|
|
|
More "Focus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... others: their appointment was to trade, navigate, eat and drink, marry and give in marriage, and the rest; mine was to discover the Source of the Nile. Hither had all the threads of my life been converging for many years; they had now reached their focus, and henceforth their course ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... "mere sound," signifying nothing. Sir, the inhabitants of this district are subject to state legislation and state policy; they cannot complain of this, for their condition is voluntary; and as this city is the focus of power, of influence, and considered also as that of fashion, if not of folly, and as the streams which flow from here irradiate the whole country, it is right, it is proper, that it should be subject to state policy and state power, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... which he took the Government severely to task for designing to remove from state control this matter of fundamental importance. Coinciding with the cry for more troops with which to confront Sherman, the topic of negro soldiers became at once one of the questions of the hour. It helped to focus that violent anti-Davis movement which is the conspicuous event of December, 1864, and January, 1865. Those who believed the President unscrupulous trembled at the thought of putting into his hands a great army of hardy barbarians trained to absolute ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... heathen writers, that the Temple of Jerusalem was never built again, for as the foundation was about to be laid, fire broke out of the ground accompanied by an earthquake. The same earthquake also destroyed Delphi, "the centre of the earth," and the focus of the religious and political ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... have had occasion to review the public records of Christendom; and beyond all doubt the public conscience, the international conscience, of a people, is the reverberation of its private conscience. History is but the converging into a focus of what is moving in the domestic life below; a set of great circles expressing and summing up, on the dial-plate, the motions of many little circles in the machinery within. Now History, what may be called the Comparative History of Modern ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... independent, that such only exist by sufferance of their mighty neighbors, and must be subservient in trade policy and military policy to retain even a nominal freedom; and that an independent Ireland would by its position be a focus for the intrigues of powers hostile to Great Britain, and if it achieved independence Great Britain in self protection would be forced to conquer it again. They consider that security for industry and freedom for the individual can best be preserved in Ireland by the maintenance ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... too remote an era to admit of our conjecturing the period. The volcanic action can be traced from Castel Sardo, where it has formed precipices on the northern coast, to the vicinity of Monastir, a distance southward of more than 100 miles; its central focus appearing to have been about half-way between Ales, Milis, and St. Lussurgiu, where, as Captain Smyth remarks, “the phlægrean evidences are particularly abundant.” The action was principally confined to the western side of the island, though, south of Genargentu, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... the mammals (including man), sex is linked up with all the internal secretions, and hence is of the whole body.[3] As Bell [2, p.5] states it: "We must focus at one and the same time the two essential processes of life—the individual metabolism and the reproductive metabolism. They are interdependent. Indeed, the individual metabolism is ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... modern times, when a reigning monarch did not disdain to pick up a painter's pencil, and a whole city mourned an artist's death, and paid honours to his remains; all the rank, wealth, genius, talent, taste, and intelligence of the people were concentrated in one grand focus. Among the states of ancient Greece and modern Italy, the city was in fact the nation; and at Athens, Rome, Venice, and Florence, was collected all of genius, taste, and talent, the people as a body possessed. The mental qualities were thereby rendered more acute, and the tastes and manners ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Public Works Department) and I have to make an important measurement in connexion with the Apothegm of the Bilateral which runs to-night precisely through this spot. My fingers now mark exactly the concentric of the secondary focus whence the Radius Vector should be drawn, but I find that (like a fool) I have left my Double Refractor in the cafe hard by. I dare not go for fear of losing the place I have marked; yet I can get no further ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... tragedy. London is a city of onlookers. The most trivial street accident never lacks its interested audience, and a house in which a murder is reputed to have taken place becomes a center upon which the idly curious focus from the four ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... the multitudinous subcastes occasionally focus about a religious principle to such an extent as to give them almost the appearance of religious devotees. Thus the Bhats and Ch[a]rans are heralds and bards with the mixed faith of so many low-caste Hindus. But in their office of herald they have a religious pride, and, since in the ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... hypothesis of the Divine privilege, and assuming for the purposes of this narrative the Omniscient focus on the characters most concerned in it, let us for the time being look over the shoulder of God and inform ourselves of their various occupations and preoccupations of a Saturday afternoon in late June during the hour ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... all great European art is rooted in the thirteenth century; and it seems to me that there is a kind of central year about which we may consider the energy of the middle ages to be gathered; a kind of focus of time which, by what is to my mind a most touching and impressive Divine appointment, has been marked for us by the greatest writer of the middle ages, in the first words he utters; namely, the year 1300, the "mezzo ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... he aroused himself and looked. To his eyesight, twisted and fixed to a shorter focus by the drug he had taken, the steamship was little more than a blotch on the moon-whitened fog; yet he thought he could see men clambering and working on the upper davits, and the nearest boat—No. 24—seemed to be swinging by the tackles. Then the fog shut her out, though ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... kernel is that vast sleepy interior of China. Few people, even in Shanghai, know what it means; so that to the stay-at-home European pardon for ignorance of existing conditions so much out of his focus ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... we stand in the very focus and fountain, as it were, of the heavenly radiance. A whole Christ, a crucified Christ, a risen Christ, an ascended Christ, a Christ who is the Lord of the Spirit, a Christ who through the centuries is saving and blessing men, a Christ who can point to nineteen hundred years and say, 'That ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... is familiar but I can't place her. Judy, see if you know her," said Molly, as she adjusted Mr. Kinsella's opera glasses to her eyes. She and Judy got the focus at the same moment and exclaimed ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... country, protected there by the constitution, forsooth, by which it seems we are forbidden to expel the free negroes, or to prevent farther importations of this deadly pest in the persons of slaves.'—[Louisville Focus.] ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... noise from the walled end of the passage. A moment later a blinding ray of light swung in, to focus upon them. ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... placed in the focus of the gathering, which sat in a semicircle. Standing by it, one of his lean hands resting upon the back, he surveyed them, disgust in his glance, a sneer curling his lip, so terrible and brutal of aspect despite his ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... the hopes of those who stick to the old home—such a book would possess a deep human interest, and would make a high and wide appeal. Nevertheless, I feel that at the present time the most urgent need, from every point of view on which I have touched, is to focus the thought available for the Irish Question upon the definite work of a reconstruction ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... he moved through the gardens and pavilions of the casino on the rock, where with the coming of darkness the gayety of the town began to focus ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... pipes, laid for the purpose from a spring about a mile and a quarter distant, whilst other piping carries water to the end of the pier for the requirements of shipping. This improvement, the present salubrity of the town (once a fever focus), and its latest Spanish embellishments, are mainly due to the intelligent activity of its late Governors, Colonel (now General) Gonzalez Parrado, and the ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... glass in focus more scales had fallen from my eyes; and now I knew why I had seen so much of Raffles these last few weeks, and why he had always come between seven and eight o'clock in the evening, and waited at this very window, with ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... this once all darksome spot Where now their glad course mortals run, First-born of Sirius begot Upon the focus of the Sun— I'll call thee ——! for such thy earthly name— 15 What name so high, but what too low must be? Comets, when most they drink the solar flame Are but faint types and images of thee! Burn madly, Fire! o'er earth in ravage run, Then blush ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... I began collecting data for this study at the time of the first general war, I have watched the unfolding political struggle for economic and cultural objectives with the increasing conviction that politics is the primary focus, with economic forces always in play, but usually in the background, leaving the center of the stage ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... not exactly a Paradise yet, though it is in a fair way of becoming one. It is a spot of some fifty acres reclaimed from the scrubbiest part of Wormwood Scrubbs, and made the focus of a club of working men, of whom I am very proud indeed to be one. Indeed, I do not see why throughout the remainder of this article I should not use the first person plural. I will. Well, then, we secured this spot, and we ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... of his former gentility about Barnet's appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too, had other things to think of that night, and he was permitted to reach the galleries about Leicester Square—that great focus ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... flashed into rage; I leapt erect, and cried: "Could I but grasp my life as sculptors grasp the clay And knead and thrust it into shape again!— If all the scorn of Heaven were but thrown Into the focus of some creature I could clutch!— If something tangible were but vouchsafed me By the cold, far gods!— If they but sent a Reason for the failure of my life I'd answer it; If they but sent a Fiend, ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... bite or to tear him. Instinctively the fallen man covers his face with his arms, and with the lion, tiger and leopard the arms come in for fearful punishment. It is the way of carnivorous beasts to attack each other head to head and mouth to mouth, and this same instinct leads these animals to focus their initial attacks upon the heads and faces of ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... however, a horrific blaze, emitted from a huge focus of intolerable light, set the whole heavens aflame. As from a fresh-created baleful sun, blue and livid and golden-colored lightnings were shivered from it on all sides; dull, however, in comparison to the central ball, which, bursting instantaneously, bathed ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... souls—faced them while his eyes traversed the long, long line of ghastly white faces before him, out of which eyes everywhere, row on row of them, straining, fixed, fascinated, seemed to burn like living fires as they held him in their focus. ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... instinct of focalizing, which prompts such random desires. Feeling is diffused over the whole surface of the body; but light is focalized in the eye; sound in the ear. The organization of a sense or a pleasure seems diluted and imperfect, unless it is gathered by some machinery into one focus, or local centre. And thus it is that a general state of pleasurable feeling sometimes seems too superficially diffused, and one has a craving to intensify or brighten it by concentration through some sufficient ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... blue eyes, filled with coy wonder, the arch innocence of a spoiled child; her pale, smooth cheeks, rather plump, but coming oddly and enticingly to a point at the mouth and tilted chin; her lips, somewhat too full, too red, but quick and whimsical: he saw these all, and these only, in a bright focus, listening meanwhile to a voice by turns languid and lively, with now and then a curious liquid softness, perhaps insincere, yet dangerously pleasant. Questioning, hinting, she played at motherly age and wisdom. As for him, he never before knew how well he could ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... character-writer's materials, they are "Human Nature, in its various Forms and Affections." Each character should focus on a single vice or virtue, yet since "the Heart of Man is frequently actuated by more Passions than one," subsidiary traits ought to be included to round out the portrait (e.g., the covetous man may also be impudent, the impudent man generous). Budgell had expressed a similar conception. A ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... killing herself in all kinds of places and weather to teach people to love and protect the birds. She's that plum careful of them that Jim's wife says she has Jim a standin' like a big fool holding an ombrelly over them when they are young and tender until she gets a focus, whatever that is. Jim says there ain't a bird on his place that don't actually seem to like having her around after she has wheedled them a few days, and the pictures she takes nobody would ever believe who didn't stand by ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... whole argument into focus, as it were," the professor went on. "It was a settlement day on the Stock Exchange. I believe a point was made three years ago that it was curious no one had seen Farrell return, since many people who knew him would ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... Prussia supported the policy of Austria, who replied to the Western diplomatists that the proceedings of the Poles was a violation of the treaty of Vienna, and that it was necessary to the integrity and peace of the Austrian empire that Cracow should be no longer a focus of rebellion. The Western governments satisfied themselves with protests, and the last green spot of Polish independence had its life stamped out by the foot of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... reaching from your finger-tips, from your ears, your eyes, and every portion of your body come to a focus in your brain and carry information to it about the things you taste, see, hear, feel, and smell, so the wires of a telephone system come together at the central station. And as it is necessary for your ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... his camera, and looked down to see that he had the proper focus before snapping the shutter. The light was good up there, and he believed he must have the greatest success with such a picture as that. Besides, it had the genuine article of life in it, which he always sought in taking ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... "as our trip is, partly at least, in the interests of science, I will;" and then when she had got her own telescope into focus again—for the distance between the Astronef and the new world they were about to visit was rapidly lessening—she took a long ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... a rhetorical device; that for the most part they sought to avoid violence over segregation, concentrating as before on traditional methods of protest.[1-20] This reliance on traditional methods was apparent when the leaders tried to focus the new sentiment among Negroes on two war-related goals: equality of treatment in the armed forces and equality of job opportunity in the expanding defense industries. In 1938 the Pittsburgh Courier, ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... in the modern sense; not merely an emporium of commerce, but a focus where the intellectual and religious treasures of various countries were concentrated and worked up, and transmitted to all the nations that desired them. I have resisted the temptation to lay the scene of my story there, because in Alexandria the Egyptian element was too much overlaid by the Greek, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... over the floating logs, Barra abruptly transferred his focus of attention to his right rear, pulling with all the power of the boat's drive crystals. The craft swung violently, throwing a solid sheet of water over pier and shore, drenching the logs ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... product of all fine tendencies, is likewise their centre or focus out of which they start again, with some chance of fulfilment;—and we may judge in how many directions Friedrich was willing to expand himself, by the multifarious kinds he was inviting, and negotiating for. Academicians,—and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Luther, nor had ever wrestled with such spiritual anguish and distress. The thought of reconciliation with God, and the comforting of conscience by the assurance of His forgiving mercy, were not with Zwingli, as with Luther, the centre and focus of his aspirations and religious interests. He knew not that fervour and intenseness which made Luther grasp at every means for bringing home God's grace to congregations of believers, or to each individual Christian according to his spiritual need. His view, from the very first, extended rather ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... not need legislation to increase its benefits; it turned to Science, and, through Science, to Nature. The Laboratory of the Chemist was the focus that drew the attention of all minds. Mizora might be called a great school of Nature, whose pupils studied her every phase, and pried into her secrets with persistent activity, and obeyed her instructions as an imperative duty. They observed ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... those wildcats would spin up to a tremendous premium before you could turn a handspring—profit on the speculation not a dollar less than forty millions!" [An eloquent pause, while the marvelous vision settled into W.'s focus.] "Where's your hogs now? Why my dear innocent boy, we would just sit down on the front door-steps and ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... defined as a definite focus of individual opinions which are either numerous or intense enough to constitute a recognizable force, and to exert a noticeable influence upon ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... by some intelligent friend at Mrs. Clanfrizzle's establishment, with the express direction to mark and thoroughly digest as much as he could of the habits and customs of the circle about him, which he was rightly informed was the very focus of good breeding and haut ton; but on no account, unless driven thereto by the pressure of sickness, or the wants of nature, to trust himself with speech, which, in his then uninformed state, he was assured would inevitably ruin him ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... the Lares and Penates consecrated by Adrian. Now and then for purposes of airing and dusting, she entered the awful room—neither servants nor friends were allowed to cross the threshold; but otherwise it was always locked and the key lay in her jewel case. Adrian was the focus of her being. She put heavy tasks on Jaffery. There was to be a fitting monument on Adrian's grave, over which she kept him busy. In her blind perversity she counted on his cooeperation. It was he who carried through negotiations with an eminent sculptor for a bust of ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... mother came over the brow of the river bank, they saw a crowd collecting at the other end of the street. The main street of Hooker's Bend is only a block long, and the two negroes could easily hear the loud laughter of men hurrying to the focus of interest and the blurry expostulations of negro voices. The laughter spread like a contagion. Merchants as far up as the river corner became infected, and moved toward the crowd, looking back over their shoulders at every tenth or ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... which remained perfectly motionless. In a few seconds the Synapta began to extrude its feathery gills, which had been partly retracted on disturbance. I counted the gills, and while my forefinger indicated the sixth, a little fish, not previously noticed, appeared at the focus and edged off to the margin of the pool, now and again making decided efforts to regain its sanctuary. It was about an inch long and a third deep, ruby red, with pink undersides and pink, transparent fins. Three narrow bands of silver edged with ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... exactly that of the printing frame. The other end of the bamboos are tied with stout string to a piece of cardboard tube, postal tube, which slips over the lens. The length of the bamboos depends upon the focus of the lens and the amount of reduction. It will sometimes be found convenient to have the bamboo in two lengths; thus, supposing we want as a general rule 36 inches, two pieces, 24 inches each, should be obtained, and by fastening these ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... important features in the control of epidemics. If a man is suspected of having any communicable disease he is instantly placed under quarantine until the diagnosis has been confirmed, after which he is removed from the army area altogether as a possible focus of infection. The British Army takes no chances, and its wonderful record of freedom from contagious disease proves that it has been ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... first canto of Pope's Rape of the Lock. The author, identified as W. Overb - - ry, presents a realistic morning scene without either the charms and beauties that surround Pope's Belinda or the viciousness and focus of Swift's similar pictures (see ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... battle, which was to decide its fearful issue. With divided sympathies, Europe looked with anxiety to this scene, where the whole strength of the two contending parties was fearfully drawn, as it were, to a focus. ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... practical. Throughout the whole seventh century the annual public elections to the civil magistracies, especially to the consulship and censorship, formed the real standing question of the day and the focus of political agitation; but it was only in isolated and rare instances that the different candidates represented opposite political principles; ordinarily the question related purely to persons, and it was for the course of affairs a matter of indifference whether the majority of the votes ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... inverted pocket-flasks, and feats of strength with a rapidly lightening ale-keg. But, although our friends bore the proximity of these city gunners with great patience for a while, an event soon occurred which brought matters to a focus. ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... very commencement, the Eumenides stands on the very summit of tragical elevation: all the past is here, as it were, concentrated into a focus. Orestes has become the mere passive instrument of fate; and free agency is transferred to the more elevated sphere of the gods. Pallas is properly the principal character. That opposition between the most sacred relations, which often occurs in life as a problem not to be solved ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... his special knowledge, he had a large acquaintance with literature and science. He was bright, lively, and energetic. He was a living record of good stories, and in every circle in which he moved he was the focus of cheerfulness. In fact, there was no greater social favourite in Edinburgh ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... concern was to do for satire (with The Dunciad as his focus) what Dryden's Discourse had done: to reassert ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... with blood in them, and yet the head lost nothing by that. There was then a France, Monsieur. The province had an existence, subordinate doubtless, but real, active, and independent. Each government, each office, each parliamentary centre was a living intellectual focus. The great provincial institutions and local liberties exercised the intellect on all sides, tempered the character, and developed men. And now note well, Durocher! If France had been centralized formerly ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... less ardent picture-catcher. Wherever the camera was set up, there swarms of children sprang into being, burrowed in and out like rabbits, and scuttled about over everything, to the confusion of the poor artist, who had to fix focus and look after the safety of her camera legs at the same time, while the second Missie Ammal held an umbrella over her head, and the third exhorted the picture, which speedily got restive, to sit still. So much for ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... the Christian graces into its focus. It draws Charity, followed by her lovely train, her forbearance with faults, her forgiveness of injuries, her pity for errors, her compassion for want. It draws Repentance, with her holy sorrows, her pious resolutions, her self-distrust. It attracts Faith, with ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... occurred to her that this girl was married—there seemed nothing of the wife about her. And that she should be the neighbor whom Anne had pictured as a commonplace Four Winds housewife! Anne could not quickly adjust her mental focus to this astonishing change. ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of a prisoner to trial by due process of law. Thereupon a counter-committee was organised for the defence of the man who, like Cromwell, judged that the people preferred their real security to forms, and had presumably saved the white population of Jamaica by striking promptly at the focus of rebellion. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... the South enough general and floating knowledge of chemistry, of botany, of zoology, of geology, of mechanics, of electricity, of mathematics, to reconstruct and develop a large part of the agricultural, mechanical, and domestic life of the race. But how much of it is brought to a focus along lines of practical work? In cities of the South like Atlanta, how many coloured mechanical engineers are there? or how many machinists? how many civil engineers? how many architects? how many house decorators? In the whole State of Georgia, where ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington
... necessary, are not ordinarily in themselves interesting and admirable. But when the exercises had been duly gone through, then arose the original and powerful minds, to take full advantage of what had been gained by all the practising, and to concentrate and bring to a focus all the hints and lessons of art which had been gradually accumulating. Then the sustained strength and richness of the Faery Queen became possible; contemporary with it, the grandeur and force of English prose began in Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity; and then, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... ephemeris for this day. The morning was cloudy, with rain; but towards noon the weather cleared up, and I had the satisfaction to observe the eclipse with a refracting telescope of forty-six inches focus, and a power of about two hundred. The beginning took place at 1h 12' 37.8" of apparent time, and the end at 3h 36' 11.8". So soon as the observation was concluded, the tents and astronomical instruments ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... gauge. "The airlock compartment is all right, so the scout ships haven't been touched. They couldn't fire on them without splitting the whole ship down the middle." Johnny leaned forward, flipped on the viewscreen, and an image came into focus. ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... several far-reaching discoveries made by their use; beginning with mechanism for the manipulation of light. Optics is based on the accidental discovery that a piece of glass of certain shape will draw light to a focus, forming an image of any object at that point. The next step was in learning that this image can be viewed with a microscope, and magnified; thus came the telescope revealing unheard of suns and galaxies. The first telescopes colored everything looked at, but by a hundred years of mathematical research, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... school-teacher surrounded by his pupils in the thinning afternoon sunlight became memorable to me. It photographed itself on my mind, not sharply, but softened with a fringing prism of feeling, like a picture taken with what camera-men call a "soft-focus." It touched my heart, in some way, and threatened to bring a choke up into my ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... and exert an influence upon it. That which makes an act religious is always feeling as a point of indifference between knowing and doing, between receptive and forthgoing activity, as the center and junction of all the powers of the soul, as the very focus of personality. And as feeling in general is the middle point in the life of the soul, so, again, the religious feeling is the root of all genuine feeling. What sort of a feeling, then, is piety? Schleiermacher answers: A feeling of absolute dependence. Dependence on what? On the universe, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... pair of broken shoes, and sustained by what he called a single gallows; his broad-brimmed straw hat scooped down upon his shoulders behind, and in front added to his congenital difficulty of getting people in focus. "How do you do, this morning, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... beside her, she stood there in the red glow, straining eyes and memory to focus both on a past that receded and seemed to dwindle to a point ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... himself the focus of non-Muscatelish eyes, And the pain of their convergence was a terror and surprise. As with pitiless impaction all their heat-waves on him broke He was seen to be evolving awful quantities ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... it in careful focus—took a reading for distance—another for direction—and while he was doing it he was vaguely conscious of one single sharp flash in the sky above that far-off cloud. In his range-finder it showed once, like a glittering star; then it vanished, but the trained eye of O'Rourke observed ...
— The Hammer of Thor • Charles Willard Diffin
... duty, but as a personal obligation; no longer did it subordinate the individual to the city-state, but pretended above all to assure his welfare in this world and especially in the world to come. The Oriental mysteries offered their votaries radiant perspectives of eternal happiness. Thus the focus of morality was changed. The aim became to realize the sovereign good in the life hereafter instead of in this world, as the Greek philosophy had done. No longer did man act in view of tangible {xxiii} realities, ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... she was thinking less of the death of Jem than of the approaching arrival of Arthur. There must have been something wrong with her mental focus, to which trifles presented themselves as of the first importance, to the obliteration ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... of the fact in such quiet and simple words came with more force than a tragic declamation, and had somewhat the effect of setting the distorted images in each mind present into proper focus. Oak, almost before he had comprehended anything beyond the briefest abstract of the event, hurried out of the room, saddled a horse and rode away. Not till he had ridden more than a mile did it occur to him that he would have done better by sending some other man on this ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... also notes that the young Prince, greatly interested by all he saw of free England and its rulers, was above all taken with the "perfect domestic happiness which he found pervading the heart, and core, and focus of the greatest empire in the world." Four years later the Prince was again visiting England, a guest of the royal family in its Scottish retreat of Balmoral, where they had just been celebrating with beacon fires and Highland mirth and music the glad news of the fall ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... their effect was thwarted, the disheartened statesman had written and forwarded on May fourteenth a second letter, of the same tenor as the first. This measure likewise had failed of effect, for the messenger had been stopped at Bastia, now the focus of Salicetti's influence, and the letter had never reached ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... who had stopped for her. Barnabas, slender and handsome in his best suit, advancing with a stern and almost martial air, tried not to see Charlotte Barnard; but it was as if her face were the natural focus for his eyes, which they could not escape. However, Charlotte was not talking to Thomas Payne; he was not even very near her. He was already in the top of a cherry-tree picking busily. Barney saw his trim dark head and his bright blue waistcoat ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Cape Cod, over our larboard quarter, and before us, the wide waters of Massachusetts Bay, with here and there a sail gliding over its smooth surface. As we drew in toward the mouth of the harbor, as toward a focus, the vessels began to multiply until the bay seemed actually alive with sails gliding about in every direction; some on the wind, and others before it, as they were bound to or from the emporium of trade and centre ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... our family traits, you understand. I spent some miserable, undecided days. It was not the threat of disinheritance that worried me, although when you have been brought up to regard yourself as a prospective millionaire it is rather difficult to adjust your vision to a pauper focus. But it was the thought of alienating Uncle Dick. I love the dear, determined old chap like a father. But last night my guardian angel was with me and I decided to remain my own man. So I wrote to Uncle Dick, respectfully ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... position in the examination of this journal than in the examination of the Illustrated London News. The pictures, strictly speaking, are not so good, either artistically or morally, but there is a tang about them, an I-do-not-know-what. And it is always wisest to focus attention on some such extraneous interest. Otherwise you may get to looking ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... collided with these religious requirements and on what grounds. If men were deeply concerned about the taboo food that went into their bodies, they would not be concerned about the evil thoughts that arose in their souls. If they were taught to focus on petty duties, such as tithing, the great ethical principles and obligations moved to the outer field of vision and became blurred. The Sabbath, which had originated in merciful purpose toward the poor, had been turned into another burden. ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." Here we have the truer philosophy, here we have the secret of Lewis Carroll's life. He never wasted time on ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... satisfy the law of speed? Could the rate of description of areas be uniform with it? Well, he tried the ellipse, and to his inexpressible delight he found that it did satisfy the condition of equable description of areas, if the sun was in one focus. So, moving the planet in a selected ellipse, with the sun in one focus, at a speed given by the equable area description, its position agreed with Tycho's observations within the limits of the error of experiment. Mars was finally conquered, and remains in his prison-house ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... preeminently in Christ that the prophecies of the Old Testament have their fulfilment. As the rays of the sun in a burning-glass all converge to one bright focus, so all the different lines of prophecy in the Old Testament centre in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Separated from him they have neither unity nor harmony; but are, like the primitive chaos, "without form and void." But in him predictions, apparently ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... Guadalquivir, bearing on its bosom a flotilla of barks from Catalonia and Valencia. Farther up is seen the bridge of boats which traverses the water. The principal object of this prospect, however, is the Golden Tower, where the beams of the setting sun seem to be concentrated as in the focus, so that it appears built of pure gold, and probably from that circumstance received the name which it now bears. Cold, cold must the heart be which can remain insensible to the beauties of this magic scene, to do justice to which the pencil ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... cameras was invented. One consisted of a film-feeding mechanism which moves the film step by step in the focus of a single lens, the duration of exposure being from twenty to twenty-five times as great as that necessary to move an unexposed portion of the film into position. No shutter was employed. As time ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... awoke with bird life; dawn came rapidly. Islands took shape, trees stepped out from their obscurity and small details drew into focus. First I sought her home and could hardly take my eyes from it. Low and rambling, it stood two hundred feet away, nestled in a most inviting shade of splendid trees. Flowers and climbing vines were everywhere, touched with the rich coloring of poinsettia ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... McDonald had started already, flinging out his Indian scouts as far as Perth and Broadalbin, and Sir Henry Clinton had gathered a great army at New York and was preparing to sweep the Hudson Valley from Fishkill to Albany. And the focus of these three armies and of Butler's, Johnson's, and McDonald's renegades and Indians was this unhappy county of Tryon, torn already with internal dissensions; unarmed, ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... dissected and criticised either her diction, line of argument, choice of metaphors, or intonation of voice. In these compositions he encouraged her to seek illustrations from every department of letters, and convert her theme into a focus, upon which to pour all the concentrated light which research could reflect, assuring her that what is often denominated "far-fetchedness," in metaphors, furnished not only evidence of the laborious industry of the writer, but is ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... lifted up the curtain and flooded it with the light of day. You shall have the fact for your senses. Tomorrow I shall explain it all. I shall deliver my greatest lecture; in which my whole Me has come to a focus. It is not spiritualism nor sophistry. It is concrete fact and common sense. The subject of my lecture tomorrow will be: 'The ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... determining the sensitiveness of plates, Mr. G.F. Williams, in the Br. Jour. of Photo., thus explains his plan. I will now explain the method I adopt to ascertain the relative sensitiveness of plates to daylight. Procure a small direct vision pocket spectroscope, having adjustable slit and sliding focus. To the front of any ordinary camera that will extend to sixteen or eighteen inches, fit a temporary front of soft pine half an inch thick, and in the center of this bore neatly with a center bit a hole of such diameter as will take the eye end of the spectroscope; unscrew the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... conscience, I never saw so many handsome females together, as were assembled on this occasion. At the Leith races, the best company comes hither from the remoter provinces; so that, I suppose, we had all the beauty of the kingdom concentrated as it were into one focus; which was, indeed, so vehement, that my heart could hardly resist its power. Between friends, it has sustained some damage from the bright eyes of the charming miss R[ento]n, whom I had the honour to dance with at the ball — The countess of Melville attracted all ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... axis is simply that of a body turning entirely round upon its own centre. The only centre around which the moon performs a revolution is very far from its own proper axis, being situated at the centre of the earth, the focus of its orbit, and as it has no other rotating motion around the earth, it cannot revolve on its ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... carried on for the most part in detached buildings, often in private dwellings remote from towns, the opportunities of destroying them were unusually easy. In the neighbourhood of Nottingham, which was the focus of turbulence, the machine-breakers organized themselves in regular bodies, and held nocturnal meetings at which their plans were arranged. Probably with the view of inspiring confidence, they gave out that they were ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... out the slide to a mark upon the tube which indicated the focus which suited his eye, and then as he began slowly sweeping the portions of the harbour which were within reach he went ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... service, and a host of lesser matters. The animosities aroused by the war, however, and the insistent nature of the reconstruction question almost completely distracted attention from most of these problems. Only upon the tariff, finance and the civil service did the public interest focus long enough to ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... channel of psychic information for him. As a rule these thought-forms are only projected by those who have trained their minds and will along occult lines; but occasionally under the stress of strong emotion or desire an ordinary person may focus his psychic power to such an extent that ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... took part had been prodigies of virtue. The young mother with the Madonna face—Lady Newhaven firmly believed that her face, with the crimped fringe drawn down to the eyebrows, resembled that of a Madonna—with her children round her, Lord Newhaven as usual somewhat out of focus in the background; and Hugh, young, handsome, devoted, heartbroken, and ennobled for life by the ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... tropical climates; poor pay and conditions have been a problem in the past, as has alleged nepotism in the promotion of officers, as reflected in the 1995 and 2003 coups; these issues are being addressed with foreign assistance as initial steps towards the improvement of the army and its focus on realistic security concerns; command is exercised from the president, through the Minister of Defense, to the Chief of the Armed ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... she resembled, well rooted among the rocks of principle and truth. She was the youngest and the pet of the household, and yet the "petting" was not of that kind that develops selfishness and wilfulness, but rather a genial sunlight of love falling upon her as a focus from the entire family. They always spoke of her as "little Sis," or the "child." And a child it seemed she would ever be, with her kittenish ways, quick impulses, and swiftly alternating moods. As she developed into womanly proportions, her grave, businesslike father ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... tragedy. In tragic power, Webster approaches nearest to Shakespeare. Webster's greatest play, The Duchess of Malfi (acted in 1616), and The White Devil, which ranks second, show the working of a master hand, but Webster's genius comes to a focus only in depicting the horrible. He loves such gloomy ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... who first spoke. "But what do all these figures mean?" And Tom observed how the paper shook and rustled in the tremor of excitement that shook his hand. He raised the paper to the focus of his spectacles and began to read again. "'Mark 40, ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... Court with all the forms it had acquired under Louis XIV.; dignity alone was wanting. As to gaiety, there was none. Versailles was not the place at which to seek for assemblies where French spirit and grace were displayed. The focus of wit and ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... beautifully-formed head, which was covered only by his own luxuriant raven curls. In a better light it could not have been placed, particularly in the evening; the rays, condensed and softened, seemed to gather up their power into one focus, and throw such an almost supernatural glow on the half face, give such an extraordinary appearance of life to the whole figure, that a casual visitant to that chamber might well fancy it was no picture but reality on ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... the thought of the pre-existence and rebirth of the soul will disappear if we do not lose sight of the fact that the soul is a center of consciousness, which is always consciousness somewhere, but which very gradually shifts its focus from plane to plane. Its permanent home is in that body of filmy matter drawn about the ego in the higher levels of the heaven world. From that point it sends energies outward and draws about itself ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... OF ST. MARK, VENICE, ITALY.—Facing the piazza of St. Mark, which is in the heart of Venice and the grand focus of attraction, rises the magnificent Cathedral of St. Mark, decorated with almost oriental splendor. The building dates back to the tenth and eleventh centuries, and portions of the materials used in its construction have been brought from almost every country ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... the columns erected by nature in thousands from the first epochs of the formation of the globe. The basalt pillars, fitted one into the other, measured from forty to fifty feet in height, and the water, calm in spite of the tumult outside, washing their base. The brilliant focus of light, pointed out by the engineer, touched every point of rock, and flooded the walls with light. By reflection the water reproduced the brilliant sparkles, so that the boat appeared to be ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... was speaking very deliberately. He even paused at this point and lighted a cigarette, while we all listened breathlessly. We felt that we had got the thing to a focus at last. ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... vision had come partly true; and yet so out of focus that she couldn't see its truth. It was like the sunlight which she knew to be shining somewhere, with a wrong refraction in its rays. The world into which she had been carried was like that in a cubist picture which someone had shown her at the studio. It bore a relation to the world she ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... thermo-electric pyrometers in that a thermo-couple is employed. The heat rays given out by the hot body fall on a concave mirror and are brought to a focus at a point at which is placed the junction of a thermo-couple. The temperature readings are obtained from an indicator similar to that used with ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... how many a lonely woman is not life made endurable, even pleasant, by the possession and the love of a devoted dog! The man who would focus the burning glass of science upon the animal, may well mock at such a mission, and speak words contemptuous of the yellow old maid with her yellow ribbons and her yellow dog. Nor would it change his countenance or soften his ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... men and hurl them like an avalanche upon the critical point, crowding volley upon volley, charge upon charge, till he made a breach. What a lesson of the power of concentration there is in this man's life! He was able to focus all his faculties upon the smallest detail, as well as upon an empire. But, alas! Napoleon was himself defeated by violation of his own tactics,—the constantly repeated crushing force of heavy battalions ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... may be called the quality of line. A line may be straight or broken, and if curved, curving continuously or brokenly, etc. That this quality of line is distinct from form may be shown by the simple experiment of turning a spiral—a logarithmic spiral, let us say—in different ways about its focus. The aesthetic effect of the figure is absolutely different in the different positions, and yet the feeling about the character of the line itself seems to remain the same. In what sense, and for what reasons, ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... briefed and informed on as many aspects of the provisions of the proposed Code as possible. As stated later by Dr. S. L. Emsweller (a member of the committee, representing U. S. D. A. and the American Society for Horticultural Science), this situation brought into sharp focus the need in this country for a single horticultural organization of organizations that could serve as authorized in matters at the international level. The American Horticultural Council, to which the Northern Nut Growers Association belongs may ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... mania produced many changes in the Stock Exchange. The share market, which previously had been occupied by only four or five brokers and a number of small jobbers, now became a focus of vast business. Certain brokers, it is said, made L3,000 or L4,000 a day by their business. One fortunate man outside the house, who held largely of Churnett Valley scrip before the sanction of the Board of ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... was near me, and I seized it. I brought it to the right focus. I saw them plainly, Ruth and Wilfred standing side by side, with her hand resting on his arm. There could ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... intense significance. Here is summed up the whole of the revelation of God's Word. Here all the lines of Revelation meet. Almost two thousand years of inspiration come to a climax in this little end-book. Psalmist and prophet, historian and law-giver, Gospel and Epistle come to a final focus point in one simple intense message. The purpose of the book is intensely and only practical. Here is the message of the whole Bible to Christ's people for this present interval between the Ascension and the next great step in ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... unconscious that he spoke. At the same instant the stunned eyes found their focus—and found her beside his stirrup, leaning wide from her seat in sweet concern, one gloved hand resting on the ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... amazement. It had not occurred to her that this girl was married—there seemed nothing of the wife about her. And that she should be the neighbor whom Anne had pictured as a commonplace Four Winds housewife! Anne could not quickly adjust her mental focus to this astonishing change. ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a species of maternal idolatry; centered in her child Louis Marie as rays gathered up into a focus, were all her hopes, her aspirations, her ideas of the future. If she could be assured she would live to see her son leading the armies of the empire, ruling in the cabinets of state or worshipped in the circles of the great and ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... the interstellar trade situation chart from Economics. Red line for production, green line for exports, blue for imports, sectioned vertically for the ten Viceroyalties and sub-sectioned for the Prefectures, and with the magnification and focus controls he could even get data for individual planets. He didn't bother with that, and wondered why he bothered with the charts at all. The stuff was all at least twenty days behind date, and not uniformly ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... police, but, after all, he was none the worse off—except for his promise to Poritol and Alcatrante, now involuntarily broken. He must explain to them as best he could. The marked bill had been of no consequence to him except as a focus of adventure. And he had had about as much adventure as he could expect ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... my small ability, every man and woman who had the misfortune of being in any way connected with me, until they had agreed to exert all their interest, direct or indirect, and concentrate the same in one focus upon the head and heart of Sir Barnaby Blueblazes, vice—admiral of the red squadrons a Lord of the Admiralty, and one of the old plain K.B.'s (for he flourished before the time when a gallant action or two tagged half of the letters of ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... and then shifted his uncertain gaze to the figure approaching him. He was able to focus her more clearly as she stopped to reply to the proprietor of the place, who had hastened to meet her with every mark of respect. Men at the tables she passed smiled at her and murmured respectful greetings, to which she replied with little nods of the head. Evidently ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... fact and the substance. I have lifted up the curtain and flooded it with the light of day. You shall have the fact for your senses. Tomorrow I shall explain it all. I shall deliver my greatest lecture; in which my whole Me has come to a focus. It is not spiritualism nor sophistry. It is concrete fact and common sense. The subject of my lecture tomorrow ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... forward, confronting him, insolent eyes meeting his; and, ere he could guess what she purposed, she had snatched the blotted fragment from him and crushed it in her hand, always eying him until he crimsoned in the focus of her ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... evening of my birthday, and you the only friend who remembered it; if confession were not good for the soul, though harder than sin to some people, of whom I am one—well, if all reasons were not at this instant converged into a focus, and burning me rather violently, in that region where the seat of emotion is supposed to lie, I should keep my trouble to myself. Yes, I have fifty times had it on my mind to tell you the whole story. But who can be certain that his best friend will not smile—or, what is worse, ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... began to ring in front of Roger. Without hesitation he adjusted a dial that brought the radar scanner into focus. When the screen remained blank, he made a second adjustment, and then a third and fourth, until the bright white flash of a meteor was seen on the scanner. He quickly grabbed two knobs, one in each hand, and twisted them to move two thin, plotting lines, one ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... insanely in love with Ismene, who is so beautiful and virtuous. Scylla is insanely in love with Minos, who is old and dignified. Ismene is in love with Focus, who is a hero; and, possibly, Focus loves Ismene, though he does not treat her quite gallantly. He says ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... Strasbourg, was it not needful that Besancon should become a focus of enlightenment as well as of trade? The leading questions relating to the interests of Eastern France could only be dealt with in a review. What a glorious task to rob Strasbourg and Dijon of their literary importance, to bring light ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... to have staid at Birmingham to-night, to have talked more with Mr. Hector; but my friend was impatient to reach his native city; so we drove on that stage in the dark, and were long pensive and silent. When we came within the focus of the Lichfield lamps, 'Now (said he,) we are getting out of a state of death.' We put up at the Three Crowns, not one of the great inns, but a good old fashioned one, which was kept by Mr. Wilkins, and was the very next house to that in ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of cold, soft fingers at my throat. I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear I should be in bodily peril; and I concentered all my faculties in the single focus of resisting stubborn will. And I turned my sight from the Shadow; above all, from those strange serpent eyes,—eyes that had now become distinctly visible. For there, though in naught else around me, I was aware that ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... plain. This new gold-camp has not reached the blood-spilling stage yet. It hadn't, I should say. The news of this killing will fly. It'll focus minds on this claim-buyer, Blight. His deed rings true—like that of an honest man with a daughter to protect. He'll win sympathy. Then he talks as if he were prosperous. Soon he'll be represented in this changing, growing population ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... and name his memory circled, drawing toward a focus, curving closer and closer, coming nearer in decreasing spirals, finally falling on it. With the pounce a broken sentence fell from his lips: "The tules! Knapp ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... me in one of the two enormous rooms that were allotted to me, I threw myself into an arm-chair and tried to focus the extraordinary imaginative impression which ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... protracted heredity. The negroes in the South have, by a lifelong proximity and struggle with the disease, acquired a practical freedom from typhoid fever, although it remains with the negro sufficiently to form a focus for the spread of the disease among others not equally immune. Creoles in yellow-fever districts have a natural immunity from the hookworm disease, although probably the class are responsible for its generous transmission ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... behind on their sleep, and when each of them has been trying so hard to hold down the lid that it has finally blown off. But always these storms have cleared the air, and afterward they have come closer to each other than before. Marriage, for them both, is the great central core of life—focus of love, ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... wish that I could find the shorter path—fix forms and characters in my mind—and instead of copying the lines, try to read the language, and, if possible, find the grammar of the art by bringing into one focus the various observations I have made, and then trying by my power on the canvas how far my plan enabled me to combine and apply them to practice. For this purpose I considered what various ways, and to what different purposes, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... missionaries, when they reached Alexandria, found a people ready to appreciate the profoundest mysteries. But with these advantages came great evils. The Trinitarian disputes, which subsequently deluged the world with blood, had their starting-point and focus in Alexandria. In that city Arius and Athanasius dwelt. There originated that desperate conflict which compelled Constantine the Great to summon the Council of Nicea, to settle, by a formulary or creed, the essentials of ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... earnestly and toiled as indefatigably as before, but the place was utterly transformed for him. He saw it now as she would see it when she came, even while at the same time his own eyes retained their point of view. It was as though he had lengthened the focus of a glass, and looked beyond at what was beautiful and picturesque, instead of what was near at hand and practicable. He found himself smiling with anticipation of her pleasure in the orchids hanging from the dead ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... Malcolm were now gathered the Prince, Raasay, and Miss Flora. To me as a focus came all eyes. I got to my feet in ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... and poor sat down upon the rocky ground. Under the open azure, at the focus of the semicircle, with clear view before of the city, and to right of the red cliffs of the Acropolis, rose a low platform hewn in the rock,—the "Bema," the orator's pulpit. A few chairs for the ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... not dared a visit to the Three Star. Who the rider with her was he did not care. That it was a tenderfoot was plain by his clothes and by his seat. As he adjusted the powerful glasses to a better focus Plimsoll's face twisted to an ugly smile. He had a flask in his hip pocket and he swigged at it before he rode to catch up with Parsons ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... of England. What Is to be the result of all this, it is impossible to tell; but one thing Is certain, that, in a political point of view, the Mormons are already powerful, and that the object of Smith Is evidently to collect all his followers Into one focus, and thus concentrate all his ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... Wassaf thus exalts Kublai: "Although from the frontiers of this country ('Irak) to the Centre of Empire, the Focus of the Universe, the genial abode of the ever-Fortunate Emperor and Just Kaan, is a whole year's journey, yet the stories that have been spread abroad, even in these parts, of his glorious deeds, his institutes, his decisions, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... deafening explosions the shells exploded in a small street behind me. The Germans were evidently trying to smash up the old Flemish town hall, which was in the corner of the market-place, so I decided to fix my focus in its direction. But though I waited for over an hour, nothing else happened. The Germans had ceased firing for that morning at least. Not till I had gone to my cafe did I realise the danger I had exposed myself to, but ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... similar to mine, but attended with more serious results. He had knocked his wildebeeste over in much the same way, and thought it was dead; and as he was very keen on obtaining photographs of game, he took his stand-camera from the Indian who carried it and proceeded to focus it on the animal's head. When he was just about to take the picture, he was thunderstruck to see the wildebeeste jump up and come charging down upon him. He sprang quickly aside, and in an instant up went the camera into the air, followed the next moment by the unfortunate ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... in business, Cyrus H. McCormick might be named. The inventor of the reaper and builder of the first American business which covered the world was not a man of extraordinary intellect, wit, or judgment. He had, however, the will and power to focus his attention on a single question until the answer was evolved. Again and again, his biographers tell us, he pursued problems which eluded him far into the night and he was frequently found asleep at ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... independent and separate existence. For this reason, therefore, I consider the existence of Cracow as a state, having been thus secured by general treaty—whatever the complaints the three Powers had made that Cracow was the focus of disturbances; that revolutionary intrigues there found a centre and a means of organization; that there arose from that small state insurrection against the three surrounding Powers; that it was impossible to preserve those Powers from this insurrection: that if these reasons were good ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... history and in all parts of Christendom the central and highest focus of Christian worship and devotion, and the great normal vivifying channel of spiritual renewal and power, has been the sacrament of Holy Communion. It has been celebrated amid great diversities of liturgy and ritual and circumstance, and has been known by many different ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... exist this minute with you, and then you focus your attention on Mart there, the next minute, and he exists, what becomes of me when you ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... our conjecturing the period. The volcanic action can be traced from Castel Sardo, where it has formed precipices on the northern coast, to the vicinity of Monastir, a distance southward of more than 100 miles; its central focus appearing to have been about half-way between Ales, Milis, and St. Lussurgiu, where, as Captain Smyth remarks, “the phlægrean evidences are particularly abundant.” The action was principally confined to the western side of the island, though, south ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... of sensuous emotion, scattered abroad all the year long, surged here in a focus for an hour. The forty hearts of those waving couples were beating as they had not done since, twelve months before, they had come together in similar jollity. For the time paganism was revived in their hearts, the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... Furthermore, we talk of objects as things of secondary importance and the mind as everything. Now I am firmly convinced that the mind of man, so far from being a thing apart from the objects that form its environment, is, in fact, nothing else but a mirror or focus upon which objects register their impressions and that all the thinking in the world is done not really by the mind but by the objects that form our thoughts and the reasons, utterly divorced from what we call human reason, that connect together the ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... in the previous chapter is essentially transitional. What we have there seen is the town emerging out of the country, or, to put it another way, the country merging, through the principle of attraction, into the focus of the town. This method of viewing the subject is necessarily partial and incomplete. The existence of a common in association with a town or village or group of villages is not a self-evident proposition, to be taken for granted. It is clearly part of a system which it ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... explanation of the phenomena observed in the central district of the Indian earthquake; and he therefore favours an extension of the second theory, which, though first proposed in 1882,[78] was thought out independently and in greater detail by himself. When the focus is of considerable dimensions, the shock at neighbouring places is constantly varying in direction, owing to the arrival of vibrations from different parts of the focus. Thus, instead of the two separate shocks required ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... originated under his administration. He induced the Athenian people to expend on the decoration of Athens a larger part of its ample revenues than was ever applied to this purpose in any other state, either republican or monarchical. Of the surpassing skill with which he collected into one focus the rays of artistic genius at Athens, no stronger proof can be afforded, than the fact that no subsequent period, through the patronage of Macedonian or Roman princes, produced works of equal excellence, Indeed, it may be said that the creations of the age of Pericles ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... face with his arms, and with the lion, tiger and leopard the arms come in for fearful punishment. It is the way of carnivorous beasts to attack each other head to head and mouth to mouth, and this same instinct leads these animals to focus their initial attacks upon the heads and ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... it was not intended to represent the epicentric area of every individual earthquake center (which would have crowded the map beyond reasonable limits), but rather to show the principal seismic regions. Hence most of these curves contain more than one focus. The approximate position of each of the latter has, however, been indicated by a star, while the figure placed close to the star gives the number of earthquakes which proceeded ...
— Catalogue of Violent and Destructive Earthquakes in the Philippines - With an Appendix: Earthquakes in the Marianas Islands 1599-1909 • Miguel Saderra Maso
... times in life when everything is out of focus, when events take on the measure, not of what they really are, but of the mental state of the people affected by them. Such a time had now come to the mistress of the Trellis House. For a while Mrs. Otway saw everything, heard everything, read everything, through a mist of aching ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... said before, we think that a good lens requires no "actinic" focus to find. In a properly constructed lens the chemical and visual foci are identical; and we would ourselves not be troubled with the use of one in which they differed. Our advertising columns will point out to you where such a lens ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... focus of the eyes often causes a strain on the brain in the effort to adjust them. This sometimes causes epilepsy, and we have known many cases cured by the use of spectacles made to correct this inequality. In all cases of this disease, therefore, ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... overhead and made us involuntarily cower, as if the next moment the great limbs of the trees, or the trees themselves, would come crashing down. The mountain upon which we were encamped appeared to be the focus of three distinct but converging storms. The last two seemed to come into collision immediately over our camp-fire, and to contend for the right of way, until the heavens were ready to fall and both antagonists were literally spent. We stood ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... men and gods focus their interest on one woman—maybe quite ardently—and fiercely resent interference, as an angry bee is apt to sting when kept from the flower it has accidentally chosen; but that is a different thing from the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... writer suggests the theory that a stream or group of innumerable bodies, comparatively small, but of various dimensions, is sweeping around the solar focus in an orbit, which periodically cuts the orbit of the earth, thus explaining the actual cause of shooting stars, ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... great distance back—on the great high-priest of our national school of logic and metaphysics,—he who gathered up its divers rays, and, helping them with light from all other sources of human knowledge, concentrated the whole into one powerful focus. No one could look at the massive brow, the large, full, lustrous eyes, the firm compressed lip, without seeing that the demon of energy was powerful within him, and had it not found work in the conquest of all human learning, must have sought it elsewhere. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... provided, the course of study is arranged and administered, and the teacher employed. The child is major, and all else is subsidiary. In the general scheme even the teacher takes secondary place. Teachers may come and go, but the child remains as the focus of all plans and purposes. The teacher is secured for the child, and not the child for the teacher. Taxpayers, boards of education, parents, and teachers are all active in the interests of the child; and all school legislation, to be important, ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... landscape dimly lighted, the wonder is whether it is all artificial, or whether one is not one's self the victim of some morbid illusion; and whether it is not indeed a real country view seen through a distorted vision out of focus, or through the ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... usually circular in shape and about one-quarter-inch curve to a six-inch diameter. This gives a long focus, so that the mirror may be hung upon a wall at about two yards distance from the subject. A greater degree of concavity proportionate to the diameter will produce a focus which allows the mirror to be held in the hand while ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... will advance subsequently towards the point B, and will arrive there at the same time. As for the Ellipse which served for reflexion, it is evident that it will here become a parabola, since its focus A may be regarded as infinitely distant from the other, B, which is here the focus of the parabola, towards which all the reflexions of rays parallel to AB tend. And the demonstration of these effects is just ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... far. One could make believe too much. He sat idly a few minutes and then, putting the glasses to his eyes, took another survey of the far horizon where blue sky and blue water met. He moved the focus slowly around the circle, and when he came to a point in the east he started violently, then sprang to his ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... for a time, thinking, or rather trying to think, for he felt like one vainly endeavouring to get the focus of a stereoscopic picture. His mind kept going away from him. He knew himself able to think, yet he could not think. It was a revelation to him of our helplessness with our own being, of our absolute ignorance of the modes in which our nature works—of ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... always some law—metrical scheme in poetry, time in music, similarity of column and equality of interval between them in a colonnade—pervading the elements. But there is also balance; for as the elements enter the mind one after the other, there is rivalry between the element now occupying the focus of the attention and the one that is about to present an equal claim to this position. Because of its intrinsic value, we tend to hold on to each element as we hear or see it, but are forced to relinquish it for the sake ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... throne, raised by ROBESPIERRE, was overthrown: hope succeeded to terror; and victory, to defeat. Then, the Sciences, issuing from the focus in which they had been concentered and concealed, reappeared in all their lustre. The services they had rendered, the dangers which had threatened them, were felt and acknowledged. The plan of campaign, formed by the scientific men, called ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... the glass in focus more scales had fallen from my eyes; and now I knew why I had seen so much of Raffles these last few weeks, and why he had always come between seven and eight o'clock in the evening, and waited at this very window, ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... to judge distance is due principally to our possessing two eyes situated in slightly different positions, from which we get two views of objects, and also to the power possessed by the eyes of focussing at different distances, others being out of focus for the time being. In a picture the eyes can only focus at one distance (the distance the eye is from the plane of the picture when you are looking at it), and this is one of the chief causes of the perennial difficulty in painting backgrounds. In nature they ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... been in my unnatural position for many minutes before I began to suffer agonies, agonies not only physical but mental; for standing there like some prisoner of the Inquisition, it came to me how this dismantled apartment must be the focus of the dreadful forces of ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... Taravao, and letters for farther on were carried afoot by the mutoi, or postman-policeman of the adjoining district, who handed on to his contiguous confrere those for more distant confines. But for centuries Tautira was known as a focus of the wise, of priests, sorcerers, and doctors, and, said the knowing Brault, especially of the dancers, and those who, he explained, under the banner ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... logical proofs of such a Being's existence, farther than to say that none of them seem to me sound. I must therefore treat the notion of an All-Knower simply as an hypothesis, exactly on a par logically with the pluralist notion that there is no point of view, no focus of information extant, from which the entire content of the universe is visible at once. "God's consciousness," says Professor Royce,[Footnote: The Conception of God, New York, 1897, p. 292.] "forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious moment"—this ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... accommodation of all travelers. Each one of you who reaches the lower end of this valley should take the Mountain Trolley and spend a season at those schools. They occupy some of the grandest buildings in the world. Focus your glasses and behold the ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... substitution of steam or electricity for horsepower in propelling tram-cars and other passenger carriages, with a view to minimize the number of horses kept within greater London. Every large stable is a focus of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... the glass, but by the time he could focus it to fit his eyes, the man had re-mounted, riding south, and there was only the dead girl left there where she fell, an Indian girl they both knew, Anita, daughter of Miguel, the major-domo of Mesa Blanca, whose own little rancheria was with the ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... whichever way you care to look at it. But most artists have got to canalise their emotion and concentrate their energies on some more definite and more maniable problem than that of making something that shall be aesthetically "right." They need a problem that will become the focus of their vast emotions and vague energies, and when that problem is solved their ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... about her, like one assuring herself of her situation. A minute later, Hetty was seen on her knees in the other end of the canoe, repeating the prayers that had been taught her in childhood by a misguided but repentant mother. As Hutter laid down the glass, still drawn to its focus, the Serpent raised it to his eye and turned it towards the canoe. It was the first time he had ever used such an instrument, and Hist understood by his "Hugh!," the expression of his face, and his entire mien, that something wonderful ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... under the mastership of Dr. Jenkyns, attained pre- eminence for success in the schools, and for the high standard required of its members, who formed 'the most delightful society, the very focus of the most stimulating life of the University,' within those unpretending walls, ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... should be judicious, clear, succinct; The language plain, and incidents well linked; Tell not as new what everybody knows, And new or old still hasten to a close; There centring in a focus round and neat, Let all your rays of information meet. What neither yields us profit nor delight Is like a nurse's lullaby at night; Guy Earl of Warwick and fair Elenore, Or giant-killing Jack ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... not have been Persis had she failed to have something to suggest. Whether her businesslike methods aided in bringing matters to a focus, or whether the change was due to a conscience-stricken reaction on the part of the representative women of Clematis, it is certain that the deliberations of the body were not again side-tracked by the intrusion of ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... Works Department) and I have to make an important measurement in connexion with the Apothegm of the Bilateral which runs to-night precisely through this spot. My fingers now mark exactly the concentric of the secondary focus whence the Radius Vector should be drawn, but I find that (like a fool) I have left my Double Refractor in the cafe hard by. I dare not go for fear of losing the place I have marked; yet I can get no further without my ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... best plan is obviously to decide beforehand exactly what needs to be observed, and then to focus attention on this precise point. That is the principle underlying the remarkably sure and keen observation of the scientist. Reading may be called a kind of observation, since the reader is looking for what the author has to tell; and the rule that holds for other observation holds also ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... the Janseniuses to identify with Henrietta the person he had seen. Jane suggested dragging the canal, but was silenced by an indignant "sh-sh-sh," accompanied by apprehensive and sympathetic glances at the bereaved parents. She was displaced from the focus of attention by the appearance of the two policemen who had been sent to the chalet. Smilash was between them, apparently a prisoner. At a distance, he seemed to have suffered some frightful injury to his head, but when he was brought into the midst of the company it appeared that he had twisted ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... in relation to stature Bird song, origin of Biting in relation to origin of kissing Blind, sense of smell in the sensitiveness to voice Blondes, the admiration for Breasts, as an element of beauty as a tactile sexual focus Breath, odor of Brothels, public baths once synonymous with Brummell ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... plate in this box, and it is set at what they call a universal focus. That is, I can take a picture of something not too close, and one at a distance. The box is lined with black paper, and in front there is a very small hole, now covered by a flap of the same stuff. ...
