"Elemental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she deny this assertion out of the wonder of her own experience. She guessed what Gora had come for and that she was feeling as elemental as she looked. She herself had recovered from that sudden access of horror but she moved still further from, that ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... intelligence, imperfectly taught,—and this is the condition of our finite humanity,—will certainly fail to keep all these laws perfectly. Disease is one of the penalties of one of the forms of such failure. It is prefigured in the perturbations of the planets, in the disintegration of the elemental masses; it has left its traces in the fossil organisms of extinct creations. [Professor Agassiz has kindly handed me the following note: "There are abnormal structures in animals of all ages anterior to the creation of mankind. Malformed specimens of Crinoids ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the spirit, without any study at all, than any of your learned Scollers, although they may be fuller of Scripture." This, indeed, was the secret of Mistress Anne's power, that she spoke the language of the untutored, and infused into the scholastic categories of theology the elemental and familiar emotions ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... remind you of how absolutely conformable it is to everything that man does in this world. The great richness of nature, the great richness of life, comes when we understand that behind every specific action of man there is some one of the more elemental and primary forces of the universe that are always trying to express themselves. There is nothing that man does that finds its beginning within itself, but everything, every work of every trade, of every occupation, is simply the utterance of ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... as now raged above our heads, to think or talk of anything but the storm. And yet, when he spoke, it was merely on a subject connected with his introduction to me at North Villa. His attention seemed as far from being attracted or impressed by the mighty elemental tumult without, as if the tranquillity of the night were uninvaded by ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... find a liar in the lightning of heaven over the telegraphic wires. Let us get over our surprise. The lie is human altogether, not elemental at all. The operator has his private object to carry, the partisan his political end to serve, the government itself flatters the people it fears with incorrect accounts of military movements and fortified posts and the numbers of dead and wounded on either side. Kinglake calls the telegraph ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... This elemental struggle was to resolve itself into one between Aryan and non-Aryan—the Slav and the Finn; and this again into one between the various members of the Slavonic family; then a life-and-death struggle with Asiatic barbarism in its ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... ritual was supplemented with the blood of human sacrifices, which drenched the altars of their war-god, Huitzilopochtli, and the tearing out of the hearts of the victims on the summit of the Teocali may be regarded as a direct survival of the elemental-worship of their ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... of tobacco before which he stood. Above this rich volume of sound fluted the piercing thin sopranos of the women, piping higher, higher, until the ancient hymn resolved itself into something that was neither human nor animal, but so elemental, so primeval, that it was like a voice imprisoned in the soil—a dumb and inarticulate music, rooted deep, and without consciousness, in the passionate earth. Over the mass of dark faces, as they rocked back and forth, I saw light shadows tremble, as faint and ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... truth is taught, The mystery dimly understood, That love of God is love of good, And, chiefly, its divinest trace In Him of Nazareth's holy face; That to be saved is only this,— Salvation from our selfishness, From more than elemental fire, The soul's unsanctified desire, From sin itself, and not the pain That warns us of its chafing chain; That worship's deeper meaning lies In mercy, and not sacrifice, Not proud humilities of sense And posturing of penitence, But love's unforced obedience; That Book and ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... evening's storm had had the effect of deliciously cooling the atmosphere; and the sun's clear rays obliquely striking the fragrant gum-leaves, which fluttered high over-head in the gentle morning breeze, and still bathed, as it were, in tears for the late elemental strife, made them sparkle like glittering gems in the roof of their arboreous edifice. The aromatic exudation from the dwarfish wattle, with its May-like blossom, which seemed to flourish under the protection of its gigantic compeers; and the bright acacia, decking, with its brilliant ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the immemorial ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... York he lives his life among the artists and fashionable people with whom his highly successful profession throws him, and I don't see why he cares to come back here where he was born and reared, in pursuit of a woman like me. I am as elemental as a shock of wheat back on one of father's meadows and Nickols is completely evolved. He laughs at race pride and resents mine. For six months I had been in New York living with Aunt Clara in Uncle ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... reply. Striking off along the path that ran to the camp, she walked rapidly, choking a rising flood of desperate thought. With growing coolness paradoxically there burned hotter the flame of an elemental wrath. What right had he to lay hands on her? Her shoulders ached, her flesh was bruised from the terrible grip of his fingers. The very sound of his footsteps behind her was maddening. To be suspected and watched, to be continually the target of jealous fury! ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... midnight came and the elemental uproar was at its height. Still she lay there all in a heap, suffering in a dulled, miserable way that was worse than sharpest pain. She lay there stunned, overwhelmed, not caring ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... Portugais and Louis Trudel, with which he had had to do, the simplicity of the life around him—the uncomplicated lie and the unvarnished truth, the obvious sorrow and the patent joy, the childish faith, and the rude wickedness so pardonable because so frankly brutal—had worked upon him. The elemental spirit of it all had so invaded his nature, breaking through the crust of old habit to the new man, that, when he fell before his temptation, and his body became saturated with liquor, the healthy natural being and the growing ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... across the clear patch to the scrub, bellies to earth, and tails flying in a straight line from their spines. And the third thing that happened in that instant was the arrival at the end of the gunyah of Finn. The arrival of the Wolfhound was really a great event. There was something elemental about it, and something, too, suggestive of magic. The Wolfhound had caught his first glimpse of the two lesser dingoes as he reached the far side of the clear patch, and, for an instant he had stood still. He was dragging a young wallaby over one shoulder. Then it came over him ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... mixed motives, which are at the bottom of most human sayings and doings, surged in him like the sea at the vexed tide-line of an iron-bound coast. But it was the better Brookes Ormsby that struggled up out of the elemental conflict. ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... whole course of history two distinct will-powers have been noticed that would seem to be the opposing elemental manifestations of the spirit of our globe, one seeking only evil, injustice, tyranny, suffering, the other strives for liberty, right, radiance, joy. These two powers stand once again face to face. Our opportunity is to annihilate ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... the dark and terrible aspects of life will find my brutality, my flash of rage in our final tragedy, easy enough to blame; for they know what is wrong as well as any, but not what is possible to tortured men. But those who have been under the shadow, who have gone down at last to elemental things, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... earth Plunges in fury, when the internal fires Have reached and pricked her heart, and throwing flat The marts and temples, the triumphal gates And towers of observation, clears herself To elemental freedom. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... passion. He reached up to her height, felt her love, understood the nature of her agony. These made him heroic. But it was the hard life, the wild years of danger on the desert, the companionship of ruthless men, the elemental, that made possible his physical achievement. Madeline loved his spirit then and ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... For the moment I, who had never even set eyes on her, suffered the pain of an almost personal bereavement; I was moved, as poets are moved by the vanishing of something beautiful from the earth. Was she then so beautiful? I don't know. But I like to persuade myself that she was a fiery, elemental creature of a rare and pathetic brilliance ... for the sake of her story, no doubt. But, for the moment, when old Colonel Hoylake, who always began his Times by quotations from the obituary column—he had survived the age when births or marriages ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... not a little camera. He is a small vital organism which has direct dynamic rapport with the objects of the outer universe. He perceives from his breast and his abdomen, with deep-sunken realism, the elemental nature of the creature. So that to this day a Noah's Ark tree is more real than a Corot tree or a Constable tree: and a flat Noah's Ark cow has a deeper vital reality than ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... essay (757/2. An address on "Elemental Pathology," delivered before the British Medical Association, August 1880, and published in the Journal of the Association.); I hear that he has occasionally attended to this subject from his youth...I am very glad he has called attention to galls: ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Jewish law. All Israel was called together to the Temple. An awful air of dread hung over the assemblage; in a silence as of the grave each man upheld a black torch that flared weirdly in the shadows of the synagogue. A ram's horn sounded shrill and terrible, and to its elemental music the anathema was launched, the appalling curse withdrawing every human right from the outlaw, living or dead, and the congregants, extinguishing their torches, cried, "Amen." And in a spiritual darkness as black, Manasseh ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the story of the old political machines in Pittsburg, and of that interesting, and—in certain elemental, human senses—strong personality, Chris Magee, the ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... any sound people or any State that was not in decomposition. But in this case there was something else. Such a war as this could not fail to take on at once the character both of a world war and of a national war. That is why in this struggle with Germany and Austria-Hungary, elemental forces united in one impulse and spirit both the Russian Radicals, with their tendency to cosmopolitanism, and the extreme Nationalist Conservatives. Nay, more than that, all the races of Russia understood that a challenge had been ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... processes in nature, the clouds, the winds, the storms, the sun and moon, the conflict of the elements. Such is mainly the mythical character of the old Vedas. Many a trace of this ancient conception we can find in Homeric Fableland, which has a strong elemental substrate in the wrath of Neptune, in the tempests, in the winds of AEolus, in the Oxen of the Sun. Still the Odyssey has passed far beyond this phase of mythical consciousness; it cannot be explained by resolving it back into mere nature-myths, which method simply leaves out the vital fact, namely, ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... deck, there were great globules of water on the bulk-heading, and everything, including the men's clothes and blankets, was wet. The men lay in their bunks from necessity, because it was a laborious matter to sit. They said very little since it was difficult to hear anything amid the cataclysm of elemental sound. It became at length almost a relief to turn out into inky darkness or misty daylight, dimmed by flying spray, to take a turn ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence our art is of the moon and plays with shadows, while Greek art is of the sun and deals directly with things. I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... 1793, the streets of Paris were darkened with a dismal storm of low, scudding clouds, and chilling winds, and sleet and rain. Pools of water stood in the miry streets, and every aspect of nature was cheerless and desolate. But there was another storm raging in those streets, more terrible than any elemental warfare. In locust legions, the deformed, the haggard, the brutalized in form, in features, in mind, in heart—demoniac men, satanic women, boys burly, sensual, blood-thirsty, like imps of darkness rioted along toward the Convention, an interminable ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... was not clever. Clever men—like Pomp— Might jest. And fools might laugh. But when a man, Simple as all great elemental things, Makes his whole heart a sacrificial fire To one whose love is in her supple skin, There comes a laughter in which jests break up Like icebergs in a sea of burning marl. Then dreamers turn to murderers in ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the emotional possibilities of weak men. The fact that, penniless and without a home, he had nothing to offer was lost in the beat and surge of his feelings. He went with the smashing completeness of a heavy body, broken loose in an elemental turmoil. He wanted her; her fragrant spirit, the essence that was herself, Rosemary Roselle. He couldn't take it; such consummations, he realized, were beyond will and act, they responded from planes forever above human desire—there was not even a rift of hope. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... living being, spontaneously evolving itself—a vital organism whose successive developments and transformations constitute all visible phenomena. A second class laid hold on the analogy suggested by mechanical arrangements. For them the universe was a grand superstructure, built up from elemental particles, arranged and united by some ab-extra power or force, or else aggregated by some inherent mutual affinity. Thus we have two sects of the Ionian school; the first, Dynamical or vital; the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... of subject. He has a song for every age; a musical interpretation of every mood. But this is a subject for a book to itself. His songs are sung all over the world. The love he sings appeals to all, for it is elemental, and is the love of all. Heart speaks to heart in the songs of Robert Burns; there is a freemasonry in them that binds Scotsmen to Scotsmen across the seas in the firmest bonds ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... and terrific elemental convulsion our little boat was driven powerless before the blast. The impenetrable forests of mangroves which clothed the riverbanks obliging us to run far up the stream until at last a convenient opening enabled us to land ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... The shouting sea, as though encouraged by this triumph, hurled tempest after tempest upon the one lonely small ship that was staggering on its way to Spain; and the duel between this great seaman and the vast elemental power that he had so often outwitted began in earnest. One little ship, one enfeebled man to be destroyed by the power of the sea: that was the problem, and there were thousands of miles of sea-room, and two months of time to solve it in! Tempest after tempest rose and drove ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... I strive in vain To break my slender household chain,— Three pairs of little clasping hands, One voice, that whispers, not commands. Even while my spirit flies away, My gentle jailers murmur nay; All shapes of elemental wrath They raise along my threatened path; The storm grows black, the waters rise, The mountains mingle with the skies, The mad tornado scoops the ground, The midnight robber prowls around,— Thus, kissing every limb they tie, They draw ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... mass of Mont Blanc. One may not go forth in such peril, for the last waves of the storm-wind roll even to the great veranda, to that harbor where they have taken refuge; and these victims of a great internal wound encompass with their gaze the elemental convulsion. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... clear vision of tremendous masses of green and purple glaciers being ground to fine powder in their swift descent on all sides of him, . . . he saw the feathery ice fragments catch fire in the moonlight, . . . he heard the elemental roar and grinding crash of ice mountains sundering in a titanic convulsion . . . then he lost hearing . . . In that same sick bewildering moment of preternatural consciousness he thought wildly of Annadoah . . . he saw her appealing wan face amid the blur of white moonlight . . . he knew she needed ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... a flash of illumination, like that which comes to a dying man, in which his mind runs back over his long life and sees something of profound meaning in the elemental sorrow moving side by side with magnificent courage. Then follows the fight with the firedrake, in which Beowulf, wrapped in fire and smoke, is helped by the heroism of Wiglaf, one of his companions. The ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... deposited in the base of a votive building on the fifteenth day of August in the year of Christ 1840, and never likely to see the light again till all the surrounding structures are crumbled to dust by the decay of time, or by human or elemental violence, may then testify to a distant posterity that his countrymen began on that day to raise an effigy and architectural monument to the memory of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., whose admirable writings were then allowed to have given more delight and suggested better feelings to a large ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... Master alone, but the whole pack also—were keeping pace with him through the soundless dark beyond the rim of the spruces. But not a hint of their grim companioning could he see or hear. He felt it merely in the creeping of his skin, the elemental stirring of the hair at the back of his neck. From moment to moment he expected the swift attack, the battle for his life. But he was keyed up to it. It was not fear that made his nerves tingle, but the tense, trembling excitement ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... poetry all the spiritual aspiration and the eager search for knowledge of his time. He explored all domains of thought, and he enriched his verse with the fruit of his studies. All the great elemental forces are found in his poems: he is the laureate of love and sorrow, of grief and aspiration. Throughout his verse runs the great natural law that the man who is not pure in heart can never see the ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... and usually we concede that point in the beginning. However, this is not aimed as a blow at life's greatest romance ... it is merely the recognition of an elemental fact.... Marriage must have its practical side. To become successful in the highest degree man and wife must establish a comradeship. It is not the part of wisdom that either should rule the other, but rather that each should have the interest of the other at heart and should strive to be helpful ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... which he had inherited from his dissolute father, and which had been so long submerged, were upheaved, while all that he had received from his mother by birth and education sank out of sight and memory. Three elemental passions assumed complete possession of his soul—the love of admiration, of gambling and ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... not anticipate any definite outcome of his visit. In his boyish, elemental way he just wanted to take a revolver and a pocketful of cartridges, ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... situation of different individuals? But there are great wants, pertaining to every human being, into which all lesser ones run. There are things in a house that every one, high or low, rich or poor, ought, according to his means, to seek. I think I shall class them according to the elemental division of the old philosophers: Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. These form the groundwork of this need-be,—the sine-qua-nons ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities, the sweat of your death-bed. So I think it was with my uncle; so, very nearly, it ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... comfort of the interior had a heightened emphasis by reason of the elemental turmoils without. True, the rain beat in a deafening fusillade upon the roof, and the ostentation of the one glass window, a source of special pride to its owner, was at a temporary disadvantage in admitting the fierce and ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... its smaller groups and then into its individual elements. A crowd of the sort described constitutes one type of the incomplete group. It is a chance assembly, moved by a common purpose but coalescing only temporarily, guided by elemental impulses, and readily breaking up without permanent achievement other ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... moonlight and the watching balloons there will be swift noiseless rushes of cycles, precipitate dismounts, and the never-to-be-quite-abandoned bayonet will play its part. And now men on the losing side will thank God for the reprieve of a pitiless wind, for lightning, thunder, and rain, for any elemental disorder that will for a moment lift the descending scale! Then, under banks of fog and cloud, the victorious advance will pause and grow peeringly watchful and nervous, and mud-stained desperate men will go splashing forward into an elemental blackness, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... melancholy of Childe Harold, which made their author an idol, and still make him one to multitudes of Frenchmen and Germans and Italians. One prime secret of it is the air and spaciousness, the freedom and elemental grandeur of Byron. Who has not felt this to be one of the glories of Mr. Carlyle's work, that it, too, is large and spacious, rich with the fulness of a sense of things unknown and wonderful, and ever in the tiniest part showing ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... now the elemental instinct of self-preservation that swayed the men and determined their actions. Oh, there was plenty of sympathy for me, and for Holy Joe and Newman; there was rage on our account; but underlying the sympathy and rage was a very terrible ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... colour and sound is there no more than this length of vibration of that. We have reached to a conception of that universe of molecular physics by a great enterprise of organised analysis, and our universe of daily experiences stands in relation to that elemental world as if it were a synthesis of ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... afraid of these fellows. The unrestrained lust for money is always the essence of murder, and the man or woman who surrenders to its spell will kill when put to the test. The law which holds burglary constructive murder is founded on an elemental truth. The man who puts on a mask, arms himself with revolver, knife, and dark lantern and enters my house to rob me of my goods will not hesitate to kill if a human life stands in the way ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... quickened interest, he was not only positively good-looking, but every line of his face, the poise of his well-proportioned, upstanding figure, the tilt of his head and the squareness of his chin, all spoke of strength; of elemental strength, and of a purposeful, resolute character. And, too, she told herself that he had nice eyes. The nice eyes never wavered in their ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Citizens of the five great warring countries and their descendants, to a very great extent, constitute our population. Partiality of any kind tends to destroy the elemental ties which bind us together, to disrupt our Union, and to make us a house divided against itself. James M. Beck's article in last Sunday's TIMES is of the kind which, serving no good purpose, helps to loosen, if not sever, our most vital domestic ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... reading like autobiography, of a kid who ran away from a farm in East Texas to be a cowboy in Arizona. His cowpuncher teachers are the kind "who know what a cow is thinking of before she knows herself." Passages in Cowboy combine reality and elemental melody in a way that almost no other range writer excepting Charles M. Russell has achieved. Santee is a pen-and-ink artist also. Among his other books, Men and Horses is ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... had been out in the world, she had come up against the elemental in life, she had learned that God in His wisdom had peopled the earth with saints and sinners,—and she was tolerant of both! In a word, she was broad-minded. She had been an observer rather than ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... ardua" they tend, they may, now and then, be stirred to momentary wrath by the unnecessary obstacles with which the ignorant, or the malicious, encumber, if they cannot bar, the difficult path; but why should their souls be deeply vexed? The majesty of Fact is on their side, and the elemental forces of Nature are working for them. Not a star comes to the meridian at its calculated time but testifies to the justice of their methods—their beliefs are "one with the falling rain and with the growing corn." By doubt they are established, and open inquiry is their bosom friend. ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... picture Jeanne imagined of her fair Duke was not the true one. They were never to meet; but if they had met there would have been serious misunderstandings between them, and they would have remained incomprehensible one to the other. Jeanne's elemental, straight-forward way of thinking could never have accorded with the ideas of so great a noble and so courteous a poet. They could never have understood each other because she was simple, he subtle; ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... traveler might have found some compensation for his disappointment in the weird aspect of that vicinity. There were huge fissures on the hillside, and displacements of the red soil, resembling more the chaos of some primary elemental upheaval than the work of man; while, half-way down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some forgotten antediluvian. At every step smaller ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... authority in the world. They bore an escutcheon and were proud of it, they had their portraits painted in gorgeous attire, they gave the things their terse and pretty names, and they spoke picturesquely and gallantly as befits people leading a flourishing elemental life. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... reasonable assumption that the formation of the American girl is due to the same large elemental causes that account for American phenomena generally; and her relative strikingness may be explained by the reflection that there was more room for these great forces to work in the case of woman than in the case of man. The Englishman, for instance, through his ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... for trivial ideas and thoughts of little things. The mind harked back unconsciously to the broad, simpler, basic emotions, the fundamental instincts of the race. The huge spaces of earth and air and water carried with them a feeling of kindly but enormous force—elemental force, fresh, untutored, new, and young. There was buoyancy in it; a fine, breathless sense of uplifting and exhilaration; a sensation as of bigness and a return to the homely, human, natural life, to the primitive old impulses, irresistible, changeless, and unhampered; ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... the mountain spurs in enormous masses which rolled together, parted, and rolled together again like charging squadrons, while the lightning, keen and vivid as molten steel, incessantly darted from their black breasts like the flashes of a platoon of musketry. And while this elemental warfare was raging furiously up there among the mountains it was brilliant weather where the wanderers were camped, with not a breath of wind to assuage the torrid heat. Stukely happened to make some remark upon the contrast to Vilcamapata, to which ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... the element of fire. This production, however, belongs to the work of creation, at least, according to those who hold that formlessness of matter preceded in time its formation, since the first form received by matter is the elemental. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... the rugged, elemental power of the old poet had somehow got to my heart and stirred my imagination. It all came not fully to my understanding until later. Little by little it grew upon me, and what an effect it had upon my thought and life ever after I should not dare to estimate. And soon I sought out the 'poet ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... all the elements present in other than elemental form for the reconstruction of the atom ... for a million billions ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... Such an elemental fury can not last long. Having torn up the ponderous trees, overturned rocks, and cleaned out the stream, the cyclone seemed to mount upward and leave the earth entirely, probably to descend some miles away and continue its ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... woman out of each; so that there is hardly life-blood enough to go round among them. Milton's creatures are in a certain way more vital, though less real. Bunyan's characters being traits, the other's are moods. Yet both groups seem to have been cast in a large, elemental mould. Now, Hawthorne is vastly more an adept than either Milton or Bunyan in keeping the creatures of his spirit separate, while maintaining amongst them the bond of a common nature; but besides this bond they are joined ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... frightful danger. This elemental disturbance is volcanic, and how it will end cannot be foretold. No doubt an earthquake is devastating the nearest land, or will do so before many hours have elapsed. At any moment rocks or islands may arise from the sea, and obstruct our passage. All we can do is to hold ourselves ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... to the letters, he says, "The first of these matters is under the rule of every body, and therefore is very properly to be excluded from the discussions of that philosophy which desires to be effectual in its instruction. How can we hope to establish a system of elemental pronunciation in a language, when great masters in criticism condemn at once every attempt, in so simple and useful a labour as the correction of its orthography!"—P. 256. Again: "I deprecate noticing the faults of speakers, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Treasuries' of Professor Palgrave and Mr. Coventry Patmore, and to the excellent 'Poets' Walk' of Mr. Mowbray Morris. My purpose has been to choose and sheave a certain number of those achievements in verse which, as expressing the simpler sentiments and the more elemental emotions, might fitly be addressed to such boys—and men, for that matter—as are privileged to use our noble ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... Finding its elemental forms in the structure of the organ of Knowledge, it failed to tell us how we ever managed by means of these to get beyond our own subjective states, or how we ever came to think that there was a World outside ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... that elemental Whirl Where Arc on Arc the traind Planets swirl - The Astronomic Marvels have no charm For him who walks ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... and ondines. To this strange sect some of the savage opinions on the subject of spirits seem to have been transmitted in a philosophical form from classical antiquity. They taught that it was possible for the philosopher by austerity and study to rise to intercourse with these elemental spirits, and even to obtain them in marriage. But the orthodox regarded the Cabalists as magicians and their spirits as foul incubi. See Lecky, "History of Rationalism," vol. ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... fancy. They conceived themselves to be perfect, even as they were represented in religious art and in fiction. Their husbands must be models, worthy of their high ideals, and other women must have no blemish of any kind. Aileen, urgent, elemental, would have laughed at all this if she could have understood. Not understanding, she felt diffident and uncertain ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... itself out, though it poured for two or three hours afterward. And all the while, although I exulted in that play of elemental force, I was worrying about my Dinky-Dunk, who was away for the day, doing what he could to arrange for some harvest hands, when the time for cutting came. For the wheat, it seems, ripens all at once, and then the grand rush begins. If it isn't cut the moment it's ripe, the grain shells out, and ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... that pretty, children? There's a dear little heathen for you! The whole heart of Greek mythology is in that; the idea of a personal being in the elemental power;—of its being moved by prayer;—and of its presence everywhere, making the broken diffusion ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... have yet to settle fundamentals. Races hoary with political wisdom may look with disdain on the attempts at political thinking by a new self-governing nationality, or the theories of civilization discussed about the cradle of an infant State. To childhood may be forgiven the elemental character of its thought and its idealistic imaginations. They may not persist in developed manhood; but if youth has never drawn heaven and earth together in its imaginations, manhood will ever be undistinguished. This book ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... possibility was correct the greater need had he of strong magic if real ghosts were taking to walking abroad visibly, and the other case merely proved beyond question the invincible magic of Eyes-in-the-hands. But to Bakahenzie the reaction was slightly different, for his elemental reason took him a little farther than Yabolo by pointing out that in all his wide experience never had spirits taken demons' shape, so that the suspicion that they had been due to Moonspirit became more plausible, and ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... most things a bad bargain at such a price. But his bitterness had been too strong. It seemed as though all his devotion, ay, and—he did not scruple to say to himself—all his real gifts were to weigh as nothing against the cut of a coat and the "sit" of a cravat—for to such elemental constituents his merciless and jealous analysis reduced poor ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... States Senator Albert J. Beveridge in an introduction to one of the volumes of "Modern Eloquence," says: "The profoundest feeling among the masses, the most influential element in their character, is the religious element. It is as instinctive and elemental as the law of self-preservation. It informs the whole intellect and personality of the people. And he who would greatly influence the people by uttering their unformed thoughts must have this great and unanalyzable bond ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... coasts. It is the archetype of manly beauty, the tradition of those races who have wandered the least from Paradise; and who, notwithstanding many vicissitudes and much misery, are still acted upon by the same elemental agencies as influenced the Patriarchs; are warmed by the same sun, freshened by the same air, and nourished by the same earth as cheered and invigorated and sustained the earlier generations. The costume of the East certainly does not ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... heroine slights him, is said to "feel for a moment the wild, primordial desire of the cave-man, the longing to seize her, to drag her with him, to carry her away, to make her his." When he takes her in his arms it is recorded that "all the elemental passion of the cave-man surges through him." When he fights, on her behalf against a dray-man or a gun-man or an ice-man or any other compound that makes up a modern villain, he is said to "feel all the fierce fighting joy of the cave-man." If ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... more he saw of this unconventional countess the more she intrigued his interest. She was the most unusual woman he had ever met and he was eager to learn all about her. His knowledge of women was peculiarly elemental; his acquaintance with the sex was extremely limited. Those he had known in his home town were one kind, a familiar kind; those he had encountered since leaving home were, for the most part, of a totally different class and of a type that awoke ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... of fact, they are nothing more or less than the results of evolution, natural selection and the survival of the fittest. All we require for the demonstration of our theory, is a little bit of protoplasm at the beginning of things and a mass of elemental matter ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... was not clever; she was simple and childish, with no complexity of passions or devious ways of intellect. It was her elemental jealousy which suggested the cunning plan for the unmasking of Juliette. She would make the girl cringe and fear, threaten her with discovery, and through her very terror shame her ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... namely about the God who made oxygen and hydrogen. There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse. The water itself, that dances, and sings, and slakes the wonderful thirst—symbol and picture of that draught for which the woman of Samaria made her prayer to Jesus—this ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... exaggerated attention of a mind on guard against itself. He hated it all. It emphasized and justified his aloofness from the mass of men. These people were sick and ugly—sicklier and uglier in their pleasure-seeking than in their stubborn struggle for survival, which had at least some elemental dignity. It was from their poisoned lives that women like Gyp Labelle sucked their strength. It was their childish perverted instincts that made her possible. They made the very thought of immorality a grisly joke. And yet their nearness, the touch of their ill-grown, ill-cared-for, or grossly ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... which sat a young man whose face and hands and clothes told of rough life in the open in contact with elemental things. Pan could catch such significance as quickly as he could the points of a horse. He belonged to that ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... that it includes a variety of topics which never have been, and never can be made the subjects of experimental verification. For it postulates, in the words of an acute writer, "the establishment of nuclei in the body of the elemental mass, as well as the action of heat on its substance, and then seeks to explain the concentration of the nebulous particles into these nuclei by the force of gravitation, the rotation of the bodies so produced by the confluence of the nebulous fluid, the separation of a portion of the outer ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... was no line or track of experience, on her broad, tranquil brow, nor was there the hushed, restrained expression left in all eyes that have deeply mourned and bitterly wept. The look was serene and youthful, with such happiness as might come from health and elemental life,—such as a Dryad might have in her songful bowers, or a Naiad plunging in the surf. But it was a shallow face, and pleased only as the sunshine does. For my part, I would rather listen to the sorrowful song of the pine-tree: that is the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... supreme effort, in the last scene, he saw and heard her again clearly and distinctly, yet not as with his ordinary senses, for she wore for him the elemental guise of a supernatural vision. When the prompter's bell tinkled and the curtain descended for the last time, he had a feeling as though the universe had ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... discriminating intelligence, marvellous in a youth of sixteen, Beethoven is to be included in this hero-worship, and is eventually to supplant his former ideal. "It was Beethoven who opened up the boundless faculty of instrumental music for expressing elemental storm and stress," he says in the "Art-Work of the Future," and elsewhere in the same article, "the deed of the one and only Shakespeare, which made of him a universal man, a very god, is yet but the kindred deed of the solitary Beethoven, who found the language ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... badly I feel at the way they have treated me. I simply did not succeed in gaining their confidence; I did succeed in making them believe in me for a while, but soon a mere trifle was enough to plunge them back among their dark shadows and to awaken in them an elemental, brutal instinct. And now I have to die. I am not afraid of death, but of a tarnished life full of empty remorse. Why have I struggled? In the name of what am I going to die? I am only a poor victim stripped of the strength of an ideal and cared for by no one.... It had to be so, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... of locks and canals, where everything depends on keeping the gates shut, and so holding the upper waters at their level; but the system under which the young republican American is born trusts the whole unimpeded tide of life to the great elemental influences, as the vast rivers of the continent settle their own level in obedience to the laws that govern the planet and the spheres that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... as "full of wounds and bruises and putrifying sores." It is all true and yet, paradoxical as it may appear, there are still in him the power to love; some gift of gratitude; some sense of fair play; an elemental idea of justice. There is still some secret reverence for purity and modesty and truth. The preacher, notwithstanding all the schoolmen may tell him, must believe this, or else he ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... you can get no racial indications from things like that. There is a state of decadence, that may come to any race,—that has perhaps in every race cycles of its own for appearing,—when artists go for their ideals and inspiration, not to the divine world of the Soul, but to vast elemental goblinish limboes in the sub-human: realms the insane are at home in, and vice-victims sometimes, and drug-victims I suppose always. Denizens of these regions, I take it, are the models for some of our cubists and futurists. . . . I seem to see the same kind of influence in these ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... so, through our tears, we have learned the lesson that it is not wealth or cleverness or skill or power which makes a nation or an individual great. It is goodness, gentleness, kindliness, the sense of brotherhood, which alone maketh rich and addeth no sorrow. When we are face to face with the elemental things of life, death and sorrow and loss, the air grows very still and clear, and we see ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... to have also an elemental cunning which would dissuade him from violent measures so long as we were in Quebec. I resolved, therefore, not to avoid him, but to await ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... electric cloud, the weird, contorted shapes of which clearly indicated that they were being powerfully acted upon by the mighty antagonistic forces that they carried within their bosoms, and gave unmistakable warning that an elemental strife was impending, for which it would be well to prepare. Beneath this louring canopy the surface of the water shone with the unwrinkled smoothness of polished glass, faithfully reflecting every detail, even to the most minute, of form and colour exhibited by the writhing ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... will our language be laid down, distinct in its minutest subdivisions, and resolved into its elemental principles. And who upon this survey can forbear to wish, that these fundamental atoms of our speech might obtain the firmness and immutability of the primogenial and constituent particles of matter, that ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... the same as the darkness of the first chapter in Genesis. For it is a mistake to suppose that by darkness in the second verse of the first chapter is meant the absence of the light of the sun. This is accidental darkness, whereas in the creation story the word darkness signifies something elemental at the basis of corporeal things. This is what is known as matter, which on account of its darkness, i. e., its imperfection and motionlessness, is the cause of all the blemishes and evils in the world. In receiving ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... satisfaction. They told her that her management had been perfect; they appealed to her barbaric love of contrasts. It fed her pride very pleasantly to know that she could command these luxuries; to know that by her own wealth she could bring the trivialities of civilization into the elemental life of ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... divine is the soil under foot—veritable star-dust from the gardens of the Eternal. He has made us feel at one with the whole cosmos, not only with bird and tree, and rock and flower, but also with the elemental forces, the powers which are friendly or unfriendly according as we put ourselves in right or wrong relations with them. He has shown us the divine in the common and the near at hand; that heaven lies about us here in this world; that the glorious and the miraculous are not ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... which a merely technical or superstitious irregularity attaches is being more and more acknowledged, and the fanciful barriers to human happiness are everywhere giving way before the daylight of common sense. Love and youth and pleasure are asserting their sacred natural rights, rights as elemental as those forces of the universe by which the stars are preserved from wrong, and the merely legal and ecclesiastical fictions which have so long overawed them are fleeing like phantoms at cockcrow. It is no longer sinful to be happy—even in one's own way; and ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... a simple man, and always prefer to reduce things to elemental simplicity. I raise no opposition, but I express my opinion. Nature is one thing, ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... certain classes in England who wished relief from the burden of taxation. And because Parliament had this power, it would use it, against the dictates of expediency and the instincts of common-sense; yea, in defiance of the great elemental truth in government that even thrones rest on the affections of the people. Blinded and infatuated with notions of prerogative, it would not even learn lessons from that conquered country which for five hundred years it had vainly attempted to coerce, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... knowledge of anatomical structure and so did not feel quite clear on that point—but the remarkable feature about them in his eyes was that they were all more or less blackened, and amongst them he found a heap of lime-dust, which he took to be bones reduced to their elemental form by the application of great heat. Still he felt justified in regarding the identity of the place as being sufficiently established, and without wasting any more time he returned the way he ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... Mrs. Cafferty came into the room. She was, as every woman is in the morning, primed with conversation about husbands, for in the morning husbands are unwieldy, morose creatures without joy, without lightness, lacking even the common, elemental interest in their own children, and capable of detestably misinterpreting the conversation of their wives. It is only by mixing amongst other men that this malignant humor may be dispelled. To them the company of men is like a great bath into which a husband will plunge wildly, renouncing as he ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... yielding poles, covered cunningly with mats and bark, carpeted with robe of elk and buffalo? Yet why should the elements rage at a tiny fire, and why should they tear at a little house of nomad man, since these things were old upon the earth? Was it somewhat else that incited this elemental rage? This might have been; for surely, builder of this hearth-fire which would not quench, master of this house which would not yield, there was now come up to the door of the wilderness the white man, risen from the sea, heralding the day which the tribes had for generations ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... that love is a thing like a chemical element: with a fixed symbol 84 and a rigid atomic equivalent. And so it may be; but, like the philosopher's stone, hitherto it has defied detection in its elemental form. The ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... clearly, nor was his hand as prompt to express his vision as Sir Joshua's; but Gainsborough saw further, for he felt more keenly and more profoundly. But light indeed were their minds compared with Rembrandt's. Rembrandt was a great visionary; to him the outsides of things were symbols of elemental truths, which he expressed in a form mighty as the truths themselves. There is no question of comparison between him on one hand and Reynolds and Gainsborough on the other. Yet we should hesitate to destroy our Reynolds and Gainsboroughs, to preserve any works of art, however ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... of his strength and vigor, Harry was very weary. But less from his long night's vigil than from the emotions that had torn him and left his heart heavy with the necessity of covering always this strong, elemental love that smoldered, waiting in abeyance until it might leap into ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... heat of the past weeks was broken just after sunset by a terrific thunderstorm, and the fury of the elemental outburst covered all noises and allowed the toilers to work without any precaution. But, alas! their very haste was their undoing. The head, blunted and worn, broke off short in the depth of the wall. Attempts to extricate it in the darkness only wedged it in more tightly. ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... only teach this lesson indirectly. Goethe taught it always in the most direct and emphatic manner, for it was the governing principle of his nature. It is not yet fifty years since he died, but he has already become a permanent elemental power, the operation of which will continue through many generations to come. The fact that an association bearing his name exists and flourishes here in New York is a good omen for ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... kiss is as the moon to draw The mounting waters of that red-lit sea That circles brain with sense, and bids us be The playthings of an elemental law, Shall we forego the deeper touch of awe On love's extremest pinnacle, where we, Winging the vistas of infinity, Gigantic on ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton |
