"Descriptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... here speaks of Barclay, as born beyond the Tweed, is not a little strengthened by the accuracy with which even in allegory he delineates his peculiar characteristics. 'He lodged upon a bed of sweet camomile.' What figure could have been more descriptive of that agreeable bitterness, that pleasant irony, which distinguishes the author of the 'Ship of Fools?' 'About him many shepherds and sheep with pleasant pipes, greatly abhorring the life of courtiers.' What could have been a plainer paraphrase of the title of Barclay's ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... Life.—In all of the traditions and writings descriptive of the old Greek social life, with the exception of the Works and Days of Hesiod, the aristocratic class appears uppermost. Hesiod "pictures a hopeless and miserable existence, in which care and the despair ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... resolution of the 2d of this month, I transmit to both Houses those instructions to and dispatches from the envoys extraordinary of the United States to the French Republic which were mentioned in my message of the 19th of March last, omitting only some names and a few expressions descriptive of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 4) of Volume 1: John Adams • Edited by James D. Richardson
... his battle is not yet quite passed away, nor his ghastly wounds forgotten. The citizens of Camden have lately enclosed his grave, and placed on it handsome marble, with an epitaph gratefully descriptive of his VIRTUES and SERVICES, that the people of future days may, like Washington, heave the sigh when they read of "the generous stranger who came from a distant land to fight their battles, and to water, with his blood, the tree of ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... her the ideal mother of a family, and just what the wife of such a man as Cyrus Talbert ought to be, but no doubt because Mrs. Talbert's characteristics were not so salient as her mother's, my wife was less definitely descriptive of her. ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... the scene changes; the whole world of Paris passes before one. Yet the book, to my thinking, is far less descriptive than analytical. The souls of the principal characters are probed to their lowest depths. Many of the scenes, too, are intensely dramatic, admirably adapted for the stage; as, for instance, Baroness Duvillard's interview with her daughter in the chapter which I have called "The Rivals." And side ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... great; the effect they make is greater than the range." But this selection has been admirably chosen with a view to making the range as wide as possible, and I can only hope that it will serve to influence some of our younger writers toward a greater descriptive ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... we could hear heavy rifle and machine gun fire, but the din was too great to distinguish much detail. The common expression used on the front, "Hell let loose," was the only term at all descriptive of ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... that toxic agents cannot be accurately classified, the following grouping may for descriptive purposes be admitted with the view of ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... tells Laertes, 'the wind sits in the shoulder of your sail'—a technical expression, the singular propriety of which a naval critic has recently established; whilst some of the commentators on the passage in King Lear, descriptive of the prospect from Dover Cliffs, affirm that the comparison as to apparent size, of the ship to her cock-boat, and the cock-boat to a buoy, discover a perfect knowledge of the relative proportions of the objects named. In Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest, The Merchant of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... home manufacture. At this meeting Professor J. F. W. Johnson, of Edinburgh, who was making a tour of North America, was present. The address of the president, Henry Ruttan of Cobourg, is a most valuable reference article descriptive of the agricultural progress of the province from the first settlements in 1783 to the time of the exhibition. Ruttan was a loyalist's son, and, from his own personal knowledge, he described the old plough that was given by the government to each of ...
— History of Farming in Ontario • C. C. James
... of Mr. Blacklock's poetry, so far as it was descriptive of visible objects; and observed, that 'as its authour had the misfortune to be blind, we may be absolutely sure that such passages are combinations of what he has remembered of the works of other writers ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... last deed, brothers, with the map annexed, are descriptive of the purchase made sixteen years ago at this place; one of the boundary lines calls for a creek by the name of Tyadoghton, we wish our brothers the Six Nations to explain to us clearly which you call the Tyadoghton, as there are two creeks issuing from ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... about to furnish details, her mood being communicative, but Mrs. Baxter led the way into the "living-room"; the hall was vacated, and only the murmur of voices and laughter reached William. What descriptive information Jane may have added was spared his hearing, ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... Saturn? In the Faery Queen, iii. 11, Britomart saw in the castle of Bu'sirane (3 syl.), a picture descriptive of the love of Saturn, who had changed himself into a centaur out of love for Erig'one. It was not Saturn, but Bacchus who loved Erig'one, and he was not tranformed into a ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... destiny—one can use no other word—which bears so heavily upon us as we read these books. In other writers one feels that when one has gone "full circle" with the principal characters, and has noted the "descriptive setting" all has been done. Here, as in Aeschylus and Euripides, as in Shakespeare and Goethe, one is left with an intimation of the clash of forces beyond and below humanity, beyond and below nature. One stands at the brink of things unspoken and unspeakable. One "sees the children ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... Dreeme," and a few doors below is the red brick apartment where in more modern days so many of the younger scribblers have toiled in the years of their pseudo-Bohemia. Across the Square N.P. Willis, the town's crack descriptive writer, was in the habit of making his way, and on one occasion with sorry results. The actor, Edwin Forrest, appeared in his path and fell upon him with vigorous assault. Bystanders were on the point of intervening. "Stand back, gentlemen!" cried the Thespian. "He has interfered in ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... surveyors and nautical cartographers to achieve standardization in nautical charts and electronic chart displays; to provide advice on nautical cartography and hydrography; to develop the sciences in the field of hydrography and techniques used for descriptive oceanography ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... done by hand, and the type distributed immediately upon completion of presswork. The printing, in all its details, is the personal work of THOMAS C. RUSSELL, at 1734 Nineteenth Avenue, San Francisco, California. Descriptive circulars sent ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... inns in England are often named after animals with an adjective descriptive of the color of the sign; as, The Golden Lion, The ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... throat; but it is too much, and one perceives that Balzac lived too soon to profit by Balzac. The later men, especially the Russians, have known how to forbear the excesses of analysis, to withhold the weakly recurring descriptive and caressing epithets, to let the characters suffice for themselves. All this does not mean that 'Cesar Birotteau' is not a beautiful and pathetic story, full of shrewdly considered knowledge of men, and of a good art struggling to free itself from self-consciousness. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... betrayed so little desire. The sheltered paths and well-known trees, even the little clumps of shrubbery that filled up the intervals, were too pleasant and familiar to his eye not to seem favorable to his progress, and with a hope that had no foundation, save in the warm and descriptive colors of a young heart's fancy, William Hinkley pursued the route which led him to one of the most lovely and love-haunted glades in ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... is clear enough and useful to make: the modern Novel in its beginning did introduce a more truthful representation of human life than had obtained in the romantic fiction deriving from the medieval stories. The term "realism" as first applied was suitably descriptive; it is only with the subsequent evolution that so simple a word has taken on ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... Langdon grinned happily as he listened to the other's vociferations, which threatened Dishpan with every known form of torture and punishment, from instant disembowelment to the more merciful end of losing her brain through the medium of a club. He grinned because Otto's vocabulary descriptive of terrible things always impending over the heads of his sleek and utterly heedless pack-horses was one of his chief joys. He knew that if Dishpan should elect to turn somersaults while diamond-hitched under her pack, big, good-natured Bruce ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... grave anguish to talk of going to the police in the morning, of printing descriptive bills, of setting people to drag the ponds for miles around. It was extremely gruesome. I murmured something about communicating with the young lady's relatives. It seemed to me a very natural suggestion; but Fyne and his wife exchanged such ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... efficiency in that leap; on that depends his life; his very existence turns on the wondrous perfection of the sneak, of which the leap is the culmination. Hunters in all parts where these creatures abound, agree in calling Wildcat, Lynx, and Cougar by the undignified but descriptive name of Sneak-cat. ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... one of the most unhappy and ominous allusions ever made by a Minister of this country. He quoted certain words, easily rendered as 'Empire and Liberty'—words (he said) of a Roman statesman, words descriptive of the State of Rome—and he quoted them as words which were capable of legitimate application to the position and circumstance of England. I join issue with the Prime Minister upon that subject, and I affirm that nothing can be more fundamentally unsound, more practically ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... days to which I have referred is not one on market life in particular, but one on violets. It contains, however, a vigorous, if brief, picture of the Halles in the small hours of the morning, and is instinct with that realistic descriptive power of which M. Zola has since given so many proofs. We hear the rumbling and clattering of the market carts, we see the piles of red meat, the baskets of silvery fish, the mountains of vegetables, green and white; in a few paragraphs the whole market world passes in kaleidoscopic ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... scenery, this eclogue possesses. The route of a camel-driver is a scene that scarce could exist in the imagination of a European, and of its attendant distresses he could have no idea.—These are very happily and minutely painted by our descriptive poet. What sublime simplicity of expression! what nervous plainness in ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... appears in the descriptive passages, and there is a melodious rhythm to his prose style that is pleasurable in a high degree. Mr. Warman has a field of his own, and he is master ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... the gentleness and force, the grace and energy, the descriptive and passionate power, the unstudied ease, and the consummate art of both imagery and diction which distinguish this remarkable writer, will soon make a place for him among the most interesting and distinguished of those who have attempted to write ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... Rydal Mount as some of Pope's countrymen have treated the house and grounds at Twickenham.[038] It would be sad indeed to hear, after this, that any one had refused to spare the Poor Robins and wild geraniums of Rydal Mount. Miss Jewsbury has a poem descriptive of "the Poet's Home." I must give ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... algebra through quadratic equations, plane geometry, descriptive geography, physical geography, United States history and ...
— Go Ahead Boys and the Racing Motorboat • Ross Kay
... study of a descriptive list of the new glass, received a week or two ago from the manufacturers, I find, to my great regret, that this new glass seems to suffer from a similar weakness to that made by the English firm twelve ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... gorgeous summer sunsets and clear moonlight nights, soon wearied her—for we were too much occupied with the beauties of nature to notice her fine attitudes, or beautiful eyes cast up imploringly to heaven, while she recited, in a half theatrical manner, passages of poetry descriptive of her imaginary feelings. I suspected she was meditating a flitting, when one day Lucien, and two of his student friends, made their appearance amongst us. How quickly her mood changed; the listless, yawning, dissatisfied manner disappeared, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... are more descriptive than any other sort of writing. You have a description of a new invention, of a great fire, of a prisoner at the bar of justice. It is not quite so spontaneous as narrative. Children seldom describe, and the newspaper man finds difficulty in making what seems a very ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... not, finding it as costly as beautiful. It was a very happy day, though quietly spent sitting by the lake enjoying the well-chosen extracts from Shakspeare, Wordsworth, Byron, Burns, Scott, and other descriptive poets, and writing loving letters home, proudly stamped with the ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... notice of this flower in Gerarde; and in Sowerby, out of eighteen lines of closely printed descriptive text, no notice of its crosslet form, while the petals are only stated to be "roundish-concave," terms equally applicable to at least one-half of all flower petals in the {93} world. The leaves are said to be very deeply pinnately partite; but drawn—as neither ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... dangerously fallacious, in that its use blinds or tends to blind our own people to the real conditions existing in the Archipelago. It is correct to speak of the Filipino peoples, because this expression is, geographically, accurately descriptive; but it is absolutely misleading to speak of the Filipino people, because of the false political idea involved and conveyed by the use of the singular number. Similarly, there is no objection to the term "Filipino" or "Filipinos," ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... was again fascinated by the inexhaustible wit and allusive badinage of this great little comedian, beside whose ready gagging GEORGE GRAVES himself is inarticulate. Had not GEORGE ROBEY invented for application to himself the descriptive phrase, "The Prime Minister of Mirth," it should be at once affixed to the Law Courts' fun-maker; but, since it is too late to use that, let us think of him as "The Chancellor of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... for ragged nerves—provided you are a good sailor. But the forms are too fleeting, they change too quickly—so quickly, indeed, that I have never succeeded in so fixing their record upon my memory as to be able to develop one form from the other in descriptive notes. It is that very fact, I believe, upon which hinges the curative value of the sight: you are so completely absorbed by the moment, and all other things fall away. Many and many a day have I lain in my deck chair on board a liner and ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... have been given names descriptive of their shape. The narrowest kind, with the same width all the way, ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... of his simpler economic theories. A quotation, admirably apropos to Banneker's present purposes, flashed forth clear and pregnant, to his journalistic memory. From the Ledger "morgue" he selected one of several cuts of Mr. Vanney, and turned it in to the night desk for publication, with this descriptive note: ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... borrowed and exchanged among themselves not merely refrains and single lines, but whole verses, passages, and situations. Always frugal in the employment of ornament in his text, the balladist never troubled to invent when he found a descriptive phrase or figure made and lying ready to his hand. Plagiarism from his brother bards was a thing that troubled him no more than repeating himself. He lived and sang in times before the literary conscience had been ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... "you're no better than all the rest. Commend me to a clever man for incapacity to apprehend what is patent to the intelligence of the most ordinary woman. Look about you."—Helen sketched in their surroundings with a quick descriptive gesture. "Observe the lights and shadows. The ghostly wavings of those pale curtains. Smell the potpourri and spices. Think of the ancestor worship. Listen to the protesting wind and rain. See the mysterious treasure you hold in your hand. And then ask me what middle-age and the clerical profession ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... courageous soldiers of Italy and Austria have been called upon to undergo are not easily appreciated unless one has been on the very ground on which they do some of their fighting. The following extracts from descriptive articles from the pen of Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Hilaire Belloc, and some special correspondents of the London "Times" give a most vivid picture of actual conditions in the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Colt Hoare, to whose talents and benevolence Mr. Bowles pays a merited tribute. Longleat, the residence of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, succeeds; and Marston, the abode of the Rev. Mr. Skurray, a friend of the author from his "youthful days," introduces the following beautiful descriptive snatch:— ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... other matters for which the term "irregularity" would have been only mildly descriptive, Gregor Lang sent Sir John a report which was not favorable to Frank Vine's regime. Sir John withdrew from the syndicate in disgust and ordered Lang to start a separate ranch for him; and Gorringe himself began to investigate the interesting ways of his superintendent. Why ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... a poet of the highest sensibility and the most vivid imagination in describing an incomprehensible natural phenomenon; not more, for example, than in "the sound of a trumpet and the voice of words" on Mount Sinai. Still it is not the question of descriptive exaggeration, but of scientific fact, that is now before us; and if the whole of the so-called conflict of Fingal with the Prince of the Power of the Air on Roraheid in Hoy was so utterly inexplicable to Macpherson, both as to place ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... minute anatomical and generally descriptive account of the large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands. The gigantic stature, the prodigious strength and activity, the wild ferocity, and the imitative propensities of these mammalia are sufficiently well known ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... with a severe cold, which compelled him to prolong his stay with his friends; and Mrs Izett, who took a warm interest in his welfare, suggested that he might turn his illness to account, by composing a poem, descriptive of the beauties of the surrounding scenery. The hint was sufficient; he commenced a descriptive poem in the Spenserian stanza, which was speedily completed, and given to the world under the title of "Mador of the Moor." It was well received; and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... teeth, the short head and upturned nostrils, give these cattle the most ludicrous, self-confident air of defiance. The skull which I presented to the College of Surgeons has been thus described by Professor Owen (3/66. 'Descriptive Cat. of Ost. Collect. of College of Surgeons' 1853 page 624. Vasey in his 'Delineations of the Ox-tribe' has given a figure of this skull; and I sent a photograph of it to Prof. Rutimeyer.) "It is remarkable from the stunted development of the nasals, premaxillaries, and fore-part ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... voice, "We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more." The ladies stood their ground courageously for a time, but while the Chaplain, playing his own accompaniment, was singing My Maryland, with words descriptive of Lee's invasion and retreat from Maryland, including the words, "And they left Antietam in their track, in their track," the ladies threw open the front door and rushed precipitately to the street and thence to their homes. It ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... words may not be out of place, in a work descriptive of the Australian colonies, upon the subject of emigration, but so much has been written upon this matter, that a very few words may suffice to give the opinions of those who are practically acquainted with the subject. Undoubtedly, active, industrious, and prudent persons, are ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... author of many MS. plays, and the most agreeable of company, being an educated man. But we had to part company as I have already stated, and I went home, pondering over his advice. Now, my pen writes these lines descriptive somewhat of the breaking apart from those noble hearts, and that still more noble ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... BRITISH ARCHITECTURE chronologically arranged, neatly printed in red and black, and containing seventy-five figures, with a Descriptive Manual. By Archibald Barrington. Price, on sheet, with Manual, 2s. In cloth, ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... to be the highest place in the world! And when you have got to this height you find [a great lake between two mountains, and out of it] a fine river running through a plain.... The plain is called PAMIER.' The bearing and descriptive details here given point clearly to the plain of the Great Pamir and Victoria Lake, its characteristic feature. About sixty-two miles are reckoned from Langar-kisht, the last village on the northern branch of the Ab-i-Panja and some six miles above Kila Panja, to Mazar-tapa ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... disapproval. We talk of one occupation, enjoyment, work of art, as superior to another, and mean hardly more than that we like it better. Probably there is not another pair of terms current in ethics where the laudatory usage is so liable to slip into the place of the descriptive. Our opponent's ethics always seem to embody low ideals, our own to be of a higher type. Accordingly the terms should not be used in controversy unless we have in mind for them a precise meaning other ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... through, carefully, deliberately, down to the final statements in regard to Browning. She wondered at first. Then the light dawned upon her, as she came upon a carefully-turned phrase descriptive of "the little grey dog, the constant companion of his gifted mistress," and ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... moment. I returned it to its maker, with whom I had so contumelious a passage that the street outside was crowded from wall to wall with gossips looking on and listening. The pad changed hands with much vivacity; perhaps it would be more descriptive to say that we threw it at each other's heads; and, at any rate, we were very warm and unfriendly, and spoke with a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that are dependent on poetic execution—the whole difference is in the degree; there is only one way of feeling, which varies from more to less; even the diversity of external forms changes nothing in the quality of aesthetic impressions. Whether the form be lyric or epic, dramatic or descriptive, we can receive an impression either stronger or weaker, but if we remove what is connected with the nature of the subject, we shall always be affected in the same way. The feeling we experience is absolutely ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... an extract from the Norwich Aurora, an American paper, descriptive of a newly discovered cavern. The writer, with a power of imagination almost marvellous, remarks, "The air in the cavern had a peculiar smell, resembling—NOTHING." We believe that is the identical flavour of "Leg ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 13, 1841 • Various
... passed in less time than it has taken me to write a line descriptive of the pantomime. The mound was shaped, and the decorously mournful train turned from it to retrace their course to the house, Frederic Chilton imitating the example of those about him, but moving like a sleep-walker, his brows corrugated and eyes sightless to all surrounding objects. ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... vocations and occupations had not only implements but a vocabulary of their own, and all have become almost obsolete; to the various terms, phrases, and names, once in general application and use in spinning, weaving, and kindred occupations, and now half forgotten, might be given the descriptive title, a "homespun vocabulary." By definite explanation of these terms many a good old English word and phrase ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... from the older type of magazine article, not so much in subject as in form and style. The most marked difference lies in the fact that it supplements the recognized methods of literary and scientific exposition with the more striking devices of narrative, descriptive, and ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... the voice and by a slight change of expression. But the reader stood perfectly still, and the instant transition of the voice from the dramatic to the descriptive tone was unfailing and extraordinary. This was perfection of art. Nor was the evenness of the variety less striking. Every character was indicated with the same felicity. Of course the previous image in the hearer's ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... more archaeological than descriptive, however, and we must acknowledge our indebtedness again to Miss Scidmore for the following passage to show the scope of ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... Silas was explaining, "it ain't one o' yer ordinary stars. Lord love ye! it's a 'igh sight better'n that. It's a planet, that's wot it is, like our own world, an' it keeps a-spinnin' 'round the sun like our earth, too." He ended up with a descriptive sweep of his arm, and gazed ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... repeatedly urged upon me on previous occasions, and also during the progress of these sheets through the press, that I should make a clean breast of my own belief or disbelief in spiritualism; that besides being descriptive, I should go one step beyond a mere catalogue of phenomena, and, to some extent at least, theorize on this mysterious ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... believe that one's own prudence is everything and divine providence nothing. I remarked that man has no proprium unless you want to call it his proprium that he is such or such a subject or organ or form. This is not the proprium that is meant, however, for it is only descriptive of the nature of man. No man, I said, has any proprium as the word is commonly understood. At this those who ascribed everything to their own prudence and who may be called the very picture of proprietorship, flared up so that flames seemed to come ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... red through yellow, green, blue, and purple. The horizontal curve describes the chromas of the spectrum in the same sequence; while the third curve leaning outward is obtained by uniting the first two by two planes at right angles to one another, and sums up the three qualities by a single descriptive line. Now the red and purple ends are far apart, and science forbids their junction because of their great difference in wave length. But the mind is prone to unite them in order to produce the red-purples which we see in clouds at sunset, in flowers and grapes and the amethyst. Indeed, it ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... study to avoid all unnecessary remarks on the letters in this volume, so as to allow the writers to speak for themselves. But he has deemed it a sacred obligation due to the memory of Sir Isaac Brock, to withhold nothing descriptive of his energetic views and intentions, and of the obstacles he experienced in the vigorous prosecution of the contest—obstacles which his gallant spirit could not brook, and which necessarily exposed "his valuable life" much ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... papers by adherents of the French system and to a well-considered editorial in the same paper. But the most important contribution to the question is that of Mr. Henry Rutgers Marshall in the last number of The Architectural Record, which also contains a descriptive article upon the Royal Polytechnicum at Berlin and ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 7, - July, 1895 • Various
... Quaker Hill, which it is my purpose in this book to write, comprises three periods; and the descriptive sociology records two differing yet related forms of social life, connected by a period of transition. This study will then be made up of three parts: First, the Quaker Community; second, the Transition; and third, the Mixed Community. The periods of time corresponding to these ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... particular. The Three first Books I have already dispatched, and am now entering upon the Fourth. I need not acquaint my Reader that there are Multitudes of Beauties in this great Author, especially in the Descriptive Parts of his Poem, which I have not touched upon, it being my Intention to point out those only, which appear to me the most exquisite, or those which are not so obvious to ordinary Readers. Every one that has read the Criticks who have written upon the Odyssey, the Iliad and the Aeneid, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... "Unfounded Rumor, Ladies, is, we all know, a descriptive phrase applied by the Associated Press to all important foreign news procured a week or two in advance of its own similar European advices, by the Press Association[A]. We perceive then, Ladies, (Miss JENKINS will be good enough to stop ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... Isaacs," published in 1882, was followed almost at once by "Dr. Claudius." Then The Atlantic Monthly claimed a serial, "A Roman Singer," in 1883. Since that time the list of his novels has been increased to thirty-two, besides the historical and descriptive works entitled "Ave Roma Immortalis" and "The ...
— Man Overboard! • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... boy, Florian, much will be said as the story goes on; but what can be said of a boy who is only ten which shall be descriptive and also interesting? He was small of his age, but clever and sharp, and, since his mother's death, had been his father's darling. He was beautiful to look at, as were all the children, except poor ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... in the foregoing pages to those scenes, descriptive, grotesque, and sentimental, which took place at the Bower of Nature and Winchester, it is proper that we should now go back to the domain of Apple Orchard, and the inhabitants of that realm, so long lost sight of in the contemplation ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... had done. When the article appeared in the paper my mother bought fifty copies and gave them out to our neighbors. There was nothing to shock such neighbors here, and they praised me highly for what they called my "real descriptive power." ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... EASTWARD POSITION. A term descriptive of the position used by a Priest who adopts the custom of celebrating Holy Communion facing the East, with his back to the people. There is a very great difficulty in ascertaining what the rubrics ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... the use of various collections of fairy tales and for the use of any particular fairy tale that has been presented in outline, descriptive narrative, criticism, or dramatization. Among collections special mention should be made of The Fairy Library, by Kate D. Wiggin and Nora A. Smith; the Fairy Books, by Clifton Johnson; and the Fairy Books, by ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... god D is Kukulcan. These different opinions show, at all events, on what uncertain grounds such attempts at interpretation stand, and that it is best to be satisfied with designating the deities by letters and collecting material for their purely descriptive designation. ...
— Representation of Deities of the Maya Manuscripts • Paul Schellhas
... want of union, an arrest or stasis of development, as from a bona fide separation, the word solution seems to be, on the whole, the best. It corresponds in application to the word liber (calyx liber, &c.), in general use by descriptive botanists. As here employed, the term nearly corresponds with the "adesmie heterologue" of Morren. Moquin Tandon does not make any special subdivision for the class of cases here grouped together, but places them all under "Disjonctions qui isolent les organes." It seems, however, ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... Rheumatism, High Blood Pressure, Constipation, Nervous Prostration, Heart, Lungs, Liver, Kidney and Bladder trouble, etc. No matter what you have tried, or what your trouble may be, try Degnen's Radio-Active Solar Pad at our risk. Write today for Trial offer and descriptive literature. Radium Appliance Co., 2833 Bradbury ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... but two—"general merchandise," which meant chiefly saddles and firearms, and that other industry of new lands which flaunts under such signboards as the Lone Star, the Happy Home, the Quiet Place, the Cowboy's Dream, and such descriptive nomenclature. Of fourteen business houses, nine were saloons, and all these were prosperous. Money was in the hands of all. The times had not yet come when a dollar seemed a valuable thing. Men were busy living, busy at exercising this vast opportunity ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... at times so imperfectly understood the events of the great French Revolution is, that it never occurred to him to study the genius of crowds. He took as his guide in the study of this complicated period the descriptive method resorted to by naturalists; but the moral forces are almost absent in the case of the phenomena which naturalists have to study. Yet it is precisely these forces that constitute the ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... He sets me dreaming. I'm not used to it. For when my tailor from Vienna comes I never hear these bright, descriptive words; And so this wealth of curious adjectives And all that seems to you mere vulgar chatter, Has moved me—stirred me. Let him be, ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... capacity he taught also Michelangelo and put him upon the designing of his relief of the battle of the Lapithae and Centaurs. At the time of Lorenzo and Giuliano's famous tournament in the Piazza of S. Croce, Poliziano wrote, as I have said, the descriptive allegorical poem which gave Botticelli ideas for his "Birth of Venus" and "Primavera". He lives chiefly by his Latin poems; but he did much to make the language of Tuscany a literary tongue. His elegy on the death of Lorenzo ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... already far advanced; the god has separated himself from his worshippers, and assumed an anthropomorphic form. Indra, while still retaining traces of his 'weather' origin, is no longer, to borrow Miss Harrison's descriptive phrase, 'an automatic explosive thunder-storm,' he wields the thunderbolt certainly, but he appears in heroic form to receive the offerings made to him, and to celebrate his victory in a solemn ritual dance. In Greek art and literature, on the other hand, ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... a large variety of comical descriptive talk on all lines of goods we handled, besides an endless variety of funny sayings and jokes with which to hold and entertain ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... harmonies. He kept his hearers enthralled by his magical music, and astonished by his wonderful execution. I shall never forget hearing him play the "Walpurgis Nacht," when he appeared at the Amphitheatre in 1835 or 1836. It was painting a picture by means of sounds. His descriptive powers were wonderful. Anybody with the least touch of imagination could bring before "his mind's eye" the infernal revel that the artist was depicting. The enchantments of the witches were visible. You could hear their diabolical songs, you could fancy ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... says Lucian, page 985, "were the first who invented the science of the stars, and gave names to the planets, not at random and without meaning, but descriptive of the qualities which they conceived them to possess; and it was from them that this art passed, still in an imperfect state, to ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... had made their eight days' tour of the lake, from June 23, unaccompanied by Mary and Claire, we find a month later Shelley taking them for an eight days' tour to Chamouni, unaccompanied by Byron. Of this tour Shelley each day writes long descriptive letters to Peacock, who is looking out for a house for them somewhere in the neighbourhood of Windsor. They return by July 28 to Montalegre, where he writes of the collection of seeds he has been making, and which Mary intends cultivating ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... a description of our departure and of the passage to Jamaica, not only because they were quite uneventful (we did not even sight a' privateer), but because they have been celebrated in verse by Plinny, in a descriptive poem of five cantos and some four thousand lines, entitled "The Voyage: with an Englishwoman's Reflections on her Favourite Element," a few extracts from which ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... in the ascendant. For Ahaz to turn for help to Sargon was to court disaster in the end. Isaiah saw this and went out to meet Ahaz one day "at the end of the conduit of the upper pool in the highway of the fuller's field"—a vivid descriptive touch. The king was apparently preparing to stand a siege in his capital and was making sure of the water supply. Isaiah's remonstrance was in substance: You need not take so much trouble with your preparations; Syria and Israel will have more than ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... have private carriages; and each carriage has a flock of white-turbaned black footmen and drivers all over it. The vicinity of a lecture-hall looks like a snowstorm,—and makes the lecturer feel like an opera. India has many names, and they are correctly descriptive. It is the Land of Contradictions, the Land of Subtlety and Superstition, the Land of Wealth and Poverty, the Land of Splendor and Desolation, the Land of Plague and Famine, the Land of the Thug and the Poisoner, and of the Meek and the Patient, the Land of the Suttee, the Land ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Sidelights, Simeon, Swanker, Chirgwin, Steamer, Peter, Fluffy, Steward, Slippery, Elliott, Roy, Noel, Shakespeare, Jamie, Bummer, Smuts, Lupoid, Spider, and Sailor. Some of the names, it will be noticed, had a descriptive flavour. ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... enjoyments—leads us to Whitefriars Street, on the east side of which, at No. 67, is the office of The Daily News, edited by Dickens from 21 Jany. to 9 Feby., 1846, and for which he wrote the original prospectus, and subsequently, in a series of letters descriptive of his Italian travel, his delightful Pictures from Italy. St. Dunstan's Church in Fleet Street is supposed to have been ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... seemed like a death-blow to Raoul. If there be anything which can in any way assuage or mitigate the tortures of jealousy, it is the inferiority of the man who is preferred to yourself; while, on the very contrary, if there be an anguish more bitter than another, a misery for which language has no descriptive words, it is the superiority of the man preferred to yourself, superior, perhaps, in youth, beauty, grace. It is in such moments as these that Heaven almost seems to have taken part against the disdained ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... John's Hill, Canongate, Edinburgh, in 1850, in the thirty-fourth year of his age. Ritchie was possessed of a vast fund of humour, and was especially esteemed for the simplicity of his manners and his kindly dispositions. He excelled in reading poetry, whether dramatic or descriptive, and sung his own songs with intense feeling. He lived with his aged mother, whom he regarded with dutiful affection, and who survives to lament his loss. Shortly before his death he composed the following hymn, which has ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... recollection of what passed is too indefinite in some salient particulars to make it safe to attempt to complete the outlines of the story. I consider the fragment in all respects finer than Hand and Soul, and the passage descriptive of the artist's identification of his own personality in the portrait on the walls of the gallery among the very finest pieces of picturesque, impassioned, and dramatic writing that Rossetti ever achieved. On one occasion I remarked incidentally upon something ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... my letters from abroad have been very interesting. One dear little girl at Darjeeling, in India, wrote a very nice descriptive letter, and concluded by asking me to write "something about the stars," and speaking of new stories brings me to another subject that I wish to talk ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... discharged. It can easily be seen that no matter how good the books brought out by a firm, they would be likely to remain on stockroom shelves if readers were not properly made aware of their issue. The name "Publicity department" is the most descriptive title that can be given to the part of the staff devoting its energies to the many variations of news-spreading involved in ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... good poetry, descriptive of rural life, is essentially pastoral, or has the effect of the pastoral on the minds of men living in cities; but the class of poetry which I mean, and which you probably understand by the term pastoral, is that in which a farmer's girl is spoken of as a "nymph," and a farmer's boy as a "swain," ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... individual the less one can learn satisfactorily of beginnings of tendencies, just on account of the unreliability of the principal actor in the drama. The cases of older swindlers at first sight seem to offer much for the student of criminalistics, if only for purely descriptive purposes, but in the literature we have failed to find any satisfactory studies of the formative years of such careers. By taking instances of younger pathological liars, such as we have studied, the natural progress into swindling can be ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... upon devils and spirits, in thirty-four chapters. It contains an infinity of quotations from or references to the writings of those whom the author terms witch-mongers; and several chapters are devoted to a descriptive catalogue of the charms in repute and diabolical rites of the most extravagant sort. On the accession of James I., whose 'Demonologie' was in direct opposition to the 'Discoverie,' it was condemned as monstrously heretical; as many copies as could be collected being solemnly committed to the ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... nurse is coming?" said Mrs Grove, after they had been some time at the table. "How delightful! You look quite excited, Rose. She is a very nice person, I believe, Miss Elliott." Graeme smiled. Mrs Grove's generally descriptive term hardly indicated the manifold virtues of their friend; but, before she could say so, Mrs ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... you that two other Englishmen, friends of mine, who had come with me to America, were then making a tour through Georgia, the Carolinas, and some other Southern States. One of them, Mr. Kennaway, was so much interested with all he saw, and the people at home have appreciated his letters descriptive of it so well, that he is intending to publish a short account of his visit. Not having, however, had an introduction to yourself, he is anxious to avail himself of the somewhat full accounts I wrote ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... the great poet, and so turned to the most accomplished of helpers, who naturally found Lockhart a brilliant and acute pupil, the mention of whom ever after roused the teacher to enthusiasm. No one, he declared, had ever put him so on his mettle. The invalid wrote long letters, descriptive of his Roman life, to his daughter, which show that he exerted himself much beyond the little strength that remained to him, and in the spring he gladly turned his face homeward. His resignation of his editorship ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... time to say a descriptive word or two concerning the various persons with whom our friend Bob was for some time to be ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... name given to the Fairies is "Y Tylwyth Teg," or, the Fair Tribe, an expressive and descriptive term. They are spoken of as a people, and not as myths or goblins, and they are said to be a fair ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... headland upon which it was situated the waters swept with a mighty impetus and a deafening roar that gave the place its descriptive name of Rushy Shore. As the air and water here were mildly salt, the situation was deemed very healthy and well suited to such delicate lungs as required a stimulating atmosphere, and yet could not bear the full strength of the sea breezes. As such the place ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... 12. Descriptive of a very important Proceeding on the Part of Mr. Pickwick; no less an Epoch in his Life, than ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... friend who had never seen such an animal before, and after watching its graceful motions for a moment in the glass bowl where it was swimming, he asked, "Is it anything more than organized water?" The question was very descriptive; for so little did it seem to differ in substance from the water in which it floated that one might well fancy that some drops had taken upon themselves organic structure, and had begun to live and move. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Mexican viceroys to procure it in China; but "the Chinese mercury obtained from Canton and Manilla was impure, and contained a great deal of lead; and its price [1782] amounted to 80 piastres the quintal." See Humboldt's account, descriptive and historical, of this use of mercury, in his New Spain (Black's trans.), iii, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
... poetry going the round of the publishers at this moment, things that nobody can make head nor tail of, stories in verse that begin in the middle, like The Corsair and Lara. They set up to be original, forsooth, and indulge in stanzas that nobody can understand, and descriptive poetry after the pattern of the younger men who discovered Delille, and imagine that they are doing something new. Poets have been swarming like cockchafers for two years past. I have lost twenty thousand francs through poetry ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... expression, derived, I believe, from Po-to-wau-me-ac. Po-to-wau, as we have it, in Potawattomie, means to make a fire in a place where fires, such as council fires, are usually made. The ac in the word is apparently from ak or wak, a standing tree. The whole appears descriptive of a burning tree, or a ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... journey, under the title of Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley. He found, in passing up the river Des Plaines, a remarkably well characterized specimen of a fossil tree, completely converted to stone, of which he prepared a descriptive memoir, which had the effect further to direct the public mind ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... you to get "Appleton's Dictionary of Mechanics." Also send for descriptive catalogue to Henry Carey Baird, Philadelphia, from which you will be able to judge for yourself what works are suited to ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp." Many of these have this claim to be called songs: they have been set to music by the cowboys, who, in their isolation and loneliness, have found solace in narrative or descriptive verse devoted to cattle scenes. Herein, again, through these quondam songs we may come to appreciate something of the spirit of the big West—its largeness, its freedom, its wholehearted hospitality, its genuine friendship. Here again, ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... such a contradiction astonishing to me; and may God preserve me from calling it a crime! The ancients believed that revolutions announced their advent by dreadful signs, and that among other prodigies animals spoke. This was a figure, descriptive of those unexpected ideas and strange words which circulate suddenly among the masses at critical moments, and which seem to be entirely without human antecedent, so far removed are they from the ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... artistic and exquisitely finished pieces of work that Crawford has produced. The picturesque setting, Calabria and its surroundings, the beautiful Sorrento and the Gulf of Salerno, with the bewitching accessories that climate, sea, and sky afford, give Mr. Crawford rich opportunities to show his rare descriptive powers. As a whole the book is strong and beautiful through its simplicity, and ranks among the choicest of the author's many fine ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... rustick in phrase (for, though the learned are not agreed as to the particular dialect employed by Theocritus, they are universanimous both as to its rusticity and its capacity of rising now and then to the level of more elevated sentiments and expressions), while it is also descriptive of real scenery and manners. Yet it must be admitted that the production now in question (which here and there bears perhaps too plainly the marks of my correcting hand) does partake of the nature of a Pastoral, inasmuch as the interlocutors therein are purely imaginary ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... following the first chapter of Genesis and expanding the motive of each of the seven days with facile rhetoric. Of action and of human interest the poem has none; of artistic beauty little. The sustained descriptive style wearies; and were not this the last work of Tasso, it would not ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... open? Why? Can you see any similar effect from introducing their covert in the tenth sentence? What does the expression knowingly left open suggest to you? This selection from Irving illustrates the Descriptive style of writing. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... be said that in contrast with the Melanesian Mission, which possesses its biographies of Bishop Patteson and Bishop J. R. Selwyn, its detailed history by Mrs. Armstrong, and several other books of a descriptive and historical character, the New Zealand Church is meagrely provided. The early missionaries themselves published little. Yate's "Account of New Zealand" (1835), and Taylor's "Te Ika a Maui" (London, 1855), and his "Past and Present of New Zealand" ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... for commercial purposes. A student of rugs can readily understand that throughout the vast territory which concentrates its commerce in Smyrna there are a score or more of valuable manufactures which could never be known under one descriptive name. ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... taxed the descriptive powers of the milliners in splendour and were scarcely eclipsed by the rich brocade and lace of Mrs. White, as she sailed in on Captain Henderson's arm; but her elaborate veil and feathery bonnet hardly concealed the weary tedium of her face, though to ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... MALL GAZETTE.—"A classic in descriptive journalism which no collector and no patriot ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... laboriously acquired exclusive information, forwarded by a confiding correspondent of an opposition syndicate, made a careful duplicate of the matter, and brought the result to Torpenhow, who said that all was fair in love or war correspondence, and built an excellent descriptive article from his rival's riotous waste of words. It was Torpenhow who—but the tale of their adventures, together and apart, from Philae to the waste wilderness of Herawi and Muella, would fill many books. They had been penned into a square ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... pair were Mananan, god of the sea, and Fand his wife, of whom a tale of great interest is told in the Cuchulain Cycle of legends. The sea-cloak of Mananan is the subject of a magnificent piece of descriptive poetry in ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... Synoptic parables, a wealth of allegories, in which Christ is symbolised as the Bread of Life, the Light of the World, the Door of the Sheep, the good Shepherd, the Way, and the true Vine. Wind and water are also made to play their part. Moreover, there is much unobtrusive symbolism in descriptive phrases, as when he says that Nicodemus came by night, that Judas went out into the night, and that blood and water flowed from our Lord's side; and the washing of the disciples' feet was a symbolic act which the disciples were to understand hereafter. Thus all things in the world may remind ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... having brought out in that time about twenty-one operas, some of them comic, one or two of them serious. His music is light and pleasing, and he is credited with having been the first to produce descriptive airs ("Le Marechal") and the unaccompanied quartette ("Tom Jones," 1764). The great merit of his works was their clever construction for the stage. Contemporaneous with him was Pierre Alexander Monsigny (1729-1817). Not having been intended for the profession of music, he had a classical education, ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... Lady Bradeen. Lady Bradeen was Cissy, Lady Bradeen was Mary, Lady Bradeen was the friend of Fritz and of Gussy, the customer of Marguerite, and the close ally in short (as was ideally right, only the girl had not yet found a descriptive term that was) of the most magnificent of men. Nothing could equal the frequency and variety of his communications to her ladyship but their extraordinary, their abysmal propriety. It was just the talk—so profuse sometimes that she wondered what was left for their real meetings—of ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... interior has been very much neglected. It served as a quarter for a body of Prussians in 1815, and the following year was a barrack for the English troops quartered at St. Germain. A French poet of his time wrote these lines descriptive of the life he led in ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... been variously classified under the terms pure and applied, static and dynamic, descriptive and theoretical. Terms have changed somewhat, as the psychological emphasis has supplanted the biological. It is important that terms should be used correctly and should be sanctioned by custom, but it is not necessary to make sharp distinction between all the different divisions, ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... application of the Laws of Mathematics to the movements of the celestial bodies. Restricting Astronomy proper to this domain, where, as a Science, it strictly belongs, and setting aside its merely descriptive and conjectural features, as hardly an integral part of the Science itself, we have another Exact Science ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... again, but his rapid vision left in Alvan Hervey's mind a trail of invincible sadness, a sense of loss and bitter solitude, as though he had been robbed and exiled. For a moment he ceased to be a member of society with a position, a career, and a name attached to all this, like a descriptive label of some complicated compound. He was a simple human being removed from the delightful world of crescents and squares. He stood alone, naked and afraid, like the first man on the first day of evil. There are in life events, contacts, glimpses, that seem brutally ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... diamonds. In the third, she wears the coarse habit of a penitent, and her waist is tied with a cord; but her repentance goes no further than these exterior signs. She says no word, and Ulick could not accept the descriptive music as sufficient explanation of her repentance, even if it were sincere, which it was not, and he spoke derisively of the amorous cries to be heard at every moment in the orchestra, while she is dragging herself to Parsifal's feet. Elizabeth's prayer was to him a perfect ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... we may trace a deliberate contrast between various descriptive passages. Thus Hobbinol feels the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... all this time left the reader without any formal descriptive introduction to this whimsical young lady angler. Not without reason, for, like any really charming personality, she was very difficult to picture. Paint a woman! as ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... Naples; and from internal evidence there is good reason to suppose that the greater part of them were written at intervals in the first fourteen years of the twenty-five he passed in confinement.[9] In the descriptive catalogue of his own works, the philosopher mentions seven books of sonnets and canzoni, which he called 'Le Cantiche.'[10] Whether any of these would have been printed but for a mere accident is doubtful. ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... by herself; carried from Syria all the way to Northumberland, and there wrecked upon the coast; thence yet again driven up and down among the waves for five years, she and her child; and yet, all this while, Chaucer does not let fall a single word descriptive of the sea, or express any emotion whatever about it, or about the ship. He simply tells us the lady sailed here and was wrecked there; but neither he nor his audience appear to be capable of receiving any sensation, but one of simple aversion, from waves, ships, ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... be the appointed means by which the highest nature of man is to be disciplined and developed. Assuming happiness to be the end of being, sorrow may be the indispensable condition through which it is to be reached. Hence St. Paul's noble paradox descriptive of the Christian life,—"as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... always been somewhat of a mystery to me. Its contents differed from the other specimens in two respects. First, whereas all the other skeletons and the skulls bore full descriptive labels, these human skeletons were distinguished merely by a number and a date on the pedestal; and, second, whereas all the other specimens illustrated some disease or deformity, these were, apparently, quite normal ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... Conspiracy, Byron's Tragedy, &c. &c.—Webster has happily characterized the "full and heightened style" of Chapman, who, of all the English play-writers, perhaps approaches nearest to Shakspeare in the descriptive and didactic, in passages which are less purely dramatic. He could not go out of himself, as Shakspeare could shift at pleasure, to inform and animate other existences, but in himself he had an eye to perceive ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... received Lord Hardinge's letter of the 4th.[46] She would for the future wish all papers for signature to be accompanied by a descriptive list showing at a glance the purport of the documents, as is done with papers from other ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... photograph had appeared in scores of newspapers, with a cross marking the abode of Priam and Alice. It was beset and infested by journalists of several nationalities from morn till night. Cameras were as common in it as lamp-posts. And a famous descriptive reporter of the Sunday News had got lodgings, at a high figure, exactly opposite No. 29. Priam and Alice could do nothing without publicity. And if it would be an exaggeration to assert, that evening papers appeared with Stop-press News: "5.40. Mrs. Leek went out shopping," the exaggeration ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... the regulation railroad service. All lovers of Italy are devoted to these original tours of private exploration. A recent trip to Saracinesco, in the region of Tivoli, was made by Mrs. Stetson (Grace Ellery Channing) with her husband, and in a descriptive record of the little journey into an unfrequented mountain region this ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... course, that those chapters in the book which are descriptive of the advance and subsequent retreat of the German troops under the eye of Don Marcelo are masterpieces of descriptive reporting. But Philip Gibbs has given us a whole book of masterpieces of descriptive reporting which do not bear the stamp of approval of the official ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... of Paradise itself you have Milton's sunny side as a man; here his descriptive powers are exercised to the utmost, and he draws deep upon his Italian resources. In the description of Eve, and throughout this part of the poem, the poet is predominant over the theologian. Dress is the symbol of the Fall, but ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... Shakespeare. To call such passages—which Jonson never intended for publication—plagiarism, is to obscure the significance of words. To disparage his memory by citing them is a preposterous use of scholarship. Jonson's prose, both in his dramas, in the descriptive comments of his masques, and in the 'Discoveries', is characterised by clarity and vigorous directness, nor is it wanting in a fine sense of form or in the ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... guard than he is, and of making that man so jealous of the pickle that he will perform perfectly unreasonable feats for a week to beat it out for the place. He has a way of saying "Hurry up," with a few descriptive adjectives tacked on, that makes a man rub himself in the stung place for an hour; and oh, how mad he can make you while he is telling you pleasantly that while the little fellow playing against you is only a prep and has sloping shoulders and weighs ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... Orenburg Government (1852). Most famous of all, and most delightful, are the companion volumes, "A Family Chronicle and Souvenirs" (1856) and "The Childhood's Years of Bagroff's Grandson" (1858). In these Russian descriptive language made a great stride in advance, even after Pushkin and Gogol; and as a limner of landscape, he has no equal in Russian literature. The most noteworthy point about his work is that there is not ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... concatenation like the following: "You ought not to break your word, or to give needless pain to your parents, if you don't want to do violence to that nature which is yours as a reasonable being," or "to thwart your own moral development,"—and so on in a variety of phrases descriptive of the argument of the last section. Here it seems the chain is made fast to a staple in the wall. If a person goes on to ask, "Well, what if I do contradict my rational self?" we can only tell him that he is a fool for his question. The ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... the groups of stars resemblances to human persons and objects.[612] Such resemblances are worked out by civilized peoples, a descriptive science of constellations arises, and stories are invented to explain the origin of their names. These stellar myths, brought into connection with others, play a great part ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... countenance, are all indicative of the genuine Scottish character, and well distinguish a person fitted to move steadily and wisely through the world, with a strength of resolution to ensure success, and a disposition to enjoy it."—Historical and Descriptive Account of Heriot's Hospital, with a Memoir of the Founder, by Messrs James and John ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... accompanied her Tramping Methodist anywhere, but of late years that promise has not been fulfilled, and her last novel is, I think, distinctly her poorest. I like her affection for Sussex, her catalogue of Sussex names, the fine colour of her descriptive work; but her story is on the present occasion too obviously arranged behind the scenes. One can see the author working again and again for the romantic moment, and scenes that should have convinced and wrung the reader's heart (always eager ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... of Henry of Monmouth might doubtless be made more attractive and entertaining were their Author to supply the deficiencies of authentic records by the inventions of his fancy, and adorn the result of careful inquiry into matters of fact by the descriptive imagery and colourings of fiction. To a writer, also, who could at once handle the pen of the biographer and of the poet, few names would offer a more ample field for the excursive range of historical romance than the life of Henry of Monmouth. From the day of his first compulsory ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... Lytton has truly said, "has the character of youth in its defects and its beauties. The redundance of its descriptive passages is in marked contrast to the terseness of description which Horace studies in his Odes; and there is something declamatory in its general tone which is at variance with the simpler utterance of lyrical art. On the other hand, it has all the ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... the barrier and atoll classes may be seen in the small, but accurately reduced charts on Plate I. (The authorities from which these charts have been reduced, together with some remarks on them and descriptive of the Plates, are given separately.), and this resemblance can be further shown to extend to every part of the structure. Beginning with the outside of the reef; many scattered soundings off Gambier, Oualan, and some other encircled islands, ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... ragged Nance?" said Mrs. Rooney; for that was the unenviable but descriptive title the new-comer was known by: and though she knew it for her soubriquet, yet she also knew Mrs. Rooney would not call her by it if she were not in an ill temper, so she began humbly to explain the cause of her visit, when Mrs. Rooney ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover |
