tale of a society, as the ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... not reconstruct his maxims theoretically. We must study everything that surrounds, alters, and determines him, for it is at this point that a man's environments and relationships most influence him. As Grohmann said, half a century ago, "If you could find an elixir, which could cause the vital organs ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... interesting public garden on the edge of the bluff, overlooking the bay. The city is served by four street-car lines, connecting the suburbs with both the upper and lower towns. In 1906 contracts were made to reconstruct some of these lines for electric traction. The railways radiating from the city to inland points are the Bahia & Alagoinhas which is under construction to Joazeiro, on the Sao Francisco river, a short ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... whether the entire picture is rendered much more natural and real by an accumulation of correct particulars may be questioned. 'La recherche exageree du vrai peut conduire au faux.' It is most doubtful whether laborious research can reconstruct a life-like presentation of a vanished society, its modes of life, its ways of thinking and acting. In vain the novelist or the painter studies archaeology, takes a journey to the Holy Land for his local colouring, reads up the records of the time, or works in museums. The result may be ingenious ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... to reconstruct the accident from Lorraine's description. "He'd no business to start down if his rough-lock wasn't all right," he said. "It ain't like him. Brit's careful about them things—little men most always are. I don't see how 'n 'ell it worked loose. It's a damn queer layout all ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... excellent idea. He applied a sort of cap to the stern, which he filled in with wool, rope-yarn, and the intestines of the animals slaughtered on board, and so effected a stoppage of the leak. From this time the men, who spoke of driving the vessel on a coast to reconstruct another from its ruins, which might take them to the East Indies, thought only of finding a suitable ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... agriculture are the characteristics of us Americans, who have abundance of land, a whole continent to cultivate, and comparatively few hands and small capital with which to do the work. We erect temporary houses and barns and fences, hoping to find time and means at a future day, to reconstruct them in a more thorough manner. We half cultivate our new lands, because land is cheaper than labor; and it pays best for the present, rather to rob our mother earth, than to give her labor ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... were held together by iron, copper, or wooden cramps or plugs, and were covered with sculptured pictures representing scenes of peace and war, from which, as was the case with the Egyptian remains, we are able to reconstruct for ourselves the daily life of the monarchs of those early times. Above the alabaster slabs plastered decorations were used; in some cases painted frescoes have been found, or mosaics formed with enamelled bricks of various ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... from life to death and from death to life by being molded and remolded into different forms, which are constructed according to the intelligence absorbed by the whole. That it is within the power of the human race, if working together as a unit, to reconstruct all living matter on earth into more perfect organisms, just as it is within the power of man to re-mould a pile of dead scrap iron into new and useful machinery. That these results could only be accomplished by the eradication of selfishness from ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... For in that pellucid atmosphere of the Greek mind, untroubled as yet by theoretic mists, there may have been visible the very things which our scientific instruments are enabling us to see and reconstruct piecemeal, great groupings of reality metamorphosed into Fata Morgana cities seemingly built by ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... Bonaparte's landing was received at Vienna it must be confessed that very little had been done at the Congress, for measures calculated to reconstruct a solid and durable order of things could only be framed and adopted deliberately, and upon mature reflection. Louis XVIII. had instructed his Plenipotentiaries to defend and support the principles of justice and the law of nations, so as to secure ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... on this spot at the time of the completion of the Porta della Carta were destroyed by another great fire in 1479, together with so much of the palace on the Rio that, though the saloon of Gradenigo, then known as the Sala de' Pregadi, was not destroyed, it became necessary to reconstruct the entire facades of the portion of the palace behind the Bridge of Sighs, both towards the court and canal. This work was entrusted to the best Renaissance architects of the close of the fifteenth and ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... vortex, and became one of the principal actors in the grand drama of that age, so that Russian interests were sacrificed to ambition, to the love of military glory, and to the Czar's desire to become Don Quixote with an imperial crown and sceptre. He wished to reconstruct the map of Europe, which had been so terribly deranged by those terrible map-destroyers and map-makers, the French republicans. Catharine II. had had the sense to keep out of the war that had been waged against France, though ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... died in 1443, and the Venetians, whom he had honourably served, granted the privilege of a site in the tributary town of Padua for the monument, the cost of which was borne by the family of the dead Condottiere. Donatello had to reconstruct the anatomy of a horse on a colossal scale. He was faced by the formidable task of making the first equestrian bronze statue erected in Italy during the Renaissance, and no model existed except the antique statue of Marcus Aurelius at Rome. Donatello was, however, familiar ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... author's own adventures. It was true in its aspects, rather than in its details. The greater artist disregards the truth of detail to render more strikingly a phase or a condition, to produce an atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished time. This was what Mark Twain did in 'Roughing It'. He told the story of overland travel and the frontier, for his own and future generations, in what is essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing fiction, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... She couldn't even tell the truth, which was that I certainly would have done so if Lady Beldonald hadn't; and she never could mention the subject at all before that personage. I can only describe the affair, naturally, from the outside, and heaven forbid indeed that I should try too closely to, reconstruct the possible strange intercourse of these good friends ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... the method of Zadig, applied to a greater body of facts than the present generation is fortunate enough to handle, will enable the biologist to reconstruct the scheme of life from its beginning, and to speak as confidently of the character of long extinct beings, no trace of which has been preserved, as Zadig did of the queen's spaniel and the king's horse. Let us hope that they may be better rewarded for their toil ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... evident from the text of the appeal that at the time the Council looked upon the Revolution as being primarily a political event, not as a movement to reconstruct the economic and social system. There is no reference to social democracy. Even the land question is not referred to. How limited their purpose was at the moment may be gathered from the statement, "The Council ... makes it its supreme task to organize the people's ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... speaking plainly. If you would wait to speak the truth until you can replace the old decaying formula by a completely elaborated system, you must wait for ever; for the system can never be elaborated until its leading principles have been boldly enunciated. Reconstruct, it is said, before you destroy. But you must destroy in order to reconstruct. The old husk of dead faith is pushed off by the growth of living beliefs below. But how can they grow unless they find distinct utterance? and ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... one hundred and ten feet long and fifty-two feet wide, with stone walls three feet thick, and a flat roof covered with lead. From the Loseley documents, which M. Feuillerat has placed at the disposal of scholars,[280] we are now able to reconstruct the old Frater building, and to point out exactly that portion which was made into ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... being set side by side, had melted into one another in such a way as to give the whole a peculiar quality, to make a kind of musical phrase out of it. In order, then, to estimate retrospectively, the number of strokes sounded, I tried to reconstruct this phrase in thought; my imagination made one stroke, then two, then three, and as long as it did not reach the exact number, four, my feeling, when consulted, was qualitatively different. It had thus ascertained, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... by the restorations of a Lanciani, enables us to piece together these encumbering ruins, until with tolerable clearness we can follow Horace in his walk along the Via Sacra towards Caesar's gardens, and can fairly reconstruct the objects which must have met his view. Everywhere is haunted ground: there is the bronze wolf of the Capitol, "thunder-stricken nurse of Rome," and the Tarpeian rock, from which "the Traitor's leap cured all ambition." There is the mythical gulf of Curtius, and the Mamertine ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... the people praise thee!" Again: when the city is redeemed, the low haunts of vice and pollution will be extinguished. Mr. Etzler, of England, proposes, by the forces of tide, and wind, and wave, and sunshine, to reconstruct the world. In a book of much genius, which rushed rapidly from edition to edition, he says:—"Fellow-men: I promised to show the means of creating a paradise within ten years, where everything desirable for human life may be had by every man in superabundance, without labor and without ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... "I'm afraid you must reconstruct your ideas of me, Ishmael," she said, with an air of candour that struck him as worthy of her even through his pain. "You think of me as something ethereal and angelic, and I'm not. I'm only a woman, Ishmael, and the little things of life—friendship, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... all the life of the valleys, and here more simply than elsewhere is the eternal flux of nature manifested. Ice changing to water, lakes to meadows, and mountains to plains. And while we thus contemplate Nature's methods of landscape creation, and, reading the records she has carved on the rocks, reconstruct, however imperfectly, the landscapes of the past, we also learn that as these we now behold have succeeded those of the pre-glacial age, so they in turn are withering and vanishing to be succeeded by ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... or the dexterity with which, without seeming to rebuke the follower who had moved the Amendment and the eminent men who were prepared to support it, he sustained the Ministry in their effort to reconstruct the Indian Councils, and suggested that the Amendment should with all haste be put into the fire. Whilst SCHWANN appropriated an hour of the Sitting, and SEYMOUR-KEAY exceeded that time, twenty-five minutes served Mr. G. for a speech delivered without note, apparently without ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 9th, 1892 • Various
... to make mysteries, but it is impossible at the moment of action to enter into long and complex explanations. I have the threads of this affair all in my hand. Even if this lady should never recover consciousness we can still reconstruct the events of last night and ensure that justice be done. First of all I wish to know whether there is any inn in ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that, of all abuses, the most hateful to me are those of property; but once more, there is a remedy for this evil without violating it, all the more without destroying it. If the present laws allow abuse, we can reconstruct them. Our civil code is not the Koran; it is not wrong to examine it. Change, then, the laws which govern the use of property, but be sparing of anathemas; for, logically, where is the honest man whose hands are entirely clean? Do you think that one can be a robber without knowing ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... which was the Doctrina in Tagalog, and the other the same work in Chinese. Although we are chiefly concerned here with the former, the fact that they were produced at about the same time and probably at the same place makes it necessary to trace the history of both in order to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the production of the one. Of the Chinese Doctrina no copy has yet come to light, and except for two 1593 references, there are no records of ...
— Doctrina Christiana • Anonymous
... of Sismondi, however much their force may be felt on the Continent, could be formidable at home, as we have said, in only a time of revolution, when the very foundations of society would be unfixed, and opinion set loose, to pull down or reconstruct at pleasure. But it is surely not uninteresting to mark how, in the course of events, that very law of England which, in the view of the Frenchman, has done the Highland peasant so much less, and the Highland chief so much more than justice, is bidding fair, in the case of Sutherland at least, to ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... we can reconstruct things on those lines. Mr. Douglas enters the room. He puts down the candle. A man appears from behind the curtain. He is armed with this gun. He demands the wedding ring—Heaven only knows why, but so it must have been. Mr. Douglas gave it up. Then either in cold blood or in the course of a struggle—Douglas ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... time? So it would be to the end of the chapter. It had been his privilege to tell Fifi that he could not spare her another minute of time till his work was finished.... Had been—but no longer was. Looking back now, he found it impossible to reconstruct the chain of impulse and circumstance which had trapped him into it, but the stark fact was that his own lips had authorized Fifi to profane at will his holy time. Not three hours before he had been betrayed ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the child becomes a mirror in which you recognize your features, that the heart is moved and awakens. Existence becomes duplicated, you are no longer one, but one and a half; you feel your importance increase, and, in the future of the little creature who belongs to you, you reconstruct your own past; you resuscitate, and are born again in him. You say to yourself: "I will spare him such and such a vexation which I had to suffer, I will clear from his path such and such a stone over which I stumbled, I will make him happy, and he shall owe all to me; he shall ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... have correctly apprehended the significance which Jesus attached to His death, men like John and Peter and Paul, or an equal number of scholars in our time, however discerning and candid, who undertake to reconstruct the thoughts of Jesus, and to disentangle them from the supposed subjective reflections of His disciples? Where is the subjectivity likely to be the greatest—in the interpretations of the eye and ear witness, or in the reconstructions ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... expected that the Belgian chamber of commerce would be in possession of definite information. The impassioned belief of these gentlemen in the magnanimity and wealth of America was inspiring, and I sincerely hope that when the time comes to reconstruct this stricken land our people will have as large a part as the Belgians expect and one much more generous than they have had in the saving of the ...
— A Journey Through France in War Time • Joseph G. Butler, Jr.
... any, who would be so illiberal as to wish for the exclusion from the sacred volume of all those books or passages which, though neither genuine nor perhaps edifying, have remained in the Canon of Scripture for many centuries. Any serious attempt to reconstruct the Canon would raise a theological storm which would not subside in this century. The work could never be done perfectly, and even if it could, it would have to be done at the expense of tearing all Christendom in pieces. The passages ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... he would never have the courage to discuss money with her. If she could have looked in upon his thoughts she would have been well content; there was every indication of easy sailing for her scheme to reconstruct ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness. Out of no amount of discreteness can you manufacture the concrete. But place yourself at a bound, or d'emblee, as M. Bergson says, inside of the living, moving, active thickness of the real, and all the abstractions ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... with the words let fall by the portress, what with watching the movements of my cook and making inquiries about her in the proper quarter, I began to understand. Then, the other night, came the lightning-flash. I heard the row in the house, in spite of my being asleep. I managed to reconstruct the incident, to follow up Mme. Mergy's traces, first, to the Rue Chateaubriand and, afterward, to Saint-Germain... And then... what then? I put different facts together: the Enghien burglary... Gilbert's arrest... the inevitable treaty of alliance between the weeping mother and the leader of the ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... reform which may threaten to turn aside a stream of wealth. I sometimes feel as if a great social revolution were necessary to break up our present mercenary civilisation, in order that Christianity, now repelled by the almost universal worldliness, may come into new contact with the soul, and may reconstruct society after its own pure and disinterested principles." Channing's ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... simple reasoning to reconstruct the tragedy even while we hastened to shelter. The family had offered resistance, but had been thrown into a panic at the first danger from fire. Then it was quickly over. Doubtless there had been something of a parley with the usual promise of life if they came ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... attempts at enriching the poor by spoliation and at creating an artificial equality among men have proved a failure. They have invariably ended in national ruin, and have left the masses poorer and more miserable than ever. The reason of this universal failure is obvious. Man cannot reconstruct Nature. He may violate, but cannot alter, the laws of Nature. Inequality rules throughout Nature, and it seems as little possible to equalise the fortunes, as it is to equalise the bodily and mental powers, of men. We all are the slaves of Nature. The inequality of natural gifts and the division ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... put his official foot down with so strong a pressure that McGowan, fearing that he would have to reconstruct everything from the bed of the stream up, if he held out any longer, agreed to arbitrate the matter, he selecting one expert and MacFarlane the other; and the Council—that is, Garry—the third. MacFarlane had chosen the engineer of the railroad who had examined McGowan's ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... to the copy, my ancestors were not married until the 15th of January, 1748. I must have made a blunder—and yet I could hardly believe I had, for I had reason to consider myself accurate. If there was no mistake, I should have to reconstruct my ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... could not. By no mere shibboleth of words, no waving of a wand, could she restore the past, reconstruct what had been out of what was. Love she could give him in full measure, the same enduring love which would be his for ever, believing or unbelieving, living or dead. And his love she would take again—only she herself knew how gladly! But always their mutual love must lack something—that ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... discharge as machines for municipal government, they would become powerful and legalized engines for working out the great aim of the Papists—the destruction of the Protestant church. The clauses which went to reconstruct the Irish corporations were struck out by the lords on the 17th of May; and on the following day Mr. O'Connell put forth a letter "to the people of England," the object of which was to rouse them to show their gratitude to Ireland for the aid which she had lent them ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... was I to proceed to reconstruct this midnight drama? Clearly only one could get into the hole, and that one was Brunton. The girl must have waited above. Brunton then unlocked the box, handed up the contents, presumably—since they were not to be ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... indeed," Rand told her. "And what do you suppose Rivers did with this little item of information? Why, as nearly as I can reconstruct it, he did a very foolish thing. He tried to blackmail a man who had committed a murder. He told Fred Dunmore he'd keep his mouth shut about the .36 Colt, if Dunmore would get him the Fleming collection. He wanted that instead of cash, because ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... moment analyzing. In fact, one could ferret out the full life history in great detail, thus obtaining a complete autobiography leading far down into the depths of the dreamer's mental life and into the inner world of his own. With the material so obtained one could truly reconstruct the complete life history, piecemeal, until the wonderful and inspiring structure of the mental world of the dreamer would be reared, reaching far back to early childhood and perhaps even to infancy, extending so far forward as to give us a prophecy, based on the dreamer's ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... of information did not my father gather as he read, but what a far greater mass did he not see that he must get hold of ere he could reconstruct ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... her passion (increased, as is ever the case with women, even the worst, by the sacrifices it had cost her), and if that passion paused, by the energy of her ambition, which already began to scheme and reconstruct new scaffolds to repair the ruined walls of the past,—Lucretia as yet had not detected what was so apparent to the simple sense of Mr. Fielden. That Mainwaring was grave and thoughtful and abstracted, she ascribed only ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... property and his self-respect. He went out the back way and wandered down the obscure lane grieving, and wondering if any course of future conduct, however discreet and carefully perfected and watched over, could win back his uncle's favor and persuade him to reconstruct once more that generous will which had just gone to ruin before his eyes. He finally concluded that it could. He said to himself that he had accomplished this sort of triumph once already, and that what had been done once could be done again. He would set about it. He would bend every energy ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the second formula, while Burgheimar and myself have shown that it is the true formula of atrolactic acid. Lately we have succeeded in performing the complete synthesis of atropic acid, and the artificial preparation of atropine has been greatly facilitated since I have shown that we can easily reconstruct atropine by starting from its products of decomposition, tropic acid, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... family at discreet intervals, his communications not being altogether untinctured, it is true, by considerations of a financial nature; and his sister Jane, who charged herself with the preservation of this correspondence, would have undertaken to reconstruct his route and to make a full report of his movements up to date on ten minutes' notice. She kept his letters in a large box-file that she had teased from her father at the store; and two or three times ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... me when you read this that it is almost too good to be true. There is a freshness and a naivet about it which is only to be found in American melodrama. Let us reconstruct the situation, and we shall see at once how delightfully true to fiction ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... more than reconstruct them by analogy. Royal Hippo is utterly gone. Bona, which has taken its place, is about a mile and a half away, and the fragments which have been dug out of the soil of the dead city are very inadequate. But Africa is full of Christian ruins, and ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... question of the existence or nonexistence of the western towers. Mr. William Longman and Mr. E.B. Ferrey give none in their south-west view, because "no drawings or plates are known to exist which would settle the question." But it is our misfortune that we have to reconstruct Old St. Paul's practically without the help of drawings, until we come to Inigo Jones' finished work. In Dugdale's ground-plan they cover almost exactly the same area as one of the severies of the neighbouring aisles, and are flush with the west front; in both ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... concerned, the mathematician's technical equipment is almost wholly Greek. The Greeks laid down the principles, fixed the terminology and invented the methods ab initio; moreover, they did this with such certainty that in the centuries which have since elapsed there has been no need to reconstruct, still less to reject as unsound, any essential part of ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... was born, or criticism conceived, or the telescope invented, or America and Australia and the Germanic races heard of; but we should hold our speculative theological beliefs freely and provisionally, ready to reconstruct and read just them, from time to time, in accordance with the demands of the growing body ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the suggestion, as he turned it over in his mind. "By George! I think you're right," he said. "I'd quite forgotten it. Of course I did. Let me see—oh yes, I reconstruct it readily enough now. Poor old chappie—he needs all he can get. He was bothering her about money—that was it, I remember now—but what an idiot I was to forget it. But what I was saying—there's no one else but my mother and sister, and my brother ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... can examine, is frayed. He was cunning enough to do that with his knife. But the other end is not frayed. You could not observe that from here, but if you were on the mantelpiece you would see that it is cut clean off without any mark of fraying whatever. You can reconstruct what occurred. The man needed the rope. He would not tear it down for fear of giving the alarm by ringing the bell. What did he do? He sprang up on the mantelpiece, could not quite reach it, put his knee on the bracket—you will see the impression in the dust—and so got his ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... that which is solid and indestructible. Perhaps some great and wise spirit brooding over our world, learned with the experience of aeons, of human attempts and mistakes, smiles at the deadly earnestness of the intention to reconstruct. I do not care. We have reached a pass when all life and all hope are centred in this faith: the faith that we can make anew and good and beautiful the distorted web ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... exhausted, and words have lost their usual meaning. Nothing but the logic of events touches their understanding; but, of late, this has worked a wonderful change. If our country were like Europe, crowded with people, I would say it would be easier to replace this class than to reconstruct it, subordinate to the policy of the nation; but, as this is not the case, it is better to allow the planters, with individual exceptions, gradually to recover their plantations, to hire any species of labor, and to adapt ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... will not do," said the husband of Zenobia. "We must have new blood. Peel must reconstruct on a ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... was that I was asked to believe the unbelievable. It was impossible to reconstruct in that quiet house a scene of violence. It was equally impossible, in view, for instance, of that calm and filial inscription in the history of Bolivar County, to connect Miss Emily with it. She had killed a woman, forsooth! Miss Emily, of the ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... made, so as to rise, by a clear analysis of things, to the general principles on which they have been actually framed and put together, they have set out from the lofty region of universal abstractions, and proceeded to reconstruct the world for themselves. Instead of beginning with the actual, as best befits the feebleness of the human intellect, and working their way up into the great system of things, they have taken their position at once in the high and boundless realm of the ideal, and thence ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... made almost sacrosanct by having been used for the greatest of our dramas, Goethe's Faust; Wildenbruch in particular tried to gain new effects with it. Other attempts also went hand in hand with deeper-reaching efforts to reconstruct the inner form of the drama; thus the tendency to a veiled polyphony of language in the folk-scenes of Christian Dietrich Grabbe and in all the plays of Heinrich von Kleist; this in Hofmannsthal's ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... make of these, stepping-stones to success. He will experience griefs and bereavements, but out of these he will build a finer character and rise to higher things. One, however, who gives in to these things, refusing to rise again and reconstruct his life, condemns himself to further suffering, thus making utter shipwreck ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... in a new light. He, too, had met temptation, had fallen, had gone down into the depths, and in that awful and interpretative experience, comprehended the victory which his mother had won on the field of dishonor and defeat! He was now enabled to reconstruct, by the aid of his enlightened imagination, a true picture of the events which she had sketched so imperfectly in those few brief words. He realized what she must have had to struggle against, and could measure the whole weight of ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... Russia; from this centre they dispersed in all directions. The majority of the people—Greeks, Latins, Germans, Slavs—forgot their origin; but the sacred books of the Hindoos and the Persians preserve the tradition. Effort has been made[22] to reconstruct the life of our Aryan ancestors in their mountain home before the dispersion. It was a race of shepherds; they did not till the soil, but subsisted from their herds of cattle and sheep, though they already ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... throws him back on his own resources; it makes him honest to himself. If he thinks the criticism thus passed on Aristotle unfair, he will begin to read his works with new eyes. He will not only construe his words, but try to reconstruct in his own mind the thoughts so carefully elaborated by that ancient philosopher. He will judge of their truth without being swayed by the authority of a great name, and probably in the end value what is valuable in ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... deprived you of mirrors, which reflect the present, so they left you in ignorance of history, which reflects the past. Since your imprisonment, books have been forbidden you; so that you are unacquainted with a number of facts, by means of which you would be able to reconstruct the shattered mansion of your recollections and ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... find only slight and imperfect remnants, and as you pass monstrosities more modern you will involuntarily close your eyes. But the remnants are there, slight as they are; and they are worth your search for them, as we try together to reconstruct the ancient city of which they formed ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... and Taggart had expected to wait the year specified in the will, certain that he would not appear to claim the money or the idol, or they might have planned to leave before he could return. But since he had surprised them by returning unexpectedly, it followed that they must reconstruct their plans; they would have to make it impossible for him to comply with his father's wishes. They could easily do that, or thought they could, by making life at the ranch unbearable for him. That, ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... carries wherever he goes the true peasant simplicity of outlook, speaks with the peasant's bald frankness, and suffers a peasant confusion in the face of complexity. How far he sees life on one simple plane may be illustrated by his short story When the Old Century Was New, an attempt to reconstruct in fiction the New York of 1801 which shows him, in spite of some deliberate erudition, to be amazingly unable to feel at home in another age than his own. This same simplicity of outlook makes A Traveler at Forty so revealing a document, makes the Traveler ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... arrangement and motive of its life; and it stands ready to attempt nothing less than a radical reconstruction, which only frank and honest counsels and the forces of generous cooperation can hold back from becoming a revolution. We are in a temper to reconstruct economic society, as we were once in a temper to reconstruct political society, and political society may itself undergo a radical modification in the process. I doubt if any age was ever more conscious of its task or more ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... of coloured paper interested her mightily—hotel labels. She was for ever scanning luggage and finding her way about the world, via these miniature pictures. London, Paris, Rome! There were no hotel labels on the patient's trunk, but there were ship labels; and by these she was able to reconstruct the journey: from New York to Naples, thence to Alexandria; from Port Said to Colombo; from Colombo to Bombay; from Calcutta to Rangoon, thence down to Singapore; from Singapore to ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... thought a fool or a prig. They talk about games, they gossip about boys and masters, sometimes their conversation is nasty and bestial. But it conceals very real if very fitful emotions; yet it is impossible to recall or to reconstruct; and when older people attempt to reconstruct it, they remember the emotions which underlay it, and the eager interests out of which it all sprang; and they make it something picturesque, epigrammatic, and vernacular which is wholly untrue to life. The ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to reconstruct the crime as the next entrant would judge it—the thief gliding in by the window; the collector busy over the examination of his curios; the blow, probably only intended to stun; the hasty ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... is goaded into too many pusillanimous concessions to plausibility. He no longer moves with the gait of omnipotence. It was very different in the palmy days when Dumas was free to play at ducks and drakes with history, and Victor Hugo to reconstruct the whole system of English government, and Scott to compel the sun to set in the east, whenever such minor changes caused to flow more smoothly the progress of the tale these giants had in hand. These freedoms are not tolerated in American noveldom, and only a few futile "high-brows" sigh in ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... carefully predetermined line. The intention was to destroy all the control panels of the absorber screens; parts so vital that without them the great vessel would be helpless, and yet items which the Terrestrials could reconstruct quite readily from their photographs ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... which it has been handed down to us by epitomizers, has rendered, and continues to render, service to science; if it is not the actual history of Egypt, it is a sufficiently faithful substitute to warrant our not neglecting it when we wish to understand and reconstruct the sequence of events. His dynasties furnish the necessary framework for most of the events and revolutions, of which the monuments have preserved us a record. At the outset, the centre to which the affairs of the country gravitated was in the extreme ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... impossible afterwards to reconstruct the manner of its occurrence. To Angele's mind—what there was left of it—the matter always remained a hideous blur, a blot, a vague, terrible confusion. No doubt they two had been watched; the plan succeeded too well for any other supposition. One moonless night, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... terms, the Roman constitution had gone utterly to wreck; Sulla was in something of the same position as Oliver Cromwell. He had to reconstruct under conditions which made a constitutional restoration impracticable; but his control of the efficient military force gave him the necessary power. That any system introduced must be arbitrary and find its ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... heathen philosophers to those plants which the earth produces in places that have never seen the heavens. The soil of his experience does not grow a single belief; and as no community can exist without a belief of some kind, so a politician without belief can but help to destroy; he cannot reconstruct. Such writers corrupt a society; they do not ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... After fifty years of railways, there still does not exist, in a world which is said to be over devoted to military affairs, a skilled and organized body of men, specially prepared to seize, repair, reconstruct, work, and fight such an important element in the new social machinery as a railway system. Such a business, in the next European war, will be hastily entrusted to some haphazard incapables drafted from one or other of the two prehistoric ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... early morning of August 12 will never be fully known; but much of it, in view of our knowledge, we were able to reconstruct. Thus—Jones ate his supper that night, a mild and well-disposed individual. During the afternoon before, he had read prayers for the soul of Schwartz, in whose departure he may or may not have had a part I am inclined to think not, Jones construing his mission as being ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... up and down after a while, marvelling, trying to reconstruct his ideas once more, and to take in the astonishing system and organization whose signs were so evident about him. Certainly it was thorough and efficient. There must be countless institutions—hospitals, retreat-houses, cloisters, besides all the offices ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... must have existed; OLLENDORFF cannot have been a mere symbol. And as students of SHAKSPEARE have endeavoured to reconstruct the man from his plays so I feel sure that the character of OLLENDORFF, his interests and politics, might very well be reconstructed from a study of his dialogues. One must admit that his Teutonic patronymic is an obstacle to his revival, but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... this jargon is the depository of certain Middle High German expressions and elements no longer used in the modern German, and that philologists are forced to resort to the study of the Polish-Jewish patois to reconstruct the old idiom. In 1523, the year of Luther's Pentateuch translation, a Jewish-German Bible dictionary was published at Cracow, and in 1540 appeared the first Jewish-German translation of the Pentateuch. The Germans strongly influenced the popular ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... talk according to the simple rules of modern times. It is rather that about this time the man of letters emerges from the mists of legend and becomes as real as one's uncle in his daily passions and his train of little interests. One has not to reconstruct the lives of Swift and Pope from a handful of myths and references in legal documents. There is no room for anything akin to Baconianism in their regard. They live in a thousand letters and contemporary illusions, and one might as well be an ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... thousands of small facts and faint indications accidentally preserved in the relics of the past; to interpret them with the aid of comparative ethnology; and, after having heard so much about what used to divide men, to reconstruct stone by stone the institutions which ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... engagement of her brother. When the whole groundwork on which one's daily life is built caves in, and falls into the cellar without one moment's warning, it is not in human nature to pick one's self up, and reconstruct and rearrange in a moment. So Grace thought, at any rate; but she made a hurried effort to dash back her tears, and gulp down a rising in her throat, anxious only not to be selfish, and not to disgust her brother in the ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... must come "among those present." It should show us its famous places. It should afford us peep-holes into the studios of famous artists—Augustus John's studio is a revelation in careful disarrangement; it should take us round a "Show Sunday"; it should reconstruct the naive gaieties of Cremorne; and, finally, it should recreate and illumine all the large, forgotten moments in the lives of those apostles of beauty whose ruminations and dreams the soul of Chelsea has fused with more of herself than men ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... letters had, for the most part, either been dropped, or fused with the case-endings, long before the period of historic Old English. It is only, therefore, by a rigid comparison of the Germanic languages with one another, and with the other Aryan languages, that scholars are able to reconstruct a single Germanic language, in which the original stem-characteristics may be seen far better than in any one historic branch of the Germanic ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... variation, suggested by local conditions, of a well-known stanza. When to the possession of a mass of traditions and stories and of facility of improvisation is added the habit of singing and dancing, it is not difficult to reconstruct in our own thought the conditions under which popular poetry came into being, nor to understand in what sense a community can make its own songs. In the brave days when ballads were made, the rustic peoples were not mute, as they are to-day; nor sad, as they have become in so ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... women indignant. A crowd of people spent the day on the site of the funeral pile, looking for fragments of bone in the shingle that was still warm. They found enough bones to reconstruct ten skeletons, for the farmers on shore frequently throw their dead sheep into the sea. The finders carefully placed these various fragments in their pocketbooks. But not one of them possesses a true particle ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... kuppenheimers is a fine achievement of projected psychology. He knows Tarkington so well that if the latter were unhappily deleted by some "wilful convulsion of brute nature" I think it undoubtable that his biographer could reconstruct a very plausible automaton, and would know just what ingredients to blend. A dash of Miss Austen, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Daudet; flavored perhaps with coal smoke from Indianapolis, spindrift from the Maine coast and a few twanging chords ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... sank into a deep rush chair Patty had a blurred vision of low bookcases, pictures, rugs, and polished brass thrown into soft relief by a shaded lamp which stood on the table. Before she had time to mentally shake herself and reconstruct her ideas she was gaily chatting to Miss Prescott about the probable outcome of a serial story in ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... but the Socialism of 1840-50 was a very different proposition from the Socialism of to-day. The earlier socialists were not in politics. They had no party, politically speaking, and took only a remote and indirect interest in political affairs. What they wanted was to reform the world; to reconstruct civilization on a scientific basis. That was what President Lincoln was wont to call a big job. However, faith will move mountains, and the socialists certainly had faith. Their purpose was far reaching, to be sure, ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... and diplomatist, would doubtless have entirely altered the aspect of human affairs. There was very much in his plan to secure the approval of all those enlightened men who were mourning over the incessant and cruel wars with which Europe was ever desolated. His intention was to reconstruct Europe into fifteen States, as nearly uniform in size and power as possible. These States were, according to their own choice, to be monarchical or republican, and were to be associated on a plan somewhat resembling that of the United ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... resultant benefits. He increases his own independence and comfort and that of his family. He is immune to superstitious belief in and respect for the mysterious power of political or economic nostrums to reconstruct human society according to ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... this, equally shared by both, was so intense that, for a second, Cassy felt that everything happening then had happened ages ago, that she was taking part in a drama rehearsed on a stage that memory cannot reconstruct but which stood, and, it may be, still stands, back of those doors that close ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... messenger. The calendar on the wall had been set back to January 9th, and the HERALD of that date lay half-opened on Sydenham's old desk. It will be remembered that Sydenham had been detained on some of Mr. Sandford's private business, and it was perfectly feasible to reconstruct its details. Mr. Sandford had been coached in his part by Indiman, and the preparations for the experiment being finally perfected, Sydenham was called in. He appeared, dressed in the same clothes that he had worn the month before, looking a little pale, indeed, ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... incidentally presented, as thereby we shall be able to trace the career of the remarkable man who controlled the National Assembly, and who applied the torch to the edifice whose horrid and fearful fires he would afterwards have suppressed. It is easy to destroy; it is difficult to reconstruct. Nor is there any human force which can arrest a national conflagration when once it is kindled: only on its ashes can a new structure arise, and this only after long and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... battle of Actium is a baffling problem to reconstruct on account of the wide divergence in the accounts. For instance, the actual number of ships engaged is a matter of choice between the extremes of 200 to 500 on a side. And the consequences were so important to Octavius and to Rome ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... remember it (better than the event has proved), and then I wandered away and looked at another curious old church, Notre-Dame-de-la-Couture. This sacred edifice made a picture for ten minutes, but the picture has faded now. I reconstruct a yellowish-brown facade, and a portal fretted with early sculptures; but the details have gone the way of all incomplete sensations. After you have stood awhile in the choir of the cathedral, there is no ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... no doubt of all her father's wealth. "I must have seen her—I am sure there was a child about"; he said to himself again; and his thoughts went groping into a mostly forgotten past, and as he endeavoured to reconstruct it, the incident which had brought him for a few weeks into close relations with Robert Blanchflower, then Major Blanchflower of the—Dragoons, came at ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... escape the fate of all other ideas of innovation. Indeed, as the most revolutionary and uncompromising innovator, Anarchism must needs meet with the combined ignorance and venom of the world it aims to reconstruct. ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... the theory that the trail had been made by the Indian to whom the trapping rights of the district belonged. At once the two men began to spy here and there eagerly, trying to reconstruct from the meagre vestiges of occupation who the camper had been and what he ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... once set in. It is a pregnant problem. What will be the nature of this new and most necessary law of development? Can the common man pause long enough from his undermining labors to answer? Since he is bent upon dragging down the bourgeoisie and reconstructing society, can he so reconstruct that a premium, in some unguessed way or other, will still be laid upon the strong and efficient so that the human type will continue to develop? Can the common man, or the uncommon men who are allied with him, devise ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... her. She had often dreamed of the great world beyond Coniston, and no one, not even Jethro, had guessed the longings to see it which had at times beset her. Often she had dropped her book to summon up a picture of what a great city was like, to reconstruct the Boston of her early childhood. She remembered the Mall, where she used to walk with her father, and the row of houses where the rich dwelt, which had seemed like palaces. Indeed, when she read of palaces, these houses always came to her mind. And now she was to behold a palace ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... not the El Paso of The Spider's earlier days, and for a brief while he forgot his mission in endeavoring mentally to reconstruct the old town as he had known it. Arrived at the Plaza he turned and gazed about. "Number two," he said to himself, recalling the portly Mexican—and the voice. ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... converts were from among the young people, not a few were persons of mature years, and some of them in affluent circumstances. The large increase of members rendered it necessary to reconstruct the classes, but the want of class rooms retarded this branch of our work. Several of the classes were assigned to meet during the week at private houses, and four of them met in the audience room at the close of the morning service. By placing a class in each ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... awkward in expression, the reader should revise it; wherever there is a seeming error in the logical development of a subject, or the psychological development of a fictitious character, he should reconstruct it. Nothing is so helpful to a writer as self-criticism. Thus Mrs. Humphrey Ward has recently confessed that the happy ending of her "Lady Rose's Daughter" was an artistic error, false to psychology, her heroine being doomed to unhappiness by her character. After creating his characters, ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller |
