"Palpable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his career, in the gravely reflective but kindly mood of Cymbeline, A Winter's Tale, and The Tempest; yet no serious attempt has ever been made to trace and demonstrate in the personal contact of the writer with concurrent life the underlying spiritual causes of these very palpable changes in his expression of it. Until this is done no adequate life ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... grass, he studied the look of the rows of windows. She was within, and strangely to his clouded senses she was no longer Tony, no longer the deceptive woman he could in justice abuse. He and she, so close to union, were divided. A hand resembling the palpable interposition of Fate had swept them asunder. Having the poorest right—not any—to reproach her, he was disarmed, he felt himself a miserable intruder; he summoned his passion to excuse him, and gained some ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... failure shall serve as a warning to those who do not cultivate a power of immoral self-control which shall prevent them from saying, or even thinking, anything that shall not be to their immediate and palpable advantage.' To do our countrymen justice, it is often not self-interest, but a tendency to deal with the concrete instance, in disregard of the general law, that blinds them to the larger aspects of great problems. Those who are able to trace causes and effects further than the majority ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... it, if people were dying of disease without help while material assistance could so easily be rendered, and I supplied them with a doctor, a hospital, and an asylum for the aged? And is it not a palpable, unquestionable good if a peasant, or a woman with a baby, has no rest day or night and I give them rest and leisure?" said Pierre, hurrying and lisping. "And I have done that though badly and to a small extent; but I have done something toward ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... live, and it was not difficult to surmise how. Another significant fact was that goods subject to heavy duties—such as spirits, hams, etc.—could be bought at any store at a price which was less than original cost plus carriage and duty. Smuggling was a very palpable fact, and—quoth the public and the officials—a very convenient and even ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... entrusted to their charge, was insulted, coerced, and crushed. Sufficiently cunning to avoid a palpable infraction of the orders of government, they constantly violated their spirit. Physical weakness, or mental incapacity, they treated as evasion or contempt. Prone to invoke the interposition of the magistracy, ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... the poet, unlike most, was never very thoroughly satisfied with his poems, and that, therefore, the vanity possessed him to vest the sense of beauty which he felt tingling in his blood in something more palpable than language. Hence came the charming walks and woods and waters of Leasowes. With this ambition holding him and mastering him, what mattered a mouldy grain-crop, or a debt? If he had only an ardent admirer of his walks, his wilderness, his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... amongst the sugar-cane growers to invite little parties of friends to come to the plantation to drink the fresh juice, and other uninvited guests are apt to stroll round in the hope of getting something. The code of hospitality amongst Indians being such a liberal one, even the palpable cadgers are not sent away empty. Apparently every visitor to any garden must be made to take away some tangible memento of his visit, if it be ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... to their country, they sealed its doom by inviting in among them like wolves into the sheep-fold), the fierce and impious Saxons, a race hateful both to God and men, to repel the invasions of the northern nations. Nothing was ever so pernicious to our country, nothing was ever so unlucky. What palpable darkness must have enveloped their minds-darkness desperate and cruel! Those very people whom, when absent, they dreaded more than death itself, were invited to reside, as one may say, under the selfsame roof. Foolish ...
— On The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) • Gildas
... shadow which had fallen upon all of us seemed at that moment almost palpable—a thing to be felt like the darkness of Egypt and not to be dispelled even by ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... domestic animals can produce only a limited degree of variation. The maximum variation known at the present time in the animal kingdom is seen in dogs, but in all the varieties the relations of the bones remain the same and the shape of the teeth undergoes no palpable change. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... with a sense of relief, as I mused alone in the still neatly arranged sitting-room, after the landlord, who sat and chatted for a few minutes, had left me. "There is, I am willing to believe, a basis of good in this man's character, which has led him to remove, as far as possible, the more palpable evils that ever attach themselves to a house of public entertainment. He had but entered on the business last year. There was much to be learned, pondered, and corrected. Experience, I doubt not, has led to many important changes ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... appear to have gone deeply into the study of original sources, but it is only in his incidental treatment of continental history that his deficiencies in this respect become palpable. Here he is often inaccurate, and even when his facts are correct his mode of stating them shows that he is not master of the whole field, and has little appreciation of mingled motives and attendant circumstances. Such ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... compact crowd; but I myself am no longer there; I am elsewhere; farther ahead, I hope.' 'That man is right,' he thought, 'who has allied himself most closely with the future.' The future, to Ibsen, was a palpable thing, not concerned merely with himself as an individual, but a constantly removing, continually occupied promised land, into which he was not content to go alone. Yet he would always have asked of a follower, with Zarathustra: 'This is my road; which ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... it had been requisite to some strange design of fate, in its inscrutable vagary, that several persons should suffer a night of broken rest at Gosnold House, why must they have been those four and none other—Sally, Adele Standish, Lyttleton, Trego? Especially Trego! Why that one? Palpable bonds of mutual interest linked the three first named; their common affliction might conceivably have been ascribable to subtle psychological affinity. But Trego was well outside the triangle, even as perceptibly out of sympathy with a majority of ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... the most fatal and palpable error of the commander-in-chief was his neglect to preserve that ascendancy on Lakes Erie and Ontario which was actually enjoyed by the British at the opening of the contest. The command of these lakes is so evidently an object of primary consideration ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... thought with myself, as I stood and enjoyed the sight, what a palpable and eloquent, though undesigned and silent, refutation that is, of all such Northern chimeras. If poisons are mixed with articles of food or medicine by the negroes with any noticeable frequency, the sign of a negro compounding medicines for public sale would surely be, to customers, ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... a less palpable world, do these two passages of immortal verse, wearing each its beam of golden light, stand in their effulgence before the sympathies of the observer alive to the charms and influences of moral beauty! Surely no other poet has the world produced comparable to Shakspeare ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... Highlanders, in the same manner as the word 'Erse' is now frequently used to express their language; but inconclusive as it is, this charter," he continues, "cannot be admitted at all, as it bears the most palpable marks of having been a forgery of a later time, and one by no means happy in its execution. How such a tradition of the origin of the Mackenzies ever could have arisen, it is difficult to say but the fact of their native origin and Gaelic descent is completely set at ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... and cannot, look for anything but poverty, and wretchedness, throughout your connection. A worldly-minded man, will be far from an interesting companion; yet, in the issue, it is better to trust yourself with the slave of business, than with a palpable drone. ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... deceased had left a will; and she saw the Bible placed in the bottom of a new pack, which she had made for his accommodation, with a most stoical indifference; but as the six silver spoons were laid carefully by its side, a sudden twinge of her conscience objected to such a palpable waste of property, ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... thoughts, the loftier aspirations of the Spirit, or the logic of reason. The first, therefore, was taught to the initiated in the Mysteries. There, also, it was taught by symbols. The vagueness of symbolism, capable of many interpretations, reached what the palpable and conventional creed could not. Its indefiniteness acknowledged the abstruseness of the subject: it treated that mysterious subject mystically: it endeavored to illustrate what it could not explain; to excite an appropriate feeling, if it could not develop an adequate idea; ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... So palpable was this impress of sanctity in his every-day-life, that no one could come in contact with him without perceiving it and feeling its inherent power. Such being the rare effulgence of Father Vincent's sanctity as seen amid ...
— Memoir • Fr. Vincent de Paul
... whether Noah's Ark did not first rest upon it; and this might be one of the Summits of Ararat, with some Confutations of the gross and palpable Errors, which place this extraordinary Skill among the Mountains ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... was considered unsafe is still extant. It is in one of the attics of "the Upper House," but the entrance is now very palpable. Those who are curious enough to climb up into this black hole will discover a rude wooden bench within it—a luxury compared with ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... with the reader's leave, that all ornament is base which takes for its subject human work, that it is utterly base,—painful to every rightly-toned mind, without perhaps immediate sense of the reason, but for a reason palpable enough when we do think of it. For to carve our own work, and set it up for admiration, is a miserable self-complacency, a contentment in our own wretched doings, when we might have been looking at God's doings. And all noble ornament is the exact reverse of this. It is the expression ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... still more obvious, palpable, and impressive circumstance. A man with ordinary means looks with alarm on the too visible and too unbounded extravagance of the ladies from among whom he is expected to take a partner. The thought of the apparel, of the luxuries, of the attendants, of the restless moving about, ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... was the custom of his housekeeper to air the rooms once a week; and, this being Wednesday, she had lighted a fire there, while Lydia, a young housemaid and general factotum, had allowed all other fires to go out. There was a palpable sense of chilliness about the room, and in one corner of it the green-and-gold wall-paper showed stains of damp. Long gilded mirrors between tall windows occupied one side of the room, and had marble shelves beneath them upon which were placed ornate Bohemian glass vases and ormolu ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... religious elements of family life, and to show that the development of individual character and happiness in the church and state, in time and in eternity, starts with, and depends upon, home-training and nurture. The author, in presenting it to the public, is fully conscious of its many palpable imperfections; yet, as it is his first effort, and as it was prepared amid the multiplied perplexities and interruptions of his professional life, he confidently expects that it will be received with charitable consideration. It is now ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... reeling brain from wreck With its bewilder'd senses! (He covers his eyes for a while.) What! E'en now That Babel left behind me, but my eyes Pursued by the same glamour, that—unless Alike bewitch'd too—the confederate sense Vouches for palpable: bright-shining floors That ring hard answer back to the stamp'd heel, And shoot up airy columns marble-cold, That, as they climb, break into golden leaf And capital, till they embrace aloft In clustering flower and fruitage over walls Hung with such purple curtain ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... body. From his lips I learned something of the mishaps of the regiment. My Captain's wound he spoke of as less grave than at first thought; but he mentioned incidentally having heard a story recently that he was killed,—a fiction, doubtless,—a mistake,—a palpable absurdity,—not to be remembered or made any account of. Oh, no! but what dull ache is this in that obscurely sensitive region, somewhere below the heart, where the nervous centre called the semilunar ganglion lies unconscious of itself until a great grief or a mastering ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... royal family had not yet left, and this fact made the arrangements possible. It was now very warm. Dust lay everywhere, on the huge palms, on the withered plants, on the chairs and railings, and swam palpable in the air. Breitmann was nowhere to be found, but he had seen the manager of the hotel and secured rooms facing the bay. Later, perhaps two hours after the arrival, he appeared. In this short time he had completed ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... book of war is a catalogue of errors, and the errors in a campaign, though unrealised at the time by those who make them, became palpable after the deed is done, and increase ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... that I am a professional Gambler. I shall set out, if we meet, to prove to the audience, among other things, that in his illustrations of the cheatery which he says the gambler practices upon his victim, he is actually at that very moment practising a palpable cheat upon the very audience which he is proposing to enlighten. As regards any profits that may arise from such a meeting, I want none, although perhaps as needy ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... O, you stood beside me, like my youth, Transformed for me the real to a dream, Cloathing the palpable and familiar With ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... Buena's Gift to George and Mary Donner An Alcalde's Negligence Mary Donner's Land Regranted Squatters Jump George Donner's Land A Characteristic Land Law-suit Vexatious Litigation Twice Appealed to Supreme Court, and once to United States Supreme Court A Well-taken Law Point Mutilating Records A Palpable Erasure Relics of the Donner Party Five Hundred Articles Buried Thirty-two Years Knives, Forks, Spoons Pretty Porcelain Identifying Chinaware Beads and Arrow-heads A Quaint Bridle-bit Remarkable Action of Rust A Flint-Lock Pistol A Baby's Shoe The ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... remonstrances by which the habitual dexterity of Rome at once saves appearances, and suffers the continuance of the delinquency. The Jesuits were too useful to be restrained; yet their crimes were too palpable to be passed over. In consequence, the complaints of the monarchs of Spain and Portugal were answered by bulls issued from time to time, equally formal and ineffective. Yet even from these documents may be ascertained the singularly gross, worldly, and illegitimate pursuits of an order, professing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... palpable dust; and then as from afar off came a faint roar, increasing each moment, till, with a furious rush, a fierce wind came tearing through the ruins of the smitten town, sweeping all before it, so that we had to ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay. I hesitated once, debating ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... will not suffer from the grasp of the seven-year-old; and the familiar fables and tales of the "Goldilocks" variety have a firmness of surface which does not let the glamour rub off; but stories in which there is a hint of the beauty just beyond the palpable—or of a dignity suggestive of developed literature—are sorely hurt in their metamorphosis, and should be protected from it. They are ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... wearing a remarkably fine diamond necklace, much too fine for journalism, and regarding him with that quality of questionable proprietorship, of leashed but straining intimacy, that seems inseparable from this sort of affair. It is so much more palpable than matrimony. If anything was wanted to complete my conviction it was my uncles's eyes when presently he became aware of mine, a certain embarrassment and a certain pride and defiance. And the next day he made an opportunity to praise the lady's intelligence to me concisely, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... you feel as when coming, in a forest, upon what seems a dead lion; perhaps he may not be dead, but only sleeping; nay, perhaps he may not be sleeping, but only shamming. And you have a jealousy, as to Milton, even in the most flagrant case of almost palpable error, that, after all, there may be a plot in it. You may be put down with shame by some man reading the line otherwise, reading it with a different emphasis, a different caesura, or perhaps a different suspension of the voice, so as to bring out a ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Sandt.—No falsehood is more palpable than that wisdom leads to happiness—I mean in this world; in another, we may well indeed believe that the words are constructed of very different materials. But here we are, standing on a barren molehill that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... His magic cap, invisible may walk, And none so lynx-eyed as detect his presence, In the most peopled city—yet beware, Let him not, trusting to the demon's power, Cross the white splendour of the sun, for there, Although no palpable substance is discern'd, His shadow will ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... recent order, which I have approved, you will only arrest individuals, and suppress assemblies or newspapers, when they may be working palpable injury to the military in your charge; and in no other case will you interfere with the expression of opinion in any form, or allow it to be interfered with violently by others. In this you have a discretion to exercise with great caution, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... prize. This so delighted him that he quickly recovered his health and spirits. But he would never have known to whom he was indebted for his success, had not the preceptor pressed Verin to tell him why he had made such palpable faults ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... Bob's turn to sustain the drooping courage of Dick, who, like most country-bred lads, was intensely superstitious, fancying the darkness to swarm with ghosts and goblins, who were on the watch to devour him; the boy, while bearing up bravely against palpable privations and open dangers, staring them in the face, from which grown men would have quailed, was now affected by silly fears which a baby would ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... years of exhausting struggle for a position in society, three years of crawling, and pushing, and scrambling, and climbing. There had been a dubious triumph. Then six years of respectable futility, ambiguous courtship, and palpable frustration. After all that, there was something flattering in the thought that, at forty-five, she should yet find her name still coupled with Walter ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... the lamp, and it was one of the moments at which he had, in his extraordinary way, most his air of designedly showing himself. It was as if at these instants he just presented himself, his identity so rounded off, his palpable presence and his massive young manhood, as such a link in the chain as might practically amount to a kind of demonstration. It was as if—and how but anomalously?—he couldn't after all help thinking sufficiently well of these things to let them go for what ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... common in such representations to represent the Virgin with a sword in her bosom, and even with seven swords in allusion to the seven sorrows. This very material and palpable version of the allegorical prophecy (Luke ii, 35) has been found extremely effective as an appeal to the popular feelings, so that there are few Roman Catholic churches without such a painful and literal interpretation ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... Thereafter I was more careful, but the idea haunted me. Yet, I was not the only person who sat with her. Other men paid her attentive court. The difference was, however, that with me she assumed ever so delicate, yet palpable an air of proprietorship, none the less alluring because there was no heart in it. So far as the other passengers were concerned, there was nothing jarring to propriety in our companionship. They did not know of Number 116 Intermediate. She had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... tradition, and, further, the traditional motives of the Niblung story have varied enormously not only in different countries, but in one and the same language at the same time. The story is never told alike by two narrators; what is common and essential in it is nothing palpable or fixed, but goes from poet to poet "like a shadow from dream to dream." And the historical names are apparently unessential; yet they remain. To look for the details of the Niblung story in the sober history of the Goths ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... her breath as if the oppression of the room in which she had immured her darling had infected the sunny air of this glorious day and made free breathing an impossibility. The weights on her feet were so palpable to her that she unconsciously looked down at them. This was how she came to notice the dust on her shoes. Alive to the story it told, she burst the spell which held her and made a ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... morning in her life when she went with her husband into the woods, to hunt up a wild steer. She knew every foot of the place, and yet one turn of the path brought them into the heart of a picture thrillingly new with the unfamiliarity of pure and living beauty. The evergreens enfolded them in a palpable dusk; but entrancingly near, shimmering under a sunny gleam, stood a company of birches in their first spring wear. They were trembling, not so much under the breeze as from the hurrying rhythm of the year. Their green was vivid enough to lave the vision in light; and Letty looked beyond it to ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... the Egyptians was a palpable discouragement to all the fleet, but not all were aware that their leader, Antony, had shared Cleopatra's flight. Some of those who realized what had happened gave up all further effort for victory, and leaving the line drove ashore on the sandy ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... night unlustrous, dark, Of every planet reft, and palled in clouds, Did never spread before the sight a veil In thickness like that fog, nor to the sense So palpable and gross. Entering its shade, Mine eye endured not with unclosed lids; Which marking, near me drew the faithful guide, Offering me ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... the proudest of his fellows. The sting of defeat still rankled in his heart. The sense of infinite distance between his race and that unfortunate race whom he pitied so sincerely, to whose future he looked forward with so much apprehension, was as distinct and palpable to him as to any one of his compeers. The thousandth part of a drop of the blood of the despised race degraded, in his mind, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... spirit, and life, and power! Not to speak of the removal of affection and the employing of the marrow of your soul upon base lusts and creatures, or the scattering of your desires abroad amongst them, for that is too palpable, even your very thoughts and minds are removed from this business, you have nothing present but an ear, or eye, and your minds are about other business, your desires, your fears, your joys, and delights, your affections, never did run in the channel of religious ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... gave to them. With wiser purposes, he superseded the old petrifying process of the magician in the Arabian tale, and struck the prisons and parish abuses of his country, and its schools of neglect and crime, into palpable life forever. A portion of the truth of the past, of the character and very history of the moral abuses of his time, will thus remain always in his writings; and it will be remembered that with only the light arms of humor and laughter, and the gentle ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... been played there during long lazy days, in the careful shadows of the trees. "General Merchandise," in faint letters upon a long board, had to be read with a slanted glance, for the sign dangled by one end; but the porch of the old store was a palpable legend of ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... sight, of course, and with a perfect gift of seeing how much loftier each was than the other; and what an extraordinary fact it was that in everything imaginable they were quite alike, except in the palpable certainty possessed by each of the betterness of the other. What an age it seemed since first they met, positively without thinking, and in the very middle of a skirmish, yet with a remarkable drawing out of perceptions one anotherward! Did Mary feel this, when she acted so cleverly, and ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... soldiers till one o'clock, at which time we made an end, and I went home and took my wife and went to my cosen, Thomas Pepys, and found them just sat down to dinner, which was very good; only the venison pasty was palpable beef, which was not handsome. After dinner I took my leave, leaving my wife with my cozen Stradwick,—[Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Pepys, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, and wife of Thomas Stradwick.]—and ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... business-like activity of simple blue country has been already alluded to. This attribute renders in it a plain palpable brick dwelling-house allowable; though a thing which, in every country but the simple blue, compels every spectator of any feeling to send up aspirations, that builders who, like those of Babel, have brick for stone, may be put, like those of Babel, ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... been surmounted on every side. I wish no other proof of this than the deplorable fact of which I have just made mention: the conduct of the Tract Society, the internal crisis which it has experienced, the reprobation which it encounters, in Europe as in America. Are not these palpable proofs of the too little known truth that the great moral force which is struggling with ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... every chapter of every book, were the fruit of ample meditation and repeated revision, if he had never written with any thought of profit, never written but what he could not contain hidden within him—this is to tell us palpable nonsense. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... beyond redemption; and before he left for his imprisonment, or transportation, the thief requested Sir Walter to come into his cell. On meeting, the fellow frankly told his counsel that he felt very grateful to him for his efforts to clear him; that he had done the best he could; but the proof was too palpable against him. He would gladly reward Sir Walter for his services; but he had no money, and could only give him a piece of advice, which might, perhaps, be serviceable hereafter. Sir Walter heard him, no doubt, with some regret at losing ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... A palpable election, a conscious predestination controlled the free agency, and transfigured the individuality of his mind; and that, which he 'might have been', was compered into that, which he 'was to be'. From his early ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... This explanation had palpable truth, but Lily perceived that it had wider application than to the meeting they ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... the cultivated classes of our day—and that very largely because in Erasmus there is no quick sensibility to religious emotion as there is in Luther, and no inconvenient fervour. The faults are there—coarse, plain, palpable— and perhaps more than enough has been made of them. Let us remember, as to his violence, that he was following the fashion of the day; that he was fighting for his life; that when a man is at death-grips with a tiger he may be pardoned if he strikes without considering whether he ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... The thing peeled off with difficulty; for it was a work of art, very firmly and gracefully fastened with sticking-plaster. But it peeled off at last—and with it the whole of the Count's and Dr. Fortescue-Langley's distinction. The man stood revealed, a very palpable man-servant. ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... question in my head which has never received a satisfactory answer: Why does a bull come to a call anyway? It is held generally—and with truth, I think—that he comes because he thinks the sound is made by a cow moose. But how his keen ears could mistake such a palpable fraud is the greatest mystery in the woods. I have heard a score of hunters and Indians call, all differently, and have sometimes brought a bull into the open at the wail of my own bark trumpet; but I have never yet listened to a call that has any resemblance to the bellow of a cow moose as I have ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... a standstill, for what could it add to these wonders? Yet the fairyland of which Ludo and I had dreamed was more beautiful and more real than this palpable magnificence of tin and pasteboard; which is, perhaps, one reason why the overexcited imagination of a city child shrinks back and tries to find in reality what a boy brought up in the quiet of the country can conjure ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... it until daybreak that any thing like tranquillity was restored. In spite of my early instruction, the dogs delight to bark and bite, and should be allowed to do so, it being their nature, I could not help wishing that, for a short season, the power was vested in me to carry out the most palpable service for which brickbats and the Bosphorus could ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... has been betrayed into palpable and undisguised weakness at least once in the presence of this assembly, who are looking upon him almost for the last time before they part from him, and see his face no more. Let us not inquire too curiously, then, how he received this kind proposition. It is enough, ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... candelabra of the Medicis stood a shining table of varnished splendor; on it, as if hoping to deaden its aggressive luster, was a marvelous strip of Paduan lace, while around its stodgy newness were six smug chairs of a very palpable "golden oak." Folsom threw up his hands ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... any palpable beginning, and drifted into reminiscence. "I remember being run away with by a mule train in Ronda ... the first I had ever handled. They got out of hand—it was a nasty gorge with a bend in it where you turn on to the bridge. ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... most signal instance within all time, of a malignant delusion maintained directly and immediately by ignorance, by an absolute determination and even a fanatic zeal not to receive one new idea. Tenets involving the most palpable impossibilities, and asserted in self-contradictory terms, must stand inviolable to all question or controversy; literature must be scouted as a profane folly; not a principle of true philosophy is to be ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... has the temerity to ask you to throw away your reason, to dismiss logic from your minds, to trample law under your feet, to scatter the evidence to the four winds of heaven, and to believe what? Why, a boy's silly story of an absurd and palpable lie? ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... found a prominent place. To assert that Pharisaism included the small and excluded the great, that it enforced rules and forgot principles, that it exalted the letter and neglected the spirit, is a palpable libel. Pharisaism was founded on God. On this foundation was erected a structure which embraced the eternal principles of religion. But the system, it must be added, went far beyond this. It held that there was a right and a wrong way of doing things in themselves trivial. Prescription ruled in ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... god, since he can call into palpable shape dreams born of impalpable thought; as a god, since he has known the truth divested of lies, and has stood face to face with it, and been not afraid; a god thus. But a cripple inasmuch as his hand can never fashion the shapes that his vision beholds; an alien because he has lost what he ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... province, what in reality cannot be explained. Some weak abortion of the human reason is always substituted, in the attempt, for some profound mystery in the moral government of God; and men ill-grounded in the faith are led to confound the palpable abortion with the inscrutable mystery, and are ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... open to debate. It is when a Court gives what is thought to be an erroneous decision on matters exciting the feelings of large classes that the difficulty of obtaining acquiescence in its judgments is palpable. The judges decided, and it is quite possible decided rightly, that Ship Money was a legal exaction, and that the Crown's dispensing power was authorized by law. Popular opinion branded the judges as ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... so!" we hear the modern economist exclaim; "the effect of the foreign influx of goods will merely be a stimulant to the national industry, and a consequent lowering of our prices." Here we have him between the horns of a plain and palpable dilemma. If the manufacturer for the home market will be compelled, as you say he must be, to lower his prices at home, in order to meet the competition of foreign imported manufactured goods, which are still liable in a ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... has a grammatical double entendre whose application is palpable. Harf al-Jarra particle governing the noun in the genitive or a mode of thrusting ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... with a deprecating look at Joyce as he emerged. "I was just—just botanizing, you know." Delighted that she broke into merry laughter over the palpable fib he joined in, adding presently, "Pardon me, but you all looked so jolly! And you know I don't often see ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... for the palpable exaggeration of small details, this excitable Frenchman's description of the ascent is the best that we have seen, therefore we have given ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... have her cards dealt round to them in their turn. The child's attention appeared to be distracted by seeing the stranger again who had kissed her hand so fervently—she began to look confused—and ended by committing an open and most palpable blunder in the very first trick that ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... audience. The sneering reader, and the loud critic, and the tart review, are scattered and distant calamities; but the trampling of an intelligent or of an ignorant audience on a production which, be it good or bad, has been a mental labour to the writer, is a palpable and immediate grievance, heightened by a man's doubt of their competency to judge, and his certainty of his own imprudence in electing them his judges. Were I capable of writing a play which could be deemed ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... uniform action of health. It is not the chorea that used to be described, in which there was an irresistible impulse to excessive action, and which was best combated by complete muscular exhaustion; but the foundation of this disease is palpable debility. ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... heart. Was it because he was tied to a false theology and a false theory of human nature? We are not called upon to answer this question. Let others say what was wrong in his standpoint. The object of this book is not controversial; but when a palpable injustice has been done, and is persisted in by people of the purest motives, as to the thoughts, emotions, and mental operations of the "savage," and as to the finer workings within that constitute ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... absurd, the bias of the court so palpable, that it is not worth while to discuss them. The parallel proceedings in the military trial and execution of Francisco Ferret in Barcelona in 1909 caused worldwide indignation, and the illegality ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... sight of me, and began to think that I had perished; when the application of my friend the doctor told him where I was to be found. The message of the head of the Republic, requiring a confidential bearer of documents, struck him as affording an opportunity of my liberation; and though the palpable absurdity of my worthy friend Pantoufle prevented any communication with him, no time was lost in proposing my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... circle, and not being gifted with the penetration which discerns a latent energy, but only with the vision which discerns apparent results, they are taken by surprise. Nay, so biased are we by superficial judgments, that we frequently ignore the palpable fact of achieved excellence simply because we cannot reconcile it with our judgment of the man who achieved it. The deed has been done, the work written, the picture painted; it is before the world, and the world is ringing with applause. There is no doubt whatever that the ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... take away your power. They think they have given and can take it away. They think it lies in the Church property, and they know that they have politically the power to confiscate that property. They have been deluded into a notion that present palpable usefulness, producible results, acceptableness to your flocks, that these and such like are the tests of your divine commission. Enlighten them in this matter. Exalt our Holy Fathers the bishops, as ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... leisure to make upon my new dignity obliged me to take great care of my hat, whose dazzling flame of colour turns the heads of many that are honoured with it. The most palpable of those delusions is the claiming precedence of Princes of the blood, who may become our masters the next moment, and who at the same time are generally the masters of all our kindred. I have a veneration for the cardinals of my family, who made me suck ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... daughter-in-law; but now the splendid vision could never be more than a vision. She could solace herself with thinking of the high position her son had won for himself, but she could never enjoy the palpable reality of his honours. ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... have held undisputed sway over the minds of succeeding generations for hundreds of years cannot be overthrown in a moment, unless the agent of such an overthrow be so obvious that it cannot be challenged. The rudimentary chemistry that overthrew alchemy had nothing so obvious and palpable. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... thought, to make everything that he did faultless and strong, no less than lovely. But of all men, deserving to be called "great," Fra Angelico permits to himself the least pardonable faults, and the most palpable follies. There is evidently within him a sense of grace, and power of invention, as great as Ghiberti's:—we are in the habit of attributing those high qualities to his religious enthusiasm; but, if they were produced by that enthusiasm in him, they ought to be produced by the same feelings ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... time these events became endowed with more palpable bodies which moved. The square of semilucent window faded into something indescribable, and that into something indescribable, and that into ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... of The Merchant of Venice it has been my object to combine with the poet's art a faithful representation of the picturesque city; to render it again palpable to the traveller who actually gazed upon the seat of its departed glory; and, at the same time, to exhibit it to the student, who ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... clamoured for an insurgent, Barabbas, a man caught red-handed in the very crime for which these hypocrites professed in their new-fledged loyalty to Caesar to be anxious to have Jesus executed. The cynicism of their choice is palpable. By daring to make it, they show in what contempt they hold Pilate. The governor loses ground considerably by this false move. Then he tries to throw the blame of the murder of Jesus, which he sees he cannot prevent, on the Jews. A new motive urges him to escape from the responsibility of ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... the Knights of the Golden Circle, or their operations in cajoling and terrorizing the Southern population into acquiescence. Much unanimity through this process was made to appear on the surface; but it is more palpable to the analytic mind acquainted with Southern society, that the very means employed to enforce acquiescence afforded also the evidence that there was a strong under-current of aversion. Willing apostasy from allegiance ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... Bringing out the best and highest there is in us, is the only true conformity to that which is deepest and surest and most enduring in our environment. That in environment which makes for digestion is almost palpable and tangible, that which makes for activity less so perhaps; but that which makes for brain and truth and right is intangible and invisible. We easily fail to notice it; and, unless we take a careful view of the course of development in the highest ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... Italiana he is as peu communicatif as a carp. His other book,[51] written in French, simply and beautifully says of this law of 1868 that it is "a precious heritage transmitted from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in which period there was condensed"—or shall we say made palpable?—"the spirit which is jealous of the municipal liberties." "Down to this day," says he, "Rieka is in complete possession of her charter. Rieka has to-day still got her great charter. This constitutional charter ..." and so ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... in this perplexity of soul, spoke to him as a friend, and searched to know what had taken possession of him, and my grandfather, partly moved by his entreaty and partly by the thought of the great palpable Antichrist of Scotland, who had done the bailie's fireside such damage and detriment, being in a manner exposed to their taking, told him what had been propounded ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... pristine simplicity in all his movements, that touched his fat commonplaceness with beauty. Then there were the two other men, shy, inflammable, unintelligent, with their sudden Italian rushes of hot feeling. All their faces are distinct in the lamplight, all their bodies ate palpable and dramatic. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... had set his heart? He had told his sister that he would not break his heart; and so much, he did not doubt, would be true. A man or woman with a broken heart was in his estimation a man or woman who should die of love; and he did not look for such a fate as that. But he experienced the palpable misery of a craving emptiness within his breast, and did believe of himself that he never could again be in comfort unless he could succeed with Clara Amedroz. He stood leaning against one of the trees, striking his hands together, ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope |
