"Narrowing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... comfortable note about the middle of your voice range, and letting your mouth take the shape for that note unconsciously, you will find that, as you sing up the scale, you change the shape of your mouth, lips, and tongue at every note, thrusting the lips and mouth further forward as if to whistle, narrowing the opening and closing up the back of your throat for the ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... turn the gravest political resolutions into outbursts of sentimental feeling appeared in his "Vow of the Swan," when rising at the royal board he swore on the dish before him to avenge on Scotland the murder of Comyn. Chivalry exerted on him a yet more fatal influence in its narrowing of his sympathy to the noble class and in its exclusion of the peasant and the craftsman from all claim to pity. "Knight without reproach" as he was, he looked calmly on at the massacre of the burghers of Berwick, and ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... and not separated from the Tunicha except by a drawing in or narrowing of the mountain mass, with no depression of the summit, is another part of the same range, which bears a separate name. It is known as the Lukachukai mountains. Here something of the range character is lost, and the uplift becomes a confused mass, a single great pile, with a maximum ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... to converse with common strangers and shake hands with them?" continued Mrs. Randolph, with narrowing lips. ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... she rose early, and taking only some milk and bread for her breakfast, set out to walk on the road towards Ashby, under a leaden-coloured sky, with a narrowing streak of yellow, like a departing hope, on the edge of the horizon. Now in her faintness of heart at the length and difficulty of her journey, she was most of all afraid of spending her money, and becoming so destitute that she would have to ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... toward him again, his eyes narrowing. "Butchery? It's better than no purpose at all, Lee! It'll get me off of these damned outworlds eventually, if I'm a good enough butcher. And I mean to be, Lee ... I mean ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... not be taken, according to the will of the sovereign. The form of declaration was also strongly objected to in the committee; and several amendments were carried to meet the views of the objectors, though not narrowing the principles of the bill; and it finally passed by a large majority. The amendments made simply consisted in this, that the man assuming a public office in a Christian community should declare that he was a Christian, or, at least, that he was not an infidel. The commons agreed to all that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... was the name given to the circle of hunters which, gradually narrowing, hemmed the deer into a small space, where they ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... York and the James, is only eight miles wide. In this broad and bold river, a ship of the line may ride in safety. Its southern banks are high, and, on the opposite shore, is Gloucester Point, a piece of land projecting deep into the river, and narrowing it, at that place, to the space of one mile. Both these posts were occupied by Lord Cornwallis. The communication between them was commanded by his batteries, and by some ships of war which lay under ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... Widow and A Reiver's Neck-verse are all poems of fine imaginative power, and some of them are terrible in their fierce intensity of passion. There is no danger of English poetry narrowing itself to a form so limited as the romantic ballad in dialect. It is of too vital a growth for that. So we may welcome Mr. Swinburne's masterly experiments with the hope that things which are inimitable will not be imitated. The collection is completed by a few poems on ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... with plenty of troops and money at command, would have brought the heroic champion of Catholicism to the ground. He was hemmed in upon all sides; he was cut off from the sea; he stood as it were in a narrowing circle, surrounded by increasing dangers. His own veterans, maddened by misery, stung by their King's ingratitude, naked, starving, ferocious, were turning against him. Mucio, like his evil genius, was spiriting away his supplies just as they ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... make a dash across the mighty barrier that shut us away from Italy. Under a lowering sky, and buffeted by short, sharp gusts of wind, which seemed the heralds of fiercer blasts, we swung along the reedy shores of the narrowing lake, the broken sides of the Rigi standing finely up on our right hand. Winston was satirical about the poor Rigi and its railway, calling it the Primrose Hill and the Devil's Dyke of Switzerland, the paradise of trippers, ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... in this age of specialties than the dwarfing, crippling, mutilating influence of occupations or professions. Specialties facilitate commerce, and promote efficiency in the professions, but are often narrowing to individuals. The spirit of the age tends to doom the lawyer to a narrow life of practice, the business man to ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... used for signaling the fisherman when a fish is caught, is made of a 1/4-in. pine board, about 15 in. long, 2-1/2 in. wide at one end and narrowing down to about 1 in at the other. At a point 6 in. from the smaller end, the board should be cut slightly wider and a 1/2-in. hole bored through it. Two or three wrappings of fine copper wire may be wound around the ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... personal salvation. An impartial study shows that both views are one-sided. On the one hand, no conception of the life of Jesus can be more misleading than that which represents Him as a political revolutionist. But, on the other hand, it would be a distinct narrowing of His teaching to assume that it was confined to the aspirations of the individual soul. His care was indeed primarily for the person. His emphasis was put upon the worth of the individual. And it is not too much to say that the ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... outdone, Lanyard gave a fleeting smile, a bare curving of lips together with an almost imperceptible narrowing of amused eyes—goading the other to the last stage of exasperation—then calmly ignored the fellow, returning indifferent attention to ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... us is, Can Protestantism and Popery—or, somewhat narrowing the ground, Can the Church of England (including that of Ireland) and the Church of Rome—be co-ordinate powers in the constitution of a free country, and at the same time Christian belief be in that country a vital ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... sunshine, throughout the book; earnest and passionate, yet never bitter; humble, yet never abject; with a depth and vehemence of affection "passing the love of woman," yet without a taint of sentimentality; self-restrained and dignified, without ever narrowing into artificial coldness; altogether rivalling the sonnets of Shakespeare; and all knit together into one spiritual unity by the proem at the opening of the volume—in our eyes, the noblest English Christian poem which several ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... in the dream of one sick to death, There comes a narrowing room That pens him, body and limbs and breath, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... one bony hand on his hip, narrowing the long eyes as he looked down on us. The purposeful cruelty of the man was inherent; it was entirely untheatrical. Still ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... rage, in which the leaf should not change nor the blossom wither. That man is greater, however, who contemplates with an equal mind the alternations of terror and of beauty; who, not rejoicing less beneath the sunny sky, can bear also to watch the bars of twilight narrowing on the horizon; and, not less sensible to the blessing of the peace of nature, can rejoice in the magnificence of the ordinances by which that peace is protected and secured. But separated from both by an immeasurable distance would be the man who delighted in convulsion and disease ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... cyclone were perched there for a while, amusing itself among the leaves before blowing on. Then, if you steal up toward the sound, you will find Mooween standing on a big limb of a beech tree, grasping the narrowing trunk with his powerful forearms, tugging and pushing mightily to shake down the ripe beechnuts. The rattle and dash of the falling fruit are such music to Mooween's ears that he will not hear the rustle of your approach, nor the twig that snaps ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... universe but one kind of thing. Nevertheless, when we hear a man called a monist without qualification, we may, perhaps, be justified in assuming, in the absence of further information, that he holds to some one of the forms of doctrine indicated above. There may be no logical justification for thus narrowing the use of the term, but logical justification goes for little ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... plainly means to say that the Indians call the narrow place in the river Quebec. For this meaning of the word, viz., narrowing of waters, in the Algonquin language, the authority is abundant. Laverdiere quotes, as agreeing with him in this view, Bellenger, Ferland, and Lescarbot. "The narrowing of the river," says Charlevoix, "gave ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... animals grazing in the valley, and by the time this was accomplished Indian riders had appeared on every side, gradually closing in upon the party. It was clearly impossible to drive off the bunch through that gradually narrowing cordon of mounted ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... sanguinity was being tested to the utmost. The green lead was barely paying expenses. There had come no justification for a night shift, and use of all the batteries of the mill, for the ledge of ore was gradually, but certainly, narrowing to a point where ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... think," her eyes narrowing till naught but a line of their beautiful blue-green could be seen, "that one of those would dare ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... excitedly, in his chair; he stooped, bringing his eyes level with yours. When he talked he tossed back his head and stuck out his sharp-bearded chin. She was not sure that she liked his eyes. Hot black. Smoky blurs like breath on glass. Old, tired eyelids. Or his funny, sallowish face, narrowing to the black chin-beard. Ugly one minute, ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... are characteristically different from the hypnotic experience. Thus the dreams show that unselective awakening of ideas which is to be expected from a general decrease of functioning. The hypnotic variation is characterized just by its selective narrowing of consciousness. For the same reason, hypnotism is strikingly different from such diseases of the mind as dementia. Certainly in dementia too, many associations are cut off, but it is not a selective ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... on one side by the promotion of cooperative marketing, and we might well inquire into the benefits of cooperative buying. Admittedly, the consumer is much to blame himself, because of his prodigal expenditure and his exaction of service, but Government might well serve to point the way of narrowing the spread of price, especially between the production of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... table. His sombrero was tipped back and the hair hung dank about the pale, sweating forehead, suggestive of sickness. But weak health did not imply weak purpose; every feature in that hawk-like face was sharp with hatred, and in the narrowing eye was vengeance that ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... she whispered in return, and then, marvelling at her boldness, blushed. He glanced sharply at her from narrowing eyes. It was not the answer he ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... working now; there was a quiver of excitement in his voice, a grayer shade on his cheek, a narrowing and a restless movement of his eyes, a stronger twitching of his lips. More shells crashed sharply; a little along the line a gust of rifle-bullets swept over and into the parapet; a Maxim rap-rap-rapped and its bullets spat hailing along ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... gross and visible world of dust, Even to the starry world, with thousand rounds, Builds itself up; on which the unseen powers Move up and down on heavenly ministries— The circles in the circles, that approach The central sun with ever-narrowing orbit— These see the glance alone, the unsealed eye, Of Jupiter's glad children ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the only way through. Missing it will bring you to ever-narrowing ledges, until at last you end at a precipice, and there is no room to turn your horses around for the return. Some of the great box canons thousands of feet deep are practicable by but one passage,—and that steep and ingenious in its ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... would come. Up and away for life! be fleet!— The frost-king ties my fumbling feet, Sings in my ears, my hands are stones, Curdles the blood to the marble bones, Tugs at the heart-strings, numbs the sense, And hems in life with narrowing fence. Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep,— The punctual stars will vigil keep,— Embalmed by purifying cold; The winds shall sing their dead-march old, The snow is no ignoble shroud, The moon thy mourner, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... at the start, I repeat, was revenue. But gradually the people, seeing great tracts of land held unimproved for speculation, seeing the domain of free land narrowing while the pressure of want was beginning to make itself felt east of the mountains, as in Europe, and feeling concerned, as some men of vision did, at the passing of the world's great opportunity for the practical realization of man's natural right to the land without disturbing the system ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... pain and sorrow and evil. Evil must appear as soon as there is {178} process of separation, differentiation, variety, specialization and particularity.[20] Darkness appears as soon as there is a contraction or narrowing ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... the outside world in suspense. The deserter had expected to hear cannon before sunlight so slowly crept under the cave's lip. It was as if they sat within a colossal skull, broad between the ears but narrowing towards the top, with light coming through the parted mouth. Accustomed to the soft twilight, the two could see each other, and the woman covertly put her dress ...
— Marianson - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... eyelashes. In England women of the leisure class showed during the years of the sports craze a tendency to an unfeminine length of limb, often attaining or surpassing the male average. But Nature avenged herself by narrowing the pelvis and weakening the reproductive organs. Free trade drove the old sturdy yeoman into the towns and diminished the stature and muscular power of their descendants, but ten months of trench life and Nature laughed at the weak spot in civilization. The moment ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... See how narrowing are some creeds. This reverend gentleman was personally gentle, kind, considerate, and naturally just; yet, knowing no actor's life, never having seen the inside of a playhouse, he, without hesitation, denounced the theatre and declared it ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... extremely pretty from it, and always cheerful; we rarely go out, yet always are pleased to return. We have our books, our prate, and our boy—how, with all this, can we, or ought we to suffer ourselves to complain of our narrowed and narrowing income? If we are still able to continue at Passy, endeared to me now beyond any other residence away from you all, by a friendship I have formed here with one of the sweetest women I have ever known, Madame de Maisonneuve, and to M. d'Arblay by similar ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... two o'clock. The tide is rising fast; the sea dashes, in higher and higher waves, on the narrowing beach. Rain and mist are both gone. Overhead, the clouds are falling asunder in every direction, assuming strange momentary shapes, quaint airy resemblances of the forms of the great rocks among which we stand. Height after height ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... one that dwellers in the chilly spiritual clime of Unitarianism can be cured of their faith in that icy creed by being subjected to the horrors of a polar winter. Far more clearly does the novel show the falling-off in his artistic conceptions and the narrowing process his opinions were undergoing. At the rate this latter was taking place it seems probable that had he lived to write another novel on a theme similar to this, his hero would have been compelled to abandon his belief in Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, Methodism, ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... one sex and where it was not until after death ascertained that the person belonged to the other sex. Valmont had a hypospadic urethra and penis; a scrotum without testicles; ovaries with the Fallopian tubes; a uterus opened into a vagina of two inches in length, which, gradually narrowing, ended in the male urethra, to which was attached a prostate gland. Valmont contracted marriage as a man and was not discovered to have been a female until the autopsy revealed her to be a woman. The relation does not state anything in regard ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... antagonism or differentiation of interests, the later situation by an emulation constantly increasing in relative absence of antagonism or differentiation of interests, the later situation by an emulation constantly increasing in intensity and narrowing in scope. The traits which characterize the predatory and subsequent stages of culture, and which indicate the types of man best fitted to survive under the regime of status, are (in their primary expression) ferocity, self-seeking, clannishness, and disingenuousness—a ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... vast, unquiet distance the surf came booming in with the heavy impetus of high tide, flinging long streamers of kelp and bits of driftwood over the narrowing stretch of sand where garishly costumed bathers had lately shrieked hilariously at their gambols. Before the chill wind that had risen with the turn of the tide the bathers retreated in dripping, shivering groups, to appear later in fluffs and furs and woollen sweaters; still ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... plates; and even if it were, narrow sluice plates were a step in the wrong direction. If anything the amalgamating surface should be widened to give the particles of gold a better chance to settle. His argument was that the conditions should be changed; by narrowing the stream and giving it less fall, gold, which was incapable of amalgamation on the wide plates, would be saved. We finally put one in, and it proved so successful that we now have one at the end of each table. The per-centage recovered on the sluice plates, of the total yield, ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... the question of phthisis and mental disease, Ziehen remarks that the tuberculous are often observed to be optimistic but that other cases show a hypochondriacal depression with egocentric narrowing of interests. He speaks of a sort of rudimentary delusional disorder looking in the direction of jealousy in certain cases. Pronounced mental disorder occurs rarely in tuberculosis, according to Ziehen, and ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... narrowed with the narrowing of her daily life. They reduced themselves at last to but two, her passion for her money and her perverted love for her husband when he was brutal. She was a ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... grounds began to rise on either side of her, and hills stood back of hills, ambitious of each other's standing, and threw their deep shadows all along the margin of the river. As the sloop entered between these narrowing and lifting walls of the river channel, the draught of air became gentler, often hindered by some outstanding high point she had left behind; more slowly she made her way past hill and hill- embayed ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... being entirely innocent of the practice of expectation, was never disappointed. To set against this negative gain there may have been some positive losses from a certain narrowing of the higher tastes and sensations which it entailed. But limitation of the capacity is never recognized as a loss by the loser therefrom: in this attribute moral or aesthetic poverty contrasts plausibly with material, since those who suffer do not mind it, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... had now wherewith to live; and if it seem to my reader that the horizon of hope was narrowing around them, it does not follow that it must have seemed so to them. For what is the extent of our merely rational horizon at any time? But for faith and imagination it would be a narrow one indeed! Even what we call experience ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... husbands could change places with their wives for a year, they would feel the contracting, narrowing influence in which the average wife lives. Their minds would soon cease to reach out, they would quickly feel the pinching, paralyzing effect of the monotonous existence, of doing the same things every day, year in and year out. The wives, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... was ready Jock whistled for his companion, and on looking out was surprised to find him gone; but from the narrowing walls of the gorge came the sound of his furious barking. Jock whistled again and again, but the dog did not come. Perfectly convinced that something was wrong, he seized his rifle and hurried off, expecting to find that Collie had cornered ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... world of mousmes and grasshoppers: Chrysantheme in love with Yves; Yves with Chrysantheme; Oyouki with me; I with no one. We might even find here, ready to hand, the elements of a fratricidal drama, were we in any other country than Japan; but we are in Japan, and under the narrowing and dwarfing influence of the surroundings, which turn everything into ridicule, nothing will come of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... deepening and narrowing, became a gorge, the beginning of that long series of fissures in the metamorphic and secondary rocks which, crossing an extensive tract of Languedoc and Guyenne, leads the traveller up to the Cevennes Mountains, through ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... bounds, as at Kobe. We were encountering the accustomed uncertainties of a period of revolutionary transition, intensified by prejudices engendered through centuries of national isolation, with all the narrowing and deepening of prepossession which accompanies entire absence of intercourse with other people. At this very moment, in March, 1868, the decree against the practice of Christianity by the natives was reissued: "Hitherto ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... reacted violently both against the misplaced and artificial erudition of the Pleiade and their unforced outbursts of lyric song. His object was to purify the French tongue; to make it—even at the cost of diminishing its flavour and narrowing its range—strong, supple, accurate and correct; to create a language which, though it might be incapable of expressing the fervours of personal passion or the airy fancies of dreamers, would be a perfect instrument ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... cushions under the flattery of the south wind in the course of her evening drive. She had ceased latterly, however, to note particularly that or any impression. Such things require range and atmosphere, and she seemed to have no more command over these; her outlook was blocked by crowding, narrowing facts. There was certainly no room for perceptions creditable to one's intellect or one's taste. Also it may be doubted whether Alicia would have tried the days of her hospitality to Captain Filbert by her ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... articles of supply and consumption will certainly enable the interchange of goods between Chile and America to increase without narrowing the horizons of our commerce with friendly markets, which today bring us capital, raw ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... proportions in the dim light. Venters whistled softly, began a slow approach, and then called. The horse snorted and, plunging away with dull, heavy sound of hoofs, he disappeared in the gloom. "Wilder than ever!" muttered Venters. He followed the sorrel into the narrowing split between the walls, and presently had to desist because he could not see a foot in advance. As he went back toward the open Wrangle jumped out of an ebony shadow of cliff and like a thunderbolt shot huge and black past him down into the starlit glade. Deciding that all attempts to catch ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... ever been before. Their leaders frankly stated to the world that their four billions of negro property was of more importance to them than any federal union which threatened the value of that property by narrowing the limits of its usefulness. The negroes knew a great war was beginning and that they were the objects of contention; but long discipline and a curious pride in the prowess of their masters kept them at their lowly but important tasks. They boasted that their masters could ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... the position in which I stood inconvenient. The triangular space, narrowing acutely towards the bottom, hindered me from standing fairly on my feet; but I soon remedied this defect, by filling the angle with some pieces of cloth and velvet that were near at hand. I then proceeded ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... beauty grew till drawn in narrowing arcs The southing autumn touch'd with sallower gleams The granges on the fallows. At that time, Tir'd of the noisy town I wander'd there. The bell toll'd four, and by the time I reach'd The wicket-gate I found ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... battlements and the turret tower at one angle. The fallen stone lay in irregular heaps on the ground at its foot; all around it were clumps of furze and bramble. From the level plateau on which it stood the Glen fell away in horseshoe formation gradually narrowing and descending until it terminated in a thick covert of fir and pine that ran down to the land end of the cove of which Spurge had told them. And beyond that stretched the wide expanse of sea, with here and there a red-sailed fishing boat tossing restlessly on the white-capped waves, and over that ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... old house stood looked far out upon the ocean; no other house was in sight, and it was completely sheltered not only by a forest of trees but by the banks that, high and broken, curved in at the mouth of the cove, narrowing the inlet, and forming altogether a sea and land view scarcely to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... eyes narrowing down, his whole face setting in hard cast of intense preoccupation, as if he visualized a ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... rocker in time of heavy weather special appliances are necessary, which, of course, must be easily operated from the deck. Wedge-shaped pieces with rails attached may be driven down by screws upon the sides of the vessel, thus having the effect of gradually narrowing the amplitude of the rocking motion until a condition of stability with reference to the ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... speak with more freedom, to be less afraid of him. The gap between her small provincial experience and modes of thought, and his, was narrowing. Each was beginning to discover the inner personality of the other. And the more Farrell explored her the more charmed he was. She was curiously ignorant, whether of books or life. Even the busy commercial life amid which she had been brought up, as it seemed to him, she had ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... field," said Bell, his eyes narrowing suddenly. "On the direct route. Fifty miles back there's ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... river running to the east and, for four nights, paddled up it. The country was now assuming a different character, and the stream was running in a valley with rising ground—from a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet high—on each side, and was narrowing very fast. Towards morning on the fifth day the river had become a small stream, of but two or three feet deep; and they decided to leave the boat, as it was evident that they would be able to go but a short ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... class of wheels special attention should be given to the concentration and increase of the velocity of the current by wing dams or by the narrowing of shallow streams; always bearing in mind that any increase in the velocity of the current is economy in increased power, as well as in the size and cost of a wheel for a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... and her sister Mrs. Caroline Tappan. Unequal as the contributions are in merit, the periodical is of singular interest. It was conceived and carried on in a spirit of boundless hope and enthusiasm. Time and a narrowing subscription list proved too hard a trial, and its four volumes remain stranded, like some rare and curiously patterned shell which a storm of yesterday has left beyond the reach of the receding waves. Thoreau wrote for ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... clasp, From seaweed fringe to mountain heather, The British oak with rooted grasp Her slender handful holds together, With cliffs of white and bowers of green, And ocean narrowing to caress her, And hills and threaded streams between, Our little mother ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... Holy Office, and to be her friend was slightly dangerous. It is obvious that Vittoria's religion was of an evangelical type, inconsistent with the dogmas developed by the Tridentine Council; and it is probable that, like her friend Contarini, she advocated a widening rather than a narrowing of Western Christendom. To bring the Church back to purer morals and sincerity of faith was their aim. They yearned for a reformation and regeneration ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... machinery, the engine, and some lumber were to go in La Biche's boat, and that the provisions and the airship were to be carried in Moosetooth's batteau. In the end of each boat there was a little deck the width of the narrowing end of the boat and about ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... insult!" cried Lucian, the boy who so often widened his eyes, while Julian, narrowing his lids, said in ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... merely in union with one other person. For what love gains in intension it is apt to lose in extension; so that in practice it may even come to frustrate the very end it seeks, limiting instead of expanding, narrowing just in proportion as it deepens, and, by causing the disruption of all other ties, impoverishing the natures it should have enriched. Or don't you think that this happens sometimes, ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... politician who insists upon mere purity of administration and upon the control and suppression of the unruly elements in the community, may be the easy result of a narrowing and selfish process. For the painful condition of endeavoring to minister to genuine social needs, through the political machinery, and at the same time to remodel that machinery so that it shall be adequate to its new task, is to encounter the inevitable discomfort of a transition ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... which the colossal achievements of mankind have been built up. Work, as has well been said, is an ascending stairway. On its broad base are ranged all the multitudes of the earth. Those who can climb mount the higher and ever-narrowing stair. ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... for examining this curious chain, and, after some preliminary questions, was rash enough to lean towards her and put out his hand toward the neck that lay in the golden coil. She threw her head back, her eyes narrowing and her forehead drawing down so that Dick thought her head actually flattened itself. He started involuntarily; for she looked so like the little girl who had struck him with those sharp flashing teeth, that the whole scene came back, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... unconscious of the other's existence, though in reality no detail of the brewing storm had escaped him. He was studying the other faces around the table, and what he saw in them appeared to occupy him. Wilfred Horton's cheeks were burning with a dull flush, and his eyes were narrowing with an unveiled dislike. Suddenly, a silence fell on the party, and, as the men sat puffing their cigars, Horton turned toward the Kentuckian. For a moment, he glared in silence, then with an impetuous exclamation ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... to us a wedding wind, O cover me with kisses of her mouth; Blow thou our souls together, heart and mind; To narrowing northern lines, blow from the south! Out to the ocean fleet and float; Blow, blow my little ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... of the South, as will be seen later, have been exempt, in large measure, from the narrowing influence of one-sided theological or philosophical tenets. They have not aspired to the role of social reformers; and in their loyalty to art, they have abstained from fanatical energy ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... opened from the side walls of the pit, which was gradually narrowing into the shape of a funnel. But Harry began to feel a fresher air rising from beneath, whence he concluded that the bottom of the pit communicated with a gallery of some description in the lowest part ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... their Father with frank and childlike confidence, and, if aroused to a consciousness of sin or wrong, to entreat at once His forgiveness. Such however, he tells us, was not what he was taught. On the contrary, he was instructed, and trained up from childhood in that narrowing conception of Christianity, and that outward form of religiousness, against which, more than anything, he bore ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... with my glass, his monstrous body appeared on every side of us, except dead to windward, where there was a clear opening, towards which point we were doing our best to beat up. Even that small space appeared to be narrowing. I watched it with no little anxiety—so did the mate, and so did Jerry Wilkins. Jerry was the first to discover that the serpent ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... the city comes in distant bells and whistles, changing their sound, just as scenery moves, according to the state of the atmosphere. The islands shift as if enchanted, now near and plain, then removed and dim. The bay widening, sapphire blue, or narrowing, green and gray, or, before ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... a question of discretion, and that discretion exercised solely upon what will appear best for the conservation of the state on its present basis, I should recommend it to your serious thoughts, whether the narrowing of the foundation is always the best way to secure the building? The body of disfranchised men will not be perfectly satisfied to remain always in that state. If they are not satisfied, you have two millions of subjects in your ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... at the landing stage before they reached it, a slender brilliant figure in her hood and mantle, with her aunt beside her. Chris stood up again and cried between his hands across the narrowing space that all was well; and her face was radiant as the boat slipped up to the side, and balanced there with the boatman's hand on the ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... far back to the time when Dudley Venner was born,—she being then a middle-aged woman. The heir and hope of a family which had been narrowing down as if doomed to extinction, he had been surrounded with every care and trained by the best education he could have in New England. He had left college, and was studying the profession which gentlemen of leisure most affect, when he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... begin to demand that neurasthenics shall not marry? Even the health certificate at the wedding may give only an illusion of safety, as the health of too many marriages is destroyed by the escapades of the husband, and it may, on the other hand, lead to a narrowing down under the pressure of arbitrary theories, producing a true race suicide. The question whether the healthy man is the only desirable element of the community is one which allows different answers. Much of the greatest work for the world's progress ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... indelicate," the marquis suggested, "to allow even truth to appear quite unclothed in the presence of a lady?" He smiled and took a short turn on the grass. "Look you, Master Mervale," said he, narrowing his pale-blue eyes to slits, "I have, somehow, a disposition to confidence come upon me. Frankly, my passion for the Lady Ursula burns more mildly than that which Antony bore the Egyptian; it is less a fire to consume kingdoms than a candle wherewith to light a contented home; and quite ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... our physical and mental development was kept away from us, and our teachers might call themselves so because, with virile energy, they had understood how to protect the institute from every injurious and narrowing outside influence. The smallest and the largest pupil was free, for he was permitted to be wholly and entirely his natural self, so long as he kept within the limits imposed by the existing laws. But license was nowhere more sternly prohibited than at Keilhau; and the deep religious ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the horse advanced round the little bend in the ever-narrowing cliffs, and there in front of me, under the gigantic mass of overhanging rock, appeared the kraal of Zikali surrounded by its reed fence. The gate of the fence was open, and beyond it, on his stool in front of the large hut, sat Zikali. Even at that distance it was impossible to mistake ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... desires to deny the evil, but only to estimate its extent. Yet it cannot be gainsaid that its fatal empire is narrowing instead of enlarging. Especially is it the progress accomplished in the higher regions of intellect and of the feelings which here exerts its beneficent influence. On our moral greatness depends our material power. The elevation or debasement ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... from that old world to this new one, through the war-storms. It takes away the sulphur and the blood-flecks, and drowns out the harsh noises of battle. The two margins of the great gulf which has divided you from me seem approaching each other: I stretch out my hand across the narrowing fissure, to grasp yours on the other side. And I wish, with all my heart, that you and I could spend this ineffable May afternoon under that old oak at Whittaker's and 'talk it ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... element which made such destructive inroads into the manner of the later prose writers. In this period the writers as a rule are not public men, but belong to what we should call the literary class. They wrote not for the public but for the select circle of educated men whose ranks were gradually narrowing their limits to the great injury of literature. If we ask which of the two sections of this period marks the most strictly national development, the answer must be—the Ciceronian; for while the advancement of any literature is more accurately tested by its prose writers than by ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... followed up the crevasse, which showed no sign of narrowing. The snow was thick, the bitter wind increasing, and a plunge into icy water might prove disastrous. It was obvious that he must extricate his companion as soon as possible, but the means of accomplishing it was ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... considerations of a sordid nature, I am told, had to do with that; something about a guinea and a half and six shillings with which we will not concern ourselves—but I rejoice to see many signs to-day that that phase of narrowing and restriction is over, and that there is every encouragement for a return towards a laxer, more spacious form of novel-writing. The movement is partly of English origin, a revolt against those more exacting and cramping conceptions ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... narrow line of sky between the sea and the lower edge of the sun now," said Fred. "It looks no more than an inch broad, and it is narrowing, I think." ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... Amsterdam, took him up. All the next day Ragon was in misery, but nightfall came and he had heard nothing of Sandy, though several craft had come into port. If another day got over he would feel safe; but he told himself that he was in a gradually narrowing circle, and that the sooner he leaped ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... in the choice of words, but his humour is racier and scarcely less delicate, and in passages of pathos he knows his way straight to the human heart As the invention or discovery of new themes grows day by day less easy—as the bounds of the story-teller's personal originality are constantly narrowing—the purely literary faculty, the mere craft of authorship in its finer manifestations must of necessity grow more valuable. Mr. Barrie is a captain amongst workmen, and there is little fear that in the final judgment of the public and his peers he will be huddled up ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... She drew back, slightly tilting her chin and narrowing her eyes, as one who contemplates a beautiful statue or other work of art. "Is it true they whipped that, naked, through ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... passed quite near to them, with a creaking of new leather, a jangling of bits tossed proudly and white with foam as after a wild gallop, two superb horses bearing a human couple compelled to ride close together by the narrowing of the path; he supporting with one arm the flexible form moulded into a waist of dark cloth, she, with her hand on her companion's shoulder and her little head, in profile—hidden beneath the tulle of her half-fallen veil—resting tenderly thereon. ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... say that I refer to those coupon bonds, issued in the days of eight and ten per cent interest, and gradually narrowing as they drop their semiannual slips of paper, which represent wishes to be realized, as the roses let fall their leaves in July, as the icicles melt away in the ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... order and the entire Union force now advanced at a gallop. Through the woods, narrowing so rapidly, came the swift beat of hoofs on the other side, and it was apparent that coincidence would bring the two forces to the point of convergence at the same time. The moonlight seemed to Dick to grow so bright and ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to try and ride straight up to a bustard, and this he knew. The only thing to do is to excite his curiosity and fix his attention by moving round and round him in an ever-narrowing circle. Putting his pony to a canter, John proceeded to do this with a heart beating with excitement. Round and round he went; the pauw had vanished now, he was squatting in the tuft of grass. The last circle brought him to within seventy yards, and he did not ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... to his sight; the world was narrowing around him. I glanced about me, and saw that the hay and straw were trampled over the floor, as if there had been ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... that do. Thereupon my soft-voiced handmaid bears out a large tin pan, and then the wholesome countryman, heaping the peck-measure, spreads his broad hands around its lower arc to confine the wild and frisky berries, and so they run nimbly along the narrowing channel until they tumble rustling down in a black cascade and tinkle on the resounding metal beneath.—I won't say that this rushing huckleberry hail-storm has not more music for me ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... I, who had fallen to the rear, rode leisurely northward athwart the open prairie on a clear trail, which twice crossed the shallow river, and, leaving the main valley, carried us up a narrowing vale on slightly rising ground. On either side and in front rose abrupt mountains some two thousand feet above the plain, and below the remarkable outline of Soda Butte marked the line of the Park boundary. Near by was a little corral where ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... either develop into adherents as they read, or, what is more likely, they will exchange a vague disorderly objection for a clearly defined and understood difference. To arrive at such an understanding is often for practical purposes as good as unanimity; for in narrowing down the issue to some central point or principle, we develop just how far those who are divergent may go together before separation or conflict become inevitable, and save something of our time and of our lives ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... mountain, and far blue peaks in the north. And so at last I came to the place. The track went up a gentle slope, and widened out into an open space with a wall of thick undergrowth around it, and then, narrowing again, passed on into the distance and the faint blue mist of summer heat. And into this pleasant summer glade Rachel passed a girl, and left it, who shall say what? I did not stay ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... streets of the village, where the principal traffic is over rough country roads, would not be very great, but it would enable the road authorities of the township to realize the advantage of first-rate roads and the degree to which the narrowing of the roadway cheapens construction. As a result, there would soon be an extension of the improvement over the more important highways into the country; where a well-metalled width of twelve feet would accommodate nearly the whole ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... wild call which had awakened the echoes before, and this time his practised ear distinguished amongst the multitudinous replies an answering shout from human lips. Releasing Gelert, who dashed forward with a bay of delight, the lad commenced springing from rock to rock up the narrowing gorge, until he reached a spot where the dwindling stream could be crossed by a bound; from which spot a wild path, more like a goat track than one intended for the foot of man, led upwards towards the higher ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... hospital-corps orderly were working to extricate the wounded from their painful position. A gun was overturned against the ambulance. A melee of horses and men was forming at the foot of the garden gate in front of the narrowing bounds of the road into the town, as a stream banks up before a jam of driftwood. The struggle for right of way became increasingly wild; the dam of men, horses, and wagons grew. A Brown dirigible was descending toward the great target; but on closer view its commander forbore, ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... refreshment, but did not dare to venture out of sight of the house. Miss Ann was the perfect image of Patience in a hay-mow, smiling at his anxiety. The motion of her needles never ceased, except when she counted the stitches in narrowing. ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... perfect, failed him utterly. He was baffled, netted; there was a spell upon him. Was it a dream? Was it all one of those hideous nightmares of endless pillars beyond pillars, stairs above stairs, rooms within rooms, changing, shifting, lengthening out for ever and for ever before the dreamer, narrowing, closing in on him, choking him? Was it a dream? Was he doomed to wander for ever and for ever in some palace of the dead, to expiate the sin which he had learnt and done therein? His brain, for the first time in his life, began to reel. He could ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... clear records of the Christian epoch after the re-Latinisation of England. An outpost beyond these three is the institution of St Frideswides at Oxford. Beyond that point the upper river, gradually narrowing, losing its importance for commerce and as a highway, supported no great monastery, and felt but tardily the economic change wrought by the foundations lower ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... that he is no fool. Or at least he may find there a centre of interest, otherwise lacking, round which other interests can group, and to which knowledge obtained in various class-subjects can attach itself, and so get for him a meaning and a use. And further, if we do not make the mistake of narrowing the range of choice, and allow, at any rate at first, a succession of interests, the very range and variety of these pursuits is an antidote against the tendency to early specialisation, encouraged by scholarship and entrance examinations, ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... narrowing his eyes, as if he recalled a picture he had found incredible, "she was playing croquet out in ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... usual deck-hand on its outer end the stage hung half its length over the narrowing water. On its inboard half, attended at one side by the first mate and at their backs by a knot of white-jackets with hands and arms full of baggage, waited the exhorter, his two champions, and the sporting pair, outwardly ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... horizon where the hills became a blue mist rolling softly against the sky. He seemed to make up his mind, presently, that nothing would follow the chestnut out of the distance and he began to move about Alcatraz in a rapid gallop, constantly narrowing his circle. ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... century known as al-barbet.[4] There is a stringed instrument, as yet unidentified by name, of which there are at least four different representations in sculpture,[5] which combines the characteristics of both lyre and rebab, having the vaulted back and gradual narrowing to form a neck which are typical of the rebab and the stringing of the lyre. In outline it resembles a large lute with a wide neck, and the seven strings of the lyre of the best period, or sometimes nine, following the decadent lyre. Most authors ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... hundred leagues from the Amazon, from whose majestic volume the little party of explorers had turned southward more than a month before. The broad sail, which was erected in the centre of the craft, swept it smoothly along over the narrowing bosom of the Xingu, between luxuriant forests and past tribes of strange-looking Indians, who stood on the banks staring wonderingly at the extraordinary beings, the like of which many of ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... everybody practises restraint and sacrifice since everybody is to some extent moral. But it goes very hard with your average man and woman in your average marriage, and there is a decided setting of the mouth and narrowing of ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... flowing down a valley, shut in by mountains. The valley gradually contracted in the ascent, till it became a ravine, and further on a mere crevice marked by the thick growth of the chestnut-trees; but before this greater narrowing, they saw the roofs of the houses in the little town. The sun shone clear, the air had grown fresh as they mounted higher; Amabel could hardly imagine sickness and sorrow in so fair a spot, and turned to ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... conscious of the fact that the conversation had, up to this point, been narrowing her hesitation concerning the concert company's offer down to a decision that would absolutely satisfy her own judgment of Jesus' probable action. It had been the last thing in the world, however, that she had desired, to have her decision made in any way so public as this. Somehow what Rollin ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... for a family merely to continue from generation to generation piling up possessions, and narrowing its interests. It must do this for a time to become solid, and then it should take a vaster view, and begin to help the world. Nearly everything is spoiled in all civilisation because of this inability to see beyond the nose, ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... so. From all points there rode in on the outfit from Diamond X an ever narrowing circle of horsemen, many of whom carried lances which pointed ...
— The Boy Ranchers Among the Indians - or, Trailing the Yaquis • Willard F. Baker
... hills, and then back into my face, his eyes narrowing, his lips setting firm over the white teeth. I little realized what was taking place in the fellow's brain, what real motive influenced his decision, or ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... the capture of the hare by a well-known trick. Thrusting a stake into the ground, he placed his hat on it, and strolled unconcernedly away. Then, as though he had changed his mind, he walked round the clump, in ever narrowing circles, gradually closing on his prey. Meanwhile, the hare, her attention wholly diverted by the improvised scarecrow, remained motionless, baffled by the artifice. Suddenly she felt the touch of the man's hand. The poacher had thrown himself down on the ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... the boy's schoolbook and was looking at the writing on the flyleaf again. Then he raised his head, eyes narrowing on the boy as though searching for some elusive memory connected with him—with his name in the Latin book—perhaps with the writing, which, somehow, had stirred in him, once more, the same odd and uncomfortable sensation which he had experienced ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers |
