"Pendulum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... only to listen attentively to recognise the ticking of a clock. Yes, it was this and nothing else that broke the profound silence of the dark room; it was indeed the deliberate ticking, rhythmical as the beat of a metronome, produced by a heavy brass pendulum. That was it! And nothing could be more impressive than the measured pulsation of this trivial mechanism, which by some miracle, some inexplicable phenomenon, had continued to live in the heart ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... him so great misfortunes he published Discorso e Demonstr. interna alle due nuove Scienze, Delia Scienza Meccanica (1649), Tractato della Sfera (1655); and the telescope, the isochronism of the vibrations of the pendulum, the hydrostatic balance, the thermometer, were all invented by this great leader of astronomical and scientific discoverers. Many other discoveries might have been added to these, had not his ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... spinet, and mounted upon it, thinking rightly that the infuriated major would follow him, and that he might the better execute a certain manoeuvre from the vantage of height. Colden indeed rushed after him, and thrust at him, Peyton sweeping the thrusts aside with pendulum-like swings of his own short weapon. His thought was to send the point that menaced him so astray that he might leap forward and cleave his enemy with a downward stroke before the Tory could recover his guard. But Colden ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... there, old boy! Don't let go!" begged Dick of his pet, who swung to and fro, dangling like some grotesque pendulum over the side of the airship. ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... case plainer. The bob of a pendulum swings first to one side and then to the other of the centre of the arc which it describes. Suppose it to have just reached the summit of its right-hand half-swing. It is said that the 'attractive forces' of the bob for the earth, and of the earth for the bob, set the former in motion; and ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... truly clock party?" exclaimed Caddy, and in the same moment the big clock had swung its long pendulum wire around her waist, and lifted Caddy as if she were a feather, whirled her so fast that Caddy saw nothing at all, and then set her down very gently in a room whose floor was shaped like the flat side ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... way up to the top flat, where the chimes were played, I had to pass through the vault in which the great pendulum was slowly swinging in its ghostly-like tick-tack, tick-tack; while the great ancient clock was keeping time with its sudden and startling movement. The whole scene was almost as uncanny as the witches' cell underneath. There was also a wild rumbling thumping ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... not without effect upon a mind by nature reasonable above the average. Tryon's race impulse and social prejudice had carried him too far, and the swing of the mental pendulum brought his thoughts rapidly back in the opposite direction. Tossing uneasily on the bed, where he had thrown himself down without undressing, the air of the room oppressed him, and he threw open the window. The cool night air calmed his throbbing pulses. The moonlight, streaming through the window, ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... from our own specially-raised American correspondent:—A gentleman who fancied himself a pendulum always went upon tick, and never discovered his delusion until he was carefully wound ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... Voltaire. It was a reassertion of the rhetorical instinct in all its strength and in all its forms. There was no attempt simply to redress the balance; no wish to revive the studied perfection of the classical age. The realistic spirit was almost completely abandoned. The pendulum swung violently from one ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... I, "I ain't so modest, I can tell you, for I do know. I am a clockmaker, and understand machinery. I know all about the wheels, pulleys, pendulum, balances, and so on, the length of the chain, and what is best of all, the way to wind 'em up, set 'em a going, and make 'em keep time. Now, Doctor, I'll tell you what neither the English nor the Yankees, nor the colonists themselves, know anything of, and that is about the extent and importance ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... print of a bull-dog in an overcoat, Mr. Bixby hung a fine engraving of the Madonna, and on the mantel itself he had placed his clock. It was a small French clock under a crystal, so that its rapidly-swinging pendulum could be easily seen. All bachelors, however negligent of their surroundings, have some one hobby among articles of furniture. It may be an easy-chair, or a book-case, or a chandelier—there is one thing that must be the best of its kind. There could be no doubt, from the care with which Mr. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... Presently I shall sleep again; as men say, die; then doubtless wake again. Life and death are but sleeping and waking on a larger scale. Our little life is rounded with a sleep. It is the swing of the pendulum, the revolution of the orb. Yes, I am writing my autobiography. So little is known of the private history of Shakespeare, conceive the boon it will be to mankind. I shall leave the manuscripts to my executors, for them to publish after I have lain down to my next long ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... emotions have the deni- zens of earth awaited the approach of to-day. Some sufferer has counted the vibrations of the pendulum impatient for its dawn, who, now that it has arrived, is anxious for its close. The vo- tary of pleasure, conscious of yesterday's void, wishes for power to arrest time's haste till a few more hours of mirth shall be enjoyed. The ...
— Our Nig • Harriet E. Wilson
... must be taken into consideration, and what may be a perfectly commendable play in one situation may be altogether reckless and foolhardy in another. Therefore, the most important faculty of all, the pendulum which regulates, and the rudder which guides, is judgment. An illustration may make my meaning clear. In the ninth inning, with a runner on first base and the score a tie, it may be a good play for the runner to ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... torch-bearers will presently yield their place also. There is no last word. The new evangel was old when Nineveh reared her greatness to the sky. These gallant words which seem so novel to those that speak them were said in accents scarcely changed a hundred times before. The pendulum swings backwards and forwards. The circle is ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... appointed time, Evariste waited, measuring the minutes by the beating of his heart as by the pendulum of a clock. A patrol passed, guarding a convoy of prisoners. Ten minutes after a woman dressed all in pink, carrying a bouquet as the fashion was, escorted by a gentleman in a three-cornered hat, red coat, striped waistcoat and breeches, slipped into the ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... distance it ever departs from the sun on either side varies approximately from sixteen to twenty-eight degrees. Its motion resembles a pendulum, swinging from one side of the sun to ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... information of the slightest practical importance; but the boy Galileo, as he watched a lamp left swinging by accident in the cathedral at Pisa, saw in the regularity of those oscillations the useful principle of the pendulum. Even the iron doors of a prison were not enough to shut him out from research. He experimented with the straw of his cell, and learned valuable lessons about the relative strength of tubes and rods of ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... let me say thus much. Of course, I must approve the modern very philanthropic movement, but only in its rational aspect of moderation. In my youth, the pendulum swung towards excess, now its reaction being exactly opposite; both extremes to my mind are wrong. And here let me state (valeat quantum) that I never exceeded in liquor but once in my life: that once serving afterwards as a valuable life lesson ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... not bear to hear the clock cuckoo and fixed the pendulum so that it would not work, saying that she always had the time in her head. And it was indeed wonderful how true this was—at any minute she could tell what time it was, although it was of very little consequence to her. In ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... between Titian, Velasquez, and Rembrandt. He accepts them as they are, and is grateful. But even the most obscure of mortals may have his preferences, and a curious chapter in the lives of individuals who have concerned themselves with painting would be the bewildering way in which the pendulum of their appreciation and admiration has swung backwards and forwards from Titian to Velasquez, from Velasquez to Rembrandt, and sometimes back to Titian. It is often a question ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... to the detriment of one or the other, it must be conceded that Schumann was the greater genius. A just estimate of Mendelssohn's work is difficult, for his career was so meteoric and in his life he was so overvalued that now, with the opposite swing of the pendulum, he is as often underrated. He was assuredly a great artist, for what he had to say was beautifully expressed; the question hinges on the actual worth of the message. With perfect finish there often goes a lack of power and objective energy; somewhat the same difference that we feel between ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... into 3000 parts, and this you can do with a clock by making the pendulum lighter ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... choir. They said he looked like Napoleon, but it was not true; he was a good-looking fat fellow, short and thick, and pale with fatigue, and not at all lively, quite the contrary. During the service he did nothing but yawn and rock back and forth like a pendulum. I am telling you what I saw myself, and that shows how blind people are, they want ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... front of you, holding the end of the chain with both hands. You will soon see that it will swing in harmony with your thoughts. If you think of a circle, it will swing around in a circle. If you think of the movement of a pendulum, the locket will ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton
... all. I don't know if you remember an old wall clock with a brass ball on top and brass scrolls down the sides and a painted glass door in front of the pendulum with a picture of a castle and a lake? The paint's been wore off the glass with cleaning, so the pendulum shows plain. That clock has not been wound since we come to live here. I don't believe a hand has touched it since the night he was carried feet foremost out of ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... fever raged, and the pendulum swung backwards and forwards. The cables between Berlin and St. Petersburg were never idle. There was a rumor, amongst those behind the scenes, of an enormous bribe offered to France in return for her neutrality alone. Its instantaneous ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... at the clock, a fine French affair, which had been one of Ida's wedding gifts, standing swinging its pendulum on the shelf between a Tiffany vase and a bronze. "Father must be home soon now, if he comes on that ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... AEschylus or Pindar, oppressed by long illness, and forgetful of the gods, might possibly have felt. In its sense of spiritual vacancy, when the world and all its uses have become flat, stale, unprofitable, and the sentient soul oscillates like a pendulum between weariful extremes, seeking repose in restless movement, and hurling the ruins of a life into the gulf of its exhausted cravings, we perceive already the symptoms of that unnamed malady which was the plague ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the observatory by an ingenious instrument run by clockwork, and called a heliostat. This is set on the sun at such an angle as to throw the solar image into the objective of the telescope placed horizontally in a darkened observatory, and the pendulum ball set in motion, when it will follow the sun without moving its image, all day if desired. At the eye end of the telescope is attached the spectroscope and the micrometer, and the whole set of instruments so adjusted that just the edge of the sun is seen, making a half spectrum. The other ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... pen, not with a lump of coal on a whitewashed wall. The pen thinks for you; and so does the scythe mow for you if you treat it honourably and in a manner that makes it recognise its service. The manner is this. You must regard the scythe as a pendulum that swings, not as a knife that cuts. A good mower puts no more strength into his stroke than into his lifting. Again, stand up to your work. The bad mower, eager and full of pain, leans forward and tries to force the scythe through the grass. The good mower, ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... Tables de la Lune were dedicated to La Haute Amiraute de sa Majeste la Reine de la Grande Bretagne et d'Irlande. One of the most remarkable of Airy's researches was his determination of the mean density of the earth. In 1826 the idea occurred to him of attacking this problem by means of pendulum experiments at the top and bottom of a deep mine. His first attempt, made in the same year at the Dolcoath mine in Cornwall, failed in consequence of an accident to one of the pendulums; a second attempt in 1828 was defeated by a flooding ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... as if realizing that this was no jaunt of ten or twenty miles, held to his steady, machine-like lope that measured the distance of each swing with the accurate regularity of a pendulum; while the lean, loose body of his rider, resting easily in the saddle, yielded without resistance to the horse's every movement so that those laboring muscles, working so smoothly under the yellow hide, might not be called upon to adjust themselves to the sudden strain of unexpected ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... to the strength of no more than a moderate breeze; there were no repetitions of those sickening lee lurches as the ship was flung aloft on the steep breast of a mountainous, swift-running sea, but, in place of it, a gentle, rhythmical, pendulum-like swinging roll, and a long, easy, gliding rush forward, with an acre of foam seething and hissing about our bows as those same steep, mountainous seas caught us under the quarter and hurled us headlong forward with our bow-wave roaring and boiling ahead of ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... and the condition is rendered incurable. Cases are reported of animals that have suffered rupture of the long digital extensor and the subjects learned to throw the member forward during extension, substituting for the extensor tendon the pendulum-like momentum which the foot affords when so employed; and a walking and even a trotting pace was possible without doing injury to ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... an andante sostenuto, provided the piece is prolonged, they will, by dint of progressive animation, attain a moderato long before the end. The moderato is their natural pace, and they recur to it as infallibly as would a pendulum after having been a moment hurried or ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... not check the ardor of his pursuit, or induce him to surrender one atom of his claim. His claim involves a right. He is as conscious of it as of his existence. His mind has acquired the power of observing, reasoning, reflecting, judging, and acting; and he feels that, like a pendulum, the action of his mind is capable of giving activity, force, and value, to a large body of well-compacted machinery, of ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... comet at this time was compared by Bessel,[281] who watched it with minute attention, to that of a blazing rocket. He made the singular observation that this fan of light, which seemed the source of supply for the tail, oscillated like a pendulum to and fro across a line joining the sun and nucleus, in a period of 4-3/5 days; and he was unable to escape from the conclusion[282] that a repulsive force, about twice as powerful as the attractive force of gravity, was concerned in the production of these remarkable effects. Nor did he ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... home that evening and went to her room, she felt strangely disturbed, and so affected that the slightest thing impelled her to weep. She looked at her clock, imagining that the little bee on the pendulum was beating like a heart, the heart of a friend; that it was aware of her whole life, that with its quick, regular tickings it would accompany her whole life; and she stopped the golden fly to press a kiss on its wings. She would have kissed anything, no matter what. She remembered ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... the law, and the isochronism of the pendulum was discovered. An immensely important practical discovery this, for upon it all modern clocks are based; and Huyghens soon applied it to the astronomical clock, which up to that time had been a crude ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... universal and absolute, progress comes to a standstill, and degeneration soon sets in. The ordinary situation, apart from the presence of the content of the over-world within the life of the soul, swings like a pendulum between a shallow optimism and a blind pessimism. There is no power present in the soul to come to any fundamental decision, but life drifts on a river between Yea and Nay; a failure to penetrate beneath the [p.114] crust of chance and circumstance becomes evident, and the deeper values ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... whistling of the wind through the cordage, and the wash of the waves as they raced over each other and broke with a seething 'whish' into masses of foam, and the motion of the ship gently rocking to and fro like a pendulum as she lurched this way and that with rhythmical regularity, my eyes presently began to close. So, cuddling myself up in the tarpaulin, for the air fresh from the north felt rather chilly, I dropped off into a sound nap, ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... until his footsteps ceased to echo in the gallery, and then, he scarcely knew why, he furtively opened the door and peeped out. All was dark; and save for the regular tick of the pendulum on the stairs, the house was still. Mr. Thomasson, wondering which way Julia's room lay, stood listening until a stair creaked; and then, retiring precipitately, locked his door. Lord Almeric, in the gloom of the ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... attracted by the oscillation of a brass lamp suspended from the ceiling of the cathedral at Pisa. Galileo was impressed with the regularity of its motion as it swung backwards and forwards, and was led to imagine that the pendulum movement might prove a valuable method for the correct measurement of time. The practical application of this idea he afterwards adopted in the ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... pacing up and down, and longed to question him, yet was fearful that in so doing he would betray his own secret. At last he could bear the suspense no longer; that regular walking to and fro tortured him, it was like the constant swinging of a pendulum and made him giddy to look at. When he spoke, it was in a voice so shrill ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... 'Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage' by Jeremy Collier, which carried the more weight because the author was not a Puritan but a High-Church bishop and partisan of the Stuarts. Partly as a result of such attacks and partly by the natural course of events the pendulum, by the end of the period, was swinging back, and not long thereafter Restoration comedy died and the stage was left free for more decent, though, as it proved, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... sure, but with this place sold even at a sacrifice, maybe a hundred thousand dollars more might stop the gap till the pendulum swings back a little. And—it might not! It might simply be ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... the virtuosi, than a cat in a hole doth from a cat out of a hole; betwixt which that inquisitive person ASDRYASDUST TOSSOFFACAN found a very great resemblance. 'Tis not the increasing of the powers of mankind by a pendulum watch, nor spectacles whereby divers may see under water, nor the new ingenuity of apple-roasters, nor every petty discovery or instrument, must be put in comparison, much less preferred, before the protection and enlargement ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... weave my stupid nothings into one of those airy fabrics the value of which depends entirely upon the skillful work, or rather penmanship, which distinguishes it. I have even fancied that if I could steal a feather from the living opal swinging like a jeweled pendulum from the heart of the great tiger-lily which nods its turbaned head so stately within the mosquito-net cage standing upon the little table, my poor lines would gather a certain beauty from the rainbow-tinted quill with which I might trace them. But as there is nobody magician ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... before his wife was half through with hers he was back on the gallery. His paper was cast aside and he was watching. The original buzzard—or, anyhow, he judged it was the first one he had seen—was swinging back and forth in great pendulum swings, but closer down toward the swamp—closer and closer—until it looked from that distance as though the buzzard flew almost at the level of the tallest snags there. And on beyond this first buzzard, coursing above him, were other buzzards. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... with weights and chains And pendulum swinging up and down! A dresser filled with shining delft, Speckled and white and ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... collection worth a hard-earned dollar. Mirrors with dingy and broken frames loomed ghost-like up in the dusky corners; tarnished epaulets and sword hilts told pathetically of forgotten honors; there were clocks, tall and stately, without works or pendulum. ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... turn.' However, she said it half-heartedly as she stopped drawing the shining jewels lightly through her slim fingers, and began gently to swing the fleur-de-lys back and forth like a pendulum that glanced bewitchingly ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... morning of the day when Mr. Dubourg had called at the house, she had been cleaning the mantelpiece. She had rubbed the part of it which was under the clock with her duster, had accidentally struck the pendulum, and had stopped it. Having once before done this, she had been severely reproved. Fearing that a repetition of the offense, only the day after the clock had been regulated by the maker, might lead perhaps to the withdrawal of her leave of absence, ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... the troubadours. There is even a bed in the salle a manger. A piece of furniture, however, from which my eye takes more pleasure is one of those old clocks which reach from the ceiling to the floor, and conceal all the mystery and solemnity of pendulum and weights from the vulgar gaze. It has a very loud and self-asserting tick, and a still more arrogant strike, for such an old clock; but, then, everybody here has a voice that is much stronger than is needed, and it is the habit to scream in ordinary ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... wide—in reality a cross-country road, so Bartley had opportunity to try Dobe's different gaits. The running walk was a joy to experience, the trot was easy, and the lope as regular and smooth as the swing of a pendulum. Finally Bartley settled to the best long-distance gait of all, the running walk, and began to enjoy the vista; the wide-sweeping, southern reaches dotted with buttes, the line of the far hills crowded against the sky, and the intense light in which there was no faintest ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... with all my force at the portion of the body within reach, ducking simultaneously. Shooting over me, the head of the enemy struck the rock with brain-bemuddling impact. For once the serpent had been foiled. With jaws awry, the head swung limply, like a ceasing pendulum. One blow with the back of the tomahawk established the right of man to wander at will among the rough and secret ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... of the pendulum carries the mind to the opposite extreme. Co-existence failing to supply the required solution, the key is sought in identity. God and the world are thought as identical. The terms are connected ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... wars, even in the recent terrible war, he was among the bravest. Help her to make a scrap book that she may pass her knowledge on to others. While authorities in history say that a race once great, can never attain greatness again, as truly as the pendulum swings this mixed race will surely come into its own. The colored race comes from several lines of white ancestry, and as fruit is grafted to a finer degree of species, so the colored race will some day show its latent powers. The ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... they stood on something like equal terms. It was surely not to be wondered if the parties should come out of this contest too hostile ever to maintain to each other the relation of employer and employed. This six years of vexatious swinging like a pendulum over the line between bondage and liberty was well calculated to spoil all the gratitude and ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... you are to grapple with those old metaphysico-divinity books.... The pendulum is now swinging against our side, but I feel positive it will soon swing the other way; and no mortal man will do half as much as you in giving it a start in the right direction, as you ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... true picture of the normal state of a small Scottish provincial town and its society, it may have been as false in its own direction as the kail-yarders had been in theirs. But for Mr. Douglas's untimely death—a real loss to literature—he would doubtless have shown in future fictions that the pendulum had ceased to swing, and would have given us more artistic, because completer, pictures of human life. With Crabbe the force of his primal bias never ceased to act until his life's end. The leaven of protest ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... the inevitableness of a physical law, that the alternate swing of the pendulum between a naturalism which set above everything the material fact and the cry for truth, and a subtle estheticism which set the word above the spirit, would in the end usher in an art that had profited ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please,—you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets,—most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... absence the parliament of 1702, which would soon have terminated by efflux of time under the provisions of the Triennial Act, had been dissolved (5 April) and a new one summoned. Once more the political pendulum swung back and a Whig parliament was returned. The Tories rather injured than aided their cause by raising the cry that the Church was in danger, whilst the Whig party was daily increasing in favour not only with the queen, who highly resented such a cry, but also with Marlborough and ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... was gone with the maids to exchange just a few constitutional words with the gardener; and the whole house was drowsy with that by-time when light and shadow seem to mix together, and far-away sounds take a faint to and fro, as if they were the pendulum ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... The other rooms of the house comprised a sitting-room—used only when there was company—a parlour, four bedrooms, and the room reserved for the old people. Up-stairs were the sleeping and store-rooms. In the hall stood the tall old fashioned house clock, with its long pendulum swinging to and fro with slow and measured beat. Its face had looked upon the venerable sire before his locks were touched with the frost of age. When his children were born it indicated the hour, and it had gone on telling off the days and years until the children were grown. ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... the man moves in eternity like a pendulum between the hours of life and death, but if these hours, the periods of life terrestrial and life posthumous, are limited in their continuation, and even the very number of such breaks in eternity between sleep ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... The pendulum of the great clock went to and fro, and the hands turned, and every thing in the room became still older; but ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... of Jack Carleton, while he stood in the woods, silent and listening, was a peculiar swashing noise, which continued a few seconds, followed by the same space of silence—the intervals being as regular as the ticking of a huge pendulum. Accompanying the sound was another, a soft, almost inaudible flow, such as one hears when standing on the bank of ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... had wrought so much for the public benefit would have been appreciated by the great mass of the electors, and they were unfeignedly astonished at the verdict returned by the country. They had not taken into account that swing of the pendulum which has so large an influence in popular constituencies. Nor had they noted the extent to which the unity of the Liberal party, and its consequent strength, had been impaired by the action of advanced sections, who were so passionately bent upon carrying ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... and shook under his pressure. With his eye he measured the distance from the sill to the pipe; it was about four feet. Desmond reckoned that, if the pipe would hold, by getting out of the window and hanging on to the sill, he might, by a pendulum-like motion, gain sufficient impulse to swing his legs across the diagonally-running pipe, then transfer his hands and so slide down to ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... the chair and raced to the periscopic mirror. Stooping, he stared into it. Far back in space, like a silver bauble, swung Craven's ship. It swung back and forth in space, like a mighty, cosmic pendulum. Breathlessly he watched. The ship was still in the grip ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... sooner when the cricket went Than when the winter came, Yet that pathetic pendulum Keeps ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... package coffees, such as Yuban, Arbuckle's Breakfast, Arbuckle's Drinksum, and Arbuckle's Certified Java and Mocha. The pioneer Ariosa brand is still being sold; although it is interesting to note that the demand for ground Ariosa is increasing, marking the swing of the pendulum of public taste away from the original bean package to the so-called "steel-cut," or ground, coffee package. Will it swing back again, some day? Many coffee men believe it will. If it does, good old Ariosa, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... effect of molecular upset, and the falling part, or recovery, the restoration to equilibrium. The mechanical model (fig. 62) will help us to visualise many complex response phenomena. The molecular model consists of a torsional pendulum—a wire with a dependent sphere. By the stimulus of a blow there is produced a torsional vibration—a response followed by recovery. The writing lever attached to the pendulum records the response-curves. The ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... and his irregular clumsy footsteps sounded on the pebble-paved yard. When the noise of them ceased in the soft roadway, Froyle jumped off the table again. Gradually his body, like a stopping pendulum, came to rest under the hook, and hung twitching, with strange disconnected movements. The horse in the stable, hearing unaccustomed noises, rattled his chain and stamped about in the straw of ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Castilian mules with them. These thousand tiny bells quivered for some time with the vibration of the rope, then gradually died away, and finally became silent when the manikin had been brought into a state of immobility by that law of the pendulum which has dethroned the water clock and the hour-glass. Then Clopin, pointing out to Gringoire a rickety old stool placed beneath the manikin,—"Climb ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... dear brethren knew of the theatre parties, dinners and dances I was going to, they would think I was on a toboggan slide for the lower regions! I am mot though. I am simply getting a good swing to the pendulum so that I can go back to "the field," and the baby organs and the hymn-singing with better grace. It is very funny, but do you know that for a steady diet I can stand the saints much better ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... drooped heavily. It was as if, in watching Arlt's overthrow, her old prescience of impending disaster had come back upon her in fourfold measure, heightened by the intensity of her exhilaration of a few moments before. When a quiet woman is stirred from her usual poise, the pendulum of her nerves swings in a long arc. The Dvorak dance had not deepened Sally's color; the Damrosch song had not caused her to draw her white ostrich boa more closely about ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... from her and returned to the dining-room. It was then half-past eight, and, hardly able to contain herself with excitement, Bessie sat down by the window, and almost, if not quite, counted every swing of the pendulum that pushed the hands of the clock on to the desired hour. She could not eat, and not until curiosity was gratified as to what it was that had detained Thaddeus, and what, more singular still, was bringing him home instead of sending him to business at nine o'clock ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... stateroom, hibernating, weathering the final rude shock of the Atlantic. Part of this time I was capable of feeling a languid interest in the oscillations of my coat suspended from a hook in the door. Back and forth, back and forth, all day long, vibrated this black pendulum, at long intervals touching the sides of the room, indicating great lateral or diagonal motion of the ship. The great waves, I observed, go in packs like wolves. Now one would pounce upon her, then another, then another, in ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... but could not prove them. Hansen, it was supposed, had straightened out the tangle by showing that the action of Venus produced a swinging of this sort in the moon; for one hundred and thirty years she would be running ahead and then for one hundred and thirty years more falling back again, like a pendulum. Two motions of this sort were combined together. They were claimed to explain the whole difficulty. The moon, having followed Hansen's theory for one hundred years, would not be likely to deviate from it. Now, it was deviating. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... be wondered at that, in the perturbation of his mind, the pendulum should have swung towards Robin. "Confound the fellow!"—(meaning Captain Langrishe)—"What did he mean by making Nelly unhappy?" A still, small voice whispered to the General that the young man was acting on some foolish, overstrained, honourable ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... you,' exclaimed No. 1, 'and you will see what a fool I have made of myself. You must know that it is impossible to follow the pendulum of the clock with the hand, and to repeat "Here she goes—there see goes," just as it swings to and fro, that is when people are talking all round you, as it puts you out. One day I was with a set of jolly fellows in a dining-room, with a clock just like this in your room; the conversation ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... During one of these reviews I took occasion to remark to a citizen that they were almost equal to the Seventh Regiment of New York. The bystanders laughed incredulously. The bands are as perfect in movement as the troops. The whole affair passes off literally like clock-work, a pendulum being kept in sight of the reviewing officers, by which to measure the music of the bands, and step of the soldiers. Each review concludes with a presentation of the royal standard—the identical colors which were first unfurled upon the Redan by this regiment at the fall of Sebastopol. ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... lines would then have been covered in by the east and west span of the crystal roof. Mr Dent's clock might have been set to the precise time of the Greek Slave, and it would yet have been nearly two seconds wrong by the time of the Liverpool Model. The pendulum swinging so steadily within its case had a longer and more stately stride than most of its congeners. It took a second and a half of time to complete its step from side to side. But notwithstanding this, if a string had been suddenly stretched across in space above ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... history with William the Conqueror; since Freeman wrote his five thick volumes and proved—not that the Norman Conquest was unimportant—but that it did not involve a breach of continuity, a new start in national life, the pendulum has swung too much the other way, and the tendency of late years has been to underestimate the ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... 330.).—The reality of the rotation, and the cause assigned to it by Foucault in his experiment, is now admitted without question by scientific men. But in measuring the amount of the motion of the pendulum, so many disturbing causes were found to be at work, that the numerical results have not been obtained as yet with exactness. The best account is, perhaps, the original one in the Comptes Rendus. Mr. Foucault has lately invented ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 186, May 21, 1853 • Various
... of lively simplicity called out, 'I'll make Dr. Johnson a convert.' Dr. Johnson, at his desire, read aloud some of Chatterton's fabricated verses, while Catcot stood at the back of his chair, moving himself like a pendulum, and beating time with his feet, and now and then looking into Dr. Johnson's face, wondering that he was not yet convinced. We called on Mr. Barret, the surgeon, and saw some of the ORIGINALS as they were called, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... hand whenever it could have slain, and the silent struggle which the Moderates of Chinese politics must have waged to avert the catastrophe by merely gaining time and allowing the Desperates to dash themselves to pieces when the inevitable swing of the pendulum took place. Finally, it will not escape notice that many remarks borne out all through the narrative tend to show that British diplomacy in the Far East was at one time at a ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... was back and forth across the Channel, like an insane human pendulum, and the work went bravely on! Kingsland was being transformed—the landscape gardeners and the London upholsterers had carte blanche, and it was the story of Aladdin's Palace over again. Sir Everard rubbed his golden lamp, and, lo! mighty genii ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... Peter Hele of Nuremberg invented the mainspring as a substitute for the weight, and the watch appeared soon afterwards (1525 A.D.). The pendulum was first adopted for controlling the motion of the wheels by Christian Huygens, a ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... thoughts disturb'd the Hero's breast, Who thus with modest mien the Seer addrest: Say, friend of man, in this unbounded range, Where error vagrates and illusions change, What hopes to see his baleful blunders cease, And earth commence that promised age of peace? Like a loose pendulum his mind is hung, From wrong to wrong by ponderous passion swung, It vibrates wide, and with unceasing flight Sweeps all extremes and scorns the mean of right. Tho in the times you trace he seems to gain A steadier movement and a path more plain, And tho experience will have taught him then To ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... night on the planets, while they shine with more than reflected light. In addition to the five or six large planets in each group, which, however, are many millions of miles apart, there is in some clusters a small planet that swings backward and forward across the common centre, like a pendulum, but in nearly a straight line; and while this multiplicity of motion goes on, the whole aggregation sweeps majestically around Sirius, its mighty sun. Our little solar system contains, as we know, about one thousand planets, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... has been a distinct swing away from this sort of preaching and talking. Everything we humans do seems to go by the clock movement, the pendulum swing: first one side, then the other. Now we hear a very different sort of preaching. This is really a good world. There is some wickedness in it, to be sure. Indeed, there is quite a great deal of it. But in the main it is not ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... rebuilt after the first long sleep, often twelve hours at a stretch. They knew all the sensations of physical man, man battling with nature, in contrasts of exhaustion and danger and recuperation and security, as the pendulum swung slowly back from fatigue to ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... are, evanescent. In most of such works some heat is produced by hammering or friction, and the labourers are fatigued; but these consequences soon pass off. Hence the effect as a whole only momentarily survives the cause. Consider a pendulum which, having been once set agoing, swings to and fro in an arc, under the joint control of the shaft, gravitation and its own inertia: at every moment its speed and direction change; and each change may be considered as an effect, of which the antecedent change was one condition. ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... acquainted at Leyden with the astronomer Galileo, co-resident with them there, and through this acquaintance some of the wealthier and more scholarly may have come to know, and even to own, one of the earliest Dutch clocks made with the pendulum invented by Galileo, though hardly probable as early as 1620. Pocket watches were yet ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... Hawkes, and Robert Carter, caused the chimes of this church to be made and set up, at their equal and proper cost and charges, A. D. 1635. The clock, which is represented to be a remarkable good one, has a pendulum upon an unusual construction, the rod being fourteen yards in length, and the ball ...
— A Description of Modern Birmingham • Charles Pye
... serenely admiring the view. But the clerical golfer, being a man of quick temper, poured forth a torrent of abuse, exclaiming, "How could I hole the ball with that blockhead over there working his umbrella as if it were the pendulum of an eight-day clock!" When this is the kind of thing that is happening, I advise the golfer to try variations in his stance for putting, effecting the least possible amount of change at a time. There is a chance that at ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... time—in one beat of the pendulum of a clock—light travels two hundred thousand miles. Were a cannon ball shot toward the sun, and were it to maintain full speed, it would be twenty years in reaching it, and yet light travels through this space ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... an electro-magnetic brake siren of Mr. Bourbouze; Konig's apparatus for the synthesis of sounds; and Mr. S.P. Thompson's cymatograph—a pendulum apparatus for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... of the pendulum, And, lo! the desert-haunting wolf shall come, And, seated on the spot, shall howl by night O'er rotting ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... which it pleases God to send. Midway between two vulgar errors: steering a sure track between Scylla and Charybdis: the grovelling multitude to the left, the romantic few to the right; stand the words of inspired wisdom. The pendulum had probably oscillated many times between the two errors, before it settled at the central truth; 'Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full and deny Thee, and say, Who is the Lord? Or lest I be poor, and steal, and ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... common Laburnum, but it is of larger growth, and flowers later in the season. The flowers, too, though in longer racemes, are usually less plentifully produced. It grows 30 feet high. There is a weeping form, L. alpinum pendulum, and another with fragrant flowers, named L. alpinum fragrans, as also a third, with very long racemes of flowers, named ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... call her by her real name—found herself alone, the tall clock in her boudoir struck ten, although the hour was nearer two. She rose at once, and taking a little key from her bosom, unlocked and opened the door of the old-fashioned timepiece. But instead of hanging weights and a swinging pendulum, the opening revealed another open door beyond, through which stepped ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... uttering the solemn words, ecce agnus Dei, a fly lit on the end of his nose. To be really creative, ideas have to be worked up and then "put over", so that they become a part of man's social heritage. The highly accurate pendulum clock was one of the later results of Galileo's discovery. He himself was led to reconsider and successfully to refute the old notions of falling bodies. It remained for Newton to prove that the moon was falling, and presumably all the heavenly bodies. This quite ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... work, Captain Sabine gives an account of experiments to determine the acceleration of the pendulum in different latitudes. This appears to have resulted from the joint labor of Peary and Sabine. He says: "The accidental discovery that a pendulum on being removed from Paris to the neighborhood of the equator increased its time of vibration, gave the first step to our ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... from Concord, an offer to every mind—the choice between repose and truth, and God makes the offer. "Take which you please ... between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets," most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation. Here is another aspect of art-duality, but it is more drastic ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... body is one having a to-and-fro movement, like that of a clock pendulum or the string of a violin on sounding. Bodies to give out sound waves must vibrate rapidly, making not less than sixteen vibrations per second. The upper limit of hearing being about 40,000 vibrations per second, certain ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... evangelists. Its face was carved as it is now in the days of Francois Premier, and on its one hand is still seen the lamb of Rouen pointing to the hours. You must by no means omit to mount the tower and see the guardian wind it up, for the swing of its pendulum and the simplicity of its internal arrangements will be of the greatest interest. The astronomical part, showing the phases of the moon, is quite modern, and is set in a separate place just behind the clock-face. As you turn into the belfry out of the arch ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... administration, while they declaim against the reaction which followed. That the reaction has produced, and is still producing, much evil is perfectly true. But what produced the reaction? The spring flies up with a force proportioned to that with which it has been pressed down. The pendulum which is drawn far in one direction swings as far in the other. The joyous madness of intoxication in the evening is followed by languor and nausea on the morrow. And so, in politics, it is the sure law that every excess shall generate its opposite; ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Professor Huxley says, materialistic; but from the self-contradictions inseparable from every species of materialism the Cartesian variety is, of course, no more exempt than any other, and it has besides one self-contradiction peculiar to itself. A clock's pendulum vibrates, and its hands move, not simply by reason of the situation and figure of its weight and wheels, but also because some intelligent person, by winding up the clock, has communicated an impulsive force to the weight and wheels. Waterworks perform all sorts of antics, not solely because ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... had it suggested to him by the fiend to break in at a funeral with a real character of the deceased, instead of that Mrs. Grundyfied view of him which the clergyman is so painfully elaborating in his prayer? Remove the pendulum of conventional routine, and the mental machinery runs on with a whir that gives a delightful excitement to sluggish temperaments, and is, perhaps, the natural relief of highly nervous organizations. The tyrant Will is dethroned, and the sceptre snatched by his frolic sister Whim. This state of ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... fro, like a pendulum, swayed the scene of action—to-day east, to-morrow west. Colonel Campbell and 500 American soldiers, with nothing better to do, made a bonfire of Port Dover, the incident being officially described by the U.S. War Department as "an error of judgment." Then ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... broken fragments of speech, Mrs. Steadman lamented over her dead, while the heavy pendulum of the eight-day clock in the hall sounded the slowly-passing moments, until the coming of the doctor broke upon the quiet of the house, with the noise of opening doors ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... France that had turned him to the Intelligentsia. In the vast republic of art and letters he had imbibed the philosophy that was to threaten the very existence of his own clan. The spread of the revolution had not dismayed him, for he believed that in time the pendulum would swing back and bring a constitutional government to Russia. But in the weeks of struggle, privation, and passion a ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... is mounted as a horizontal pendulum, and the less or greater stress required according to the size to be reeled is obtained by inclining its axis to a less or greater degree from the vertical. An arrangement is also adopted by which the strains existing in the thread when it arrives at the first drum are neutralized, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... interest the spectator. We heard a fine lecture respecting the experiment of Foucault, by which the diurnal rotation of the earth is said to be rendered visible to the eye. Foucault is a young Parisian, who, whilst engaged in some investigations with a pendulum in his mother's cellar, made this discovery, as he claims it to be. We saw the experiment repeated here on the same scale as it has recently been shown at the Pantheon at Paris. A brass sphere, weighing about five pounds, was suspended from the lofty ceiling by a piece of music wire, and made to ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... have been an easy one, but for the fact that just now his conscience seemed to be on the other side. Samson's civilization was two years old—a thin veneer over a century of feudalism—and now the century was thundering its call of blood bondage. But, as the man struggled over the dilemma, the pendulum swung back. The hundred years had left, also, a heritage of quickness and bitterness to resent injury and injustice. His own people had cast him out. They had branded him as the deserter; they felt no need of him or his counsel. Very well, let them have it so. His ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... here was a being with probably a very wide range of possibilities, a machine with a pendulum that most likely had ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood |
