"Narrowing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... country would sound political thought exercise a more beneficial influence upon the life of the people than in Ireland. Indeed I would go further and give it as my strong conviction that, properly developed and freed from the narrowing influences of the party squabbles by which it has been warped and sterilised, the political thought of the Irish people would contribute a factor of vital importance to the life of the British empire. But at the moment I ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... ill, close-built town, swarming with inhabitants, and, from what I could learn, like all the other free towns, governed in a manner which bears hard on the poor, whilst narrowing the minds of the rich; the character of the man is lost in the Hamburger. Always afraid of the encroachments of their Danish neighbours, that is, anxiously apprehensive of their sharing the golden harvest of commerce with them, or taking a little of the trade off their hands—though ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... on, in time to wailing flute-music, until, it seemed from nowhere, a lovelier woman than any of them appeared in their midst, sitting cross-legged with a flat basket at her knees. She sat with arms raised and swayed from the waist as if in a delirium. Her arms moved in narrowing circles, higher and higher above the basket lid, and the lid began to rise. Nobody touched it, nor was there any string, but as it rose ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... young persons of the female sex. Dick was seized with a great passion for examining this curious chain, and, after some preliminary questions, was rash enough to lean towards her and put out his hand toward the neck that lay in the golden coil. She threw her head back, her eyes narrowing and her forehead drawing down so that Dick thought her head actually flattened itself. He started involuntarily; for she looked so like the little girl who had struck him with those sharp flashing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... parallel with the trench (p. 251) it covers, although when seen from the parapet its inner stakes seem always to be about the same distance away from the nearest sandbags. But taken in relation to the trench opposite the entanglements are laid with occasional V-shaped openings narrowing towards ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... one place the lane, narrowing suddenly, led between high banks crowned with bushes, so that it was very dark there. As we entered this gloom Charmian suddenly drew closer to my side and slipped her hand beneath my arm and into my clasp, and the touch of ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... forces covered a semicircular front of about forty miles, the right under Ian Hamilton near Thabanchu, and the left at Karee. This was the broad net which was to be swept from south to north across the Free State, gradually narrowing as it went. The conception was admirable, and appears to have been an adoption of the Boers' own strategy, which had in turn been borrowed from the Zulus. The solid centre could hold any force which faced it, while the mobile flanks, Hutton upon ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... phase of his mother's long martyrdom was developing. The pair, already old—James with work and anxiety, his wife with sickness—read it together. They shut it up without a word. Its tone of jubilant hope seemed to have nothing to do with them, or seemed rather to make their own narrowing prospects look more narrow, and the approach of the King of Terrors more black and relentless, than before. Jenny lay back on her poor bed, with the tears of a dumb self-pity running down her cheeks, and James's only answer to it was conveyed in a brief summons to Sandy to come and see his ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... requisite, as may be imagined, to contrive that wherever the spectator pauses an harmonious composition is presented. One has the sensation, as the roll unfolds, of passing through a delectable country. In the foreground water winds, narrowing and expanding, among verdant knolls and lawns, joined here and there by little wooden bridges; and the water is fed by torrents that plunge down among pine-woods from crags of fantastic form, glowing with hues of lapis-lazuli and jade; under towering peaks are luxuriant valleys, groves ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... more apparent in this age of specialties than the dwarfing, crippling, mutilating influence of occupations or professions. Specialties facilitate commerce, and promote efficiency in the professions, but are often narrowing to individuals. The spirit of the age tends to doom the lawyer to a narrow life of practice, the business man to a ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... so on down to the minutest twigs; and even the arrangement of the clustered leaves has the same general tendency. Climb into one, and you are delighted with a succession of verdant floors spread around the trunk and gradually narrowing as you ascend. The beautiful cones seem to stand upon or rise out of this green flooring.' The same writer says that by examining the different growths of wood inside the trunk of one of the trees these ancient cedars of ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... equilibrium between the upward and the downward forces, embodied in the vertical and horizontal lines respectively. The upward force is manifest primarily in the vertical columns, and is emphasized there by the flutings, the slight progressive narrowing toward the top, and the inward effort of the necking just below the echinus. The downward force is embodied in the horizontal lines of the lintel, architrave, cornice, and in the hanging mutules and gutta. The two forces come to rest in the abaci, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... background of storm and cloud, the vague suggestion of evanescence intensifying the mysterious charm with poetic significance. The receding coast discloses a striking panorama of the mountain heights piled one upon another, the grey towers and bastions guarding this narrowing Cape of the Minahasa, a veritable outpost of Nature, eternally washed by the restless seas. As the steamer rounds the savage promontories, and threads the blue straits formed by two rocky islets at the northern extremity, the weird and desolate landscape ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... narrowing majorities. What will the House do as to the Lords' amendments on the Bankruptcy Bill?" There was a Bill that had gone down from the House of Commons, but had not originated with the Government. It had, however, been fostered by Ministers in the House of Lords, and had been sent back with certain ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... around in ever-narrowing circles, faster and faster. Jack noticed that twice in each revolution it went respectively lower and higher on the course, and always at the same places. That is to say, the whirlpool was on what might be termed a slant. At one time the boat would be at the lowest point, and ...
— Through Space to Mars • Roy Rockwood
... rigging is loose and slovenly, her course erratic, she seems to be idly drifting, and there is no one at the wheel. A derelict, abandoned at sea, she mocks their hopes of rescue. But she is not entirely deserted, for a faint shout comes across the narrowing strip of sea and is answered from the "Rodeur." The two vessels draw near. There can be no launching of boats by blind men, but the story of the stranger is soon told. She, too, is a slaver, a Spaniard, the "Leon," and on her, too, every soul ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... The railroad follows the course of the Animas River (to which the Spaniard gave the musical but melancholy title of "Rio de las Animas Perdidas," or River of Lost Souls) until the picturesque mining town of Silverton is reached. To the right is the silvery Animas River, which frets in its narrowing bed, and breaks into foam against the opposing boulders, beyond which rise the hills; to the left are mountains, increasing in rugged contour as the advance is made, and in the shadow of the rocks all is solitary, weird and awful; the startled traveler ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... the northern side of the pit, by which not only the miners, but even horses can descend to their work. Passing through the entrance, the mine gradually widens underground to a depth of 1062 feet. The chief mass of ore is 600 feet broad on its upper surface, greatly narrowing as it descends to a depth of 1200 feet. Round it are other similar deposits. As the copper pyrites are deposited generally on the circumference of the outer shell of these masses, which are of a very irregular outline, the mining ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... this way, now that, all eyes followed them to see who should be the happy ones to secure the precious emblems of benediction and absolution. One leaf, after hovering in the air a moment, sank in ever narrowing circles until it lodged on the flag of a volunteer regiment, whereupon a mighty cheer burst from thousands of throats. The other, borne hither and thither by shifting breezes, was finally wafted toward the raised platform where sat the ladies of the ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... space in one direction while the star swept onwards in another. A planet could not very well come into final conflict with its sun at one fell swoop. It would gradually draw nearer and nearer, not by the narrowing of its path, but by the change of the path's shape. The path would, in fact, become more and more eccentric; until, at length, at its point of nearest approach, the planet would graze its primary, exciting ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... procured, and Malchus found that the cave extended some fifty feet back, narrowing gradually to the end. It had evidently been used for a long time by wild animals. The floor was completely covered with ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... possible enemy courses of action which can materially influence his own plan. Therefore, in instances of this nature, it is apparent that the procedure of giving first consideration to the commander's own courses of action affords the advantage of (see page 134) narrowing the field ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... are to be parted out? The word has attracted to itself contemptuous meanings and ascetical meanings, and meanings which really deny the true democracy of Christianity and the equality of all believers in the sight of God. But its scriptural use has none of these narrowing and confusing associations adhering to it, nor does it even directly and at first mean, as we generally take it to mean, pure men, holy in the sense of clean and righteous. But something goes before that phase of meaning, and it is this—a saint is a man separated and set apart for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... company commander knew the section of shell-punctured, swamp land that was his to hold, and the battalion commander, a veteran American soldier, was well aware of the particular perils of the position which his one thousand or more men were going to occupy in the very jaw-joint of a narrowing salient. ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... bribe too small or lacked the power to accept it. The breeze did not stiffen. The sailors strove like demons at the sweeps, but almost imperceptibly the gap betwixt them and the war-ships was narrowing. ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... narrowing path carried us up until one of those gaps I had noticed came in view. Chapman stopped, and then hearing my approaching steps, ran forward and jumped. His calculation and strength were yet secure and adequate. He safely passed the first break in the pathway, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... church towers of the town of Bristol, and beyond it, the slime of the water of the Bristol Channel; and nearer, on one side, the spire of Elmwood Church looked up, and, on the other, the woods round Elmwood House, and these ran out as it were, lengthening and narrowing into a wooded cleft or gulley, Hermit's Gulley, which broke the side of the hill just below where Steadfast stood, and had a little clear stream running along ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was tipped back and the hair hung dank about the pale, sweating forehead, suggestive of sickness. But weak health did not imply weak purpose; every feature in that hawk-like face was sharp with hatred, and in the narrowing eye ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... a thicket. So quickly did it pass that he scarcely saw it; nevertheless, a burning desire to capture and possess the beautiful strange creature filled his breast. He instantly ordered his attendants to form a ring round the thicket, and so encircle the hind; then, gradually narrowing the circle, he pressed forward till he could distinctly see the white hind panting in the midst. Nearer and nearer he advanced, till just as he thought to lay hold of the beautiful strange creature, it gave one mighty bound, leaped ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... simply in surrounding the musmons and goats, and gradually narrowing the circle around them. Cyrus Harding, Pencroft, Neb, and Jup, posted themselves in different parts of the wood, while the two cavaliers and Top galloped in a radius of half ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... spring being discovered in the lowest part of the outcrop. A favourable condition for the existence of a large and permanent fountain, is where a porous stratum spreads over a broad area at a high level, and is prolonged, by a gradually narrowing course, to an outlet at a lower one. The broad upper part of the stratum catches plenty of water during the wet season, which sinks into the depths as into a reservoir, and oozes out in a regular stream at its lower outlet. A fissured rock makes a still ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... transverse section of our stately but distant friend the sand-hill. That is the form in which he is thought to appear to best advantage. By the time you have circumvented him by circumscribing him in the gradually narrowing circuit of a buggy,—for stalking him, unless in higher grass than is common at this season, is but vexation of spirit,—you will feel vicious enough to eat him in any shape. His brother, the beautiful white bugler, you will hardly meet at dinner, he being the shyest of his kind. A Canada ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... contract the sweep, and quicken the pace to deal not with possible origins, but with actual results—not with Ancient or Transition literature, but with the literature of English in the department first of fiction generally and then, with a third and last narrowing, to the main subject of English fiction ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... bushes; and, motionless above the sombre tumult of the slopes, the monumental stretch of bare rock rose on high, level at the top, and emitting a ghastly yellow sheen in the flashes. The thunderclaps rolled ponderously between the narrowing walls of that chasm, that was all aflame one moment, and all black the next. A torrent springing at its head, and dashing with inaudible fury along the bottom, seemed to gleam placidly amongst the rounded ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... holds with narrowing space, From mart and crowd, her old-time grace, And guards with fondly jealous arms The ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... this book to you as the representative of a class which ought to be more numerous,—the class of large-minded persons who take a lively interest in arts which are not specially their own. No one who had not carefully observed the narrowing of men's minds by specialities could believe to what a degree it goes. Instead of being open, as yours has always been, to the influences of literature, in the largest sense, as well as to the influences of ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... bunch disease are mainly the production of brooms or sucker shoot growth on the tree trunk and main branches and the tufting of terminals, profusion of small branches from axillary buds, the dwarfing and narrowing of the leaflets, and the dying back of the trees resulting sometimes in the death of the trees. The principal symptom is the production during summer of bushy, wiry growth caused by the breaking into growth of lateral buds that ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... had laid his saddle-bags down by the side of the chair in which he had seated himself, his elbows on his knees, his hands held out to the flickering blaze in the deep chimney-place, his eyes significantly narrowing as he ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... for itself, and those who maintained its authority appropriated the name, which thus became a party title. In the course of its sessions, it rejected doctrines, notably that of Justification by Faith, which had been strongly favoured even by such men as Pole and Contarini, so narrowing the bounds of orthodoxy. But while cutting off all possibility of reconciliation with the Protestants, it marked a strong tendency to reformation not of dogma but of practice; while an increased intolerance of what was stigmatised as error, an intensification ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... into the distance, at the horizon and its trees, delicate and feathery in their nakedness against the sky. Swollen with recent rains and snows, the water came hurrying towards him—the storm-bed of the little river, which, meandering in from the country, through pleasant woods, in ever narrowing curves, ran through the town as a small stream, to be swelled again on the outskirts by the waters of two other rivers, which joined it at right angles. The bridge trembled at first, when other people crossed it, on their way to the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... She noticed that Paul had, from, long habit, learnt to continue his own thoughts during Grace's stories, and she also tried to do this, but she was not clever at it because Grace would suddenly stop and say, "Where was I, Maggie?" and then when Maggie was confused regard her suspiciously, narrowing her eyes into little thin points. The shopping was difficult because Grace would stand at Maggie's elbow and say: "Now, Maggie, this is your affair, isn't it? You decide what you want," and then when Maggie had decided, Grace simply, to show her power, would say: "Oh, I don't ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... title any more," said Harlan, narrowing his eyes at the other. "He needs plantin'. Soon as we get set some of you boys can go over an' take care of him. You'll find him in the harness shop. He busted down the door of Miss Barbara's room last night, an' she made a colander out ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... putting up was usually consumed in the loving, and with nothing left over. If the affection that isolates and simplifies its object may be distinguished from the affection that seeks communications and contracts for it, Julia Dallow's was quite of the encircling, not to say the narrowing sort. She was not so much jealous as essentially exclusive. She desired no experience for the familiar and yet partly unsounded kinsman in whom she took an interest that she wouldn't have desired for herself; and indeed the cause of her interest ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... gave a fleeting smile, a bare curving of lips together with an almost imperceptible narrowing of amused eyes—goading the other to the last stage of exasperation—then calmly ignored the fellow, returning indifferent attention to the progress of ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... edge of a low escarpment. Below him the narrowing valley showed bare, black ribs of rock, long, winding gray lines leading down to a central floor where mesquite and cactus dotted the barren landscape. Moving objects, diminutive in size, gray and white in color, arrested Gale's roving sight. They bobbed away for a while, then stopped. They were ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... literature, law, statecraft, and the rest—have, one and all, freed themselves by slow degrees from ecclesiastical control, till little or nothing has been left for the Church to regulate but her own rites and ceremonies, the morals (in a narrow and ever-narrowing sense of the word), and the faith (in the theological sense of the ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... satisfactory results. If we would master the lessons of this life we must not take other lives within the field of consciousness. The very process of reincarnation is a coming out of the general into the particular, with the consequent narrowing ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... allowed herself to be led forward. "There's something about this place that frightens me," she said uncomfortably as the high black wails closed in, narrowing until only a slit of yellow sky was visible overhead. The path underfoot was surprisingly smooth and free from rocks, but the narrow corridor, steeped in shadows, was gloomy and depressingly silent. It even bothered Kennon, although he wouldn't admit it. ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... there is a tide phenomenon, called the barre, as in English rivers the bore, which, when not provided for, is very dangerous, especially at spring tides. The water then rushes up the narrowing funnel-shaped estuary, in a broad and swelling wave, sometimes four feet high, and this will sweep off even large vessels from their anchors, and it ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... This narrowing and hardening process by which such a symbol, the anonymous creation of humanity under the shocks of circumstance, becomes limited and inadequate, is a process frequently assisted by those premature and violent syntheses of the ultimate contradiction which we name dogmatic ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... hinted at "theories" and their danger; and our talk soon fell on a certain "John's Place," where he thought there was a great deal to be learned. In five minutes more we stood in the spot which interested him, an alley running between two mean streets, and narrowing at one end till we crept out of it as if through the neck of a bottle. It was by no means the choicest part of the parish: the drainage was imperfect, the houses miserable; but wretched as it was it was a favourite haunt of the poor, and it swarmed with inhabitants ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... argument neglects the fact that this present complex life is such because it has added one by one these separate interests to those which it has received as an inheritance, each of which in its own narrowing niche having been preserved under the ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... its branches in exactly the same style,—some short and simple, others branched like the parent stem,—in an arrangement approximately alternate; and is everywhere covered, stem and branch, by thickly set scale-like leaflets, that, suddenly narrowing, terminate in exceedingly slim points. It has, however, proportionally a stouter stem than Lycopodium; its leaves, when seen in profile, seem more rectilinear and thin; and none of its branches yet found bear the fructiferous stalk or spike. Its resemblance, however, to this commonest of the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... this, watching the round of light on the ceiling, with its narrowing inner rings, a sufferer from whom pain has fled looks back to the shores she is leaving, and would be well with them who walk there. It is false to imagine that schemers and workers in the dark are destitute of the saving gift of conscience. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a little stronger refreshment, but did not dare to venture out of sight of the house. Miss Ann was the perfect image of Patience in a hay-mow, smiling at his anxiety. The motion of her needles never ceased, except when she counted the stitches in narrowing. ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... and elevate him he appreciated still less. As has been said, he loved better to disfurnish the outside of other people's heads than to furnish the inside of his own. What he felt, and keenly, was that the newcomers treated him as an inferior, were day by day narrowing his range, and slowly but surely reducing his condition to that of a subject people. Dull as he was, he saw that one of three fates confronted him: to perish, to migrate, or to lay aside his savage character and mode of ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... that Philip and I were equally gifted. Phil was of a graceful, slender figure; within an inch of six feet, I should say; with a longish face, narrowing from the forehead downward, very distinctly outlined, the nose a little curved, the mouth still as delicate as a boy's. Indeed he always retained something boyish in his look, for all his studiousness and thoughtfulness, and all that came later. He was not as pale as ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... or it will settle unevenly, and the stack will lean to one side accordingly. 4. Increase the diameter from the ground upward until ready to draw in or narrow to form the top. 5. Aim to form the top by gradual rather than abrupt narrowing. 6. Top out by using some other kind of hay or grass that sheds the rain better than clover. 7. Suspend weights to some kind of ropes, stretching over the top of the stack to prevent the wind from removing the material put on to ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... time to lose. The huge mass of ice was closing rapidly into the mouth of the creek, and narrowing the only passage through which the canoe could escape into the open water of the river beyond. Stanley might, indeed, drag his canoe up the bank, if so disposed, and reach home by a circuitous walk through the woods; but by doing so he would lose much ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... joined, as you note, by Two frondent brother Avenues from this hand and from that, spreads out into Place Royale and Palace Forecourt; yonder is the Salle des Menus. Yonder an august Assembly sits regenerating France. Forecourt, Grand Court, Court of Marble, Court narrowing into Court you may discern next, or fancy: on the extreme verge of which that glass-dome, visibly glittering like a star of hope, is the—Oeil-de-Boeuf! Yonder, or nowhere in the world, is bread baked ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... us like tiny satellites in a narrowing spiral ellipse. Our attraction, the normal gravity of our close bulk, was drawing them ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... associations. Her mind has been given no better means of development than the knowledge of her beauty, the general and superficial homage that it always receives, the little round of thought that centres about self, and the daily question of dress. That's narrowing the world down to a cage large enough only for a poll-parrot. If the bird within has a parrot's nature, what is the use of opening the door and showing it larks singing in the sky? I fear that's what I'm trying to do, and that I shall go back to my fall work with ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... to his sight; the world was narrowing around him. I glanced about me, and saw that the hay and straw were trampled over the floor, as if there had been ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... reforming politician who insists upon mere purity of administration and upon the control and suppression of the unruly elements in the community, may be the easy result of a narrowing and selfish process. For the painful condition of endeavoring to minister to genuine social needs, through the political machinery, and at the same time to remodel that machinery so that it shall be adequate to its new task, is to encounter the inevitable discomfort ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... Narrowing his eyes and crooking his knees, Evan stood before Mary. "Like to find out more would I," he said. "Guess did the old female that I had seen ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... and to save its victim? We have heard them refusing him admission or cutting him off, but we have not heard of any considerable aid which they have given to public or private morality. And, further, do we not find them narrowing the circle of obligation, substituting attachment and duty to an order for love and obligations to mankind? Membership in a lodge, not character, is held to make one "worthy," opening the way to favor ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher
... sake, accept another narrowing of the field. The effect of the Bible and its religious teaching, on the writer himself is a separate study, and is for the most part left out of consideration. It sounds correct when Milton says: "He who would not be frustrate of his Power to write well ought himself ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... ghastly souvenir and bent over it. A fine bit of Oriental workmanship that any museum might have valued; the haft was of silver, exquisitely chased, the blade was straight and slender, narrowing to a needlelike point, so that it belonged rather to the stiletto type than the dagger. An inscription ran lengthwise down the steel, which was of a distinct bluish tinge where it was not darkly stained. About an inch from the ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... members of her family acted on me as a kind of external influence, as something belonging to the environment of my life; it never frightened me as an atavistic evil. It justified me in being cautious and in being prepared for the worst, and so far it may be said to have helped in shaping or narrowing the course of my life. Fortunately, however, this tendency to deafness seems now to have exhausted itself. In my own generation there is one case only, and the next two generations, children and grandchildren ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... narrowing conceptions! Can it be imagined that God would consign infants to everlasting torment, simply because they are children of unbelieving parents? A thousand times No! Let us remember that they are His own children, whatever earthly parentage they may have. His love and power are not ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... cauldron, and then, with scarcely a moment of slack water, the whole went whirling by in the opposite direction. In a few moments the low rollers had passed the islands and united again in a single bank of water, which swept up the narrowing channel with the thunder ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... stridulent, and, in the ordinary sense of the phrase, "broad" forms of utterance, are not dialects at all, having nothing dialectic in them; and all phrases developed in states of rude employment, and restricted intercourse, are injurious to the tone and narrowing to the power of the language they affect. Mere breadth of accent does not spoil a dialect as long as the speakers are men of varied idea and good intelligence; but the moment the life is contracted by mining, millwork, or any oppressive and monotonous labor, the accents and phrases ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... question of discretion, and that discretion exercised solely upon what will appear best for the conservation of the state on its present basis, I should recommend it to your serious thoughts, whether the narrowing of the foundation is always the best way to secure the building? The body of disfranchised men will not be perfectly satisfied to remain always in that state. If they are not satisfied, you have two millions of subjects in your bosom full of uneasiness: not that they cannot ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Earth a slimy spine, Heaven a space for winging tons. Farther, deeper, may you read, Have you sight for things afield, Where peeps she, the Nurse of seed, Cloaked, but in the peep revealed; Showing a kind face and sweet: Look you with the soul you see't. Glory narrowing to grace, Grace to glory magnified, Following that will you embrace Close in arms or aery wide. Banished is the white Foam-born Not from here, nor under ban Phoebus lyrist, Phoebe's horn, Pipings of the reedy Pan. Loved of Earth of old they were, Loving did interpret her; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... love with Yves; Yves with Chrysantheme; Oyouki with me; I with no one. We might even find here, ready to hand, the elements of a fratricidal drama, were we in any other country than Japan; but we are in Japan, and under the narrowing and dwarfing influence of the surroundings, which turn everything into ridicule, nothing will come ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... edged nearer, narrowing their eyes and squaring their shoulders as much as to say, 'Now we'll just trip her up at the ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... success, A. is broadening and becoming something of an idealist. B. is narrowing and through failure is losing his ideals. This is not an uncommon effect of success and failure. Where success leads to arrogance and conceit it narrows, but where the character withstands this result the increased experience and opportunity is of great value to character. Failure ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... establishment of monopoly. But this tendency may not result in the establishment of any monopoly. There is a tariff on potatoes, but there is no monopoly in their production. Evidently the tariff cannot create a monopoly; it only makes its establishment more easy by narrowing the field of competition to the producers of this single country. If we turn back over the list of monopolies we have studied, to find those which the tariff has any effect in aiding to establish, we shall find none till we reach the first two chapters. The monopolies in mineral products and manufactured ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... As Drake turned away from me again, our cab poked its laboring nose into a narrowing, gloomy street. I had a glimpse of a single unsteady street lamp on the corner, and a dim sign, "Mate Lane." And then we were dragging along the curb. The cab stopped ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... up rather suddenly, bowed and went. With narrowing eyes she watched him walk away, but when he had gone all melancholy disappeared from her face; she stretched herself and laughed. "Voila! Sonia ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... "This narrowing down," wrote Irish Freedom (the organ of Mr P. H. Pearse and his friends), "of Nationalism to the members of one creed is the most fatal thing that has taken place in Irish politics since the days of the Pope's Brass Band," and the Ancient Order was further referred to as "a job-getting ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... articles of supply and consumption will certainly enable the interchange of goods between Chile and America to increase without narrowing the horizons of our commerce with friendly markets, which today bring us capital, raw materials, ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... couldn't ye wait until the yams, were in the copper, bad luck to ye—and them all scraped too! I do believe, if they even had been taties, it would have been all the same to you." We stood on, the channel narrowing still more the rocks rising to a height of at least five hundred feet from the water's edge, as sharply and precipitously as if they had only yesterday been split asunder; the splintered projections and pinnacles on one side, having each their corresponding fissures and indentations ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... With speed of thought, a shattering blow! and first One Grecian bark plunged straight, and sheared away Bowsprit and stem of a Phoenician ship. And then each galley on some other's prow Came crashing in. Awhile our stream of ships Held onward, till within the narrowing creek Our jostling vessels were together driven, And none could aid another: each on each Drave hard their brazen beaks, or brake away The oar-banks of each other, stem to stern, While the Greek galleys, with ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... income remains highly unequal, with perhaps 75% of the population below the poverty line. Ongoing challenges include increasing government revenues, negotiating further assistance from international donors, upgrading both government and private financial operations, curtailing drug trafficking, and narrowing ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... circle kept drawing nearer and nearer, narrowing the space between life and death at every moment; yet no groan escaped the lips of Hamilton; and he evinced the steady and unflinching heroism of a martyr. At a sign from Durant, the Indians prepared themselves ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... blood-red splashes. Pollard willows indicated the edge of one field, gaunt poplars marked the boundary of another, alike leafless and unbeautiful, standing darkly out against the dim grey sky. Night was hastening towards the travellers, narrowing and blotting out that level landscape, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... you see him look up at the mountains, about him at the trees? Do you see him lay his head upon the earth? Do you still see his smile, the smile which is weary and yet not afraid? Do you hear him sigh? And what is this he whispers, here at the end of the long and narrowing way—'I know not if this be the end or the beginning!' Ah, what does this man mean who whispers ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... covered with a dense growth of water-loving trees such as the cypress and black gum. The center of the swamp is occupied by Lake Drummond, a shallow lake seven miles in diameter, with banks of pure-peat, and still narrowing from the encroachment of vegetation along ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... originating in the rocky walls of limestone around. Sometimes, after proceeding a considerable distance, they suddenly open out into spacious vaults fifteen feet in width, the site probably of some valuable "pocket" or "churn" of ore; and then again, where the supply was less abundant, narrowing into a width hardly sufficient to admit the human body. Occasionally the passage divides and unites again, or abruptly stops, turning off at a sharp angle, or changing its level, where rude steps cut in the rock show the mode by ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... come to see that this kind of effort leads often to nervous breakdown and early death; always to a certain narrowing of sympathy and hardening of method even in the career itself. So we conscientiously "take up" a hobby or a sport and set aside some hour or day for indulgence in it. We make it a duty to lay aside for the time ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... he had crossed had evidently its source in the more densely wooded hills beyond and he followed it on its narrowing way up toward the locality where the fighting seemed now to be going on. Once a group of khaki-clad figures passed stealthily among the trees, intent upon some quest. The sight of their rifles reminded Tom that he was himself in danger, but he reflected that he was in no greater danger than ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... next mine had an ear like a sea-shell, a skin of satin. Her youth was bound, strong shoulders already stooped, chest fast narrowing. At 7 A.M. she came: albeit fresh, pale still and wan; rest of the night too short a preparation for the day's work. By three in the afternoon she was flushed, by five crimson. She threw her hands up over her head and exclaimed: "My back's broke, and I've ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... her eyes, she sent a long, limpid glance at Quarrier like a pale shaft of light; and under his heavy-fringed lashes, at moments, his level gaze encountered her's with a slow narrowing of lids—as though there was more than one game in progress, more than one stake being played for under the dull rose glow ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... and spoke except Hence Sturgill on the wagon-tongue, who stopped whittling, and merely looked at the big man with narrowing eyes. ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... to it, sounded it, and found it solid. Moreover, it seemed to lead all the way round, broadening and narrowing as it went, but wide enough in every part. I was sure-footed and unafraid, so at once I determined to essay the passage. 'I am going to try it!' I called to John, who was clinging to the cliff some yards behind and above me. 'Don't follow ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... the big meadow. He passed again and again amid whirring blades and sweet odours of grass, encompassing with narrowing circles the sacred centre of the field. Tom was ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... urethra is obstructed or closed by pure coagulated blood. Perhaps there may have been a wound of the bladder, although no external haemorrhage has appeared, but the blood coagulating gradually in the bladder has occasioned an obstruction or narrowing of the urinary passage. Or possibly the blood from a renal haemorrhage has descended into the bladder and obstructs the urethra. Hence I say that the sound is useful in these cases where the urethra is obstructed by blood or gross humors. Examination should also ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... between the section of the table where Kori sat, and the angular buffet-end. Kori could not possibly see anything but the shining mahogany, thought Thorn. And yet the man's eyes were narrowing to ominous slits as he ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst
... and beauty, and over against them pain and sorrow and evil. Evil must appear as soon as there is {178} process of separation, differentiation, variety, specialization and particularity.[20] Darkness appears as soon as there is a contraction or narrowing into ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... changed, and with that change the laird of Stanesland's curious movements became very explicable, for her face was singularly charming when she smiled. It was a rather pale but fresh and clear-skinned face, wide at the forehead and narrowing to a firm little chin, with long-lashed expressive eyes, and a serious expression in repose. Her smile was candid, a little coy and irresistibly engaging, and her voice was very pleasant, rather low, and most engaging too. She was of middle height and ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... only the island. But the princess, as she lies facing backward, sees the danger. In despairing, motionless silence, she looks at the sinking sun, with no color in her cheeks but that which he casts upon her. The red, warning sun looks awfully back, face to face with her, in the narrowing strip of blue sky between two horizontal bars of thundering clouds, which the lightning is beginning to chain together, that the night may come before its time, and the enchanted princes and their sister may drown ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... words was lost in the drunkenness of his rage. With a dismal roar he flung the mallet away, and it rolled on the ground in narrowing circles. "My hands, my hands," he thought. He would strangle Philip, and then he would kill everybody in his way, merely for the lust of killing. Why not? The fatal line was past. Nothing sacred remained. ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... territories formerly belonging to Russia, Rumania, and Turkey; the surrender of thousands of guns, locomotives, aeroplanes, of all submarines fit for sea, and of the better part of the German Navy. The Germans had no choice: their armies were in flight along roads choked with transport towards an ever narrowing exit, and they could only escape if given time, which they could only obtain by surrender. They yielded to avoid a Sedan which would have destroyed their armies as a fighting force. But they gained one at least of the objects for which they had fought. The Fatherland was saved from the abomination ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... him. Was it a dream? Was it all one of those hideous nightmares of endless pillars beyond pillars, stairs above stairs, rooms within rooms, changing, shifting, lengthening out for ever and for ever before the dreamer, narrowing, closing in on him, choking him? Was it a dream? Was he doomed to wander for ever and for ever in some palace of the dead, to expiate the sin which he had learnt and done therein? His brain, for the first time in his life, began to reel. He could recollect ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... admitted into and drained from the lock by culverts cast in the base. These are 8 by 10 feet, narrowing at the opening to 8 by 8 feet, and closed by 8 sluice gates, each operated by a 52-horsepower electric motor. It will be possible to fill or empty the lock ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... ground, I kept him on my lap for a time. Here he remained subdued and apparently uninterested. Later, becoming inured to the engine's drone and the slight vibration, he roused himself and wanted to explore the narrowing passage toward the tail-end of the fuselage. The little chap was, however, distinctly pleased to be on land again at Saint Gregoire, where he kept well away from the machine, as if uncertain whether the strange giant of an animal were ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... capelin swim inshore to feed, and they themselves are preyed on by leaping acres of voracious cod, whose own rear ranks are being preyed on by hungry seals, sharks, herring-hogs, or dogfish, then indeed the troubled surface of a narrowing bay is literally thick with the silvery flash of capelin, the dark tumultuous backs of cod, and the swirling rushes of the greater beasts of prey behind. Nor were certain other fish stories, told by Sebastian and his ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... and specific character of the mind engaged upon them. I once heard a very profound mathematician remonstrate against the impropriety of Wordsworth's receiving a pension from government, on the ground that he was "only a poet." If the study of mathematics had always this narrowing effect upon the sympathies, the science itself would need to be deprived of the rank usually assigned to it; and there could be no doubt that, in the effect it had on the mind of this man, and of such others, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... that must be pressed. "Now—the bill; for you, ne[e]san, what is left over. Honoured Shukke Sama, a gentle pace for the time being. The belly full, one loiters to let it do its work. From here to Yumoto is a ri (2-1/2 miles), of most gentle rise. And what a pretty scene; the valley narrowing to its clinging hills hiding the strange and beautiful scenes beyond, yet which cause a little fear even to the stoutest hearts. This river seems alive, twisting, and turning, and pouring in multitudinous ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville |
