"Focus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a certain distance this diminutive landscape dimly lighted, the wonder is whether it is all artificial, or whether one is not one's self the victim of some morbid illusion; and whether it is not indeed a real country view seen through a distorted vision out of focus, or through the wrong ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... in the focus of a million pairs of convergent eyes, the Ambitious Person sat him down between the sun and moon and murmured sadly to ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... good sight, for all their brightness. When any one talked with her at some little distance across a room, or even across a broad table, he could easily see by the irresponsive look of the eyes—the eyes which never quite found a common focus with his even during the most animated interchange of thought—that Miss Blanchet had short sight. But Miss Blanchet always frankly and firmly declined to put on spectacles. "I have only my eyes ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... he began desperately; but the poet's soft, heavy hand hovered in mid-air, and Wayne sat down so suddenly that when his eyes recovered their focus the ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... a tube wide at one end, where the sound enters, and narrow at the other, where the ear is applied—is constructed on this principle, its sides being so curved that, according to the law of reflection, all the sound which enters it is brought to a focus in the narrow end. It thus increases many fold the intensity of a sound which reaches the ear through it, and enables a person who has become deaf to common conversation to mix again with pleasure in society. The concave hand ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... Court with all the forms it had acquired under Louis XIV.; dignity alone was wanting. As to gaiety, there was none. Versailles was not the place at which to seek for assemblies where French spirit and grace were displayed. The focus of wit and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... evidence of physical force they had just witnessed. He at once suppressed the memory of stories he had heard of "physical mediums" and their dangerous phenomena; for if these were true, and either his aunt or himself was unwittingly a physical medium, it meant that they were simply aiding to focus the forces of a haunted house already charged to the brim. It was like walking with unprotected lamps among uncovered ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... saves from eccentricity or helps to correct it. Eccentricity may appear harmless and even interesting, but in practice it is found to be a drawback, enfeebling some sides of a character, throwing the judgment at least on some points out of focus. In children it ought to be recognized as a defect to be counteracted. When people have an overmastering genius which of itself marks out for them a special way of excellence, some degree of eccentricity is easily pardoned, and ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... latter, however, which was to win the day in Boston, for almost all subsequent advertising specified the Betton Oil. Godfrey's Cordial was first mentioned in 1761.[37] Thus, of the ten old English patent medicines which are the focus of the present study, eight had been advertised in the Boston News-Letter. The other two, Steer's Opodeldoc and Dalby's Carminative, did not reach the market before this colonial journal fell prey to the heightening ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... that his letter is reverentially handed about on special occasions quite without a thought of its possible commercial value and that often—though here the argument itself becomes cunningly commercial—it becomes the focus of a local hero-worship that expresses itself outwardly in increased purchases of the author's books. Now, of course every author is only too aware that requests for his autographs are manifestations of reverence, and is only too apt to disregard the supposition of crude curiosity. He knows ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... that he spoke. At the same instant the stunned eyes found their focus—and found her beside his stirrup, leaning wide from her seat in sweet concern, one gloved hand resting on the pommel of ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... shows a little colour. The divergence may be varied and adjusted by inclining the prism to the line of sight. By its means the ordinary image of one component is thrown upon the extraordinary image of the other, and the composite may be viewed by the naked eye, or through a lens of long focus, or through an opera-glass (a telescope is not so good) fitted with a sufficiently long draw-tube to see an object at that short distance with distinctness. Portraits of somewhat different sizes may be combined by placing the larger one farther from the eye, and a long face may ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... world-conception which had hitherto obtained in the Chinese mind. He did not ask his fellow-countrymen to discard any part of what they had long held in high esteem: he raised the old theories from the sphere of science to that of philosophy by unifying them and bringing them to a focus. And he made this unification intelligible to the Chinese mind by his famous T'ai chi t'u, or Diagram of the Great Origin (or Grand Terminus), showing that the Grand Original Cause, itself uncaused, produces ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... and the immediate requirements of her social position. Her life was faithful to its first impulse. Devoted to the improvement of the condition of the people, she was the moving spring of the charitable development of this great city. Her house, without any pedantic effort, had become the focus of a refined society, who, though obliged to show themselves for the moment in the great carnival, wear their masks, blow their trumpets, and pelt the multitude with sugarplums, were glad to find a place where they could at all times divest themselves of their mummery, and ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... can last no longer. Every day which passes enhances the dangers of the country. The Assembly, which ought to be the firmest support of order, has become a focus of conspiracies. The patriotism of three hundred of its members has been unable to check its fatal tendencies. Instead of making laws in the public interest it forges arms for civil war; it attacks the power which ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... single blow of a hammer rendered them useless, and as the manufacture was carried on for the most part in detached buildings, often in private dwellings remote from towns, the opportunities of destroying them were unusually easy. In the neighbourhood of Nottingham, which was the focus of turbulence, the machine-breakers organized themselves in regular bodies, and held nocturnal meetings at which their plans were arranged. Probably with the view of inspiring confidence, they gave ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... cloud passed, and with trembling hands I presented the little disk to the face of the glowing luminary. Quivering with excitement lest a sudden cloud should interpose, a moment passed before I could hold the lens steadily enough to concentrate a burning focus. At length it came. The little thread of smoke curled gracefully upwards from the Heaven-lighted spark, which, a few moments afterwards, diffused with warmth and ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... SPECTACLES and EYE-GLASSES for the Assistance of Vision, adapted by means of Smee's Optometer: that being the only correct method of determining the exact focus of the Lenses required, and of preventing injury to the sight by ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... optical illusion, produced by the refraction of the terrestrial atmosphere. All the stars in the neighborhood of the Earth, and many actually behind it, had their rays refracted, diffused, radiated, and finally converged to a focus by the atmosphere, as if by a double convex lens ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... she could not guess—moving slowly in the direction of Sinkhole Camp,—something wide and queer looking, with a horseman on either side and with a team pulling. Here again the distance was too great to reveal details. She strained her eyes, changed the focus hopefully, blurred the image, and slowly turned the little focusing wheel back again. She had just one more clear glimpse of the thing before ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... mania produced many changes in the Stock Exchange. The share market, which previously had been occupied by only four or five brokers and a number of small jobbers, now became a focus of vast business. Certain brokers, it is said, made L3,000 or L4,000 a day by their business. One fortunate man outside the house, who held largely of Churnett Valley scrip before the sanction of the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... principally through public speaking, the controversial and illustrated press, the circulation of pamphlets and handbills, parades and mass-meetings, and the generous use of placards, cartoons, and other devices designed to attract and focus attention. Plans are laid, arguments are formulated, and (p. 095) leadership in public appeal is assumed by the members of the Government, led by the premier, and, on the other side, by the men who are the recognized leaders of the ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... home and stood just inside his gateway to wait for Lydia. He judged that she had been going to Amabel's, and now, her thoughts thrown out of focus by meeting him with Esther, she would give up her visit and come home to be sad a little by herself. He was right. She came soon, walking fast, after her habit, a determined figure. He had had time to read her face ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... childhood it has always shrunk; there is no instance of such house being as big as the picture in memory & imagination call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions; the house hasn't altered; this is the first time it has been in focus. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... present state of the world can really be independent, that such only exist by sufferance of their mighty neighbors, and must be subservient in trade policy and military policy to retain even a nominal freedom; and that an independent Ireland would by its position be a focus for the intrigues of powers hostile to Great Britain, and if it achieved independence Great Britain in self protection would be forced to conquer it again. They consider that security for industry and freedom for the individual can best be preserved in Ireland by ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... the Polish National Government had no object in view but to excite and await the intervention of France; that Galicia was the principal focus of the rebellion, and that the unknown Government had no actual existence, is, on the one hand, an unskilful attempt to justify the Governments of Russia and Austria, and, on the other, by the ignoring of all the reports of the Polish ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... man: "Stands he not thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities?" One day I saw the American army standing "in the centre of immensities, in the conflux of eternities," at the focus of histories. One day I saw the American army in France march in answer to General Pershing's offer to the Allies at the beginning of the big drive, march to its place in history beside its Allies, the English ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... to himself thus was the only way in which he could focus or make it thinkable. He had forgotten the sensations necessary for understanding the progress, fate, or meaning of any such business; he simply could no longer grasp the possibilities of people running any risk for the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... exception of "To a Water-lily," whose quality is uncomplex and unconcealed, these tone-poems in little are a curious blend of what, lacking an apter name, one must call nature-poetry, and psychological suggestion; and they are remarkable for the manner in which they focus great richness of emotion into limited space. "At an Old Trysting Place," "From an Indian Lodge," "A Deserted Farm," and "Told at Sunset," imply a consecutive dramatic purpose which is emphasised by their ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... centre of fertile and generous thoughts! What precious and life-giving rays would stream incessantly from this focus of charity, emancipation, and love! What great things might be attempted what magnificent examples given to the world! What a divine mission! What an irresistible tendency towards good might be impressed on the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... as he could focus his sight upon them, these "shadows," without any light to cast them, moved in distorted guise there on the deck with a motion that was somehow rhythmical—a great movement as of dance ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... a point of view—a matter of perspective, and most of us are a trifle out of focus. When we change our opinions we change ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... old-fashioned fire-places, with space for a large family between the jambs, and the hollow of the chimney ample enough to show one of the smaller constellations at the top of it in a clear night. A seat on the brick or stone floor before one of these kitchen fire-places is to me the focus of the home comforts of the house, and I always make for it mechanically. As the darkness drew on, several agricultural laborers drifted in, one after the other, until the broad, deep pavement of the hearth was lined by a ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... in the soil, presented an awful example of the might of the tornado. It was a chestnut of the largest size, the trunk near the base being seven or eight feet in circumference; it reclined at what seemed to have been the very focus of the whirlwind; its roots yet clung to earth; but, through the resistance thus offered, the tree had been literally twisted round and round, until it was split into laths, the trunk having the appearance of a great bundle of saplings peeled and twined together by the hand of ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... other confessed. "You and Bluff described it as a strange looking building, and worth seeing, so I'm fairly wild to snap it off. And then, if we just happened to come on Aaron himself, why I might manage to get him in focus and click my camera without his knowing it. I hope you'll go this time, Frank. Somehow I've got my heart ...
— The Outdoor Chums at Cabin Point - or The Golden Cup Mystery • Quincy Allen
... finished medical college Dick Livingstone had found, like other men, that the two paths of ambition and duty were parallel and did not meet. Along one lay his desire to focus all his energy in one direction, to follow disease into the laboratory instead of the sick room, and there to fight its unsung battles. And win. He felt ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... received a check. A blood-stained revolution at Belgrade ousted the pro-Austrian Obrenovitch, and put in its place the rival family of the Karageorgevitch. Under the new dynasty Servia escaped from Austrian tutelage, and became an independent focus of Slav life in close touch with Russia. The change was illustrated in 1908, when Austria took advantage of the revolution in Turkey, led by the Young Turks, to annex formally the occupied territories of Bosnia and the Herzegovina. ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... was queer to slip through garish stations with a hundred arc lights glowing, and to see long lines of lamps running to the horizon. Peter dropped off early, but I kept awake till midnight, trying to focus thoughts that persistently strayed. Then I, too, dozed and did not awake till about five in the morning, when we ran into a great busy terminus as bright as midday. It was the easiest and most unsuspicious journey ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... against fear." This was followed by a shout from the gallery. "Is it in the Tuileries? No; there the national sabre has cut down the tree which cast its deadly fruits among the nation. Where then is the focus of the plot—where the gathering of the storm that is to shake the battlements of the Republic—where that terrible deposit of combustibles which the noble has gathered, the priest has piled, and the king has prepared to kindle? Brave citizens, that spot is ——," he paused, looking mysteriously ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... a distance of at least 200 mm. from the end; the observer seats himself at the opposite end in such a manner as to bring his eye in line with the tube J. The telescope is moved in or out until the proper focus is secured, so as to give a clearly defined image, when the field of the instrument will appear as a round, luminous disk, divided into two halves by a vertical line passing through the center, and darker on one half of the disk than on the other. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... M. Sainte-Beuve, thinks he can trace a marked rise even in Bossuet's style from the moment he became a courtier of Louis XIV. The King brought men together, placed them in a position where they were induced and urged to bring their talents to a focus. His court was alternately a high-bred gala and a stately university. If we contrast his life with those of his predecessor and successor, with the dreary existence of Louis XIII and the crapulous lifelong debauch of Louis XV, we become sensible that Louis XIV ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... of his reflections were bitter. He viewed the events of the night in truer focus; he saw that by his flight he had sealed his fate—had voluntarily outlawed himself. It became frightfully evident to him that he dared not seek to draw from his bank, that he dared not touch even his modest Post Office account. With the exception of some twenty-five ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... practicability of ameliorating the condition of Gypsies. It is with pleasure that on this subject the following statement of facts is introduced, respecting two schools established in the neighbourhood of the metropolis. One of them at Kingsland, a situation which has been termed, "A focus where the most abandoned characters constantly assembled for every species of brutal and licentious disorder." The other is at Bowyer-lane, near Camberwell, a district inhabited by persons of the worst description; among whom the police officers have been accustomed ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... species of maternal idolatry; centered in her child Louis Marie as rays gathered up into a focus, were all her hopes, her aspirations, her ideas of the future. If she could be assured she would live to see her son leading the armies of the empire, ruling in the cabinets of state or worshipped in the circles of the great and learned, ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... trifles upon the greater events of life is a constant theme of speculation among the pragmatics; no petty detail is overlooked in the possibility of its portentous consequences. Walter Shandy's hyperbolic philosophy turned about such a focus, the exaltation of insignificant trifles into mainsprings of action. Shandy bristles ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... "if I exist this minute with you, and then you focus your attention on Mart there, the next minute, and he exists, what becomes of me when you turn ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... to salvation. This would banish all other subjects and objects. The eye would be fixed upon the single fact of sin, and the simple fact that none but God can forgive it. The whole inward experience would thus be narrowed down to a focus. Simplicity and intensity would be introduced into the mental state, instead of the previous confusion and vagueness. Soliloquy would end, and prayer, importunate, agonizing prayer, would begin. That morbid and useless ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... the changes are made," replied Qril. "The human, Goat, attempted to make these changes by mechanical, surgical methods but these are too crude to be successful. The method we utilize to make such changes, which is the only right method, is to focus the mental forces upon the embryo. I believe you would ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... by no means all. Its making and its binding must be accompanied by a vivid, methodically directed attention, which turns all the mental light gettable in a focus upon the subject passing across the mind's screen. Before Loisette was thought of this was known. In the old times in England, in order to impress upon the minds of the rising generation the parish boundaries in the rural districts, the boys were taken to each of ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... seldom been so barren. Its principal acts were to narrow the county electorate to an oligarchy, to restrict the choice of constituencies to resident knights and burgesses, and to impair its own influence as a focus of public opinion. It was not content with legislative authority; it interfered with an executive which it could hamper but could not control. It was possessed by the inveterate fallacy that freedom and strong government are things incompatible; ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... ascertain the rights and to mould the institutions of men dwelling in lands of the very existence of which no Roman, from the first Julius to the last Constantine, ever dreamed. Justinian as legislator is as much out of our present focus as Justinian ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... with his foot hoisted onto a chair and a patched-up, sea-stained folio on his knee, 'I honestly detest the mere give and take of what we are fools enough to call life. I don't deny Life's there,' he swept his hand towards the open window—'in that frantic Tophet we call London; but there's no focus, no point of vantage. Even a scribbler only gets it piecemeal and through a dulled medium. We learn to read before we know how to see; we swallow our tastes, convictions, and emotions whole; so that nine-tenths of the world's nectar is merely honeydew.' He smiled ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... WILLIAM BOLLAND, Knt.: and, a few years before his death, one of the Barons of his Majesty's Exchequer. He died in his 68th year. He was an admirable man in all respects. I leave those who composed the domestic circle of which he was the delightful focus, to expatiate upon that worth and excellence of which they were the constant witnesses ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... enough of his former gentility about Barnet's appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too, had other things to think of that night, and he was permitted to reach the galleries about Leicester Square—that great focus of ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... average man. One of his favourite endeavours is to get the whole matter into a nutshell; to knock the four corners of the universe, one after another, about his readers' ears; to hurry him, in breathless phrases, hither and thither, back and forward, in time and space; to focus all this about his own momentary personality; and then, drawing the ground from under his feet, as if by some cataclysm of nature, to plunge him into the unfathomable abyss sown with enormous suns and systems, and among the inconceivable numbers and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... easily led astray. As it was, prose in this country, when euphuism invaded it, could already show seven centuries of development, and, moreover, development along the broad and national lines of common or vulgar speech. Euphuism was after all only part of the general tendency of the age to focus everything that was good in politics, religion, and art, on the person and immediate surroundings of the sovereign; and the history of the eighteenth century, which saw the last issue of the series of Euphues reprints, is the ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... norm may be seen from almost any page of Chopin's compositions. The resonance and carrying power of these waves are intensified by raising the lid[217] of the pianoforte; for then they are brought to a focus and projected into space. The effect produced by raising the dampers is appropriate and beautiful, not alone with consonant chords but, at times, equally with chords that are unrelated; which, were they sustained for long by an organ, would be intolerably harsh. But the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... pack-pony laden with his travelling kit, and mechanically obeys when I motion for him to halt. He remains stationary, and regards my movements with much curiosity while I arrange the camera. When the tube is drawn out, however, and pointed at him, and I commence peeping through to arrange the focus, he gets uneasy, and when I am about ready to perpetuate the memory of his fantastic figure forever, he moves away. Nor will any amount of beckoning obtain for me another "sitting," nor the production and holding aloft of a rupee. Whether he fancied the camera in danger of going off, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... of turning about quickly enough to catch the culprits in the corner. Every disturbance in the room, and they were not few nor slight, appeared to come from the one source; yet by the time Miss Hulburt could focus her little spectacles upon them, Phebe and Isabel were swaying to and fro and whispering their lessons to themselves with an intentness which ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... about feebly on the thin neck devoid of muscles. The toothless gums chew whatever comes along. The wondering eyes look feebly, aimlessly about, without focus or concentration. The future human being, to the cold-blooded onlooker, is a useless little atom added to ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... significance. Here is summed up the whole of the revelation of God's Word. Here all the lines of Revelation meet. Almost two thousand years of inspiration come to a climax in this little end-book. Psalmist and prophet, historian and law-giver, Gospel and Epistle come to a final focus point in one simple intense message. The purpose of the book is intensely and only practical. Here is the message of the whole Bible to Christ's people for this present interval between the Ascension and the next great step in ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... humble remarks to them: "I see you are painting my sweet little home. May I look? Oh, what a lovely little sketch!" Once, on a never-to-be-forgotten day, she observed one of them take a camera from his pocket and rapidly focus her as she stood on the top step. She turned full-faced and smiling to the camera just in time to catch the click of the shutter, but then it was too late to hide her face, and perhaps the picture might appear in the Graphic or the Sketch, or among ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... signifying nothing. Sir, the inhabitants of this district are subject to state legislation and state policy; they cannot complain of this, for their condition is voluntary; and as this city is the focus of power, of influence, and considered also as that of fashion, if not of folly, and as the streams which flow from here irradiate the whole country, it is right, it is proper, that it should be subject to state policy and state power, and not used ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... later workers, particularly as regards the relations to the coelom of the genital organs and ducts and the nephridia, but no special methodological interest attaches to these further developments.[448] We shall here focus attention upon one interesting line of speculation followed out in this country particularly by Sedgwick—the theory of the Actinozoan ancestry of segmented animals. Its relation to the Coelom theory lies in the fact that Sedgwick regarded the segmentation of ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... preeminently in Christ that the prophecies of the Old Testament have their fulfilment. As the rays of the sun in a burning-glass all converge to one bright focus, so all the different lines of prophecy in the Old Testament centre in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Separated from him they have neither unity nor harmony; but are, like the primitive chaos, "without form and void." But in him ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... opalescent light, they appeared like specters flying from hateful shadows. Suddenly, in the air before them, not farther up than a low hill-top flared a lambent flame; as they looked at it, the apparition contracted into a focus of dazzling lustre. Their hearts beat fast; their souls thrilled; and they shouted as with one voice, "The Star! the Star! God is ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... for the Russian intrenched battery. The two brigades of the 2nd division were separated by the burning village. The brigade of General Pennefather moved to the left of the village, close to the Sebastopol road, and found itself in the very focus towards which the Russians were directing their heaviest fire, both of artillery and musketry. Still undaunted, though suffering terrible loss, they pressed the Russians hard, and fully occupied their centre. While other operations were going on, the light division, under Sir George Brown, ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... develops toward maturity his talents begin to focus and his interests to direct themselves toward some special life occupation. The matter of Vocational Guidance is the most vital thing in education to-day, but wisdom in this field is far to seek. Changes in the industrial ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... focused. The selector swung away from the yellow sun and swept its orbits. The dots that were planets came into focus and out again. Hugh McCann didn't even need to count them, nor to calculate their distance from the sun. He knew the system too well to ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... the underlying conditions that terrorist seek to exploit by enlisting the international community to focus its efforts and resources on the areas most at risk. We will maintain the momentum generated in response to the September 11 attacks by working with our partners abroad and various international forums to keep combating terrorism at the forefront of ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - February 2003 • United States
... extremities of the roots into quadrangular masses of brown matter; and some of these soon changed their forms and became spherical. Some of the cells, however, remained unaffected. I repeated the experiment with another plant of the same species, but before I could get the specimen into focus under the microscope, clouds of granules and quadrangular masses of reddish and brown matter were formed, and had run far up all the roots. A fresh root was now left for 18 hrs. in a drachm of a solution of one part of the carbonate to 437 of ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... which Jack now commenced to act Toby knew he was getting ready to snap off a picture. He picked away the green leaves in front of him so as to allow of a small round opening. Through this he expected to sight his camera, and get the oil derrick in focus; after which a slight click would announce that his ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... up a suitable place, where he thought the light would be most serviceable, and then started to focus his camera on a spot which he selected; when the drifting piece of wreckage reached that position it would be at the proper distance for effective work, and he could press the button with the belief that he ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... ten-yearly census was completed to-day. Even with the aid of Frumuos and Zangamon, I have been at work on this nearly two months, for now our outlying farms, villages and settlements have pushed away fifteen or twenty miles from the original focus at the Cliffs, or 'Cliffton,' as the capital is becoming ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... courts and camps, born and bred in the focus of a most gorgeous civilization, he was banished to the ends of the earth, among savage hordes and half-reclaimed forests, to exchange the splendour of St. Germain and the dawning glories of Versailles for a stern, grey rock, haunted by sombre priests, rugged merchants, ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... long kiss, a kiss of youth and love And beauty, all concentrating like rays Into one focus, kindled from above; Such kisses as belong to early days, Where heart, and soul, and sense, in concert move, And the blood's lava, and the pulse a blaze, Each kiss a heart-quake—for a kiss's strength, I think, it must be reckoned ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... valuable inventions, unscrupulous men had tried to steal his ideas and models. To prevent this Tom had arranged a system of burglar alarms, and had also fitted up a wizard camera that would take moving pictures of anyone coming within its focus. The camera could be set to work at night, in connection with ...
— Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone • Victor Appleton
... for further comprehension Of his attitude, he begs I will focus my attention On his ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... lesion is either a caseating focus in one of the bones—most often in the upper end of the humerus—or it is of the nature of caries sicca. The greater part of the head may disappear, and the upper end of the shaft be drawn against the socket. In exceptional cases, portions of the glenoid or humerus are found separated ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... constituent masses have coalesced with one another. In a larger nebula, these local aggregations may have concentrated into rotating spheroids of vapour, while yet they have made but little approach towards the general focus of the system. In a still larger nebula, where the local aggregations are both greater and more remote from the common centre of gravity, they may have condensed into masses of molten matter before the general distribution of them ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... collocate, colligate[obs3]; get , whip in; gather; hold a meeting; convene, convoke, convocate[obs3]; rake up, dredge; heap, mass, pile; pack, put up, truss, cram; acervate[obs3]; agglomerate, aggregate; compile; group, aggroup[obs3], concentrate, unite; collect into a focus, bring into a focus; amass, accumulate &c. (store) 636; collect in a dragnet; heap Ossa upon Pelion. Adj. assembled &c. v.; closely packed, dense, serried, crowded to suffocation, teeming, swarming, populous; as thick as hops; all of a heap, fasciculated ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... this latter section of the book, taking it all as written in the reign of Hezekiah, that is, in the latter part of the eighth century before Christ. We thus view this second section of Isaiah from a wrong standpoint. The panorama of its visions becomes blurred. We cannot focus the glass upon the objects in its field. The real significance and beauty of this noblest reach of prophetic imagination ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... telescope until it grew dark, which in that latitude was at about ten o'clock. Then the magic lantern was removed to the little grass-roofed stable, in which dwelt a solitary pony, and by Edwards's direction the focus was carefully set so that it would throw a picture against the house. Edwards selected two pictures and adjusted them for use in ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... had fought with the mammoth waves as with inveterate beasts seeking to stifle her in icy embraces. A mere atom plunged in their depths as in cavernous and boundless darkness, she had struggled with an ocean the whole of the focus of which were leagued against her, possessed all the time with a foolish and trivial remembrance of child hood, the vision of a little gray kitten, with a weight about its neck, striving to beat its way up ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... what I had read of nebular convulsions. A thin cloud overspread the area of the reef and the adjacent sea—the dust, as I could not but fancy, of earlier explosions. And a little apart, there was yet another focus of centrifugal and centripetal flight, where, hard by the deafening line of breakers, her sails (all but the tattered topsail) snugly furled down, and the red rag that marks Old England on the seas beating, union down, at the main—the Flying Scud, the fruit of so many toilers, a recollection ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... for a brief but fateful moment, the focus of a very serious movement. During 1549 discontent showed itself in many parts of England, and very gravely in the West, where a rising of Devonshire and Cornish men brought about the 'Affair of the Crediton Barns,' and culminated ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... confidence. Often and often it had evidently been turned over, but on examination it was found supremely bad, worse than the thief's own mop, and not worth stealing. At last, however, and in Cowes, too, the focus of yachting, if not of honesty, my mop was stolen. The man who took it is to be pitied, for, clearly, before he coveted a bad mop, he must have been long enduring ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... essentially, of a large lens at one end of a tube, and a small lens, called the eye-piece, at the other. The function of the large lens is to act as a sort of gigantic eye. It collects a large amount of light, an amount proportional to its size, and brings this light to a focus within the tube of the telescope. It thus produces a small but bright image, and the eye-piece magnifies this image. In the reflector, instead of a large lens at the top of the tube, a large mirror is placed at the bottom. This mirror is so shaped as to reflect the light ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... among the people going back to the village. Once she whirled with an inimitable movement, flinging her fingers toward Skag, in a gesture that seemed to focus the eyes of the whole world upon him. (And in that instant, the American men could not have spoken a word—for the richness of her in ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... two minds, the discerned components of the general facts exhibited in their respective acts of sense-awareness must be different. For each mind, in its awareness of nature is aware of a certain complex of related natural entities in their relations to the living body as a focus. But the associated durations may be identical. Here we are touching on that character of the passage nature which issues in the spatial relations of simultaneous bodies. This possible identity of the durations in the case of the sense-awareness of distinct ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... conception of unchanging spatial relations in the fundamental lines of perspective vision receives constant reinforcement from the facts of daily experience. The influence of the above-described changes in experimental conditions is mediated through their effect upon the location of the focus of the limiting and perspective lines of vision. As the plane of the upper boundaries of the enclosing walls was elevated and depressed the intersection of the two systems of lines was correspondingly raised and lowered, and in dependence ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... experience very similar to mine, but attended with more serious results. He had knocked his wildebeeste over in much the same way, and thought it was dead; and as he was very keen on obtaining photographs of game, he took his stand-camera from the Indian who carried it and proceeded to focus it on the animal's head. When he was just about to take the picture, he was thunderstruck to see the wildebeeste jump up and come charging down upon him. He sprang quickly aside, and in an instant up went the camera into the air, followed ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... deal with the infinite are, besides, exposed to danger from small, unsuspected admixtures of human error, which become deadly when carried to such vast results. The smallest speck of earth's dust, in the focus of an infinite lens, appears magnified among the heavenly orbs as a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... nerves reaching from your finger-tips, from your ears, your eyes, and every portion of your body come to a focus in your brain and carry information to it about the things you taste, see, hear, feel, and smell, so the wires of a telephone system come together at the central station. And as it is necessary for your right hand to communicate with your left through your brain, so it is necessary for one telephone ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... we have often said before, we think that a good lens requires no "actinic" focus to find. In a properly constructed lens the chemical and visual foci are identical; and we would ourselves not be troubled with the use of one in which they differed. Our advertising columns will point out ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... everything in his favourite black and white or gray, and loses all the delights of gorgeous, though it may be deceptive, colouring. One man sees everything in the forcible light and shade of Rembrandt: a few heroes stand out conspicuously in a focus of brilliancy from a background of imperfectly defined shadows, clustering round the centre in strange but picturesque confusion. To another, every figure is full of interest, with singular contrasts and sharply-defined features; the whole effect is somewhat spoilt by the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... the combination he sighed and wondered whether their days of joking were over. Their life had suddenly shot out of focus and it would require all his ingenuity and patience, aided by friendly circumstance, to swing it into line again. He did not believe a word of the necklace story. Somebody was blackmailing the poor child. If he could only find out who! He made up his mind suddenly to put this problem also ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... of the administration. Mr. Lincoln seems to be a rather slow intellect, with slow powers of perception. However, patience; perhaps the shock of events will arouse and bring in action now latent, but good and energetic qualities. As it stands now, the administration, being the focus of activity, is tepid, if not cold and slow; the circumference, that is, the people, the States, are full of fire and of activity. This condition is altogether the reverse of the physiological and all other natural laws, and this ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... a piece of glass, but how did he do it? Not by putting the fuel under one ray of the sun; not by carrying it about from place to place in the sunshine; but by gathering, with the help of the glass, all the little rays together into one hot bright focus. And so we want to gather together the power and influence of total abstainers in Total Abstinence Societies and Bands of Hope, by their union through the pledge as a common bond. We want to set hearts on fire with a ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... travelled to Frankfort—a city soon to become a focus of the wide-spreading revival. Here the apostle of sacred art made the acquaintance of the poet Clemens Brentano, and fell among other friends and adorers. Philip Veit, his fellow-worker in the Casa Bartholdi and the Villa Massimo, had just been appointed Director of the Stadel Institute, ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... club," Mrs. Ballinger continued, "is to concentrate the highest tendencies of Hillbridge—to centralise and focus its complex ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... visited Dickens in 1841, and thus referred to his visit:—"I write this from Dickens's study, the focus from which so many luminous things have radiated. The raven croaks in the garden, and the ceaseless roar of London fills ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... was general and desultory; but after a little time Ernest brought conversation round to its proper focus, and placed his case of conscience fairly before his father confessor. Was it allowable for a consistent socialist to accept the place of tutor to the son of ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... on, Captain Tolliver's dementia spread and raged virulently. The dark-visaged Cornish, with his air of mystery, his habits so at odds with the society of Lattimore, was in the very focus of attention. ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... the great political topic of this administration. When California applied for admission to the Union as a free State, all these subjects were brought to a focus. A hot debate ensued, and for awhile it seemed as if the Union would be rent asunder. At this terrible crisis Henry Clay, the "Great Pacificator," came forward, and, with his wonderful eloquence, urged the necessity of mutual compromise and ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... was bent forward over a microscope, his big hands adjusting the focus screw. Presently he would break off his work of observation and jot down a few notes in crabbed German characters. His big head, his squat body, his long ungainly arms, his pale face with its little wisp of beard, would have been recognized by Oliva Cresswell, ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... that it made an admirable burning-glass, its only drawback being that it was only available when the sun was overhead. Almost instantaneously as the focus fell upon the wood the latter began to smoke, and in less than a minute a flame sprang up. Some small splinters that he had got ready were placed on it, and in a very short time a fire was blazing. As soon as the wood was well alight he had poured ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... invalid, it was agreed, should not be burdened with business. So the draft came in the letter to Dolly; and it was not half large enough. Dolly kept the draft, gave the letter to her mother to read, and sat in a mazed kind of state, trying to bring her wits to a focus upon ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... diverting natural energy from nutritive processes to hurried growth of the overstimulated brain. The result is a type of child with a puny body and an excitable brain,—the neurotic. The young eye, for example, is too flat (hypermetropic)—made to focus only on objects at a distance. Close application to print, or even to weaving mats or folding bits of paper accurately, causes an overstrain on the eye, which not only results in the chronic condition known as myopia,—short-sightedness,—so common ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... she endeavored to gain him over to her side, but failed. Espartero became Regent, and Maria Christina repaired to Paris, where she was received with great distinction by Louis Philippe, and Paris became the focus of all sorts of machinations against the constitutional government of Spain, and of plots for its overthrow. One of these had just been defeated at the time of Irving's arrival. It was a desperate attempt of a band of soldiers of the rebel army to carry off the little Queen ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... about. Her eyes fell on Caroline and this seemed to bring her into some sort of focus again; the color came back ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... extent of my small ability, every man and woman who had the misfortune of being in any way connected with me, until they had agreed to exert all their interest, direct or indirect, and concentrate the same in one focus upon the head and heart of Sir Barnaby Blueblazes, vice—admiral of the red squadrons a Lord of the Admiralty, and one of the old plain K.B.'s (for he flourished before the time when a gallant action or two tagged half ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... focus is another proof of the illusion of material sense. On the eye's retina, sky and tree-tops apparently join hands, clouds and ocean meet 122:18 and mingle. The barometer, - that little prophet of storm and sunshine, denying the ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... love had swallowed up the world, and left nothing visible beneath the sun, save itself. But the passion of Nina and her lover was that of more complicated natures and more mature years: it was made up of a thousand feelings, each naturally severed from each, but compelled into one focus by the mighty concentration of love; their talk was of the world; it was from the world that they drew the aliment which sustained it; it was of the future they spoke and thought; of its dreams and imagined glories they made themselves a home and altar; their love had ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... revolted towns. To this irruption succeeded an interval of peace—the calm before the storm. From every part of Spain, the most chivalric and resolute of the Moors, taking advantage of the pause in the contest, flocked to Granada; and that city became the focus of all that paganism in Europe possessed ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book IV. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... other images of the Plumie ship into sharp focus. So near, the scanners required ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... the course of a second or so by the voluntary realisation of 'meaning,' and finally by a deliberate effort of recollection and thought. Tennyson, partly because he was a born poet and partly perhaps because his excessive use of tobacco put his brain occasionally a little out of focus, was extraordinarily accurate in his account of those separate mental states which for most men are merged into one by memory. A song, for instance, in the 'Princess,' describes the succession which I ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... store. The door was open, and so was the window. In the gloom of the interior I made out Henriques' legs. He was standing by the counter, and apparently talking to Japp. He moved to shut the door, and came back inside my focus opposite the window. There he stayed for maybe ten minutes, while I hugged my impatience. I would have given a hundred pounds to be snug in my old room with japp thinking me ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... startled. He had once or twice seen seals disporting on these rocks, and on one occasion a sea-lion,—an estray from the familiar rocks on the other side of the Golden Gate. But he ceased work in his garden patch, and coming to his house, exchanged his hoe for a telescope. When he got the mystery in focus he suddenly stopped and rubbed the object-glass with his handkerchief. But even when he applied the glass to his eye for a second time, he could scarcely believe his eyesight. For the object seemed to be a WOMAN, the lower part of her figure submerged ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... case lilac. At first we might think that this would be a disadvantage, as tending to make the caterpillar more conspicuous; and in fact, if we put one in full view—for instance, out on a table—and focus the eye on it, the colored lines are very striking. But we must remember that the habit of the insect is to sit on the lower side of the leaf, generally near the middle rib, and in the subdued light of such a situation, especially ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... ST. MARK, VENICE, ITALY.—Facing the piazza of St. Mark, which is in the heart of Venice and the grand focus of attraction, rises the magnificent Cathedral of St. Mark, decorated with almost oriental splendor. The building dates back to the tenth and eleventh centuries, and portions of the materials used in its construction have been brought from almost every country ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... for instance—no great distance back—on the great high-priest of our national school of logic and metaphysics,—he who gathered up its divers rays, and, helping them with light from all other sources of human knowledge, concentrated the whole into one powerful focus. No one could look at the massive brow, the large, full, lustrous eyes, the firm compressed lip, without seeing that the demon of energy was powerful within him, and had it not found work in the conquest of all human learning, must have sought it elsewhere. You see in him ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... draw out her guest, and dinner passed off gaily, for Bernard Clowes was no dog in the manger, and listened with sparkling eyes to adventures that ranged from Atlantic sailing in a thirty-ton yacht to a Nigerian rhinoceros shoot. Nor was Lawrence the focus of the lime-light-he was unaffectedly modest; but when, in expatiating on a favourite rifle, he confessed to having held fire till a charging rhinoceros bull was within eight and twenty yards of him, Bernard could supply the footnotes for himself. "I knew ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... understand what he called "my superstition." He did not know that by perpetually feeling on my bosom the facets of the beloved jewel which had long lain warm upon hers—the cross which had received the last kiss from her lips—I had been able to focus all the scattered rays of thought—I had been able to vitalise memory till it became an actual presence. He did not know that out of my sorrow had been born at last a strange kind of happiness—the happiness that springs from ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... a lonely woman is not life made endurable, even pleasant, by the possession and the love of a devoted dog! The man who would focus the burning glass of science upon the animal, may well mock at such a mission, and speak words contemptuous of the yellow old maid with her yellow ribbons and her yellow dog. Nor would it change his countenance or soften his heart to be assured that ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... when Tee flipped the switch, the worried face of the chief mechanic sprang into focus. "Oh, there you are, Mr. Jenner. Glad I caught you before you ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... importance. For it brought about a national unanimity unexampled in our history since the reign of Elizabeth; and Providence, never wanting to a good work when men have done their parts, soon provided a common focus in the cause of Spain, which made us all once more Englishmen by at once gratifying and correcting the predilections of both parties. The sincere reverers of the throne felt the cause of loyalty ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... from the polar compression, the shape seemed as if the spheroid were irregularly squeezed; so that though not broken by projection or indentation, the limb did not present the regular quasi-circular curvature exhibited in the focus of our telescopes. Also, between the inner ring and the planet, with a power of 500, I discerned what appeared to be a dark purplish ring, semi-transparent, so that through it the bright surface of Saturn might be discerned as through a veil. Mercury shone ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... looked at me in a dazed sort of way, as if she was trying to focus my face so as to recall me to her memory, and ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... henceforth to be based on "the necessary acquirement of each mental capacity by gradation." With these memorable words the door closes on the old and opens on the new horizon. The mental focus henceforth is not on the maintaining or refuting of an orthodoxy but on the genesis and evolution of a capacity, not on perfection but on process. Continuous evolution leaves no gap for revelation sudden ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... a focus than Charlie gave a cry of surprise. There, half a mile away still, were a dozen camels grouped together and covering the ground with huge strides. On their backs he could make out the white figures of men, and something flashed in ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... that weather-stained, faded old house appeared a throbbing seat of esoteric intelligence. It was as if a hundred invisible magnetic threads converged to a focus under that roof and incessantly clicked ouit the most startling information,—information which was never by any chance allowed to pass beyond the charmed circle. The pile of letters which the mail brought to Mr. Taggett every morning—chiefly anonymous suggestions, ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... not for a moment the conditional! Rachel did not fail to make another note; but now there was nothing bitter even in her thoughts. She believed in this man, and in his promises; moreover, she began to focus the one thing about him in which she disbelieved. It was his feeling towards her—nothing more and nothing else. There he was insincere; but it was ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... The transfer of a diseased process from a primary focus to a distance by the conveyance of the causal agents through the blood vessels or lymph channels, like mumps from ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Jewish, and heathen writers, that the Temple of Jerusalem was never built again, for as the foundation was about to be laid, fire broke out of the ground accompanied by an earthquake. The same earthquake also destroyed Delphi, "the centre of the earth," and the focus of the religious and ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... had nothing more serious to deal with than one of the international army of amateur photographers, who had been stalking the Princess as a hunter follows an elk, or as he would have stalked a race-horse or a prominent politician, or a Lord Mayor's show, everything being fish that came within the focus of his camera. A helpless statue and an equally helpless young girl were both good subjects and at his mercy. He was bending over, with an anxious expression of countenance, and focussing his camera on the back of the Princess Aline, when Carlton approached from the rear. As the young man put ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis
... of resisting. He stood motionless, his arms hanging limp, his eyes protruding. The liquor had died in him, and his anger had turned chill. He tried to moisten his lips to speak, but his throat was baked, and no sound issued. He tried to focus his eyes upon the menacing little figure behind the desk, but between the two lamps it swayed, and shrank and swelled. Of one thing only was he sure, that some grave disaster had overtaken him, something that when he came fully to his senses still would overwhelm him, something he could not conquer ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... is, that he has never experienced any form of sensation from it. Emerson lived in a time and clime where there was no plastic art, and he was obliged to arrive at his ideas about art by means of a highly complex process of reasoning. He dwelt constantly in a spiritual place which was the very focus of high moral fervor. This was his enthusiasm, this was his revelation, and from it he reasoned out the probable meaning of the fine arts. "This," thought Emerson, his eye rolling in a fine frenzy of moral ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... which was to decide its fearful issue. With divided sympathies, Europe looked with anxiety to this scene, where the whole strength of the two contending parties was fearfully drawn, as it were, to a focus. ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one won't be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... required, within five years, and effective action toward meeting similar requirements in handling wastes at all Federal establishments in the Basin. It calls, also, for immediate reconvening of the 1957 Enforcement Conference on the Potomac to focus attention on the timetables for controlling pollution ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... to stay. It was unfortunate, therefore, that just as they were beginning to acquire a standing as a solid and sensible business concern, the Grain Growers' Grain Company should find themselves driven into a corner, their backs to the wall, the focus of ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... Jack's turn to focus his gaze. This was the first time any one had asked that question in the ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the old dad would stare if I could only have him in Dawson for a day. He'd never be able to get things just in focus any more. He would be knocked clean off the pivot on which he's revolved these thirty years. Seems to me every one's travelling on a pivot in the old country. It's no use trying to hammer it into their heads there are ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... reverberation of religious zeal surprised him beyond words; and he laboured in vain, as he walked, to piece together into any kind of whole his odds and ends of knowledge—to adjust again into any kind of focus with itself his picture ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is the most unreasonable of all created things—next to a man. Reason is actually beyond a lover's orbit. This woman has lost the focus of truth, and all things are out of perspective. Every object is twisted and distorted by the one thought that fills her life. Lovers are fools, but Nature makes ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... no more questions, but bent his head to see the last of this wonderful craft. The sight of it, and what he had heard about it, suddenly gave point and focus to his thoughts. He knew at last what it was that had lurked, formless and undesignated, these many days in the background of his dreams. The picture rose in his mind now of Celia as the mistress of a yacht. He could see her reclining in ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated in a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder. Captivity has brought my mental faculties to a focus; and you are well aware that from the collision of clouds electricity is produced—from electricity, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a regular gradation of fertility, surprisingly rich on the equator, but decreasing systematically from it; and the reason why this great fertile zone is confined to the equatorial regions, is the same as that which has constituted it the great focus of water or lake supply, whence issue the principal rivers of Africa. On the equator lie the rainbearing influences of the Mountains of the Moon. The equatorial line is, in fact, the centre ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... Celich, Heerbrand, and Dieterich, he pondered over the problem in his little Saxon parsonage, until in 1681 he set forth his proofs that comets are heavenly bodies moving in parabolas of which the sun is the focus. Bernouilli arrived at the same conclusion; and, finally, this great series of men and works was closed by the greatest of all, when Newton, in 1686, having taken the data furnished by the comet of 1680, demonstrated that comets are guided in their movements ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the civil service, and a host of lesser matters. The animosities aroused by the war, however, and the insistent nature of the reconstruction question almost completely distracted attention from most of these problems. Only upon the tariff, finance and the civil service did the public interest focus long ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... invented then, so that of course it's impossible for me to grasp them; and the same with geography—the map of Africa then had about three names on it, so it's quite superfluous to try to remember any more. I'm going to cultivate the mental atmosphere of the place and focus my mind accordingly. I'll concentrate on the Elizabethan period of history, and the ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... out of the mist; and when the broad day broke upon us, there lay the low sand-hills of Cape Cod, over our larboard quarter, and before us, the wide waters of Massachusetts Bay, with here and there a sail gliding over its smooth surface. As we drew in toward the mouth of the harbor, as toward a focus, the vessels began to multiply until the bay seemed actually alive with sails gliding about in every direction; some on the wind, and others before it, as they were bound to or from the emporium of trade and centre of the bay. It was a stirring sight for us, who had been months ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... and the prettiest of the East Indian half-castes tried hard to disguise her perception that an African, in his best clothes, under conviction of sin, was the funniest thing in the world. The silence seemed to focus itself upon the cook, who fumbled at his coat collar and cleared his voice. It was a shock to all concerned when Stephen Arnold, picking up his hat, got upon his ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Dr. Gould, then in Washington, informing me that a vacancy was to be filled in the corps of professors of mathematics attached to the Naval Observatory, and suggesting that I might like the place. I was at first indisposed to consider the proposition. Cambridge was to me the focus of the science and learning of our country. I feared that, so far as the world of learning was concerned, I should be burying myself by moving to Washington. The drudgery of night work at the observatory ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... heard that this is the very heart of the district that has long been recognised as the greatest focus of volcanic ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... most marvelous of all is that of the Greyhounds, which evolves in gigantic spirals round a dazzling focus, and then loses itself far off in the recesses of space. Fig. 24 gives ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... and distressing sight, only half clothed and seemingly starving. Their number is only equalled by the legion of priests, who come upon you at every turn, in all grades, from cardinals to novices. Of course, this is by no means to be wondered at, Rome being the one great focus and clerical seminary of the Roman Catholic world. But the contrast between the starving squalid poor and the legions of well-fed ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... to pant for breath, and his heart pounded horribly and his eyes tried to go out of focus, but Joe Kenmore strained in his acceleration-chair and managed to laugh ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... trees, linen laid out to dry, the thatched cottage of the miller, his fishing-nets, and the tank where the fish are kept,—not to speak of the miller's boy, who was already watching me. No matter where you are in the country, however solitary you may think yourself, you are certain to be the focus of the two eyes of a country bumpkin; a laborer rests on his hoe, a vine-dresser straightens his bent back, a little goat-girl, or shepherdess, or milkmaid climbs a ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... memory circled, drawing toward a focus, curving closer and closer, coming nearer in decreasing spirals, finally falling on it. With the pounce a broken sentence fell from his lips: ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... in an entirely different direction, the application of photography to the study of the stars. The first photographic image of a star was obtained in 1850, by George P. Bond, with the assistance of Mr. J.A. Whipple, at the Harvard College Observatory. A daguerreotype plate was placed at the focus of the 15-inch equatorial, at that time one of the two largest refracting telescopes in the world. An image of [Greek: alpha] Lyrae was thus obtained, and for this Mr. Bond received a gold medal at the first international exhibition, that at the Crystal Palace, ...
— The Future of Astronomy • Edward C. Pickering
... in all parts of Christendom the central and highest focus of Christian worship and devotion, and the great normal vivifying channel of spiritual renewal and power, has been the sacrament of Holy Communion. It has been celebrated amid great diversities of liturgy and ritual and circumstance, and has been known by many different names and titles—mass, ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... dispensation of justice, and it would have been reasonable to suppose that Americans, beyond all others, would have been alive to this teaching of experience, and have studiously withdrawn their bench from politics. In fact they have ignored it, and instead they have set their judiciary at the focus of conflicting forces. The result has been the more unfortunate as the English system of jurisprudence is ill calculated to bear the strain, it being inflexible. In theory the English law moves logically from precedent to precedent, ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... Dana's pen, are pregnant with great significance, and their meaning is brought out by taking a little thought, as the leaves and sticks and stones and pigmy men and women in the shady corners of the stereograph are developed into the seeming proportions of real life, when the images in the focus of the lenses of the stereoscope. We know of no modern book of travels which gives one so vivid and fresh a picture, in many various aspects, of the external nature, the people, the customs, the laws and domestic institutions of a strange ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... he wrenched his thought from his present urgency, and brought it to focus upon a puzzle which now seemed oddly like an echo ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... my sorrowing relatives developing the plate to see how it happened, for I pressed the button at the right time. The picture, such as it is, I give as Plate XL, c. I was so calm and cool and collected that I quite forgot to focus ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... a long pin, a trifle fallaciously, into her hat—she had, with an approach to irritation, told her maid, a new woman, whom she had lately found herself thinking of as abysmal, that she didn't want her—she tried to focus the possibility of some understanding between them in consequence of which he ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... the state, his library locked up by the Jesuits, and himself exiled by public clamor. For seventeen years he works calmly upon the demonstration of the great principles that planets revolve in ellipses, with the sun at one focus; that a line connecting the center of the earth with the center of the sun passes over equal spaces in equal times, and that the squares of the times of revolution of the planets above the sun are proportioned to the cubes by their mean distances ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden |
