"Dwindle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of conduct. The enemy must be kept in a state of constant ferment. If the Indians act as they did under Tecumseh, who probably might be induced to return to Amherstburg, that army will very soon dwindle to nothing. Your artillery must be more numerous and effective than any the enemy can bring, and your store of ammunition will enable you to harass him continually, without ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... in the waste places of the earth—temporary shelter for wayfarers whose homes are under their hats. The thin stream of civilization that trickles off into the wilderness, following the iron track, makes puddles now and again. Some of these dwindle away soon enough—or perhaps not quite soon enough; some of them increase and become permanent ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... solve, difficulties and emergencies of a most perplexing and bewildering nature. Boer and Briton alike had to face such difficulties and disadvantages. The disadvantages, however, under which the English had to labour in South Africa dwindle into insignificance when contrasted and compared with those of the Boers, especially towards the latter part of the war. The impartial critic must admit that eventually the vantage ground was altogether ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... unalloyed. The vice, unhappily, is not unknown in England. A country which had the ingenuity to call a penny reading "university extension," and to send its missionaries into every town, cannot be held guiltless. But our poor attempts at culture dwindle to a paltry insignificance in the light of American enterprise; and we would no more compare the achievement of England in the diffusion of learning with the achievement of the United States, than ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... I was doing. And all the time I was in a state of fierce revolt. I had moments when my life's ambitions, when New York itself, the Mecca of my dreams, and that marvellous theatre, with its marble and silk, seemed suddenly to dwindle to a miserable, contemptible little doll's house. And then again I played, and I felt my soul as I played, and the old dreams swept over me, and I said that it wasn't anything to do with personal vanity that made me crave for the big gifts of success; that it was my art, and that I must find ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... especial reference to the maintenance of the same numeric proportions in all times, that, while a Class is represented by few types, those types are wonderfully rich and varied, but in proportion as other expressions of the same structure are introduced, the first dwindle, and, if they do not entirely disappear, become at least much less prominent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... days after the capture of Malolos, General Otis issued a proclamation to the Filipinos, in the hope that by drawing off public sympathy from the insurgent cause it would dwindle away. The terms of this document ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... was Doc Swartz's answer. "There's a chance that clot will dwindle, erode, and harden up. But obviously we want to keep him as quiet as possible to make ...
— The Right Time • Walter Bupp
... feel that our friendship is going to be subjected to the heaviest strain it has ever borne, and I wish to minimize any risks to it, in which, however, I don't believe. I am determined that it shall not dwindle into a form or pretence of friendship of which the substance has departed. It will be a great change if I do not feel that I can go to your house or to your room as freely as ever. At the same time confidence from one in the inner circle of the Cabinet to one wholly outside ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... blemish of circumstance—not his, but circumstance, in whose evil shade he must seem smirched. What could she do with her faulty vision, but send him away? Was that not less dishonourable than to bid him remain and dwindle as she looked at him? What a kink in her affairs, when she must be cruel to her love, not because she loved him less, but rather that she might love ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... ranked after Ostia as the chief victualling port of Rome. And of the two celebrated cities which adorned the shores of this Bay in classical times, Puteoli was the seat of commerce, and Baiae the resort of pleasure and luxury; yet both were doomed to dwindle and almost perish in the disastrous years that followed the break-up of the Empire. The invading hordes of Germany, the raids of Saracen pirates, and the constant presence of malaria on this deserted ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... but no one can master its contents and become possessed of it as a whole without perceiving that the mirror is held up to nature, that it reflects spots and blemishes which, on a survey of the vast and various orb, dwindle into natural and so comparative insignificance. Byron was under no delusion as to the grossness of Don Juan. His plea or pretence, that he was sheltered by the superior grossness of Ariosto and La ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Rebellion and Restoration up to the very confines of the eighteenth century. Why, we have to ask, even granting that William Hogarth's "monster Caricatura" is thus omnivorous and omnipresent, does he tower aloft in some countries and under some conditions to the majesty of a new art, and in others dwindle ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... that," Freddy said. "He inherited a magnificent kingdom; he let it dwindle almost to ruin. If you could read some of the letters of Horemheb, the commander-in-chief of his army, begging him to send reinforcements to Syria, imploring him to realize the danger that menaced Asia, you would feel ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... quickly to his hand; because the five hundred pounds must be preserved intact for eventual use. That was the great point. With the entire five hundred one felt a substance at one's back; but it seemed to him that should he let it dwindle to four-fifty or even four-eighty, all the efficiency would be gone out of the money, as though there were some magic power in the round figure. ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... was still looking moodily out of the window, when there came a sharp clang at the bell. Often it had rung, and with every ring his hopes had sprung up, only to dwindle away again, and change to leaden disappointment, as he faced some beggar or touting tradesman. But the doctor's spirit was young and elastic, and again, in spite of all experience, it responded to that exhilarating summons. He sprang to his feet, cast his eyes ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... other hand, fatty substances, such as beef suet, lard and butter, do not undergo any appreciable change. Moreover, the worms soon dwindle away, incapable of growing. This sort of food does not suit them. Why? Apparently because it cannot be liquefied by the reagent disgorged by the worms. In the same way, ordinary pepsin does not attack fatty substances; it takes pancreatin ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... frost-bitten, but merely the little nippings of nose, cheeks, and wrists that one soon gets accustomed to in this country. As Lieutenant Schwatka says, it is like almost all other dangers that you hear and read about, they seem to dwindle when you meet them boldly face to face. A battle always seems more terrible to those in the rear than to those ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... elders. If it be not observed soon after the house is built bad dreams will plague the dwellers therein, toothache (dreaded for mystic reasons) will torture them, and the evil influence from the north will cause them all kinds of bodily ill; the flocks will dwindle, ill luck will come, ghosts will haunt the place, and the house ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... tent I'm quick set down With a Bedouin, lean and brown, Plotting gain of merchandise, Or perchance of robber prize; Clumsy camel load upheaving, Woman deftly carpet-weaving, Meal of dates and bread and salt, While in azure heavenly vault Throbbing stars begin to dwindle. ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... accept responsibilities, and there would probably be children. He would dislike having to leave Ninian and Roger and Gilbert, particularly Gilbert, and his share in the meetings of the Improved Tories would begin to dwindle. On the other hand, there would be Mary ... If he were to lose his friends and the careless, cultured life they led in the Bloomsbury house, he would gain Mary, and perhaps she would ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... produce a ripple on the surface of its steady and continuous progress. It is because these events can be particularized and described that they assume proportions beyond their real importance, but when compared with the colossal advances made by the state during the period covering them, they dwindle into mere points of educational experience, to be guarded against in the future, while the many blessings showered upon the state, consisting of the health and wealth imparting sunshine, the refreshing ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... deficient; in others they are superior. Some animals are possessed of all but reason, and even in that, the highest of them come very little short of the lowest of the human species. If they have not reason, they possess an instinct which nearly approaches it. These qualities dwindle down gradually thro the various orders and varieties of animated nature, to the lowest grade of animalculae, a multitude of which may inhabit a single drop of water; or to the zoophytes and lythophytes, which form the connecting link between the animal and vegetable kingdom; ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... simplest means those physical and moral effects, which they waste toil and expense in bringing about. The splendid procession, for instance, which takes place on the day of Corpus Christi at Rome, with all its assemblage of monks, horse and foot guards, cardinals, choristers, and banners, would dwindle before the eye of reason into "shreds and patches, were it not for the figure of the truly venerable man who now fills the papal chair, kneeling with the same humility and abstraction from the busy scene around him, which marked the deportment of the penitents ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... when I tell you that thrift of time will repay you in after life with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams, and that waste of it will make you dwindle alike in intellectual and moral stature beyond your ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... and the smoke and the red flare were to die, it would be frightening in more ways than one. But I see what you mean. There might be a sense of peace, but the minds and bodies which had been vibrating with the stir of power would feel that the soul had gone out of things, and they would dwindle too." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... continued laughter of the spectators at the public airing of their private wrongs with which the public had nothing to do, or becoming tired of mere words and came to diminish the ardor of their combat, the crowd would begin to dwindle away. The judges quick to understand the loss of trade after vainly trying to induce the litigants to new efforts, would gently and suggestively push under their hands a pair of dice boxes or a pack of cards and the dispute would sometimes end upon the throw of a die or ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... was destined to disappointment; for the wind continued to dwindle after sunset until it finally died away altogether, and left both craft without steerage-way. By this time, however, we had drifted within range of the barque's guns, and she had opened a rather desultory but well-directed fire ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... lie here, hours of the dead night, 85 Dying in state and by such slow degrees, I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook, And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point, And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop Into great laps and folds of sculptor's-work: 90 And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts Grow, with a certain humming in my ears, About the life before I lived this life, And this life too, popes, cardinals, and priests, Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount, 95 Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes, And new-found agate urns as fresh as day, And ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... inertness of men born with the indomitable energy which characterises Europeans and Americans, of men imbued with the progressive and stirring instincts of the white people, who yet allow themselves to dwindle into pallid phantoms of their kind, into hypochondriacal invalids, into hopeless believers in the deadliness of the climate, with hardly a trace of that daring and invincible spirit which ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... now on the way—a surprise so stupendous and unexpected that, beside it, the lobster-surprise would dwindle away into insignificance and be quite forgotten for the rest of the day. And oddly enough, it was to be Blossom ...
— Judith Lynn - A Story of the Sea • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up. That which was a weed in one intelligence becomes a flower in the other. A flower, on the other hand, may dwindle down to a mere weed by the same change. Healthy growths may become poisonous by falling upon the wrong mental soil, and what seemed a night-shade in one mind unfold as a morning-glory ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... drink at one of the broad glassy pools that seemed to lie right and left. Once the faint track I was following headed straight towards one of these apparent sheets of water, and I was even meditating a bathe, but, lo! when I was a hundred yards or so off, it began to dwindle and disappear, and I found nothing but the same endless stretch of grass, burnt up by the ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... order to assure the trees' survival until 50 years have proved or disproved my faith. For, after all, these trees are guinea pigs—pioneering. They break some traditional rules. The land they stand on is grazed. They are not set the traditional 80 feet apart. Their nut crops may dwindle away. One never sees walnut trees growing in pure stands—always with other species which scatter their seeds and push in. They are not ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... great biologist has also perceived the degree to which size may be modified; may dwindle to dwarfness when a niggardly soil refuses to furnish beast and plant alike with a ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... her geography book assigned that distinction to Quebec and Montreal. Mr. Holt affirmed that the pre-eminence of these must dwindle before this young city at their feet, which could be captured by no coup-de-main in case of war, and was at the head of the natural land avenue to the ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... plainly his longing for utterance, his hesitation; reserve and a desire to liberate his soul, the one fighting against the other. And at moments the whole man seemed to be wrapped in weakness like a garment, the soul and the body of him. Then, as a light may dwindle till it seems certain to go out, all that was Marcus Harding seemed to Malling to dwindle. The large body, the powerful head and face, meant little, almost nothing, because the spirit was surely fading. But these ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... is very well known, and still prevails among the lower orders in this country. The disastrous consequence to be apprehended from noncompliance with this strange custom is not (as before stated) that the bees will desert the hive, but that they will dwindle and die. The manner of communicating the intelligence to the little community, with due form and ceremony, is this: to take the key of the house, and knock with it three times against the hive, telling the inmates, at the same time, that their master or mistress, &c., ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... foliage by degrees, So fade expressions which in season please; And we and ours, alas! are due to fate, And works and words but dwindle to a date. Though, as a monarch nods and commerce calls, Impetuous rivers stagnate in canals; Though swamps subdued, and marshes drain'd sustain The heavy ploughshare and the yellow grain; And rising ports along the busy shore Protect the vessel from old Ocean's ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Two hands have come floating From no one sees where; 410 Place a bucket of vodka, A large pile of bread On the magic white napkin, And dwindle away. ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... Condy's enthusiasm in the matter began to dwindle. The fine fire which had sustained him during the story's composition had died out. He was satisfied with his work. He had written a good story, and that was the end of it. No doubt he would send it East—to the Centennial Company—to-morrow or the day after—some time that week. ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... strong imagination turn The great wheel backward, until Troy unburn, And then unbuild, and seven Troys below Rise out of death, and dwindle, and outflow, Till all have passed, and none has yet been there: Back, ever back. Our birds still crossed the air; Beyond our myriad changing generations Still built, unchanged, their known inhabitations. A million years before Atlantis ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... confronted. His eyes narrowed into red points that bored into the other's eyes, and plunged like daggers into his heart and mind. Before that glance, like a vivisectionist's knife, Jake wilted; he seemed to shrink, dwindle, collapse. And with a growing, cold, awful horror, a suspicion so hideous that his mind revolted from it, Peter Champneys stood staring from one ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... present to the bridesmaids. Mrs. Tipping had chosen them, and it did not take the hapless skipper long to arrive at the conclusion that she was far fonder of bridesmaids than he was. His stock of money was beginning to dwindle, and the purchase of a second wedding suit within a month was beginning to tell even upon ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... smaller than ever this year," she remarked every season; and every season the headgear of fashionable London did indeed seem to shrink and dwindle, "fine by degrees, and beautifully less." The coalscuttle-shaped headdress of our grandmothers had not yet resolved itself into a string of beads and a rosebud in these days, but was obviously ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Ibrahim maintained his guard; and beside Trench there lay in the House of Stone, in the town beyond the world, a man who one night had sailed out of Dublin Bay, past the riding lanterns of the yachts, and had seen Bray, that fairyland of lights, dwindle to a golden blot. To think of the sea and the salt wind, the sparkle of light as the water split at the ship's bows, the illuminated deck, perhaps the sound of a bell telling the hour, and the cool dim night about and above, so wrought upon Trench that, practical unimaginative ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... was not exactly an illness. But he seemed to dwindle and pine, somehow, and Cyril and I got dreadfully anxious about him. I don't think Richmond suited him, and I could not give him the comforts he needed; and he fretted so about his want of education. He seemed to get better ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... will place your dogma in its class, above or below a hundred competing dogmas, exactly as the naturalist classifies his species. From being a conviction, it will sink to a curiosity; from being the guide to millions of human lives, it will dwindle down to a chapter in a book. As History explains your dogma, so Science will dry it up; the conception of law will silently make the conception of the daily miracle of your altars seem impossible; the mental climate will gradually deprive your symbols of their nourishment, and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... headland was lit by a bonfire beacon, kept burning at night; and there is a story that a Government packet, passing in the days of our French wars, noticing that the sleepy watchman had allowed the fire to dwindle to a mere smoulder, discharged a cannon-ball at the spot to arouse the neglectful watcher. It must be remembered that the Lizard is rendered doubly perilous by a sea-covered stack of rocks lying to the southward. Before oil was introduced for the lamps it ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... they to be accounted for? of course the theory of descent with adaptive modification has a simple answer to supply—namely, that when, from changed conditions of life, an organ which was previously useful becomes useless, it will be suffered to dwindle away in successive generations, under the influence of certain natural causes which we shall have to consider in future chapters. On the other hand, the theory of special creation can only maintain that these rudiments are formed for the sake of adhering to an ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... should he accomplish it? How small and insignificant he felt, and how utterly worthless! How he seemed to dwindle into nothing beside the great work that he was called to do! And yet how anxious he was to do it well! How he longed to be like his father David, a true shepherd to his people! How his heart yearned over his subjects; and how greatly ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... simplicity of the verse matched some veiled and hitherto but half-expressed quality within him, and dignified him. Miss Brewster suffered the strange but not wholly unpleasant sensation of feeling herself dwindle. ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... indeed every one begins to feel that something must be done, and that quickly. Miss Beecher's book enlightened most people on this subject, and reform is already inaugurated. It is well that it is so, or the race would dwindle away before our very eyes. Listen to some serio-comic verse upon this subject, taken out of your Lecturer's portfolio. It is an address to America, dictated ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... striving to advance, or else through poverty or satiety has fallen into the last stage of the Seven Ages, "sans eyes, sans teeth—sans everything." When what is good is neither perceived nor desired, then the arts, small and great, dwindle and disappear, and nothing remains to show that they have been, but a name, and ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... but all attempts to calculate the distance of that luminary have proved futile. Of its inconceivable remoteness some notion may be formed by the fact, that the diameter of the earth's annual orbit, if viewed from it, would dwindle into an invisible point. This is what is meant by the stars not having, like the planets, a parallax; that is, the earths' orbit, as seen from them, does not subtend a measurable angle. With two other stars, however, astronomers have unexpectedly and ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... could keep his eye on each thoroughfare from one end to the other. The structures were of rough material hastily put together, and among the debris are to be found portions of older buildings, stehe, and fragments of statues. The town began to dwindle after the Pharaoh had taken possession of his sepulchre; it was abandoned during the XIIIth dynasty, and its ruins were entombed in the sand which the wind heaped over them. The city which Amenemhait III. had connected with his tomb maintained, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... accidents, most of them trivial. And these accidents, often the most trivial, most powerfully determine not only the direction but also the degree and kind of force—what characteristics shall develop and what shall dwindle. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... wrathful, my good Lord of Douglas," answered the Prince; "I did but smile to think how your princely retinue would dwindle if every thief were dealt with as the poor Highlanders ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... as the war went on and showed no signs of subsiding, the resources of those who, with perfect confidence in its short duration, had left the Rand at a moment's notice, began to dwindle the more quickly insomuch as they had not properly economised in the beginning, when the general idea was prevalent that the English army would enter Pretoria for the Christmas following upon the beginning of the war, and that an era of ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... the yellow bar of carriage-windows brush in vibration across their faces. The ground and the air rocked. Then Siegmund turned his head to watch the red and the green lights in the rear of the train swiftly dwindle on the darkness. Still watching the distance where the train had ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... immorality," I sighed, "is well-nigh over. Already the augurs of the pen begin to wink as they fable of a race of men who are evilly scintillant in talk and gracefully erotic. We know that this, alas, cannot be, and that in real life our peccadilloes dwindle into dreary vistas of divorce cases and the police-court, and that crime has lost its splendour. We sin very carelessly—sordidly, at times,—and artistic wickedness is rare. It is a pity; life was once a scarlet volume scattered with misty-coated demons; it is now a yellow journal, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... novelty, I determined on visiting America; within whose wide extent all the elements of society, civilized and uncivilized, were to be found—where the great city could be traced to the infant town—where villages dwindle into scattered farms—and these to the log-house of the solitary backwoodsman, and the temporary wig-wam of ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... courage and danger, that it is not to be broken in a day. We may come back soon from Montgomery, Julie, but I see war, a great and terrible war, a war, by the side of which those we have had, will dwindle to mere skirmishes. I shut my eyes, but it makes no difference. I see it close at ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... think about it," said Thorndyke. "I never reject a case off-hand unless it is obviously fishy. It is surprising how difficulties, and even impossibilities, dwindle if you look at them attentively. My experience has taught me that the most unlikely case is, at least, worth ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... This meant, as Lord Clarendon pointed out at the time, that fourteen millions of people would henceforth regard the Czar as their defender, whilst their allegiance to the Sultan would become little more than nominal, and the position of the Turkish ruler would inevitably dwindle from independence to vassalage. ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... troth she has, and now I think on't, a little taller wou'd do well for Propagation; I should be both the Posterity of the antient Family of the Blunts of Essex should dwindle ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... Life! thy lips enkindle With their love the breath between them; And thy smiles before they dwindle Make the cold air fire; then screen them In those looks, where whoso gazes ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... of Sindbad was taken to Almighty Allah, much wealth came to the possession of his son; but soon did it dwindle in boon companionship, for the city of Baghdad is sweet to the youthful. Then did Sindbad bethink him how he might restore his fortune, saying to himself: "Three things are better than other three; the day of death is better than the day of birth, a live dog is better than a dead lion, and the grave ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... Her life, she reflected, had held, until recently, but little of happiness. The long, weary days of poverty, when her husband, incapacitated by a paralytic stroke, had seen his savings slowly dwindle away; the death of her son, and then that of Mr. Morton himself passed before her mental vision. Only Ruth had been left to her, and in the girl's happiness and success lay Mrs. Morton's whole life and being. Now, that things had at last taken a turn, and the future seemed ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... Still ever sped the glorious Hope along, Nor could the parch'd Impatience halt, appeased By the calm answer of the Hierophant— "What have I, if I have not all," he sigh'd; "And giv'st thou but the little and the more? Does thy truth dwindle to the gauge of gold, A sum that man may smaller or less small Possess and count—subtract or add to—still? Is not TRUTH one and indivisible? Take from the Harmony a single tone A single tint take from the Iris bow— And lo! what once was all, is nothing—while Fails ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... to the ground in sober recognition of my error. "Forgive me the heat of my zeal," I protested. "I diminish, I dwindle, I wither. Unless your pity forgives me, I shall evaporate ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... particular distasteful. My house-deaths have generally been periodical, recurring after seven years, but this last is premature by half that time. Cut off in the flower of Colebrook. The Middletonian stream and all its echoes mourn. Even minnows dwindle. A parvis fiunt MINIMI. I fear to invite Mrs. Hood to our new mansion, lest she envy it and rote us. But when we are fairly in, I hope she will come and try it. I heard she and you were made uncomfortable ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... across the country you inhabit, and if you so please you may accompany me all the way. You may even follow me into the land of Repose which lies beyond your own territory, but its air will not agree with you. You will dwindle, peak, and pine in that exquisite atmosphere, and in a very little while I shall have seen the ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... interest I should have considered better if I had arranged her first appearance in some piece by Verdi or Donizetti, or indeed anything but LOHENGRIN. But enough of such stuff, although I am grieved to see Herr A., the tenor of the future (if well prepared), dwindle into thin air also. May heaven grant that Caspari will keep on, or that a decent tenor may come to ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... months of work behind us. We had seen the typhus, and had dodged the dreaded louse who carries the infection, we had seen the typhus dwindle and die with the onrush of summer. We had helped to clean and prepare six hospitals at Vrntze or Vrnjatchka Banja—whichever you prefer. We had helped Mr. Berry, the great surgeon, to ventilate his hospitals ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... and her countenance underwent a marked and fearful change. All her beauty vanished, her eyes blazed, and terror sat on her wrinkled brow. The hag, on the contrary, crouched lower down, and seemed to dwindle less than her ordinary size. Writhing as from heavy blows, and with a mixture of malice and fear in her countenance, she cried, "Were I to speak, you would not thank ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... allies, however, were not to be trifled with, and in the beginning of March signed the treaty of Chaumont, which bound them each to keep 150,000 men on foot for twenty years. The battles of Craonne and Laon followed, in which Napoleon held his own, but saw his resources dwindle. On March 18th the conferences at Chatillon came to an end, and on the 24th the allies determined to march on Paris. Marmont and Mortier, with less than thirty thousand men, could make no head against them, while Napoleon himself tried a fruitless diversion against their communications. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... movement, side-ways, of its tail. For the unassisted eye, and still more for the microscope, what spectacle can be more marvelous than the gradual process of change by which this tiny fish becomes a reptile? Legs bud; the fish-like gills dwindle by a vital process of absorption; the fish-like air-bladder becomes transmuted, as by a miracle, into the celled structure of lungs; the tail grows daily shorter, not broken off, but absorbed; the heart adds to its cells; the fish becomes a reptile ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... persistence in getting ready for the fulfilment of his hopes, he ordered tanks and printer for the final work of getting his stuff ready for the market. He had at best a crudely primitive outfit, though he saw his bank balance dwindle and dwindle to a most despairingly small sum. And still it did not snow nor show ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... minute pay glad life's arrears Of pain, darkness and cold. For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, The black minute's at end, And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, Shall dwindle, shall blend, Shall change, shall become first a peace ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... without precedent. Nothing can be so contemptible as the persons or so foolish as the understandings of these hobgoblins. Ariel's speech is one continued impertinence. After he has talked to them of black omens and dire disasters that threaten his heroine, those bugbears dwindle to the breaking a piece of china, to staining a petticoat, the losing a fan, or a bottle of sal volatile—and what makes Ariel's speech more ridiculous is the place where it is spoken, on the sails and cordage of Belinda's ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... It seems to me that human greatness resides in the good opinion of others; and that, if this opinion changes, the greatest can quickly dwindle into nothing. ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... floor "the gentleman from the Rocky Mountains," or "the gentleman from the Pacific," or "the gentleman from Patagonia," but "the gentleman from the North Pole," and also "the gentleman from the South Pole;" and the poor original thirteen states would dwindle into comparative insignificance as ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... literary works, like the beginning and purpose of his intimacy with Elisa, are always large, comprehensive, and idealistic, but they always, even in his most important work, Merlin, dwindle to petty details of actuality. His significance for the present age does not so much rest on his objective achievement, as on some of his qualities which prevented achievement. He was perhaps the most considerable representative of the literary "Epigones" intervening between ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... for all that comes storming against thee of disease, disappointment, loss, and misery. Set on the one side all possible as well as all actual weaknesses, burdens, pains, and set on the other these two words—'My grace,' and all these dwindle into nothingness and disappear. If troubled Christian men would learn what they have, and would use what they already possess, they would less often beseech Him with vain petitions to take away their blessings which are in the thorns ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... one, and from this by further burning distilled the single ejaculation of the Faith, "There is no god but God and Mohamed is the Prophet of God," which was all his maturer wisdom deemed essential:—so in the books of that period do we find the corpus of genetic knowledge dwindle to a few prerogative instances, and these at last to the brief formula of an ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... towards La Richaudiere, whilst Claude watched his figure dwindle as he crossed the cultivated plain, until nothing remained but the shiny silk of his hat and the black spot of his coat. The young man returned home slowly, his heart bursting with nameless sadness. However, he said nothing about ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... is going to be away more than usual, and I'm dreading it awfully; but never mind, Aunt Mary, I don't want to make you blue, because honestly I don't think I'm going into a decline, even if the doctor does. And, after all, if I did sort of dwindle away it wouldn't matter much, for I'm not worth anything, and no one knows that as well as myself—except you, Aunt Mary. I must stop because it's nine o'clock and time I was in bed. I've got some socks to wash out first, too; you see, I'm learning how to economize just as fast as ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... theological phraseology, but we mean every word to its fullest extent. The Father of Truth chooses His own prophets, and He speaks to them in a voice stronger than the voice of thunder. It is the same inner voice through which God speaks to all of us. That voice may dwindle away, and become hardly audible; it may lose its Divine accent, and sink into the language of worldly prudence; but it may also, from time to time, assume its real nature, with the chosen of God, and sound into their ears as a voice from Heaven. A 'divine instinct' may sound more scientific, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... through the breach of the revolving doors What dreams of splendour blinded us and fled! I have since then contended and rejoiced; Amid the glories of the house of life Profoundly entered, and the shrine beheld: Yet when the lamp from my expiring eyes Shall dwindle and recede, the voice of love Fall insignificant on my closing ears, What sound shall come but the old cry of the wind In our inclement city? what return But the image of the emptiness of youth, Filled with the sound of footsteps and that voice Of discontent ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... burghers have become unfaithful and strengthened the enemy. If it were not for those unfaithful people out of our midst we would never have had such a hard time of it. If we go on we shall ever become weaker and weaker, and ultimately dwindle away. What shall we then have gained by continuing the struggle? To-day we are still in a position to obtain something from the enemy, and to stipulate for assistance for our ruined people, who cannot get on their legs again without help. The burghers are prepared to proceed and ...
— The Peace Negotiations - Between the Governments of the South African Republic and - the Orange Free State, etc.... • J. D. Kestell
... helped Mrs. Bal out of the blue car (also big, in proportion to the size of the owner and his fortune) was Morgan P. Bennett of New York, the Tin Trust millionaire. Somerled's puny horde of millions dwindle into humble insignificance beside Morgan Bennett's pile. If Somerled has made two millions out of his mines and successful speculations, and a few extra thousands out of his pictures, M. P. Bennett has made twenty millions out of tin—and ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... among the remarkable achievements of medicine. It is the sound opinion of conservative men that if the knowledge now in the hands of the medical profession could be put to wide-spread use, syphilis would dwindle in two generations from the unenviable position of the third great plague to the insignificance of malaria and yellow fever on the Isthmus of Panama. The influences that stand between humanity and this achievement are the lack of general public enlightenment on the disease itself, and ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... to deaden the shock, to cause the nation to pass insensibly from the monarchy to democracy by the practice of constitutional fictions,—what detestable reasons all those are! No! no! let us never enlighten the people with false daylight. Principles dwindle and pale in your constitutional cellar. No illegitimacy, no compromise, no grant from the king to the people. In all such grants there is an Article 14. By the side of the hand which gives there is the claw which snatches back. I refuse your charter point-blank. A charter is a mask; the lie ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... He looked upon it as a mere misfortune that no person could avoid; but I, besides that, thought it was a judgment upon me, to punish me in the loss of all my ill-got gain. But when I found that his own fortune began to dwindle as well as mine, I was almost ready to think it was possible his lordship might have been as wicked a liver as I had, and the same vengeance as had been poured upon me for my repeated crimes might also ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... would hardly believe him to be of the same race. But when you looked at the eyes that sparkled out like a beetle's from each side of his hooked nose, you saw at once that he inherited all the fiery spirit of his forefathers. In fact, a Frenchman's spirit never exhales, however his body may dwindle. It rather rarefies, and grows more inflammable, as the earthly particles diminish; and I have seen valor enough in a little fiery-hearted French dwarf, to have furnished out ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... wax, and now they dwindle, Whirling with the whirling spindle. Twist ye, twine ye! even so ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... how our Lord here declares that in comparison with the sin of not listening to His words, and being taught by His manifestation, all other sins dwindle into nothing. 'If I had not spoken, they had not had sin.' That does not mean, of course, that these men would have been clear of all moral delinquency; it does not mean that there would not have been amongst them crimes against their own consciences, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... unit. The possible variety of courses is in direct ratio to the number enrolled. In a class of 200 carpenters there would probably be, for example, 10 or 15 men who need specialized instruction in stair-building. On the basis of the present enrollment of 40 or 50 carpenters the class would dwindle to three or four, with the result that the per capita ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz
... across the ship and disappeared, but the noise of its engines did not dwindle more than a little. The blast of the siren seemed to summon it back again. Once more it came in sight, and this time it dived steeply, flashed across the forecastle deck amid a hideous uproar, desperately, horribly close to the dangling ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... habituated to assert. But if we make ourselves too little for the sphere of our duty, if, on the contrary, we do not stretch and expand our minds to the compass of their object, be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds. It is not a predilection to mean, sordid, home-bred cares that will avert the consequences of a false estimation of our interest, or prevent the shameful dilapidation into which a great empire must fall ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke |
