"Minuteness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... under different forms assume various names, and may thus be broken up into separate virtues. These are many or few, according as we distribute in smaller or larger groups the occasions for virtuous conduct, or analyze with greater or less minuteness the sentiments and dispositions from ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... Dorsetshire, the Channel Islands, part of Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire, and the six southern Welsh counties. In this way I had an opportunity of seeing a considerable portion of Great Britain, with a minuteness which few have enjoyed. And I did my business after a fashion in which no other official man has worked at least for many years. I went almost everywhere on horseback. I had two hunters of my own, and here and there, where I could, I hired a third horse. I ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... times better than the microscope," said he to himself again. "Atoms are annoying and disgusting to look at, with their incomprehensible and frightful minuteness, and their horrible celerity. One does not like to think that everything is composed of myriads, be they ever so beautiful,—which they are not, that ever I could see, but chiefly all head or a wriggling tail. Bah! This is much better. Hark! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... my description, which was proceeding with the minuteness of a passport, has been interrupted for several days. In ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 474 - Vol. XVII. No. 474., Supplementary Number • Various
... only those who have gone with some minuteness into the facts of this singular life are aware how great was the change effected during this very short period of time. When Coleridge left London for the Lake country he had not completed his eight-and-twentieth year. Before he was thirty he wrote that Ode ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... these most interesting cases will be understood from the general view (fig. 70) and from the elevation (fig. 71), but I shall proceed to describe them with some minuteness. ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... called 'making his models sit to him.' And in this close adherence to reality consisted the great secret of his art. It is strange that his favourite amongst all his pupils was the one whose style least resembled his own—Gerard Douw—he who aimed at the most excessive minuteness of delineation, who stopped key-holes lest a particle of dust should fall on his palette, who gloried in representing the effects of fresh scouring on ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... stars, from the immensity of the universe to the minuteness of the electron, in living things no less than in lifeless ones, science recognizes everywhere the inevitable sequence of cause and effect, the universality of natural processes, the reign of natural law. Man also ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... up by Weyrother for the battle of Austerlitz were a model of perfection for that kind of composition, but still they were criticized—criticized for their very perfection, for their excessive minuteness. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... impossible, and most eternally true? We feel that one must have lived for thirty years beneath burning chains of burning kisses to learn what she has learned; to dare so confidently set forth, with such minuteness, such unerring certainty, the delirium of those two predestined lovers of "Wuthering Heights"; to mark the self-conflicting movements of the tenderness that would make suffer and the cruelty that would make ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... She had for exportation therefore, in addition to her own manufactures, merchandise which had been gathered from all parts of the then known world. The Venetian laws regulated commerce with the greatest minuteness. All goods purchased by Venetian traders must as a rule be brought first to the city and unloaded and stored in the city warehouses. A certain amount of freedom of export by land or water was then allowed, but by far the greater proportion ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... in large and expensive works, with a host of annotations from the journals of recent travellers and other volumes which bear upon the main subject. This part of the series, describing vegetable substances used for the food of man, is executed with considerable minuteness. A Pythagorean would gloat over its accuracy, and a vegetable diet man would become inflated with its success in establishing his eccentricities. The contents are the Corn-plants, Esculent Roots, Herbs, Spices, Tea, Coffee, &c. &c. In such a multiplicity of facts as the history of these plants ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... propriety of a phrase. Their own poetry had, perhaps, never been neglected; but it was not till the writings of Bembo furnished a new code of criticism in the Italian language that they began to study it with the same minuteness as modern Latin.'' "They were encouragers of a numismatic and lapidary erudition, elegant in itself, and throwing for ever little specks of light on the still ocean of the past, but not very favourable to comprehensive observation, and tending to bestow on an unprofitable pedantry the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... o'clock the Maharajah, with the Governor and all his guests, came on board. His Highness inspected the yacht with the utmost minuteness and interest, though his Mohammedan ideas about women were considerably troubled when he was told that I had had a great deal to do with the designing and arrangement of the interior. At half-past eleven the party left, and an hour afterwards we went ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... corner of it without a meaning and a charm; that the open record of its immemorial past tells us at every turn that all agencies have conspired for loveliness and ruin itself has been benign. A passage of Wordsworth's describing the character of the lake-shores illustrates this fact with loving minuteness. ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... minuteness with which I have traced Waverley's pursuits, and the bias which these unavoidably communicated to his imagination, the reader may perhaps anticipate, in the following tale, an imitation of the romance of ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... of the concubinage of witches with their familiars were discussed with a relish and a filthy minuteness worthy of Sanchez. Could children be born of these devilish amours? Of course they could, said one party; are there not plenty of cases in authentic history? Who was the father of Romulus and Remus? nay, not so very long ago, of Merlin? ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... aspects of nature creatures so fairy and delicate. But such is the law. Go to the sea or climb the mountain, and with the ruggedest and the savagest you will find likewise the fairest and the most delicate. The greatness and the minuteness of nature ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... of this recent knowledge of the true nature of matter, of the minuteness and complexity of the atom, we can now understand how the highly triturated and refined (attenuated) homeopathic remedy may still retain the dynamic force of the element, as Hahnemann has expressed it, and how a remedy so attenuated ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... golden cup to the baron, with a low bow, that nobleman could not find sufficient words to express his admiration. He sighed with rapture, and examined the cup from every side with the utmost minuteness. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... preserved a recollection of a previous one. He also appeals to internal evidence, viz. the perfect coherence of the tale, though he is very well aware, as he says in the Cratylus, that there may be consistency in error as well as in truth. The gravity and minuteness with which some particulars are related also lend an artful aid. The profound interest and ready assent of the young Socrates, who is not too old to be amused 'with a tale which a child would love to hear,' are a further assistance. To those who were naturally inclined ...
— Statesman • Plato
... That he attended some of them is, perhaps, to be inferred from the distinctive character of his language that he never attended a Trial. The description given, in his Life of Phips, of what was exhibited and declared by the "afflicted children," at the Examinations, exhibits a minuteness and vividness, seeming to have come from an eye-witness; but there is not a particular word or syllable, I think, in the account, from which an inference, either way, can be drawn whether, or not, he was present at them, personally. This ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... the charms of a noble and highly-cultivated mind with the fascinations of female delicacy and loveliness. To understand the secret of the almost miraculous influence she exerted, it is necessary to trace her career, with some degree of minuteness, from the cradle to the hour of her sublime and ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... to be stiff, priggish, and commonplace; and his ladies, especially his young ladies, are as deficient in individuality as the figures and faces of a fashion-print. Their personal and mental charms are set forth with all the minuteness of a passport; but, after all, we cannot but think that these fine creatures, with hair, brow, eyes, and lips of the most orthodox and approved pattern, would do very little towards helping one through a rainy day in a country-house. Judge Temple, in "The Pioneers," and Colonel Howard, in "The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... the unfortunate event which Father Medina mentions with as much minuteness as candor, two important points must not be overlooked by the judicious reader, which were the cause of this unfortunate deed. One was the extreme harshness of the provincial in his government, which must have been very excessive.... The imposition ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... comment. The scope of the following remarks will therefore be limited to a consideration of such features of the subject as appear to throw light upon the supernaturalism in "Macbeth." This consideration will be carried out with some minuteness, as certain modern critics, importing mythological learning that is the outcome of comparatively recent investigation into the interpretation of the text, have declared that the three sisters who play ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... them up to 5040; wherefore the law ought to order phratries and demes and villages, and also military ranks and movements, as well as coins and measures, dry and liquid, and weights, so as to be commensurable and agreeable to one another. Nor should we fear the appearance of minuteness, if the law commands that all the vessels which a man possesses should have a common measure, when we consider generally that the divisions and variations of numbers have a use in respect of all the variations of which ...
— Laws • Plato
... form, much resembling the first in shape and proportions, which slowly emerged from the floor. Her dress was also of red samite, fantastically cut and flounced, as if she had been dressed for some exhibition of mimes or jugglers; and with the same minuteness which her predecessor had exhibited, she passed the lamp over her face and person, which seemed to rival the male's in ugliness. But with all this most unfavourable exterior, there was one trait in the ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... opportunity for the display of marksmanship in an elephant battue, there is one feature in the sport, as conducted in Ceylon, which contrasts favourably with the slaughterhouse details chronicled with revolting minuteness in some recent accounts of elephant shooting in South Africa. The practice in Ceylon is to aim invariably at the head, and the sportsman finds his safety to consist in boldly facing the animal, advancing to within fifteen paces, and lodging a bullet, either in the temple or in the hollow over ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... the author of the Annals only the framework of his picture, and the events of the time when he lived gave the scenes for the painting, his colours would fail, and his outlines become unsteady. In other words, there could not be the scrupulous minuteness and the perfect freedom which make history live and breathe, unless, like Tacitus, he registered facts in which he took the deepest interest, from feeling their influence directly and powerfully exerted over himself, and the living and loved ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... and he followed the different movements of the poultry with an earnestness of attention which seemed almost idiotic in its ridiculous intensity. If it be asked, why a person so contemptible as this solitary youth has been introduced with so much care, and described with so much minuteness, it must be answered, that, though destined to form no important figure in this work, he played, from his position, a remarkable part in the great drama on which it is founded—for this feeder of chickens was no less a person ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... uncertainty; but many examples may be found in which there is positive evidence of the existence of a strong desire on the part of the primitive basketmaker to enhance beauty of form. It will be observed that the textile materials and construction do not lend themselves freely to minuteness in detail or to complexity of outline, especially in those small ways in which beauty is ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... of these books.... The events are described with minuteness and care. The result is a very amusing ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... of the Periplus did not enter the Gulf of Persia, he certainly stretched over, with the monsoon, either to Karmania, or directly to Scindi, or to the Gulf of Cambay; for at these places the minuteness of information which distinguishes the ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... is indispensable, however, not only to preface the details of the campaign with a concise description of the condition of the disordered and degraded people whom our enmity and vengeance smote so heavily; but likewise to explain, with some degree of minuteness, the views and purposes which, from first to last, influenced our Indian government in its conduct of these delicate, and ultimately momentous transactions, in order fully to appreciate the union of moderation and energy which, under the auspices of Sir Henry Hardinge ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... document at full length, is the circumstance of its containing the only direct evidence of Park's death. In every other point of view it is wholly destitute of interest, and cannot even be read through, without a strong effort; being inconceivably tedious, and having all the dry minuteness of a log book, without its valuable precision. There is great confusion as to places and times; and it is possible only in a very few cases, to identify the former by reference to the names of places given by Park. Incidents ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... purposes each age must concern itself with its own environment; and his logical starting-point is an analysis of wealth-production as it exists to-day. He begins by insisting on the fact that labour in the modern world is divided with such a general and such an increasing minuteness that each labour produces one kind of product only, of which he himself can consume but a small fraction, and often consumes nothing. His own product, therefore, has for him the character of wealth only because he is able to exchange it for ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... the special seat of thought, whether from its position or its size or from some other consideration we have no means of knowing. The explanation of the form and appearance of the liver became itself a separate science, and this science was developed with extraordinary minuteness by the Babylonians. The whole structure of the liver, together with the gall, bladder, and the ducts, was analyzed, and to every part, every line, and every difference of appearance a separate significance was assigned. Thus hepatoscopy, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... when all my grief for mother returned, and I sat in my darkened chamber, recalling with a sad persistence her gestures, her motions, the tones of her voice, through all the past back to my first remembrance. The places she inhabited, her opinions and her actions I commented on with a minuteness that allowed no detail to escape. When my thoughts turned from her, it seemed as if she were newly lost in the vast and wandering Universe of the Dead, whence I ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... occasion,[W] elsewhere, to consider at some length, the peculiar love of the English for neatness and minuteness: but I have only considered, without accounting for, or coming to any conclusion about it; and, the more I think of it, the more it puzzles me to understand what there can be in our great national mind which delights to ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... whom I quote say that they "cannot express" the excessive minuteness of the granules in question, and they estimate their diameter at less than 1/200000 of an inch. Under the highest powers of the microscope, at present applicable, such specks are hardly discernible. Nevertheless, particles of this ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... and you can judge by the minuteness with which I am telling you all this how great a place this event has ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... His conversation appeared like the elaboration of a mine of results. ... Taylor led him into political economy, into the Greek and Latin accents, into antiquities, Roman roads, old castles, the origin and analogy of languages; upon all these he was informed to considerable minuteness. The same with regard to Shakespeare's sonnets, Spenser's minor poems, and the great writers and characters of Elizabeth's age and those of ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... litigation, and the advantages which the rich thus obtained over the poor. But if delays and forms led to an expensive and vexatious administration of justice, these were more than compensated by the checks which a complicated jurisprudence gave to hasty or partial decisions. It was in the minuteness and precision of the forms of law, and in the foresight with which questions were anticipated in the various transactions of business, that prove that the Romans, in their civil and social relations, were very much on a level with modern times. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... only for his skill. In the bust of Mrs. Hudson there was something almost touching; it was an exquisite example of a ruling sense of beauty. The poor lady's small, neat, timorous face had certainly no great character, but Roderick had reproduced its sweetness, its mildness, its minuteness, its still maternal passion, with the most unerring art. It was perfectly unflattered, and yet admirably tender; it was the poetry of fidelity. Gloriani stood looking at it a long time most intently. Roderick wandered away into ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... dwell here for any length of time upon the history of the expositions of this passage. It has been given with sufficient minuteness by Pococke and Marckius among older writers, and by Credner among the more modern. We content ourselves with remarking that the figurative exposition is the more ancient, having been adopted by the Chaldee ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... guidance ceases. Perhaps, although deficient in minuteness of detail, this pot pourri of gossip, history, description, anecdote, suggestion, and opinion, may not only amuse the traveller by railway, but assist him in choosing routes leading to those scenes or those pursuits in ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... by his travelling suit, which is always avowedly the refuse of his wardrobe; and the importance which he is apt to attach to everything connected with his own town or district, if it leads to ridiculous minuteness, at least insures the accuracy of his details. The marked civility and attention of the French to strangers is too well known to be commented on, particularly to those who pay them the compliment ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... poetry was no longer a living stream, but a treasury of glittering words. Verse- writers studied it carefully and used it cleverly, but never could make up for the want of free movement of hand by any laborious minuteness of tessellation. Yet if removed from the side of their great models they are graceful enough, with a prettiness that recalls and probably in many cases is copied from the novelists of the fourth century; and sometimes it is only a touch of the diffuseness inseparable from all Byzantine ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... similar problems of city planning have been worked out theoretically with much minuteness of detail, and are known to every student of the science of cities, but very little of it all has been realized in a practical way—certainly not on this side of the water, where individual rights are held so sacred that a property owner may ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... acceptances, and then revamping the manuscripts to make them presentable. When the young aspirant got a start at last, he rode into sudden fame by describing the celebrated author's private life with such a caustic humor and such minuteness of blistering detail that the book sold a prodigious edition, and broke the celebrated author's heart with mortification. With his latest gasp he said, "Alas, the books deceived me; they do not tell the whole story. Beware of the struggling young author, my friends. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... had been detailing with tireless minuteness the virtues of his magnificent team of stallions, Tom and Jerry, and had described (as was his wont on all possible occasions) the manner in which they had once saved his life when he was attacked by a tremendous Indian Devil. This Indian Devil (as the Northern Panther is called ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... child, and so was Petrarch's Laura. Following their example, Surrey addressed his love complaints, by way of compliment, to a little girl of the noble Irish family of Geraldine. The Amourists, or love sonneters, dwelt on the metaphysics of the passion with a tedious minuteness, and the conventional nature of their sighs and complaints may often be guessed by an experienced reader from the titles of their poems: "Description of the restless state of a lover, with suit to ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Mr Spottiswoode, as with far-reaching vision he distinguishes the systems of science into which phenomena, our knowledge of which is still in the nebulous stage, are growing. I have been carried by the penetrating insight and forcible expression of Dr Tyndall into that sanctuary of minuteness and of power where molecules obey the laws of their existence, clash together in fierce collision, or grapple in yet more fierce embrace, building up in secret the forms of visible things. I have been guided by Prof. Sylvester towards ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... with? [Footnote: In Lightfoot's Notes of the Assembly and Gillespie's similar Notes, the proceedings which I have endeavoured to summarize in this paragraph and the two preceding may be traced in detail—Lightfoot's Notes traversing, with great minuteness, the whole of the time under notice; and Gillespie's beginning at Feb. 2, 1643-4. Prefixed to Gillespie's Notes, as edited by Meek in 1846, there is, however, a very useful set of official minutes of the proceedings from ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... to the vastness of the cathedral one may cross into North Street and enter the portal of the toy church of St. Olave, which dates from the 14th century, and is remarkable, not only for its minuteness, but as being one of the churches of Chichester which, in my experience, is ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... presence of many different persons, all of whom are well acquainted with them, that she describes Lartigue; Dufresne; Richard; Phelan; Bonin; Comte; Bourget; McMahon; Kelly; Demers; Roux; Roque; Sauvage; Tabeau; Marcoux; Morin; Durocher; and all the Roman Priests around Montreal, with the utmost minuteness of accuracy; while the Chaplain of the Ursuline Nunnery at Quebec, Father Daule, is as exactly depicted by her, as if her whole life had been passed under his surveillance. Some of the appellatives in ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... usually took on the quarter-deck. His conversations showed no signs of despair or mental lethargy. They ranged over a great variety of topics, general and personal. He discussed details of navigation and shipbuilding with a minuteness of knowledge that surprised the men of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... termed in print from the exactness of the folds. So in Mynshul's Essays, 4to, 1618. "I vndertooke a warre when I aduentured to speake in print, (not in print as Puritan's ruffes are set.)" The term of Geneva print probably arose from the minuteness of the type used at Geneva. In the Merry Devil of Edmonton, a comedy, 4to, 1608, is an expression which goes some way to prove the correctness of this supposition:—"I see by thy eyes thou hast bin reading little Geneva ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... he is all life and interest in the social circle," said Major Favraud. "His range of thought is the grandest and most unlimited, his powers of conversation are the rarest I have ever met with. Yet he never refused, on any occasion, to answer with minuteness the inquiries of the smallest child or most insignificant dependant. 'Had he not been Alexander, he must have been Parmenio.' Had fortune not struck out for him the path of a statesman, he would have made the most impressive and perfect of teachers. As it was, without the slightest ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... although a few hands were put to the pumps to try if she made any water. It was not until the Aurora presented a more cheerful appearance that Captain Wilson went over to the other ship, whose deck, now that the light of heaven enabled them to witness all the horrors even to minuteness, presented a shocking spectacle of blood and carnage. Body after body was thrown over; the wounded were supplied with water and such assistance as could be rendered until the surgeons could attend them; the hatches were then taken off, ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... The minuteness and accuracy of God's program of the ages is often overlooked. There is a singular and striking instance of this in the triumphal entry of our Lord into Jerusalem. [1592:A]The command to go into the village nearby and bring the colt that would be found ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... greatness—the abyss of the infinite—that lies beyond, and which our minds can never measure. The indefinite has a limit somewhere; but it is not the indefinite, it is the measureless, the infinite, that vast extension forces upon our minds. In like manner, the immeasurable in minuteness is an inevitable mental sequence from the facts and phenomena revealed to us by a study of the minute in nature. The practical divisibility of matter disclosed by modern physics may well arrest and astonish ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... account the large number of species of fungi, probably scarcely less numerous than all the flowering plants, and the immense number of spores which some of the individuals produce, they must be exceedingly plentiful and widely diffused, though from their minuteness not easy to be discerned. It has been attempted to estimate the number of spores which might be produced by one single plant of Lycoperdon, but the number so far exceeds that which the mind is accustomed to contemplate that it seems scarcely possible to realize ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... like all other boys, and his childhood and youth were in no wise extraordinary. The first part of this work, which describes his youth up to the age of eighteen, is the most important, and everything is given with remarkable fidelity and minuteness. It is a tale of little things. All the friendships and loves and impulses are there, and he is fundamentally selfish and utilitarian; God and nature were one, and only when his beloved Army died did he wish to believe in immortality. He, too, as a child, found two ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the sake of building cottages, or making those inclosures for their cabbages, which the islanders call crubs. They have been pulling down the Pictish castle, on the little island in the fresh-water loch called Cleikimin, near Lerwick, described with such minuteness by Scott in his journal, till very few traces of its original construction are left. If the inclosing of lands for pasturage and cultivation proceeds as it has begun, these curious monuments of a race which ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... with the statues of saints and martyrs. Stone seems, by the cunning labor of the chisel, to have been robbed of its weight and density, suspended aloft as if by magic, and the fretted roof achieved with the wonderful minuteness and airy ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... all these branches the most important are the inlaying and mosaic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, represented in a central manner by these mosaics of St. Mark's. Missal-painting could not, from its minuteness, produce the same sublime impressions, and frequently merged itself in mere ornamentation of the page. Modern book-illustration has been so little skillful as hardly to be worth naming. Sculpture, though in some positions it becomes of great importance, has always a tendency to lose itself ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... and no doubt, if she thought it would flatter, would tell, a beautiful young girl that her destiny was to be a queen; but there is in this prediction a minuteness of detail, that cannot be accounted for on the ground of accidental coincidence. It is a brief history of her life. Unless we are prepared to believe that an ignorant old mulatto woman was gifted by divine Providence with supernatural power, ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... alternately on either side branches which curl into spirals and are richly adorned with rosettes, acanthus-leaves, scrolls, tendrils, and blossoms. In the best examples the detail was modelled with great care and minuteness, and the motive itself was treated with extraordinary variety and fertility of invention. Aderived and enriched form of the anthemion was sometimes used for bands and friezes; and grotesques, dolphins, griffins, infant genii, ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... vases. A line of absolute correctness, observe. I do not care how slowly you do it, or with how many alterations, junctions, or re-touchings; the one thing I ask of you is, that the line shall be right, and right by measurement, to the same minuteness which you would have to give in a Government chart to the map of ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... which Hahnemann professes to have established is the efficacy of medicinal substances reduced to a wonderful degree of minuteness or dilution. The following account of his mode of preparing his medicines is from his work on Chronic Diseases, which has not, I believe, yet been translated into English. A grain of the substance, if it is solid, a drop if it is ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... occurred which gave me an opportunity of observing the Chief Consul with critical minuteness. I had left the second room, and taken my station in front of the row of gazers, close to the folding-doors which opened into the first room, in order to see him receive petitions and memorials. There was no occasion for BONAPARTE to cast his eyes from side to side, like the ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... Such minuteness and simplicity would, in ordinary cases, not be necessary. I go into it here merely to show how, by simply subdividing the steps, a subject ordinarily perplexing may be made plain. The reader will observe that in the above there are no explanations by the teacher—there are not even leading questions; ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... speak English—I learned it when I was valet for Mr. Parker in London. That is why I am sent here. The pay is of a minuteness. Circumstances make ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... glowing in the evening under the rays of the setting sun, standing out from the crimson and gold, scarcely visible in the mist, the colossal edifice impresses itself upon the eye, reconstructed with its thousand details of architectural chiselling, drawn without minuteness but with superb decision, and these pictures approach the composite, bold and ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... visible some markings still smaller than the last; and in like manner has every increase in the power of the telescope developed more worlds and suns far away from our system and beyond our Milky Way. An approach to the infinite in minuteness and to the infinite in magnitude and distance is thus furnished to us ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... following example. It is recorded by the well-known John Bunyan, in a fugitive tract of his, entitled the Life and Death of Mr. Badman, but which has since been inserted in the works of the author in two volumes folio. In minuteness of particularity and detail it may vie with almost any story which human industry has collected, and human simplicity ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... the passions of robust manhood with artless and unconscious truth. Its freedom, its voluble minuteness of delineation, its rapid changes of construction, its breaks, pauses, significant and sudden transitions, its easy irregularities, exhibit the intellectual play of national youth; while in boldness ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... then so little foreseen, have unfolded themselves, in all their grandeur, to the eyes of the present age. It is a common amusement of speculative minds to contrast the magnitude of the most important events with the minuteness of their primeval causes, and the records of mankind are full of examples for such contemplations. It is, however, a more profitable employment to trace the constituent principles of future greatness in their kernel; ...
— Orations • John Quincy Adams
... converse on erotic matters. He told me all the tale of his affair with his cousin, and, although I was already well acquainted with it, I was glad to draw all the particulars from himself. I had seen the note his mother wrote to the doctor. The minuteness and undisguised description she had therein given struck me as very strange, and I augured that she herself must be a lewd and lecherous person, to have done more than merely hint at the affair, instead of dwelling, doubtless in erotic delight, on ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... With elaborate minuteness, he cross-questioned her, refusing to let the subject drop, protesting that she had dark circles under her eyes; that she had ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... of burial,' &c, it is important to have every particular bearing on this branch of the subject, and much minuteness is desirable. ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... Testament, though it cannot notice "every thing," contains a multitude of rules to regulate the conduct of the master and the slave. Otherwise he could scarcely have imagined that it was from an aversion to minuteness, or from an impossibility to forbid every evil, that the sin of slavery is ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... character of Joan of Arc. Both had written of her, and both held her to be something almost more than mortal. When, therefore, Anatole France published his exhaustive biography of the maid of Domremy, a book in which he followed, with exaggerated minuteness and innumerable footnotes, every step of Joan's physical career at the expense of her spiritual life, which he was inclined to cheapen, Lang wrote feelingly, and with some contempt, of the performance, inviting the author of the Personal Recollections to come ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hillsides, its swains, its toiling cattle, comes swooping to our vision! The leaves rustle, the birds warble, the rivers roar a song. The sun beats on the plain; the winds carry waves into the grain; the clouds plant shadows on the mountains. The minuteness and the accuracy of his observation are something wonderful; if farmers should not study him, our young poets may. He never puts a song in the throat of a jay or a wood-dove; he never makes a mother-bird break out in bravuras; he never puts a sickle into green grain, or a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... perplexed and obsolete statutes. He was not an antiquary by nature, for an antiquary, I take it, is one who loves antiquity for its own sake, and enjoys a minute inquiry almost in proportion to its minuteness. Fitzjames's instinct, on the contrary, was to care for things old or new only so far as they had some distinct bearing upon living problems of importance. I could not venture to pronounce upon the value of his researches; but I am happily able to give the opinion of Professor ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... life in Mr. Croker's edition of 1831 - and not the least interesting circumstance connected with it is, that Johnson himself read, from time to time, Boswell's record of his sayings and doings; and, so far from being displeased with its minuteness, expressed great admiration of its accuracy, and encouraged the chronicler to proceed with his grand ulterior proceeding. See Life, vol. i. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... this excellent fish. First comes the Thames trout of the professional fisherman. Of this class there is an untold number. Their movements are keenly watched, and often chronicled with surprising minuteness. They are liberally scattered over every likely district from Teddington upwards, and there is a degree of familiarity with their habits, on the part of local observers, that at once whets our appetite and craves our admiration. You ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... pretend to write this meeting with the method and minuteness of the first ; for that took me so long, that I have not time to spare for such another detail. Besides the novelty is now over, and I have not the same inducement to be so very circumstantial. But the principal parts of the conversation I ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... makes a general statement of the work of the day, and the captains then report on their particular operations. When you see what exact notes they have taken of every operation: the precise moment of sending out parties and of receiving reports, the minuteness with which they locate every action, the science with which they carry out the work that falls to them, and the team-play that animates them, you see that this is no old-style cut-and-dried "sham battle," but an actual study, of course on a small ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... mind to acquiring an intimate knowledge of furs, and of fur-bearing animals, and their haunts and habits. His opportunities for doing so were very good, as many of the skins were sold over Bowne's counters by the hunters who had taken them. These men he questioned with a minuteness that astonished them, and the result was that in a few years he was as thoroughly familiar with the animals, their habits, their country, and the mode of taking them, as many of the trappers themselves. He is said to have been in his prime the best judge of furs in America. He appreciated ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... dear Grandison. I know you love I should be so. From this minuteness, you will judge of the workings of her mind. They are resolved to take your advice, (it was very seasonable,) and treat her with indulgence. The count is earnest to ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... Anderson forthwith proceeded to detail the particulars of the quarrel and subsequent encounter, with a minuteness and circumstantiality which, we fear, the reader would think rather tedious were we here to repeat. In this statement of her case, Mrs. Anderson, having the fear of her husband's presence before her eyes, made no allusion whatever ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... that its appearance was due to contrast of some form, though the precise nature of this contrast is the most difficult point of all." The present discussion undertakes to explain with considerable minuteness every factor of the illusion, yet the writer does not see how in any essential sense contrast could be said to ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... With great minuteness of observation he had an amplitude of comprehension such as has never yet been vouchsafed to any other ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... finesse, which is a union of insight and address, to the French. This normal attribute is another proof how the economy of Gallic life is reduced to an art. It is the expression in manners of Rochefoucauld's maxims, of Richelieu's policy, of Talleyrand's cunning. It is favored by the tendency to minuteness of excellence and love of system before noted. To understand what superior range is afforded to such a principle in France, it is only requisite to consult the memoirs of a celebrated woman, or even an old Guide or Picture of Paris, such as in former days the provincial gentlemen used to study ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... separate accounts of the life of Christ—all repeat many of His wonderful sayings—all dwell with marked minuteness on the circumstances of His death—and all attest the fact of His resurrection. Each mentions some things which the others have omitted; and each apparently observes the order of time in the details of his narrative. But when we combine and arrange their various statements, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... was entered first as upon the earlier visit, but Ashton-Kirk wasted but little time upon it. In the front room, however, he examined things with a minuteness that amazed Pendleton. And yet everything was done quickly; like a keen-nosed hound, the investigator went from one object to another; nothing seemed to escape him, nothing was too small for his attention. One of the first things that he did was ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... which are the supernatural fountains of our whole spiritual life. It exercises faith, because it leads men not only to dwell in the unseen world, but to work for it with as much energy and conviction as if it was before their very eyes. Unthoughtful or ill-read persons almost start sometimes at the minuteness, familiarity, and assurance with which men talk of the unseen world, as if it were the banks of the Rhine, or the olive-yards of Provence, the Campagna of Rome, or the crescent shores of Naples, some place which they have seen in their travels, and ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... notion of the furnishing of colonial houses from a contemporary and reliable source—the inventories of the estates of the colonists. These are, of course, still preserved in court records. As it was customary in early days to enumerate with much minuteness the various articles of furniture contained in each room, instead of classifying or aggregating them, we have the outlines of a clear picture of the household belongings ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... to me the events, the prolongation of sitting, while my wife wrote: 'We again went to see Alba's portrait yesterday. The painter erased what he had done.' Finally it became impossible for me to endure it. With their abominable minuteness of detail, the anonymous letters gave me even the address of their rendezvous! I set out. I said to myself, 'If I announce my arrival to my wife they will find it out, they will escape me.' I intended to surprise them. I wanted—Do I know what I wanted? ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... he wrote. To a writer who invented the rector of Mount Vernon, the further invention of a couple of Boswells would be a trifle. I say Boswells advisedly, for these stories are told with the utmost minuteness, and the conversations between Washington and his father are given as if from a stenographic report. How Mr. Custis, usually so accurate, came to be so far infected with the Weems myth as to tell the colt story ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... this little voyage was the complete knowledge of the existence of a strait separating Van Diemen's land from the continent of New Holland, it may not be improper to enter with some degree of minuteness into the particulars of it; and the writer of these pages feels much gratification in being enabled to do this, from the accurate and pleasing journal of Mr. Bass, with the perusal and use of which he ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... not only possible but manifest, that there actually are animals whose eyes are by nature framed to perceive those things which by reason of their minuteness escape our sight. What think you of those inconceivably small animals perceived by glasses? must we suppose they are all stark blind? Or, in case they see, can it be imagined their sight hath not the same use in preserving their bodies from injuries, which appears in that of all other animals? ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... iron over the linen, one might have said that she had a kind of monstrous and cynical affection for a death struggle. She never spoke of anything but of the people she had seen die, of the various kinds of deaths at which she had been present, and she related with the greatest minuteness, details which were always the same, just like ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... different tribes, but different persons in the same tribe, gesture the same sign with different degrees of beauty, for there is calligraphy in sign language, though no recognized orthography. It is nevertheless better to describe and illustrate with unnecessary minuteness than to fail in reporting a real distinction. There are, also, in fact, many signs formed by mere positions of the fingers, some of which are abbreviations, but in others the arrangement of the fingers ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... to say of what races of men it is not allowable to lay down that the society in which they are united was originally organised on the patriarchal model. The chief lineaments of such a society, as collected from the early chapters in Genesis, I need not attempt to depict with any minuteness, both because they are familiar to most of us from our earliest childhood, and because, from the interest once attaching to the controversy which takes its name from the debate between Locke and Filmer, they fill a whole chapter, though not a very profitable ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... so important a factor in generating voice, writers on voice-production have described it with much minuteness, and because of these minute descriptions readers may have obtained an exaggerated idea of the size of this organ. But one of the marvels of voice-production is the smallness of the organ in which voice is generated, the size of the average larynx being about two inches in height by an inch and ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... landlord, a well-dressed, good-looking man, made his appearance with the ostler; he bore the letter in his hand. Without glancing at me, he betook himself at once to consider the horse, going round him, and observing every point with the utmost minuteness. At last, after having gone round the horse three times, he stopped beside me, and keeping his eyes on the horse, bent his head towards his right shoulder. 'That horse is worth some money,' said ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... familiar, comes charmingly, it must be said, from a closet naturalist, who surveys the world of savage beasts from his London study. He apparently forgets that Commodore Byron lived in a time when the painful accuracy and excessive minuteness we are accustomed to was not expected from a writer, whenever he happened to touch on any ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson |
