"Shifting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eliminated. Underscored words are printed in italics. The line breaks in the manuscript are indicated by shilling marks (/). In the manuscript many of the "Theca" numbers have been written over older numbers (indicating, no doubt, ashifting of the books to different shelves). Most of the older numbers are illegible, and only the newer, more legible numbers are printed. The occasional use of brackets in the manuscript (as in Numbers 120, 121, 157, 166, 167, and 238) makes impractical the editorial expansion in brackets ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... gondola through the soft, imprisoned wave; the silence of wheel and hoof, of all that hurries and clatters; the tide that comes and goes, noiseless, indispensable, bringing in the freshness of the sea, carrying away the defilements of the land; the narrow winding ways, now firm earth, now shifting sea, that bind the city into one social whole, where the industrial and the noble alike are housed in palaces, equal often in beauty as in decay; the marvellous quiet of the nights, save when the northeast wind, Hadria's stormy leader, ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Stephenson shifting-link pattern (see fig. 27), a simple and dependable motion used extensively in this country between about 1850 and 1900. The author believes that this is the original valve gear of the Pioneer, since the first mention (1854) in the Annual Report of the Cumberland ...
— The 'Pioneer': Light Passenger Locomotive of 1851 • John H. White
... burial vaults. The natives vigorously protested against an attempt to excavate any of these, claiming that their ancestors or members of their families are buried in them and must not be disturbed. In the dunes human skeletons are frequently exposed by the shifting of the sands by the high wind. The natives seem to have little regard for these. Perhaps they are of the "common people," while cairns cover the chiefs or priests. There is a tradition that in "the ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... confounded with Thomas Baltzar, a violinist of Lubec, who, in 1656 introduced the practice of shifting in London, where he wholly eclipsed David Mell, a much admired clockmaker fiddler, although the latter, as a contemporary stoutly averred, "played sweeter, was a well-bred gentleman, and was not given to excessive drinking as Baltzar was." His marvelous ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... bewitching commingled. We sat down to study and enjoy this singular spectacle. The tints remained during several minutes—fitting, changing, melting into each other; paling almost away for a moment, then reflushing—a shifting, restless, unstable succession of soft opaline gleams, shimmering over that air film of white cloud, and turning it into a fabric dainty enough to clothe ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Leichhardt were perhaps little capable of shifting for themselves in case of any accident to their leader. The second in command, a brother-in-law of Leichhardt, came from Germany to join him before starting, and he told me, when I asked him what his qualifications ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... would have seemed very far from insane, had it not been for his large black eyes, shifting and glittering in the bright ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... was not through the brain alone of the child the panorama flitted, but through his mind and heart as well, and there, like a glacier it scored its passage. Or rather, it left its ghosts behind it, ever shifting forms and shadows, each atmosphered in its own ethereal mood. Hardly thoughts were they, but strange other consciousnesses of life and being. Hills and woods and valleys and plains and rivers and seas, entering by the gates of sight into the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... lost my wits and was pickin' a row to no advantage. I'll admit the gent riled me some, but the point I had in view was what old Judge Hinky used to call "shifting the issue." I wanted to make one stab at just one man—not the whole party—on grounds that the rest of the crowd, who was plainly all good two-handed punchers, would see was perfectly fair. And I intended to land that stab so's they'd see I was no trifler. ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... court may be the surroundings are substantially the same. The scene is laid and the carpenters have left. The spectators have found their places. The stage is empty however, there is a sudden bustle and shifting of feet, a rumor has gone abroad that something is about to happen. The court attendants take their places. One of them straightens up and with a commanding voice cries out: "Gentlemen, please rise. Hear ye, hear ye, all persons having business ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... bleat from Pillbot. Above them was a sudden furious play of lights and shades. Vast masses seemed shifting in crazy juxtapositions, now descending rapidly ...
— The 4-D Doodler • Graph Waldeyer
... on the step of the porch one May night when the moon was making shifting shadows through the trees and silvering the paths. Chilian was studying the face, and wondering a little what was flitting through the brain that now and then gave ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... picture, for instance, an appeal to the higher faculties which is more useful than usefulness. This I do not see in bric-a-brac, certainly not if the objects are to be so crowded in a small room that no one can see anything more than prettiness in them. Instead of my beautiful vases with their shifting lights, which do, after all, give me real pleasure sometimes when I am not too anxious lest I should break them, cut glass tumblers would have given me the same aesthetic enjoyment renewed at every meal. I might break a tumbler to be sure, ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... and panic of this eminent cleric was as nothing compared with that of Fenn, when, shifting to his brother's seat, he got the first clear view he had had of the audience. In a box to the left of the dress-circle sat, "laughing all ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... its net-work of bands, she gazed upon it with an air of profound meditation, and put together whatever she had been able to pick up of natural history on the roofs, the yard, and the garden. Her thoughts were reflected in her shifting glance, and I was able to read in it the result of her examination: ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... at hand were the American Falls, with the sun shining on them and a cloud of pure white mist rising in an ever-shifting veil from the gorge into which plunged and roared the mighty volume of water. Then came Goat Island, with Horseshoe Falls beyond, shooting forth great boiling fountains of white spray and sending heavenward billow after billow of mist. Beneath ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... no loitering of the shadows. The gloomy isles have changed from black to purple and from purple to blue, and as the imperious sun flashes on the mainland a smudge of brown, blurred and shifting, in the far distance—the only evidence of the existence of human schemes and agitations—the only stain on the celestial purity of the morning—betokens the belated steamer for the coming of which the joy-giving watches of the tropic ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... Cham; But though I think that even a Naturalist may without disparagement believe all the Miracles attested by the Holy Scriptures, yet in this case to flye to a Supernatural Cause, will, I fear, look like Shifting off the Difficulty, instead of Resolving it; for we enquire not the First and Universal, but the Proper, Immediate, and Physical Cause of the Jetty Colour of Negroes; And not only we do not find expressed in the Scripture, that the Curse meant ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... from another part of Wigfall's reply, that the speeches of Union Senators had been so effective that a necessity was felt on the part of the Southern Conspirators to still further attempt to justify Secession by shifting the blame to Northern shoulders, for, while referring to the Presidential canvass of 1860—and the attitude of the Southern Secession leaders during that exciting period—he said: "We (Breckinridge-Democrats) gave notice, both North and South, that if Abraham Lincoln was elected, this Union was ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... sequences of the evolutionary process, as if from without, we can get an adequate idea of the forces that really are at work, exactly the delusion by which the skillful juggler tries to deceive his audience when he directs their attention to the shifting objects that he manipulates, and away from ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... their origin, and for the better reason of their unfitness to fill satisfactorily even the meanest situations in a well-ordered English household. Their resource is to take service with people only a step or two above the poorest class, with whom they fare scantily, endure harsh treatment, lead shifting and precarious lives, and finally drop into the slough of evil, through which, in their best estate, they do but pick their slimy way ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... three thicknesses, in which the pin is pushed as far as it will go. In the case of large-bodied moths, or any valuable insects, it is as well to support the abdomen with a layer of wool, cross-pinning the body on either side to prevent it jarring or shifting. The box may then, for greater security, be wrapped in a sheet of wool and tied up. The address should not be written on the box, or the stamps affixed thereto, but on a direction label, otherwise some vigorous post-office ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... dialogues cannot be determined with any degree of certainty. The Theaetetus, like the Parmenides, has points of similarity both with his earlier and his later writings. The perfection of style, the humour, the dramatic interest, the complexity of structure, the fertility of illustration, the shifting of the points of view, are characteristic of his best period of authorship. The vain search, the negative conclusion, the figure of the midwives, the constant profession of ignorance on the part of Socrates, also bear the stamp of the early dialogues, ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... front of the house, with its quaint leaden figures of Diana pursuing a hound-pressed stag, successive squires and lords of Torywood had walked to and fro with their friends, watching the thunderclouds on the political horizon or the shifting shadows on the sundial of political favour, tapping the political barometer for indications of change, working out a party campaign or arranging for the support of some national movement. To and fro they had gone in their ...
— When William Came • Saki
... between the trenches was fairly thickly scattered over with dead, the majority of them German, and it was easy enough for an extra score or so of men, lying prone and motionless as the dead themselves, to be overlooked in the shifting light. The work was proceeding satisfactorily and was almost completed when a mischance led to the ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... of plants dry with facility between the leaves of books, or other paper, the smoother the better. If there be plenty of paper, they often dry best without shifting; but if the specimens are crowded, they must be taken out frequently, and the paper dried before they are replaced. The great point to be attended to is, that the process should meet with no check. Several vegetables are ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... This throng, shifting like the fragments of colored glass in the kaleidoscope, had its far-away interest to the contemplative Joseph. To them he was of little interest, or none. Of the many passers, scarcely an occasional one greeted him, and such only with an extremely polite ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... the bridge as long as I could bear the heat, to look at the strange desert view, which could be seen to great advantage in going through at the top of high water. Sand, sand everywhere; here a train of camels, there a few Arab tents, now a whole party shifting their place of abode; a group of women washing, or a drove of buffaloes in a small tributary stream. After going about eight miles we stopped at a gare (as the stopping-places are called) to allow three vessels ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... the maternal fount. One little precocious even went so far as to attempt to set his wee fore paddies against Rose Mary's knee and to stiffen a tiny plume of a tail, with a plain instinct to point the direction of the shifting base of supplies. Rose Mary gave a cry of delight and hugged the whole talented family to her breast, while Stonie and Tobe yelled and danced as Uncle Tucker turned with evident emotion to Everett to claim ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... rehearsing at "rehearsal:" the "times," the scenic effects are settled with the conductor of the band; there are no bare arms or bloomers practising on their carpets: a few dark groups, in ordinary walking dress; others, in their shirt sleeves, are opening boxes, and no mystery, no shifting lights: the stage and the house one wan hole, except the red and gold note of the curtain and the black mass of the musicians, ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... in one of the narrow arm chairs of the old- fashioned parlor suite. Her long, rather shapely hands traced the lines and cross-bars in her plaid skirt, and the sudden shifting of her gaze, from one speaker to the other, betrayed the nervousness she was ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... no waiting for better things, but an animal joy in all that comes. It could never be the face of an artist; it is the face of a viveur—kindly, pleased and pleasing, protected from excess and upheld in contentment by the shifting versatility of his desires. For a single desire is more rightly to be called a lust; but there is health in a variety, where one may ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... situation was profoundly changed. If Danton and the popular insurrectional force were for the moment defeated, Robespierre and intellectual democracy were making rapid headway; the centre of gravity of revolutionary opinion was shifting in his direction. Just before the crisis the Jacobins had been invaded by a Palais Royal mob who had hooted down the constitutionalist speakers, and imposed their opinion on the club. This led to disruption. The moderate Jacobins left, ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... one now another of the hideous burrowing phantasms. I could trace no order and little relation in the mingling and crossing currents and eddies. If I seemed to catch the shape and rhythm of a dance, it was but to see it break, and confusion prevail. With the shifting colours of the seemingly more solid shapes, mingled a multitude of shadows, independent apparently of originals, each moving after its own free shadow-will. I looked everywhere for the princess, but throughout the wildly ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... thick mist of windless marshes, masked the Kentish coast. The Medway at flood-tide from Sheerness to Gillingham Reach was one maze of creeks and bends and inlets and tiny bays. Nothing was visible an oar's length overside but shifting cloudy shapes that bulked obscurely in the fog. But although this was Francis Drake's first voyage as master of his own ship, he knew these waters as he knew the palm of his hand. His old captain, dying a bachelor, had left him the weather-beaten cargo-ship as reward for his ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... tribute of the soil. The sun was reflected from this wall down on the depot building and the wharf floor beyond. Across the water came the strumming of a banjo, and the low note of singing also arose from the rooms where workmen shuffled about with truck and hook, shifting the cotton bales. An inspector, almost the only white man at the wharf, moved slowly from bale to bale, ripping the covers with his knife and probing with his cotton auger into the middle of each bale to test its ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... D'Avuli, a man of quality, and of great worth and learning, highly esteemed among the Calvinists, and at Geneva, being converted by him, induced him to go thither, to have a conference with the famous minister La Faye. The minister, during the whole conference, was ever shifting the matter in debate, as he found himself embarrassed and pressed by his antagonist. His disadvantage being so evident that be himself could read it in the countenance of every one present, he broke off the conference by throwing out a whole torrent of injurious language on Francis, who ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... that spread'st thy branches to the air, And firmly in the earth dost fix thy roots; No shifting of the land, no mighty elements, Which Heaven from the stormy north unlocks; Nor whatso'er the gruesome winter sends, Can tear thee from the spot where thou art chained. Thou art the veritable portrait of my faith, Which, fixed, remains 'gainst every casual chance. Ever the self-same ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... tried to penetrate the secrets which the gray and shifting veil still hid from his view. Beside him lay the Italian knife, its steely surface shimmering in the vaporous light, there where a dull and ruddy stain had not dimmed its brilliant polish. The murderer gazed at his tool and shuddered feebly. But he picked up the knife and mechanically wiped ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... cent of the country's exports. But in the complexity of these trade developments townsmen have been cut off more and more from personal contact with the country, and in this way have lost their sense of its importance. My point is that the shifting of the trade relationship of town and country from its former local to its present national and international basis in reality increases their interdependence. And I hold most strongly that until in this matter the obligations of a common citizenship ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... as they were in everything else. Palus fought better with his left hand attacking and his right defending, Murmex better the other way, but each was genuinely ambidextrous and used either hand at will, shifting at pleasure. When, amid the flash of their staffs, either scored, the hit brought a roar of delight from the upper tiers, even from the front rows, for the most dignified senators caught the infection of the general enthusiasm and so far forgot themselves as to yell like street urchins ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... the boatswain. "I only wish she had the wind freer. It will be no easy matter for that big ship, rigged as she is, to beat up this harbour, and when she is inside it is hard to say where she can bring up; for, with the wind shifting and veering about, there is no safe anchorage that ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... among the Greeks a peculiar national signification, publicity being, according to their republican notions, essential to the completeness of every important transaction.' Thus the Chorus represented idealised public opinion: not of course, the shifting, hasty public opinion of the moment—to that it was a conservative check, and it calmed to soberness and charity—for it was the matured public opinion of centuries; the experience, and usually the sad experience, of many generations; the very ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... lights and shadows shifting, The sungleams gold-dust sifting Down thro' the latticed leaves; Gray brooks the meadows lacing, Young flow'rs the uplands gracing, Her faery 'broidery tracing The skillful ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... a nice cabin," said Miss Jewell, shifting an inch and a half nearer to the skipper. "I suppose poor Bert has to have his meals in that stuffy little place at the other end of the ship, ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... the ceiling and started down with it, I realized presently that it was not going in the direction of the floor. At least not directly. It was slanting off at a bias to the southeast, leaving a long, lean, wedge-shaped gap between it and the last strip. I pulled it off and started again, shifting the angle. But I overdid the thing. This time it went biasing off in the other direction and left an untidy smudge of paste on Westbury's nice, clean strip. I reflected that this would probably dry out—if not, I would hang a picture over it. Then I gave the strip I was hanging a little ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... large onions, pill and boil them in milk and water whilst tender, (shifting them two or three times in the boiling) beat 'em in a marble mortar to a pulp, and rub them thro' a hair-sieve, and put them into a little sweet gravy; then fry a few slices of veal, and two or three slices of lean bacon; beat them in a marble mortar as small as forc'd-meat; ...
— English Housewifery Exemplified - In above Four Hundred and Fifty Receipts Giving Directions - for most Parts of Cookery • Elizabeth Moxon
... shifting the reins and laying a hand on my shoulder, "you're quite a man! Your mother ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... the parent rock, crushed, rolled smooth, and left stranded in strange places. Thus was Edward Bumpus severed and rolled from the ancestral ledge, from the firm granite of seemingly stable and lasting things, into shifting shale; surrounded by fragments of cliffs from distant lands he had never seen. Thus, at five and fifty, he found himself gate-keeper of the leviathan Chippering Mill in the city ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... appear shifted from their true places by an amount depending upon the ratio which the velocity of light bears to the speed of the earth in its orbit. Because light travels with enormous rapidity, the shifting is very slight; and each star returns to its original position at the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... necessary for the preservation of a revolving solid. The creator, therefore, of a revolving solid, would make it an oblate spheroid, that figure alone admitting a perfect equilibrium. He would make it in that form, for another reason; that is, to prevent a shifting of the axis of rotation. Had he created the earth perfectly spherical, its axis might have been perpetually shifting, by the influence of the other bodies of the system; and by placing the inhabitants of the earth successively ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... or four years; but these people do not want their houses to stand for many years, because they are not like the Baganda who chose a country and stay there always. The Congo tribes move their villages after a few years and live somewhere else. So villages are always shifting, and nothing they make is wanted to last long. Some weave mats and baskets out of palm-leaves or reeds; others make pottery; others make iron-headed spears and hoes for their fields, but only a few things that ...
— People of Africa • Edith A. How
... where the dependent female adds to her neutral race-beauty the shifting attributes of sex-attraction, she has gained to a high degree in the field man most admires, and lost in the normal beauty ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... most dangerous—she pulled the trigger far too early—and Undine the most selfish of the three. The three are disagreeable, but the trio is transitional in type. Each girl is a compromiser, Undine being the boldest; she did a lot of shifting and indulged in much cowardly evasion. Vulgarians all, they are yet too complex to be pinned down by a formula. Old wine in these three new bottles makes for disaster. Undine Spragg is the worst failure of the three. She got what she ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... so, between seven and eight o'clock on that morning, the whole of the larboard guns were run out as far as they could be, and of course the larboard lower deck ports were open; the starboard guns were also run in amidships, and secured by the tackles; the shifting over of this great weight of metal brought the larboard lower deck port-cills just level with the water; the men were then able to get at the mouth of the pipe to the water-cock on the starboard side, as it ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... moonlight, found himself in a waste yard, scattered over with bits of iron, mostly old and rusty. It was not an interesting place, for it was not likely to afford him anything to eat. Yet, with the instinct of the human animal, he went shifting and prying and nosing about everywhere. Presently he heard a curious sound, which he recognized as made by a hen. More stealthily yet he went creeping hither and thither, feeling here and feeling there, in ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... mountains of shifting deserts; that is to say the formation of waves of sand borne by the wind, and of its mountains and hills, such as occur in Libya. Examples may be seen on the wide sands of the Po and the Ticino, and other ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... pole inclined towards the orbit facing the rim of the table, the light would still cut the poles, the days and nights would still be equal, and there would be no changes in the seasons, though there would be a rival revolution of the globe, by causing it to turn once a year, shifting the poles end for end. The inclination being to the surface of the table, or to the plane of the orbit, the phenomena that are known to exist are a consequence. Thus it is, that the change in the seasons is ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... requires some care and discretion. Otherwise the angles might inflict on the unwary Feeler irreparable injury. It is essential for the safety of the Feeler that the Felt should stand perfectly still. A start, a fidgety shifting of the position, yes, even a violent sneeze, has been known before now to prove fatal to the incautious, and to nip in the bud many a promising friendship. Especially is this true among the lower classes of the Triangles. With ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... necessitated by them. The changed conditions to which we refer are such as we know have occurred throughout all geological time and in every part of the world. Land and water have been continually shifting their positions; some regions are undergoing subsidence with diminution of area, others elevation with extension of area; dry land has been converted into marshes, while marshes have been drained or have even been elevated ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... silence a moment and glared at the scene, at the excited faces, the gleaming eyes, the shifting glance of ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... idea a term may get its meaning slightly changed. In that slight change of meaning lurks the error illustrated here, ready to lead to false reasoning and weakening of the argument. Certain words of common use are likely to such shifting meanings—republic, equality, representative, monarchy, socialistic. Any doubtful passage in which such an error is suspected should be reduced to its syllogistic form to be ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... s'pose, an' me own affairs. What's it to you, anyhow?" But Donnelly was shifting rather unsteadily on those same legs and twisting ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... day they proceeded on their way to San Francisco, and matters drifted on at Barker's much as before. Johnson had, after an absence of some months, come back and lived without molestation, amid the shifting population. Now and then, too, some of the older residents fancied they recognized, under slouched sombreros, the faces of some of his former "crowd" about the "Ranchman's Home," as his ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... from the tenements pierced the dusk high and low. The night shone with recent rain, and in a shifting haze of grey and rose the dancers sank and glided, until the public-house lamp was turned on and a cornet joined the organ. In the warm yellow light, the revels broke bounds, and, to the hysterical appeal of "Hiawatha," the Point became a Babel.... ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... dry farmer on a small scale, and farming is a laborious business in the shifting sands of Hopiland. Their corn is their literal bread of life and they usually keep one year's crop stored. These people have known utter famine and even starvation in the long ago, and their traditions have made them wise. The man tends the fields and flocks, makes ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... foreground there were other moods whose shifting was out of his control. In his exalt moods, which came upon Him like a breeze from Paradise, the background was bright with hope and drama—He saw Himself and His companions as Peter and the Apostles must have regarded themselves, ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... a grave that has not its little inclosure planted with shrubbery; and a thick mass of foliage half conceals each funeral stone. The sighing of the wind, as the branches rise and fall upon it,—the occasional note of a bird among the trees, and the shifting of light and shade upon the tombs beneath, have a soothing effect upon the mind; and I doubt whether any one can enter that inclosure, where repose the dust and ashes of so many great and good men, without feeling the religion ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... driven off. On the 26th the "Caroline" tried to get up stream to Jackson's camp, but could not against a strong head wind; and on the 27th the British were able to burn her with hot shot. The "Louisiana" succeeded in shifting her place, and thenceforth lay on the west bank of the stream, abreast of and flanking the entrenchments behind which Jackson ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... slipped from the bed, and, crossing to the window, peered out into the close that was faintly illumined by a moon in its first quarter. A shadow moved, he thought. He watched with increasing panic for confirmation, and presently saw that he had been right. Not one, but several shadows were shifting there among the trees. Shadows of men, they were, and as he peered, he saw one that went running from the house across the lawn and joined the others, now clustered together in a group. What could be their purpose ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... conditions of warfare a century of science had brought about, the non-military section of the population could do no serious damage in any form to their enemies, and that there was no reason, therefore, why they should not do as they did. The balance of military efficiency was shifting back from the many to the few, from the ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... of all on board, and not without reason, for the steamer was gradually shifting her position; and hardly had a boat been lowered, and a hawser made fast to one of the big trees ashore, before she lifted more and more; and in a few moments more, to the delight of all, they felt the branches sweeping the rigging, and the ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... a man moved. On the contrary, a little murmur of something like reproach ran around the semicircle. The ship's company looked in each other's eyes; they stood shifting their feet uneasily. ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... for hundreds of miles, is covered with a loose, shifting, blinding, white sand, and is entirely destitute ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... ladyship that this damsel's ailment comes entirely of idleness, and the cure for it is honest and constant employment. She herself has told me that lace is worn in hell; and as she must know how to make it, let it never be out of her hands; for when she is occupied in shifting the bobbins to and fro, the image or images of what she loves will not shift to and fro in her thoughts; this is the truth, this is my opinion, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the attention of the mind of man. It is a very long trail, rough and unblazed, wandering over the continents of the earth. Those who have travelled it came in contact with the mysteries of an unknown world. They faced the terrors of the shifting forms of the earth, of volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, storms, and ice fields. They witnessed the extinction of forests and animal groups, and the changing forms of lakes, rivers, and mountains, and, indeed, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the latitude of 24 degrees and nine minutes we met with a great hollow sea, the like whereof I neuer saw on this coast, and this day there came to the ships side a monstrous great fish (I thinke it was a Gobarto) which put vp his head to the steepe tubs where the cooke was in shifting the victuals, whom I thought the fish would ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... contradiction of the text. Whom are you to believe, the author or the artist? the man who tells you that the heroine is ethereal, or the man who plainly demonstrates that she is podgy? How often, too, do the people dress differently in the words and in the picture, not to speak of the shifting backgrounds! Dickens had so much difficulty with his illustrations because he saw his characters so much more clearly than any other novelist; the sight of his inner eye was so good. And one can understand, too, how Cruikshank came to fancy he had created Oliver Twist, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... born," says Hogarth, in his Memoirs of himself, "in the city of London, November 10, 1697. My father's pen, like that of many authors, did not enable him to do more than put me in a way of shifting for myself. As I had naturally a good eye and a fondness for drawing, shows of all sorts gave me uncommon pleasure when an infant; and mimicry, common to all children, was remarkable in me. An early access to a neighboring painter drew my attention from play, and I was, at ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... to further and further explanation. To this further explanation Philosophy gave notable assistance. To 'elaborate our concepts' has been said to be the whole business of Philosophy, that is, to arrest the vague and shifting meanings that float before our minds loosely attached to the words of ordinary careless speech, to fix their outlines, distinguishing, defining, ordering and organizing until each mass of meaning is improved and refined into a thought worthy to ...
— Progress and History • Various
... woodsia ferns, mealy-bell-wort, true and false Solomon's Seal, ground ginger, greenbrier, smilax and flaming cardinal flowers which were lit up with flying gleams of sunshine, forming great masses of tremulous shifting mosaic of rarer and older designs than any that Persia or India yet know. This Ohio of ours is indeed a fair land; and this morning, of all mornings of our lives, we seemed to hear "the ever-lasting poetry ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... meager "development" over the centuries of its service to civilized men. Most past attempts to alter it significantly for man's use have either failed or have not led to lasting results, though their changing purposes over the years summarize, to a degree, America's shifting attitudes toward the utility of flowing water. Early projects under George Washington and others to assure the navigability of the main river above the Fall Line, which they saw as an artery for ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... the black muzzle that looked him squarely in the eye was too much for Caleb's nerves. Beseeching the sentry, in whining tones, to turn that weapon t'other way, he shinned up the pickets, Dixon and Billings shifting their hold from his arms to his legs and feet as he ascended, and in two minutes more he stood within the ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... has joined between you. Live the lot you have chosen as bravely as you can, remembering that the thorn that you have developed will never change into a rose by mere change of circumstances. Divorce and the mere shifting of the stage setting will never make your tragedy over into a vaudeville or a ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... suppose that observations have been made by which it can be inferred that there is in nature such a thing as change among organized beings actually taking place. There is no such thing on record. It is shifting the ground from one field of observation to another to make this statement, and when the assertions go so far as to exclude from the domain of science those who will not be dragged into this mire of mere assertion, then it is time ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... dense mass of green foliage seemed to wither and consume away within the tick of a clock. Through the glass I caught a glimpse of a dark figure that rolled down to the water's edge, clutching feebly at the shifting shingle. Perhaps a log, ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... appreciation, which literature of the higher order requires. There is nothing to encourage them to concentrate. The newspaper, the popular magazine, the theatre, the moving-picture show, and the whole shifting, rapid panorama of modern life discourage concentration. There are readers who can only give the odds and ends of their time to reading. Most of them are devoting the best efforts of their brain and attention to their business, household ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... much," concluded Mangles, dexterously shifting his cigar by a movement of the tongue from the port to the starboard side of his mouth. Cartoner did not seem to be very much interested in Miss Netty Cahere. He was a man having that air of detachment from ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... time and the general acceptance of competent judges; and this cannot often be reasonably expected for theories which can appeal for support or confirmation to no positive evidence, but at best to a cloudy and shifting probability. What personal or political allusions may lurk under the text of Shakespeare we can never know, and should consequently forbear to hang upon a hypothesis of this floating and nebulous kind ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the moment at which he would ship the belt of his colloquial machinery on to the tight pulley. It was done so easily and naturally that there was hardly a sign of it. Master Gridley could usually detect the shifting action, but the young man's features and ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... earlier centuries it was quite usual in the best society for the young man to invite the girl to a dance by a kiss, and in some times it was the polite thing for the gentleman after the dance to sit in the lap of the girl. The shifting of opinion comes to most striking expression, if we compare our present day acquiescence to the waltz with the moral indignation of our great-grandmothers. No accusers of the tango to-day can find more heated words against this Argentine importation than the conservatives of a hundred ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... horses moved down Main Street. At the bank Crittenton Madeira was standing at the plate-glass window. He had his thumbs in his trousers pockets, and he was rocking to and fro, shifting his weight from his heels to the balls of his feet peculiarly, as though seeking for balance. His eyes were moodily thoughtful, and he kept snapping at his lower lip with his ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... Macpherson had not yet decided to ascribe the poems to a single poet; Ossian is one of the principal poets in the collection but the whole is merely ascribed "to the bards" (see pp. v-vi). It is also evident from the Preface that Macpherson was shifting from the reluctant "translator" of a few "fragments" to the projector of a full-length epic "if enough encouragement were given ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... no means came up to my expectations. I had conceived a very different idea of the grandeur and wealth of this town. At first sight it appeared nothing more than a mass of badly-built houses, whilst on every side stretched vast plains of arid, yellowish, shifting sands. The sky was of a dull red colour on the horizon; all nature seemed melancholy; profound silence prevailed, not so much as the song of a bird was heard. And yet there was something indescribably imposing in the sight of a large town rising up in the midst of the sandy desert, and the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... penetrating, and exquisitely finished Sainte-Beuve, the prince of modern critics and literary artists. It was this skill in vivid delineation that gave such point and piquancy to the memoirs of the period, which are little more than a series of brilliant and vigorous sketches of people outlined upon a shifting background of events. In this rapid characterization the French have no rivals. It is the charm of their fiction as well as of their memoirs. Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Daudet, are the natural successors of La Bruyere ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... Shifting fashions of shape replaced aristocracy of texture: dressmakers, shoemakers, hatmakers, and tailors, increasing in cunning and in power, found means to make new clothes old. The long contagion of ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... men—my own being limited to a small box of sardines, some twenty or thirty boxes still remaining in my supply of provisions—we resumed our journey down the troublesome rapid. We had to do that with ropes, Alcides, with his extraordinary way of thinking, actually going to the trouble of shifting a big rock out of the water, which took him the best part of an hour, rather than let the canoe go round it—in absolutely placid waters in that particular spot. I let him do it rather than have a quarrel, as I firmly believed that ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... began to close behind the brig, hence it was necessary to cut through the ice; both prudence and duty commanded them to go forward. The difficulties were enhanced by the impossibility of Shandon's fixing the direction of the brig among all the changing points, which were continually shifting and presenting no definite point to be ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... have resulted in a sharp contraction of the economy since 1991, with the steepest annual decline occurring in 1994. The government has pursued a moderate program of economic reform and privatization, resulting in a gradual lifting of state controls over economic activity and a shifting of assets into the private sector. Nevertheless, government control over key sectors of the economy remains strong. Moreover, continued lack of pipeline transportation for expanded oil exports has closed off a ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... lay on the lip of Nature, even the broad leaves of the quassia rising and falling on the shifting breaths of air, without that peculiar rustling sound generally belonging to the ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... gale at S., on the 19th, we stood to the westward, till eight o'clock in the morning; when the wind shifting to the W. and N.W., we tacked and stretched to the southward. At this time, we saw nine sail of large ships, which we judged to be French men-of-war. They took no particular notice of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... several processes may have its educational value for them in relation to the industry as a whole; they may to advantage shift from one process to another to relieve the strain of routine work. For the sake of production and for the sake of the educational value to the workers, the shifting of the workers from one process to another will be a matter of experiment. But the workers will not be shifted from one construction process to another for the sake of learning all the processes because skill in all the processes is not a requisite either of education ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... of retreat for naiads from the deep and fairies from the grove—there was no lack of objects to delight the eye and woo the pencil to its performances. Besides, never was blue sky, and gold-and-purple sunset, more frequent, more rich, more shifting in its shapes and colors, from beauty to superior beauty, than in our latitude. The eye naturally turned up to it with a sense of hunger; the mind naturally felt the wish to record such hues and aspects for the use of venerating love; and the eager spirit, beginning to fancy the vision ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... bad weather. One of the ships, the "Nassau," had, in spite of the gale, the good fortune to make a rich prize. Standing in towards the fleet, however, the sea ran so high that the prize foundered. The gale continued to increase, and the whole squadron was thus separated, every ship shifting for herself. At length ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... before me thought that perhaps he might count the numbers of those that occupied this platform as the real advocates of that question. Oh, no! The number of those who sympathize with us must not be counted so. Our idea penetrates the whole life of the people. The shifting hues of public opinion show like the colors on a dove's neck; you can not tell where one ends, or the other begins. [Cheers]. Everybody that holds to raising human beings above the popular ideas, and not caring for artificial ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... across the black, silent sweep of the river three giant prismatic searchlights were playing high toward the polestar, such searchlights as the gods might be using in some monstrous game. They wavered here and there, shifting and dodging, faded and sprang up again, till Bennie, dizzy, closed his eyes. The lights were still dancing in the north as he stumbled to his ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... the details of her task, and when she looked up from it she was struck to the point of bewilderment by the change in her husband's face. He had seated himself near the farther lamp, and was absorbed in the perusal of his letters; but was it something he had found in them, or merely the shifting of her own point of view, that had restored his features to their normal aspect? The longer she looked, the more definitely the change affirmed itself. The lines of painful tension had vanished, ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... almost visible movement. New and strange colours, varying about a fixed note of blue according to the nature of that with which the earth was covered, slowly came into being. Here, in front, now and again a patch of water glowed suddenly, three thousand feet beneath, as it met the shifting angle between the eye and the sun; and beyond, far out across the darkening plain, shone the remote line of the sea, itself ablaze with gold, and above and about in every quarter burned the enormous luminous dome ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of palaces and strips of sky; I wait to see thee vanish like the fleets Seen in mirage, or towers of clouds uplifting In air ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... migratory flocks. It is almost incredible to describe the prodigious flights of these birds in the western wildernesses. They appear absolutely in clouds, and move with astonishing velocity, their wings making a whistling sound as they fly. The rapid evolutions of these flocks wheeling and shifting suddenly as if with one mind and one impulse; the flashing changes of color they present, as their backs their breasts, or the under part of their wings are turned to the spectator, are singularly pleasing. When they ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... Armigo, shifting the blankets from one arm to the other, "pray then that the two horses that you borrowed may return. As for your Uncle ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... would seem socially expedient to encourage each woman to have her own three children, instead of shifting the burden upon the shoulders of some other. If such activities of nursing and caring for the very young can be pooled, so much the better. Doubtless some women who find them distasteful would be ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... which ever the Cliff stands on, that Line is the place of C. and accordingly the other Lines are to be reckoned: Sometimes likewise we find the Bass Cliff is removed to the middle Line, and upon such removal, that Line is F, &c. and tho' this manner of Shifting the Cliff is troublesome, yet Custom and Practice having made the knowing of them necessary, you ought to be very well understanding in the manner of them, if you would be well skilled in Vocal or ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... may remember, Madam, how he masked, and danced, and sung, and play'd a thousand Tricks to gain you; and how he was at last carry'd off by a Cold that he got under your Window one Night in a Serenade. I was that unfortunate young Fellow, whom you were then so cruel to. Not long after my shifting that unlucky Body, I found myself upon a Hill in AEthiopia, where I lived in my present Grotesque Shape, till I was caught by a Servant of the English Factory, and sent over into Great Britain: I need not inform you ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... England's Ship of State. There were constant head-winds, and now and again shifting gales of fierce opposition, and all the time a fat captain to pacify and appease. This captain was stupid, sly, obstinate and insane by turns, and to run the ship and still allow the captain to believe that he was in command was the problem that confronted Pitt. And that he succeeded as ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... along the great river's entire length, and far eastward and westward, calling it Louisiana, in honor of King Louis XIV. A metal plate, bearing the arms of France, the king's name, and the date of the discovery, was fixed on a pillar in the shifting soil. ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... to do that he would meet madness. He recognised this. No man's brain could stand what he had been going through for long; had he been left to himself he might have adapted his mind gradually to the perpetual shifting from Jones to Rochester and vice versa. The woman had brought things to a crisis. The horror that had now suddenly fallen on him, the horror of the return of that awful feeling of negation, the horror of losing himself, cast all other considerations ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole |
