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More "Slowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... has been a perfect and at the same time an economical mixer. Concrete can be mixed by hand and the materials well incorporated, but this is an expensive and man-killing method, as the handling of the wet mass by the shovel is extremely hard work, besides which the slowness of the method allows part of a large batch to set before the other is mixed, so that small batches, with attendant extra handling, are necessary to make a good job. Mixers with a multiplicity of knives to toss the material have been used, but ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... slowness usually in parents found, Induced the girl, whose heart by LOVE was bound; To celebrate the Hymeneal scene, As in the statutes of Cythera's queen. Our legendary writers this define A present contract, where they nothing sign; The thing is common;—marriage made in haste: LOVE'S ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... observable. The movement, such as it is, is accelerated, and the whole structure of society in America is becoming affected more or less for good or evil, and very often for evil, through the extreme tenacity or slowness of those who ought to be leaders in every revolution of thought, but who, on this subject, are pleased to leave their places to the unqualified and the fanatical. Wise men will be sorry presently. When Faraday was asked to go and see Hume, to see a heavy table lifted without ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... for the present break off my arduous work of educating the Press. We shall resume our studies later on; but just now I am tired of playing the preceptor; and the eager thirst of my pupils for improvement does not console me for the slowness of their progress. Besides, I must reserve space to gratify my own vanity and do justice to the six artists who acted my play, by placing on record the hitherto unchronicled success of the first representation. It is not often that ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... words came with a slowness that meant finality. "Why need to-morrow or a year from now be different from to-day unless we make ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... who had served under William of Orange in Ireland, and afterwards under the Duke of Savoy in Piedmont, disappointed with the slowness of his promotion, had taken service under Louis XIV., and was now employed as a partizan chief in the suppression of his former co-religionists in Languedoc. Like all renegades, he was a bitter and furious persecutor; and in the councils ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... relief that the nurse came back and said quietly, "You've talked enough." As she walked to the door, Eleanor found that her will was focused on the operation of her feet, commanding them to move with decent slowness. Had she obeyed her impulse, she should have run. She forced herself to turn at the door and smile back, forced herself to bridle her emotions and go quietly to breakfast and to her ordeal with the lightning ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... average length, and counted the number of rings in each inch, beginning at the center, thus:" And then follows a table of figures filling a page. "Of those eight, average growth about one seventh of an inch per year. Calling the smallest number of rings in an inch in each tree one, the comparative slowness of growth of the inches is thus expressed." Then follows another carefully prepared table of figures. Before one is done with these pages one fairly suspects the writer is mad, the results are so useless, and so utterly fail to add to our ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... blows away that froth in time, and then—as for example after the Suffragette antics—the real argument behind the capers and the words becomes known. Thus in England all revolutions are gradual, and in their very slowness lies their ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... Abraham Froth and his friends of the 'Hebdomadal Meeting', all 'Grave, Serious, Designing Men in their Way' have a confused notion in 1711 of the Methuen Treaty of 1703 as 'the Act for importing French wines,' with which they are much offended. The slowness and confusion of their ideas upon a piece of policy then so familiar, gives point to the whimsical solemnity of their ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of those dreams were now for ever impossible, others only possible on terms that she trembled even to think of. Perhaps it was worst of all to reflect that she was in some measure responsible for his change of religion; she fancied that it was through her slowness to respond to light, her delaying to confide in him, that he had been driven through impatience to take this step. And so week after week went by and she dared not ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... that did that deed was no other than the hand of the Venetian girl, Paolina Foscarelli," said the lawyer, with deliberate and impressive slowness, emphasizing his words with extended forefinger as he ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... than a lightning (conductor) flash to seize any situation in which I am concerned. But I don't need to tell you that! You, too, have married a Britisher, and know just how much that dear old American joke about English slowness of comprehension amounts to—unless the ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... University is based entirely on the mediaeval principle of mnemonics, and as there are no examinations, no degrees, no limits to the duration of any given course, nor is any disgrace attached to slowness in learning, it is not surprising that many students, coming as youths, linger by the fountain of Kairouiyin till their hair is gray. One well-known oulama has lately finished his studies after twenty-seven years at the University, and is justly proud of the length of his ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... with seemingly infinite slowness, with all the hundreds of straining, thrusting, clumsy pushpots clinging to it and pushing it ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... as these that this winter at length drew to an end, while my prospects of getting to Germany gradually grew more hopeful, though with a slowness that sorely tried my patience. I had kept up a continuous correspondence with Dresden respecting Rienzi, and in the worthy chorus-master Fischer I at last found an honest man who was favourably disposed to me. He sent me reliable and reassuring reports ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... side. Seen from this distance, they looked like bright-colored beetles flying through the air; the motion appeared slow, and the throwing out of the horses' fore and hind legs almost mechanical. But in spite of the apparent slowness, they cleared the ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... acutely felt as he becomes more intelligent and more sensitive; and thus there has arisen a number of sorrows which poor humanity has tried to relieve by all the means in its power. Humanity in its misery has put question after question to science, and has lost patience at the slowness of the advance of knowledge. It has declared that the answers already found by science are futile and of little interest. But science, confident of its methods, has quietly continued to work. Little by little the answers to some of the questions ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... wife and her friend had got it into their heads that they must go both to Vienna and Berlin. Was Berlin much out of the way in going from Vienna to Paris? He said they told him it was n't. At any rate, he must get round at such a date: he had no time to spare. Then, besides the slowness of getting on, there were the trunks. He lost a trunk in Switzerland, and consumed a whole day in looking it up. While the steamboat lay at the wharf at Rorschach, two stout porters came on board, and shouldered his ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... parties to carry wire and stakes up to the front line. These journeys were made through heavy shelling, and we were always thankful to return safely. My policy was never to allow the pace to become that of the slowest man, for there was no limit to such slowness. I myself set a pace, which I knew to be reasonable, and men who straggled interviewed me next day. By this policy the evening's work was completed in two-thirds of the time it would otherwise have taken, and my disregard of proverbial maxims probably ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... the great day of the cake-baking he came in earlier than usual, with his hands quite full of letters and parcels. All the girls made a rush for him at once; but he fended them off with an elbow, while with teasing slowness he read the ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... the breeze; and having hitherto seen them hanging lazily by their claws to boughs, I was surprised at the rapidity of their movements. I have often heard people assert that the sloth spends his torpid existence in a perpetual state of pain, from the peculiar sighing noise he makes, and the slowness of his movements when placed on the ground. In the first place, I cannot believe that God has created any animal to pass an existence of pain. The fact is, that the sloth is formed to live in trees, to climb, and to feed on leaves, and not to walk on the ground. Though ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Lady Martindale, with the slowness of one little wont to originate a scheme, 'how pleasant it would be, if we could keep Arthur and Violet always with us. I cannot bear to part with the dear children, and I am sure they will all be ill again if they go ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at inopportune moments, and greatly to the annoyance of the sufferer. This is sometimes accompanied by a sense of fulness in the head, a giddiness, and dulness of the brain, sometimes going so far as to cause an uncertainty in the step, a slowness of comprehension, and a feeling as if one might fall at any moment in some sort ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... The slowness of these proceedings drove the English wild with impatience. Winchester had hoped to bring the trial to an end before the campaign; to have forced a confession from the prisoner, and have dishonored King ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... first time Swan knocked her senseless. When she recovered, the sheep-wagon was rocking her in its uneasy journey to the distant range. Swan's cruelties multiplied with his impatience at her slowness to master the shepherd's art. The dogs were sullen creatures, unused to a woman's voice, unfriendly to a woman's presence. Swan insisted that she lay aside her woman's attire and dress as a man to gain the ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... many feet in depth gradually accumulated on the floors of the caverns, slowly filling them up. And that, in some cases at least, this cave residence ended a very long time ago, we are assured, for since then a great thickness of stalagmite, which is deposited with extreme slowness, has spread over the lower cave ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... which come over are rejected as they carry with them traces of water remaining in the salt. The platinum receiver is then attached, and the heat increased, allowing the decomposition to proceed with a certain degree of slowness. The receiver is then surrounded with a mixture of ice and salt, and from this moment all the hydrofluoric acid is condensed as a limpid liquid, boiling at 19.5 deg., very hygroscopic, and, as is well known, giving abundant fumes in presence of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... Stillman, Mrs., sister-in-law of W.J. Stillman, Paul, brother of W.J. Stillman, Russie, son of W.J. his illness his death Stillman, Thomas B., brother of W.J. Stillman, William James early life and training religious experience intellectual slowness love of nature and struggles of conscience runs away from home returns attends school in New York city, living with his eldest brother goes to a school at De Ruyter, N.Y. mental slowness disappears college education decided on by the family continues preparation ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... battle, and repulsed the enemy. The Spaniard, as often as he had done before, so now with great earnestness sent to the duke of Parma, to send forty fly-boats, without which they could not fight with the English, because of the greatness and slowness of their ships, and the agility of the English, entreating him by all means now to come to sea with his army, which army was now to be protected as it were, under the wings of the Spanish Armada, until ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... O di Giotto!" ("Thou art rounder than Giotto's circle"). This proverb can be called beautiful not only from the occasion that gave it birth, but also for its significance, which consists in the double meaning; tondo being used, in Tuscany, both for the perfect shape of a circle and for slowness ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... when she was sitting meditatively in the room set apart for her use, Alton passed the half-opened door, and noticing the curious slowness of his pace she signed him to enter. She had, somewhat to the indignation of Mrs. Margery, taken the room in hand, and with the aid of a few sundries surreptitiously brought from Vancouver with Seaforth's connivance, made a transformation in its aspect. A red ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... with painful slowness, as though suddenly grown old, the reprieved assassin rode away up the mountain, his head low, his ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... to whatever incivility might, at any rate, attach to the question; and some did attach, that was clear, even if warbled through an air of Cherubini's and accompanied on the flute. Perhaps they were not idiots, and only seemed to be such from the slowness of apprehension naturally connected with deafness. That I saw them but seldom, arose from their peculiar position in the family. Their father had no private fortune; his income from the church was very slender; and, though considerably ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... added, as showing the slowness of reform, that even when, in 1828, two medical superintendents were appointed at Bethnal Green, no less than seventy, out of four hundred patients, were in irons; there was no bath, no book or newspaper, and little ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... reacted upon PREMIER. He spoke with unusual slowness, further developing tendency of recent growth to drop his voice at end ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... together on horseback, the married have ever been warned, one must ride behind. And when two people are speaking slowly one must needs be the slowest. Comparative success implies the comparative failure. But where this actor or that actress fails, the great cause of slowness profits, obviously. The record is advanced. Pshaw! the word "advanced" comes unadvised to the pen. It is difficult to remember in what a fatuous theatrical Royal Presence one is doing this criticism, and how one's ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... The Giant had now pushed off his slippers, and was waiting until the men should bring his boots; and as one lazy fellow was poking around, as if he was half asleep, Tur-il-i-ra was so irritated at his slowness that he slipped the toe of his stockinged foot under him, and gave him a tremendous send right out of the door, and he went flying over the trees at the bottom of the lawn, and over the barley-field on the other side of the ditch, and over the pasture, where the cows were ...
— Ting-a-ling • Frank Richard Stockton
... obediently after him and Raven, though he saw in her slowness the hesitating desire to express her distaste for putting any one out, paid no attention but went on ahead ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... who will not tire his horse at the beginning of a long day's journey, and knows not where he shall pass the night, he was aware of a man on foot coming up behind him at a slow, steady, loping, wolf-like trot, which in spite of its slowness gained ground on him so fast, that he saw at once that the man could ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... fallacies of Malobservation. Malobservation may be due to obtuseness or slowness of perception; and it is one advantage of the physical sciences as means of education, that the training involved in studying them tends to cure these defects—at least, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... opportunity to take in all the details of her costume, and he did so with a practised, sophisticated eye. It was, after all, of a fashion two years old, evidence of the slowness with which the modes reached these outposts of civilization. Here was a perfect fitting blue frock of the then popular changeable gros de zane, the skirt very wide, set on the body in large plaits, one in front, one on each side and two behind. The sleeves also were wide from shoulder ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... repulsion, took its place, a look of consciousness of her own high breeding—a pride, not of life, but of circumstance of life, which disappointed me in the midst of so much that was very lovely. Her voice was sweet, and I could have fancied a tinge of sadness in it, to which impression her slowness of speech, without any drawl in it, contributed. But I am not doing well as an artist in describing her so fully before my reader has become in the least degree interested in her. I was seeing her, and no words ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... direction, and as the crowd was then scattering, there appeared in the midst of them, and advancing with the slowness of a phantom, a human being, bent, lean, entirely naked, and covered down to his flanks with long hair bristling with dried leaves, dust and thorns. About his loins and his knees he had wisps of straw and linen rags; his soft ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... mixture of dog and wolf. He was a sleek and lively little fellow from the beginning, for there was no division of mother strength and attention. He developed with the true swiftness of the wolf-whelp, and not with the slowness ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... that Catherine, perspiring under the sultriness of the August evening, thought him the coolest person she had ever seen. He greeted her with gallantry when introduced, and, though he spoke English with slowness, his pronunciation was ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... not with the city, but with the United States. Its postal arrangements are at best erratic, at worst miserable. Letters which would be delivered in London in three or four hours take in New York anywhere from six to sixteen hours. It was a long time before I realised and learned to allow for the slowness of the postal service. At first I used mentally to accuse my correspondents of great dilatoriness in attending to notes that called for an immediate reply. On one occasion I posted in Madison Square at 3 P.M. a letter addressed to the Lyceum Theatre, not a quarter of ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... comply with his sister's wish and to go off at once without delay. He seized his staff and started away, but stopped now and then for his brother-in-law and his suite, to whom he gave a good chiding for their slowness.[FN423] They continued thus their march until they came to the palace of the queen, the ugly king's sister; but when they arrived there the one-eyed king cried with a roaring voice to his sister, and asked her what she wished, as she had ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... speech (says Bacon in his ESSAYS) without a good speech of interlocution, shews slowness; and a good reply or second speech, without a good settled speech, sheweth shallowness and weakness. As we see in beasts, that those that are weakest in the course, are yet nimblest in the turn; as it is betwixt ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... like to take it as God gives it to me; not before he gives it to me. This slowness—or faith—or whatever it is, is one of my inheritances from my blessed father. Who is it that says, 'I'd see to it pretty sharp that I didn't hurry Providence.' ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... The celebrated FABIUS MAXIMUS in his boyhood was called in derision "the little sheep," from the meekness and gravity of his disposition. His sedateness and taciturnity, his indifference to juvenile amusements, his slowness and difficulty in learning, and his ready submission to his equals, induced them to consider him as one irrecoverably stupid. The greatness of mind, unalterable courage, and invincible character, which Fabius afterwards displayed, they then imagined had lain concealed ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... undertaken. My patience, which nothing exhausts, the fruit of my miserable childhood, ripened under this last trial. The count was delighted when he could jeer at me for not putting in practice the principles or the rules he had explained; if I reflected before I played he complained of my slowness; if I played fast he was angry because I hurried him; if I forgot to mark my points he declared, making his profit out of the mistake, that I was always too rapid. It was like the tyranny of a schoolmaster, the despotism of the rod, of which I can really ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... Livingstone acknowledged the kindness of the Directors, with whom, for sixteen years, he had never had a word of difference. He referred to the slowness of the African tribes, in explanation of the comparatively small progress of the gospel among them. He cordially acknowledged the great services of the British squadron on the West Coast in the repressing of the slave-trade. He had been told that to make such explorations as he was engaged ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... now undertaken. But a strange fastidiousness, a most uncharacteristic anxiety about the smallest matters, delayed him through every stage of his present undertaking. Mrs. Peckover, who came every morning to see how he was getting on, was amazed at the slowness of his progress. He was, from the first, morbidly scrupulous in keeping the board smooth and clean. After he had shaped it, and fitted it to its upright supports; after he had cut in it (by Mrs. Peckover's ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... and slowness of the Dutch character, was to give to their art yet another distinctive feature,—finish, which was carried to the very extreme of possibility. It is truly said that the leading quality of the people may be found in their ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... on the ship's books for a three years' viage, an' no help for it. I feel nigh to six hundred years old when I think how long that viage was. There isn't no hour-glass as runs slow enough to keep a tally of the slowness of them fust hours. But I done my duty like a man, seem' there wasn't no way of gettin' out of it. I told my shipmates of the trick as had been played on me, an they tried to cheer me up a bit; but I was sore sorrowful for ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... required the same. There he meditated awhile with himself how he might counterplot and bring the bear to disgrace (who he knew loved him not) and himself to honor; at last he came forth, and said, "Dear uncle Bruin, you are exceeding welcome. Pardon my slowness in coming, for at your first speech I was saying my even song, and devotion must not be neglected. Believe me, he hath done you no good service, nor do I thank him which hath sent you this weary and long journey, in which your much sweat and toil far exceeds the worth ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... possess. Besides this, you must remember that a want of quickness and facility in recollection, of ease and distinctness in expression, is quite as likely to arise from desultory and wandering habits of thought as from the slowness referable to deep reflection. Most people find difficulty in forcing their thoughts to concentrate themselves on any given subject, or in afterwards compelling them to take a comprehensive glance of every feature of that subject. Both ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... room but two diners beside himself. These were a man and a woman, who by many little obvious evidences made manifest that they were not husband and wife. They had arrived at the dessert and were eating ice cream with genteel slowness, conversing the while with great decorum. Both were tall and fair, singularly well matched as to height and the ample and shapely proportions of their figures, and both were well, though quietly and even simply, dressed. They were nearly of ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... America are not to be compared with Australia. Unfortunately, England doesn't know it. Australia herself doesn't half realise it, and as for America and Canada, they haven't the remotest ghost of a notion of it. In England they learn with regrettable slowness, and their knowledge is scanty indeed; but across the Atlantic the ignorance is deplorable. "Australia?" says the Canadian. "Oh yes! Let's see, that's the place where it's always droughty—yes, yes, to be sure, the place where y' can't get a ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... few stops judiciously through his copy, and having done so began to upbraid his partners for their slowness. ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... Such variations multiply, and when various observers of the same event describe it they do it according to their different characteristics. And the differences may be tremendous. Substitute numerals for letters and the thing becomes clear. The relative slowness of our apprehension of visual elements has the other consequence that we interpolate objects in the lacun of vision *according to our expectations. The best example of this sort of thing would be the perception of assault and battery. When ten ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... vault; and as he looked he saw that a patch of paler green had appeared below it. All in a moment he saw too the flying buttress crook itself like an elbow and disappear. Then the vault was gone and the roof beyond; the walls sank with incredible slowness and vanished. ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... rough; no gay fish darted Like silver arrows from the quivering wave; But monsters, with thick scales and hideous eyes, Looked sullenly up in stupid wonderment, While some swam to'ards me, with rapacious maws Sharp-fanged and bloody, and exulting fins Flapping with demon slowness their huge sides;— ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... eternal; I only assert that our true being is eternally one with the being of God and that to be separated from a full knowledge of that truth is to have undergone a fall. But this fall has no sinister antecedents; its purpose is good, and there is nothing to mourn over except our own slowness at getting into line with the cosmic purpose. Another way of describing it would be to call it the incarnation of God in nature and man, a subject about which I must say more in another chapter. This view of the meaning ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... to the slowness and overcrowding of the trains. Police search the travellers for evidences of "speculation," especially for food. The police play, altogether, a much greater part in daily life than they do in other countries—much ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... The old stall, with two shelves loaded with books attached to them by chains, and a desk and seat for the use of the reader, was manifestly no longer adequate, when books could be produced by the rapidity of a printing-press, instead of by the slowness of a writer's hand. And yet, as we ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... ineradicable evil had been sown, mischiefs had grown by neglect, abuses been established by custom; and his own personal disadvantages, his mauvaise honte, his reserved, apparently proud manner, his slowness of speech, dislike to interruption, and over-vehemence when excited, had so much increased upon him, as, in spite of his efforts, to be serious hindrances. Kind, liberal, painstaking, and conscientious as he had become, he was still looked upon as hard, stern, and ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of a man, who was decent and orderly. The occasions of life, however, are often reasons for men going quicker or slower; but in the incorruptible nature of the stars, it is not possible that any cause can be alleged of quickness or slowness." It is seeking an argument of analogy very far, to suppose that the stars must observe the rules of decorum in gait and carriage prescribed for themselves by the long-bearded philosophers satirized ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... principle," said the Colonel, with something of the same slowness of comprehension as his son. "If excuses are to be made for everything, I don't wonder that there is no teaching one's boys truth or common ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... gentleman, but she feared that he would never be more. There was nothing imposing about him. He had lifted her out of sordid want, but he would not raise her to the pinnacle of greatness. The bland flat face of Mr. Early and his commanding slowness of movement impressed her imagination much as a great stone image might its votary. Here was indeed the truly illustrious. She devoured every floating newspaper paragraph that concerned Sebastian; for she was still ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... distributors of consolation and of despair! In the agony of waiting, minutes lose their mathematical value, and the hands of the clock become motionless on the dial like impaled serpents. The operations of the office proceed with a slowness that seems like a miniature eternity. This anxious crowd stand in single file, forming a living chain of eager notes of interrogation, and, as fate always reserves the last link for me, I have to witness the filing-off of these ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... sharpness and tension of contrasts. They who hold by gradual development as a kind of moral law must be somewhat shocked at the sight of one who, in the course of a single lifetime, succeeds in producing something absolutely new. Being dawdlers themselves, and insisting upon slowness as a principle, they are very naturally vexed by one who strides rapidly ahead, and they wonder how on earth he does it. No omens, no periods of transition, and no concessions preceded the enterprise at Bayreuth; no one except Wagner knew either the goal or the long ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... course, are waiting for the facts," he presently resumed, speaking with a slowness which told of a mind labouring for the right mode of expression. "These are so scanty, I fear, of so, shall I say, phantom a kind, that even when they are in your possession you will consider me to be merely the victim of a delusion. In the first place, then, ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... for the morrow to spring within his bosom, sent his eyes at Master Gammon, who was half an hour behind his time for bed, and had dropped asleep in his chair. This unusual display of public somnolence on Master Gammon's part, together with the veteran's reputation for slowness, made the farmer fret at him as being in some way an obstruction to the lively progress of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... meditating on the propriety, or on the means, of effecting the desired end. He envied their promptitude, while they never saw reason to envy his wisdom; for his conscience, tender and not strong, frequently transformed slowness of determination into irresolution: while a delicacy of the sympathetic nerves tended to distract him from any predetermined course, by the diversity of their vibrations, responsive to influences from all quarters, and destructive to ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... all my seven brothers, awkward heavy Oddity, as usual, in the rear. He had often been laughed at for his slowness, but this time it was well for him that he was slow! On rushed the six foremost, almost together, scrambling one over another in their haste; they disappeared into what looked like a dark hole, and then— alas! ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... slow drift is remarkable in spite of the high winds. If there should be land to the north? I begin more and more to speculate on this possibility. Land to the north would explain at once our not progressing northward, and the slowness of our southward drift. But it may also possibly arise from the fact of the ice being so closely packed together, and frozen so thick and massive. It seems strange to me that there is so much northwest wind, and hardly any from the northeast, though the latter is what the ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... Constantine Pavlovich joined the army. He had taken part in the beginning of the campaign but had subsequently been removed from the army by Kutuzov. Now having come to the army, he informed Kutuzov of the Emperor's displeasure at the poor success of our forces and the slowness of their advance. The Emperor intended to join the army personally ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... city and class and class, there is one common characteristic of the Dutchman which, like the mist which envelops meadow and street alike in Holland after a warm day, pertains to the whole race, viz. his deliberation, that slowness of thought, speech, and action which has given rise to such proverbs as 'You will see such and such a thing done "in a Dutch month."' The Netherlander is most difficult to move, but once roused he is far more difficult ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... exhibited the Czar and himself as firmly allied. He perceived clearly that Austria was determined on another campaign; gave orders for concentrating and increasing his own armies, accordingly, both in Germany and Italy; and—trusting to the decision and rapidity of his own movements, and the comparative slowness of his ancient enemy—dared to judge that he might still bring matters to an issue in Spain, before his presence should be absolutely ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... pressure of changed circumstances which make it useless or harmful, unless the man consciously recognises the inutility of the custom and sets himself to root it out and plant another custom in its place. So the slowness of this work of industrial adjustment has been in no small measure due to the lack of definite realisation by the members of modern communities of the need and importance of this adjustment. A society which should bring its conscious will to bear upon the work of ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... long next morning, and, dressing with comfortable slowness, noticed with pleasure that the sun was shining. Visions of a good breakfast and a digestive pipe, followed by a walk in the fresh air, passed before his eyes as he laced his boots. Whistling cheerfully ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... night and day, in their despair, upon the ruinous fragments. But the most horrid fate—(a fate too dreadful to conceive or to relate)—was theirs, who, buried alive beneath the fallen edifices, awaited, with an anxious and doubtful hope, the chances of relief—accusing, at first, the slowness, and then the avarice, of their dearest relations and friends; and when they sank under hunger and grief—with their senses and memory beginning to fail them—their last sentiment was that of indignation against their kindred, and hatred of humanity. ...
— The Book of Enterprise and Adventure - Being an Excitement to Reading. For Young People. A New and Condensed Edition. • Anonymous
... If endowed with the attributes of humanity, it may seem to them that he would long before that time have achieved civilization. Such persons do not consider the lowliness of his first condition and the extreme slowness with which progress must have gone forward. On this point the geologists and the sociologists agree. Says Mr. Geikie: "The time which has elapsed from the close of the Paleolithic Age, even up to the present day, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... did Mr. Darwin, and we have seen that in the later editions of the "Origin of Species" he found himself constrained to lay greater stress on these than he had originally done. Substantially, Mr. Chambers held much the same opinion as to the suddenness or slowness of modification as Mr. Darwin did, nor can it be doubted that Mr. Darwin knew ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... reached the Zoological Gardens at Fordham she had fallen blissfully asleep. He ran the car with considerate slowness, and looked at her very often. She waked as they crossed the river. Her eyes shrank from the piled serried buildings of Manhattan. The air was no longer clean ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... the letter with quivering features. Then, laying it down on the table with a reverential slowness, went to Euphra, put his arms ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... despair and hurls herself on me. So then Tessie is nearest to me in the whole factory, and Tessie is slow. The faster I pack the more it shows up Tessie's slowness. If Ida scolded Tessie it would break my heart. The thought of the man who owns that factory, and his orders and his profits and his obligations, never enter my or any other packer's head. I will not pack so many boxes that Tessie gets left ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... to Bolbeck, where he established his camp, and was joined by Abaz Pasha, his nephew, at the head of 800 men. But his presence was required in other quarters. Divisions had broken out at several points, and the slowness with which the operations of the siege of Saint Jean d'Acre was carried on had damped the ardour ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... things (which is the chief point), and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to reconsider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture. So I thought my nature had a kind of ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... sail a week after the departure of the packet; and that possibly, he may be the bearer of orders from the treasury, to repay Fiseaux' loan, with the money you borrowed. But it is also possible, he may bring no order on the subject. The slowness with which measures are adopted on our side the water, does not permit us to count on punctual answers; but, on the contrary, renders it necessary for us to suppose, in the present case, that no orders will arrive in time, and to consider whether any thing, and what, should be done. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... was much consulted in relation to the civic and religious welfare of the community. His conscientious habit of deciding in all things, great and small, upon the absolutely right course of action gave him an air of slowness and hesitation in manner. He would stand listening intently, without comment, to violent arguments for and against a project, turning toward each speaker the frank dark eyes that illumined his pale countenance. When it came to ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... eyes came on, with a strange slowness, and as they came they moved from side to side as if their owner walked unevenly. Nothing could have exceeded the horror with which I awaited their approach,—except my incapacity to escape them. Not for an instant did my glance pass from them,—I could not have shut my eyes for all the gold ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... assistants, his appointed collaborators, who keep and relieve guard, undertaking, in his absence, some observation already in hand, so that no detail may be lost, no incident of the story that unrolls itself sometimes with exasperating slowness beneath the bell-covers of the laboratory or on some bush in the garden. He inspires the whole household with the fire of his own genius, and all those about him are almost as ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... these prizes were matters of secondary interest, the great thing was to get them for ridiculous prices. So the trophies from the auction-rooms now began to inundate the apartment which, at the beginning, he had been furnishing with such desperate slowness. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... not a word is corrupted in any indecent haste, slowness, slovenliness, or incapacity of pronunciation. There is no lisping, drawling, slobbering, or snuffling: the speech is as clear as a bell and as keen as an arrow: and its elisions and contractions are either melodious, ("na," for "not,"—"pu'd," for "pulled,") or as normal ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... this slowness, this sadness, and leisurely mounted his horse. The king pushed on sharply, the lieutenant followed him. At the bridge Louis turned around for the last time. The lieutenant, patient as a god who ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... responded, with some slowness; "you look the same—and you look different. A healthier color, perhaps, sir—and the eye clearer." He grew more confident under Loder's half-humorous, half-insistent gaze. "Now that I look ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... of long deep breathing will often put persons to sleep when all other devices fail. The lungs should be filled to their utmost capacity, and then emptied with equal slowness, repeating the respiration about ten times a minute, instead of eighteen or twenty, the natural rate. Those who fall asleep upon first going to bed, and after a few hours awake, and are unable to sleep again, may find relief by getting out of bed, and rubbing the surface of the body with ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... left them with Mr. Hardie; the bills he took to his desk to note them on the back of the receipt. Whilst he was writing this with his usual slowness and precision, poor Dodd's heart overflowed. "It is my children's fortune, ye see: I don't look on a sixpence of it as mine: that it is what made me so particular. It belongs to my little Julia, bless her:—she is a rosebud if ever there was ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... willing to forget many disagreeable things which he has caused me for your sake. The "Flying Dutchman" will go to Uhlig tomorrow. I was unable to send it sooner, because the copying here is done with the most troublesome slowness. It is therefore no fault of mine that this return has been delayed so long, for I have pushed it on every day. The two first pianoforte rehearsals of the "Flying Dutchman" I have already held, and can guarantee a successful performance on February 16th. After ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... answer,' which the Twelve She-deputies returned in to seek. Slim sylph, she has set forth, through the black muddy country: she has much to tell, her poor nerves so flurried; and travels, as indeed to-day on this road all persons do, with extreme slowness. President Mounier has not come, nor the Acceptance pure and simple; though six hours with their events have come; though courier on courier reports that Lafayette is coming. Coming, with war or with peace? It is time that the Chateau also should determine on one thing or ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... all very kind to Mr. Wood, in their own way, but they were a little impatient of his slowness to be sociable, and had, I think, a sort of feeling that the ex-convict ought not only to enjoy evening parties more than other people, but to be just a little more grateful ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Eclectic schools was that of the Carracci, at Bologna, which was founded by LODOVICO CARRACCI (c. 1555-1619), a scholar of Prospero Fontana and Passignano at Florence. In his youth he was nicknamed "the ox," partly from his slowness, but possibly also for his study of long-forgotten methods, by which he arrived at the decision that reform was necessary to counteract the independence of the mannerists. He therefore obtained the assistance of his two ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... a story which doubtless had for its germ a joke regarding the slowness of an errand boy in a friend's household, but which at the same time shows us how rapidly Rembrandt worked. The artist had been carried off to the country to lunch with his friend Jan Six, and as they sat down at the table, Six discovered there ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... rent or investments or pensions would presently be very busy thinking how they were going to get food when the butcher and baker insisted upon cash. It would be only with comparative slowness that the bulk of men would realise that a fabric of confidence and confident assumptions had vanished; that cheques and bank notes and token money and every sort of bond and scrip were worthless, that employers had nothing to pay with, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... tree tops. He remained so long motionless that I thought he was not aware of our approach. But he had heard us. Only it was no part of his orders to make abrupt movements. With infinite caution, with the most considerate slowness, he turned, scowled, and waved us back. It was the care with which he made even so slight a gesture that persuaded me the Germans were as close as the colonel had said. My curiosity concerning them was satisfied. The sentry did not ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... deserves to be considered a good one, not only from the circumstances out of which it arose, but much more for its meaning, which is due to the two-fold significance of the word tondo in Tuscany, that of a perfect circle, and slowness and heaviness of mind. Accordingly the Pope sent for Giotto to Rome, where he received him with great honour, and recognised his worth. He caused him to paint for the tribune of St Peter's five subjects from the life of Christ, and the principal ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... kept up for some years at the cost of much exertion on his part. I have often heard him speak of the wearisome drives of ten miles to or from Croydon or Sydenham—the nearest stations— with an old gardener acting as coachman, who drove with great caution and slowness up and down the many hills. In later years, all regular scientific intercourse with London became, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... length of nose, The excellence of Woman (softer creature) Consisted in the shortness of that feature. Few arguments were wanted to convince The already more than half persuaded Prince; Truths, which we hate, with slowness we receive, But what we wish ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... MacDonald's warning, he kept his pistol in his hand. The moon was just beginning to rise over the shoulder of a mountain, and after a little it lighted up the more open spaces ahead of him. Now and then he paused, and turned to listen. As he progressed with slowness and caution, his mind worked swiftly. He knew that Donald MacDonald was the last man in the world to write such a message as he had sent him through Blackton unless there had been a tremendous reason for it. But why, he asked himself again and again, should Culver Rann want to kill him? Rann knew ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... the gift of not being able to classify the people with whom she was dealing, but of continuing to regard them as a multitude of individualized souls as distinct and considerable as herself. That makes no doubt for slowness and "inefficiency" and complexity in organization, but it does make for understandings. And now, through a little talk with Susan Burnet about her sister's attitude upon the dispute, she was able to take the whole situation ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... decomposition with extreme slowness, as is at once illustrated by the fact that its shining scales may frequently be met with entirely unchanged in the soil. Its persistence is dependent on the small quantity of alkaline constituents which ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... recovering himself is by increased deliberation. He must pause, and give himself time to think;—"ut tamen deliberare non haesitare videatur." He need not be alarmed lest his hearers suspect the difficulty. Most of them are likely to attribute the slowness of his step to any cause rather than the true one. They take it for granted, that he says and does precisely as he intended and wished. They suppose that he is pausing to gather up his strength. It excites their attention. ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... times more favourable to mankind than to think them blind to the beauties of his works, and imputed the slowness of their sale to other causes; either they were published at a time when the town was empty, or when the attention of the publick was engrossed by some struggle in the parliament, or some other object of general concern; or they were, by the neglect of the publisher, not diligently ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... "Hearty Cow," was kept by people who were new to him—"foreigners, from up-country." The fat landlord complained to Seymour of the slowness of the Clinton people, that they never could be induced to see things to their own proper advantage. "A dead-alive place I call it," he said; "but still, mind you," he added, "it's got a sort ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... and the two vehicles moved up into Broadway. They travelled with painful slowness; the horses had to be held in to keep them behind the cart, for the oxen could be only guided by the whip, and not by word of mouth. The old man moaned a little at the pace, and quivered when he heard ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... acid on metallic zinc affords an instance of what was once called disposing affinity. Zinc decomposes pure water at common temperatures with extreme slowness; but as soon as sulphuric acid is added, decomposition of the water takes place rapidly, though the acid merely unites with oxide of zinc. The former explanation was, that the affinity of the acid for oxide of zinc disposed the metal to unite with oxygen, ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... not be inferred from the foregoing that there is not a wide range of mental difference among Quaker Hill men and women. In the matter of quickness and slowness of action this variation appears even among the members of any one group. In the same family are two brothers, both farmers, both tenants. One is able to farm a thousand acres more successfully than the other can cultivate two hundred. ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... Bloomington somewhat scarified and nervous under the Reverend's firing, like the good Samaritan, I tried to pour oil and wine on their wounded spirits, by exalting intuition, and with a pitiful and patronizing tone deploring the slowness, the obtuseness, the materialism of most of the sons of Adam. It had its effect. They soon dried their tears, and with returning self-respect, told me of all the wonderful things women were doing in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... even, if any of their offspring happen to be badly formed, are not the less careful in nourishing and cherishing them. But Lucius Manlius aggravated the misfortune of his son by severity, and further clogged the slowness of his intellects; and if there were in him even the least spark of natural ability he extinguished it by a rustic life and a clownish education, and keeping him ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... by inch, almost imperceptibly. The conquest was by no means bloodless. Towns were sacked and men were slain; here was an explosion, there an outbreak of lawlessness; but for the most part the change was wrought with deadly slowness and a ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... gone into the back-yard, and was sitting there in the rain by the side of the water-butt. She was soaked, and her best clothes were spoiled. I must confess that I did not take very kindly to her. I was irritated at her slowness in learning; it was, in fact, painful to be obliged to teach her. I thought that perhaps she might have some undeveloped taste for music, but she showed none, and our attempts to get her to sing ordinary ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... back to the house for Aunt Ellen and Chrystie, and found they were gone. But they might have left a letter, some written message to tell her where they were. With those words her anxieties came to life again, her step lost its lingering slowness, her face ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... families; to acquire the bearing of freemen; to abandon their imitation of the whites among whom they had lived; and thus, by degrees, to consolidate a social and political system which may expand into independent and lasting nationality. Instead, therefore, of lamenting the slowness with which the colonies have reached their vigorous promise, we should consider it a blessing that the vicious did not rush forth in turbulent crowds with the worthy, and impede the movements of better folks, who were still unused to ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... to structure, what is the fundamental foot? Name each line. What irregularities may exist and for what purpose? Is the movement slow or rapid? Explain the source of slowness or rapidity. What is the order of rhymes? Are they perfect or defective? Are there double, triple, middle, or sectional rhymes? Point out the alliteration. What is the effect? Name the stanza. Is it blank ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... in the carriage, drawing always nearer to the struggle with her mistress, the warmth, the slowness, the jolting over stones, the steaming from the horses, the cries of men and animals and birds, and the new life all round about were simply maddening. "Baby! if you don't lie still, I think I kill you. I can't stand it ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... honour, to be the means of taking away all slowness from the execution of our orders. Who knows not what a quantity of ships you can muster at the least hint from us! Scarcely is the ink dry on the evectio [permission to use the public post] prepared by ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... man that gets excited and irritable should be looked upon as an undesirable person. The person of good breeding now speaks with slowness and deliberation. He is cultivating more and more of a reposeful attitude. He is consciously attentive and holds his mind to one thing at a time. He shuts out everything else. When you are talking to anyone give him your sole and undivided attention. Do not let your attention wander ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... slowly; so a fire may blaze or smoulder. Thus it is with Karma, the works that fill out the life-span. By an insight into the mental forms and forces which make up Karma, there comes a knowledge of the rapidity or slowness of their development, and of the time when the debt ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... his fortunate return, removed more than a part of the uneasiness which weighed upon the four friends. The days of expectation are long, and d'Artagnan, in particular, would have wagered that the days were forty-four hours. He forgot the necessary slowness of navigation; he exaggerated to himself the power of Milady. He credited this woman, who appeared to him the equal of a demon, with agents as supernatural as herself; at the least noise, he imagined himself about to be arrested, and ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... officers were loud in condemning Austrian slowness; the inaptitude they exhibited to profit by a success, and the over-caution which made them, even in victory, so careful of their own safety. From what I overheard, it seemed plain that Genoa was untenable by any troops but French, or opposed to any ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... at Eastbourne has been several times referred to. As usually happens, the move was considerably delayed by the slowness of the workmen; it did not actually take place till the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... it then. A pilotless snapper-boat! That's why its actions were a little uneven. Only one thing could explain its deliberate slowness. It was bait. The Scorpius had sent piloted snapper-boats over the asteroid at high speed, criss-crossing in order to cover the thorium world completely, expecting to have the unknown rocketeer fire at them. Then a fire bomb had been dropped as a further means of getting the ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... Mansfelt and Duke of Brunswik, the pretended obstacles of the treatie, are now with all their forces removed.' Sept. 3, 1622. Cabala 201. How difficult this was for him we see from a letter of Nethersole to Carlisle, Oct. 18, 1622. 'The slowness of resolution of this side may move H. Mai. [the King of Bohemia] to precipitate his before the time, which will be then to lose the fruits ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... greedy desire to devour a story at one sitting filled him with impatience at his own slowness. He found, to his chagrin, that he could not read the "Waverley Novels" with the swiftness the course of events demanded. He tried having them read aloud by his father, but though Jake was always willing, he stumbled and spelled ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... singular in the manner in which the Quakers deliver themselves when they preach. In the beginning of their discourses, they generally utter their words with slowness; indeed, with a slowness, which sometimes renders their meaning almost unintelligible to persons unaccustomed to such a mode of delivery; for seconds sometimes elapse between the sounding of short sentences ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... With incredible slowness the laggard moments passed; the second dog-watch came to an end; and then, still more slowly, as it seemed to my impatience, first one, then two, three, four, and so on up to eight bells of the first watch were tolled out, and still there were no signs of the enemy. ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... principles of all things, whereof one is the father and the other the mother; the former, Light, and the latter, Darkness. Pythagoras thought that the Dependencies on Light were warmth, dryness, lightness, swiftness; and those of Darkness, cold, wet, weight, and slowness; and that the world derived its existence from these two principles, as from the male and the female. According to Porphyry, he conceived two opposing powers, one good, which he termed Unity, the Light, Right, the Equal, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... and shortly afterward the firing began, the assailants very properly directing their main effort upon the English rear ships, which, as happens with most long columns, had opened out, a tendency increased in this case by the slowness of the fourth ship from the rear, the "Prudent." The French flag-ship, "Ville de Paris," of one hundred and twenty guns, bearing De Grasse's flag, pushed for the gap thus made, but was foiled by the "Canada," seventy-four, whose captain, Cornwallis, the brother of Lord Cornwallis, ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... a terra incognita to railways. It is on the extremest verge of Europe towards the Atlantic; and European civilisation finds entrance there with remarkable slowness. In 1845, the government tried to invite offers from capitalists to construct railways; in 1849, the invitations were renewed; but the moneyed men were coy, and would not be wooed. In 1851, the government appointed a commission to investigate the whole subject. The commission consisted of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... in May, 1634[208], and was received with the greatest politeness by the High Chancellor, who did not however explain his intentions: Grotius wrote to his brother, July 13, 1634, that the Chancellor proceeded with great slowness in his affair; but that every body assured him he was a man of his word: "If so, he adds, all will go well." He wrote for his wife, and she arrived at Franckfort, with his daughters and son Cornelius, in the beginning of August. The Chancellor continued ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... which each muscle changes from one associated tribe to another, and that either backwards or forwards, is well observable in the muscles of the arm in moving the windlass of an air-pump; and the slowness of those muscular movements, that have not been associated by habit, may be experienced by any one, who shall attempt to saw the air quick perpendicularly with one hand, and horizontally with the other ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... blow to The Pilot, who had set his heart upon a church, and neither Mrs. Muir's "hoots" at her husband's slowness nor her promises that she "wad mak him hear it" could bring comfort ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... whenever the brain is subject to any remarkable influence, increasing or diminishing the activity and size of particular organs, the external form fails to indicate the internal condition, because it can change but slightly, and with slowness, after the skull is fully developed and ossified. Were the skull composed of more pliable materials, cranioscopy would be more accurate in its facts, but while it preserves a uniform exterior, the interior ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... ride together on horseback, the married have ever been warned, one must ride behind. And when two people are speaking slowly one must needs be the slowest. Comparative success implies the comparative failure. But where this actor or that actress fails, the great cause of slowness profits, obviously. The record is advanced. Pshaw! the word "advanced" comes unadvised to the pen. It is difficult to remember in what a fatuous theatrical Royal Presence one is doing this criticism, and how one's words should go ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... cattle, but in reality to get him out of the way. He was not a bad man; on the contrary, he was in most ways a gentleman and a man of some reading—but he lacked initiative, even in his villainy. Blondell at once called him "a lazy hound"—provoked thereto by Lester's slowness of toilet of a morning, and had it not been for Fan—backed by the fifty dollars a month which Lester was paying for "instruction"—he would have been "booted ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... action, its ease or difficulty, its advance or retrocession, its home coming or its wandering, its hesitation or its surety, its conflicts and its contrasts, its force or its weakness, its swiftness or slowness, its abruptness or smoothness, its excitement or repose, its success or failure, its seriousness or play. Then, in addition, as we shall see, all modes of emotion that are congruous with this abstract form may by association be poured into its mold, so that the content ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... impossible, others only possible on terms that she trembled even to think of. Perhaps it was worst of all to reflect that she was in some measure responsible for his change of religion; she fancied that it was through her slowness to respond to light, her delaying to confide in him, that he had been driven through impatience to take this step. And so week after week went by and she dared not answer ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... difference, however, in the actual impression, between passing through the details of existence in daily and hourly engagements, which, from their variety, produce an illusion of slowness and a vague idea of almost interminable continuance, and looking at expended years after their termination, or at successive lives in the perspective of history. In the latter case, events appear crowded together, the intervening spaces are riot distinctly perceptible, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... have been if sin had been followed by immediate catastrophe? While the foot of Christ is fleet as that of a roebuck when He comes to save, it does seem as if he were hoppled with great languors and infinite lethargies when He comes to punish. Oh, I celebrate God's slowness, God's retardation, God's putting off the retribution! Do you not think, my brother, it would be a great deal better for us to exchange our impatient hypercriticism of Providence because this man, by watering of stock, makes a million ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... on to meet Olmar, who because of the slowness of his multitude preferred awaiting the enemy to attacking it; for the vessels of the Ruthenians seemed disorganized, and, owing to their size, not so well able to row. But not even did the force of his multitudes avail him. For the extraordinary ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... the beginning of this scale are especially fitted to express uncontrollable joy and delight, gayety, triviality, rapid movement, brightness, delicacy, and physical littleness; the sounds at the end are peculiarly adapted to express horror, solemnity, awe, deep grief, slowness of motion, darkness, and extreme or oppressive greatness of size. The scale runs, then, from the little to the large, from the bright to the dark, from ecstatic delight to horror, and from the trivial to the ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... shoulder of an artist-boy, who, seated at his easel, was copying one of the Gorgon-heads that stood out on the faded tapestry. She had dismissed us wholly from her thoughts, and, giving play to her native fun and coquetry, was taunting the youth with the slowness of his labors and the little progress he had made since she last inspected his work. No wonder that she laughed at the taste of the boy or his employer. Graver heads than hers might question the motive which had set the painter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... him the other one. She tried to laugh. The cough came again, and she took her hands away. He reached for them, but she put them behind her. "No, not until I have told you," she said, and he saw her lip tremble. "He was afraid to come in here to see you," she went on, speaking with timid slowness. "He is so weak and sick that he can't stand to be scolded, so I have come to—" She hesitated. He shoved himself back and looked hard at her, and his eyebrows ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... of speed have been set. In some cases these goals are being reached ahead of time; in some cases we are on schedule; in other cases there are slight but not serious delays; and in some cases—and I am sorry to say very important cases—we are all concerned by the slowness of the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... and Joan,' in a sweet contralto, but with a doleful slowness which hung heavily upon the spirits of the company, and a duly dismal effect having been produced, the young ladies were cordially thanked ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... surroundings. Fortunately for themselves, the people of Great Britain possess qualities which have made them masters of a vast and still expanding Empire. But these qualities have their defects as well as their merits, and one of the defects is a certain insularity of thought, or narrow-mindedness—a slowness to recognize that institutions which are perfectly suitable and right for us may be quite unsuited, if not injurious, to other races, and that what may not be right for us to do is not necessarily wrong for people of a different belief, and with absolutely ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... itself with a navy in an emergency. Not one battle-ship was available for purchase, and only four cruisers, of doubtful quality. And while this work of preparation was going hurriedly on the country was drifting into war with what seemed at the time inexplicable slowness, but to the calmer backward glance of history will appear dangerously swift in the face of our great lack of preparation. What might be termed the milestones on the march to ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... and the dawn came with provoking slowness, a grey mist veiling the ground until the sun gained power and the sky showed pale-blue flecked with fleecy clouds. Men blew on their fingers, for ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... Ridgley School on this eve of the great struggle was filled with a feeling of restlessness; it seemed that the minutes were dragging with indescribable slowness, that the night would never pass and that the hour would never come when the referee would blow his whistle to start the contest upon which the Ridgley ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... would be long hours of languor when he could scarcely bear to change his position or lift a pen. He would commence a letter with the words 'Dear Sir,' forming the letter 'D' with painful, accurate slowness, elaborating and thickening the up and down strokes, and being troubled when he had to leave that letter for the next one; he built the next letter by hair strokes and would start on the third with hatred. The end of a word seemed to that man like the ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... expecting to be diverted. M. de Noyon, saluting everybody with a satisfaction he did riot dissimulate, made his speech with his usual confidence, and in his usual style. The Abbe replied with a modest air, and with a gravity and slowness that gave great effect to his ridiculous discourse. The surprise and pleasure were general, and each person strove to intoxicate M. de Noyon more and more, making him believe that the speech of the Abbe was relished solely because it had so worthily praised him. The prelate was delighted ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... how the Indians derided the slowness, and dullness of the English army, in its setting out. For after the desolations at Lancaster and Medfield, as I went along with them, they asked me when I thought the English army would come after them? I told them I could not tell. "It may be they ...
— Captivity and Restoration • Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
... own inclinations pointed to the army; but Captain Borrow had apparently seen too much of the army in war time, and the slowness of promotion, to think of it as offering a career suitable to his son, now that there was every prospect of a prolonged peace. He thought of the church as an alternative; but here again that fatal facility the boy had shown in learning Erse seemed to stand out as a barrier. "I have observed ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... disposition by prevarication, Buckingham showed his by an impatience that soon led to anger and insolence. The wearisome slowness of the negotiations ill suited his hasty and arbitrary temper, he quarrelled with members of the State Council, and, in an interview between the prince and the friars, he grew so incensed at the demands made that, in disregard ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... among you, or any endowed with knowledge" and that word, "glory not," strikes at the root of all the forementioned and aftermentioned evils. From whence I say doth that promptitude and bensal(435) to speak, that slowness and difficulty to hear, that readiness and inclination to pride, (reproved, James i. 19, 20) proceed? Is it not from an overweening conceit of our own wisdom, that we are so swift to speak, and so slow to hear, and that we would teach others and yet be taught of none? ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... cradle of eternity. As the man is to the animal in the slowness of his evolution, so is the spiritual man to the natural man. Foundations which have to bear the weight of an eternal life must be surely laid. Character is to wear forever; who will wonder or grudge that it cannot be developed in a day? ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... curious slowness and lack of emphasis in his speech, with a pause after each word, that gave a singular impressiveness to ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... very slow in coming to birth, very embarrassed, and which never arise until after the event. "One would say that my heart and my intelligence do not belong to the same individual.... I feel all, and see nothing; I am carried away, but I am stupid.... This slowness of thinking, united with such vivacity of feeling, possesses me not only in conversation, but when I am alone and working. My ideas arrange themselves in my head with incredible difficulty; they circulate there in a dull way and ferment until they agitate me, fill me with heat, and give me palpitations; ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the influence of French classicism was in the ascendant, this study is not concerned. In the period which has just been surveyed three points are noteworthy: the character of the English critics, the slowness with which the classical theories penetrated English thought, and the modifications which they underwent in the process. Gregory Smith calls attention to the influence of Sidney and Daniel in establishing "the claim of English criticism ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... seen that the three vessels ahead were commencing to come back, but with terrible slowness. Code, lashed in the weather-rigging, studied them for more than an hour through his glasses. Then he leaped ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... This slowness of development, or prolonged infancy as it is called, is of vast significance to the child. It marks at once the chief distinction between the human infant and the young of all other animals. It makes possible a long period of adjustment and training ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... if he [Warren] had not been there; and that, when he did move, it was not with sufficient confidence or ability on his part to manoeuvre his troops." It is very doubtful whether Warren ever put his opinion in so strong a way as thus quoted by Hooker from memory. His report does speak of Gibbon's slowness in coming up, and of his thus losing the chance of crossing the canals and taking the breastworks before the Confederates filed into them. But beyond a word to the effect that giving the advance to Brooks's division, ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... o'clock that afternoon the train broke corral, and for the first time I realized the slowness of our progress, and the long trip before us. Under the most favorable circumstances we could not make over ten miles a day and more often at the beginning three, five ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... dared not look up until Idris crossed to them and bade them go about their work. What work they did in the factory that day neither knew. They were only aware that the hours passed with an extraordinary slowness, but the ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... alluded to the length of time it had taken the Land League agitation to make itself felt in Kerry, and to the swiftness with which, when once ignited, the far south-west of Ireland blazed into open disaffection. The causes of this slowness to light up, immediately followed by a fierce and sudden flame, are by no means obscure. Kerry has always been the last place to follow a popular movement, and the last ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... five miles from their starting-point, and setting out at daybreak on the following day, they pushed on with pain and difficulty, harassed at every step by the galling attacks of the Syracusan troops. [Footnote: Thucydides, with characteristic brevity, leaves this to be inferred from the slowness of their progress.] A march of two miles and a half brought them to a village, situated on a level plain, and here they halted, wishing to supply themselves with food, and replenish their water-vessels; for the country which they had now to traverse was a desert, many miles in extent. Directly ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... blazes and burns, exhaling emotions and thoughts as a planet exhales light and heat. Wondrous the power of the loom newly invented, that with marvelous swiftness weaves in silk figures of flowers and trees and birds. But the uttermost speed of those flying shuttles is slowness itself compared to the swiftness of the mental loom, that without noise or clangor weaves fabrics eternal out of the warp and woof of affection and thought, of passion and purpose. Consider that every man is not simply two men, but a score of men. All the climatic disturbances in ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Seymour learned these facts, he thwarted Lord Elgin as much as he could in the naval operations, especially in the Peiho. This Lord Elgin and Mr. Oliphant declared; and the admiral admitted that his slowness to cany out the plenipotentiary's requisitions arose partly from disapproval of the policy that functionary was sent out to enforce. In fact, Sir Michael knew that he would be backed by a tory admiralty, at the head of which was such a thorough-going party man as Sir ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... nothing incompatible in this view with the evidence at hand, we can safely assume it correct for the time being at least. When farther south, you remember, we found no trace of ice action, notwithstanding the comparative slowness with which we decided that the ridges in the crust had been upheaved on account of the resisting power of gravity, and, as I see now, also on account of Jupiter's great mass, which must prevent its losing ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... the operations undertaken on a larger scale by Princess Metternich to secure me some compensation dragged along with mysterious slowness, and it was to a merchant named Sturmer, whom I had previously known in Zurich, that I owed my deliverance from my present troubles. He had constantly interested himself in my welfare while in Paris, and now by his help I was enabled, first to ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... extreme slowness, as is at once illustrated by the fact that its shining scales may frequently be met with entirely unchanged in the soil. Its persistence is dependent on the small quantity of alkaline constituents which it contains; and for this reason it is observed that ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... to outdo you and the squaw, you wood creatures you!" Then she bent above the flowers and whispered: "Tuck this in the toe of your slipper! Three times to-night it was in his eyes, and on his tongue, but his slowness let the moment pass. I can 'bide a wee' for my Scotsman, I can bide forever, if I must; for it's he ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... work. Professor Rolleston, who has opened several of these early heathen tombs of our Teutonic ancestors, finds in them everywhere abundant evidence of "their great aptness at destroying, and their great slowness in elaborating, material civilisation." Until the Anglo-Saxon received from the Continent the Christian religion and the Roman culture, he was a mere average Aryan barbarian, with a strong taste for war and plunder, but with small love for any of the arts of peace. Wherever else, in Gaul, Spain, ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... not being able to classify the people with whom she was dealing, but of continuing to regard them as a multitude of individualized souls as distinct and considerable as herself. That makes no doubt for slowness and "inefficiency" and complexity in organization, but it does make for understandings. And now, through a little talk with Susan Burnet about her sister's attitude upon the dispute, she was able to take the whole ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... find yourself becoming bound to the dismal thought of your test and its terrors, free yourself from it every time, by concentrating upon the weight of your body, or the slowness of the slowest breaths you can draw. Keep yourself truly free, and these feelings of discouragement and all other mental distortions will steadily lose power, until for you they are no more. If they last longer than you think ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... custom, or too far gone in corruption, to admit of the influence of religion, it can only prevail by ultimately destroying the political system. This helps us to understand the almost imperceptible progress of Christianity against Mahometanism, and the slowness of its increase in China, where its growth must eventually undermine the whole fabric of government. On the other hand, we know with what ease comparatively savage tribes—as the natives of California and Paraguay—were converted to a religion which first ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... distant end of the table, watched her a little; he saw that she behaved just as usual; she did not shun anybody, though her mother shunned her. A glove covered her right hand, yet Daisy persisted in using that hand rather than attract notice, though from the slowness of her movements it was plain it cost her some trouble. Gary McFarlane asked why she had a glove on, and Mr. Randolph heard Daisy's perfectly quiet and true answer, that "her hand was wounded, and had to wear a glove," given without any confusion or evasion. He called his little daughter to ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... contemporary productions.[120] They bewilder us by heaping ages upon ages, and in order to explain nature they substitute the idea of time for the ideas of power and intelligence. They seem to suppose that what is produced little by little is sufficiently explained by the slowness of its formation. ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... white smoke went up into the black heavens. There one could thoroughly realise what an awful thing a wave really is. I talk like other people about the rushing swiftness of a wave. But the horrible thing about a wave is its hideous slowness. It lifts its load of water laboriously: in that style at once slow and slippery in which a Titan might lift a load of rock and then let it slip at last to be shattered into shock of dust. In front of me that night the waves ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... out from the blizzard of alkali. A blinded horse, with head bent low, bearing on its back a motionless man, and led by a stumbling, blinded girl, against whose shoulder the helpless rider leaned, came with ghostlike slowness ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... with her he would have given her the manuscript of his speech, and occupied himself by saying it to her as a lesson which he had learnt. As he could not do this he recapitulated to her all his engagements, as though excusing his own slowness as to matrimony, and declared that what with the property and what with Parliament, he never knew whether he was standing on his head or his heels. But when he paused he had done nothing towards naming a certain day, so that Lady ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... Slaughter there was, no doubt, on the battle-field or in towns like Anderida whose long resistance woke wrath in their besiegers. But for the most part the Britons were not slaughtered; they were defeated and drew back. Such a withdrawal was only made possible by the slowness of the conquest. For it is not only the stoutness of its defence which distinguishes the conquest of Britain from that of the other provinces of the Empire, but the weakness of attack. As the resistance of the Britons ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... states of Italy. Spain also contributed a number of naval adventurers, and squadrons were fitted out by his vassals on the sea coasts of Normandy, Brittany, and Picardy. King Edward had crossed over into Belgium, and after vast delays in consequence of the slowness of the German allies, at last prepared to enter France at the end of September, 1339. Such, my lad, is the story, as far as I know, of the beginning of that war with France which is now raging, and whose events you know as well as I do, seeing that they are all of late occurrence. ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... and having hitherto seen them hanging lazily by their claws to boughs, I was surprised at the rapidity of their movements. I have often heard people assert that the sloth spends his torpid existence in a perpetual state of pain, from the peculiar sighing noise he makes, and the slowness of his movements when placed on the ground. In the first place, I cannot believe that God has created any animal to pass an existence of pain. The fact is, that the sloth is formed to live in trees, ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... are distinguished from one another in respect of motion and rest, quickness and slowness, and not in ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... afterward, when the volunteers, unimpeded by regulars, quickly put down a much more formidable rising in the Northwest. But in the present case they were hampered by their dependence on the British troops, whose commander moved them with all the ponderous slowness of real war, and approached O'Neill as if he had been approaching Napoleon. He thus managed to get in a day after the fair on every occasion, being too late for the fight at Ridgeway, and too late to capture ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... gradually accumulated on the floors of the caverns, slowly filling them up. And that, in some cases at least, this cave residence ended a very long time ago, we are assured, for since then a great thickness of stalagmite, which is deposited with extreme slowness, has spread over the lower cave deposits and ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... question with his scrupulous decorum at the helm. Once or twice I have got the better of him, and touched him off into a kind of compromised explosion, like that of damp fireworks, that splutter and simmer a little, and then go out with painful slowness and occasional relapses. But his fuse is always of the unwillingest, and you must blow your match, and touch him off again and again with the same joke. Or rather, you must magnetize him many times ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... the horse, nerved by Brant's apparent slowness to respond, and loosened the rein from the scrub oak. "Then I will myself go to him, even if they ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... typewriter to say "How do you spell comparatively?" saw his face in its momentary bitterness as he frowned, pen in hand, out of the window. He was waiting to sign the letters before he went out to a committee meeting, and she thought she was annoying him by her slowness. She spelt comparatively anyhow, and with the wholehearted wrongness to which she and the typewriter, both bad spellers, often attained in conjunction, hastily finished and laid the letters before him. Called back to work and actuality, Barry was again cheerful and ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... poetic numbers, than to identify it with them. It is their proportion or modulation, rather than the numbers themselves. According to Dr. Webster, "RHYTHM, or RHYTHMUS, in music [is] variety in the movement as to quickness or slowness, or length and shortness of the notes; or rather the proportion which the parts of the motion have to each other."—American Dict. The "last analysis" of rhythm can be nothing else than the reduction of it to its least ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... (conductor) flash to seize any situation in which I am concerned. But I don't need to tell you that! You, too, have married a Britisher, and know just how much that dear old American joke about English slowness of comprehension amounts to—unless the creature is ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... company of his wife and daughters—a correct, but possibly a depressing, way of spending a vacation which must have been intended to furnish some social variety in a man's life; and we were all very idle, and all very much inclined to grumble at the heat, and length, and general slowness of the days, when one morning, as I was going out in order to send a parcel off to Mrs. Craven, who should I meet coming panting up the stairs ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... Minister, declared: "We have been actively engaged for a long period in producing this weapon (which is recognised as important) in adequate numbers." It seems to be true that efforts were then being made, but not true that these efforts were of long standing. "Altogether 'slowness' was the keynote throughout of the German attitude towards the tank idea." He neither appreciated their true use nor the best means of fighting them; and even when we presented him with derelict tanks, as was soon the case on the Ancre in 1916, ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... delight is perceptible only by 'a mind at ease,' a mind at once calm and clear; but that a mind gloomy and impetuous like that of Johnson, cannot be fixed for any length of time in minute attention, and must be so frequently irritated by unavoidable slowness and errour in the advances of scholars, as to perform the duty, with little pleasure to the teacher, and no great advantage to the pupils[295]. Good temper is a most essential requisite in a Preceptor. Horace paints the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... With painful slowness Elim made his preparations to descend; his fingers could hardly buckle the stiff strap of his revolver sling, but finally he made his way downstairs through a deep narrow hall. He turned from a blank wall to a darkened reception room, with polished mahogany, somber books and engravings on ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... politely, and then, with a more kindly bow and smile to Miss O'Flynn, she went through the draperies, through the front salesroom, and out at the front door. The milliner and her forewoman followed her with a dignified slowness, but reached the window in time to see Patty get into an elaborately-appointed motor-car which rolled ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... it seems to move so slowly that the shadows scarcely change their position. In winter, when the branches are bare, a light that is nearly vertical over a tree can cast but little shadow, and that falls immediately around the trunk. So that the smallness of the shadow itself and the slowness of its motion together tend ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... the slowness of time, at the interminable minutes, began to gnaw him with its intolerable fever. What should he do until he could go to the club for dinner, since he could not work at home? The thought of the streets tired ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... patient and kindly of leaders. He would have been the first to admit how he wounded tender hearts, and, perhaps, even repulsed some who could have been of greater helpfulness to him had he been able to endure more patiently their slowness and timidity. ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... "And the slowness and procrastination, the parts of our character that are most assailed by their criticism, need not make you blush. If we undertake the war without preparation, we should by hastening its commencement only ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... off the brim of a cap, bang against a water-bottle, bury itself in the mass of a knapsack. It seemed as though no one could live in such a hail of lead. But no one had fallen down on the task of the day. Each battalion was advancing, with slowness and awful ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... or slowness with which bones are decomposed and disappear in different soils, is sometimes a question of importance to the antiquary. We all know that they preserve for many long centuries in dry soils and dry positions. ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... detained them at Etoges: and the king would get out, and walk up the hills, and they had to wait for him: so that though they gave double money to the drivers to get on fast, they had gone only sixty-nine miles by ten at night. This slowness ruined everything. ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... the present break off my arduous work of educating the Press. We shall resume our studies later on; but just now I am tired of playing the preceptor; and the eager thirst of my pupils for improvement does not console me for the slowness of their progress. Besides, I must reserve space to gratify my own vanity and do justice to the six artists who acted my play, by placing on record the hitherto unchronicled success of the first representation. It is not often that an author, after a couple of hours of ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... stellar pairs have been computed, but only with partial success. Some stars have shown themselves to be totally regardless of theory and computation, and have shot ahead far beyond the limits ascribed to them, whilst others, by the slowness of their motions, have upset the calculations of astronomers as much in the opposite direction. So that out of this number the orbits of not more than half a ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... June 15th, the loud report of a cannon told the inhabitants of Boulogne that he intended to start. At seven o'clock he and Romain stepped into the gallery and the balloon was released. With majestic slowness they rose into the air and sailed out over the sea; but a moment later the wind, that had so long been his enemy, drove them back. The crowd watched with great anxiety. Twenty-seven minutes after starting, the balloon, ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... conquering march of the Russians to Adrianople had awakened that people to a passing thrill of national consciousness. Other travellers,—for instance, Cyprien Robert in the "thirties,"—noted their sturdy patience in toil, their slowness to act, but their great perseverance and will-power, ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... the Austrians were founded on the slowness which had hitherto characterised Napoleon's movements. Hess thought that two days might be safely allowed for the Austrian advance, and that the enemy would remain passive on the west bank of the river Chiese, waiting to be attacked on the 25th. ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... passed, and, as she did not return, Martha went in search of her. The album, she knew, was in their boudoir, which was situated at the end of the long and rather gloomy corridor of the upper storey. Highly incensed at her sister's slowness, she was hastening along the corridor, when, to her supreme astonishment, she suddenly saw the figure of a man in kilts, with a bagpipe under his arm, emerge through the half-open door of the boudoir, and with a peculiar gliding ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... with the distance of the Swedish regency from the scene of action, and with the slowness which necessarily accompanies all ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... the same to the occupant of the little room. They passed with equal slowness and impartial darkness. Five days that he could account for crawled by before anything unusual happened to break the strain of his solitary, inexplicable confinement. He could tell when it was morning by the visit of a bewhiskered chambermaid with a deep bass voice, who carried a lighted candle ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... school-room, "Gracie, Gracie, are you not done with lessons yet? Do come out and play." And how dreary "Noel and Chapsal" used to grow all of a sudden when that invitation came, and with what relentless slowness the hands of the old clock dragged through the lesson-hour ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... these which bore the heat of the battle, and repulsed the enemy. The Spaniard, as often as he had done before, so now with great earnestness sent to the duke of Parma, to send forty fly-boats, without which they could not fight with the English, because of the greatness and slowness of their ships, and the agility of the English, entreating him by all means now to come to sea with his army, which army was now to be protected as it were, under the wings of the Spanish Armada, until they should land ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... truth hidden beneath. Well, a sense of humour blows away that froth in time, and then—as for example after the Suffragette antics—the real argument behind the capers and the words becomes known. Thus in England all revolutions are gradual, and in their very slowness lies their incalculable ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... find that the moon was nearer and nearer to the earth the further back our view extends; in fact, concentrating our attention solely on essential features, we may say that the path of the moon is a sort of spiral which winds round and round the earth, gradually getting larger, though with extreme slowness. Looking back we see this spiral gradually coiling in and in, until in a retrospect of millions of years, instead of its distance from the earth being 240,000 miles, it must have been much less. There was a time when the ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... Steadily, and with a slowness that only increased its threatening aspect, the cloud to the northward joined the vast overhanging canopy that had been seen earlier in the day. By half-past six in the evening it was black as the densest night, the murk only being ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... his hand frankly, and he had not noticed the moment's slowness or, if he did, took it for the passing ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... man noticed nothing in his impatience, and only chid her for her slowness. "Where have you ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... has not forgiven that blow I dealt him a month ago, when I flattened in his helmet with my blunted axe and stretched him senseless on the ground; in faith, I meant not to hit so hard, but he had been taunting me with my slowness, and seeing an opening for a blow at his head I could not resist it, and struck, as he was always telling ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... of the evening's chores, stalling the cow and throwing into her manger the scanty supply of night fodder that could be afforded. Then she sat down to milk, and accomplished that operation so slowly that Whitey turned her head as far as the stanchions would permit to see what this slowness meant. ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... largest peach of all, began to pare it with his own pocket-knife, making a plate and napkin of his newspaper. With careful slowness he pared and stoned and quartered it, then handed her the segments on a bit of the paper torn from ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... fighting-machine in the squadron, but her speed was only five knots an hour through the water, and her engines so little commensurate with her weight that Flag-Officer Foote hesitated long to receive her. The slowness was forgiven for her fitness for battle, and she went by the name ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... and, like. AEneas, he may be hidden in a cloud amidst his associates. The celebrated FABIUS MAXIMUS in his boyhood was called in derision "the little sheep," from the meekness and gravity of his disposition. His sedateness and taciturnity, his indifference to juvenile amusements, his slowness and difficulty in learning, and his ready submission to his equals, induced them to consider him as one irrecoverably stupid. The greatness of mind, unalterable courage, and invincible character, which Fabius afterwards displayed, they then imagined had lain ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... sagging end of a squeaky old gate, and scrape it across gulleys, to get the automobile into the narrow, deeply-rutted road, and with a mind fearful of tires the chauffeur wheeled down through the grove quite slowly, a slowness for which Sam was duly grateful, since it allowed him to take a careful appraisement of the walnut trees, interspersed with occasional oaks, which bordered both sides of their path. They were tall, thick, straight-trunked trees, from amongst which the underbrush had ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... interest even for the most important events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into thoughts. The sanity of the mind is between superstition with fanaticism on the one hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and a diseased slowness to action on the other. For the conceptions of the mind may be so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the realizing of them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who possess more than mere ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... outside his door. At first, he used to lie and hold his breath, while he waited for her to open the door of his room. By degrees, however, he ceased to expect her. And, as the expectation died away, he chafed increasingly at the slowness of his recovery. Anything to get out of that house! She treated him as he would have scorned to treat an invalid dog who had ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... horses, for instance, only reach their full development between the seventh and eighth years; it would, therefore, be a mistake to attempt to force them up to the full demands made on a Cavalry horse before that age. This slowness of growth must always be considered, and the animals be saved as much as possible; but there is still room to unite with this necessary concession increased demands on the ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... d'un Condamne," I read aloud with careful slowness. "Ah, indeed! You do well to read that. It is a ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... telling his stories, and sometimes invented new ones for her. George Vyell was much more appreciative. Sir Harry had heard of the lessons, and wrote to beg that his son might join the class. So George rode over three times a week to learn Latin, which he did with uncommon slowness. But he thought Taffy's stories stunning, and admired him without a shade of envy. The two boys liked each other; and when they were alone Taffy stood an inch or two higher in self-conceit than when Honoria happened to be by. But he took more pains with his stories ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and we have seen that in the later editions of the "Origin of Species" he found himself constrained to lay greater stress on these than he had originally done. Substantially, Mr. Chambers held much the same opinion as to the suddenness or slowness of modification as Mr. Darwin did, nor can it be doubted that Mr. Darwin knew ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... only sufficient to sustain life, not to suffice it until it was grown to manhood or womanhood, and when the bottle was half-emptied the mother returned it to me. How much time all this occupied I do not know, but the child took the milk with extreme slowness. I may say that it took the milk drop by drop. A great deal ...
— The Water Goats and Other Troubles • Ellis Parker Butler
... and still the puffing of the Vampire came from the same direction. It was plain enough to him that the old tub was not a racer. But she showed herself beyond the bend in about a quarter of an hour, indicating that her rate of speed, or rather of slowness, was not more than four statute miles an hour. But this was simply confirmation of what the steward had said on the subject. Yet she was coming, though it was too dark on the river to see her in detail. Though he strained his eyes to ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... were engaged cutting the ice in order to clear the water. It was already spring tide, and the ice-cakes were drifting toward the sea, but with unbelievable slowness. After all, that's the work for you, he told himself as he turned away. He was conscious of that which lay beneath the surface, but he would not ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... away. The mountains ascend; the valleys descend into the place thou hast founded for them." Here is a whole volume of geology in a paragraph. The thunder of continental convulsions is God's voice; the mountains rise by God's power; the waters haste away unto the place God prepared for them. Our slowness of geological discovery is perfectly accounted for by Peter. "For of this they are willingly ignorant, that by the word of God there were heavens of old, and land framed out of water, and by means of water, whereby the world that then was, being overflowed by ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... felt an equally strong desire to write his name on the marvellous little creature, and each in turn sat down before it and moved his awkward hands with nearly equal slowness over the keys, picking ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... mind's eye as to wonder how our predecessors failed to comprehend his image. But what does this tragedy demand of an actor? Proverbially, that he himself shall fill it, and hold the stage from its commencement to its end. The play of "Hamlet" is the part of Hamlet. The slowness of its action, and the import of its dialogue and soliloquies, make all depend upon the central figure. Next, he is to depict the most accomplished gentleman ever drawn; not gallant, gay Mercutio, nor courtly Benedict, but the prince and darling of a realm; one who cannot "lack preferment," ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... excavation, the line which divides economy and wastefulness is extremely narrow and the most constant vigilance, together with the best judgment and foresight, are needed to avoid unnecessary cost. In the laying and covering of the tile, on the other hand, it is best to disregard a little slowness and unnecessary care on the part of the workmen, for the sake of the most ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... Patrocleas, "The slowness and delay of the deity in punishing the wicked used to seem[807] to me a very dreadful thing, but now in consequence of his speech I come as it were new and fresh to the notion. Yet long ago I was vexed when I heard that line ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... resumed the labours by which they proposed to render the place tenable, when the watchman, who was placed in a high turret, called the Warder's Tower, gave the signal that a horseman was approaching. As he came nearer, his dress indicated an officer of the Life-Guards; and the slowness of his horse's pace, as well as the manner in which the rider stooped on the saddle-bow, plainly showed that he was sick or wounded. The wicket was instantly opened to receive him, and Lord Evandale rode into the court-yard, so reduced by loss of blood, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... inn door for my lady's coming She watched the minute hand of the little Dutch clock, wondering at the slowness of its progress. It was only ten minutes past two when Lady Audley came down-stairs, with her bonnet on and her hair still wet, ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... was as if one soldier looked into the eyes of his compeer on the battle field, as well could be the case with this man older and of more regular experience than himself. The answer came with the measured slowness of an earnest thanks and appreciation—"The offer comes from a kind heart, shown on previous occasions.... There are women held here." He hesitated. "Deign the last cup of cold water at their hands." The officer did not refuse. ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... what remains for me to tell you? I believe I have read more Hebrew than Greek lately; yet the dear Greek is not less dear than ever. Who reads Greek to you? Who holds my office? Some one, I hope, with an articulation of more congenial slowness. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... With excruciating slowness, like a crawling glacier, tender as a nerve of the touching leaves, I moved, I stole, obliquely toward her through the wall of bush, the knife behind my back. Once only there was a restraint, a check: I felt myself held back: I had to stop: for ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... a state of increasing restlessness. The month of waiting which Dr. Hilton had laid down for him seemed to wear away with extraordinary slowness; this was increased by the lack of companionship, and further by the cutting off of even the little episodes usual to daily life. His patience, great as it was naturally and trained as it had been by the years of self-repression, ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... when they spoke of him; he had come a great deal nearer to them in departing than he had ever known how to come, or they to approach him, before. Something young in his nature that had been hidden by gray hairs and slowness of years, sprang to join itself to their youth on which he had laid his bequest of the Lord's work. They ran lightly up and down where he had walked with measured gravity; they chatted and laughed, for they knew he ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... speak of unhappy days at this school: the richer girls made sport of the dress of the drawing-master's daughter, and of her independent, awkward ways. Her progress in drawing, too, was counterbalanced by her slowness in her other studies; in fact her new accomplishment was such a delight to her, that in her devotion to it she became less and less interested in her books; and as for dress—that it should be clean and suited both to her means and to the work she was doing, was ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... at other times more favourable to mankind than to think them blind to the beauties of his works, and imputed the slowness of their sale to other causes; either they were published at a time when the town was empty, or when the attention of the publick was engrossed by some struggle in the parliament, or some other object of general concern; or they ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... work, during which I raged about the deck like a man with a strong toothache. The transition from the wild sea to the comparative immobility of the lagoon had wrought strange distress among my nerves: I could not hold still whether in hand or foot; the slowness of the men, tired as dogs after our rough experience outside, irritated me like something personal; and the irrational screaming of the seabirds saddened me like a dirge. It was a relief when, with Nares, and a couple of hands, I might drop into the boat and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pace. You quite understand that to throw one's self into the water, for instance, with a friend, at the same headlong rate as he himself would do it, would be the act either of a fool or a madman. I therefore allowed De Guiche to get in advance, and I proceeded on my way with a commendable slowness of pace, feeling quite sure that my unfortunate friend would not be received, or, if he had been, that he would ride off again at the very first cross, disagreeable answer; and that I should see him returning much faster than he went, without having, myself, gone much ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... change seems to have fallen on him with some suddenness on his return to America; for some years, ever since the hard winter of "The Scarlet Letter" at Salem, he had complained of fatigue in writing and of lassitude and slowness of mind; after the winter in Rome he felt this with new weariness, as he says when he practically ended his notebooks in Switzerland, not having the vital impulse to continue them, and in the intervening time he had ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... them masters of their own time, and was perhaps in their case, the best that could be adopted; for slowness of progress, which is its greatest objection, was rather desirable in George's then state ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
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