— The Hilltop Boys - A Story of School Life • Cyril Burleigh
... denunciation of this use of their forum. The building is called in print this year, (1768,) the Town-House, the State-House, the Court-House, and the Parliament- House. It may be properly termed the political focus of the Province, and it then bore to Massachusetts a similar relation to that which Faneuil Hall now bears to Boston. The goodly and venerable structure that still looks down on State Street and the Merchants' Exchange has little in it to attract the common eye, much less a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... about three and a half feet high, and the top or desk about fourteen by twenty inches. This top should tilt only slightly, so that the conductor may glance from it to his performers without too much change of focus. Our reason for mentioning apparently trivial matters of this kind is to guard against any possible distraction of the conductor's mind by unimportant things. If these details are well provided for in advance, he will be able while conducting to give his entire attention ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... back of my mind there seemed to be a thought that I could not focus, I trembled on the verge of some ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... child of impulse, and careless of appearance and opinion, she felt her thoughts, none too cheerful or optimistic that morning during her long walk down the avenue, drawn by the expression upon the legless man's face to a sudden focus of triumph and solution. She struck the palm of one small workman-like hand with the back of the other, and exclaimed: ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... by the action of great men may be comfortably believed so long as, resting in general {233} notions, you do not ask for particulars. But now, if, dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we discover the hypothesis to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping at the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back a step, and ask, Whence comes the great man? we find that the theory breaks down completely. The question has two conceivable ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... percent by 2020. Muscat is attempting to "Omanize" the labor force by replacing foreign expatriate workers with local workers. Oman actively seeks private foreign investors, especially in the industrial, information technology, tourism, and higher education fields. Industrial development plans focus on gas resources, metal manufacturing, ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... railway stations, streets and open spaces, search-lights and lighthouses. They are sometimes naked, but as a rule their brightness is tempered by globes of ground or opal glass. In search-lights a parabolic mirror projects all the rays in any one direction, and in lighthouses the arc is placed in the focus of the condensing lenses, and the beam is visible for at least twenty or thirty miles on clear nights. Very powerful arc lights, equivalent to hundreds of thousands of candles, can be seen for ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... with the issues between Houses, and I come to that between Parties. Great changes in a community are very often unperceived; the focus of reality moves from one institution in the State to another, and almost imperceptibly. Sometimes the forms of institutions remain almost the same in all ceremonial aspects, and yet there will be one ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... In regard to religion, he finds the modern school amalgamating everything in characterless masses of generalities. They deny the reality of sin, and in matters of faith generally they have put every question out of focus until the whole picture is blurred and vague. He attacks this way of dealing with religion in one of his most amusing essays, "The Orthodox Barber." The barber has been sarcastic about the new shaving—presumably in reference to M. Gillett's excellent invention. "'It seems you ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... out her guest, and dinner passed off gaily, for Bernard Clowes was no dog in the manger, and listened with sparkling eyes to adventures that ranged from Atlantic sailing in a thirty-ton yacht to a Nigerian rhinoceros shoot. Nor was Lawrence the focus of the lime-light-he was unaffectedly modest; but when, in expatiating on a favourite rifle, he confessed to having held fire till a charging rhinoceros bull was within eight and twenty yards of him, Bernard ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... Nature discovers grandeur, beauty, or truth according as the quality abides in the seer. In this view Balder or Don Quixote was no more insane than other people. Their eyes bore true witness to what was in their minds, and the sanest eyes can do no more. Their minds were, perhaps, out of focus; but who can ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... carried their comments and tender messages to Esperance. Francois Darbois had great difficulty in constraining himself to remain in the noisy vestibule. He suffered too acutely at seeing his daughter, that pure and delicate child, the focus of every lorgnette, the subject of every conversation. Several phrases he had overheard from a group of men had brought him to his feet in a frenzy; then he fell back in his place like one stunned. ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... Sphagnam, a curious moss, with curious incomplete spiral cells in the leaves. I dare say it will bear preservation in Canada balsam. I have received a new microscope, a queer-looking thing, very portable; one object glass of a quarter inch focus, by Ross; two eye- pieces magnifying linearly 200 to 300 times. I have put it up, but I am not well enough to decide on its merits. Now that I have arranged all my things, I am literally frightened at the work I ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... get nothing satisfactory out of it. The force of Eddyism lies in its being mysterious, incomprehensible and contradictory. These qualities would kill an ordinary system, but this is no ordinary system. The only way to beat the Christian Scientist is to invite him to focus all the energy of his mind on a vulgar lamp-post and engrave thereon the name of the revered Eddy—this to show the power of mind. Then to prove the non-existence of matter, ask him to consent to your endeavoring to make ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... instant after he spoke there was a cessation of firing, and then came a whole broadside of great guns and small-arms concentrated in one focus, crashing among our rigging. Several of the shot told—the head of the mainsail was riddled, and down came our peak, the halyards shot away in two places. The smugglers were not long in discovering our disaster and the ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... however, wondered. "But doesn't the man of courage know what he's afraid of—or not afraid of? I don't know that, you see. I don't focus it. I can't name it. I only ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... far, that it is possible by just a touch to convert the noblest sentiment into commonplace. No more than a touch is necessary. The parabolic mirror will reflect the star to a perfect focus. The elliptical mirror, varying from the parabola by less than the breadth of a hair, throws an image which is useless. But Mr. Cardew was far more wrong than he was right. He did not take into account that what his wife said and what she felt might ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... depraved sense of duty, perhaps the residue of what such writers as Marcus Aurelius have done for me, refuses to allow every volume to be jettisoned. It imposes, as a hair shirt, several new and serious books which there has been no time to examine. They are books that require a close focus, a long and steady concentration, a silent immobility hardly distinguishable from sleep. This year for instance I notice Jung's Analytical Psychology confidently expecting to go for a holiday with me. I feel I ought to take some such stern reminder of ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... whereby she might be instrumental in helping out of their difficulties her several friends whom she so dearly loved. She believed that she had succeeded in hitting upon a scheme which would, at least, bring things to a focus. She was sure that, if she could bring all the parties together under one roof, matters would straighten themselves without much outside assistance. Jack and Sally owned a beautiful country place, within easy motoring distance of the city, and the young matron, having decided ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... couple are apt to be in the foreground of any social event which they may both grace with their presence. The common human interest of the unengaged, and the reminiscent interest of the married, tend to focus all eyes upon them. For this reason they will try and be as little conspicuous as ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... other tree, yet fixed in the soil, presented an awful example of the might of the tornado. It was a chestnut of the largest size, the trunk near the base being seven or eight feet in circumference; it reclined at what seemed to have been the very focus of the whirlwind; its roots yet clung to earth; but, through the resistance thus offered, the tree had been literally twisted round and round, until it was split into laths, the trunk having the appearance of a great bundle of saplings peeled and twined together by the hand of a Titan, ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... punch-drinkers whom the landlord cannot expel. Blots and inequalities there are in the great book. Cooper off the prairie, Galt out of Ayrshire, are not more untrue to themselves than is Boswell at such moments. But 'within the focus of the Lichfield lamps' he regains his strength like ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes;" it is a crowd annular, compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus. ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... playing that weird mysterious part—the part of an International Spy. He was seeing secret things. He had, in fact, crossed the designs of no less a power than the German Empire, he had blundered into the hot focus of Welt-Politik, he was drifting helplessly towards the great Imperial secret, the immense aeronautic park that had been established at a headlong pace in Franconia to develop silently, swiftly, and ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... human, Goat, attempted to make these changes by mechanical, surgical methods but these are too crude to be successful. The method we utilize to make such changes, which is the only right method, is to focus the mental forces upon the embryo. I believe you would call ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... MARK, VENICE, ITALY.—Facing the piazza of St. Mark, which is in the heart of Venice and the grand focus of attraction, rises the magnificent Cathedral of St. Mark, decorated with almost oriental splendor. The building dates back to the tenth and eleventh centuries, and portions of the materials used in its construction have been brought from almost every country ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... generally, though not uniformly, extended in a south-east and north-west direction, and therefore corresponded to the lines of undulation or of principal flexure. Bearing in mind all these circumstances, which so clearly point to the south-west as the chief focus of disturbance, it is a very interesting fact that the island of S. Maria, situated in that quarter, was, during the general uplifting of the land, raised to nearly three times the height of any other part ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... term of the religious experience, that felt communion with a Person which is the clou of the devotional life, we get as it were the link between the extreme apprehensions of transcendence and of immanence, and their expression in the lives of contemplation and of action; and also a focus for that religious-emotion which is the most powerful stimulus to spiritual growth. It is needless to emphasize the splendid use which Christianity has made of this type of experience; nor unfortunately, the exaggerations to which it has led. Both extremes are richly represented ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... thriving, increasing place, of over six thousand inhabitants, solely Chinese, with the exception of a small Kling population, which keeps small shops, lends money, drives gharries and bullock-carts, and washes clothes. This place was the focus of the disturbances in 1873, and the Chinese seem still to need to be held in check, for they are not allowed to go out at night without passes and lanterns. They are miners, except those who keep the innumerable shops ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... the magic of that genial kiss. He has beheld beds of them unfolding in due succession as the sunrise stole gradually from flower to flower,—a sight not to be hoped for unless when a poet adjusts his inward eye to a proper focus with the outward organ. Grapevines here and there twine themselves around shrub and tree and hang their clusters over the water within reach of the boatman's hand. Oftentimes they unite two trees of alien ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... most marvelous of all is that of the Greyhounds, which evolves in gigantic spirals round a dazzling focus, and then loses itself far off in the recesses of space. Fig. 24 gives ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... her knees, at the window, and prayed for strength, wisdom, and courage. She could realise absolutely nothing. She had thought so much and so continuously, that all mental vision was out of focus and had become a blur. Even his dear face had faded and was hidden from her when she frantically strove to recall it to her mental view. Only the actual fact remained clear, that in a few short minutes she would be taken to the room where he lay. She would see the face she had not seen since ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... players. It is the favorite par excellence at all schools, colleges and universities; every county, every town and every village has its local club; while the I Zingari and its host of rivals serve to focus the ubiquitous talent of All England. The public enjoy it, merely as spectators, to such a degree that a grand match-day at Lord's is only second in point of enthusiasm to the Derby Day. Special trains carry thousands, and the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... onwards in the Memoir the focus of the Egyptian question changes; attention is centred on the diplomatic questions arising out of the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... took the primer, adjusted his spectacles, and moved the little book up and down before the candle to get the proper focus. "Ralph Everett Stanwell," he read slowly. "What kind o' a name would that be, whatever!" he cried, with ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... to work in, she was not at all pleased. In the first place she said it was too dark, so Her Majesty ordered the paper windows to be replaced by glass. This made the room too bright, and Miss Carl asked for some curtains so as to focus the light on the picture. When I informed Her Majesty of this request, she said: "Well, this is the first time I have ever changed anything in the Palace except to suit myself. First I alter the windows, and she is not satisfied, but ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling
... that Peter sought to bring matters to a focus was not long in coming, for when he reached the sawmills, which had resumed desultory operations, he found Flynn and Jacobi, the "Reds," calmly seated in the office, smoking and talking with Shad Wells. Peter had left his "flivver" up the road and ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... but brightened up at the sight of the visitors, and his mother, who thought Monte Carlo too near, though she had kept as far from it as possible, accepted the more willingly Mr. White's cordial invitation to come and spend a day or two at Rocca Marina. Trifles were so much out of the good lady's focus of vision that the possible dangers in that quarter never occurred to her, though Maura was demurely bridling, and Francie, all unawakened, but prettier than ever, was actually wearing a scarlet anemone that Ivinghoe had given ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and absolutely now, while she stuck a long pin, a trifle fallaciously, into her hat—she had, with an approach to irritation, told her maid, a new woman, whom she had lately found herself thinking of as abysmal, that she didn't want her—she tried to focus the possibility of some understanding between them in consequence of which he should ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... brown girl and the little brown horse blurred and faded. He tried to look, but could not see. He brought his eyes to nearer vision to fix their focus for another look, and straight before him whirled a shackly old saloon, rough and tumble, its character apparent from the men who were grouped about its doorway and from the barrels and kegs in profusion ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... Court of the Universe.—Passing through the Tower of Jewels into the great court where themes become universal under the circle of stars above the surrounding colonnade, we come to the Fountains of the Rising and the Setting Sun, by A. A. Weinmann, one at either focus of the elliptical sunken garden. In the East, the Sun, in the strength of the morning, his wings spread for flight, is springing upward from the top of the tall column rising out of the fountain. Walk toward him from the west and you get the effect ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... similar motion, they must be at periastron and apastron together, and any acceleration or retardation of speed must occur simultaneously with each. Stars of unequal magnitude always maintain a proportionate distance from their common focus, and both simultaneously occupy ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... controls, But she is a magnet to emigrant Poles, 1410 And folks with a mission that nobody knows Throng thickly about her as bees round a rose; She can fill up the carets in such, make their scope Converge to some focus of rational hope, And, with sympathies fresh as the morning, their gall Can transmute into honey,—but this is not all; Not only for those she has solace, oh say, Vice's desperate nursling adrift in Broadway, Who clingest, with all that is left of thee human, To the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... compassionate woman, fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular, compact and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downward and inward, to one common focus. ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... social necessities, but the abstract moralities, that sexual intercourse is wrong except between married people, and that it is wrong to tell a lie, even if the lie be a perfectly harmless one, exist of themselves. That we cannot bring abstract moralities into the focus of our understanding is no argument. As well deny the stars because we cannot understand them. That abstract moralities impose on us should be a sufficient argument that they cannot be the futilities that Owen would argue them to be—not them, ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... a small satellite in attendance." And the captain drew his servant's attention to a bright speck, apparently about the size of one of Jupiter's satellites seen through a moderate telescope, that was clearly visible just within the focus of ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... the Civil War was picturesquely set forth in Emerson's "Journal." The War had unrolled a map of the Union, he said, and hung it in every man's house. There was a universal shifting of attention, if not always from the province or section to the image of the nation itself, at least a shift of focus from one section to another. The clash of arms had meant many other things besides the triumph of Union and the freedom of the slaves. It had brought men from every state into rude jostling contact with one another and had developed a new social ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... could not guess—moving slowly in the direction of Sinkhole Camp,—something wide and queer looking, with a horseman on either side and with a team pulling. Here again the distance was too great to reveal details. She strained her eyes, changed the focus hopefully, blurred the image, and slowly turned the little focusing wheel back again. She had just one more clear glimpse of the thing before it, ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... human heart. The writer would suggest that the great outline of the theological struggles of that phase of civilisation and world unity which produced Christianity, was a persistent but unsuccessful attempt to get these two different ideas of God into one focus. It was an attempt to make the God of Nature accessible and the God of the Heart invincible, to bring the former into a conception of love and to vest the latter with the beauty of stars and flowers and the dignity of inexorable ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... was not irritation he appeared to express, but the slight strain of an effort to get into relation with the subject. Better to focus the image he closed ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... glass from Byfield, and brought it to focus upon one of these peepshow rifts: and lo! at the foot of the shaft, imaged, as it were, far down in a luminous well, a green hillside and three figures standing. A white speck fluttered; and fluttered ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... position to some extent consoled me. In the filaments brushed across the face of my understanding I could discover none so strong as to support an overt act on my part. I cannot doubt, that had the affair come to a focus, I should have warned the scientists even at the risk of my life. In fact, as I shall have occasion to show you, I did my best. But at the moment, in all policy I could see my way to little ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... there was bred in Taunton a fiercer and more soldierly spirit than is usual in an English country town, and this flame was fanned by the unwearied ministerings of a chosen band of Nonconformist clergymen, amongst whom Joseph Alleine was the most conspicuous. No better focus for a revolt could have been chosen, for no city valued so highly those liberties and that ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... one had not the slightest notion whether he—old Mr. Henry McCain—was aware that this twenty years of devotion on his part to Mrs. Denby was the point upon which had come to focus the not inconsiderable contempt and hatred for him of his ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... evening, a week after the wreck, my inaction had goaded me to frenzy. The very sight of Johnson across the street or lurking, always within sight of the house, kept me constantly exasperated. It was on that day that things began to come to a focus, a burning-glass of events that ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... them. Decorative art in fiction has perhaps never gone farther than with Taou Yuen, the marvelous Manchu woman brought home from Shanghai to Salem as wife of a Yankee skipper in Java Head. She may be taken as focus and symbol of Mr. Hergesheimer's luxurious inclinations. By her bewildering complexity of costume, by her intricate ceremonial observances, by the impenetrability of her outward demeanor, she belongs rather to art than to life—an Oriental Galatea radiantly adorned but not wholly metamorphosed ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... desideratum. But when you collect one thing you always incidentally collect others. The fisherman who casts his net for shad usually secures a few other fish, and once in a while a turtle, which enlarges the mesh to suit, and gives sweet liberty to the shad. To focus exclusively on dollars is to secure jealousy, fear, vanity, and a vaulting ambition that may claw its way through the mesh and let your dollars slip into ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... taking that in the picture, but a more scientific and accurate method has been devised by Bertillon. His camera lens is always used at a fixed height from the ground and forms its image on the plate at an exact focus. The print made from the negative is mounted on a card in a space of definite size, along the edges of which a metric scale is printed. In the way he has worked it out the distance between any two points in the picture can be determined. ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... denomination of rogues! never presume to call yourself by that name if you have not gone through two courses, at least, in the academy of the tunny fisheries. There it is that you may see converging as it were in one grand focus, toil and idleness, filth and spruceness, sharp set hunger and lavish plenty, vice without disguise, incessant gambling, brawls and quarrels every hour in the day, murders every now and then, ribaldry and obscenity, singing, dancing, laughing, swearing, ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... mind free of disease. Furthermore, we talk of objects as things of secondary importance and the mind as everything. Now I am firmly convinced that the mind of man, so far from being a thing apart from the objects that form its environment, is, in fact, nothing else but a mirror or focus upon which objects register their impressions and that all the thinking in the world is done not really by the mind but by the objects that form our thoughts and the reasons, utterly divorced from what we call human ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... hypermetropia, or morbidly long sight: in this affection, the organ, instead of being spherical, is too flat from front to back, and is often altogether too small, so that the retina is brought too forward for the focus of the humours; consequently a convex glass is required for clear vision of near objects, and frequently even of distant ones. This state occurs congenitally, or at a very early age, often in several children of ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... warehouses crowded with goods, and the women and children of our present factory towns. By fixing our attention on people instead of things, we should almost certainly secure more and better things; but, regardless of cost, we must change the focus of our attention. ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... things in the rest of the world seem tame and inconsequential by comparison. I am not purposing to describe them. By good fortune I had not read too much about them, and therefore was able to get a natural and rational focus upon them, with the result that they thrilled, blessed, and exalted me. But if I had previously overheated my imagination by drinking too much pestilential literary hot Scotch, I should have ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... multitudinous knowledges, its aroused conscience, its spurred and yet thwarted sympathies, its new incitements to egotism also, and new tools and appliances for egotism to use,—placed, as it were, in the focus of a vast whispering-gallery, where all the sounds of heaven and earth came crowding, contending, incessant upon his ear? One sees at a glance how the serious thought and poetry of Greece cling to a few master facts, not being compelled to fight always with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... is the way with morbid impulses, the moment she ceased to be alone. The first word was sufficient to take her out of herself, to recall her to her normal state, and to readjust her view of life, setting it back to the proper focus. But still she looked out at the world from a low level, if healthy; a dull, dead level, the mean temperature of which was chilly, while the atmosphere threatened to vary only from stagnant apathy to boisterous discontent, positive, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... progress. We are still childishly pleased when we see the further subdivision of labor going on, because the quantity of the output is increased thereby, and we apparently are unable to take our attention away from the product long enough to really focus it upon the producer. Theoretically, "the division of labor" makes men more interdependent and human by drawing them together into a unity of purpose. "If a number of people decide to build a road, and one digs, ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... processes to hurried growth of the overstimulated brain. The result is a type of child with a puny body and an excitable brain,—the neurotic. The young eye, for example, is too flat (hypermetropic)—made to focus only on objects at a distance. Close application to print, or even to weaving mats or folding bits of paper accurately, causes an overstrain on the eye, which not only results in the chronic condition known as myopia,—short-sightedness,—so common ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... treatment,—not of Marlborough, whom he regarded only as he would have done a pair of military boots or a holster-pistol of superior excellence, for the uses that were in him,—but of the Kaiser Karl his own sublime self, the heart and focus of Political Nature; left in this manner, now when the sordid English and Dutch declined spending blood and money for him farther. "Ungrateful, sordid, inconceivable souls," answered Karl, "was there ever, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... save matches, and holding the mirror in one hand and the burning-glass in the other, I worked myself into a suitable position for the experiment. Babemba and the witch-doctor were arguing so fiercely that neither of them seemed to notice what I was doing. Getting the focus right, I directed the concentrated spark straight on to Imbozwi's greased top-knot, where I knew he would feel nothing, my plan being to char a hole in it. But as it happened this top-knot was built up round something of a highly ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... eyes, seen on the evening of our arrival, after a fifteen miles' walk, and, seen, too, in the glow of a singularly angry-looking evening sky, Livorno Bay, with its derelict barque to focus one's gaze, presented a spectacle almost terrifying in its desolation. Years must have passed since anything edible could have been found on board the Livorno. Yet I hardly think I should exaggerate if I said ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... sought deeply, through her reasoning powers, to find a means whereby she might be instrumental in helping out of their difficulties her several friends whom she so dearly loved. She believed that she had succeeded in hitting upon a scheme which would, at least, bring things to a focus. She was sure that, if she could bring all the parties together under one roof, matters would straighten themselves without much outside assistance. Jack and Sally owned a beautiful country place, within easy motoring distance of the city, ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... soldier's life, and used to war; on the other, he was supercilious as regards the provincials, opinionated on every subject connected with the narrow limits of his professional practice, much disposed to fancy the British empire the centre of all that is excellent in the world, and Scotland the focus of, at least, all moral excellence in that empire. In short, he was an epitome, though on a scale suited to his rank, of those very qualities which were so peculiar to the servants of the Crown that were sent into the colonies, as these servants estimated themselves in ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... were holding Eva close to the floor, while now from the fire god's eyes a blinding glare of flame blazed forth, the two rays converging and scorching the very ground as they traveled slowly nearer and nearer, in their fatal focus, to ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... a passionate gesture, "To gather the straying thoughts of men into one burning focus—and turn THAT fire on ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... some time gaining the proper focus, but when I once had the distant vessel caught fairly in the lens, ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... aera as contemporary with Croesus and Solon (B.C. 570,) about a century after Psammeticus (Psamethik 1st) threw Egypt open to the restless Greek.[FN233] From Africa too the Fable would in early ages migrate eastwards and make for itself a new home in the second great focus of civilisation formed by the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. The late Mr. George Smith found amongst the cuneiforms fragmentary Beast-fables, such as dialogues between the Ox and the Horse, the Eagle and the Sun. In after centuries, when the conquests of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Sainte-Beuve, thinks he can trace a marked rise even in Bossuet's style from the moment he became a courtier of Louis XIV. The King brought men together, placed them in a position where they were induced and urged to bring their talents to a focus. His court was alternately a high-bred gala and a stately university. If we contrast his life with those of his predecessor and successor, with the dreary existence of Louis XIII and the crapulous lifelong debauch of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... that he spoke. At the same instant the stunned eyes found their focus—and found her beside his stirrup, leaning wide from her seat in sweet concern, one gloved hand resting on the pommel of ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... Inn that she had conceived as a project so unimaginably fine? Who were these shadow people that came and went there? Who was she? Why with all her vitality and all her hungry yearning for life and adventure couldn't she even believe in her own substantiality and focus? Wasn't life even real enough for a creature such as she to ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... indecision whether Hume or Buckle will weigh heavier on his page. Or if one of them looks up from his desk in a blurred near-sighted manner, it is because his eyes have been so stretched upon the distant centuries, that they can hardly focus on a room. If a scholar chances to sneeze because of the infection, let it be his consolation that the dust arises from the most ancient and respected authors! Pages move silently about with tall dingy tomes in their arms. Other tomes, whose use is past, they bear off ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... unburdened his soul would she be able, she knew, to focus his complete attention ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... former happy home in safety; my second, to jump up, clap my hands, shout, and run up and down the deck, with no other object in view than that of giving vent to my excited feelings. Then I went below for the telescope, and spent nearly ten minutes of the utmost impatience in vainly trying to get a focus, and in rubbing the skin nearly off my eyes, before I discovered that having taken off the large glass to examine the phosphoric water with I had omitted ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... colonies of Spain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands, and that the people here, who can obtain what land they choose and till it without rent, should not grumble at paying this small tax to the mother country. However it be, I fear that troubles will come, and, this place being the head and focus of the party hostile to England, my husband, feeling himself out of accord with all his neighbors, saying a few loyal gentlemen like himself, is thinking much and seriously of selling our estate here and of moving away into the new countries of the West, where he will be free from ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... dressed persons. Vance heard himself called by name. He had forgotten the London world,—forgotten, amidst his midsummer ramblings, that the London season was still ablaze; and there, stragglers from the great focus, fine people, with languid tones and artificial jaded smiles, caught him in his wanderer's dress, and walking side by side with the infant wonder of Mr. Rugge's show, exquisitely neat indeed, but still in a coloured ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... audiences. Such questions of chance influence of trifles upon the greater events of life is a constant theme of speculation among the pragmatics; no petty detail is overlooked in the possibility of its portentous consequences. Walter Shandy's hyperbolic philosophy turned about such a focus, the exaltation of insignificant trifles into mainsprings of action. Shandy ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... absolute of the roycean type (similarly sterile) by its pragmatic treatment of the problem of knowledge. As the views of knowledge, reality and truth imputed to humanism have been those so far most fiercely attacked, it is in regard to these ideas that a sharpening of focus seems most urgently required. I proceed therefore to bring the views which I impute to humanism in these respects into focus as briefly as ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... bark just enough to come to the first light under coating, which is somewhat moist. With a lead pencil make an outline of the inscription to be burnt on the tree and bring, the rays of a large magnifying glass not quite to a fine focus on the same. The tree will be burnt along the pencil marks, and if the glass is not held in one spot too long, the inscription will be burnt in as evenly as if it had been written. —Contributed by Stewart H. ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... had left me in one of the two enormous rooms that were allotted to me, I threw myself into an arm-chair and tried to focus the extraordinary imaginative impression which this ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... a stereoscopic pair of photographs, they are placed at the same distance from the eyes as the length of the focus of the lens used in producing them, then without doubt the distance between the eyes, viz. about two and a quarter {228} inches, is the best difference between the two points of view to produce a perfectly natural ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... which beats upon the throne is as a rushlight in comparison with the electric glare which our newspapers now focus upon the public man in Lee's position. His character has been subjected to that ordeal, and who can point to a spot upon it? His clear, sound judgment, personal courage, untiring activity, genius for war, absolute devotion to his State, mark him out as a public man, as a patriot to be forever ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... in order to keep the pictures from running off their canvases onto the floor while being painted. But with people, his first likes and dislikes were definite and usually final, and this quality of personal consistency had come to a fixed focus on Helen Maitland. ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... chiefesses and common women without distinction, this king has made the Hawaiian nobility, the present alii say, bastard and dishonored. The chiefs descended from Keawe conceal their origin, and are by no means flattered when reminded of it. From Keawe down, the genealogies become a focus of disputes, and it would be really dangerous for the rash historian who did not spare the susceptibilities ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... alone, and rather late; Rebecca had come some time before with one of her girl mates who had stopped for her. Barnabas, slender and handsome in his best suit, advancing with a stern and almost martial air, tried not to see Charlotte Barnard; but it was as if her face were the natural focus for his eyes, which they could not escape. However, Charlotte was not talking to Thomas Payne; he was not even very near her. He was already in the top of a cherry-tree picking busily. Barney saw his trim dark ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... pried his thoughts away from aborigines and heat, and tried to focus his mind elsewhere. He didn't understand psionic processes, he thought; but then, nobody did, really, as far as he knew. ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... woman's eyes seemed to grow small in her wrinkled face, as if directing themselves with effort upon something minute. They looked straight into the eyes of her daughter, but had a more distant focus. The fixed gaze continued for nearly ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... hand in acknowledgment, and rolled his cigar from corner to corner of his mouth. "Oh, I've lost a lot more in my time, Judge, but with a squint in my eye! But I'm doing this with no astigmatism. I've got the focus." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the north, on this Red Sea littoral, is a province of much more importance, the Hejaz, in which are situate the most holy of cities in the Moslem world, Mecca and Medina. To Christians, the Hejaz is forbidden ground. To Mahomedans, it is the focus of pilgrimage from all parts of the world. The Sultan of Turkey, as the ruler of Mecca, is looked up to by the Sunni or orthodox Mahomedans in all lands as the spiritual head of their Church. Though rulers ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... the amphitheatre now sees the Emperor re-enter his box and take his place as Androcles, desperately frightened, but still marching with piteous devotion, emerges from the other end of the passage, and finds himself at the focus of thousands of eager eyes. The lion's cage, with a heavy portcullis grating, is on his left. The Emperor gives a signal. A gong sounds. Androcles shivers at the sound; then falls on his knees ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... Webster approaches nearest to Shakespeare. Webster's greatest play, The Duchess of Malfi (acted in 1616), and The White Devil, which ranks second, show the working of a master hand, but Webster's genius comes to a focus only in depicting the horrible. He loves such gloomy ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... in which a sensitive and poetical man is made or marred; the crisis in which a sentiment is replaced by the passions—in which love for some real object gathers the scattered rays of the heart into a focus: out of that ordeal he might pass a purer and manlier being—so Maltravers often hoped. Maltravers then little thought how closely connected with his own fate was to be that passage in the history of the Italian. Castruccio contrived ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... observation of fine detail, it is absolutely necessary to stop down the aperture to a very large extent, by reducing it to about 12 inches in diameter or even less. The big telescope is thus really converted into a small one of long focus. ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... or opening in the foliage of a large tree that overtopped its fellows in the distance. In the centre of this rift I perceived a white spot, but could not, at first, distinguish what it was. Adjusting the focus of the telescope, I again looked, and now made it out ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... the flower she resembled, well rooted among the rocks of principle and truth. She was the youngest and the pet of the household, and yet the "petting" was not of that kind that develops selfishness and wilfulness, but rather a genial sunlight of love falling upon her as a focus from the entire family. They always spoke of her as "little Sis," or the "child." And a child it seemed she would ever be, with her kittenish ways, quick impulses, and swiftly alternating moods. As she developed into womanly proportions, her grave, businesslike ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... hundred-pound arms, trying to focus the telescope that swiveled over the panel. As the field cleared, he could see that the plume was flaring unevenly, flickering red and orange along one side. Quietly and viciously, he was talking ...
— Slingshot • Irving W. Lande
... eyes repeatedly focus above the level of the other man's eyes, you make the impression that you are an idealist rather than a practical person. What you say will not seem to him to apply directly to his case. He will not feel the personal, or man-to-man contact of your thoughts. Sometimes, ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... administration. He induced the Athenian people to expend on the decoration of Athens a larger part of its ample revenues than was ever applied to this purpose in any other state, either republican or monarchical. Of the surpassing skill with which he collected into one focus the rays of artistic genius at Athens, no stronger proof can be afforded, than the fact that no subsequent period, through the patronage of Macedonian or Roman princes, produced works of equal excellence, Indeed, it may be said that the creations of the age of Pericles are the only ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... bring to you the fact and the substance. I have lifted up the curtain and flooded it with the light of day. You shall have the fact for your senses. Tomorrow I shall explain it all. I shall deliver my greatest lecture; in which my whole Me has come to a focus. It is not spiritualism nor sophistry. It is concrete fact and common sense. The subject of my lecture tomorrow will be: 'The ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... about the only thing I could do, at the time—the only thing, that is, that I wanted to do. It seemed like I couldn't get away fast enough." It was brazen of him, she thought, to treat it all so coolly. "And out here," he added thoughtfully, "I could get the proper focus on Myrt—which I couldn't do ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... trying to get his train of thought to focus once more on the submarine problem. But for some reason the business with the microphone and the speaker in the next room ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... which personifies under one figure every social revolution is an illusion. It springs from that tendency to hero worship, ineradicable in the heart of the race, which leads every nation to have an ideal, the imagined author of its prosperity, the father of his country, and the focus of its legends. As has been hinted, history is not friendly to their renown, and dissipates them altogether into phantoms of the brain, or sadly dims the lustre of their fame. Arthur, bright star of chivalry, dwindles into a Welsh subaltern; the Cid Campeador, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... be said of Coleridge, in the phrase which he used of Nelson, that he was "heart-starved." Tied for life to a woman with whom he had not one essential sympathy, the whole of his nature was put out of focus; and perhaps nothing but "the joy of grief," and the terrible and fettering power of luxuriating over his own sorrows, and tracing them to first principles, outside himself or in the depths of his sub- consciousness, gave him the courage to ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... luxurious sensation. When I had no more ticks to make, I folded all my bills up uniformly, docketed each on the back, and tied the whole into a symmetrical bundle. Then I did the same for Herbert (who modestly said he had not my administrative genius), and felt that I had brought his affairs into a focus ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... their own and dwarfed their activities. There was no bitterness in Mrs. Wilcox; there was not even criticism; she was lovable, and no ungracious or uncharitable word had passed her lips. Yet she and daily life were out of focus: one or the other must show blurred. And at lunch she seemed more out of focus than usual, and nearer the line that divides life from a life that may be of ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... will be seen a wonderful volcanic tract. So vast, in fact, that Professor Johnstrup has termed it the Fire Focus of the North. To the north-east, again, is found a large lake, called 'Myvata,' or 'Midge Lake,' with a volcanic range of mountains which stretch from north to south; the most famous of these are 'Leivhnukr,' and 'Krafla,' which, after ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... happens, however, that a lantern slide 31/4 by 31/4 has to embrace the whole of a picture contained in a much larger negative, so that recourse must be had to the camera, and the picture reduced with the aid of a short focus lens to within the lantern size; this is what is called making a transparency by reduction in the camera. Both cases are the same, however, so far as the process being simply ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... realization of my hopes, the utter, the inevitable defeat of the minions of pride, prejudice, caste. Nor would such consummation of hopes affect me only, or those around me. Nay, even I was but the point of "primitive disturbance," whence emanates as if from a focus, from a new origin, prayer, friendly and inimical, to be focused again into realization on one side and discomfiture on the other. My friends, my enemies, centre their hopes on me. I treat them, one with earnest endeavor for realization, the other with supremest indifference. ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... first and second volume," said a tall, long-chinned, short-sighted blue, dressed in yellow, peering into my face, as if her eyes were magnifying glasses, and she was obtaining the true focus of vision, "but you fall off in your last, which is all about that ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... erected, the equipment is provided, the course of study is arranged and administered, and the teacher employed. The child is major, and all else is subsidiary. In the general scheme even the teacher takes secondary place. Teachers may come and go, but the child remains as the focus of all plans and purposes. The teacher is secured for the child, and not the child for the teacher. Taxpayers, boards of education, parents, and teachers are all active in the interests of the child; and all school legislation, to be important, must have the child as its ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... number of witches live here, who won't let it rain." Africans in general are sufficiently superstitious, but those of Tette are in this particular pre-eminent above their fellows. Coming from many different tribes, all the rays of the separate superstitions converge into a focus at Tette, and burn out common sense from the minds of the mixed breed. They believe that many evil spirits live in the air, the earth, and the water. These invisible malicious beings are thought to inflict much suffering on the human race; but, as they have a weakness for beer and a craving ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... that such only exist by sufferance of their mighty neighbors, and must be subservient in trade policy and military policy to retain even a nominal freedom; and that an independent Ireland would by its position be a focus for the intrigues of powers hostile to Great Britain, and if it achieved independence Great Britain in self protection would be forced to conquer it again. They consider that security for industry and freedom for the individual can best be preserved in Ireland by the maintenance of the ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... had caught the word "Vorspielen" being bandied about the long tea-table, and had gathered that there was to be an informal playing of "pieces" before Fraulein Pfaff. She welcomed the event. It relieved her from the burden of being in high focus—the relief had come as soon as she took her place at the gaslit table. No eye seemed to notice her. The English girls having sat out two meal-times with her, had ceased the hard-eyed observation which had made the long silence of the earlier repasts ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... and swung back to the microscope. Then he gave up as his tired eyes refused to focus. "Why don't ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... purchased of a peddler, and differing in color from its natural mate, perpetually getting out of focus ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... from ten to twelve seconds, accompanied by a rumbling noise. The line of disturbance was from north to south, striking the Mendips, and traversing parts of the shires of Somerset and Gloucester. 'The chief focus of oscillation was at Cheddar, where the hill is said to have waved to and fro during several seconds; and in the alluvial flat or marsh below Cheddar, some houses had the plaster of the ceilings ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... two focus points are the stoniest of Joan of Arc and Bastille Day. Both furnish abundance of colorful detail and incident upon which to build the pupils' conceptions of the spirit and ideals of the French people. In the case of Bastille Day, correlation ...
— The French Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... And bade them loose his chain. The boar from that day forward Still followed in her train; Nor ever to the wildwood Attempted to return, But in the focus of Desire Preferred to ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... merely passive to the action of the various light-waves, and becomes active, and active in a more or less complicated way; turning its differently sensitive portions to meet or avoid the stimulus, adjusting its focus like that of an opera glass, and like an opera glass, turning it to the right or left, higher ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... generally; it doesn't stand up on its hind legs and rear around and call attention to itself—couldn't if it should try. But it's here and there and everywhere in America, just the same. A railroad car with one drunken fool in it gives you the idea. You focus on him and say, 'What a beastly shame!' and you entirely overlook the other fifty-odd people in the car who are quietly minding their ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... the commonwealth, Brambletye was the focus of many a cavalier conspiracy. "From its not being a place of any strength or notice, it was imagined that Brambletye might better escape the keen and jealous watchfulness, which kept the protector's eye ever fixed upon the strong holds ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... government's reluctance to publicize economic data limit the amount of reliable information available. State-owned industry produces nearly all manufactured goods, and the regime continues to devote its focus on heavy and military industries at the expense of light and consumer industries. Economic conditions remain stagnant at best and the country's deepening economic slide has been fueled by acute energy shortages, poorly maintained and aging industrial facilities, and a lack ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... conservation of the received law and order should presumably best be effected under cover of a collusive peace of the defensive kind, which is designed to retain those national discrepancies intact that count for so much in the national life of today, both as a focus of patriotic sentiment and as an outlet for national expenditures. This plan would involve the least derangement of the received order among the democratic peoples, although the plan might itself undergo some change in the ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... the ballroom, save where it was cleft by a great stairway. As they stood looking over the railing, 'twas like looking down upon an immense concave opal, peopled by the gorgeously apparelled. Myriad tints seeming to assimulate and focus wherever the eyes rested. Gilt bewreathed pillars, mouldings, shimmering satin, lights, jewels, flowers, ceiling, gallery and parquetry appeared like a homogeneous mass of opal. Mistress Katherine could not speak, her perturbed spirit was silent, she held to Janet and the curtain that ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... curtain, the stage projected into a wide "apron," as it was called, lined on either side by boxes filled with spectators; and the house was so inadequately lighted that almost all the acting had to be done within the focus of the footlights. After the curtain rose, the actors advanced into this projecting "apron" and performed the main business of the act beyond the ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... in another way. It is not operated by light, at least not by light alone. A certain temperature must be attained, and that temperature suffices in complete darkness. Nevertheless, I find that on exposing to a very concentrated spectrum (collected by a lens of short focus) a slip of paper prepared as above (that is to say, by washing with the mixed solutions, exposure to sunshine, washing and discharging the uniform blue color so induced, as in the last article), its whiteness is changed to a brown over the whole region of the red and orange rays, but ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... captain; "always the result. Never mind," he continued, speaking through his closely set teeth; "our turn will come one of these days." And then with his telescope tightly nipped beneath his arm he would tramp up and down the quarter-deck, pausing now and then to focus his glass, take a peep through, close it again with a ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... gardeners and farmers had few fertilizers other than animal manure and compost. These were always considered very valuable substances and a great deal of lore existed about using them. During the early part of this century, our focus changed to using chemicals; organic wastes were often considered nuisances with little value. These days we are rediscovering compost as an agent of soil improvement and also finding out that we must compost organic waste materials to recycle ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... trough between the two ends of the instrument. In using the instrument the lamp is placed at a distance of at least 200 mm. from the end; the observer seats himself at the opposite end in such a manner as to bring his eye in line with the tube J. The telescope is moved in or out until the proper focus is secured, so as to give a clearly defined image, when the field of the instrument will appear as a round, luminous disk, divided into two halves by a vertical line passing through the center, and darker on one half of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... This focus spread its fires and gained new partizans every day; it attacked the power of Napoleon in the opinion of all Germany, extended itself into Italy, and threatened its complete overthrow. It was already easy to see that, ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... commonly associated in the mind with the thought of the pre-existence and rebirth of the soul will disappear if we do not lose sight of the fact that the soul is a center of consciousness, which is always consciousness somewhere, but which very gradually shifts its focus from plane to plane. Its permanent home is in that body of filmy matter drawn about the ego in the higher levels of the heaven world. From that point it sends energies outward and draws about itself in the lower levels of the mental world a body, or vehicle of consciousness, that is not permanent ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... presented the little disk to the face of the glowing luminary. Quivering with excitement lest a sudden cloud should interpose, a moment passed before I could hold the lens steadily enough to concentrate a burning focus. At length it came. The little thread of smoke curled gracefully upwards from the Heaven-lighted spark, which, a few moments afterwards, diffused with warmth and ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... Start the humming tone as indicated in the first lesson, and maintain the same focus while forming certain elements. Take the syllable n-o-m, allowing no break while going from n, the nares sound, to the vowel sound of o, and returning to the nares sound of m. This is perhaps the best element to begin upon, because of its definiteness, ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... the place save that it was away up in the north- west, on one of the higher reaches of the Enyong Creek, and a two days' journey for her by water. The lads lived at a town called Ikpe, an old slave centre, that had been in league with Aro, and the focus of the trade of a wide and populous area. It was a "closed" market, no Calabar ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... Every regiment has its club, and, what is odd, the navy furnishes many crack players. It is the favorite par excellence at all schools, colleges and universities; every county, every town and every village has its local club; while the I Zingari and its host of rivals serve to focus the ubiquitous talent of All England. The public enjoy it, merely as spectators, to such a degree that a grand match-day at Lord's is only second in point of enthusiasm to the Derby Day. Special trains carry thousands, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... old dad would stare if I could only have him in Dawson for a day. He'd never be able to get things just in focus any more. He would be knocked clean off the pivot on which he's revolved these thirty years. Seems to me every one's travelling on a pivot in the old country. It's no use trying to hammer it into their heads there are more points of view than one. If you don't just ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... this pavilion I stood alone, happy to have got clear away from those terrible beasts and the gaze of their steadfast eyes. As I stood there, I became conscious of the fact that the nebulous light of the place was concentrating itself into a focus on the columned wall opposite to me. It grew there, became intenser, and then spread, revealing, as it spread, a series of moving pictures that appeared to be scenes actually enacted before me. For the figures in the pictures were living, and they ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... cue to haul off and stand staring at us. We all withdrew to easier pistol range, for contrary to general belief, close quarters almost never help straight aim, especially when in a hurry. There is a shooting as well as a camera focus, and each ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... vast amphitheatre of sward, whose walls banked out the narrow sky above. And here, in the focus of the huge ring, an object appeared which stirred strange melancholy in Lancelot,—a little chapel, ivy-grown, girded with a few yews, and elders, and grassy graves. A climbing rose over the porch, and iron railings round the churchyard, told of human care; and from the graveyard ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... with. Nor throughout the day did weather conditions or tempers improve. All day long the sky was heavily overcast with dense, low-hanging, dark gray clouds, which, while wholly obscuring the sun, seemed to focus its rays upon us like a vast burning-glass; wherefore it was expedient for the two pajama-clad passengers to keep well within the shelter of the bridge-deck awning. Toward sunset, a dense black wall of cloud settled upon the western horizon, aft of us. But suddenly, just at the moment the ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... before the select committee raised by the English House of Commons, that the use of the locomotive-whistle as a fog-signal was first suggested by Mr. A. Gordon, C.E., who proposed to use air or steam for sounding it, and to place it in the focus of a reflector, or a group of reflectors, to concentrate its sounds into a powerful phonic beam. It was his idea that the sharpness or shrillness of the whistle constituted its chief value. And it is conceded that Mr. C.L. Daboll, under the direction of Prof. Henry, and at ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... can hold a book so near your eyes as not to be able to read a word of it; hold it off further, and get the right focus, and you can read beautiful. Now the right distance to see a colony, and know all about it, is England. Three thousand miles is the right focus for a political spy-glass. A man livin' here, and who never ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... drinking-water conducted in pipes, laid for the purpose from a spring about a mile and a quarter distant, whilst other piping carries water to the end of the pier for the requirements of shipping. This improvement, the present salubrity of the town (once a fever focus), and its latest Spanish embellishments, are mainly due to the intelligent activity of its late Governors, Colonel (now General) Gonzalez Parrado, and the ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... at the strap across his breast, took a little field-glass from the case, adjusted the focus, and levelled it ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... material naught, Focus of light infinitesimal, Sum of all things by sleepless Nature wrought, Of which ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... because of a fairly recent afternoon spent in an English garden with English friends. The question of pronunciation came up. Now you will readily see that with them and their compactness, their great public schools, their two great Universities, and their great London, the one eternal focus of them all, both the chance of diversity in social customs and the tolerance of it must be far less than in our huge unfocused country. With us, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, is each a centre. Here you ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... the geographical focus of our Negro population, but in many other respects, both now and yesterday, the Negro problems have seemed to be centered in this State. No other State in the Union can count a million Negroes among its citizens,—a population as large as the slave population ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... nautical ephemeris for this day. The morning was cloudy, with rain; but towards noon the weather cleared up, and I had the satisfaction to observe the eclipse with a refracting telescope of forty-six inches focus, and a power of about two hundred. The beginning took place at 1h 12' 37.8" of apparent time, and the end at 3h 36' 11.8". So soon as the observation was concluded, the tents and astronomical instruments were carried on board, the launch was hoisted in, and everything prepared for going ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... not been in my unnatural position for many minutes before I began to suffer agonies, agonies not only physical but mental; for standing there like some prisoner of the Inquisition, it came to me how this dismantled apartment must be the focus of the dreadful forces of Hassan ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... their look or behavior should excite the suspicions of their companions, make them the focus of inquisitive observation and whispered remark, the diplomate passed again into the hall, sweeping along in advance of them when they deserted their curtained recess, and would have joined the rest of ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... of arrangement or assimilation which might unite all my scattered knowledge. Oh, how different if I had had one definite object which, like the lens, should concentrate all the scattered rays to one focus. I met with this remark of Sir Egerton Bridges to-day; it applies to me exactly: "I have never met with one who seemed to have the same overruling passion for literature as I have always had. A thousand others have pursued it with more principle, reason, method, fixed ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... unable to get the proper focus on events, the foreman blundered stupidly about the place searching cursorily, and cursing the helplessness ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... forget the electric thrill which went through my whole being at this instant. I seemed to see lines radiating from every part of the globe, converging to a focus where that plain, awkward-looking man stood, and to hear in spirit a million prayers, 'as the sound of many waters,' ascending ...
— Luke Walton • Horatio Alger
... almost feel the steadily-growing pull of his mindless enemy in the distant sky. Floating and kicking his way over to the Tele-screen, he quickly switched the instrument on. Rotating the control dials, he brought the blinding white image of the onrushing solar disk into perfect focus. Automatically he adjusted the two superimposed polaroid filters until the proper amount of light was transmitted to his viewing screen. They really built ships and filters these days, he reflected wryly. Now if they could only form a rescue squad ...
— Rescue Squad • Thomas J. O'Hara
... the focus of the eyes often causes a strain on the brain in the effort to adjust them. This sometimes causes epilepsy, and we have known many cases cured by the use of spectacles made to correct this inequality. In all cases of this disease, ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... her, or at least to look, the girl was gone again. And something in the way she stood there a few feet beyond, and stared down into his eyes so steadfastly in silence, made him shiver. The moonlight was behind her, but in some odd way he could not focus sight upon her face, although so close. The gleam of eyes he caught, but all the rest seemed white and snowy as though he looked ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... warrior, clad in steel, save the beautifully-formed head, which was covered only by his own luxuriant raven curls. In a better light it could not have been placed, particularly in the evening; the rays, condensed and softened, seemed to gather up their power into one focus, and throw such an almost supernatural glow on the half face, give such an extraordinary appearance of life to the whole figure, that a casual visitant to that chamber might well fancy it was no picture but reality on which he gazed. But no such emotion was at work in the bosom of Nigel ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... set aside. But, remember, it is but for an hour. The wise man will be he who quickest lights his candle; the wisest he who never lets it out. Tomorrow, the next moment, he, a poor, darkened, blurred soul, may need it again to focus the Image better, to take a mote off the lens, to clear the mirror from a breath with which the ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... that graveled him most, to start with, was not this, but the price he had fetched! He couldn't seem to get over that seven dollars. Well, it stunned me so, when I first found it out, that I couldn't believe it; it didn't seem natural. But as soon as my mental sight cleared and I got a right focus on it, I saw I was mistaken; it was natural. For this reason: a king is a mere artificiality, and so a king's feelings, like the impulses of an automatic doll, are mere artificialities; but as a man, he is a reality, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of a species of maternal idolatry; centered in her child Louis Marie as rays gathered up into a focus, were all her hopes, her aspirations, her ideas of the future. If she could be assured she would live to see her son leading the armies of the empire, ruling in the cabinets of state or worshipped ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... station alarm over my bunk. I'll say this, the Navy boys know their business. When the sirens screamed, the crew secured ship and blasted off before I had finished reading the report. As soon as my eyeballs unsquashed back into focus I read it through, then once ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... grow at a point of junction between the bone proper and an overlying layer of gristle or cartilage, known as the zone of ossification. It is upon this zone of ossification that the various growth influences appear to focus and concentrate their efforts, among them the internal secretions. After growth has been finished, that is, after adolescence, these zones of ossification close, so that growth is no longer possible unless they become reactivated. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... steady and continuous growth. From month to month, and from year to year, as aeroplane constructors and pilots have continued at their tasks, overcoming technical difficulties and personal risks, the interest of ordinary people has grown perceptibly. Even before the war—which has done so much to focus attention on flying—the attitude of scepticism and apathy had been greatly changed. When the London Aerodrome at Hendon was established, there were shrewd men in the city, men who are ordinarily very sound in their conclusions, who declared the public would never ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... to this, he wears the lens of his heart upon his sleeve, and will adjust it so as to focus the groups around him—it may be a pair of lovers, or some tired mother, or happy child, or lonely wayfarer, or a waif—he will often get a picture of joy, or sorrow, or hope—life dramas all—which will not only enrich the dull hours of travel, but will leave imprints on the mind which can be ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... terrible dread, the girl forced her eyes to focus upon the gruesome form, and the next instant she uttered a quick little cry of relief. The man's hat had fallen off and lay at some distance from the body. She could see a shock of thick black hair, and noticed that he wore a cheap cotton shirt that had once been white. ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... In order to focus the attention of the would-be guides upon certain important essentials, the questions started ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... "by suggesting questions which help to detect the passion, and strangeness and dramatic contrasts of life." And not only to bring suggestions, but repose, by granting to eyes wearied with minute concerns the contrasts of vast times and spaces, the majestic idea of the Whole; to change the focus and variously dispose the ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... earlier and the impossible events of the past day kept whirling around in his head. He would think about it some other time, right now all he wanted to do was let his overworked circuits cool down, if he only had something to read, to focus his attention on. Then, with a start, he remembered the booklet. Everything had moved so fast that the earlier incident with the truck driver ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... are too tender to endure his own lustre reflected and doubled on the focus of your burnished brass. He dreads the fate of Milton, "blasted with excess ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... the accommodation of all travelers. Each one of you who reaches the lower end of this valley should take the Mountain Trolley and spend a season at those schools. They occupy some of the grandest buildings in the world. Focus your glasses ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... sat smoking, listening to what was said in the listless way that lunatics listen, unable to focus his attention, but gathering in his addled brain that he was being discussed. I watched him as one does a caged tiger, guessing at the beast's thoughts and thankful that it can prey ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... an engineer (section D of the Public Works Department) and I have to make an important measurement in connexion with the Apothegm of the Bilateral which runs to-night precisely through this spot. My fingers now mark exactly the concentric of the secondary focus whence the Radius Vector should be drawn, but I find that (like a fool) I have left my Double Refractor in the cafe hard by. I dare not go for fear of losing the place I have marked; yet I can get no further without ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... been discovered, among other things, that in oblique refraction light is separated into colors. Therefore, any small portion of the convex lens of the telescope, being a prism, the rays proceed to the focus, separated into prismatic colors, which make the image thus formed edged with a fringe of color and indistinct. But, fortunately for the early telescope makers, the degree of this aberration is independent of the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... a cause of trouble. Had there been no extra business-pressure caused by the war, there would have been some other focus for their misunderstandings. They would have quarreled over clothes and aviation, Aunt Emma and Martin Dockerill, poverty and ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... point where the circumstances of the moment make the epoch such as to focus the life of the parish in ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... conjecturing the period. The volcanic action can be traced from Castel Sardo, where it has formed precipices on the northern coast, to the vicinity of Monastir, a distance southward of more than 100 miles; its central focus appearing to have been about half-way between Ales, Milis, and St. Lussurgiu, where, as Captain Smyth remarks, “the phlægrean evidences are particularly abundant.” The action was principally confined to the western ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... District of Columbia, the seat of this powerful Federal Government, and in the city of Washington, the metropolis of the United States. Here are concentrated as it were into one focus, the associations of the past, connected with the great struggle for independence, and the memory of those names and events which already belong to history. Whatever may be our political principles, or the opinions of those who like myself ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... last—by no direct exertion of my own, but by turn after turn of things to which I blindly gave my little help—the mystery of my life was solved. Many things yet remained to be fetched up to focus and seen round; but the point ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... was in apogee. His bank, as I have said, was coming to be more than a mere bank; it was now the focus of many miscellaneous enterprises. Several of these were industrial companies; prospectuses bearing his name and that of his institution constantly came my way. Some of these undertakings were novel and daring, but most of them went through; and he was more likely to use his associates ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... he expected to be an architect, and that mother liked it. He had an idea, which he had imparted to her, of an arch; it must be made of black marble, with gold veins, and ought to stand in Egypt, with the word "Pandemonium" on it. The kitchen was the focus of interest to him, for meals were prepared at all hours for comers and goers. Temperance told me that the mild and indifferent mourners were fond of good victuals, and she thought their hearts were lighter than their stomachs when they went away. She presided there ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... in the Memoir the focus of the Egyptian question changes; attention is centred on the diplomatic questions arising out ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... second great method of securing clairvoyant en rapport relations with the astral plane. How the crystal, magic-mirror, etc., serves to focus the psychic energy of the clairvoyant person. The crystal serves the purpose of a psychic microscope or telescope. How crystals tend to become polarized to the vibrations of their owner. Why crystals should be preserved ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... obviously apt to outstrip his spoken words; but even in the course of speech his ideas would crystallise, quite palpably to the listener, and the sentence that began by throwing out a shadowy idea would culminate in a definite project, as the image comes into focus under the lens, and with as much ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... back over the misty, half-forgotten years and not see a few that stand out clear and golden, sharp-cut against the sky-line of memory? Years that we wish we could live again, so that we might revel in every full-blooded hour. For we so seldom get the proper focus on things until we look at them through the clarifying telescope of Time; and then one realizes with a pang that he can't back-track into the past and take his old ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... brother had ever threatened the distribution of the territory of Capua, and it is, therefore, probable that in this case he did not contemplate a large agricultural foundation, but rather one that might serve better than the existing village to focus the commerce of the Campanian plain. But the revenue from the domain, and the jealousy of Rome's old and powerful rival, which might be awakened in all classes, were strong weapons in the hands of his opponents, and the renewal of Capua was destined to be ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... netting to some metal uprights and struggling to focus his mind on what he was doing enough to forget that Delight Hathaway was on the other side of the partition when from the window above the bench he saw Cynthia Galbraith come rolling up to the gate in her runabout, accompanied by a strikingly ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... of semi-consciousness in which she realized nothing but the strong holding of his arms. She even vaguely wondered after a time whether this also were not a dream, for other fantasies began to crowd about her. She rocked on a sea of strange happenings on which she found it impossible to focus her mind. It seemed to have broken adrift as it were—a rudderless boat in a gale. But still that sense of security never wholly left her. Dreaming or waking, the force of his personality ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... guard against, despite of all our precautions, be introduced amongst us, measures better calculated for the destruction of a community, could scarcely be devised, than the ancient quarantine regulations; for they certainly would convert every house proscribed by their mark, into a den and focus of the most concentrated pestilential contagion, ensuring fearful retribution upon those who had thus so blindly shut them up. The mark alone, besides being equivalent to a sentence of death upon all the inmates, ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... friend concluded that his "true Mount Sinai" was the focus and origin of this volcanic region; and that the latter was the "great and terrible wilderness" (Deut. i. 19) through which the children of Israel were led on their way to mysterious Kadesh-Barnea. Thus, too, he explained the "pillar of the cloud by day," and the "pillow ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... welcome, of course, and the varied mechanism explained to him. As the crowning "treat," he was given a peer through the celebrated instrument. It was leveled at the moon, or, rather, arranged to have that orb in its focus at the time. The visitor was appalled, as well as wondering at the view, and slowly withdrew by the trap-door. But when the astronomer resumed his observations and calculations he was interrupted by the same sedate and ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... after development unless I felt otherwise disposed; but that as I was to treat them as under suspicion, so must they treat me, and that every act I performed must be in the presence of two witnesses; nay, that I would set a watch upon my own camera in the guise of a duplicate one of the same focus—in other words, I would use a binocular stereoscopic camera and dictate all the conditions ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... king was the vice-king. Yet they had seen their beloved viceroy, Iturrigaray, deposed by a conspiracy of Spanish shop-keepers, which had organized itself in that focus of Mexican trade, the Parian. All this was bewildering to the nation. All New Spain was astonished to see a power sufficiently potent to arrest the vice-king emanate from such a quarter. And not only had they witnessed this, but they had also seen this same officer, whose person ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... any of the four plain walls of the office; there was no focus of outer-world sunlight on the desk there. Yet the five disks set out on its surface appeared to glow—perhaps the heat of the mischief they could cause ... had ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... were now gathered the Prince, Raasay, and Miss Flora. To me as a focus came all eyes. I got to my feet in ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... an exclamation and switched on his electric torch, trying to focus the circle of light upon that particular window. There was nothing there. Only, it seemed to me that something, incredibly swift and silent, flashed down one of the bewildering turns to which our attic is addicted. But when we ran forward, the passage was empty. We brought ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... Richard straightened his bowed shoulders somewhat and his sallow cheek flushed. "Here at last I may serve you somewhat, Martin," said he and, turning his back to the sun, he set the instrument to his eye and began moving the three vanes to and fro until he had the proper focus and might obtain the sun's altitude; whereby he had presently found our present position, the which he duly pricked upon the chart. He now showed me how, by standing out on direct course instead of following the tortuous windings of the coast, we could shorten our ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... The War had unrolled a map of the Union, he said, and hung it in every man's house. There was a universal shifting of attention, if not always from the province or section to the image of the nation itself, at least a shift of focus from one section to another. The clash of arms had meant many other things besides the triumph of Union and the freedom of the slaves. It had brought men from every state into rude jostling contact with one another and had developed a new social and human curiosity. It ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... awakened to the realization that the roots of his malady lie deep in his own nature, his own organism, his own habits. To blame everything upon the capitalist and the environment produced by capitalism is to focus attention upon merely one of the elements of the problem. The Marxian too often forgets that before there was a capitalist there was exercised the unlimited reproductive activity of mankind, which produced the first overcrowding, the first want. This ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... the center of our book, the hub where all the spokes of evidence focus and unite, clearly revealing the unity, power and purpose of the Wheel of Revolution which now is rolling through the minds and wills of American radicals. To make this complex plot simple, it has been ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... motherhood for children alone, or merely in connection with this proposed Bureau. I urge you, indeed, to employ it in all conceivable ways. Be the mothers of men and women as well as of little children—the mothers of communities—the mothers of the state. And as a focus to these energies and disinterested activities, let us pray Washington to give ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... Forge from New York with a mingled sense of pleasure and the feeling that his place was unsupportably empty. The loneliness of which he had been increasingly conscious seemed to have its focus in his house. The following morning he walked restlessly down the short, steep descent to the Forge, lying on its swift water diverted from Canary Creek. Unlike a great many iron families of increasing prosperity, the ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... any one of them, he is sure to disgust the rest; if he select particular men from among them all, it is a hazard that he disgusts them all. Those who are left out, however divided before, will soon run into a body of opposition; which, being a collection of many discontents into one focus, will without doubt be hot and violent enough. Faction will make its cries resound through the nation, as if the whole were in an uproar, when by far the majority, and much the better part, will seem for a while as it ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... any direction, I waited. With deafening explosions the shells exploded in a small street behind me. The Germans were evidently trying to smash up the old Flemish town hall, which was in the corner of the market-place, so I decided to fix my focus in its direction. But though I waited for over an hour, nothing else happened. The Germans had ceased firing for that morning at least. Not till I had gone to my cafe did I realise the danger I had exposed myself to, but somehow I had seemed so confident that I should not get hit, that to film ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... Woodford talked of the trial, beginning perhaps to regret that his niece must go to the very focus of Roman influence in England, where there seemed to be little scruple as to the mode of conversion. Would it be possible to alter her destination? was his thought, when he rose the next day, but loyalty stood in the way, and that ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in itself during times when judicial murders were common, would have excited nothing more than passing interest had not the national sentiment been so aroused by the chaotic conditions. As it was it served to focus attention on the general maladministration over which Yuan Shih-kai ruled as provisional President. "What is my crime?" had shrieked the unhappy revolutionist as he had been shot and then bayonetted to death. That query was most easily answered. ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... the issues between Houses, and I come to that between Parties. Great changes in a community are very often unperceived; the focus of reality moves from one institution in the State to another, and almost imperceptibly. Sometimes the forms of institutions remain almost the same in all ceremonial aspects, and yet there will be one institution ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... the spot he had already suggested as the focus of attention, and they both saw, with the quick-sightedness of men accustomed to live by the chase, the cause ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... hand, Washington was for many (to me) good reasons highly objectionable. Especially because it is the political capital of the country and focus of intrigue, gossip, and slander. Your personal preferences were, as expressed, to make a new department east adequate to my rank, with headquarters at Washington, and to assign me to its command—to remove my family here, and to avail myself of its schools, etc.; to remove ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... little idol; and absolutely now, while she stuck a long pin, a trifle fallaciously, into her hat—she had, with an approach to irritation, told her maid, a new woman, whom she had lately found herself thinking of as abysmal, that she didn't want her—she tried to focus the possibility of some understanding between them in consequence of which ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... Always the child of impulse, and careless of appearance and opinion, she felt her thoughts, none too cheerful or optimistic that morning during her long walk down the avenue, drawn by the expression upon the legless man's face to a sudden focus of triumph and solution. She struck the palm of one small workman-like hand with the back of the other, and ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... lofty chamber wherein I stood on that fateful afternoon. Liszt, with his powerful profile, the profile of an Indian chieftain, lounged in the window embrasure, the light streaking his hair, gray and brown, and silhouetting his brow, nose, and projecting chin. He alone was the illuminated focus of this picture which, after a half-century, is brilliantly burnt into my memory. His pupils were mere wraiths floating in a misty dream, with malicious white points of light for eyes. And I felt like a disembodied ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... by chemiotaxis, i.e. by sensitiveness to chemical substances in their surroundings—a property which is not peculiar to them but is possessed by various unicellular organisms, including motile bacteria. When the cell moves from a less to a greater degree of concentration, i.e. towards the focus of production, the chemiotaxis is termed positive; when the converse obtains, negative. This apparently purposive movement has been pointed out by M. Verworn to depend upon stimulation to contraction or the reverse. Metchnikoff showed that in animals immune to a given organism phagocytosis ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... story is then for me in more than usual sensitiveness to emotion. If this encounters the right focus (and heaven only knows why it is the "right" one) I get simultaneously a strong thrill of intense feeling, and an intense desire to pass it on to other people. This emotion may be any one of the infinitely varied ones which ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... Fenton's death he had reached the nadir of contrition and misery, and would have made confession, and sought for absolution, had the family given him the chance. He was in the mood for it, being run-down and broken-hearted. But Joseph's death had altered the focus of things for the moment, making Jimmy's affairs a secondary consideration, and after the reading of the will, Joseph's legacy had effectually destroyed any hope of peace, at least as far as Ida was concerned. ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated dramatic life. How may we see in them all that there is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.... While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... was not exactly a Paradise yet, though it is in a fair way of becoming one. It is a spot of some fifty acres reclaimed from the scrubbiest part of Wormwood Scrubbs, and made the focus of a club of working men, of whom I am very proud indeed to be one. Indeed, I do not see why throughout the remainder of this article I should not use the first person plural. I will. Well, then, we secured this spot, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... finishing touches on the Niagara plant. That will give them condensing machinery for over 90,000,000 horsepower, all told. As I see the thing, it looks absolutely as though, when that is done, the whole Capitalist system of the world will center right there—focus there, as at a point. Let kings and emperors continue to strut and mouth vain phrases; let our own President and Congress make the motions of governing; even let Wall Street play at finance and power. All, all ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... due to either astigmatism, nearsightedness, farsightedness, or weakness of the eye muscles. The farsighted eye is one in which parallel rays entering the eye, as from a distance, come to a focus behind the retina. The retina is the sensitive area for receiving light impressions in the back of the eyeball. Sight is really a brain function; one sees with the brain, since the optic nerve endings in the back of the eye merely carry ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... with infinite tentacles, approaching nearer and nearer to straight lines, the asymptotes, but never succeeding in meeting them. Suppress that term and you have the parabola, which vainly seeks in infinity its lost second focus; you have the trajectory of the bombshell; you have the path of certain comets which come one day to visit our sun and then flee to depths whence they never return. Is it not wonderful thus to formulate the orbit of the worlds? I thought so then and ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... topsy-turvydom which has marked the passage of the last ten years, the tremendously accelerated velocity with which labour is moving towards emancipation from all control, have so confused things in general that an observer must stand back and get a new focus before he can allow his mind to dwell on the things that he sees. One day's issue of any good newspaper is enough to show what a revolution is upon us, for we merely need to run the eye down columns at random to pick out suggestive little ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... sterile) by its pragmatic treatment of the problem of knowledge. As the views of knowledge, reality and truth imputed to humanism have been those so far most fiercely attacked, it is in regard to these ideas that a sharpening of focus seems most urgently required. I proceed therefore to bring the views which I impute to humanism in these respects into focus as ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... of the ground. In the centre of this pavilion I stood alone, happy to have got clear away from those terrible beasts and the gaze of their steadfast eyes. As I stood there, I became conscious of the fact that the nebulous light of the place was concentrating itself into a focus on the columned wall opposite to me. It grew there, became intenser, and then spread, revealing, as it spread, a series of moving pictures that appeared to be scenes actually enacted before me. For the figures in the pictures were living, and they moved before ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... so far, that it is possible by just a touch to convert the noblest sentiment into commonplace. No more than a touch is necessary. The parabolic mirror will reflect the star to a perfect focus. The elliptical mirror, varying from the parabola by less than the breadth of a hair, throws an image which is useless. But Mr. Cardew was far more wrong than he was right. He did not take into account that what his wife ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... all action, the key, in the last resort, to all suffering. Whether we call it a fact or a truth, a power or a doctrine, it is that in which the differentia of Christianity, its peculiar and exclusive character, is specifically shown; it is the focus of revelation, the point at which we see deepest into the truth of God, and come most completely under its power. For those who recognise it at all it is Christianity in brief; it concentrates in itself, as in a germ of infinite potency, all that the wisdom, power ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... going from Clark's headquarters to the fort. It was a peremptory demand for unconditional surrender. Hamilton refused, and fighting was fiercely resumed from behind rude breastworks meantime erected. Every loop-hole and opening of whatever sort was the focus into which the unerring backwoods rifles sent their deadly bullets. Men began to fall in the fort, and every moment Hamilton expected an assault in force on all sides of the stockade. This, if successful, would mean inevitable massacre. Clark had warned ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... ten to twelve seconds, accompanied by a rumbling noise. The line of disturbance was from north to south, striking the Mendips, and traversing parts of the shires of Somerset and Gloucester. 'The chief focus of oscillation was at Cheddar, where the hill is said to have waved to and fro during several seconds; and in the alluvial flat or marsh below Cheddar, some houses had the plaster of the ceilings cracked; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... From the hour when the news of the sinking of the Lusitania came over the wires, Italy began to mutter and shout. The months of hesitation were ended. There were elements enough of hate, and Germany had given them all focus. "Fuori i Barbari!" I bought a sheet from the old woman who went hurrying up the street shouting hoarsely,—"Fuori i Barbari!" ... ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... a fairly recent afternoon spent in an English garden with English friends. The question of pronunciation came up. Now you will readily see that with them and their compactness, their great public schools, their two great Universities, and their great London, the one eternal focus of them all, both the chance of diversity in social customs and the tolerance of it must be far less than in our huge unfocused country. With us, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... observatories where the astronomers were nightly beholding new evidences of threatening preparations in Mars, the kings and queens of the old world felt that they could not remain at home; that their proper place was at the new focus and centre of the whole world—the city of Washington. Without concerted action, without interchange of suggestion, this impulse seemed to seize all the old world monarchs at once. Suddenly cablegrams flashed to ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... again. Of course I focus my mind on America, not on France! You can't expect me to go jabbering French when I think of the times my friends will be having to-day on the other side of the Atlantic. I've had rather a brain throb though. We'll dress up after dinner in anything we can ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... his fame. He had carefully constructed a pair of spectacles through which his earlier poems were to be studied, and the public insisted on looking through them at his mature works, and were consequently unable to see fairly what required a different focus. He forced his readers to come to his poetry with a certain amount of conscious preparation, and thus gave them beforehand the impression of something like mechanical artifice, and deprived them of the contented repose of implicit faith. To the child a watch seems to be ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... surface of the sea and then traced their luminous way on the overhanging clouds. Another shift and the shining pathway reached to their very feet, illuminating with its radiance every object within its focus, down to the tiniest shell upon the beach. Esmay, startled, clung to her ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... is what is wanted, more than colour, diactinic lenses, multiplication of impressions, or anything else. And when it is remembered that the law of an ordinary convex lens is, the farther the object from the lens the nearer the focus, and, vice versa, the nearer the object the farther the focus, it becomes evident that by such an instrument distant objects must be made to appear near, and near objects ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... He doubted himself, and all the more noisily asserted his talent and the injustice of the world. He looked clean and energetic and desirous, but he had nothing on which to focus. He became an active but careless reporter on newspapers in Wichita, Des Moines, Kansas City, St. Louis, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Between times he sold real-estate and insurance and sets of travel books, for he had no pride of journalism; ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... at all. I am not sure that I have got the right focus yet. I know that the plans of a lifetime are upset; I can't get much ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... were preoccupied with more immediate things—with the evening's movies and the week-end's dance. But upon two young men in the class, it made a powerful impression. It crystallized within them certain vague conceptions and brought them to a conscious focus, enabling the young men to turn formless dreams into concrete acts. That is why I take the position that the above enthusiastic words of this sociology professor, whose very name I have forgotten, were the prime moving influence which many years later succeeded ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... in a disconnected sort of way," he said, evidently trying to focus his thoughts on a problem set by the gods, and which, in consequence, was incapable of logical solution by a mere mortal. "It was a fine night. I felt restless. The four walls of a room were prison-like. I strolled out. I was thinking of you. I ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... time in the quiet each day of our lives. We need this to get the kinks out of our minds and hence out of our lives. We need this to form better the higher ideals of life. We need this in order to see clearly in mind the things upon which we would concentrate and focus the thought-forces. We need this in order to make continually anew and to keep our conscious connection with the Infinite. We need this in order that the rush and hurry of our every-day life does not keep us away from the conscious ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... at the place he was heading for: the hot seat, Chief Scott's desk chair, bright under the TV spotlights, the center of every camera focus. ...
— Take the Reason Prisoner • John Joseph McGuire
... quickly, pointing to a figure in the corner of the proof, "do you see that six? Well, that tells the tale. Each plate of the series was numbered so in the apparatus. Number six could only fall into focus after numbers one, and two, and three, and four, and five, had first been photographed. We've only got the last—and least useful for our purpose. There must have been five earlier ones, showing every stage of the crime, if only ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... ones with the same eye, is the problem which the Maker of the eye had to solve. Let us look how man tried to solve it. A magnifying lens will collect the rays from any distant object, and convey them to a point called the focus. Then suppose we put this glass in the tube of an opera-glass, or pocket spy-glass, and look through the eye-hole and the concave lens, properly adjusted, in front of it, we shall see the image of the object considerably magnified. But suppose ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... a word of conclusion explaining that it was so would have been very natural, and its absence must have had some reason. It is also possible that the arrival of the Apostle in the Imperial City, and his unhindered liberty of preaching there, in the very centre of power, the focus of intellectual life, and the hot-bed of corruption for the known world, may have seemed to the writer an epoch which rounded off his story. But I think that the reason for the abruptness of the record's close is to be found in the continuity of the work of which it tells a part. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... average man. One of his favourite endeavours is to get the whole matter into a nutshell; to knock the four corners of the universe, one after another, about his readers' ears; to hurry him, in breathless phrases, hither and thither, back and forward, in time and space; to focus all this about his own momentary personality; and then, drawing the ground from under his feet, as if by some cataclysm of nature, to plunge him into the unfathomable abyss sown with enormous suns and systems, and among the inconceivable ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... everything in his favourite black and white or gray, and loses all the delights of gorgeous, though it may be deceptive, colouring. One man sees everything in the forcible light and shade of Rembrandt: a few heroes stand out conspicuously in a focus of brilliancy from a background of imperfectly defined shadows, clustering round the centre in strange but picturesque confusion. To another, every figure is full of interest, with singular contrasts and ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... bell began to ring in front of Roger. Without hesitation he adjusted a dial that brought the radar scanner into focus. When the screen remained blank, he made a second adjustment, and then a third and fourth, until the bright white flash of a meteor was seen on the scanner. He quickly grabbed two knobs, one in each hand, and twisted them to move two thin, plotting lines, one horizontal ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... are two points situated upon the line representing the major axis, and which are termed the foci when both are spoken of, and a focus when one only is referred to, foci simply being the plural of focus. These foci are equidistant from the centre of the ellipse, which is formed as follows: Two pins are driven in on the major axis to represent the foci A and B, Figure 75, and around these pins a loop of ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... such fervour that the child's suspicions are at once aroused. Previous experience has made him connect these excessive praises with articles which have aroused his distaste. If these fads and fancies on the part of the child are to be avoided, it is essential that we should do nothing to focus his attention on his refusal. It is better that his dinner should be curtailed on one occasion than that taste and appetite should be perverted perhaps for years. Every nurse or mother should cultivate an off-hand, ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... of the country. Chief among these stands the Bay of Islands. This noble sheet of water, with its hundred islands, its far-reaching inlets, its wooded coves and sheltered beaches, was for more than a quarter of a century the focus of whatever intellectual or spiritual light New Zealand enjoyed. Here the Gospel of Christ was first proclaimed, and the first Mission stations were established. Here were founded the first schools, the first printing press, the first theological college, the first library. Here ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... is brought to a single focus. There is one dish to dominate the cloth, a single bulk to which all other dishes are subordinate. If there be turkey, it should mount from a central platter. Its protruding legs out-top the candles. All other foods are, as it were, privates in Caesar's army. They do no more than flank the pageant. ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... though we were playing checkers instead of the game of life. He made no reply, but the spell was broken. I believe that both sides had been bluffing. In attempting to use my kodak while continuing the bluff, I brought matters to a focus. "What a picture you fellows will make," I said aloud, as my right hand slowly worked the kodak out of the case which hung under my left arm. Still keeping up a steady fire of looks, I brought the kodak in front of me ready to focus, and then touched the spring that ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... in him, and clear pregnant words ever ready,—or if soft methods would not serve, then by hard, and even hardest, he put down a great deal of miscellaneous anarchy in Norway; was especially busy against heathenism (devil-worship and its rites): this, indeed, may be called the focus and heart of all his royal endeavor in Norway, and of all the troubles he now had with his people there. For this was a serious, vital, all-comprehending matter: devil-worship, a thing not to be tolerated one moment longer than you could by any method help! Olaf's success ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... Paris anti-Semitism, had not—in spite of Drumont's exertions, and in spite of his paper, la Libre Parole, founded in 1892—achieved the dimensions of a genuine movement, nor was it destined to become one in the German sense. But it served as the focus for all kinds of discontents and resentments; it attracted certain serious critical spirits, too; its influence grew from day to day, and the position of the Jews ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... reputation rests. She was eminently fitted for this role by her pure character and fine intelligence; but she added to these the advantages of rank and fortune, which gave her ample facilities for creating a social center of sufficient attraction to focus the best intellectual life of the age, and sufficient power to radiate its light. Still it was the tact and discrimination to select from the wealth of material about her, and quietly to reconcile old traditions with the freshness of new ideas, that ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... wondrous centre of fertile and generous thoughts! What precious and life-giving rays would stream incessantly from this focus of charity, emancipation, and love! What great things might be attempted what magnificent examples given to the world! What a divine mission! What an irresistible tendency towards good might be impressed on the whole human race by ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... a mixture of spirits of ammonia and butyl mercaptan, but it did the job. Tallis coughed convulsively, turned his head away, coughed again, and opened his eyes. MacMaine tossed the stinking ampoule out into the corridor as Tallis tried to focus ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... in a dazed sort of way, as if she was trying to focus my face so as to recall me to her memory, and ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... has forgotten his knee-buckles, and has been obliged to send a boat up to town to hunt for them," coolly rejoined the captain, while he sought the focus of the glass, and levelled it at the vessel in question. The look was long and steady, and twice Captain Truck lowered the instrument to wipe the moisture from his own eye. At length, he called out, to the amazement ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... of work well and thoroughly done, pick a busy man. The man of leisure postpones and procrastinates, and is ever making preparations and "getting things in shape"; but the ability to focus on a thing and do it is the talent of the man seemingly o'erwhelmed with work. Women in point lace and diamonds, club habitues and "remittance men"—those with all the time there is—can never be entrusted to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... becomes the arbiter in a literary and philosophic matter." "And so," begins our author, "you wish to know, my dear Theophilus, WHERE I LOCATE GOD? I locate him in the centre of the universe, or, in better phrase, at the central focus, which must exist somewhere, of all the stars that make the universe, and which, borne onward in a common movement, gravitate together around ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... Civil War was picturesquely set forth in Emerson's "Journal." The War had unrolled a map of the Union, he said, and hung it in every man's house. There was a universal shifting of attention, if not always from the province or section to the image of the nation itself, at least a shift of focus from one section to another. The clash of arms had meant many other things besides the triumph of Union and the freedom of the slaves. It had brought men from every state into rude jostling contact with one another and had developed a new social and human ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... astray. As it was, prose in this country, when euphuism invaded it, could already show seven centuries of development, and, moreover, development along the broad and national lines of common or vulgar speech. Euphuism was after all only part of the general tendency of the age to focus everything that was good in politics, religion, and art, on the person and immediate surroundings of the sovereign; and the history of the eighteenth century, which saw the last issue of the series of Euphues reprints, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... in some coast town that was once a watering-place, and is now a port, where the genteel streets are silent and grass-grown, and the docks and warehouses busy and resonant, the life at the Hall has changed its focus, and no longer radiates from the parlour, but from the kitchen and ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... the north- west, on one of the higher reaches of the Enyong Creek, and a two days' journey for her by water. The lads lived at a town called Ikpe, an old slave centre, that had been in league with Aro, and the focus of the trade of a wide and populous area. It was a "closed" market, no Calabar trader being allowed ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... long passage to a second corridor. There was a chance that he might meet Clementina, but he reached his room without encountering any one. It was a large vaulted apartment with a single window, a deep embrasure in the thick wall that seemed to focus like a telescope some forgotten, sequestered part of the leafy garden. While washing his hands, gazing absently at the green vignette framed by the dark opening, his attention was drawn to a movement of the foliage, stirred ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... glass, but by the time he could focus it to fit his eyes, the man had re-mounted, riding south, and there was only the dead girl left there where she fell, an Indian girl they both knew, Anita, daughter of Miguel, the major-domo of Mesa Blanca, whose own little rancheria was ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... remarkable; in every interval of labour, tending the cattle, carrying water, the spindle and distaff, as in the days of Xerxes, is never out of their hands. The children are as assiduously at work, from the moment their little fingers, can turn the spindle. About Ambelakia, the former focus of the cotton-yarn trade, the peasantry has suffered dreadfully from this, though formerly the women could earn as much in-doors, as their husbands in the field; at present, their daily profit (1881) does not exceed twenty paras, if ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... stepped to one side, so that the light from the lamp shone from behind him, and he wondered if the picture had been condemned to hang with its face to the wall because it typified the existent rather than the past. He looked more closely, and drew back step by step, until he was in the proper focus to bring out every expression in the lovely face. In the picture he saw each moment a greater resemblance to Jeanne. The eyes, the hair, the sweetness of the mouth, the smile, brought to him a vision of Jeanne herself. The woman ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... of any one of them, he is sure to disgust the rest; if he select particular men from among them all, it is a hazard that he disgusts them all. Those who are left out, however divided before, will soon run into a body of opposition, which, being a collection of many discontents into one focus, will without doubt be hot and violent enough. Faction will make its cries resound through the nation, as if the whole were in an uproar, when by far the majority, and much the better part, will seem for awhile, as it were, ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... playing in the yard. Sally's eyes came to a focus upon him, crouching by a hole in the fence which kindly old Mrs. Wallingford had erected as a protection against the prying inquisitiveness of an eight-year-old determined to make life ...
— The Calm Man • Frank Belknap Long
... in my unnatural position for many minutes before I began to suffer agonies, agonies not only physical but mental; for standing there like some prisoner of the Inquisition, it came to me how this dismantled apartment must be the focus of the dreadful ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... with a decided preference for a warmer winter climate, and the ruby-crown's chief distinguishing characteristics are told. These rather confusing relatives would be less puzzling if it were the habit of either to keep quiet long enough to focus the opera-glasses on their crowns, which it only rarely is while some particularly promising haunt of insects that lurk beneath the rough bark of the evergreens has to be thoroughly explored. At ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... trained archaeologists. It is the outcome of a recommendation made by the Archaeological Joint Committee, a body recently established, on the initiative of the British Academy and at the request of the Foreign Office, to focus the knowledge and experience of British scholars and archaeologists and to place it at the disposal of the Government when advice or information is needed upon matters connected with archaeological science. The Committee is composed of representatives of the principal ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... circulation: of the parties themselves there was little trace in matters really and directly practical. Throughout the whole seventh century the annual public elections to the civil magistracies, especially to the consulship and censorship, formed the real standing question of the day and the focus of political agitation; but it was only in isolated and rare instances that the different candidates represented opposite political principles; ordinarily the question related purely to persons, and it ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... muscles, nerves, and veins with blood in them, and yet the head lost nothing by that. There was then a France, Monsieur. The province had an existence, subordinate doubtless, but real, active, and independent. Each government, each office, each parliamentary centre was a living intellectual focus. The great provincial institutions and local liberties exercised the intellect on all sides, tempered the character, and developed men. And now note well, Durocher! If France had been centralized formerly as to-day, your dear Revolution never would have occurred—do you understand? ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of short focus, every object situated beyond a distance of three yards from the apparatus is in focus. In exceptional cases, where the operator might be nearer the object to be photographed, the focusing would be done by means of the rack of the objective. The latter can also slide up and down, so that the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... rock crystal, about an inch and a half in diameter, and nearly an inch thick, having one plain and one convex surface, and somewhat rudely shaped and polished which, however gives a tolerably distinct focus at the distance of 4 1/2 inches from the plane side, and which may have been used either as a magnifying glass or to concentrate the rays of the sun. The form is slightly oval, the longest diameter being one and six-tenths inch, the shortest one and four-tenths inch. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... violin. Partly from age, and partly from a too convivial life, the old, heavily veined hands trembled so that he could scarcely unbutton his overcoat, or handle his cup of hot coffee. His head shook too, and his kind, rheumy eyes, in their endeavor to focus themselves, seemed to flicker back and forth in their sockets. The child used to watch him, fascinated, as he fumbled endlessly at the fastenings of his violin-case, and put back the top with uncertain ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... toward the hearth, pushed the cedar logs on it to a focus, and at their leaping blaze lighted the pipe which he took from his pocket. "Lopez," he said, "it strikes me that I am just in time to prevent some infamous plan of Fray Ignatius and ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... armchair, his feet comfortably elevated to the low rail about the stove, his pipe in mouth, his coat off, and his waistcoat unbuttoned. At the sight of his homely, jolly countenance, Bob experienced a pleasant sensation of slipping back from an environment slightly off-focus to the normal, accustomed and real. Nevertheless, at the first opportunity, he tested his new ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... absolutely now, while she stuck a long pin, a trifle fallaciously, into her hat—she had, with an approach to irritation, told her maid, a new woman, whom she had lately found herself thinking of as abysmal, that she didn't want her—she tried to focus the possibility of some understanding between them in consequence of which ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... a reigning monarch did not disdain to pick up a painter's pencil, and a whole city mourned an artist's death, and paid honours to his remains; all the rank, wealth, genius, talent, taste, and intelligence of the people were concentrated in one grand focus. Among the states of ancient Greece and modern Italy, the city was in fact the nation; and at Athens, Rome, Venice, and Florence, was collected all of genius, taste, and talent, the people as a body possessed. The mental qualities were thereby rendered more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... was a focus of recklessness and daring for more than a whole generation. The children born there had an inheritance of indifference to death such as has been surpassed nowhere in our frontier unless that were in the bloody Southwest. The men of this country, ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... willing to exhibit to an observant enquirer, is not so widespread, perhaps, as it should be, and the aim of this little book, this record of one page of geological history, has been to bring together the principal facts and wonders connected with it into the focus of a few pages, where, side by side, would be found the record of its vegetable and mineral history, its discovery and early use, its bearings on the great fog-problem, its useful illuminating gas and oils, ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... had ever thought or planned was thus concentrated as it were into one focus. The moment was come when he could subdue England, become master of the European world, and re-establish the Catholic faith in the form in which he professed it. When the fleet (on the 22nd July 1588) sailed out of Corunna, and the long-meditated, long-prepared, enterprise was now set in action, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... through a big magnifying glass," whispered Oliver, "at the point when everything is upside down and distorted from being out of focus." ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... big tree across the street. I'm sure he's watching the Foger house, and when Andy came to the door that time, I happened to look around and saw that man focus a pair of opera glasses ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... Torpenhow, not in the least with reference to past clowning. 'It would let you focus things at their proper worth and prevent your becoming slack in this hothouse of a town. Indeed it would, old man. I shouldn't have spoken if I hadn't thought so. Only, you make a ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... horrible demoniac force which knew no abatement. With the black night above them—with the fierce wind howling around them, sweeping across a broad expanse of hidden country, blowing as if it had arisen simultaneously from every point of the compass, and making those wanderers the focus of its ferocity—the two women walked through the darkness down the hill upon which Mount Stanning stood, along a mile and a half of flat road, and then up another hill, on the western side of which Audley Court lay in that sheltered valley, which seemed to shut in the old house from ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... closed. Jim crouched over the unconscious old man. He was in a state of utter perplexity. He could not quite gather what Parrish had been trying to tell him, and it was with difficulty that he could focus his mind upon the situation, so great had been the shock of finding his former ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... had not escaped the notice of the British military authorities, who welcomed any movement which might bring to a focus that resistance which had been so nebulous and elusive. Lord Kitchener having once seen the enemy fairly gathered into this huge cover, undertook the difficult task of driving it from end to end. For this enterprise General French was given the chief command, and ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... first impulse. Devoted to the improvement of the condition of the people, she was the moving spring of the charitable development of this great city. Her house, without any pedantic effort, had become the focus of a refined society, who, though obliged to show themselves for the moment in the great carnival, wear their masks, blow their trumpets, and pelt the multitude with sugarplums, were glad to find a place where they ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... readable by every educated man. The 'View' itself has been in a later edition eclipsed by the later 'History of the English Criminal Law.' In point of style it is perhaps better than its successor, because more concentrated to a single focus. Although I do not profess to be a competent critic of the law, a few words will explain the sense in which I take it to be characteristic ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... astronomical telescope have objectives of the standard focal length (focus to about 15 times diameter of aperture). The objective is mounted in the most approved manner and is ...
— Astronomical Instruments and Accessories • Wm. Gaertner & Co.
... a distance equal to one-half of the shield length, forming to the eye an elongated rectangle, in the center of which is the knob. The remaining quarter of the shield is hyperbolic in form with a small lozenge-shaped protrusion at the focus. The upper edge of the shield is not quite straight, an ornamental effect being produced by slight curves. In the center of the upper edge is a very small projection or sometimes a round incision, that might serve as ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... king. The act was equivalent to imposing upon him the conduct of the struggle against the Philistines, and so he understood it. The first signal for the attack was given by his son Jonathan, when he slew the necib of the Philistines at Gibeah. These in consequence advanced in force towards the focus of the revolt, and took up a position opposite Gibeah on the north, being divided from it only by the gorge of Michmash. Only a few hundred Benjamites ventured to remain with Saul. The struggle opened with a piece of genuine old heroic daring. While the ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... the senate,[909] and the despairing cry of Adherbal was being read to an assembly, to whom it could convey no new knowledge and on whom it could lay no added burden of perplexity. But emotion, although it cannot teach, may focus thought and clarify the promptings of interest. To many a loose thinker Adherbal's missive may have been the first revelation, not only of the shame, but of the possible danger of the situation. The facts were too well known to require detailed treatment. It was sufficient to remind the senate ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... to focus harder than ever. She wanted to be unselfish, and tell him the thing that was right to do, at any cost—though she had not realized how much Pennington's help and society had been to her. She felt ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... from the window, at breakfast. A gutter tearing its riotous way down the street, supplied by a whole night's rain, and clouds resting with the most resolute countenances on the whole face of the land. At the post-office—that universal focus of information—to which we wended in one of the intervals between the showers, we were told of admirable lodgings. On going to see them, they consisted of two little rooms, in a narrow lane. Then we were sent to another quarter, and found the accommodation still more inadequate; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... the boulders, propping the rifle up between the rocks, and adjusted the telescopic sights. The distant doorway sprang into sharp focus. Grunting with satisfaction, he settled down to his vigil. The rifle-barrel had been dulled down against detection by reflection, and Harry's dark glasses protected him against the glare of the morning sun. He might have to wait several ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... great outline of the theological struggles of that phase of civilisation and world unity which produced Christianity, was a persistent but unsuccessful attempt to get these two different ideas of God into one focus. It was an attempt to make the God of Nature accessible and the God of the Heart invincible, to bring the former into a conception of love and to vest the latter with the beauty of stars and flowers and the dignity of inexorable justice. There could be no finer metaphor ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... place, the action of the sun on terrestrial bodies, teaching them to regard his substance as a pure and elementary fire, they made it the focus and reservoir of an ocean of igneous and luminous fluid, which, under the name of ether, filled the universe and nourished all beings. Afterwards, having discovered, by a physical and attentive analysis, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... credulous, and inconsiderately generous to be a successful editor. If a paper could be conducted on purely altruistic principles, and without reference to profits, there would be no man fitter to occupy an editorial chair. For as an inspiring force, as a radiating focus of influence, his equal is not to be encountered "in seven kingdoms round." However, this inspiring force could reach a far larger public through published books than through the columns of a newspaper. It was therefore by no means in a regretful frame of mind that he descended from the editorial ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... almost over the floating logs, Barra abruptly transferred his focus of attention to his right rear, pulling with all the power of the boat's drive crystals. The craft swung violently, throwing a solid sheet of water over pier and shore, drenching the logs and ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... by a system of telegraph wires, called the Telegraph Bureau, of which James Crowley was superintendent and Eldred Polhamus deputy. There were three operators— Chapin, Duvall, and Lucas. A telegraph station was in each precinct—thus making thirty-two, all coming to a focus at head-quarters. These are also divided into five sections—north, south, east, west, and central. The Commissioners, therefore, sitting in the central office, can send messages almost instantaneously ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... sit with her when she is, of course, specially passive, she must receive a yet more marked influence. There is a photographic curiosity now often exhibited which, I think, illustrates the thought I want to emphasize. A family or a class can be photographed, one by one, at exactly the same focus and on the same negative, with a result that you have a clear and distinct face, not of any one's personality, but that actually combines the features of the whole into a new individual ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... delightful in its special surroundings, would fail to reach, much less hold, a large audience, not because of its simplicity, but often because of the want of skill in arranging material and of the artistic sense of selection which brings the interest to a focus and arranges the side lights. In short, the simplicity we need for the ordinary purpose is that which comes from ease and produces a sense of being able to let ourselves go, because we have thought out our effects. It is when we translate our instinct into art that ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... sweet-faced young woman, still carrying the little child who was so like her, and thus entered the large and pleasant living-room of the old house. In the embrasure of one broad window, seeming to focus all the light which streamed in freely through the thin, parted curtains, sat a woman in a gown of soft white wool, made with artistic simplicity. Her face had the same soft cream tint as her gown, and the hair, ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... weak point. They are close together, and seem to focus on the ground a few feet in front of his nose. At twenty yards to leeward he can never tell you from a stump or a caribou, should you chance ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... more than the faintest adumbration of what this place is. It is the place of power. Towards those higher modes of spirit which we speak of as "the universal," the law of man's inmost nature makes him as a lens, drawing into the focus of his own individuality all that he will of light and power in streams of inexhaustible supply; and towards the lower modes of spirit, which form for each one the sphere of his own particular world, man thus becomes the directive centre of ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... Tomorrow I shall bring to you the fact and the substance. I have lifted up the curtain and flooded it with the light of day. You shall have the fact for your senses. Tomorrow I shall explain it all. I shall deliver my greatest lecture; in which my whole Me has come to a focus. It is not spiritualism nor sophistry. It is concrete fact and common sense. The subject of my lecture tomorrow will be: 'The ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... the Arabella he found Peter Blood alone and very far gone in drink—a condition in which no man ever before remembered to have seen him. As Wolverstone came in, the Captain raised bloodshot eyes to consider him. A moment they sharpened in their gaze as he brought his visitor into focus. Then he laughed, a loose, idiot laugh, that yet somehow ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... as a definite focus of individual opinions which are either numerous or intense enough to constitute a recognizable force, and to exert a noticeable influence upon ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... pleasant warmth glowed in his frame. Starting from the stomach as from a focus, it spread to his chest, took possession of his limbs, and diffused itself throughout his flesh, like a warm and comforting tide, bringing pleasure with it. He felt better now, less impatient, less annoyed, and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... camera men in the shrubbery, where they can get the focus without bein' seen, and has rounded us up for ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... modern times,—has it no place in the natural history of literature? Shall it be mentioned only as an uncompleted something else,—as an abortive effort of thought,—as a crude melange of elements that have not been purified and fused together in the focus of the mind? And were the Muses right in refusing to admit it into their sacred realm ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... any of us could have kept the direction except by such an obvious and continuous landmark as the sea to our left. It hardly seemed worth while to focus my mind, but I did it occasionally just by way of testing myself. Schwartz still threw away his gold coins, and once, in one of my rare intervals of looking about me, I saw Denton picking them up. This surprised me mildly, but I was ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... reflections are imbedded in "drama" (or at least in narrative), and the total effect is more pleasing to present-day readers since we escape, or seem to escape, from the cool universality of humble life to a focus on an individual grief. To end on a grim note of generalized "doom," would have given the poem a temporary success such as it deserved; and it must be acknowledged that the knell-like sound of "No ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... a state like this may vary its form in, more or less richness and beauty of detail, but here is the focus of what makes life valuable. It is this spirit which makes poverty the best servant to the ideal of human nature. I am content with this type, and will only quote, in addition, a ballad I found in a foreign ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... what I am reading, and easily take in its meaning. The act of will, the effort of attention, the intending of the mind on each word and line of the page, just as the eyes are focussed on each word and line, is the power here contemplated. It is the power to focus the consciousness on a given spot, and hold it there Attention is the first and indispensable step in all knowledge. Atten. tion to spiritual things is the first ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... caused all eyes to focus upon the Montgomerys with a new intentness. Before her escapade they had been accepted as a matter of course; now that she had demonstrated that the Montgomerys were subject to the temptations that beset all mankind, every ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... succeeded an interval of peace—the calm before the storm. From every part of Spain, the most chivalric and resolute of the Moors, taking advantage of the pause in the contest, flocked to Granada; and that city became the focus of all that paganism in Europe possessed of brave ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book IV. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... to some metal uprights and struggling to focus his mind on what he was doing enough to forget that Delight Hathaway was on the other side of the partition when from the window above the bench he saw Cynthia Galbraith come rolling up to the gate in her runabout, accompanied ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... tibi virtutem fracta facit urceus ansa, Et tristis nullo qui tepet igne focus, Et teges et cimex et nudi sponda grabati, Et brevis atque eadem nocte dieque toga. O quam magnus homo es, qui faece rubentis aceti Et stipula et nigro pane carere potes. * * * * * Rebus in angustis facile est contemnere vitam: Fortiter ille ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... thoroughness they deserve. The story has the advantage of being to a great extent a narrative of the exploits of heroes, and the attention can be held almost the whole time to the deeds of particular actors who successively occupy the focus or play the principal parts on the stage. In this way the element of personal interest, which so greatly adds to the charm of a story, may ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... with the guards. Laetus, without any pretense of consultation with the dummy Emperor on the throne, spoke to the heralds and each stalked off to one focus of the ellipse of the arena. Thence each bellowed for silence, their deep-toned, resonant, loud, practiced voices carrying to the upper colonnade everywhere. Silence, deep already since Murmex received his death-wound and broken only by whispers, deepened. The amphitheater became almost ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... physical force they had just witnessed. He at once suppressed the memory of stories he had heard of "physical mediums" and their dangerous phenomena; for if these were true, and either his aunt or himself was unwittingly a physical medium, it meant that they were simply aiding to focus the forces of a haunted house already charged to the brim. It was like walking with unprotected lamps among uncovered ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Church's Founder as certainly had it. Nobody ever guided men more unfalteringly than He, and we need not doubt but that it was His instigation which turned the hearts of the village people to find a common focus for their thanksgiving. Mr. Clutton-Brock has felt the sting and owned to the need; he is in the stream, but is not a bold swimmer. I hope ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... unite Egypt under the rule of one man; we can only surmise that the feudal principalities had gradually been drawn together into two groups, each of which formed a separate kingdom. Heliopolis became the chief focus in the north, from which civilization radiated over the wet plain and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... Manchester. Since the construction of the Bridgewater Canal by Brindley, some fifty years before, the increase in the business transacted between the two towns had become quite marvellous. The steam-engine, the spinning-jenny, and the canal, working together, had accumulated in one focus a vast aggregate of population, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... unlovely, can resist their magic. That is because those arts can accomplish their function in the choice and development of some special situation, which lifts or glorifies a character, in itself not poetical. To realise this situation, to define, in a chill and empty atmosphere, the focus where rays, in themselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to burn, the artist may have, indeed, to employ the most cunning detail, to complicate and refine upon thought and passion a thousand-fold. ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... a princely fortune, Count d'Orsay spared neither trouble nor expense to render his house the focus of all that was rich and rare; and, with a spirit that does not always animate the possessor of rare works of art, he opened it to the young artists of the day, who were permitted to study in its ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... use; I'm just fighting mad," declared Frank to himself as he left the house. "I just hope Mace and Roseberry will do something to bring affairs to a focus. If this thing gets around the village, it will be a nice, pleasant thing for me, won't it, now? I've half a mind to make a break and ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... moral and religious problems of the family find a focus in the purpose of preparing persons for social living. The family justifies its cost to society in the contribution which it makes in trained and motived lives. As a religious family its first duty is to prepare the coming generation to live ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... quickly back, down the now peopled platform to the ticket barrier. As he did so his eyes and mind, trained to note all that was happening round him, together with an unconscious longing to escape from the one absorbing thought, made him focus those of his fellow-travellers who stood about him. They consisted for the most part of provincial men of business, and of young officers in uniform, each and all eager to prolong to the uttermost their golden moments in Paris; ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... get the room in focus. For I was inside a room, a room of some translucent substance, windowless, a skylight high above me, through which pink daylight streamed. Daylight—and it had been midnight in Charin! I'd come halfway around the ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... above said, that all great European art is rooted in the thirteenth century; and it seems to me that there is a kind of central year about which we may consider the energy of the middle ages to be gathered; a kind of focus of time which, by what is to my mind a most touching and impressive Divine appointment, has been marked for us by the greatest writer of the middle ages, in the first words he utters; namely, the year 1300, the "mezzo del cammin" of the life of Dante. Now, therefore, to Giotto, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... and business investment. Since the 1980s, inflation has fallen sharply and chronic trade deficits have been transformed into annual surpluses. Unemployment remains a serious problem, however, and job creation is the main focus of government policy. To ease unemployment, Dublin aggressively courts foreign investors and recently created a new industrial development agency to aid ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... ameliorating the condition of Gypsies. It is with pleasure that on this subject the following statement of facts is introduced, respecting two schools established in the neighbourhood of the metropolis. One of them at Kingsland, a situation which has been termed, "A focus where the most abandoned characters constantly assembled for every species of brutal and licentious disorder." The other is at Bowyer-lane, near Camberwell, a district inhabited by persons of the worst description; ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... at Columbia in South Carolina, I saw flagrant examples of carpet-bag rule; but of those in the State-house I have already spoken. Here was a focus of Southern feeling; and at the State University, which was charmingly situated, and altogether a most fitting home for scholars and thinkers, I was taken into the library where formerly stood the bust of Francis ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... club," Mrs. Ballinger continued, "is to concentrate the highest tendencies of Hillbridge—to centralise and focus its intellectual effort." ...
— Xingu - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... condenser is a necessary part of the optical outfit. Its purpose is to collect the beam of parallel rays of light reflected by the plane mirror, by virtue of a short focus system of lenses, into a cone of large aperture (reducible at will by means of an iris diaphragm mounted as a part of the condenser), which can be accurately focussed on the plane of the object. This focussing must be performed anew for each object, ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... depends very much on what we wish to see. The interpretation adopted is still, in a sense, the result of suggestion, but of one particular suggestion which the fancy of the moment determines. Or, to put it another way, the caprice of the moment causes the attention to focus itself in a particular manner, to direct itself specially to certain aspects ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... objective" or "the military objective" (page 55), when unqualified, ordinarily indicates the mental objective. The term is properly applicable to a physical objective when the context makes the meaning clear. Ordinarily, and always when clarity demands, a tangible focus of effort is ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... cigar and magazine shop on the corner is the political and social focus of the neighbourhood. I shall never forget the pallid and ghastly countenance of the newsdealer when the rumour first went the rounds that "Hampy" was elected. Every evening a little gathering of local sages meets in ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... The Greeks collected into one focus all that they found of beauty in art from many distant sources—Egyptian, Indian, Assyrian—and thus fired their inborn genius, which thenceforth radiated its splendour over the whole ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... seen this star of my youth expire, this burning focus of my eyes and heart extinguished! I have seen the shutters of the window closed for many a long year on the funereal darkness of that little room. One year, one day, I saw them once more opened. I looked to see who dared to live ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... in h—l are you doing with that machine gun? You've got it clean out of focus. Here, Jose, come in closer—that's right. Steady there now, and don't forget, at the second whistle you and Pete are dead. Here, you, Pete, how in thunder do you think you can die there? You're all out of the picture and hidden by that there sage brush. That's no place to die. And, ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... astronomy as Kepler's laws, are three in number. The first law is, that the planets describe ellipses around the sun, which is placed in their common focus; the second, that a line joining a planet and the sun sweeps over equal areas in equal times; the third, that the squares of the times of revolution of the planets about the sun are proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from that body. The first two laws were discovered by Kepler in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... common centre of gravity before their constituent masses have coalesced with one another. In a larger nebula, these local aggregations may have concentrated into rotating spheroids of vapour, while yet they have made but little approach towards the general focus of the system. In a still larger nebula, where the local aggregations are both greater and more remote from the common centre of gravity, they may have condensed into masses of molten matter before the general distribution of them has greatly altered. ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... consideration which held me to this impersonal relation to the problem. I refer to the fact that the Great War had brought to a focus in my own soul the inward and largely unconscious spiritual development of a decade. I had discovered, through [4] much tribulation of mind and heart, the ideal which I sought to serve, and disclosed to myself at least the picture of the realization of this ideal in institutional form. ...
— A Statement: On the Future of This Church • John Haynes Holmes
... half risen, the better to focus an opera-glass on the box. The gong solemnly announced the second act, and Alice moved her chair to face the stage. Once more Montani scanned the party with his glass. As the lights faded Alice, ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... hour the body may be dog-tired, the mind is white and lucid, like that of a man from whom a fever has abated. It is bare of illusions. It has a sharp focus, small and star-like, as a clear and lonely flame left burning by the altar of a shrine from which all have gone but one. A book which approaches that light in the privacy of that place must come, as it were, with ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... was a lady of graceful and simple manners, fair complexion, blue eyes, and auburn hair, with a rich and exquisite voice, that still thrills my memory with the echo of its vanished music. She was highly educated for her day, when Annapolis was the focus of intellect and fashion for Maryland, and its fruits shone through her conversation, and colored and completed her natural eloquence, which my father used to say would have made her an orator, if it had not been thrown away ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... Martin dropped his pipe on the hearth and fixed his dim eyes on the stranger's face. Back rolled the years that had been but stagnant pools in poor Martin Morley's life; into focus came the simple hates and injustices that had brought him where ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... of valuable inventions, unscrupulous men had tried to steal his ideas and models. To prevent this Tom had arranged a system of burglar alarms, and had also fitted up a wizard camera that would take moving pictures of anyone coming within its focus. The camera could be set to work at night, in connection ...
— Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone • Victor Appleton
... datum erratum focus formula genus larva medium memorandum nebula radius series species stratum ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... produced many changes in the Stock Exchange. The share market, which previously had been occupied by only four or five brokers and a number of small jobbers, now became a focus of vast business. Certain brokers, it is said, made L3,000 or L4,000 a day by their business. One fortunate man outside the house, who held largely of Churnett Valley scrip before the sanction of the Board of Trade was procured, sold at the best price directly the announcement was made, and ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... discovers grandeur, beauty, or truth according as the quality abides in the seer. In this view Balder or Don Quixote was no more insane than other people. Their eyes bore true witness to what was in their minds, and the sanest eyes can do no more. Their minds were, perhaps, out of focus; but who can ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... King, the warmest and almost last adherent of his family, said that there was not a vice or crime of which he was not guilty; as for his foes, they scorned to harm him even when in their power. In the year 1745 he came down from the Highlands of Scotland, which had long been a focus of rebellion. He was attended by certain clans of the Highlands, desperadoes used to freebootery from their infancy, and consequently to the use of arms, and possessed of a certain species of discipline; with these he defeated ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... loaded; those amidships being direct for the main-channels of the enemy's ship, while those abaft the beam were gradually trained more and more forward, and those before the beam more and more aft, so as to throw all their shot nearly into one focus, giving directions that they were all to be fired at once, at the word of command. The enemy, not aware of the cause of the delay, imagined that the fire of the Aurora had slackened, and loudly cheered. ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
