"Characterize" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for law was now established, and it was just law. The Queen's government had shown itself fit to cope with the situation, and for them to usurp its powers was to step backward into the night out of which they had come. Further, no lighter word than "criminal" could characterize such conduct. And yet further, he promised them, in set, sober terms, if anything serious were the outcome, to take an active part in the prosecution of every one of them. At the conclusion of his speech he made a motion to hold the prisoner for the territorial court and to adjourn, but ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... should attempt to characterize his teaching, I should say that while it conveyed the best results of his sagacious and extended observation, it was singularly modest, cautious, simple, sincere. Nothing was for show, for self-love; there was no rhetoric, no declamation, no triumphant ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... with a purpose, that purpose being to portray the dangerous haste with which sentiment degenerates into sentimentality; and because of its purpose, the story discloses a less excellent art than its fellows. 'Pride and Prejudice' finds its motive in the crass pride of birth and place that characterize the really generous and high-minded hero, Darcy, and the fierce resentment of his claims to love and respect on the part of the clever, high-tempered, and chivalrous heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. 'Northanger Abbey' is a laughing skit at the school of Mrs. Radcliffe; 'Persuasion,' ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... approaches a straight line, until it curves inward under the abacus (Fig. 51); in the post-classical period it is low and sometimes quite conical (Fig. 60). In general, the degeneracy of post-classical Greek architecture is in nothing more marked than in the loss of those subtle curves which characterize the best Greek work. Other differences must be learned from more ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... chloride (hydrochloric ether) could be regarded as a compound of ethylene and hydrochloric acid.[11] Compound radicals came to be regarded as the immediate constituents of organic compounds; and, at first, a determination of their empirical composition was supposed to be sufficient to characterize them. To this problem there was added another in about the third decade of the 19th century—namely, to determine the manner in which the atoms composing the radical were combined; this supplementary requisite ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... holds this position in the United States. The institutions which underlie and characterize it, both of the United States and of each of the States, considered by itself,[Footnote: I do not except Louisiana, for trial by jury and other institutions derived from the common law have profoundly affected her whole judicial system.] are the outgrowth of those of the thirteen ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... sense indicated by your tone. But your silly dreams and hopes, as you characterize them, have taken a stronger hold upon you than you realize. You are disappointed as well as angry. You have entertained the thought that he might do something, or become more in harmony with the last ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... position was firmly established, Herod devoted himself to magnificent building enterprises. In Antioch, Athens, and Rhodes, he reared great public buildings. Jerusalem, his capital, was provided with a theatre and amphitheatre, and other buildings that characterize the Graeco-Roman cities of the period. The two crowning achievements of Herod's reign were the rebuilding of Samaria and Caesarea, as its port on the Mediterranean coast. Both of these cities were renamed in honor of his patron ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... that shall fill the breadth of his outlook abroad over a newly wonderful world. But underneath it all is the alertness, the responsiveness to quick reflexes of judgment and action, the intimate correlations to immediate environment which must characterize the instincts of the higher animals. And it is ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... form, have been so deeply impressed upon the imagination, that even at the distance of nearly three centuries, it is unnecessary to remind the most ignorant and uninformed reader of the striking traits which characterize that remarkable countenance, which seems at once to combine our ideas of the majestic, the pleasing, and the brilliant, leaving us to doubt whether they express most happily the queen, the beauty, or the accomplished woman. Who is there, that, at the very mention of Mary Stewart's name, has not her ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... something worth recording. To paint is nothing—you must know what you are portraying. Velasquez had become acquainted with humanity, and gotten on intimate terms with life. He had haunted the waysides and markets to good purpose; he had laid the foundation of those qualities which characterize his best work: mastery of expression, penetration into character, the ability to look upon a face and read the thoughts that lurk behind, the crouching passions, and all the aspirations too great for speech. To picture great men you must be ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... be chosen to characterize American life during the generation that followed the age of Douglas and Lincoln, it must be "business enterprise"—the tremendous, irresistible energy of a virile people, mounting in numbers toward a hundred million and applied without let or hindrance to the developing ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... into a program of services. In the past it has been an armory of platitudes or a forecast of punishments. It promised that it would stop this evil practice, drive out corruption here, and prosecute this-and-that offense. All that belongs to a moribund tradition. Abuse and disuse characterize the older view of the state: guardian and censor it has been, provider but grudgingly. The proclamations of so-called progressives that they will jail financiers, or "wage relentless warfare" upon social evils, are simply the reiterations of ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... well for us to notice some of the characteristics of the Pentecostal anointing. John the Baptist, minister of the gospel and preacher of genuine regeneration, said of Jesus that "he should baptize with the Holy Ghost and fire," thus using a most powerful symbol to characterize the nature of the work of the Holy Ghost. Everyone is familiar with the action of fire; it burns everything combustible with which ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... strangers. Not a few of the younger branches of the family had followed the same evil profession, and taken foreign pay—chiefly from poverty and prejudice combined, but not a little in some cases from the inborn love of fighting that seems to characterize the Celt. The last soldier of them had served the East India Company both by sea and land: tradition more than hinted that he had chiefly served himself. Since then the heads of the house had been peaceful farmers of their ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... stream, with just enough vibration of their fins to keep themselves from going down with the current, while their bodies yield indolently to all its soothing curves. He chooses his language for its rich canorousness rather than for intensity of meaning. To characterize his style in a single word, I should call it costly. None but the daintiest and nicest phrases will serve him, and he allures us from one to the other with such cunning baits of alliteration, and such sweet lapses of verse, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... of the Markgrafen even unto the Agadir incident it has been characteristic of Prussia to extend her boundaries and interests under the plea of military necessity. Aggression is the only word to characterize Frederick's seizure of Silesia and part of Poland. South and East Prussia were added by the same forcible means (1793-1795). In the Napoleonic wars Swedish Pomerania fell as the booty of military necessity. Schleswig-Holstein ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... looked the harder it was to take my eyes away. It was a wonderfully beautiful face, unearthly, I may say, with a light in it or an expression or something "that was never on land or sea." Fear and terror had completely vanished, and it was a placidly beautiful face—if by "placid" one can characterize that intangible and occult something that I cannot say was a radiance or a light any more than I can say ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... the visiting stranger. Only gross differences of size or color are perceived by an outsider in a flock of sheep, each of which is perfectly individualized to the shepherd. A diffusive blur and an indiscriminately shifting suction characterize what we do not understand. The problem of the acquisition of meaning by things, or (stated in another way) of forming habits of simple apprehension, is thus the problem of introducing (1) definiteness and distinction and (2) consistency or stability of meaning into what is otherwise ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... make places of refuge in which on necessity they could shelter their wives and children, and later, when they became sedentary, their flocks and their stores of grain. In many different localities we find the remains of camps and fortifications, which, to avoid using a more ambitious term, we may characterize ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... have read the short Hebraistic sentences of the Book of Wisdom, and the long involved periods that characterize the style of all Philo's known writings, and yet attribute both to one writer? But indeed I know no instance of assertions made so audaciously, or of passages misrepresented and even mistranslated so grossly, as in this work of Whitaker. His ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... golden tint; and in contrast to all this, his eyes were of a deep, dark, burning brown, full of fire, passion, and fascination. There was no doubt about it—he was beautiful! I know that is a strange term to apply to a man, but it is the only true and comprehensive one to characterize the personal appearance of Herman Brudenell. He was attired in a neat black dress suit, without ornaments of any kind; without even a breastpin or ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... observes, "On comparing the osteology of the 'Talegalla' with that of other birds, it exhibits all the essential modifications which characterize the gallinaceous tribe; and among the Rasores, it most nearly resembles the ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... should be treated as such. They are easily elated, easily discouraged. They delight in playing tricks on each other and on the sailors, are usually good-natured, and when they are sulky there is no profit in being vexed with them. The methods which children characterize as "jollying" are best for such emergencies. Their mercurial temperament is Nature's provision for carrying them through the long dark night, for if they were morose like the North American Indians, the whole tribe would long ago have lain down and died of discouragement, ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... little town of Drumsna. It was by the beautiful waters of this noble river that they first felt that impassioned glow that colors all the after life of man or woman, and which is as different from the feelings that characterize early boy or girlhood, as the noon-day solar blaze is from the cold and placid beams of the pale new moon. There is one point at which the true passion of love, in all great hearts, leaps into fierce and instantaneous existence. There may be many imperceptible ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... a good rousing round of hair-splitting. "Ethics is the discipline dealing with what it good or bad, or right or wrong—or with moral duty and obligation. Ethos means the guiding beliefs, standards or ideals that characterize a group ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... 1702, was Tamerlane, in which, under the name of Tamerlane, he intended to characterize king William, and Lewis the fourteenth under that of Bajazet. The virtues of Tamerlane seem to have been arbitrarily assigned him by his poet, for I know not that history gives any other qualities than those which make ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... rational nature in men, if we refer to such examples as PLATO, ARISTOTLE, HIPPARCHUS, ARCHIMEDES, and many others. If, therefore, in such a colluvies as the human body, (for by what better name can we characterize a mixture of blood, bile, and phlegm,) a mind is formed of such great and excellent faculties, what must we think of the excellence of that which exists in the ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... of course they did not constitute two different languages, and that which they had in common was far greater than the element peculiar to each, or, to put it in another way, they in large measure overlapped each other. Perhaps we are in a position now to characterize colloquial Latin and to define it as the language which was used in conversation throughout the Empire with the innumerable variations which time and place gave it, which in its most highly refined form, as spoken in literary circles at Rome in the classical period, approached ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... upon the defenseless by assuming that you have done them a kindness. This you follow by the assertion that you will "make as much sacrifice for the peace and honor of the South as the best-born Southerner." And, because I characterize what you call as kindness as being real cruelty, you presume to sit in judgment between me and my God; and you decide that my earnest prayer to the Almighty Father to save our women and children from what you call kindness, is a "sacrilegious, ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... northern half of the Valley the productions, and the modes of cultivation and living are such as to characterize a large proportion of the population as farmers. No country on earth has such facilities for agriculture. The soil is abundantly fertile, the seasons ordinarily favorable to the growth and maturity of crops, ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... believes, moreover, that those of the Southern parts of the American continent approximate more nearly to the Pyrenean wolves, as he has seen in the tropical forest of Mexico some that possessed all that "gaunt" form and "sneaking" aspect that characterize the latter. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... pic-nic. Glasgow folk have even more, we believe, than the average share of stiff dinner parties when in town: we never saw people who seemed so completely to enjoy the freshness and absence of formality which characterize the well-assorted entertainment al fresco. We were at one or two of these; and we cannot describe the universal gaiety and light-heartedness, extending to grave Presbyterian divines and learned Glasgow professors; the blue sea and the smiling sky; the rocky promontory ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... features which characterize this progressive economical movement of civilized nations, that which first excites attention, through its intimate connection with the phenomena of Production, is the perpetual, and, so far as human foresight can ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... secondary one, as it cannot exist independently, but is always applied to objects created for some purpose entirely independent of their capacity for pleasing. This gives us one of the great underlying principles that should characterize all ornament, viz., it must be subordinate to the object which it adorns, and must not detract from its use. We often see this rule violated in personal, household, and architectural decoration—windows ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... as wood must be subjected to pressure in order to make it straight, and metal must be subjected to the grindstone in order to make it sharp, so must the nature of man be subjected to training and education in order to obtain from it the virtues of justice and self-sacrifice which characterize the best of the human race. It is impossible to maintain that man's nature is good in the same sense that his eyes see and his ears hear; for in the latter there is no alternative. An eye which does not see, is not an eye; an ear which does not hear, is not an ear. This ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... anything to think about, and no way to get anything to think about until the senses wake up and furnish some material from the outside world. Born with all the mechanism of muscle and nerve ready to perform the countless complex movements of arms and legs and body which characterize every child, he could not successfully start these activities without a message from the senses to set them going. At birth the child probably has only the senses of contact and temperature present with any degree of clearness; taste soon follows; vision of an imperfect sort in a few days; hearing ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... strikes was one which carries a true appeal to the Eastern imagination. It has all the elements of revenge, of coercion, and of trapping, of wily give-and-take, and of simple and logical gambling uncertainty, which characterize the most popular of the Arabian Nights yarns and which have made those tales remain as Syrian classics for more ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... at the county black population as a whole, it is fair to characterize it as poor and ignorant. Perhaps ten per cent compose the well-to-do and the best of the laborers, while at least nine per cent are thoroughly lewd and vicious. The rest, over eighty per cent, are poor and ignorant, fairly ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... States. The lapse of time can add nothing to her title to independence. A course of conduct such as has been described on the part of Mexico, in violation of all friendly feeling and of the courtesy which should characterize the intercourse between the nations of the earth, might well justify the United States in a resort to any measures to vindicate their national honor; but, actuated by a sincere desire to preserve the general peace, and in view of the present condition of Mexico, the Executive, resting upon its integrity, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... follow!! Mrs. Stowe will pardon me if I should perchance, inferentialy saddle on her some things, that will make the vital fluid curdle in her veins; unless she is dead to all those emotions of soul which characterize her sex. As I find her in bad company, I am forced in the absence of better testimony, to judge her from the company in which I find her. The old Spanish proverb is as true as Holy Writ, viz., "Show me the company ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... freshness and verve which characterize all Mr. Fenn's writings and put him in the front rank of ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... world. Per capita GDP has been moving up toward the levels of the big West European economies. New Zealand's heavy dependence on trade leaves its growth prospects vulnerable to economic performance in Asia, Europe, and the US. Moderate growth probably will characterize 2000. ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... to reach the stair. As she ran up, her father came in at the front door, saw her, and called her. She went down again to meet the tempest of his rage, which now broke upon her in gathered fury. He called her a treacherous, unnatural child, with every name he thought bad enough to characterize her conduct. Had she been to him as Began or Goneril, he could hardly have found worse names for her. She stood pale, but looked him in the face. Her mother came trembling as near as she dared, withered by her terror to almost twice her age. Mr. Palmer in his fury took ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... in such a way that, though hiding the actual path, and objects upon it, it permitted their reflected images to pass beneath its boughs. The reflected form was that of the man she had seen further off, but being inverted, she could not definitely characterize him. ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... it was difficult in the beginning of the struggle to characterize the situation. There were unconditional Secessionists and unconditional Union men. Judging from the condition then obtaining, no one could tell exactly which way the State would go. "Sympathy, blood, and the community of social feeling growing out of slavery," says one, "inclined her to the South; ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... power to a centre, that is, a force that is ever and ever only drawing matter to matter, or body to body, it could not of, and by itself, accomplish those necessary stellar and planetary motions by which are produced that universal order, unity and harmony which characterize the universe. It is essentially in its operations and influences, a one-sided force, ever tending and influencing towards self, and therefore by itself would only be a detriment and an evil; and, unless it were accompanied by some companion ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... the highest and most honoured in that communion have been betrayed. On the present Pope's encyclical letter [A.D. 1840] we have already observed; and in this place I propose to examine only one more of those many excesses meeting us on every side, which characterize the public worship of the Virgin. The instance to which I refer seems to take a sort of middle station between the authorized enjoined services of the Church of Rome, and the devotions of individuals and family worship. It partakes on the one hand far too much ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... industries if necessary, can act as a unit." While this convention was united in denouncing the trade unions, it was not so unanimous in other matters, for the leaders were all veterans in those factional quarrels which characterize Socialists the world over. Eugene V. Debs, for example, was the hero of the Knights of Labor and had achieved wide notoriety during the Pullman strike by being imprisoned for contempt of court. William D. Haywood, ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... of motor functions that characterize adolescence we must consider other than the measurable aspects of the subject. Perhaps the best scale on which to measure all normal growth of muscle structure and functions is found in the progress from fundamental to accessory. The former designates the muscles and movements ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... work of Woehler, and to show in what way his life and work have been of such great value to chemistry. Could he himself direct the preparation of this notice, the writer knows that his advice would be, "Keep to the facts." So far as any one phrase can characterize the teachings of Woehler, that one does it; and though enthusiasm prompts to eulogy, let us rather recall the plain facts of his life, and let them, in the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... Sitte (mores) is a synonym of habit and of usage, of convention and tradition, but also of fashion, propriety, practise, and the like. Those words which characterize the habitual are usually regarded as having essentially unequivocal meanings. The truth is that language, careless of the more fundamental distinctions, confuses widely different connotations. For example, I find that ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Madrid, the affairs of the kingdom had assumed a powerful dramatic interest, wanting in none of the romantic elements that characterize the whole history of the peninsula. "The future career [he writes of this gallant soldier, Espartero, whose merits and services have placed him at the head of the government, and the future fortunes of these isolated little princesses, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... consisted of soup, potatoes, and what the dietary boards called "Ten ounces of mutton." With respect to the latter item, however, I fancy there must have been some mistake, although I have heard the prisoners characterize it in different and much stronger terms. Whether there be any mistake or not, five ounces, or it might occasionally be six ounces with the bone, is all the prisoners receive, and if complaint was made the invariable answer ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... an offer which he had made only with self-sacrificing effort thus cavalierly received by a red-nosed, blear-eyed, impudent little chittermouse (thus, I must reluctantly admit, did he mentally characterize his new acquaintance), was just a ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... not forget the gravity which should characterize a paper addressed to the Congress of the nation by the Chief Magistrate of the nation. Nor do I forget that some of you are my seniors, nor that many of you have more experience than I in the conduct of public affairs. Yet I trust that in ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... received with acclaim in every part of South America. They have my hearty approval, as I am sure they will have yours, and I cannot be wrong in the conviction that they correctly represent the sentiments of the whole American people. I cannot better characterize the true attitude of the United States in its assertion of the Monroe Doctrine than in the words of the distinguished former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Argentina, Doctor Drago, in his speech welcoming Mr. Root at Buenos Ayres. ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... heroism. He took leave of us with a degree of cordiality and emotion, which touched the heart, and might have reconciled a misanthrope to the world."—G.F.— Who does not see in this noble veteran the radical principles which characterize a British tar? There needs indeed, but a little of the Roman or Grecian painting, to render him a fit stage-companion for almost any of the ancient heroes; and who can tell, but that in some distant aera, when the Otaheitan language shall be read and classical, the drivelling pedants ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... imagination that goes straight to the heart of whatever he writes about, combined with a verbal magic that re-creates what he has seen. Things are felicitously seen by Mr. Burroughs, and then felicitously said. A dainty bit in Sidney's "Apologie for Poetrie" seems to me aptly to characterize our author's prose: "The uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the minde, which is the ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... infidelities; and these parents, in losing a son or a daughter through marriage, may be losing everything they care for. No parent's love is as innocent as the love of a child: the exclusion of all conscious sexual feeling from it does not exclude the bitterness, jealousy, and despair at loss which characterize sexual passion: in fact, what is called a pure love may easily be more selfish and jealous than a carnal one. Anyhow, it is plain matter of fact that naively selfish people sometimes try with fierce jealousy to prevent ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... most beautiful yellow I have ever seen in a mushroom. This bright golden yellow and the orange or vermilion color on the margin or edge of the gills will always characterize the plant. ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... thought, caused it to melt. The whole process was watched with an anxiety the most intense, by the whole of the monikins, however; and when the result was announced, the amiable and lovely Chatterissa clapped her pretty little pattes with joy, and gave all the other natural indications of delight, which characterize the emotions of that gentle sex of which she was so bright an ornament. Dr. Reasono was not backwards in explaining the cause of so much unusual exhilaration, for hitherto her manner had been characterized by the well-bred and sophisticated restraint which marks high training. ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... sincerity, the same correctness and truthfulness, which characterize the Histories, mark also the work on Germany. The author certainly aimed to speak the truth, and nothing but the truth, on the subject of which he treats. Moreover, he had abundant means of knowing the truth, on all the main points, in the character and history of the Germans. It has even been ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... may perhaps have been one of great rudeness, violence, and cruelty. If so, the historians who described it contrived to soften the character of it, and to divest it in a great measure of the repulsive features which might have been supposed to characterize such a transaction, for, according to the narrative which they give us, the whole proceeding was conducted in such a manner as to evince not only great ingenuity and sagacity on the part of Romulus and his government, but also great moderation ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... were the dangers that came from the hostile tribes which already occupied this much-contested territory. For the possession of the springs and pasture lands they fought with the energy and craft that characterize the Bedouin tribes to-day. Hence, to the Hebrews, fresh from the fertile fields of Egypt, their life in the wilderness represented constant hardship, privation, ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... interested,—character and fortune. To describe a single example of these facts suffices. In the novel and drama, therefore, the personalities and life histories of men have a simplicity and singleness of direction not found in reality. The artist seeks everywhere the traits that individualize and characterize, and neglects all others. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... force on the granite and produced an intolerable heat—for he had had the stupidity to place himself adversely to the shadow thrown by the verdant majestic heads of the palm trees. He looked at the solitary trees and shuddered—they reminded him of the graceful shafts crowned with foliage which characterize the Saracen columns ...
— A Passion in the Desert • Honore de Balzac
... members of the Pickwick Club herein presented are Mr. Pickwick, a heavy, pompous, dignified gentleman, and three friends, Messrs. Snodgrass, Winkle, and Tupman. Characterize each. Weller is a guide-valet. Pickwick Papers records the experiences of the Club during a ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... justified. I would not wish to imitate certain travellers, who, on returning from a country which their readers cannot easily visit, give such exaggerated accounts of it, and relate so many marvels, as to hazard their own character for veracity. I shall rather endeavour to characterize them as they appear to me after sedulous and repeated study, without concealing their defects, and to bring a living picture of the Grecian stage before the eyes ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... spitting, which is for spittoons, not literature, our fellow-travellers on the deck of the "floating palace" were passably endurable people, in looks, style, and language. I dodge discrimination, and characterize them en masse by negations. The passengers of the Isaac Newton, on a certain evening of July, 18—, were not so intrusively green and so gasping as Britons, not so ill-dressed and pretentious as Gauls, not so ardently futile and so lubberly as Germans. Such were the negative virtues of our fellow-citizen ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... since it seemed to him that "religious suggestion," was the only hope left. He, by the way, had diagnosed her case as one of hysteria. "It had a result," he writes, "which I, though an unbeliever, can characterize only as marvellous. Marie Cools returned completely, absolutely cured. No trace of paralysis or anaesthesia. She is actually on her feet; and, two hospital servants having been stricken by typhoid, she is taking the place of one of them." Another interesting ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... not tried to characterize the university by his peculiar religious faith, but he had given a church building, a parsonage, and a fund for the support of preaching among them at Hilbrook to the small body of believers to which his people adhered. This sect had a name by which it was officially known to itself; but, ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... arrangement in which plants should be arranged according to their true affinities. In his Philosophia Botanica (1751) Linnaeus grouped the genera then known into sixty-seven orders (fragmenta), all except five of which are Angiosperms. He gave names to these but did not characterize them or attempt to arrange them in larger groups. Some represent natural groups and had in several cases been already recognized by Ray and others, but the majority are, in the light of modern knowledge, very mixed. Well-defined polypetalous and gamopetalous genera sometimes occur in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... wit, and encored it merely for the music's sake. The effect was, nevertheless, unfortunate, and calculated to give those French ladies but a bad opinion of our morals. How could they comprehend that the taste was, like themselves, imported, and that its indulgence here did not characterize us? It was only in appearance that, while we did not enjoy the wit we delighted in the coarseness. And how coarse this travesty of the old fable mainly is! That priest Calchas, with his unspeakable snicker ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... over great waters. The comprehensiveness of our thought, whether we are asleep or awake, no doubt depends largely upon our idiosyncrasies, constitution, habits, and mental capacity. But whatever may be the nature of our dreams, the mental processes that characterize them are analogous to those which go on when the mind is not held to attention ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... We are afraid to state some of the estimates which have been given of the number of women in this country who suffer from these maladies; nor do we intend to give in detail the long train of symptoms which characterize them. Such a sad rehearsal would avail little or nothing to the non-medical reader. It is enough to say, that the woman who finds herself afflicted by manifold aches and pains, without obvious cause; who suffers with her head and her stomach and her nerves; who discovers ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... was very much impaired, first by the tribunes of the people, and afterwards upon the establishment of the empire, yet they were still employed in consulting the senate, administering justice, managing public games and the like, and had the honor to characterize the year by their ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... that the argument oftenest heard in support of a proposition so abhorrent to the most primitive instincts of justice is that it will be seldom invoked and therefore cannot do very much harm. I leave you to characterize as it deserves a law whose chief merit must lie in ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... particularly the higher tone, the wider knowledge, the freedom from petty class and personal concerns, the broader range of thought, the familiarity with subjects of general human interest, which characterize the conversation of an English dinner-table or drawing-room, as compared with that of American clubs and parlours. He speaks, with the bitterness of a man often and deeply bored, of the limited range of American table-talk, the prominence of the 'shop,' the professional ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... Five Dynamic Changes acting Together.—So long as the increase of capital more than offsets the increase of population, the ultimate result of all five of the general changes which characterize a dynamic state is to increase the well-being of laborers. The movement of labor from point to point in the system of industrial groups is a necessary means of securing the largest gain for society as a whole and of ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... demology of aboriginal America is pushed forward, the records relating to the Siouan Indians and especially to their structure and institutions will aid in explaining why some stocks are limited and others extensive, why large stocks in general characterize the interior and small stocks the coasts, and why the dominant peoples of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were successful in displacing the preexistent and probably more primitive peoples of the Mississippi valley. While the time is not yet ripe for making final ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... trees suit the undulating country, with its gentle hills and brooding clouds; but in the South the spiky leaves and sharp branches of the olive carry out the defined outlines which are everywhere observable through the broader beauties of mountain and valley and sea-shore. Serenity and intelligence characterize this southern landscape, in which a race of splendid men and women lived beneath the pure light of Phoebus, their ancestral god. Pallas protected them, and golden Aphrodite favored them with beauty. Olives are not, however, by any means the only trees which play a part ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... America as a kind of missionary in the cause of international copyright; to which a prompt contradiction had been given in the Times. "I deny it," wrote Dickens, "wholly. He is wrongly informed; and reports, without enquiry, a piece of information which I could only characterize by using one of the shortest and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... of the paper alluded to above is the Rev. Mr. Hanson—himself a Gha by birth. It was laid before the British Association in 1849. Two points characterize the theory that it exhibits; but as the publication of the paper in extenso, is contemplated, I merely ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... kind of vibration. There are three things which characterize sounds; namely, pitch, intensity and character. Pitch depends on the rapidity of the vibrations; intensity on the extent or the amplitude of the vibrations; and character on the substance or instrument ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... would characterize his reign, and open to us some of the interior operations of the cabinet. The despotic will, yet vacillating conduct of Henry the Eighth, towards the close of his reign, may be traced in a proclamation to abolish the translations of the scriptures, and even the reading of Bibles by the people; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... characterize a republic, we should say it was a state in which power, both theoretically and practically, is derived from the nation, with a constant responsibility of the agents of the public to the people—a responsibility ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... capacity for thematic variation and transformation, his playful and witty and colorful instrumentation, Strauss was able to impart to his music a concreteness and descriptiveness and realism hitherto unknown to symphonic art, to characterize briefly, sparingly, justly, a personage, a situation, an event. He could be pathetic, ironic, playful, mordant, musing, at will. He was sure in his tone, was low-German in "Till Eulenspiegel," courtly ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... follower of Thought wherever she might lead him, above all, as a confessor of that Truth which is forever revealing itself to the seeker, and is the more loved because never wholly revealable, he is an ennobling possession of mankind. Let his own striking words characterize him:— ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... nature), in the relation of sovereign and subject, parent and child, elder brother and younger brother, husband and wife, friend and friend. To his sovereign, or lord, he is bound to be faithful; to his parents, dutiful, and to his elder brother, respectful. Affection should characterize the relations of husband and wife and trust those of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... indeed any member of the family, a comical bird? His head is almost square, and what a remarkable eye he has! It is a seeing eye, too, for he does not require light to enable him to detect the food he seeks in the bogs. He has many names to characterize him, such as Bog-sucker, Mud Snipe, Blind Snipe. His greatest enemies are the pot hunters, who nevertheless have nothing but praise to bestow upon him, his flesh is so exquisitely palatable. Even those who deplore and deprecate the destruction of birds ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography [July 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... remarks, with what I cannot but characterize as astonishing effrontery, or (to use his own language with respect to Tischendorf) "an assurance which can scarcely be characterized otherwise than an unpardonable calculation upon the ignorance of his ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... which Dan'l Borem had hinted might characterize his future conduct was first intimated by his treatment of the "Widow Cully," an aged and impoverished woman whose property was heavily mortgaged to him. He had curtly summoned her to come to his office on Christmas Day and settle up. Frightened, hopeless, ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... feet and limbs. With the limbs extended the front of the hoofs and the convex aspect of the bent pasterns and fetlocks will look toward that flank in which lie the head and shoulders. On examination still higher the smooth, even outline of the knee and its bend, looking toward the hind parts, characterize the fore limb, while the sharp prominence of the point of the hock and the bend on the opposite side of the joint, looking toward the head, indicate the hind ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... be left behind with their husbands. But on being assured that every moment's delay might occasion the sacrifice of a human life, they successively suffered themselves to be torn from the tender embrace, and with that fortitude which never fails to characterize and adorn their sex on occasions of overwhelming trial, were placed, without a murmur, in the boat, which was immediately lowered into a sea so tempestuous as to leave us only to hope against hope that it should live in it for a single moment. Twice ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... east? You are kind enough to admit in your letter that "from this (the aforementioned) standpoint of course the appearance of Russia among the allies is an anomaly and must be explained on other grounds." Anomaly is a rather tame word to characterize the meaning of this appearance of Russia. I should hardly designate it ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... established in the estimation of the general public look to their laurels, for here is one who is destined successfully to enter an honorable contest for the possession of the very highest honors. Unity of design, and warmth as well as vividness of light, positive atmosphere, characterize the works of this artist, and render each one a satisfactorily completed poem. No. 226, 'South Mountain, Catskills,' presents a view doubtless well known to many of our readers. The far-away horizon, the winding Hudson with its tiny sails, the square dent where lies the lake in the Shawangunk range, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... is a good view along the extensive level surfaces and gentle, hilly outlines, covered with wood, that characterize the scenery of Concord. We have not so much as a gleam of lake or river in the prospect; if there were, it would add greatly to the value of ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... of guilt. Ever arrogant, chafing at the intellectual supremacy of the North, envious of its prosperity, despising with all the rancor of a lawless 'chivalry' our regard for the rights of persons, prone to dissipation, and densely ignorant of the great tendencies to progress which characterize the civilization of the nineteenth century, the Southerner has ever felt the same tendency to break away, and be off, which a raw, fiery, conceited youth feels to sunder wholesome domestic ties. The stimulus was within, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... France in order, with her help, to attain her own special ends, but she will never impose on herself sacrifices which are not absolutely necessary, for the private advantage of her ally. These principles will characterize her plan of campaign, if she sees herself compelled by the political position and the interests of her naval supremacy to take part in a ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... to characterize Sitting Bull, of all Sioux chiefs most generally known to the American people. There are few to whom his name is not familiar, and still fewer who have learned to connect it with anything more than the conventional notion of a bloodthirsty savage. The man was an enigma at best. He was not impulsive, ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... both of these theories afford an explanation for many of the secondary pathological manifestations which characterize the intra-ocular tissues ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... action in the narrative makes it more dramatic. Why does the danger of the enterprise take so small a part in the narrative? Can you characterize this kind ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... Choctawhatchee Bay, and serves as a barrier to the sea. Behind this narrow beach island flow the waters of Santa Rosa Sound, the northern shores of which are covered with the same desolate forests of yellow pine that characterize the uplands of the Gulf coast. At the west end of Santa Rosa Island the walls of Fort Pickens rose gloomily out of the sands. It was the only structure inhabited by man on the long barren island, with the exception of one small cabin built on the site of Clapp's steam-mill, four miles beyond ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... which make even pleasure painful. Other exquisite details about those eyes, confer on them unparallelled beauty. Still, this look is far from those traits indicative of lasciviousness, with which some modern artists have thought to characterize their Venuses. ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... on a war thus originating, can it be doubted, by an English House of Commons, whether the aggression was on the part of this country or of France? or whether the manifest aggression on the part of France was the result of anything but the principles which characterize ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... 'You characterize the idea so happily,' she said, 'that I will leave it there. Will you come into the other room, and rest, and be reasonable?' And Hazel disappeared into the hall and blew a ringing blast on her whistle for Dingee and lights. In the little ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... and girls are little men and women. At an early age they are familiar with all the rules of behaviour which characterize their after life and conduct. Their clothes are cut on the same pattern, out of cloth as those of their parents and grandparents. There are no kilts and knee-breeches, pinafores and short skirts, to make them feel that they are ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... came, in time, to have certain tricks of style, such as are apt to characterize a body of anonymous folk-poetry. Such is their use of conventional epithets; "the red, red gold," "the good, green wood," "the gray goose wing." Such are certain recurring ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... surprising; but it was monstrous that she, Hilda, the secretary, the priestess, should share this uncivil apathy; and it was unjust to mark the newspaper, as somehow she had been doing, with the stigma of her mother's death. She actually began to characterize her recent mental attitude to her past life ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... treaty, he goes on to characterize the several parties combined in the war.—"Is it possible," says the Abbe, "that a strict union should long subsist amongst confederates of characters so opposite as the hasty, light, disdainful Frenchman, the jealous, haughty, sly, slow, circumspect Spaniard, and the American, who is ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... been a misunderstood book, as I have told you repeatedly, but you have not listened to me. There should have been a short preface, or, at a good opportunity, an expression of blame, even if only a happy epithet to condemn the evil, to characterize the defect, to signalize the effort. All the characters in that book are feeble and come to nothing, except those with bad instincts; that is what you are reproached with, because people did not understand that you wanted precisely to depict a deplorable state of society ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... of Geneva, composed with rapidity under the pressure of the times, but with the skill and fine literary finish that are wont to characterize even the most hurried of Calvin's productions, has maintained its position undisputed to the present time, being the oldest of existing forms of worship in the reformed churches. The gradual change in the French language since the date of its composition has rendered necessary some modernizing ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... President of the Council thus addressed her: "Madame: How could the Parisians, who are so capable of distinguishing what is good, delicate, and noble, let slip this opportunity of paying their homage to the profound tenderness, the touching grace, the true dignity that characterize Your Majesty? The happy influence of these rare qualities already makes itself felt in all classes of society, and while your august spouse elevates France in glory, you inspire it to resume the first rank among the races most renowned for urbanity." The hall in which the Imperial ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... these sayings, quoted or otherwise, may seem the more in place here because they contemplate the aspects likely to characterize the American garden whenever that garden fully arrives. We like largeness. There are many other qualities to desire, and to desire even more; but if we give them also the liking we truly owe them it is right for us to like largeness. Certainly ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... General," says Tempelhof, "would such a notion of besieging Dresden have occurred; or if it had suggested itself, the hideous difficulties would at once have banished it again, or left it only as a pious wish. But it is strokes of this kind that characterize the great man. Often enough they have succeeded, been decisive of great campaigns and wars, and become splendid in the eyes of all mankind; sometimes, as in this case, they have only deserved to succeed, and to be splendid in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... family had made no plans for departure, the London office ventured to offer them accommodations on one of our ships. I had always heard the House of Windsor was meticulous in its politeness, but I cannot characterize their rejection of our wellmeant aid as ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... liberty were only for individual cases. Villainage as an institution continued to exist and to characterize the position of the mass of the peasantry. The number of freemen through the country was larger, but the serfdom of the great majority can scarcely have been much influenced by these individual cases. The commutation of services, however, ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... country, and where the shores of the Seneca cease to offer those smiling pictures of successful husbandry that so much abound farther north. A somber, or it might be better to say a sober, aspect gave dignity to the landscape, which, if not actually grand, had, at least, most of the elements that characterize the noble in nature. ...
— The Lake Gun • James Fenimore Cooper
... delivered at Philadelphia in August 1776, and published here, is the only complete address of his which has come down to us. It was translated into French and published in Paris, and it is believed that Napoleon borrowed from it the phrase, "A Nation of Shopkeepers," to characterize the English. ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... many tourmalines and a few emeralds one may acquire an eye for the differences of color that characterize the two stones, but it is still necessary to beware of the fine glass imitation and to use the file and also to look with a high-power glass for any rounding bubbles. The emerald will never have the latter. The glass imitation frequently does have them. The sharp jagged flaws ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... bottoms have a light, sandy soil. The Au Sable well deserves its name, not only from the bar at its mouth, but also from the sand fields through which it chiefly flows. Steep, bare peaks, wild ravines, and stupendous precipices characterize the loftier ranges. The waterfalls are numerous and beautiful, and the lakes lovely beyond description. More than one hundred in number, they cluster round the higher groups of peaks, strings of glittering gems about the stately forms ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... most prominent beauties. As a whole, it is very superior to the "Election," highly as we were disposed to rate the merits of that performance. The style is masterly throughout, and every shade of the colouring has all the depth and richness which characterize works of real genius. There is a spirit in every touch which differs as much from the softened and soulless compositions of certain modern artists, as does the florid architecture of the ancients from the starved proportions of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... canvas, a gentle smile upon his strongly marked face betrays considerable satisfaction. Lord Mavourneen is a very successful man, and his smile and his yacht have been elements of no small importance in his success. They characterize him historically, like the tear which always trembles under the left eyelid of Prince Bismarck, like the gray overcoat of Bonaparte, the black tights and gloomy looks of Hamlet the Dane, or Richelieu's kitten. Lord Mavourneen is a man of action, ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... engagements, petty in themselves but contributing each its mite to ultimate success or failure, occupied detachments of the opposing Indian forces with considerable frequency.[776] Two, devised by Cooper, those of the fourteenth[777] and twentieth[778] of May may be said to characterize ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... expressed in this distich is so self-evident that we might almost characterize it as trite. Yet the history of every science marks many eminent men, of superior intelligence, who have been arrested in the way of progress by a wholly contrary opinion, and have very innocently supposed that science had uttered to them her ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... curve. In reality, however, the apse is not so sharply curved internally as externally, and its walls are very thick, so that the square form could be imposed upon the round without much overlapping. The parapet shows the same wide merlons and cruciform piercings which characterize the other Decorated parapets of the church, and it may have been ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... answer in any question. The crudeness of their intellect, which may go together with ample knowledge in other fields, predestines them to be deceived and puts a premium on the imposture. I may try to characterize some varieties of crooked thinking from chance tests of the correspondence with which the underworld has besieged me. I have only the letters of most recent date ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... distinguish the shores of France, which differ entirely from those of England, rising gradually from the water's edge, with the single exception of Scales Cliff, which seems to correspond with some of those bulwarks which characterize our coast from Dover to Portland, where, I think, chalk cliffs are succeeded by masses ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... young Red Hawk. He endeavored to conceal himself up the chimney of the cabin, in which they were; but without success. He was soon discovered and killed. The remaining Indian was murdered by piece-meal; and with almost all those circumstances of cruelty and horror, which characterize the savage, in ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... of this essay has attempted to make, as he himself phrases it, "a modest contribution to the natural history of Weltschmerz." What goes by that name is no doubt somewhat elusive; one can not easily delimit and characterize it with scientific accuracy. Nevertheless the word corresponds to a fairly definite range of psychical reactions which are of great interest in modern poetry, especially German poetry. The phenomenon is worth studying in detail. In undertaking a study of it Mr. Braun ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... next gallery, where figural pictures predominate, a very swingy composition of a Brittany festival, by Charles-Ren Darrieux, is most conspicuous, for the forceful handling and the fine quality of movement which characterize the procession of figures rhythmically moving through the picture. Of the two large nudes on the same wall, one, a Besnard, is vulgarly physical, although well painted, and the other too insipid to make ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... year before he was taught even to read. In his eighteenth year he migrated to Tennessee, and established himself in that rich upland region on the eastern border of the State, where by altitude the same agricultural conditions are developed that characterize the land which lies several degrees further North. Specially adapted to the cereals, the grasses, and the fruits of Southern Pennsylvania and Ohio, East Tennessee could not employ slave-labor with the profit which it brought in the rich cotton-fields ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... it comes under the notice of Mr. Dzierzon, he will himself prefer it to his own. It in fact combines all the good properties which a hive ought to possess, while it is free from the complication, clumsiness, vain whims, and decidedly objectionable features, which characterize most of the inventions which profess to be at all superior to the simple box, or the ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... (Blaise Pascal(1623-1662). The allusion is to a passage in the philosopher's "Pensees." Pascal describes man as a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but "a thinking reed."—Translator's Note.) Master of implements and of fire! These two aptitudes, simple though they be, characterize man better than the number of his vertebrae and ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... I conceive to be a good memory, a fertile fancy, a ready wit, fluency of speech, and a brazen countenance, so that you shall tell a man a most bare-faced falsehood, and afterwards adduce such connected proofs as especially characterize actual facts. The following dialogue is a specimen of the talents ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various
... detachment suggested that a quid of tobacco externally would be beneficial, so this also was done. It was not a dressing favorable to an aseptic condition of the wound, perhaps, nor was there anything in the quid of tobacco calculated to withdraw the poison or neutralize its effects, so the doctors may characterize this as a very foolish proceeding; but country people skilled in simples and herb remedies might tell some of these ultra scientific surgeons that the application of a quid of tobacco or of a leaf of tobacco to the sting ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... qualities characterize the work of Mary Wilkins Freeman? What is the secret of her success in so employing a little realistic incident as to hold the reader's attention? Compare the two short stories, The Madonna of the Future ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... other events. Besides slaying demons he has all along been sensitive to feminine needs, arousing in women passionate adoration and at the same time fulfilling the most intense of their physical desires. It is these qualities which characterize his later career. ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... organization of France, and also in the office of the Prefect, but it is far more elaborate, and the machinery much more complex, in Prussia. Thirdly the comparative independence of the executive from the deliberative authority, and the predominance of the officials, which characterize the central government of Prussia, repeat themselves throughout the whole of local government. And, finally, in all except the (p. 268) largest of the Prussian areas of local self-government, the executive agents of the locality, elected by it, are also the representatives ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... defenders of Londonderry, and by the Celtic defenders of Limerick, has ever been granted from the heart by either race. To this day a more than Spartan haughtiness alloys the many noble qualities which characterize the children of the victors, while a Helot feeling, compounded of awe and hatred, is but too often discernible in the children of the vanquished. Neither of the hostile castes can justly be absolved from blame; but the chief blame is due to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... lake. It is singular in how fine and subtle a way different nationalities express themselves in landscape gardening, while employing the same materials. I have seen no grounds on the continent that express the particular shade of ideas which characterize the English. There is an air of grave majesty about the wide sweep of their outlines—a quality suggestive of ideas of strength and endurance which ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right rapture. He then enunciates the four truths. The first declares that all clinging to existence involves suffering. I shall have occasion to examine later the pessimism which is often said to characterize Buddhism and Indian thought generally. Here let it suffice to say that the first truth must be taken in conjunction with the others. The teaching of the Buddha is a teaching not so much of pessimism as of emancipation: but emancipation implies the existence of evil from which men ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... Presidential office. While this is in a great measure the reaction from the king worship of the Old World, it is nevertheless a blot upon our civilization, a departure from those lofty and noble sentiments which characterize every advanced stage of human intellect, in which the supremacy and inviolability of the law is acknowledged, and in which the ruler is reverenced as the representative and impersonation of the law. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Baron strove to conceal the embarrassment with which he approached the Prelate, whose attitude was plainly assumed for the purpose of impressing him with awe and solicitude. He tried, indeed, to exhibit a demeanour of such ease as might characterize their old friendship, or at least of such indifference as might infer the possession of perfect tranquillity; but he failed in both, and his address expressed mortified pride, mixed with no ordinary degree of embarrassment. The genius of the Catholic Church was on such occasions ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... and crumplings, and clippings, and what not. But there is nothing so constantly noble as the pure leaf of the laurel, bay, orange, and olive; numerable, sequent, perfect in setting, divinely simple and serene. I shall call these noble leaves 'Apolline' leaves. They characterize many orders of plants, great and small,—from the magnolia to the myrtle, and exquisite 'myrtille' {52} of the hills, (bilberry); but wherever you find them, strong, lustrous, dark green, simply formed, richly scented or stored,—you have nearly ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... of the French nation; a trait in some individuals elevated to a sublime self-devotion, and in others degraded to mere excitability. The vivacity, gesticulation, and grimace, which characterize most of them, are the external signs of this nature; the calm heroism of the seventeenth century, and the insane devotion of the nineteenth, were alike its fruits. The voyageur possessed it, in ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... the avenging of blood, we still find perhaps in legends an echo of the original principle that a murderer, or any one who should illegally protect a murderer, might justifiably be slain by the kinsmen of the person murdered; but these very legends characterize this principle as objectionable,(3) and from their statements blood-revenge would appear to have been very early suppressed in Rome through the energetic assertion of the authority of the community. In like manner we perceive in the earliest Roman law no ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... type, proving how climate and mode of life may alter the original; for it is curious to contrast the round, rosy faces of the fresh English girls outward bound with the sharp, sallow faces and flashing, restless eyes which characterize those who are returning. The babel of tongues at these tables-d'hote, where conversations are being carried on in every European language, is most perplexing at first, though French and English predominate. Altogether, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... well-informed indeed. Following this comes an elaborate and exhaustive chapter on bread-making in all its steps and phases. To this important topic some seventy pages are devoted. And so on through the whole range of viands. Exactness, plainness, thoroughness, seem to characterize all the author's teachings. No point is neglected, and directions are given for both necessary and luxurious dishes. There are chapters on cooking for invalids, the dining-room, care of kitchen utensils, ...
— Carving and Serving • Mrs. D. A. Lincoln
... way—he was so vulgar. A word of sympathy from Lady Jocelyn might have saved her from the sourness into which her many conflicting passions were resolving; and might also have saved her ladyship from the rancour she had sown in the daughter of the great Mel by her selection of epithets to characterize him. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of these French biographers (I mean of those who have written upon and wished to characterize Lord Byron), without knowing the man they were writing about, set to work with a ready-made Byron. This, no doubt, they found to be an easier method to follow, and one of which the results must ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... catalogue of human qualities which characterize our thoroughly domesticated dogs, we must not fail to take account of their sense of property. In this the creature differs from all other of our domesticated animals. It is a common characteristic of mammals, both in their wild and tame state, ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... that a similar intelligent, manful, and, at the same time, charitable and patriotic adherence to principles, fundamental both in morals and politics, will characterize the people of Massachusetts, and all their representatives, by whatever experiences of danger or difficulty their devotion to truth and duty ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... conviction that we cannot do without it—that all selfishness be extirpated, pride banished, unbelief driven from the mind, every idol dethroned, and everything hostile to holiness and opposed to the divine will crucified; that 'holiness to the Lord' may be engraven on the heart, and evermore characterize our whole conduct. This is what we ought to strive after; this is the way to be happy; this is what our Saviour loves—entire surrender of the heart. May He enable us by his Spirit to persevere till we attain it! All comes from ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... Listen, chillun!" said Katie, in a voice of such awful solemnity that Ishmael again smiled at what he was inclined to characterize as the ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... their situation than most of them seem to do; that they should look above and beyond the ranks of partisans for the light they need; that they should listen to those who will discuss their problem with the coolness, the disinterestedness, the unhesitating honesty which characterize the leading scientists of the day in other fields of inquiry. Such are the speakers and writers they should invite to their assistance. Instead of wasting their breath in expressions of self-admiration, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... the Main hauled in and moored alongside, at the distance of only a few fathoms. Besides the captain, there were several well-dressed personages on board, who appeared to take an interest in the cargo, and lived in the cabin. But harmony did not characterize their intercourse with each other. At times violent altercations occurred, which, being carried on in the Spanish language, were to us neither ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... of history and literature? Why should both subjects be studied together? Explain the qualities that characterize all great literature. Has any text-book in history ever appealed to you as a work of literature? What literary qualities have you noticed in standard historical works, such as those of Macaulay, Prescott, Gibbon, Green, Motley, Parkman, and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... characterize the curious combination of levity and seriousness that runs through this tale. There is no illusion of reality anywhere; there is no agony of soul in Baron Pon's confession; Nerto's terror when she learns that she is the property ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... the city. The palace and houses near it are certainly in a melancholy condition. The palace, with its innumerable smashed windows and battered walls, looks as if it had become stone blind in consequence of having the smallpox. Broken windows and walls full of holes characterize all the streets in that direction, yet there is less real damage done than might have been expected, after such a furious firing ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... the highest importance for you to have in mind a clear conception of the end you wish to achieve by your speaking. This purpose should characterize all you say, so that at each step in your speech you will feel sure of making steady ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser |
