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More "Acme" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... excited to know what I'm going to get for Christmas. What I've wished for is: A set of white furs, boa, muff, and velvet cap trimmed with the same fur, acme skates because mine are always working loose, German sagas, not Greek; no thank you, hair ribbons, openwork stockings, and if possible a gold pin like the one Hella got for a birthday present. But Father says that our Christ Child would find that rather too expensive. Inspee ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... those to whom the situation is already sufficiently trying? Why, after so much pains and expense have been employed to make the occasion beautiful and impressive, should the "practical joker" take it upon himself to spoil it all by an ill-timed "pleasantry" which is the acme of rudeness and discourtesy? It is a curious character that can enjoy perpetrating what are really outrages ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... would have been the very acme of insanity to attempt such a thing. Lutali, in common with the rest, is in far too ugly a mood, after yesterday, to be fooled with needlessly. Besides, all that sentiment is simply thrown away. These people, remember, are atrocious brutes, who eat their ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... continued to hold the property, and it became a generation later the asylum of Louis Philippe. To an ordinary mind the miseries of any one condemned to make this lovely spot his home are not apt to present themselves as the acme of despair. A sensation of relief and lulling repose would be more reasonably expected, especially after so stormy a career as that of Louis. The change from restless and capricious Paris to dewy shades and luxurious halls in the heart of changeless and impregnable England ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... no Political System; yet it is controlled by the very Acme of System. Each Individual of their vast population is guided by "The Light ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... being improved in quality by the taint of the new skins in which it was transferred from the only well; and now, in the very heart of the scorching Tehama, where a copious draught of pure water seemed absolutely indispensable every five minutes, the mixture was the very acme of abomination. Fresh hides stript from the he-goat, besmeared inside as well as out with old tallow and strong bark tan, filled from an impure well at Sagallo, tossed and tumbled during two days ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... no definite limits could be assigned to that progress. The enemies of reform, on the other hand, denied improvement, and advocated steady adherence to the principles, practices, and institutions of our fathers, which they represented as the consummation of wisdom, and acme of excellence, beyond which the human mind could never advance. Although in the passage of your answer alluded to, you expressly disclaim the wish to influence the freedom of inquiry, you predict ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... there are perhaps two, at the most three pianoforte virtuosos who really deserve to be called great. To listen to them is the acme of musical delight. But right next to this comes the performance of any musical person, whether a child or grown up, on the pianola. It is better than the playing of any virtuoso not absolutely of the very first rank, and infinitely preferable to the playing of the most ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... discretion and without dishonour in one-half of the country, why not in the whole of it? If it would be a damning sin for us to admit another Slave State into the Union, why is it not a damning sin to permit a Slave State to remain in the Union? Would it not be the acme of effrontery for a man, in amicable alliance with fifteen pickpockets, to profess scruples of conscience in regard to admitting another pilfering rogue to the fraternity? "Thou that sayest, A man should not steal, dost thou steal," or consent, in any instance, ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... pressing His Acme, said, "I love thee, Acme— All my life-long will love thee, Acme! Nor day shall come to love thee less in. Or should it come, like common lover, In such poor love I love thee only; May Libyan lion dun ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... singing at this time. The reason for encouraging the boy to keep on singing is, of course, that the choirmaster, having trained a voice for a number of years, dislikes losing it when it is at the very acme of brilliancy. For this feeling he can hardly be blamed, for the most important condition of successful work by a male choir is probably permanency of membership; and the leader must exercise every wile to keep the boys ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... still blowing. The laziest man in the French Army was doing his utmost to belie his record. The ill-shod, flattened feet took up the music. They began to dance. Were there ever feet less suited to dancing? That they should dance was the acme of tragedy. Stockings fell down in creases about the ankles. Women commenced to jig their Boche babies in their arms; consumptive men and ancients waved their sauce-pans and grotesque bundles of umbrellas. The sight was damnable. It ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... are among the most interesting in the great East, for they strike the key of true cosmopolitanism. Along them 'rickshaws pass in endless procession, electric cars roar, and sedan-chairs swing. The chair borne by four bearers provides the acme of transportation in fine weather. Eighty per cent, of Hong Kong's people are Chinese, and to this multitude the human contributions of Europe and America form necessarily a thin relief. Extremely picturesque ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... modifying them. As these efforts have resulted, in past time, in the production of our best varieties, so they may, in future, in something far better than we yet have. There is no probability that any of our fruits have reached the acme of perfection. ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... more marked, and a consuming desire impelled him to spend two years in Italy (1786-1788). The rest of his years Goethe spent in Weimar, his life enriched above all else by his friendship with Schiller. In this second Weimar period Goethe reached the acme of his powers. Even his declining years, although marked by loneliness and bringing him a full measure of grief (his wife, Christiane Vulpius, whom he had met shortly after his return from Italy, died in 1816, followed in 1830 by his only son), exemplified that earnest ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... steeled to endurance and delighted in deeds of cruelty. To find him a man capable of feelings and affections, with a heart open to the wants, and responsive to the ties of social life, was amazing. But the surprise reached its acme, when I found him whiling away a part of the tedium of his long winter evenings in relating tales and legends for the amusement of the lodge circle. These fictions were sometimes employed, I observed, to convey ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... cost no lives, and seldom broke bones. They were chiefly opportunities for the display of brilliant enamelled and gilt armour, at the very acme of cumbrous magnificence; and of equally gorgeous embroidery spread out over the vast expanse provided by elephantine Flemish horses. Even if the weapons had not been purposely blunted, and if the champions had really desired to slay one another, they would have found the task very difficult, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... business, political or social equal of the allied peoples. The goal of Honor, he had attained in every war waged by America. He was with Jackson at New Orleans, a pioneer in the Mexican struggle, 200,000 strong in the great civil crisis, the acme of terror to Geronimo in the later Indian wars, the hero of San Juan in the Spanish-American combat, and at Carrizal in the latest Mexican imbroglio. By 1914, however, he had lost all rewards of honor which he had previously won. As for Equality, since the Civil War, ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... but all do not show the same artistic skill. The judgment that led Catullus to place his lyric poems in the foreground was right. They are the best known, the best finished, and the most popular of all his compositions; the four to Lesbia, the one to Sirmio, and that on Acme and Septimus, are perhaps the most perfect lyrics in the Latin language; and others are scarcely inferior to them in elegance. The hendecasyllabic rhythm, in which the greater part are written, is the one best suited to display the poet's special gifts. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... study of democracy. Legislation by unanimity was actually tried in the kingdom of Poland, where each member of the assembly had the right of liberum veto on any measure, and it prevented progress, fostered violence, and spelled failure. The Polish system has been lauded as the acme of liberty, but in fact it was directly opposed to the fundamental principle of modern popular government; that is, the conduct of public affairs in accord with a public opinion which is general, although not universal, and which implies ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of anger,) to seek his revenge by watching an opportunity to kill the survivor in the contest. If the former should die, his next of kin takes his place, and pursues his enemy, whose life is never safe; insomuch that, whole kabyles, when this deadly animosity has reached its acme, have been known to quit 153 their country and emigrate into the Sahara; for when the second death has been inflicted, it then becomes the incumbent duty of the next of kin of the deceased to seek his revenge: they call this justifying blood. ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... practice and was not young, and Dr. Luttrell suspected that he would soon take a partner. He had complained more than once lately that he was sadly overworked, but Marcus never could be sure if these hints were intentionally dropped. To be Dr. Bevan's partner would be the acme of his ambition, but in that case a good house would be ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... feeling inclined to tear my hair at such stupidity. “Can’t you see the difference? That was in daylight. Our customs allow a woman to show her feet, and even a little more, in the morning. It would be considered the acme of indecency to let those beauties be seen at a ball. The law allows a woman to uncover her neck and shoulders at a ball, but she would be arrested if she appeared décolleté on the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... to be used must be determined wholly by the character of the land and the purposes for which it is to be fitted. Lands that are hard and cloddy may be reduced by the use of the disk or Acme harrows, shown in Fig. 86; but those that are friable and mellow may not need such heavy and vigorous tools. On these mellower lands, the spring-tooth harrow, types of which are shown in Fig. 87, may follow the plow. On very hard ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... to the perception of every one around, each point that we wish them to behold. Eloquence consists not in many words, but in few words: the thoughts, the associations, the images, may be many, but the acme of eloquence is in the rapidity ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... conditions both of body and of mind. The man becomes feminine, the woman masculine in shape and character. The sexual contrast not having reached realization in the plan of Nature, each human being remained one-sided, never reached its supplement, never touched the acme of its existence. In her work, "The Moral Education of the Young in Relation to Sex," Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell says: "The sexual impulse exists as an indispensable condition of life, and as the basis of society. It is the greatest ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... from point of basque to feet just before we see them, in the seventeenth century, parting down the front and separating to show a petticoat. In Queen Elizabeth's time the acme of this style was reached by Spanish women as we see in Velasquez's portraits. Gradually the overskirt is looped back, (at first only a few inches), and tied ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... Her appeal for charity had been rejected, and can we blame her if she yielded to the tempter and took the money lying before her? We cannot. Look not on the act, gaze only on the provocation. If in hearts there dwells a shade of pity, an acme of sympathy, you cannot return a verdict of guilty. She is not guilty of theft! I unhesitatingly assert, that if to act as she has, and under the circumstances she acted, be theft, then such a thief would I become to-morrow; and ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... Claude, quite dazed, staggered beneath the violence of the onslaught. But the epithets became viler, for the acme of elegance, even for the more refined among these young fellows, was to rival one's friends in beastly language. He was, nevertheless, recovering and beginning to answer, when Dubuche recognised ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... yesterday was very infamous and incredible. You think that is all; well, no! you have only half of the story. My hand trembles with rage so that I can scarcely hold my pen. What remains to be told is the acme of perfidy; a double-dyed treason; we have been made game of, you as a plighted husband, I as a lover. All this seems as incoherent to you as a dream. What can I have in common with Irene whom I have never seen? Wait, ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... the forenoon, when the principal street of the neighboring town was just at its acme of life and bustle, a stranger of very distinguished figure was seen on the side-walk. His port, as well as his garments, betokened nothing short of nobility. He wore a richly-embroidered plum-colored ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... desire to propitiate them acquire an organised ritual in simple forms of ancestor-worship, such as the Rev. Mr. Turner describes among the people of Tanna (l.c. p. 88); and this line of development may be followed out until it attains its acme in the State-theology of China and the Kami-theology [26] of Japan. Each of these is essentially ancestor-worship, the ancestors being reckoned back through family groups, of higher and higher order, sometimes with ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... It has come to be the substructure of a rational theology based upon speculation. Maimonides cannot be said to have been very much ahead of his own age; but it is altogether certain that he attained the acme of the possibilities of the middle ages. In many respects there is a striking likeness between his life and work and those of the Arabic freethinker Averroes, whom we now know so well through Ernest Renan. While the Jewish theologian was composing his great work, the Arabic philosopher was writing ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... though They were, as all thy royal line have been, Yet none of those who went before have reached The acme of Sardanapalus, who 10 Has placed his joy ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... deep, night-blue, cat-like eyes, a long nose, a rather pleasant mouth, perfect teeth, and a really good chin, she moved always with a feline grace that was careless, superior, sinuous, and yet the acme of harmony and a rhythmic flow of lines. One of her mess-hall tricks, when unobserved by her instructors, was to walk with six plates and a water-pitcher all gracefully poised on the top of her head after the fashion of the Asiatic and the African, her hips moving, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... affected by the pollen of certain other species, for the germen swells. It is here manifestly impossible to select the more sterile individuals, which have already ceased to yield seeds; so that this acme of sterility, when the germen alone is affected, cannot have been gained through selection; and from the laws governing the various grades of sterility being so uniform throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms, we may infer that the cause, whatever it ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... lovely for anythin'." And the men were scarcely less affected, though they were better able to control their emotion. The joyous renunciation of five thousand dollars a year struck these hard men of business as something almost uncanny. They would have considered it the acme of folly in an ordinary man, but in a preacher they felt vaguely that it ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... types depends chiefly upon how much or how little of his entire story the author chooses to tell. In actual life, as was stated in a former chapter, there are no very ends; and it may now be added that also there are no absolute beginnings. Any event that happens is, in Whitman's words, "an acme of things accomplished" and "an encloser of things to be"; and in thinking back along its causes or forward along its effects, we may continue the series until our thought loses itself in an eternity. In any narrative, therefore, ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... have been at least surprising to him. The tribunal no doubt felt the necessity of severity; and we acknowledged it all in deploring the degradation of these poor devils for an act, which in so many thousand others was, at the moment, extolled to the skies as the acme of heroism. But justice hath her lottery-wheel ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... to hear him laugh when he turned the vegetable snowdrift out into the wooden butter-bowl a little too soon, and a last shot or two blew the fluffy kernels all over the room—all this was the very acme of success in making a pleasant evening. All the time I ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... themselves engaged in operations of reclamation; that they abused their power by despoiling the peasants, and that dishonest farmers made a practice of evading taxes and tribute by settling within the bounds of a manor. These abuses reached their acme during the reigns of Uda and Daigo (888-930), when people living in the vicinity of a manor were ruthlessly robbed and plundered by the intendant and his servants, and when it became habitual to elude the payment of taxes by making spurious assignments ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Judd had the lank height of his father, and his blunt elongation of face and features, informed by his mother's spirit. The result in his expression was an absolute ferocity instead of severity of gloom, a fury of resentment against his fate, instead of that bitter leaning towards it which is the acme of defiance. ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... imperfect unless faith and love find their acme, their outstretching completion, in this Christian hope. Do you seek to complete your faith and love by a living hope ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... military order, mounted on great horses, riding bareback, their rifles held aloft in their right hands, the left hand grasping the flowing mane, their naked bodies hideously adorned with paint, their long scalp-locks braided and trimmed with plumes and quills. They were the very acme of grandeur in a warfare as splendid as it was barbaric. And I, who live to write these lines, account myself most fortunate ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... appears less calm; to a superficial observer he would seem to show signs of fatigue. But after a few minutes he undertakes some much more difficult work, and becomes so deeply absorbed in this, that he shows us he has reached the acme of his activity (additions and writing down the results). When this work is finished, his activity comes to an end in all serenity; he contemplates his handiwork for a long time, then approaches the teacher, and begins ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... the aparejo, which was cinched by a wide grass-bandage. This band was drawn as tightly as possible, to such an extent that the poor brute grunted and groaned under the apparently painful operation, and when fastened he seemed to be cut in two. This always appeared to be the very acme of cruelty to the uninitiated, but it is the secret of successful packing; the firmer the saddle, the more comfortably the mule can travel, with less risk of being chafed and bruised. The aparejo ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... and arraigned the lease of the State road as illegal and unhallowed, he declared in a burst of indignation; "I would rather be buried at the public expense than to leave a dirty shilling." It was the acme of his desire to live and ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... achieved the very acme and culmination of repulsive villainy. Fortunately she has mitigated it in two ways. The stench is volatile and soon disappears; while settler's noses get used to it in a measure. Were it not for ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... him sauntering carelessly down the steps. He had removed the cigar and was whistling very softly, unconsciously, as one who is deep in some quandary, but to Masterson it seemed the acme of studious carelessness to ignore his own presence; it seemed insolent as the mocking glance through the window, and it decided him. His shoulders unconsciously squared as ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... my mattress, looking at the light and shade, listening to the sounds or stillness, dreaming of one matter and another (but more particularly of the poetic, voluptuous happiness which, in those days, I believed was to prove the acme of my felicity) and lamenting that until now it had only been given to me to IMAGINE things. No sooner had every one dispersed, and I had seen lights pass from the drawing-room to the upper chambers (whence female voices would presently be heard, and the noise of windows opening and shutting), ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... reached its acme on the receipt by his father of his first school character, which document his father sent back for Walter's own perusal, with a letter which, if not actually reproachful, was at least ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... misery she endured under such circumstances was greater than that aroused by her own individual troubles. The thought that she had added to a fellow-sufferer's life-burden cut her to the quick, and she was unsparing in her self-reproaches. She then reached the very acme of mental torture, as is seen by this ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... its height, a gentleman, feeling the hand of a thief in his pocket, turned suddenly round and caught him in the act, exclaiming, "Who are you?" The mob which gathered round applauded to the very echo, and thought it the most capital joke they had ever heard, the very acme of wit, the very essence of humour. Another circumstance of a similar kind gave an additional fillip to the phrase, and infused new life and vigour into it just as it was dying away. The scene occurred in the chief criminal court of the kingdom. A prisoner ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... state and clergy would be a mere waste of time. The only alternative was flight. That would mean the wreck of Rezanov's avowed purposes in coming to this quarter of New Spain, and perhaps of others she dimly suspected. It would mean the very acme of misery for his Sitkans, and an indefensible blow to the Company. It might even prove the fatal mistake in his career, for which his enemies were ever on the alert. He was not communicative about himself except when he had an object in view, but he ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... bronze monster or a vase of flowers; on the walls hang a few masterly sketches, vaguely tinted in Indian ink, drawn upon strips of gray paper most accurately cut but without the slightest attempt at a frame. This is all: not a seat, not a cushion, not a scrap of furniture. It is the very acme of studied simplicity, of elegance made out of nothing, of the most immaculate and incredible cleanliness. And while following the bonzes through this long suite of empty halls, we are struck by their contrast with the overflow of knickknacks ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... meted out that "peine forte et dure," that acme of humiliation and disgrace, so intensely horrible that many a little girl in that room solemnly averred and believed she would kill herself before submitting to it. Pupasse's voluminous calico skirt ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... being in a beautiful and fertile country, where abound rich fields of grain and running streams of pure water, denotes the very acme of good times is at hand. Wealth will pile in upon you, and you will be able to reign in state in any country. If the country be dry and bare, you will see and hear of troublous times. Famine and sickness will ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... seen at their boisterous revel wringing from Fate another hour of wassail and good cheer." Over the whole is flung a half-humorous, half-savage satire—aimed, like a two-edged sword, at the laws and the law-breakers, in the acme of which the graceless crew are raised above the level of ordinary gipsies, footpads and rogues, and are made to sit "on the hills like gods together, careless of mankind," and to launch their Titan thunders of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... at Monte Carlo stands in one of the loveliest settings on earth. Facing the blue Mediterranean and enhanced by the exquisitely kept marble villas of Monaco, it may justly be called the acme of gambling institutions. It has become an institution through the years. Time has brought ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... guardians of the Lake of Memory while he asks for a drink of cold water from that Lake. In another the dead person himself is thus addressed: "Hail, thou who hast endured the Suffering, such as indeed thou hadst never suffered before; thou hast become god from man!" (3) Ecstacy was the acme of the religious life; and, what is especially interesting to us, Salvation or the divine nature was open to all men—to all, that is, who should go through the necessary stages of ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... capable of imposing grave restrictions upon freedom of action. Material equipment, even though it may represent the acme of perfection in design and construction, will not surely function unless skillfully operated and maintained. Even though mobility and endurance be otherwise assured, the capacity which they represent is not susceptible of effective employment ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... certainly been all this and more, for when a woman, alone in the world, is set the appalling task of facing the struggle for existence which is called Life, without the necessary moral and physical equipment for such a battle, the support of a strong heart generously given surely becomes the very acme of ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... you'd see various specks on the tops of the furthest hills, and with the help of your glasses discover them to be the 19th. Sir Herbert (Stewart) was immensely pleased with them and pointed them out to me as being the very acme ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... took up public life in Birmingham, and he was equally fortunate in regard to the period at which he quitted it. He had set afloat great local schemes, he had laboured assiduously for the good of the town, he had attained the acme of his local popularity, he was admired even by his opponents, and an imposing memorial was erected in his honour. After this, anything that might have happened would have been in the nature of an anti-climax so far as his ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... heaven-sent compensations all that I have won and discovered with my good right hand. And with my left hand too; for with that I read, and it is as true and honourable as the other. By what half-development of human power has the left hand been neglected? When we arrive at the acme of civilization shall we not all be ambidextrous, and in our hand-to-hand contests against difficulties shall we not be doubly triumphant? It occurs to me, by the way, that when my teacher was training my unreclaimed spirit, her struggle against ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... Lettuce.—Crossman's New Improved, Early White Cabbage, Early Curled Simpson, Black-Seeded Simpson, Early Prize Head, Big Boston, Grand Rapids, All the Year Round, Yellow-Seeded Butter Musk Melons.—Extra Early Hackensack, Fine Large Green Nutmeg, Baltimore Acme Cantaloupe, Jenny Lind, Montreal Market, Bay View, Cosmopolitan, Long Island Beauty, Paul Rose or Petoskey, Delmonico, Early Christiana, Banana, Tip Top Water Melons.—Cole's Early, Green Gold, Florida Favorite, Pride of Georgia, Hungarian Honey, ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... mystic freemasonry between the discriminating guests of the Lotus. Perhaps they were drawn one to another by the fact of their common good fortune in discovering the acme of summer resorts in a Broadway hotel. Words delicate in courtesy and tentative in departure from formality passed between the two. And, as if in the expedient atmosphere of a real summer resort, an acquaintance grew, flowered and fructified on the spot ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... to school before, and of this school he often bragged as the acme of desirability and wickedness. He was always telling boys what they did at "his old school," and he quite inflamed the minds of such as fell under his influence by marvellous tales of the wild and wilful things which he and his former school-fellows had done. Many and many a scheme of sin and ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... the effect likely to be created in the wilderness by this adorable acme of the feminine, with something between a ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... apartment there was a round table, two lounges, and some easy-chairs; and in the second, which was somewhat smaller, most of the space was occupied by the bed. Mother Fetu drew attention to a crystal lamp with gilt chains, which hung from the ceiling. To her this lamp was the veritable acme of luxury. ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... a social and jovial man, had always been a favorite with his subalterns, but now his popularity attained its acme. His open house became headquarters, even more in a social than a military sense. It was a little court, and Lady Mabel played the queen ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... since I had been with a large crowd of English. They seemed to me a strange race. To me the boat was the acme of comfort, and coolness, and cleanliness. But the bulk of my compatriots thought they were roughing it. I thought of the seventy thousand houseless creatures under the sun and the rain, starving on a daily bread dole—and these people wanted two or three courses for breakfast. ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... speculators on our business for a long time; often not caring one straw about our success, after pocketing the fee of successful "humbuggery." One is no sooner gone, than we are beset by another, with something altogether different, and of course the acme of perfection. ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... London feather sales still list these among the most splendid of all living birds. And shame upon shame, when we read of 80 impeyan skins "dull," or "slightly defective," we know that these are female birds. Then, if ever, we realize that the time of the bird and the beast is passing, the acme of evolution for these wonderful beings is reached, and at most we can preserve only ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... begged to be let alone, prayed to die; but was soothed and content under the anodyne of delirium. Kah-Chucte and Gowhee dragged him on roughly, venting upon him many a savage glance or blow. To them it was the acme of injustice. ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... line with the past and would be approved by their ancestors. The whole country has been anchored for the last twenty-five centuries to a code of social laws and customs which are more unyielding than the laws of the Medes and Persians. With them conservatism is the acme of piety and propriety. All progress has been practically forced upon the country from without, and in the teeth of their most sacred institutions and their most earnest protestation and opposition. Thus the great difference between the two peoples has been a serious hindrance ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... he broke me or not, go a yard farther towards danger he should not. He might have known what was my fell purpose, for, after doggedly holding his own while I might count ten, he came up, literally inch by inch, in response to the cautious turn of the winch handle. It is the acme of sport to have a fine fish on your winch, as it were, trying his best to increase distance, fighting right and left incessantly, and yet compelled to advance against his will in the teeth of a powerful glacier-fed ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... years as an apprentice, James removed to London. There are many persons who imagine, that to settle in London is the very acme of happiness; how little do such persons know of the reality! It is true, that in the religious sphere there are many advantages possessed by the resident of the metropolis. He has the teaching and counsel of ministers eminent for their piety, ...
— The Village Sunday School - With brief sketches of three of its scholars • John C. Symons
... building burning? Why this haste?" Hester raised her eyes to those of the preceptress. Miss Burkham was the acme of all that was cultured and elegant. No imagination was strong enough to picture her, other than deliberate, low-voiced, serene of countenance. Hester who knew more of bluntness than irony, replied fearlessly, "No, there is no ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... Hollis on a false alarm. Only the "womenfolks" and children remained indoors, and they were drowning with a piano any sounds that might have come from without. That piano was the chief emblem of Purvy's wealth. It represented the acme of "having things hung up"; that ancient and expressive phrase, which had come down from days when the pioneers' worldly condition was gauged by the hams hanging in the smokehouse and the peppers, tobacco and herbs strung ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... said. As he spoke he sucked in his breath with that snakelike hissing sound which is the acme of politeness, in Japan—"that my humble breath may not blow upon you"—and spread wide his hands. "They are extremely low persons and dared ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... his coffee, and when still asleep in the morning she should handle his prick, get him up, turn her bum, put it into her cunt, work him gently, make him spend which would awake him, hold him in, pretend she herself was in the acme of delight, but on coming to her senses, upbraid him with having ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... princes, and that he had advanced from grade to grade in the religious mysteries, even to the highest, in which the great truth of the One Supreme, the omniscient, omnipotent God was imparted, as the sublime acme of all human knowledge, thus attributing to Moses before his flight into Midian, an almost modern conception of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... reason of her apparent joy when he left her, and that association with him is too much for her passion.[26] She makes an exemplary nun in a sea-side convent, and dies early of disease caught while nursing others. He, his wretchedness and hatred of life reaching their acme, exiles himself to Louisiana, and gets himself adopted by the tribe of the Natchez, where Chactas is ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... volume approached it in point of popularity. In American literature, Weems stood first. To Weems are we indebted for the hatchet tale, the story of the colt that was broken and killed in the process, and all those other fine romances of Washington's youth. Weems' literary style reveals the very acme of that vicious quality of untruth to be found in the old-time Sunday-school books. Weems mustered all the "Little Willie" stories he could find, and attached to them Washington's name, claiming to write for "the Betterment of the Young," as if in dealing with the ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... buyers had received and gone over their large and accumulated mail, the partners came over to the Dodge House, looking for the fiscal agent, as I supposed, to close the trade on Sponsilier's cattle. Siringo was the acme of indifference, but listened to a different tale. A trusted man, in whom they had placed a great deal of confidence, had failed to materialize. He was then overdue some four or five days, and foul play was suspected. The wily detective poured oil on the troubled ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... British to come. "I must apprise you," wrote Nelson to Addington, "that General Villettes, although a most excellent officer, will do nothing but what he receives, 'You are hereby required and directed;' for to obey, is with him the very acme of discipline. With respect to Sicily, I have no doubt but that the French will have it. My former reasons for inducing General Villettes to keep the Neapolitan troops in Malta, was to prevent what has happened; ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... pretending to aristocracy,—an old-world air of respectability and stake in the country, and Church-and-Stateism. The burlier of the two was even rather a beau in his way. He had first learned to dress, indeed, when Bond Street was at its acme, and Brummell in his pride. He still retained in his garb the fashion of his youth; only what then had spoken of the town, now betrayed the life of the country. His neckcloth ample and high, and of snowy whiteness, set off to comely advantage a face smooth-shaven, and of clear ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... coulter-toothed harrows (Fig. 57) have teeth resembling the coulter of a plow twisted or bent into various shapes. The Acme is a good example of this class of harrow. It cuts, turns and pulverizes the surface soil somewhat after the manner of the plow. It prepares a fine mulch and leaves an excellent seed bed. It is an excellent harrow to finish off with after ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... take leave,—Sir Henry witnessed his departure with lively satisfaction; and, with the exception of enjoying a hearty laugh, at his expense, with George and Acme, ceased to recollect ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... evening, a no less fine government clerk called Ivan Dmitritch Tchervyakov was sitting in the second row of the stalls, gazing through an opera glass at the Cloches de Corneville. He gazed and felt at the acme of bliss. But suddenly. . . . In stories one so often meets with this "But suddenly." The authors are right: life is so full of surprises! But suddenly his face puckered up, his eyes disappeared, his breathing was arrested . . . he took the opera ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold—the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... other hand, many obvious improbabilities will be endured, as belonging to the groundwork of the story rather than to the drama itself, in the first scenes, which would disturb or disentrance us from all illusion in the acme of our excitement; as for instance, Lear's division of his kingdom, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... his white vest gleaming in the sunshine, and walks slowly around his garden. Charles Baxter says that on these occasions he is asking his gardener the names of the vegetables. However that may be, he has seemed to our community the very incarnation of contentment and prosperity—his position the acme of desirability. ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... schools, churches, gardens, promenades, have rendered Marseilles the most sumptuous French capital after Paris. Neither Lyons, Bordeaux, Nantes, can compare with it for sumptuosity. In the Palais de Longchamps, the splendour of municipal decoration reaches its acme; the horsepond Arthur Young sneered at now affords accommodation of 340 acres, with warehouses, said to be the finest in the world; last, but not least, comes the enormous Byzantine Cathedral not yet finished, built at the cost of a ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... nations have done, in their efforts to follow the Parisian styles; but there is still a certain charming simplicity of manner which characterizes the whole bearing of a Spanish lady, and is quite free from that affectation and studied deportment which are too often considered as the acme of good breeding. This almost absolute lack of self-consciousness often leads to acts so naive that foreigners are often led to question their sense of propriety. But with this naivete and simplicity is joined a great love for dress and display. Madame Higgin says on this subject: "Spanish women ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... called forth all the energy of man's nature; and in the depths of this western wilderness, many hundreds of Alexanders and Caesars, who have never been heard of. At the time I emigrated to Ohio the deadly hatred of the red men toward the whites had reached its acme. The rifle, the tomahawk and the scalping knife were daily at work; and men, women and children daily fell victims to this sanguinary spirit. In this state I found things when I reached the small village opposite the mouth of Licking river, and now the great city of Cincinnati. ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... of his senses. In the first place, let me remark that the sinking or downward motion of the earth's crust would be altogether inappreciable by sense; in the next, that the depression, even when it had reached its acme, would in no sensible degree affect the contour of surrounding objects. Even at the end of the forty days, when the five thousand feet of depression had been reached, the gradient of declination across the sunken area would not exceed ten feet per ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... heretical was when in the presence of the gaitered calves of a Protestant dean. He wore his sleeves tight and his stock high, as in the days when William the Sailor was king in England, and his long gold-topped Prince Regent cane was the very acme ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... concept of God, the God of the Old Testament and of theology, was vastly different, and remained to the end unrevolutionized by his heart's insight. This background conception of God comes to extreme expression in his De servo arbitrio ["The Unfree Will"] of 1525: "This is the acme of faith, to believe that God who saves so few and condemns so many is merciful; that He is just who at His own pleasure has made us necessarily doomed to damnation, so that . . . He seems to delight in the tortures of the wretched and to be more deserving of hatred than of ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... objection to the position of the fourth term in Mr. Gladstone's "order"—on the facts, as they stand, it is quite open to any one to hold, as a pious opinion, that the fabrication of man was the acme and final achievement of the process of peopling the globe. But it must not be said that natural science counts this opinion among her "demonstrated conclusions and established facts," for there would be just as much, or ...
— The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature - Essay #4 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... leading to Kensington, Hampstead, Highgate, Islington, and Stepney, "to be much pleasanter than the paths of the gospel," the people flocked to those suburban resorts with their wives and children, to take tea under the trees. In one of Coleman's plays, a Spitalfield's dame defines the acme of ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... a man who has attained to the acme of contemporary culture, and he will perform his part with all the comilfo (comme il faut) necessary in ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... mole, tiger, otter, buffalo, wolf, and even rattle-snake. A favorite modern leather for purses and satchels, alligator-skin, has been also applied to the clothing of books. Many eccentric fancies have been exemplified in book-binding, but the acme of gruesome oddity has been reached by binding books in human skin, of which many examples are on record. It is perhaps three centuries old, but the first considerable instance of its use grew out of the horrors of the French Revolution. In England, the Bristol law library has several ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... that we can scarcely realize the extent of the sacrifice she is making for her little children. That is what love is like. And the higher a creature is in the scale of life the more love it has, until, in men and women, the acme is reached and they not only give up their comfort for each other, and especially for their children, but even their lives themselves. With human beings one can tell how high a given one is in the scale of humanity by the amount of ...
— Every Girl's Book • George F. Butler
... these railroads extending into the Andes is carrying ore, bullion, and wool. Their construction marks the acme of engineering skill; the scenery along them surpasses that of all other regions in its wild ruggedness, grandeur, ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... prepare special brands, generally according to German recipes, and sell them to the delicatessen and the grocery stores. If they were to rely upon me for business, they would soon go bankrupt. To my palate the dill pickle appeals as almost the acme of disagreeableness. ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... crowd. Its one fitting place is in the mouth of a swaggering comedian. In like manner words of contempt spoken of ourselves by ourselves, unless they are absolutely heartfelt and come from a mind thoroughly convinced of the fact of its own misery, are truly the very acme of pride, and a flower of the most subtle vanity; for it rarely happens that he who utters them either believes them himself or really wishes others to believe them: on the contrary, the speaker is mostly ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... heard, and I have in a great measure satisfied my desire to see the country. Among the great lines of railway over which I have traveled are the Union Pacific, whose overland limited, the Atlantic Express and the Portland-Chicago Special, are the acme of quick, safe and comfortable travel. The overland limited is electric lighted, steam heated and contains every known luxury and convenience of travel. The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad is noted the world over for its quick time, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... overbear the whole of the hostile war fleet at both points. To have the greater force and then to divide it, so that the enemy can attack either or both fractions with decisively superior numbers, is the acme of military stupidity; nor is it the less stupid because in practice it has been frequently done. In it has often consisted the vaunted operation of "surrounding an enemy," "bringing him between two fires," and so forth; pompous and troublesome combinations ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... in their language, signifies "pig;" apparently they called the Spaniards "swine," as expressing the acme of contempt ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... debts as well, which I paid off later on when I was conductor of the Dresden orchestra. I had received very pleasant impressions of musical and theatrical life, and for a long time Vienna lived in my memory as the acme of that extraordinarily productive spirit peculiar to its people. I enjoyed most of all the performances at the Theater an der Wien, at which they were acting a grotesque fairy play called Die Abenteuer Fortunat's zu Wasser und zu Land, in which a cab was called on the shores of the Black ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Liszt. In rythmic invention and combination he is inexhaustible, and as orchestrator he ranks among the most fascinating. To speak of such a man—seven-eighths of whose works are still music of the future—as a writer of 'dialect,' is surely the acme of unintelligence. If Grieg did stick to the fjord and never got out of it, even his German critics ought to thank heaven for it. Grieg in a fjord is much more picturesque and more interesting to the world than he would have been in the Elbe or ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... skins and horns, and some cattle, make up the remainder of the exports. English goods, sugar, tea, and coffee are the articles received in exchange. All the natives of these parts soon become remarkably fond of coffee. The acme of respectability among the Bechuanas is the possession of cattle and a wagon. It is remarkable that, though these latter require frequent repairs, none of the Bechuanas have ever learned to mend them. Forges and tools have been at their service, and ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... intelligent people amongst them degrade themselves so that one can't make head or tail of them. If you consider how essential to such a masterpiece is inoculation in the tender age of childhood, the missionary system appears no longer only as the acme of human importunity, arrogance and impertinence, but also as an absurdity, if it doesn't confine itself to nations which are still in their infancy, like Caffirs, Hottentots, South Sea Islanders, etc. Amongst these ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... "Just Western" is the acme of praise. I think I once told you what pleasure it gave me as a compliment. Several years ago at the end of one of our Christmas Eve receptions, a young fellow from the West, taking my hand and bidding me Good-night, said with great cordiality, ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... ran back to me, only just in time to rescue me from the nearer thunder yet of those who had seized the very acme of their opportunity to ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... occasions the choir were entertained by the rector—once during the summer when they made merry out in the green woods, and once in the winter when they were entertained in the school-room. Leone had thought these parties the acme of grandeur and perfection; now she sat in that brilliant circle and wondered into what world ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... who had been hovering near the doorway, gave a gasp of dismay. To her tortured soul this police investigation seemed to be the acme of disgrace. It all pointed to the arrest of her boy—-to a long term in some jail ...
— The High School Freshmen - Dick & Co.'s First Year Pranks and Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... foliage has past its acme; and, indeed, it has not been so magnificent this season as usual, owing to the gradual approaches of cool weather, and there having been slight frosts instead of severe ones. There is still a shaggy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... selection, that is to say, the survival of those forms which, on the whole, are best adapted, to the conditions which at any period obtain; and which are, therefore, in that respect, and only in that respect, the fittest.* The acme reached by the cosmic [5] process in the vegetation of the downs is seen in the turf, with its weeds and gorse. Under the conditions, they have come out of the struggle victorious; and, by surviving, have proved that they are ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... pain, but I loved my sickness and welcomed the suffering. I hated everything earthly and was glad to see it all punished and destroyed. I felt so alone and so strangely. And as a delicate spirit often grows melancholy in the very lap of happiness over its own joy, and at the very acme of its existence becomes conscious of the futility of it all, so did I regard my suffering with mysterious pleasure. I regarded it as the symbol of life in general; I believed that I was seeing and feeling ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... frequenting the Manchester Exchange for a few months, finds out that, in order to buy cotton yarn or cloth cheap, he, too, had better drop those slightly more refined but still miserable wiles and subterfuges which are considered the acme of cleverness in his native country. The fact is, those tricks do not pay any longer in a large market, where time is money, and where a certain standard of commercial morality is unavoidably developed, purely as a means of saving time ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... of one whose strength had suddenly deserted him. He had snatched at it to cover his weakness. But to the score or more who saw that spiral of smoke dissolving jauntily into air, no such thought was possible. The filmy wreath represented the acme of dare-devil recklessness, the final proof of gameness in John Beaudry's son. He had turned his back on a drunken killer crazy for revenge and mocked the fellow at the ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... its 25 per cent. duty upon cottons and woollens, and its increased duties on all forms of manufactured iron, (the tariff of 1824 which increased duties considerably), and the tariff of 1828, imposing an average of 50 per cent. duties, and in which the protective movement reached its acme (omitting, of course, the present McKinley Bill with its 60 per cent. average duty). In 1832, consequently, a great reaction in sentiment took place, and the "Compromise Tariff" was passed and duties were lowered. From this period, the advocacy of a high tariff in order ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... prevailing over France, far more than he had done over his own misfortunes. That the Communists should have committed such horrors in the presence of their enemies, the Prussians, seemed to him the very acme of humiliation and ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... sun on the brown, moist skin is not only tolerable but delightful—refreshing and purifying the body, while even light cotton clothing saturated to the dripping stage with perspiration represents the acme of discomfort, and if unchanged a good ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... hand and with which she had been measuring out flour for a cup-cake. With the book spread out before him, Freddie was lying flat on his stomach on the floor, with his little heels contentedly kicking the air. His attitude was the expression of the acme of childish satisfaction. ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... partner in the brokerage firm of Bray, Parkinson & Co., and is president of the Free Gold Mining Company. Brooks is manager of the Acme Advertisers, and secretary of Free Gold. Bray and Parkinson are stockholders, and Wagstaff is a stockholder and also manager of the Free Gold properties in B. C. All are well ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... fit to be a Republic but that her final dissolution was only a matter of time. Though the empire disappeared because it had become an impossible rule in the modern world—being womanish, corrupt, and mediaeval—to the foreign mind the empire remained the acme of Chinese civilization; and to kill it meant to lop off the head of the Chinese giant and to leave lying on the ground nothing but a corpse. It was in vain to insist that this simile was wrong and that it was precisely because Chinese civilization had exhausted itself that a new conception of government ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... rich in its decorations, and has been left almost entirely in its original form. A more perfect example of a Norman abbatial church, is perhaps no where to be found; and, as this edifice had the farther advantage of having been raised at the period when the province was at the acme of its power, of having been erected by an individual of the highest rank, and of having owed its existence to an occasion peculiarly calculated to call forth the exercise of the utmost liberality and splendor, it has been conceived that ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... purposes—to guard her own interests and humble her adversary, England—could look on with neutral eyes at her awful struggles, could keep America calmly aloof from all her entanglements. Not so Mr. Jefferson. Such a return for her services seemed to him but the acme of selfishness and ingratitude. It was not bad statesmanship that made him bear so long with the blunders, the impertinences, the fatuity of Monsieur Genet; it was the remembrance of all the benefits showered upon ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... swelling of the joints in acute rheumatism, the sore-throat in scarlatina, or the eruption on the skin in smallpox, and their course is more or less strictly limited by distinct periods of increase, acme, and decline. No such rule obtains in the case of consumption, scrofula, and rickets, which are instances of chronic constitutional diseases. In them too the local manifestations of the general disease vary also: the ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... bring the progress of humanity to a higher plane of development is being worked out on this continent and in this age; and the war now progressing between the Northern and the Southern States is, in a marked sense, the acme and critical ordeal to which that ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... true soldier, this is the immortal climax of the senses. This is the acme of the flesh, the one superb tiger who has devoured all living flesh, and now paces backwards and forwards in the cage of its own infinite, glaring with blind, fierce, absorbed eyes at that which ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... have not as yet touched on the acme of the difficulty; namely, the fact that the neuters of several ants differ, not only from the fertile females and males, but from each other, sometimes to an almost incredible degree, and are thus divided into two or even three ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... a low peninsula on the north shore of the lake, Tucker and I pitched our camp, sent our mules back to Puyusca for fodder, and set up the Acme folding boat, which we had brought so many miles on muleback, for the sounding operations. The "Acme" proved easy to assemble, although this was our first experience with it. Its lightness enabled it to be floated at the edge of the lake even in very shallow water, and its rigidity ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... with such force and accuracy as to split a bait top. This is the acme of the game and the crowning glory of the player. Often the bait consists of toothless, battered wrecks, but this does not lessen ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... deal of patriotic glorification. We smile at his boyish Federalism describing Napoleon as "the gasconading pilgrim of Egypt," and Columbia as "seated in the forum of nations, and the empires of the world amazed at the bright effulgence of her glory." These sentences are the acme of fine writing, very boyish and very poor; but they are not fair examples of the whole, which is much simpler and more direct than might have been expected. Moreover, the thought is the really important ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... was, came to an end when the country began to be convulsed by the approaching entrance of foreigners, through the Perry treaty; but it serves to show, what we believe to be the truth, that the moral rottenness as well as the physical decay of the Japanese people reached their acme just previous to the apparition of the ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... always had large means at her command. With all a child's plasticity, Laurella dropped into the improved order of things. Her cleverness in selecting the proper wear for herself and children was nothing short of marvellous; and her calm acceptance of the new state of affairs, the acme of good breeding. Johnnie immediately set about seeing that Mavity Bence and Mandy Meacham were comfortably provided for in the old boarding-house, where she assured Gray they could do more good than ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... and older human brutes spit, hiss, yell, snarl, bite noses and ears, scratch, gouge out eyes, pull hair, mutilate sex organs, with a violence that sometimes takes on epileptic features and which in a number of recorded cases causes sudden death at its acme, from the strain it imposes upon the system. Its cause is always some form of thwarting wish or will or of reduction of self-feeling, as anger is the acme of self-assertion. The German criminalist, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... from the Terran to the machine, as if inviting Raf to share in his own pride. To the pilot's mind it bore little resemblance to any form of aircraft past or present with which he had had experience in his own world. But he did not doubt that it was the present acme of alien construction, and he was ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... very splendid examples of this curious artificial kind of poetry. The amount of pleasure one gets out of dialect is a matter entirely of temperament. To say 'mither' instead of 'mother' seems to many the acme of romance. There are others who are not quite so ready to believe in the pathos of provincialisms. There is, however, no doubt of Mr. Swinburne's mastery over the form, whether the form be quite legitimate or not. The Weary Wedding has the concentration and colour of a great drama, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... ounce of superfluous flesh on her serpent-like figure. Like the men, she too was bare footed, and her hair, a dark silky texture, was short and very artistically arranged. Her snow white face, transparent with pink, was the acme of loveliness, with an expression of gentleness, purity and modesty plainly stamped upon every feature. Her dazzling eyes sparkled with the brilliancy of huge diamonds. Evidently she was as much astonished as myself at the strange ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... split up, long ago, into cliques, and we all became so select, that, at last, we reduced each clique to one member. Behold the very acme of selectness!" Hadria stood before them, in an ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... with a fair skin, a few freckles, an almost too high color at times, strange, deep, night-blue, cat-like eyes, a long nose, a rather pleasant mouth, perfect teeth, and a really good chin, she moved always with a feline grace that was careless, superior, sinuous, and yet the acme of harmony and a rhythmic flow of lines. One of her mess-hall tricks, when unobserved by her instructors, was to walk with six plates and a water-pitcher all gracefully poised on the top of her head after the fashion ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... home, I thank God, four le moment. I hope that it will continue, and that no Lord Stanhope, or a Dr. Priestly, will think a change of Government would make us happier. John is now at the ackma (acme) of Theatrical reputation, and we shall see his name on every rubrick post, I suppose, of all the Booksellers between St. James's and the Temple, with that of Congreve, Otway, ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... and the relegation of chambers to the use of a mere refuge from the weather. For many of these places are no more than villas enlarged, and might be set down with advantage to themselves in the Regent's Park in London, the very acme of the commonplace. On the other hand, all the traditional associations that go with an English hall presuppose a national style of architecture. Even florid Tudor, even sturdy "Queen Anne," can stand juxtaposition with groups of horses, dogs and huntsmen; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... beautiful and often as unsophisticated as it was when the feet of the first Pilgrims pressed them. Therein lies for all the world the chief charm of the Old Colony region. Along the old Pilgrim trails you may step from modern culture and its acme of civilization through the pasture lands of the Pilgrims into glimpses of the forest primeval. The Pilgrims' boulders, their kettle-hole ponds, mossy swamps and ferny hillsides, here and there their very forest trees, await you still. For Indian and panther you need ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... race common to all keepers, he dearly loved to see a fox killed, no matter how or where; but to see one "chopped," without any of that "muddling round and messing about," as he delighted to call a hunting run, seemed to him the very acme of satisfaction ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... hand, many obvious improbabilities will be endured, as belonging to the ground-work of the story rather than to the drama itself, in the first scenes, which would disturb or disentrance us from all illusion in the acme of our excitement; as for instance, Lear's division of his kingdom, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... loop" amid shrieks of simulated terror or dancing in disorderly saloon halls, are perhaps the natural reactions to a day spent in noisy factories and in trolley cars whirling through the distracting streets, but the city which permits them to be the acme of pleasure and recreation to its young ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... vaguely tinted in Indian ink, drawn upon strips of gray paper most accurately cut but without the slightest attempt at a frame. This is all: not a seat, not a cushion, not a scrap of furniture. It is the very acme of studied simplicity, of elegance made out of nothing, of the most immaculate and incredible cleanliness. And while following the bonzes through this long suite of empty halls, we are struck by their contrast with the overflow of knickknacks scattered about our rooms in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... if this isn't the acme of good luck! Here are horses—three, four of them, just one ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... longed for heavy sleep to crush his thoughts. So long as he remained awake, he had sufficient energy to expel the phantom of his victim; but as soon as he lost command of his mind it led him to the acme of terror. ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... hovering near the doorway, gave a gasp of dismay. To her tortured soul this police investigation seemed to be the acme of disgrace. It all pointed to the arrest of her boy—-to a long term in some ...
— The High School Freshmen - Dick & Co.'s First Year Pranks and Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... gentleman, feeling the hand of a thief in his pocket, turned suddenly round and caught him in the act, exclaiming, "Who are you?" The mob which gathered round applauded to the very echo, and thought it the most capital joke they had ever heard, the very acme of wit, the very essence of humour. Another circumstance of a similar kind gave an additional fillip to the phrase, and infused new life and vigour into it just as it was dying away. The scene occurred in the chief ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... of delicious coolness, there so coveted, that a cavalier issued on horseback from the gates of the castle, which was then at the acme of its pride and strength. Numerous retainers stood on either side by the drawbridge their heads bared to the evening sun, until the horseman should have passed, but he went forth unattended; and the men resumed their caps, and swung ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... events at the menopause, the acme and then ebb of the sex tide, may be summed up ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... and we hove to, to wait for the tug. This is a process which to the old salt seems a pleasure nearly equal to that of going ashore, at all events to dropping anchor in a well-sheltered harbour. Though I certainty cannot call myself an inexperienced sailor, it appears to me to be the acme of discomfort. Even in a heavy gale it affords but slight relief from the storm-tossed motion of the ship. On the present occasion it was a change from pleasantly gliding along through the water at a speed of ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... rank, great place, and consequence in the world's affairs, preferably even of historic fame. The canon erred in mistaking one means of securing credible intensity or richness for the many which are possible. The end in view is to represent human qualities at their acme. In other times as a matter of fact persons highly placed were most likely to exhibit such development; birth, station, and their opportunities for unrestrained and conspicuous action made them examples of the compass of human energy, passion, and fate. New ages brought other conditions. ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... Judaism reaches its acme with the completion of bourgeois society, but bourgeois society first completes itself in the Christian world. Only under the reign of Christianity, which turns all national, natural, moral and theoretical relations into relations external to man, can bourgeois society separate ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... tone in which Mr. Harry Gee, the manager of the cattle station, alluded to my pursuits. He seemed to consider me the greatest absurdity in the world. On the other hand, the B. O. S. Co., Ltd., represented to him the acme of the nineteenth century's achievement. I believe that he slept in his leggings and spurs. His days he spent in the saddle flying over the plains, followed by a train of half-wild horsemen, who called him Don Enrique, and who had no definite ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... preconceived notions, this marriage ought to have been the acme of uncle Wellington's felicity. But he soon found that it was not without its drawbacks. On the following morning Mr. Todd was informed of the marriage. He had no special objection to it, or interest in it, except that he was opposed on principle to having ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... trio. They never met unless absolutely necessary in order to arrange some ingenious piece of trickery, and they could all live weeks at the same hotel without either, by word or sign, betraying previous knowledge of each other. Indeed, Count Bindo di Ferraris was the very acme of well-dressed, well-groomed scoundrelism. ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... barrack-room, with a mess-table, and a group of intoxicated Celtic officers telling funny stories, and giving challenges to duel. I see a young Irish gentleman capable of performing prodigies of valor. I learn incidentally that the acme of all heroism is the cornetcy of a dragoon regiment. I hear a good deal of French! No, thank you," said the Haunted Man hurriedly, as he stayed the waving hand of the Goblin; "I would rather not go to the Peninsula, and don't care to have a private ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... the great family of man a Church with a Diety at its head and a religion peculiarly of principles. He left the moral code of Christianity untouched in its loveliness. After the death of St. Paul," continues Burton, "Christianity sank into a species of idolatry. The acme of stupidity was attained by the Stylites, who conceived that mankind had no nobler end than to live and die upon the capital of a column. When things were at their worst Mohammed first appeared upon the stage of life." The work was published ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... because it lasts forever. Thus, in the Laocoon, the horror of a moment grew to be the fate of interminable ages. Kenyon looked upon the group as the one triumph of sculpture, creating the repose, which is essential to it, in the very acme of turbulent effort; but, in truth, it was his mood of unwonted despondency that made him so sensitive to the terrible magnificence, as well as to the sad moral, of this work. Hilda herself could not have helped him to see it with nearly ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... phylogenetic studies. So far as the known record can inform us, the trilobites are exclusively Palaeozoic in distribution, but their course must have begun long before that era, as is shown by the number of distinct types among the genera of the lower Cambrian. The group reached the acme of abundance and relative importance in the Cambrian and Ordovician; then followed a long, slow decline, ending in complete and final disappearance before the end of the Permian. The newly-hatched and tiny trilobite larva, known as the protaspis, is very near to the primitive larval form of ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... forms of manufactured iron, (the tariff of 1824 which increased duties considerably), and the tariff of 1828, imposing an average of 50 per cent. duties, and in which the protective movement reached its acme (omitting, of course, the present McKinley Bill with its 60 per cent. average duty). In 1832, consequently, a great reaction in sentiment took place, and the "Compromise Tariff" was passed and duties were lowered. From this period, the advocacy of a high tariff in ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... the river, as though disliking very much to give up when the acme of the sport had ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... and more marked in women than in men, and in mania than in melancholia,—and adds: "I found that the younger the patient, the greater is the tendency to periodic remission and relapse. The phenomenon finds its acme in the cases of pubescent ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... temptations of the shop-window. As she hurried along, the Marquis de Monpavon, vivacious and superb, with a flower in his buttonhole, saluted her at a distance with the grand flourish of the hat so dear to the vanity of woman, the acme of elegance in the way of street salutations, the hat raised high in air above a rigid head. She answered with the polite greeting of the true Parisian, hardly expressed by an imperceptible movement of the figure ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... operations—animating everything, qualifying everything. Romantic invention lacking in peoples without imagination. The role of analogy and of association through "constellation."—The evolution of myths: ascension, acme, decline.—The explanatory myths undergo a radical transformation: the work of depersonification of the myth. Survivals.—The non-explanatory myths suffer a partial transformation: Literature is a ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... him, feeling inclined to tear my hair at such stupidity. “Can’t you see the difference? That was in daylight. Our customs allow a woman to show her feet, and even a little more, in the morning. It would be considered the acme of indecency to let those beauties be seen at a ball. The law allows a woman to uncover her neck and shoulders at a ball, but she would be arrested if she appeared décolleté on the beach of ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... volleys died down to sharpshooting across the lines; and then to hear him laugh when he turned the vegetable snowdrift out into the wooden butter-bowl a little too soon, and a last shot or two blew the fluffy kernels all over the room—all this was the very acme of success in making a pleasant evening. All the time I was ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... always been accustomed to a loose and easy attire, suitable for mountain work; and the high cravats and stiff collars, powdered heads and pigtails, and tight-fitting garments, seemed to him the acme of discomfort. It was not long, however, before he came upon a group of officers, and saw that the military etiquette was no less strict, in their case, than in that of the soldiers, save that their collars were less high, and their stocks more easy. Their walk, too, was somewhat ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold—the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the words ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... one-eyed Chinaman, who sat complacently smiling at the visitors, consisted of a loose blouse, blue trousers tucked into grey socks, and a pair of those native, thick-soled slippers which suggest to a Western critic the acme of discomfort. A raven, black as a bird of ebony, perched upon the Chinaman's shoulder, head a-tilt, surveying the newcomers with a beady, glittering left eye which strangely resembled the beady, glittering right eye of the Chinaman. For, singular, uncanny circumstance, this was a one-eyed ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... primary object is to please his reader, edifying him and gratifying his taste; the second is to produce an honest and faithful copy, adding naught to the sense or abating aught of its especial cachet. He has, however, or should have, another aim wherein is displayed the acme of hermeneutic art. Every language can profitably lend something to and take somewhat from its neighbours—an epithet, a metaphor, a naif idiom, a turn of phrase. And the translator of original mind who notes the innumerable shades of tone, manner and ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... Thus we see the men and women of the Renaissance in the works of all its painters; heavy in Ghirlandajo, vulgarly jaunty in Fillipino, preposterously starched and prim in Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; and mediaeval stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the little boys, companions of the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo Gozzoli's Building ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... was accordingly hoisted, just at the time when the fire of the Danes had reached its acme, and it was yet a matter of considerable uncertainty to which side victory would incline. Nelson was swiftly pacing his quarter-deck, moving the stump of his lost arm up and down with excitement, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... acme the basket to water, drench to enliven the stove, furnace I have got into the habit of doing it I was ashamed of it in the end he took ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... men were scarcely less affected, though they were better able to control their emotion. The joyous renunciation of five thousand dollars a year struck these hard men of business as something almost uncanny. They would have considered it the acme of folly in an ordinary man, but in a preacher they felt ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... books on harmony one would gather that consecutive fifths and octaves and a number of other things were never indulged in by composers, and to cap the climax one would naturally accept the harmony exercises contained in the books as being the very acme of what we loved best in music. Thus we see that any investigation into the music of antiquity must be more or ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... rejoicings at the election of Governor. It occurred at precisely the same period of the year,—the same week; the only difference being, that Monday and Tuesday are the Whitsun festival days, whereas, in Massachusetts, Wednesday was "Election day," and the acme of the merry-making. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the winged lions exhumed by Layard! What more authentic tokens of Mediaeval piety and patience exist than the elaborate and grotesque carvings of Albert Drer's day? The colossal Brahma in the temple of Elephanta, near Bombay, is the visible acme of Asiatic superstition. And can an illustration of the revival of Art, in the fifteenth century, so exuberant, aspiring, and sublime, be imagined, to surpass the Day and Night, the Moses, and other statues of Angelo?— But such general inferences are less impressive than the personal experience ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... of these never-to-be-repeated moments, I looked at the printed song to see how many verses had to be sung before I could step away from the torture which the cold air sent through my teeth. It was the acme of suffering. As the glow of the piled-up torches subsided, my pain subsided too. How thankful I was, though! Gentle eyes were fastened upon me all around. All wanted to speak with me, to press my hand. Tired out, I reached ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... walk down this shrubbery?" said Miss Carter. "The children are all quite happy. Every one who comes to the Rectory is happy, and you can hear by the shouts of the village children that they are in the very acme of bliss. Shall we walk down here and talk together? I have always been so amazed at your remaining on at The Follies, ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... commissions as regulars, which too few of them ever received; and they were charmed with the little viceregal court over which Lady Maria Carleton, despite her youthful two-and-twenty summers, presided with a dignity inherited from the premier ducal family of England and brought to the acme of conventional perfection by her intimate experience of Versailles. On New Year's Eve Carleton gave a public fete, a state dinner, and a ball to celebrate the anniversary of the British victory over Montgomery ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... a rough and ready man, and he had little liking for male humans of the George Lerton type. Lerton always dressed in the acme of fashion, running considerably to fads in clothes, appearing almost effeminate at times. And yet it was said in financial circles that Lerton was far from being effeminate when it came to a business deal. There had been whispers ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... was ill and she had no means to procure medical aid. Her appeal for charity had been rejected, and can we blame her if she yielded to the tempter and took the money lying before her? We cannot. Look not on the act, gaze only on the provocation. If in hearts there dwells a shade of pity, an acme of sympathy, you cannot return a verdict of guilty. She is not guilty of theft! I unhesitatingly assert, that if to act as she has, and under the circumstances she acted, be theft, then such a thief would I become ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... as complete a mystery to me as to you. I do not know why your Society, at whose annual meetings orators are as the sand upon the seashore for multitude, should call upon Philadelphia, a city in which the acme of eloquence is attained by a Friends' Yearly Meeting, "sitting under the canopy of silence." I can only suppose that you designed to relieve the insufferable brilliancy of your annual festival, that you wished to dilute the highly-flavored, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... inquisition, would have placed in the hands of the malevolent fanatics an instrument of exquisite torture. It is constructed to effect a double purpose, the achievement of the maximum of production and the expenditure of the minimum of human effort. It is the acme of inventive genius. To work the breakers, a man need have no more intelligence than the tow-mule that plods a beaten path; and such a man is the ideal laborer from the standpoint of ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... was narrow, but fifty paces away in the direction of Argeles was a track which left our road to lead to a farm. For this spot the driver was making. There he would be able to turn with the acme of ease. ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... one of those English wives, so popularly portrayed as representing the acme of submission, was delightful. A slight, slim little figure, looking slighter and slimmer in the wake of her overshadowing husband, with an outward appearance of unsurpassed mildness and meekness which her conversation readily dispelled, the wife of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... a beautiful and fertile country, where abound rich fields of grain and running streams of pure water, denotes the very acme of good times is at hand. Wealth will pile in upon you, and you will be able to reign in state in any country. If the country be dry and bare, you will see and hear of troublous times. Famine and sickness will be in ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... off-hand air of familiar scholarship, never by any chance bring forward the evidence for this greater atrociousness of the Thirty Years' War,[1] and one is inclined to suspect that this oft-repeated allusion to the Thirty Years' War as the acme of military atrocity ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... his case and Fanning-Smith's. To use courageous gambling as means to a foothold in business—he regarded that as wise audacity. To use a firm-established foothold in business as a means to gambling—he regarded that as the acme of reckless folly. Besides, when he marked the cards or loaded the dice for a great Wall Street game of "high finance," he did it with skill and intelligence; ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... time I fear that I had got my preaching stop fairly out); "I don't pretend to know what truth is, for it is infinite, and I finite; but I know particularly well what it is NOT. It is not true that religion reached its acme nineteen hundred years ago, and that we are for ever to refer back to what was written and said in those days. No, sir; religion is a vital living thing, still growing and working, capable of endless extension ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... concrete Thought is neither shadowy nor illusory. It is the acme of reality and this world which we mistakenly regard as the only verity, is but an evanescent ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... than the one at Timothy's house which she had deeply envied him ever since it had been put in. That hot and cold water should run together for one's cleansing without the trouble of fetching them in heavy buckets from a far-away kitchen, had seemed to Arethusa the acme of luxury when she had first glimpsed the ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... a length which could hardly be defended on purely dramatic grounds; and still later, occupying some hundred and twenty lines of the very last scene, we have the chatter of Osric with Hamlet's mockery of it. But the acme of audacity is reached in Antony and Cleopatra, where, quite close to the end, the old countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra discourses on the virtues and vices of the worm, and where his last words, 'Yes, forsooth: I wish you joy o' the worm,' are followed, without ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... her whole heart and soul in the words, and emitted such a blaze as filled the house with rapture and astonishment. In a word, no actress at the highest acme of popularity ever received greater applause. Next day her performance was the topic of every circle in Bath. Horatia in the Roman Father, and Palmyra in Mahomet, augmented her reputation, and in less than a month the fame of this prodigy, for such she appeared to be, had reached every ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... had to start out Monday morning to peddle the brush. Took him three days to land anything at all, and then it's nothing but a sleeping souse in a Western bar-room scene. In here now he is—something the Acme people are doing. He's had three days, just lying down with his back against a barrel sleeping. He's not to wake up even when the fight starts, but sleep right on through it, which they say will be a good gag. ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... honey, and cherry brandy had seemed to her the best in the world, so also that song, at that moment, seemed to her the acme ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... twenty-four vessels indicates the first half of the first century after Christ. The surfaces of many of them are covered with alto-relievos of beaten silver—a circumstance which traces back their origin to imperial times, distinguishing them, at the same time, from the bas-relief ornamentations of the acme of Greek art. The gilding of the draperies and weapons, and the silver color of the naked parts, in imitation, as it were, of the gold-and-ivory statues of Greek art, also indicate Roman workmanship. The annexed cuts ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... creatures or things in the world the farthest removed from him. She looked away, and found her gaze returning, fascinated, as if she were a bird and he a snake. The man was of huge frame, a giant whose every move suggested the acme of physical power. He was an animal—a gorilla with a shock of light instead of black hair, of pale instead of black skin. His features might have been hewn and hammered out with coarse, dull, broken chisels. And upon his face, in the lines and cords, ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... and nature sparkles like a diamond in the sunshine. But as we neared it, the sight of that dismal drab settlement seemed to darken the smiling landscape like a coffin which has been carried by mistake into a brilliant ball-room. I once thought the acme of desolation had been reached at Verkhoyansk, but to drive into this place was like entering a cemetery. Imagine a double row of squalid log-huts, with windows of ice, some of which, detached by the warm spring sunshine, have fallen to the ground. This ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... crustacean. Yet it is not for human admiration. Its glints speedily dim in the air. To be gobbled up by some hungry fish is the ordinary fate of the species. Possibly splendour is bestowed upon the shrimp as a means by which certain fish distinguish a particularly choice dainty, and the fish show the very acme of admiration by "wolfing" it. Thus are the examples of high ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the great guns their wonder was redoubled. They approached them with every mark of the profoundest reverence and awe, but forbore to examine them minutely. There were two large mirrors in the cabin, and here was the acme of their amazement. Too-wit was the first to approach them, and he had got in the middle of the cabin, with his face to one and his back to the other, before he fairly perceived them. Upon raising his eyes and seeing his reflected self in the glass, I thought the savage would go mad; but, upon turning ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... himself, and he does not much mind other people being so. He says what he thinks, and you have got to lump it. Sometimes he is good-natured enough, and even brave. There is an admirable sketch of a good-natured cad in one of Mrs. Walford's novels, who is the acme of kind indelicacy. The cad is dreadful to live with, because he is always making one ashamed, and ashamed of being ashamed, because many of the things he does do not really matter very much. Then, when he is out of sight and hearing, you cannot trust him. He makes ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Monte Carlo stands in one of the loveliest settings on earth. Facing the blue Mediterranean and enhanced by the exquisitely kept marble villas of Monaco, it may justly be called the acme of gambling institutions. It has become an institution through the years. Time ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... names may be found five hundred years back among the Deutsch Ritters that conquered Northern Europe from heathendom, and thence all the way down to now, occurring in martial and princely connection. It was the acme ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... been lighted at nights, while the Roman streets remained dark and dangerous. In the neighbourhood of the city was the celebrated park called Daphne, where the voluptuous and almost incredible dissipation of the ancient world perhaps reached its acme. Like Alexandria, Antioch ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... the chains were less obtrusively displayed, she had to thank Mr. Sheldon for the refinement in her taste. Her views of life in general had expanded under Mr. Sheldon's influence. She no longer thought a high-wheeled dog-cart and a skittish mare the acme of earthly splendour; for she had a carriage and pair at her service, and a smart little page-boy to leap off the box in attendance on her when she paid visits or went shopping. Instead of the big comfortable old-fashioned farmhouse at Hyley, with its mysterious ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... brands, generally according to German recipes, and sell them to the delicatessen and the grocery stores. If they were to rely upon me for business, they would soon go bankrupt. To my palate the dill pickle appeals as almost the acme of disagreeableness. ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... lend themselves willingly, as do their kin over the sea, to the ebb and flow of powerful contrary feelings, and rush body and soul from the extreme of joy to the acme of sorrow. The mild serenite, enjoyed by men with classical tendencies was to them unknown, and the word was one which no Norman Conquest, no Angevin rule, no "Augustan" imitation, could force into the language; it was unwanted, for ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... noses and ears, scratch, gouge out eyes, pull hair, mutilate sex organs, with a violence that sometimes takes on epileptic features and which in a number of recorded cases causes sudden death at its acme, from the strain it imposes upon the system. Its cause is always some form of thwarting wish or will or of reduction of self-feeling, as anger is the acme of self-assertion. The German criminalist, Friedrich, says that probably every man might ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... "love." Being in love is, as just indicated, a pathological, morbid phenomenon. The person who is in love is not in a normal condition. He can see nothing, he cannot be argued with, as far as his love is concerned. She is the acme of perfection, physical, mental, and spiritual; nobody can be compared with her. And, of course, the man is anxiously eager to marry the object of his love—unless insuperable obstacles are in the way; for instance, if the man ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... and lean, walked complacently and condescendingly in, followed by his master. At a glance, the least imaginative could see that Jud Carpenter, the Whipper-in of the Acme Cotton Mills, and Bonaparte, his ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... Leishman's, Enfield, but expect to be at Colebrooke Cottage in a week or so, where, or anywhere, I shall be always most happy to receive tidings from you. G. Dyer is in the height of an uxorious paradise. His honeymoon will not wane till he wax cold. Never was a more happy pair, since Acme and Septimius, and longer. Farewell, with many thanks, dear S. Our loves to all ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... when crossed yield fewer and fewer seeds, to species which never produce a single seed, but yet are affected by the pollen of certain other species, for the germen swells. It is here manifestly impossible to select the more sterile individuals, which have already ceased to yield seeds; so that this acme of sterility, when the germen alone is affected, cannot have been gained through selection; and from the laws governing the various grades of sterility being so uniform throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms, we may infer that the cause, whatever it may be, is the same ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... antiquity became more marked, and a consuming desire impelled him to spend two years in Italy (1786-1788). The rest of his years Goethe spent in Weimar, his life enriched above all else by his friendship with Schiller. In this second Weimar period Goethe reached the acme of his powers. Even his declining years, although marked by loneliness and bringing him a full measure of grief (his wife, Christiane Vulpius, whom he had met shortly after his return from Italy, died in 1816, followed in 1830 by his only son), exemplified ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... that personality was forever merging itself and getting lost in the more clearly perfect identity of Sah-luma, whom he regarded with a species of profound hero-worship such as one man seldom feels for another. To call himself a Poet NOW seemed the acme of absurdity; how should such an one as he attempt to conquer fame with a rival like Sah-luma already in the field and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... all speculation—simply as speculation—reaches its acme in the Essay on Bacon. The curious naivete with which Macaulay denounces all philosophy in that vigorous production excites a kind of perverse admiration. How can one refuse to admire the audacity which enables a man explicitly to identify philosophy with humbug? It ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... or three hundred acres of land, besides the ground that is included in the gardens of the two Trianons. These Trianons are small palaces erected in the gardens, as if the occupants of the chateau, having reached the acme of magnificence and splendour in the principal residence, were seeking refuge against the effect of satiety in these humbler abodes. They appear small and insignificant after the palace; but the Great Trianon is a considerable house, and contains a fine suite of apartments, among which are ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... remains of my ossified affection will lie in as decorous repose as the harmless ash heaps of some long buried damosel of the era of Lars Porsenna, dug out of Vulci or Chiusi. To make a safe and brilliant marriage is the acme of social success. What else does the world to which ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... informed by his mother's spirit. The result in his expression was an absolute ferocity instead of severity of gloom, a fury of resentment against his fate, instead of that bitter leaning towards it which is the acme of defiance. ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... that we have occasionally noted. He saw the battle-field on which Inarus had just been defeated—the ground strewn with the skulls and other bones of the slain; he made his longest stay at Memphis, then at the acme of its greatness; he visited the quarries on the east of the Nile whence the stone had been dug for the pyramids, and he gazed upon the great monuments themselves, on the opposite side of the stream. We have seen that he visited Lake Moeris, and examined the famous Labyrinth, which he thought ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... notice once exchanged between the putt-boys below and the windlass-boys above, I proceeded down a dipple to another place like a standing, for in this mine there were six, or perhaps seven, veins: and there immediately I came upon the acme of the horrible drama of this Tartarus, for all here was not merely crowded, but, at some points, a packed congestion of flesh, giving out a strong smell of the peach, curiously mixed with the stale coal-odour of the pit, for here ventilation must have been very limited; and a large number ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... of civilisation certainly are not the most civilised of individuals. They appear to consider yellow ochre and peacocks' feathers the climax of barbarism—marabouts and kalydor the acme of refinement. A ring through the nose calls forth their deepest pity—a diamond drop to the ear commands their highest respect. To them, nothing can show a more degraded state of nature than a New Zealand chief, with his distinctive coat of arms emblazoned on the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... "scrapper," and never so happy as when annoying others. A fight appeared to be the acme of pleasure with him, and it was seldom that he could be seen without some trace of a mix-up on his face in the shape of scratches, or a suspicious hue about ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... and philosophy will gather about the hearth. In the meanwhile, the Tentaillons are obliging; the table, with your additions, will pass; only the wine is execrable—well, I shall send for some to-day. My Pharaoh will be gratified to drink a decent glass; aha! and I shall see if he possesses that acme of organisation—a palate. If he has a palate, he ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lost in reverie. The agitation of my mind was not longer endurable. I was too near the acme of curiosity to longer delay. I threw reserve aside and not without fear ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... profession, once he has come to man's estate, such as being a policeman, or a performer on the high trapeze. The poet would not have been the "Peoples' Laureate," had his fairy god- mother granted his boy-wish, but the Greenfield baker. For to his childish mind it "seemed the acme of delight," using again his own happy expression, "to manufacture those snowy loaves of bread, those delicious tarts, those toothsome bon-bons. And then to own them all, to keep them in store, to watch ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... came with the joyous tidings that Stanley was safe after all; but even the Riviera fails to restore her wonted spirits. She droops visibly during the long winter. "She grows so much older away from Willy," says the fond mamma, to whom proximity to that vivacious youth is the acme of earthly bliss. Uncle Jack grins and says nothing. It is dawning upon him that something is needed besides the air and sunshine of the Riviera to bring back the dancing light in those sweet blue eyes and joy to the wistful ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... very candid, and would make a complete diplomatist: truth-telling being now pronounced (rather late in the day) the very acme of diplomacy. But do you not own that ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... even the vulgar crowd. Its one fitting place is in the mouth of a swaggering comedian. In like manner words of contempt spoken of ourselves by ourselves, unless they are absolutely heartfelt and come from a mind thoroughly convinced of the fact of its own misery, are truly the very acme of pride, and a flower of the most subtle vanity; for it rarely happens that he who utters them either believes them himself or really wishes others to believe them: on the contrary, the speaker is mostly only anxious rather to be considered humble, and consequently virtuous, ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... stuff, which had been allowed to foam copiously in order to eke out, the five desperadoes solemnly touched glasses and Slops Barnett, who had visited in Princeton, led them in that whispered toast that is the acme of devilment: ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... the comfort, the education, the success of men in general, and to their plans and projects, is in a great measure due to her self-abnegation and self-sacrifice having been so long and so sweetly lauded by poets, philosophers and priests as the acme of human goodness ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Herculean labour. In fact I never looked beyond the moment of composition, and published merely at the request of my friends. Notwithstanding so much has been said concerning the "Genus irritabile vatum," we shall never quarrel on the subject—poetic fame is by no means the "acme" of my ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... But the Acme Film Company, caught with the rest of the world in the pressure of hard times, wanted to economize. The manager had pointed out to Luck, during the course of an evening's discussion, that these Indians were luxuries in the making of pictures, ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... Willy Cameron's night off, and they went, the three of them, to the movies that evening. To Mrs. Boyd the movies was the acme of dissipation. She would, if warned in advance, spend the entire day with her hair in curlers, and once there she feasted her starved romantic soul to repletion. But that night the building was stifling, and without any warning Edith suddenly got up and walked toward the door. There was something ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... traits of his character united thus to distinguish him even among the best educated and most unfortunate of the political refugees from Southern Europe. At the time of his arrest, the vilest modern despotism of the Continent had reached its acme; and the patriotic movements it then sought to annihilate by a cruelty unparalleled since the Middle Ages were justified even by conservative reformers, on account of their stringent moral necessity, the intelligent scope ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... because it is not of a type to which its author never had the remotest intention of making it conform, and to which except for something like a miracle it was impossible that it should even approach, is the acme of critical fatuity. Judged in accordance with the intention of the author the Amyntas is no inconsiderable achievement for a young writer, and compared with other works belonging to the same tradition it occupies a highly respectable place. With Tasso's Aminta and Fletcher's Faithful ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... stood opposite the door of No. 51. Sacred ground this, and historical as well. Art had her votaries here, as the tourist of to-day will find she still has, at whose shrines pilgrims from afar and from near worshiped, and grew better and stronger for their ministrations. Crawford, then at the acme of his fame, had his constantly-thronged studio in the immediate vicinity, while those at No. 51 embraced, among others, that of Tenerani, the famous Italian sculptor, whose work is always in such fine dramatic taste, although he never sacrifices his love and deep ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... words before us, amongst other things, He says substantially this, that whilst the steward's using his lord's wealth in order to help his lord's debtors was a piece of knavery and unfaithfulness, in us it is not unfaithfulness, but the very acme of faithfulness. In the text we have the thought that there are two kinds of valuable things in the world, a lower and a higher; that men may be very rich in regard to the one, and very poor in regard to the other. In respect to these, 'There ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... know my strong attachment to my friends, and how much pleasure I have hitherto experienced from retrospect, can judge from the above circumstance, how intense were my sufferings. But the point, the acme of my distress, consisted in the awful uncertainty of our final fate. My prevailing opinion was, that my husband would suffer violent death; and that I should of course become a slave, and languish out a miserable though short ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say "See!" to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply "Here!" to a body's cry of "Where?" till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such completeness ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... in a time when the bicycle marked the acme of progress and Bryan could be a hero, in a flat-roofed Texas town, whose intellectual glory was a Baptist college and whose answer to arguments, "ropes and revolvers," Brann wrote for only three years, and wrote as Shakespeare wrote, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... our president one evening to a select few of us who sat around the fireplace, "was wiser than we knew, or than he perhaps appreciated. His Procrustes, from the collector's point of view, is entirely logical, and might be considered as the acme of bookmaking. To the true collector, a book is a work of art, of which the contents are no more important than the words of an opera. Fine binding is a desideratum, and, for its cost, that of the Procrustes could not be improved upon. The paper is above criticism. ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... beamed with gospel light; it shone through me. I was the beacon of this latter age: a comet, sent to warn the wicked. I mean, I was all this in my own imagination, which swelled and mounted to the very acme of fanaticism. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... a successful man at the acme of his success, and study him in a succession of scenes that bring out the fact of his prosperity in a way to strike the imagination of the audience, even the groundlings; and, of course, I have to deal with success of the most appreciable sort—a material success that is gross and palpable. ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... India, stands the Taj Mahal, the acme of Oriental architecture, said to be the most beautiful building in the world. It was planned as a mausoleum for the favorite wife of Shah Jehan. When the latter was deposed by his son Aurungzebe, his daughter Jahanara chose to share his captivity ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... at the acme of his wishes. After having pompously announced that the seat of the soul is in the meninges (cerebral membrane), could there be any thing to fear from the liberal thinker of Ferney? He had only forgotten that the patriarch was above all a man of good ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... social equal of the allied peoples. The goal of Honor, he had attained in every war waged by America. He was with Jackson at New Orleans, a pioneer in the Mexican struggle, 200,000 strong in the great civil crisis, the acme of terror to Geronimo in the later Indian wars, the hero of San Juan in the Spanish-American combat, and at Carrizal in the latest Mexican imbroglio. By 1914, however, he had lost all rewards of honor which he had previously won. As for Equality, ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... eighteen lines of it altogether in Dr. Sommer's reprint, but as these are long quarto lines, let us multiply them by some three to get the equivalent of the "skipping octosyllables." There will remain fifty to a hundred and fifty, with, in the prose, some extra matter not in the verse. But the acme of the contrast is reached in these words of the prose, which answer to some forty lines of the poet's watering-out. "Great was the joy that they made each other that night, for long had each suffered for the other. And when the day came, they parted." ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... different, and remained to the end unrevolutionized by his heart's insight. This background conception of God comes to extreme expression in his De servo arbitrio ["The Unfree Will"] of 1525: "This is the acme of faith, to believe that God who saves so few and condemns so many is merciful; that He is just who at His own pleasure has made us necessarily doomed to damnation, so that . . . He seems to delight in the tortures of the wretched and to be more deserving of hatred than of love. If by any ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... clergy was, in my good uncle's eyes, the exact acme of wit and wisdom. We are always clever with those who imagine we think as they do. To be shallow you must differ from people: to be profound you must agree with them. "Why, Sir," answered the sage nephew, "you forget that I have seen more of the world than ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... why in the Western States of America a yellow dog should be proverbially considered the acme of canine degradation and incompetency, nor why the possession of one should seriously affect the social standing of its possessor. But the fact being established, I think we accepted it at Rattlers Ridge without question. The matter of ownership was more difficult to settle; ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... of the country, why not in the whole of it? If it would be a damning sin for us to admit another Slave State into the Union, why is it not a damning sin to permit a Slave State to remain in the Union? Would it not be the acme of effrontery for a man, in amicable alliance with fifteen pickpockets, to profess scruples of conscience in regard to admitting another pilfering rogue to the fraternity? "Thou that sayest, A man should ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... were not even bursting. Thank God, I have at last reached a summer in which there is neither rain nor a cold wind. Krasnoyarsk is a picturesque, cultured town; compared with it, Tomsk is "a pig in a skull-cap and the acme of mauvais ton." The streets are clean and paved, the houses are of stone and large, the ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... as he said, crowded. There was a loud continued murmur of human voices. Traffic was intense, and had reached what might be supposed its acme. It seemed as if business was undergoing a paroxysm, or fit, rather than pursuing her steady, healthful course. Bodies of men were standing in groups—some were darting from corner to corner, pen in mouth—a few were walking leisurely with downcast looks—others quickly, uneasy and excited. A stout ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... thus have assumed a disguise? You are already a great noble, but your fortunes have not yet reached their acme. You will one day be Marechal de France, and the dignity will be conferred upon you on the other side of the Rhone. Beauty has great influence over you; but with those whom you seek to please your purse has ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... the planet approaches or departs from the sun. It means also that about the same conditions that Secretary Deepwaters suggested as desirable for the earth, prevail here, and that Jupiter represents, therefore, about the acme of climate naturally provided. On account of its rapid rotation and vast size, the winds have a tornado's strength, but they are nothing at this distance from the sun to what they would be if a planet with its present rate of rotation and size were where Venus or ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... this insect achieved the very acme and culmination of repulsive villainy. Fortunately she has mitigated it in two ways. The stench is volatile and soon disappears; while settler's noses get used to it in a measure. Were it not for these merciful provisions, colonization in this land ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... disease and cold was seen in its worst work in the allied camps. The genius of Elizabeth Butler has seized upon the morning "Roll Call," in the Crimean snows of 1855, as the subject of a great painting in which to depict the excess of human suffering and devotion—the acme of English heroism in a ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... the situation in its uncoloured reality. There arose within him a certain sense of shame that he had given so much and received, as yet, nothing in kind. He had passed that period of youth when a stolen kiss seems the acme of love's adventure. Such a theft on his part, irrespective of its consequences, would have ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... its close and the preparation for the marriage, even the details of the settlement were narrated, suspense reached its acme. Then came the letters of reprieve, the deliverance from the bondage of Peterson's vindictive malice, the power of establishing her claim; and when she wept her thanksgiving for salvation, many wept in sympathy; while Regina, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... certain that the exceptional man of fifty was also an exceptional man at twenty. On the average, after about thirty years of age, the elasticity of the body to rise to the strain of emergency diminishes, and, when forty years is reached, a man, medically speaking, reaches his acme. After that, degeneration of the fabric of the body slowly and maybe imperceptibly sets in. As the difficulties of exploration in cold regions approximate to the limit of human endurance and often enough exceed it, it is obvious that the above generalizations ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... approached it in point of popularity. In American literature, Weems stood first. To Weems are we indebted for the hatchet tale, the story of the colt that was broken and killed in the process, and all those other fine romances of Washington's youth. Weems' literary style reveals the very acme of that vicious quality of untruth to be found in the old-time Sunday-school books. Weems mustered all the "Little Willie" stories he could find, and attached to them Washington's name, claiming to write for "the Betterment of the Young," as if in dealing with the young we should carefully ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... slowly," replied the younger man with a calmness that struck the other as the acme of effrontery. "My light has been burning for ten minutes ... but I don't make out how you saw my window if you came from the front of ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... for the start, and here they come, And the hoof-strokes roar like a mighty drum Beat by a hand unsteady; They come like a rushing, roaring flood, Hurrah for the speed of the Chester blood; For Acme is making the pace so good There are ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... store until he sold out the year before, when he was elected to the Assembly. Murdock's Hall was in the second story, and a little way north stood a zinc house that was to be our home. It had been shipped first to San Francisco and then to Humboldt. Its plan and architecture were the acme of simplicity. There were three rooms tandem, each with a door in the exact middle, so that if all the doors were open a bullet would be unimpeded in passing through. To add to the social atmosphere, a front porch, open at both ends, extended across ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... was what first brought me to myself. Withdrawing from my narrow quarters I hastened down to them and added one more white face to the three I found congregated in the doorway. In the diabolical ingenuity we had seen displayed, crime had reached its acme and the cup of human depravity seemed full. When we had regained in some measure our self-possession, we all advanced for a closer look at the murderous object dangling before us. We found it to be a heavy leaden ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... of state, guiding the helm, and the rest of it—is much more frequently expressed by military metaphors. Even the posts of duty are the "spoils" of office. The State which to Plato was a deliberately harmonised music is to us a deliberate discord, and the acme of politics, whose crowning glory should be a peaceful measure, is by the vulgar not so inaccurately regarded as attained at a General Election, the nomenclature of which positively bristles with bayonets. Seats are won as towns were of old, and, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... way to amusement. It had been something, after all, to rouse the lazy Aubrey to wrath. She knew exactly the grievance he had been nursing against her during the last few weeks in Biskra. Though he travelled perpetually and often in remote and desolate places, he travelled with the acme of comfort and the minimum of inconveniences. He put himself out for nothing, and the inevitable difficulties that accrued fell on Diana's younger and less blase shoulders. She had always known ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... Cooking reached its acme, according to our standard, and each man became remarkable for some particular dish. Bage was the exponent of steam puddings of every variety, and Madigan could always be relied upon for an unfailing batch of puff-pastry. Bickerton once started out with the object of ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... few years ago the tomato consisted of little more than a rind, with seeds in the hollow centre. Now, the only varieties worth raising cut as solid as a mellow pear. The following is Gregory's list of varieties: Livingston's Beauty, Alpha, Acme, Canada Victor, Arlington, General Grant. I will add Trophy and Mikado. If a yellow variety is ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... that the able and brilliant statesman from Maine, James G. Blaine, died, as did Henry Clay, without having reached the acme of his ambition,—the Presidency of the United States? Why was he defeated for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1876,—the only time when it was possible for him to be elected, and defeated for the election in 1884,—the only time when it was possible for him to ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... know, mademoiselle; I can only guess. There is but one person who can perhaps judge of you correctly,—a man older than myself by many years—whose life is the very acme of spiritual perfection—whose learning is vast and unprejudiced. I must see and speak to him before I try any more of my, or rather his, remedies. But we have lingered long enough out here, and unless you have something more to say to me, we will return to the ballroom. ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... the principal street of the neighboring town was just at its acme of life and bustle, a stranger of very distinguished figure was seen on the side-walk. His port, as well as his garments, betokened nothing short of nobility. He wore a richly-embroidered plum-colored coat, a waistcoat of costly velvet, magnificently adorned with ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... Fairest spot on earth? Doth a busy world neglect thee, Careless of thy worth? Even so, thy site elysian Still remains supreme,— Acme of the painter's vision ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... to lost causes, the professor said. Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never loyal to the successful. We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination. Dominus! Lord! Where is the spirituality? Lord Jesus? Lord Salisbury? A sofa in a westend club. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... demanded that the election should be given to the people. This was done, and in 1825, Troup was re-elected over Clarke by a majority of some seven hundred votes. It was during this last contest that the violence and virulence of party reached its acme, and pervaded every family, creating animosities which neither ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... exposed the chest, loaded the limbs, and even enslaved the understanding. But these societies had been more successful in pulling down than in building up, and blinded with excess of zeal were hurrying us onward to a goal which might or might not be the acme of sanitative dress, but was certainly the zero of artistic excellence. The cause of this was not far to seek. We were inventing a new science, that of dress, and were without rules to guide us. So ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... opinion, which the institutions, which society itself conspires to give them. In short, the law is defective when it does not proportion the punishment to the real evil which society has sustained. The last degree of injustice, the acme of folly is, when society is so blinded as to inflict punishment on those citizens who ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... communication with the highest Adepts." It is with the utmost difficulty that one or two can be induced, even by the throes of a world, to injure their own progress by meddling with mundane affairs. The ordinary reader will say: "This is not god-like. This is the acme of selfishness." .... But let him realize that a very high Adept, undertaking to reform the world, would necessarily have to once more submit to Incarnation. And is the result of all that have gone before in that line sufficiently encouraging to prompt a renewal ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... hypothesis of unconscious cerebration seemed scarcely as satisfactory as the other-namely, that, having at a former time heard Terrible Tommy mention the name of Andrew Glover, my educated instinct of Nomenology, rising to the very acme of efficiency, had accurately, though unconsciously, snap-shotted a corresponding apparition on the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... railroads extending into the Andes is carrying ore, bullion, and wool. Their construction marks the acme of engineering skill; the scenery along them surpasses that of all other regions in its wild ruggedness, ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... Perfection. — N. perfection; perfectness &c. adj.; indefectibility[obs3]; impeccancy[obs3], impeccability. pink, beau ideal, phenix, paragon; pink of perfection, acme of perfection; ne plus ultra[Lat]; summit &c. 210. cygne noir[Fr]; philosopher's stone; chrysolite, Koh-i-noor. model, standard, pattern, mirror, admirable Crichton; trump, very prince of. masterpiece, superexcellence ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... taint of the new skins in which it was transferred from the only well; and now, in the very heart of the scorching Tehama, where a copious draught of pure water seemed absolutely indispensable every five minutes, the mixture was the very acme of abomination. Fresh hides stript from the he-goat, besmeared inside as well as out with old tallow and strong bark tan, filled from an impure well at Sagallo, tossed and tumbled during two days and nights under a distilling heat," formed a drink which we should conclude to be little short of poison. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... himself the effect likely to be created in the wilderness by this adorable acme of the feminine, with something between a smile and ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... confidently, and remarked: "I have nothing more to learn—if your knowledge is the acme of the understanding ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... This was the acme of Guinevere's change, the pinnacle of her development. Thereafter her transformations were rhythmical, alternating with the day and night. Through the nights of activity she was garbed in rich, warm brown. With the coming of dawn, as she climbed slowly upward, ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
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