"Absorption" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... War, without a moment's hesitation, is a signal proof of their character. No men were ever greater lovers of peace. Some philosophers have seen or tried to see in the War a judgment on the luxury and frivolity of pre-War England, on her neglect of defence, and her absorption in opulence. Were this the case, it would be ironical to reflect how the North Country homes, first and most cruelly scourged by the War, were homes to which the so-called "sins of society" were least known and most repugnant, and where military training had been ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... it is necessary to make sure that there is no wound or abrasion of the skin through which absorption might ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... no race prejudice," he would say, "but we people of mixed blood are ground between the upper and the nether millstone. Our fate lies between absorption by the white race and extinction in the black. The one does n't want us yet, but may take us in time. The other would welcome us, but it would be for us a backward step. 'With malice towards none, with charity for all,' we must do the best we can for ourselves ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... had to maintain his ideal, and it will not do to minimize this struggle, had strengthened and enlarged his soul. One may as well lament Milton's absorption in the conflicts of his country as Lanier's participation in the war and in the stirring events of reconstruction. After the fortitude and endurance manifested in this period of his life, his later sufferings were the more easily borne. One of his favorite theories was that antagonism or ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... the feat to the best advantage, or had the widest gape, seized the less fortunate, and slowly and with much straining and little apparent joy swallowed it. Often the rivals would not meet in mid air, and the lapse provided the delusion of innocent play. There were hundreds of examples of absorption of the least fit by the fittest to survive, and the chronicling of the cannibal feast would be incomplete if a singular detail were unrelated. The participators seemed of like size. Complexion alone varied and foppish discrimination ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... and morning, and rinsing out the mouth after each meal. The brush should not be very hard, as it will not only be more difficult to clean the interstices between the teeth, the part in which the tartar[FN24] is most likely to be deposited, but by its friction, will occasion the gradual absorption of the gum and the exposure of the neck of the teeth. The hair of the brush should be firm and elastic, and ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... read a letter from Captain Abney, pointing out that Prof. Rowland's plates gave clearer spectra than any others; they were free from "ghosts," caused by periodicity in the ruling, and the speculum metal had no particular absorption. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... intensity of anguish with which an ancient Roman generally regarded the thought of banishment. In the long melancholy wail of Ovid's "Tristia;" in the bitter and heart-rending complaints of Cicero's "Epistles," we may see something of that intense absorption in the life of Rome which to most of her eminent citizens made a permanent separation from the city and its interests a thought almost as terrible as death itself. Even the stoical and heroic Thrasea openly confessed that he should prefer death to exile. To a heart so affectionate, ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... that they have some time to be alone together. Yet the lovers should be as careful to keep their place in the social life of the home as if there were no special attachment. For social exclusiveness shows an absorption in each other which, if selfishly indulged, will bring its own penalty. That a couple are engaged denotes expectation of a future when they will be thrown largely upon each other's society; and, because it ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... amazing energy of private enterprise, only 17,000 miles have been completed in all the States in a quarter of a century; when we see the crippled condition of many works commenced and prosecuted upon what were deemed to be sound principles and safe calculations; when we contemplate the enormous absorption of capital withdrawn from the ordinary channels of business, the extravagant rates of interest at this moment paid to continue operations, the bankruptcies, not merely in money but in character, and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... eosine J, pyrosine J, erythrosine yellowish, may all be noted as very good sensitizers for green, yellow-green, and eventually for yellow. The bluish shades of eosine colors, on the contrary, have an absorption band further in the yellow. This is also the case with the blue shade eosine (eosine B) and the most bluish of all eosines, the bengal rosa. Of both eosines, yellow shade and blue shade, the latter gives a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... nearer. Stane was conscious of its attention, and the blood in Miskodeed's face came and went in a manner that was almost painful. Any one looking at them, and noting the apparent absorption of the man and the certain embarrassment of the girl, must have utterly miscomprehended the situation, and that was what happened, for a moment later, the sound of a laughing feminine voice ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... efface it, by a blur or darkness, but by mere light. The bluest sky disappears on that shining edge; there is not substance enough for colour. The rim of the hill, of the woodland, of the meadow-land, of the sea—let it only be far enough—has the same absorption of colour; and even the dark things drawn upon the bright edges of the sky are lucid, the light is among them, and they are mingled with it. The horizon has its own way of making bright the pencilled figures of forests, which ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... and into St. James's Park. There he threw himself on the first seat he saw, in an absorption so deep that it excited the wondering notice ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... neither from the chivalrous magnanimity of a proud, nor from the sentimental clemency of an effeminate, nature, but from the correct statesmanly consideration that vanquished parties are disposed of more rapidly and with less public injury by their absorption within the state than by any attempt to extirpate them by proscription or to eject them from the commonwealth by banishment. Caesar could not for his high objects dispense with the constitutional party itself, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... of philosophers, and the daily examples of losses and misfortunes which life forces upon our observation, such is the absorption of our thoughts in the business of the present day, such the resignation of our reason to empty hopes of future felicity, or such our unwillingness to foresee what we dread, that every calamity comes suddenly upon us, and not only presses us ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... felt the Spanish control of the navigation, and the intermittent but always possible hostility of the Spanish officials, to be peculiarly irksome. They were, as a rule, too shortsighted to see that the only permanent remedy for their troubles was their own absorption into a solid and powerful Union. Therefore they were always ready either to join a movement against Spain, or else to join one which seemed to promise the acquisition of special ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... was listening with uncomprehending awe, heard behind his back a triumphant chuckling sound. It gave him the shudders, he said, to mention it now; but at the time, except for another chill down the spine, it had not the power to destroy his absorption in the scene before his eyes, and before his ears too, because just then Captain Anthony raised his voice grimly. Perhaps he too had heard the ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... delicious the most ordinary food is, when cooked and eaten in the open air, after a day of reasonable exertion? Climbing, riding, and walking expand the lungs, and this means the absorption of immeasurably more oxygen. Weak stomachs, fickle appetites, dyspeptic symptoms, insomnia, blue devils and a score of the ills that human flesh is heir to, disappear before the floods of sunshine and oxygen that bathe the body, inside ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... compounded of a variety of elements. The shyness and reserve characteristic of many cultivated Englishmen, was accentuated in his case by a natural austerity and an absorption in serious thought. But though his temper was puritanic and inclined to moroseness, there was no sourness or cynicism in it. "If," he wrote to Miss Symonds, "I am rather a melancholy bird, given to physical fatigue and depression, ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... me send for Bryan!" she pleaded, as they met—blaming herself sharply the while for her own absorption and inaction during the morning hours. "You don't look a ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... over the red J and she still looked at it and not at Tembarom. This was not coyness, but simple, calm absorption. If she had not been making the J, she would have sat with her hands folded in her lap, and gazed at the ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Yet the spectator does not notice these stupendous discrepancies. The representation, in spite of its vast difference, at once carries the mind on to the actuality, and the spectator may even appear to himself, in moments of complete absorption, to be looking ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... that when we die there is an end even of our seeming self-hood; we are once more immersed in the All, the Whole—like a thimbleful of water drawn from the ocean and poured back into the ocean again. This is what Mr. Picton calls "the peace of absorption in the Infinite"; would it not be simpler to call it annihilation, and have done with it? Dissolve a bronze statue and merge it in a mass of molten metal, and it is gone as a statue; dissolve a soul ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... that part of the boat, and retire as far from him as she could, as if his presence were an insult to her. Tears of rage started into the young man's eyes as he watched her graceful figure resume its former posture of dreamy absorption. ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... left hand. This restful posture indicates the state of final comprehension, when the aspiring soul, raised to the different spheres of Nirvana by steps of ascending sanctity, receives increasing peace and satisfaction from gradual absorption into the Infinite. No creed passes unaltered through any crucible of national thought; Indian Buddhism borrowed both form and colour from races which, in accepting the new faith, retained their own individuality and modes of ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... it. Mr. Radnor lighted on the tracks, by dint of a thought flung at his partner Mr. Inchling's dread of the Jews. Inchling dreaded Scotchmen as well, and Americans, and Armenians, and Greeks: latterly Germans hardly less; but his dread of absorption in Jewry, signifying subjection, had often precipitated a deplorable shrug, in which Victor Radnor now perceived the skirts of his idea, even to a fancy that something of the idea must have struck ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this condition of affairs that success in such a shape is the very last reward the dramatist toils for, or desires; that when the theatre in which his work is presented is thronged nightly no one is more surprised, more abashed than himself; that his modesty is so impenetrable, his artistic absorption so profound, that the sound of the voices of public approbation reduces him to a state of shame and dismay. [Laughter.] But did I advance this plea, I think it would at once be found to be a very shallow plea. For in any department of life, social, political, or artistic, nothing ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... had for us were wilfully to miss of pleasure while we vainly strove for profit. He was too true an artist to follow art into its byeways of moral significance, and thereby cripple its broader arms; but at the same time all this absorption of the artist in his art seemed to me to live and work together with the personal instincts of the man. An artist's nature cannot escape the colouring it gets from the human side of his nature, because it is of the essence of art to appeal to ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... the whole Church, thence finally the false position of the Celtic peoples in Catholicism, when that mighty force, grown more and more aggressive, had drawn them together from all quarters, and compelled their absorption in itself. Having no Catholic past, they found themselves unclassed on their entrance into the great family, and were never able to succeed in creating for themselves an Archbishopric. All their efforts and all ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... understand each other, even a little be friends. Rose, so far had loosening and disintegration gone on in her character, now was beginning to think her obstinate strait-lacedness about his books and her austere absorption in good works had been foolish and perhaps even wrong. He was her husband, and she had frightened him away. She had frightened love away, precious love, and that couldn't be good. Was not Lotty right when she said the other day that nothing at all except love mattered? Nothing ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... of that," said Eleanor, relieved to find that Dora had not apparently noticed Jean Eastman's insolent manner, nor the careless self- absorption of one or two of her other partners. "And now that you've met the girls," she added practically, "you mustn't let them forget you. Making friends is one of ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... most jealous and eager, showed him her country and exacted his admiration. In the evenings she would take her violin, and sitting as of old with an averted face, she would bid the strings speak of the heights and depths. Durrance sat watching the sweep of her arm, the absorption of her face, and counting up his chances. He had not brought with him to Glenalla Lieutenant Sutch's anticipations that he would succeed. The shadow of Harry Feversham might well separate them. For another thing, he ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... be accomplished by increased activity of all the nutritive processes. The appetite is practically insatiable; the boy can eat three square meals in the day and lunches between meals. If he wakes up in the night he is hungry. To accomplish the digestion and absorption of this food material, the alimentary tract throughout, and particularly the stomach is greatly increased in size. To accomplish the distribution of the food (blood) the heart also is increased in size and strength. With increased bulk of muscle and increased ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... subtlety the metaphysical system of Parmenides and the Eleatics, maintaining that there is but one absolute existence, and that sense and sense-perceptions as against this [224] are nothing. This one absolute existence was alone absolutely good, and the good for man could only be found in such an absorption of himself in this one absolute good through reason and contemplation, as would bring his spirit into perfectness of union with it. Such absorption raised a man above the troubles and pains of life, and thus, in insensibility to these through reason, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... hosts from Southern and East Central Europe. This is not the Fourth of July. But people of every school would agree that it is no exuberance of rhetoric, it is only sober truth to say that the persevering absorption and incorporation of all this ceaseless torrent of heterogenous elements into one united, stable, industrious, and pacific State is an achievement that neither the Roman Empire nor the Roman Church, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... as the young man reeled past. Hans Fuellenberg did not fail to observe whose door it was that Frederick von Kammacher had just closed behind him, nor that, as he stood there with the knob still in his hand, he seemed to be in a state of indecision and absorption. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... them, being merely reflected sunlight, gives only the ordinary solar spectrum when examined with the spectroscope. But in certain cases we find that the solar spectrum thus viewed shows traces of being weakened, or rather of suffering absorption; and it is concluded that this may be due to the sunlight having had to pass through an atmosphere on its way to and from the surface of the planet from which ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... almost always a time of complete absorption. Everyone had company to entertain, everyone had plans. Nancy and Bert would come gaily into their home, on a Saturday afternoon, flushed from a luncheon party, and would entertain the noisy crowd in the dining room. After that the chugging of motors began again ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... than a month I fell into a routine as regular, as peaceful, as that in which I had moved in Boston. Each morning in my quiet sunny room I wrote, with complete absorption, from seven o'clock until noon, confidently composing poems, stories, essays, and dramas. I worked like a painter with several themes in hand passing from one to the other as I felt inclined. After luncheon I walked down town seeking exercise ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... primary tuberculous lesions, secondary changes result from the inflamed and softened bones pressing against one another subsequent to the destruction of their articular cartilages. The head of the femur undergoes absorption from above downwards, becoming flattened and truncated, or disappearing altogether. In the acetabulum the absorption takes place in an upward and backward direction, whereby the socket becomes enlarged and elongated towards the dorsum ilii. To this progressive enlargement of the socket ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... of the church toward the new learning—first, a bitter opposition; second, a forced toleration; and third, the absorption of its best products. Yet in all this the spirit of the church was not for the freedom of mind nor independence of thought. It could not recognize this freedom nor {353} the freedom of religious belief until it had been humiliated by the spirit of ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... and their sensorium is, in consequence, in a similar condition of sensitive poverty. Its impressionability for the things of the external world is at a minimum, its sensibility weak, and consequently, it is difficult to provoke the physiological condition necessary for the absorption of the external impression." ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... been the aim of Tiberius to consolidate the unwieldy mass of the Empire by the gradual absorption of the independent kingdoms inclosed within its limits. In pursuance of this policy, Judea, Chalcis, and Abilene, all parts of Herod's kingdom, had been placed under Roman governors. But when Gaius Caligula succeeded Tiberius ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... Tiglath-pileser had nations of less stubborn vitality to deal with, nor was he bound by the traditions of a common past to show equal respect to their prejudices. Arpad, Unki, the Bekaa, Damascus, and Gilead were all consecutively swallowed up by Assyria, but, the work of absorption once completed, difficulties were encountered which now had to be met for the first time. The subordinate to whom he entrusted the task of governing these districts* had one or two Assyrian regiments assigned him as his ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... by the absorption of small states that the Chinese people grew to greatness. The present work will trace their history as they emerge, like a rivulet, from the highlands of central Asia and, increasing in volume, flow, like ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... absorption in the animals robbed her speech of any hint of affectation or show—so much so, that Dick was impelled to ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... those extraordinary wars carried on by the chivalry of Europe against the Saracens in the East. Robert, in order to raise money to join the first crusade, mortgaged Normandy to his brother, and an absorption of Western France had begun, which, by means of conquest by arms and the more peaceful conquest by marriage, would in fifty years extend English dominion from the ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... overeating two or three times each day, he stays drunk with the poisons that form in his stomach and intestines. Such people over-assimilate the poisonous products of proteins, especially of sugars. Of course this may seem oddly stated because we would not want any absorption of the poisons in the intestines, but it is probable that nature can and does take care of a little of it there in ...
— How to Eat - A Cure for "Nerves" • Thomas Clark Hinkle
... followers and imitators rather than creators of independent merit. Among these youths, Georg Hirschfeld, a born Berliner, was the most promising. He was of a type abundant in every metropolis having an intense intellectual life: sensitive, impressionable, with an amazing talent for absorption and adaptation and a facile gift of language. The reception accorded to his drama. The Mothers (1896), which was frankly reminiscent of Sudermann's contrast between the front and the rear house and of Hauptmann's dialogue of real life, was so generous, that it ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... being men they were not so quick to nose out a scandal, could not help noticing his absorption in Mrs. Norton's society. One afternoon his Double Company Commander, Major Hepburn, walked into the compound of Raymond's bungalow and on the verandah shouted the usual ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... at her again was stronger than his caution. Much had happened since he had left the house of the Greek on the evening of his first day in Jerusalem, and he feared that his absorption in his own plans might result in the loss of her soon or late. So when the evening of the second week to a day of his sojourn in the city came round, unable to endure longer, he turned his steps with considerable apprehension toward the ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... readily enough, and her admiring audience crowded closer. Their interest was magnetic, their absorption and their amusement were communicated to some new-comers who had dropped in. Before the girl had dealt half the cards these bona-fide customers had found seats around the table and were likewise playing. They, too, enjoyed the novel experience, ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... had yet appeared. The young man in the chair was evidently not connected with the establishment. His expression was so forbidding, not to say arrogant, and his absorption in the newspaper so complete, that the colonel, not caring to address him, turned to the right and crossed a narrow hall to a room beyond, evidently a parlour, since it was fitted up with a faded ingrain ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... the tides—this surely is the artist's wisdom. Idealism is like love, {apora porimos}, holding us as it were in touch with the intangible: it will have us conceive the Absolute without that helpless absorption in thought which changed Amiel's life from a fountain to a vapour: it would keep us near the surf and confluence of things. Its function is not to give any mysterious transcendental knowledge, but to serve culture "by suggesting ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... amounted to much until some more of Jim Weeks's money went into them, and then they began to pay. This made the M. & T. important, especially to the C. & S.C. people, who immediately tried to make arrangements with Jim for the absorption of the M. & T. by their line. C. & S.C. had a bad name. There were many shady operations associated with its management, and Jim decided to have as little to do with it as possible, so the attempt ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... way, and far from spoiling the high tone and general impression of the drawing room, he served, by the contrast he presented to her, as an advantageous background to his elegant and tactful wife. Pierre during the last two years, as a result of his continual absorption in abstract interests and his sincere contempt for all else, had acquired in his wife's circle, which did not interest him, that air of unconcern, indifference, and benevolence toward all, which cannot be acquired artificially and therefore ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the man was curiously superior to his associations in education as well as the patent evidence which Shirley now observed of being to the manor born. Helene Marigold, ensconced in a big library chair, her feet curled under her, pink fingers supporting the oval chin, dreamily watched Shirley's absorption. She seemed almost asleep, but her mind drank in each mood that fired the criminologist's face, as he thoroughly relaxed from his usual bland superiority of mien, ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... were not contraband, to either belligerent; and our extension of contraband to cover food supplies gave deep offence. The difficulty arose not only from the inevitable tendency of law to disappear amid the clash of arms, but from the modern absorption of all energies, civilian as well as military, in the warlike operations of the State. The food of civilians making munitions became a vital element in the conduct of war, and the distinction between civil and military purposes was lost in the ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... remind the reader that one of the most important offices of the lungs is to promote the movement of the blood and lymph currents throughout the body. Active respiration assists all forms of lymph absorption, but gives special aid to the absorption of food substances from the stomach and intestines, because these particular lymph vessels are situated so close to the chest cavity that they are more directly under the influence of the ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... he had gazed himself blind in looking at her. There is also the same depth of impression in his descriptions of the objects of all the different senses, whether colours, or sounds, or smells—the same absorption of his mind in whatever engaged his attention at the time. It has been indeed objected to Milton, by a common perversity of criticism, that his ideas were musical rather than picturesque, as if because they were in the highest degree musical, they must ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... phenomena. The result of this has been that to a quite considerable extent the factors, hitherto mysterious, which control the fertilization, division, and differentiation of the egg, the digestion and absorption of food, the conduction of nervous impulses, and many of the changes undergone in the normal or pathological functioning of the organs and tissues, can be ascribed to chemical and physical causes which are well ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... manhood, hog-tied community undertakings, and generally acted as the dog in the manger toward humanity. Jesus opposed accumulation without moral purpose, the inhumanity of property differences, and the fatal absorption of money-making. Yet he was not ascetic. It is probably safe to say that he would not be against private property in so far as it serves the common good, and not against ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... Then there is an atmosphere of books in a rectory, and leisure to think, and best of all the income is not so great but that the practise of economy of time and money is duly enforced by necessity. To be launched into a library and learn by absorption ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... nurse-maid more tactfully and carried the matter much further. Occasionally he thought of other women in terms of wary courtship—or, perhaps, it would be more exact to say that he thought of them in terms of tactful comforting, ending in absorption. That was his own view of the case. He saw himself as the victim of the law. I don't mean to say that he saw himself as a kind of Dreyfus. The law, practically, was quite kind to him. It stated that ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... little pins, a drop of gum glistening on each and every pin by way of head. This appetizing gum is no other than a fatal stick-fast, the raying pins closing in its aid the more certainly to secure a hapless prisoner. Soon his prison-house becomes a stomach for his absorption. Its duty of digestion done, the leaf in all seeming guilessness once more expands itself for the enticement of a dupe. To see how much the sun-dew must depend upon its meal of insects we have only to pull it up from the ground. A touch ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... was arrested by her mother. Mrs. Bett was eating a baked potato, holding her fork close to the tines, and presenting a profile of passionate absorption. ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... enciente was divided into sections to each of which was assigned a commanding officer with a specified detail of troops; and a strong reserve of European infantry was under the command of Brigadier-General Baker, ready at short notice to reinforce any threatened point. It was presumably owing to the absorption of the troops in fighting, collecting supplies, and providing winter shelter, that when the concentration within Sherpur became suddenly necessary the defences of the position were still seriously defective; and throughout the period of investment ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... heard to least advantage on a social or festive occasion. He would use a Club-dinner or a wedding-breakfast, a flower-show or an Exhibition, for the utterance of grave thoughts which had perhaps been long fermenting in his mind; and then his intensity, his absorption in his theme, and his terrible gravity, disconcerted hearers who had expected a lighter touch. An illustration of this piquant maladroitness recurs to my memory as I write. In 1882 I was concerned with a few Radical friends in founding the National Liberal ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... upon his absorption with a disturbing element: "Mr. Courtland, this is the nurse from Good Samaritan Hospital. I thought you ought to know that Miss Brentwood has disappeared! We have searched everywhere, but can get no clue to her whereabouts. She wasn't fit to go. She had fainted again—was unconscious ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... dare to question her; but, seeing her so skilled, she must have passed, he thought, through every experience of suffering and of pleasure. What had once charmed now frightened him a little. Besides, he rebelled against his absorption, daily more marked, by her personality. He begrudged Emma this constant victory. He even strove not to love her; then, when he heard the creaking of her boots, he turned coward, like drunkards at the ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... of Torres Straits were formerly inhabited by aborigines of the Australian family, and that at a later time they were occupied by immigrants from New Guinea, who adopted the language of the aboriginal inhabitants, but gradually extinguished the aboriginal type and character either by peaceful absorption or by conquest and extermination.[274] Hence the Western Islanders of Torres Straits form a transition both geographically and ethnographically between the aborigines of Australia on the one side and the aborigines of New Guinea on the other side. Accordingly in our survey of the belief in ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... the first time her absorption gave way. She remembered who he was—where they were—how they had last met. And with the remembrance came an extraordinary leap of joy, flashing through pain and faintness. She had the childish feeling that he could not look unkindly at her anymore—after this! When ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... divinity, of the Vedas.[48] All believed in the eternity of matter, and the past eternity of the soul; all accepted the doctrine of transmigration, and maintained that the spiritual nature can only act through a material body. All were pessimistic, and looked for relief only in absorption. ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... But even when we have made every allowance for the all too human tendency to soften down the past, it remains true that in many senses the processes of industry for the worker have lost in attractiveness and power of absorption of the mind during the very period when they have gained so enormously in effectiveness and ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... creed the Sunday sermons and the week-day "lectures" served as oratory, poetry, and drama. These outpourings of the mind and heart of their spiritual leaders were the very stuff of human passion in its intensest forms. Puritan churchgoers, passing hours upon hours every week in rapt absorption with the noblest of all poetry and prose in the pages of their chief book, the Bible, were at least as sensitive to the beauty of words and the sweep of emotions as our contemporaries upon whose book-shelves Spenser and Milton ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... schoolbooks, of course, but he was rarely caught reading one of them. His mind seemed to master the offered knowledge by some mysterious process of absorption of which he himself was never aware. Study in the sense of close and painful application was quite foreign to him. Yet he seemed capable of mastering anything that aroused his interest—or that stirred his vanity, for he loved to shine. Unfortunately most of his schoolmates ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... began to whistle, with his hands behind his back. Gemma let him think undisturbed. She was sitting still, leaning her head against the back of the chair, and looking out into vague distance with a fixed and tragic absorption. When her face wore that expression, it had ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... as Alice; he had also overtaken Mary on her bicycle, and once he had seen her at a shop door on Morfe Green. And each time Mary (absorbed in what she was doing) had made it possible for him not to see her. He was grateful to her for her absorption while he saw through it. He had always known that Mary ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... only over the fulcrum of his own will. This volitional power is the ray in us of that Creative Energy whose name Jehovah signifies, I will be what I will to be. Thus, then, oneness with God is not sameness with God, nor the absorption of human personality in the Infinite Being. It is simply a state to be reached in our progressive creation where we will come to a knowledge of the laws of life, and will consciously co-operate with those divine decrees governing the origin, nature, and destiny of the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... was Kent in his thoughts that he never heard Sylvester's knock, and it was not until the clerk stood at his elbow that he awoke from his absorption. ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... impetuous, exultant freedom of voice which proclaimed the Valkyria's joy in living and doing until the catastrophe was reached, and the deep, unselfish, tender nature disclosed in her sympathy with the ill-starred lovers and her immeasurable love for Wotan. Her complete absorption in the part fitted her out with a new gamut of expression. "If anything can establish a sympathy between us and the mythological creatures of Wagner's dramas," I wrote at the time, "that thing is the acting and singing of Materna." The ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... effective results; no less did Lessing, although the latter seeks to learn from the faults of his neighbors rather than from their excellencies. Goethe's criticism is dominated to such a degree by his absorption in the antique, and also in French and English general literature, that he has no understanding of national peculiarities when they do not conform to typical literary phenomena, as Uhland's lyric and Kleist's drama—two literary phenomena which we, nowadays, consider ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and low rates for corn and oats were untoward circumstances. Speculation on the general exchange was small, indicating a growing congestion, as was proved by the low bank reserves, especially in the last quarter of the year; but there was a heavy absorption ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... learning that they must take care of the skin if they would keep in good condition, and they are what in horses would be called well groomed. The skin is rubbed, cared for, kept active, because it is understood that it is an organ of sensation, of secretion, of excretion, of absorption, and of respiration. More solid matter is thrown out from the skin than from the lungs, in the proportion of eleven to seven. It is even more than the excretion from ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... not surpass the sublime absorption in which the gaunt old man, with arm uplifted, described this stage of affairs, till he ended in a shrewd chuckle, worthy of Sancho Panza. Then ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... individual in question has not yet any special organ for nutrition, it therefore absorbs by the pores of its internal surface the substance adapted for its nourishment. Thus the first mode of taking food in a living body so simple can be no other than by absorption or a sort of suction, which is accomplished by the pores of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... this self-absorption of Mr. Balfour as much as I lament in his cousin Lord Robert Cecil the lack of the fighting qualities of leadership. To no man of the Unionist Party after the death of Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury have more hopeful opportunities presented themselves for creative statesmanship. ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... had observed a long stranger in her tea-cup. Posting him on her fingers and starting him with a smack, he had vaulted lightly and thereby indicated that he was positively coming the next day. She forgot him in the bustle of her duties and the absorption of her faculties in thoughts of the incomparable stranger Lucy had presented to the world, till a knock at the street-door reminded her. "There he is!" she cried, as she ran to open to him. "There's my stranger come!" Never was a woman's faith ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... being transformed into something absolutely different from what they were. In the United States, in the new State of Oklahoma, the Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Delawares, and other tribes, are in process of absorption into the mass of the white population; when the State was admitted a couple of years ago, one of the two Senators, and three of the five Representatives in Congress, were partly of Indian blood. In but a few years these Indian tribes will have disappeared as completely ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... with tumultuous feelings. How long I remained there I cannot say, it might have been two hours; feelings long dormant had been aroused, and whirled round and round in a continual cycle in my feverish brains. I should have remained probably much longer in this state of absorption, had I not been summoned to attend Mr Drummond. It appeared that in the meantime Mr Hodgson had come to his own senses, and had given his own version of the fracas, which had been, to an unjustifiable degree, corroborated by the stupid young ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... we have had to tell the hundred years' story of "the English Church in New Zealand." Perhaps the historian of a century hence may be able to trace its absorption into a Church which shall include all the broken fragments of the Body of Christ within its unity; all true schools of thought within its theology; all classes of men within its membership; every legitimate interest and pursuit within its ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... shaped his course accordingly. He took us through scrubs, having in the centre those holes where water usually lodges for some time after rain, where some substratum of clay happens to be retentive enough to impede the common absorption. But the water in these holes had been recently drunk, and the mud trampled into hard clay by the hoofs of cattle. Thus it is, that the aborigines first become sensible of the approach of the white man. ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... be accounted a god. The achievement of this status, however, did not complete his cycle, for the ultimate goal still remained. This was the same as in earlier centuries—release from living by union with or absorption into the supreme Spirit; and only when the individual soul had reached this stage was the cycle of birth and re-birth completed. The reverse of this process was illustrated by the fate of demons. If a man lapsed from right living, his second state was always ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... existence of such an implicit claim was more or less evident in relation to every one with whom he came in contact, manifested mainly by a stiff, incommunicative reluctance, taking the form now of a pretended absorption in his books, now of contempt for any sort of manual labour, even to the saddling of the pony he was about to ride; and now and always by an affectation of proper English, which, while successful as to grammar and ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... the great American people who are interested in the subject. The field is ours for the next four years, and we will strive to impress the doctrines of common sense upon all men and all women everywhere, until the atmosphere shall be full of it and all shall take it in by absorption. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... stood in the way of the common weal; and whatever privileges one might have, belonged to him not as a man, but as a Roman, reflecting in his own person the sacred being of the state. No wonder that in spite of all reverses, and until absorption of foreign poisons had vitiated the blood of her sons or fratricidal strife had spilled it, Rome saw the world at her feet. No wonder, too, that the customary greeting of those who used her speech was "Salus!" ("Health!") at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... and historians have speculated that this might occur. The theory is that the conquest of space may prove to be the moral equivalent of war by substituting for certain material and psychological needs usually supplied through war; that the absorption of energies, resources, imagination, and aggressiveness in pursuit of the space adventure may become an effective way of ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... Know—and on his findings all battle-lines depend. "When through Atlantic and Pacific gateways, Slavic, Italic, and Mongol hordes threaten the persistence of an American America, his is the task to show the absorption of widely diverse peoples, to chronicle the advances of civilization, or point the perils of illiterate and alien-tongue communities. To show how this great Census work is done, to reveal the mysteries ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... length that place where the destinies of France and England, so long interwoven, became again distinct, and where the English nationality, which five-and-twenty years before was in imminent danger of absorption as the fruit of victory, was decisively saved from this fate by a defeat for which all England then in her blindness mourned. The loss of Guyenne made an alien dynasty national, and by stopping the outflow of the Anglo-Saxon race upon ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... discerned by mortal eyes, and though we come very near, they will be unconscious of our presence. How attractive is childhood. The little fellow is as merry as a lark, and chatters away to his father, who, with silent absorption pursues his work. Suddenly his axe slips, and a large limb, which should have fallen in the other direction, descends with violence upon his foot. Can spirits be deaf at pleasure? If so we will quickly close our ears, for fearful is the torrent ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... his absorption continued, and immediately afterward he went into the parlor, selected a big book from a shelf, and drawing a chair near the lamp began to read. Mother put the "baby" and Peter to bed. Suzanna and Maizie, after the dishes ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... negotiations were proceeding which resulted not in the destruction of the natives, but in their incorporation with their more civilised neighbours. This first recorded amalgamation of the kind was doubtless an instance of a process of growth that continued for many centuries, resulting in the absorption of all the native tribes on the north of the Yang-tse and of most of those on the south. The expanding state was eventually composed of a vast body of natives who submitted [Page 69] to their civilised conquerors, much as the people of Mexico and Peru consented ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... at their head, was Sir Everard Valletort, his back reposing against the bulwarks of the vessel, his arms folded across his chest, and his eyes bent mechanically on the man at the helm, who stood within a few paces of him,—an attitude of absorption, which he, ever and anon, changed to one of anxious and enquiring interest, whenever the agitation of Clara was manifested in the ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... in such a trance of enjoyment of her twin sister, that she seemed scarcely able to enter into anything else. She went through her duties as usual, but with an effort to shake off her absorption in the thought of having Alda at home; and every moment she was not in sight of her darling seemed a cruel diminution of her one poor fortnight. Indeed it was tete-a-tetes that her exclusive tenderness ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... close by them and in plain sight, but their absorption in their struggle had left them attention only for each other. He knew that if he started away while they were talking his presence would be ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... Mansion House of the Lord Mayor and found two long-coated Dublin Military Police stripping the new wet poster from the yellow walls. When I arrived at Number 6, Harcourt street, I saw black-clad Mrs. Sheehy-Sheffington, in somewhat agitated absorption of thought, coming down the worn steps of the old Georgian house. In the upper back room, earnest young secretaries worked in swift silence. One of them, a curly-haired girl with her mouth o-ed about a cigarette, puffed unceasingly. At last Harry Boland, ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... French descent, and speaking the Gallic tongue, was not to be found at the Tiare. He was at the Paris, or other cafe, surrounded by gaping Frenchmen, who pressed upon him Pernoud, rum, and the delicate wines of France. So great was his absorption in his new friends, and so unbounded their hospitality, that M. Lontane laid him by the heels to rest him. Simoneau was wiry, talking the slang of the New York waterfront, swearing that he would "hike for ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... The movements of "creation" and "absorption," which are called in Hindu symbolism the outbreathing ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... spray-like; but with all the facts observed which were pointed out in Chap. II. of this Section, the convex side to the wind, the sharp edge on that side, the other soft and lost. Smoke, on the contrary, is an actual substance existing independently in the air, a solid opaque body, subject to no absorption nor dissipation but that of tenuity. Observe its volumes; there is no breaking up nor disappearing here; the wind carries its elastic globes before it, but does not dissolve nor break them.[37] Equally convex and void of angles on all sides, they are the ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... no sooner organized than Mr. Heyward sought Montgomery, tendering his services and those of a full regiment enlisted by him for the war. Such was the pressure upon the authorities, and so far beyond the power of absorption at that time the offers of volunteers, that Mr. Heyward sought long in vain for an interview with the Secretary of War. When this was at last obtained he found the ranks so filled that it was impossible to accept his regiment. Returning home in deep disappointment, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... below zero the thermometers marked more than once, while old Peterkin's, which was hung inside the Lizy Ann and always took the lead, went down one morning to seventeen, and all the water-pipes and pumps in town either froze or burst, and Arthur Tracy, who, with his absorption of self, never forgot the poor, sent tons and tons of coal to ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... more active than meditation. Her dress trailed in long, sweeping lines, and against its rich dark purple folds her strong, white hands lay in vivid contrast. The most wonderful charm of her personality was her complete absorption in thought, or the speech of her visitor. She was interested in this keen-eyed, strong-limbed young fellow as a possible convert and reformer. She wanted to state herself clearly and fully to him. ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... is that feature of this bill which has my heartiest concurrence; for I will frankly say that the difficulties which have oppressed me most in considering this question a year or more ago, before any method had been devised, arose from my apprehensions of the continued absorption of undue power over the affairs of the States; and I here declare that the power and the sole power of appointing the electors is in the State, and nowhere else. The power of ascertaining whether the State has executed that power justly and ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... always did, and always would until the end of time. At the present moment she was busily employed in thinking about her own affairs. A shabby composition book with mottled board covers lay open on the table before her, and sometimes she wrote in it with feverish haste and absorption, and sometimes she rested her chin in the cup of her palm, and with the pencil poised in the other hand looked dreamily out on the village, its huddle of roofs and steeples all blurred into positive ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and selfish materialism. But by living in that spiritual hothouse of dreams, philosophical speculations, and abstractions, these men unfitted themselves only the more completely for participation in real life; the absorption in interests having nothing to do with the life of their own country, estranged them still more from it. The overwhelming stream of words drained them of the natural sources of spontaneous emotion, and these men almost grew out of feeling by dint ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... and death. Occult science is, however, capable of appreciating the motives from which such distrust arises. For there is nothing incomprehensible in the assertion that man exists for an active, purposeful life, that his acts depend on his devotion thereto, and that absorption in such conditions as sleep and death can result only from a taste for idle dreaming, and can lead to ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... maintaining the machine in the air at any given level; for actual lift from one level to another at a speed of eleven feet per second a further 20 horse-power would be required, which means that 70 horse-power must be constantly provided for; this absorption of power in the mere maintenance of aero-dynamic ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... and obtained from St. Thomas and other West Indian Islands. It is used to some extent as a perfume for shaving soaps, but chiefly in the Bay Rhum toilet preparation. Specific gravity at 15 deg. C., 0.965-0.980; optical rotation, slightly laevo-rotatory up to -3 deg.; phenols, estimated by absorption with 5 per cent. caustic potash solution, from 45 to 60 per cent.; the oil is generally insoluble in 90 per cent. alcohol, though when freshly distilled it dissolves in its own volume of alcohol ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... of this machine to attract our attention is the absorption of food from the intestine into the blood. The digested food is carried down the alimentary canal in a purely mechanical fashion by muscular action, and when it reaches the intestine it begins to pass ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... The pressure, by keeping back the blood from the part, prevents the inflammation, or the tumor, from being nourished: in the case of inflammation, it removes the stimulus, which the organ is unfit to receive; in the case of tumors, by keeping back the nutritive fluid, it causes the absorption of matter to exceed the supply, and the diseased mass is gradually absorbed ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... made an absorbed progress along River Street he jostled Winona Penniman, who with even a surpassing absorption had been staring into the window of one of those smart shops marking Newbern's later growth. Whereas boots and shoes had been purchased from an establishment advertising simple Boots and Shoes, they were now sought by people of the right sort from this new ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... only crude, but unnatural and repellent. But it may be said of both the opinions I have mentioned, that they confuse between union and identity. It is the old mistake, with respect to a lesser goal, of those who hope for absorption in the Divine Nature and consequent loss of personality. It seems to be forgotten that a certain degree of distinction is necessary to the joy of union. "Distinction" and "separation," it should be remembered, have different connotations. If the supreme ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... regard to the use of the terms 'radiation' and 'absorption' will now disappear. Radiation is the communication of vibratory motion to the aether; and when a body is said to be chilled by radiation, as for example the grass of a meadow on a starlight night, the meaning ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... no better illustration of the eager, rapid, unwearied absorption by capital of the rights which belong to all the people than the water-power trust, perhaps not yet formed but in process of formation. This statement is true, but not unchallenged. We are met at every turn by the indignant denial of the water-power ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... and clean materials—meat from animals free from disease; fruit and vegetables free from decay; milk, butter, etc., free from harmful bacteria. The dangers are the transference to the human body of encysted organisms like trichina; of the absorption of poisonous substances as toxins or ptomaines; of the lodgment of germs of disease along with dust on berries, rough peach skins, crushed-open fruits; of dirt clinging to lettuce, celery, and such ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... blue tie and an elaborate scarf-pin, looked the picture of innocence, and it was concluded that, although no one had suspected it, he was thinking of setting up housekeeping for himself. The cap'n's face had an earnest absorption. He was evidently occupied ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... electric power and raw materials may affect industrial output in 2005. More power generating capacity is scheduled to come on line in 2006. In its rivalry with India as an economic power, China has a lead in the absorption of technology, the rising prominence in world trade, and the alleviation of poverty; India has one important advantage in its relative mastery of the English language, but the number of competent ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... protectorate. Neutralization not impossibly may ultimately call for a protectorate. Future, independence, so long as unaccomplished, implies (a), (b), (c), and (d), while (f) is completely exclusive. It may, however, not prevent foreign absorption, if, once out, we ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... remained visible—the books, the work-table, the cluttered furniture, and, most interesting of all, its owner and occupant. It was upon the latter that the newcomer fixed his attention, and with an absorption equal to that he saw expressed ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... melee wealthier than before. This fact will not serve to lessen the discontent of the masses, which their impoverishment is sure to create. Food prices will be high, the earnings of labor will be low, and after the war unemployment will be great, due to the impossibility of quick absorption into the industrial system of returned soldiers, as well as other maladjustments which the war is ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... the general order forwarded along with his railway pass, so comprehensive were the details of the Prussian military organisation. This latter so thoroughly embraced the entire country after the absorption of the lesser states on the collapse of Koniggratz, that each separate individual could be moved at any given moment to a certain defined point; while the instructions for his guidance were so complete and perfect, that they could not fail ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... face to face with St. Luc. He had known that the chevalier was somewhere in the vale of Onondaga, but in his absorption in the Iroquois ceremonies he had forgotten about him. Now he realized with full force that he had come to meet the Frenchman and to measure himself against him. Yet he could not hide from himself a certain gladness at ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... led his mate from the abandonment of her lonely mourning to renewed absorption in her motherly duties. It is true enough that nature was at work on Finn's side in this matter, and without the wolfhound's aid would presently have achieved the same result. But Finn assisted and hastened the process; and is that ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... himself behaving circumspectly. He knew already that the cultivated taste objects to the use of a table-knife save for purposes of cutting; on the whole he saw grounds for the objection. He knew, moreover, that manducation and the absorption of fluids must be performed without audible gusto; the knowledge cost him some self-criticism. But there were numerous minor points of convention on which he was not so clear; it had never occurred to him, for instance, that civilisation demands the ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... no exposure. Logically, however, the argument is rather above the usual range. X then proceeds to frighten S with the old bugbears;—the impossibility of real union between the Italian races; the absorption of the local small capitals in the event of a great kingdom, and the certainty that the European powers will never consent to an Italian monarchy. This conclusion is a short resume of Papal history, which will somewhat surprise the readers ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... nightmares of immediate anxiety for her galloped themselves away, routed for that time. Like my gold-fish when their bowl has been unduly shaken, I sank down again into the quieted waters of my little world and absorption in my own affairs. There have been hours when I wondered if I was of more importance than they, as a matter of ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... not enlisted, those of us who are not directly involved find it hard to keep up our interest. For those who are involved the absorption may be real enough to hold them even when no issue is involved. They may be exercised by sheer joy in activity, or by subtle rivalry or invention. But for those to whom the whole problem is external and distant, these other faculties do not easily come ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... though the light in her face may be from heaven, yet the whole countenance is fixed in one absorbed, almost worshipping gaze of her husband, with a wistful simplicity and innocence on devotion, like the absorption of a loving animal, to whom its master's presence is bliss and sunshine. It is a picture to make light in a dark place, and that sweet face receives a loving glance, nay, an absolutely reverent bend of the knightly head, ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she had yet dared to use. The rivalry of such a woman as Sibyl could not be despised; it threatened her ambitions. But in the struggle now to be decided she had a supreme advantage; for Sibyl, having gained her object, assuredly had paid its price. Hence her pretended absorption in study, hence the revival of her friendliness; what were these things but blinds to mislead the only woman whose observation she ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... even Webster's men seem but splendid sketches, as Tourneur's seem but shadowy or fiery outlines, beside the perfect and living figure of De Flores. The man is so horribly human, so fearfully and wonderfully natural, in his single-hearted brutality of devotion, his absolute absorption of soul and body by one consuming force of passionately cynical desire, that we must go to Shakespeare for an equally original and an equally unquestionable revelation of indubitable truth. And in no play by Beaumont and Fletcher is the concord between the two partners more ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... done under the stimulating influence of the Agricultural College, now the University. The northern climate seems to be conducive to mental vigour in both professors and students. If in moving about Hokkaido one is conscious of a somewhat materialistic view of progress it may be remembered that an absorption in "getting on" is characteristic of colonists and their advisers everywhere. It is not high ideals of life but bitter experience of inability to make a living on the mainland which has brought immigrants to Hokkaido. As time goes on, the rural and industrial development ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... household and one story should have engaged her deep interest: David's parents and David's career. As she drove about the country, visiting with the farmer's wife, there had been pointed out a melancholy remnant of a farm, desperately resisting absorption by some one of three growing estates touching it on three sides. She had been taken to call on the father and mother; had seen the poverty within doors, the half-ruined condition of the outhouses; had heard of their ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... scientific he may be. He will not find in them any thing about bacteria and the "nodular hypothesis" in respect of legumes, nor any thing about plant metabolism, nor even any thing about the effects of creatinine on growth and absorption; but, important and fascinating as are the illuminations of modern science upon practical agriculture, the intelligent farmer with imagination (every successful farmer has imagination, whether or not he is intelligent) will find some ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... of stars includes those which are of a ruddy hue, such as Betelgeux in the right shoulder of Orion, Antares in Scorpio, and Alpha Herculis. Their spectra present a banded or columnar appearance, and there is greater absorption, especially of the blue rays of light. It is believed that the temperature of stars of this colour is not so elevated as that of those belonging to the other two orders, and that this is a sufficient reason to account for the different appearance of ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... revolutionists. Nor did he repair, as they did, to Gaeta, but remained in Rome, and, to the great surprise and scandal of all the European Courts, transacted business with the governments which reigned there in the absence of the legitimate sovereign. The absorption of all the states of Italy, not excepting that of the Pope, by Piedmont, was the ruling idea of Piedmontese statesmen. They were guided by a selfish view to what they considered their own interest, not by principles that were universally recognized. Such were continental liberals. ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... the gift of memory, with capacity to survey at once vestiges of many perceptions, to feel their implication and absorption in the present object, and to be carried, by this sense of relation, to the thought that those perceptions have a representative function. And this is a great step. It manifests the mind's powers. It illustrates those ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... it acceptable to the Scotch members to whom it was proposed. The most apparently substantial of these was the unprecedented character of the measure. No past "experience of history was favorable to the absorption of a lesser state, at least where the government partook so much of the republican form, in one of superior power and ancient rivalry." But, in the case of the present measure, what had thus been a difficulty in the Scotch Union might ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge |
