"Gradation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... act with that favourable impulse on people, where property is very unequally divided, that it does where the gradation from the state of poverty to that of riches is ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... virtues, such as order, cleanliness, economy, temperance, &c. we should endeavour to make the rewards the immediate consequence of the virtues themselves; and at the same time, approbation should be shown in speaking of these useful qualities. A gradation must, however, always be observed in our praises of different virtues; those that are the most useful to society, as truth, justice and humanity, must stand the highest in the scale; those that are most ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... read in the Bibliographical Decameron.[38] At the very first page we observe an assemblage of Popes, Cardinals, and Bishops, with a King seated on his throne in the midst of them. The figures in the fore-ground are from four to five inches high; and so in gradation upwards. The colouring of some of the draperies is in a most delightful tone. The countenances have also a soft and quiet expression. The arms of Graville (Grauille?) are in the circular border. Three leaves ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... familiar with the remarkable peculiarity in the Arab system of music—its division of tones into thirds. Egyptian musicians consider that the European system of music is deficient in sounds. This small and delicate gradation of sound gives a peculiar softness to the performance ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... water by advancing through it, and the third to divide water which advances against it. And again, the buttress of a bridge differs only from that of a cathedral in having less weight to sustain, and more to resist. We can find no term in the gradation, from the plowshare to the cathedral buttress, at which we can set ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... enough, and carefully enough, at the three previous sculptures, you cannot but feel that the hand here is utterly changed. The drapery sweeps in broader, softer, but less true folds; the handling is far more delicate; exquisitely sensitive to gradation over broad surfaces—scarcely using an incision of any depth but in outline; studiously reserved in appliance of shadow, as a thing precious and local—look at it above the puppy's ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... comedian has happily expressed it—wiser than all the wise and good men who have lived before us. It was their wish, to see public and private virtues, not dissonant and jarring, and mutually destructive, but harmoniously combined, growing out of one another in a noble and orderly gradation, reciprocally supporting and supported. In one of the most fortunate periods of our history this country was governed by a connection; I mean the great connection of Whigs in the reign of Queen Anne. They were complimented upon the principle of this connection by a poet who ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... almost a citizen; and his frankness, conciliatory disposition, and elevated demeanour, an estimable one. The expressions of regret as general as he was known, and not uttered by friends and acquaintance only, but by every gradation of class, not only by grown persons, but young children, are the test of his worth. Such too is the only eulogium worthy of the good and brave, and the citizens of Quebec have, with solemn emotions, pronounced it on his memory. But at this anxious moment other feelings are ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... were standing where the Catskill hills lay before them in echelon towards the river, the ridges lapping over each other and receding in the distance, a gradation of lines most artistically drawn, still further refined by shades of violet, which always have the effect upon the contemplative mind of either religious exaltation or the kindling of a sentiment which is in the young akin to the emotion ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... ... the great law which has regulated the peopling of the earth with animal and vegetable life is, that every change shall be gradual; that no new creature shall be formed widely different from anything before existing; that in this, as in everything else in nature, there shall be gradation and harmony—then these rudimentary organs are necessary and are an essential part of the system of nature. Ere the higher vertebrates were formed, for instance, many steps were required, and many organs had to undergo modifications ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... right gradation, the text has been prepared to suit the different ages of readers. Care has been given to the illustration, print, and binding of the series, for it is believed that this is the best way to secure from the children ...
— Granny's Wonderful Chair • Frances Browne
... be a "dualism" in the case of created mind and matter, as there must be, on any supposition except that of Pantheism, in the case of the uncreated mind and the material universe? We see variety and gradation in all the works of God; we see thousands of substances, simple and compound, possessing various properties, even in the inorganic world; we see different forms of life, vegetable and animal, ascending by steps of regular gradation, from the lowest to the highest; we see, in ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... shrine of this god, the fine valley of Monlova ascends with a gentle gradation, hardly perceptible; but upon turning round toward the water, one is surprised to find himself high elevated above its surface. Pass on, and the same silent ascent deceives you; and the valley contracts; and on both sides the cliffs ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... where the territory of the monastery commences; and it is one that impresses itself on the imagination and the memory in a measure not likely to be forgotten. The change is like a pantomime transformation scene! The traveller passes without the slightest intermediate gradation from the dreary scene which has been described, into the shade and the beauty of a region of magnificent and well-managed forest! The bodily delight of passing from the severe glare of the sun into this coolness, welcome alike to the skin and to the eye, ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... its now elected champion scorn the post he renounces on his behalf. And his art is still royal though he is not. It is the utterance of the spiritual life: of the informing thought—which was in the world before deeds began—which brought order out of chaos—which guided deeds in their due gradation till itself emerged as SONG: to react in deed; but to need no help of it; to be (so we complete the meaning) as the knowledge which ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... senses and entrap her. She placed her enthusiastic eye to the window of the box. The Devil preluded with a few proverbs and wise saws, and unfolded to her view scenes of love, in which he led her fancy so adroitly from the spiritual to the carnal, that she was scarcely aware of the gradation. If she were about to turn away her eyes with shame, the offensive object changed itself at once into a sublime image, which again attracted her attention. Her cheeks glowed, and she believed herself gazing upon an unknown and enchanted world. The artful Devil caused the figure ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... costume is still farther diversified by a chequered handkerchief and white apron. The young are generally pretty; the old, tanned and ugly; and the transition from youth to age seems instantaneous: labor and poverty have destroyed every intermediate gradation; but, whether young or old, they have all the same good-humored look, and appear generally industrious, though almost incessantly talking. Even on Sundays or feast-days, bonnets are seldom to be seen, but round their necks are suspended large silver or gilt ornaments, usually crosses, while long ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... changes, aptly join'd, Is bodied forth the second whole. Regard gradation, lest the soul Of Discord race the ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... is founded on the consciousness of gradation between beasts and men. The belief in a soul-endowed animal world was present among the ancients, and the laws of intelligence and instinct were misconstrued, or were regarded as a puzzle, ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... of Leonardo was strongly felt in Milan, where he spent so many of the best years of his life and founded a School of painting. He was a close observer of the gradation and reflex of light, and was capable of giving to his discoveries a practical and aesthetic form. His strong personal character and the fascination of his genius enthralled his followers, who were satisfied to repeat his types, to perpetuate ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... confided to his management. For, not only was it the strongest, and susceptible of the highest charge of coloring, but it had also the advantage of grouping together all the principal delinquents of the trial, and affording a gradation of hue, from the showy and prominent enormities of the Governor-General and Sir Elijah Impey in the front of the picture, to the subordinate and half-tint iniquity of the Middletons and Bristows in ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... striding, with the help of his hands, from one precarious footstep to another, till he got about half-way up, where two or three bushes concealed the mouth of a hole, resembling an oven, into which the Baron insinuated, first his head and shoulders, and then, by slow gradation, the rest of his long body; his legs and feet finally disappearing, coiled up like a huge snake entering his retreat, or a long pedigree introduced with care and difficulty into the narrow pigeon-hole of an old cabinet. Waverley had the curiosity to clamber up and look in upon him in his den, as ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... not sufficient coolness to pause for metaphor, nor has metaphor ardor enough to keep pace with passion."—Nothing can be less true. Metaphoric strength of expression will burst even from vulgar and illiterate minds when they are agitated. It is a natural effort of roused sensibility in every gradation, from unlettered simplicity to the highest refinement. Passion has no occasion to pause for metaphors, they rush upon the mind which it has heated. Similies, it is true, are not natural to strong emotion. They are the result of spirits that are calm, and ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... confirmed their choice shortly after; and likewise that of his son, Diadumenia'nus, whom he took as partner in the empire. 25. Macri'nus was fifty-three years old when he entered upon the government. He was of obscure parentage; some say by birth a Moor, who, by the mere gradation of office, being made first prefect of the praetorian bands, was now, by treason and accident, ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... Eminently noble birth, or great merit on the part of their fathers, assigns the dignity of a chief[27] even to very young men. They are admitted to the fellowship of other youths stronger than themselves, and already tried in war, nor do they blush to be seen among the henchmen.[28] There is a gradation in rank among the henchmen, determined by the judgment of him whom they follow, and there is a great emulation among the henchmen, who shall have the highest place under the chief, and among the chiefs who shall have the most numerous and the bravest henchmen. This is their dignity, this ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... a Cyclopaedia which admits lives of the living as well as the dead, and to whose biographical department a great variety of authors contribute, there is an inherent difficulty of preserving the proper gradation of reputations. Doubtless, many an American gentleman will find that this Cyclopaedia gives him an importance, in comparison with the rest of the world, which time will not sanction; and doubtless, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... history we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the middle ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... mind. A series of water-deities will rise before us out of this mighty element, assuming various attitudes toward the solitary voyager. Three of them, showing themselves as hostile (Neptune), as helpful (Ino Leucothea), as saving (the River-God); all three too seem in a kind of gradation, from the vast total sea, through one of its phases, to the small stream pouring into the sea from the land. Thus the Greek imagination, playing with water, deified the various appearances thereof, specially in their relation to man. The introduction ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Mary's feet. The third in order, underneath her, lo! Rachel with Beatrice. Sarah next, Judith, Rebecca, and the gleaner maid, Meek ancestress of him, who sang the songs Of sore repentance in his sorrowful mood. All, as I name them, down from deaf to leaf, Are in gradation throned on the rose. And from the seventh step, successively, Adown the breathing tresses of the flow'r Still doth the file of Hebrew dames proceed. For these are a partition wall, whereby The sacred stairs are sever'd, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... others—he may have developed certain eccentricities. In most cases the plunge into school life will be taken well enough; in a few the little vessel will not right itself, and proves permanently unseaworthy. No doubt as a rule a private school will have preceded the public school, and this gradation should make the entrance to the public school a lesser ordeal. But it often happens that it is just in the case of the nervous child that this intermediate stage has been omitted, and that his thirteenth birthday finds him still ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... by just gradation moves, Toil builds on toil, and age on age improves: The Muse alone unequal dealt her rage, And graced with noblest pomp her earliest stage. 20 Preserved through time, the speaking scenes impart Each changeful wish of Phaedra's tortured ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... atrocious proceedings must, doubtless, be ascribed to heated imagination, to perverted principle, to a distaste for what was vulgar in morals, and a passion for what was startling and dubious. Mr Burke has touched on this subject with great felicity of expression: "The gradation of their republic," says he, "is laid in moral paradoxes. All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... CHURCH.—The Christian Church very early in its history became an organized body, with a regular gradation of officers, such as presbyters, bishops, metropolitans or archbishops, and patriarchs. There were at first four regular patriarchates, that is, districts superintended by patriarchs. These centred in the great cities of Rome, Constantinople, ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... plighted word, William." Yet there was something bordering on coldness even in the sweet accents with which she spoke; the nice instinct of love detects each gradation of feeling with an unerring certainty. I was not satisfied, and when I left her, I was more unhappy than ever. I longed to speak to my brother on the subject, yet some indescribable feeling prevented me; and I allowed the days to glide away, growing more and more troubled in ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... came from, the governor-general of New Russia, Count Stroganov. In the world of Russian officialdom professing the dogma of "gradation" and "caution" in the question of Jewish rights he was the only one who had the courage to raise his voice on behalf of complete ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... being is complete in me— In me is matter's last gradation lost, And the next step is spirit—Deity! I can command the lightning and am dust! A monarch and a slave—a worm, a god! Whence came I here, and how? so marvellously Constructed and conceived? unknown! this clod Lives surely through some higher energy; For from itself alone it could ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... of the axe at one end of a period of near three thousand years to the "levitation" of Sludge & Co. at the other end, there is a complete continuity of the miraculous, with every gradation, from the childish to the stupendous, from the gratification of a caprice to the illustration of sublime truth. There is no drawing a line in the series that might be set out of plausibly attested cases of spiritual intervention. If one is true, all may be true; if one is false, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... blend into one another with every shade of gradation. Some are admirably proficient in the well-known sciences—that is to say, they have good health, good looks, good temper, common sense, and energy, and they hold all these good things in such perfection as to be altogether without introspection—to be not under the law, but so entirely ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... unassisted by all the dark remains of original, natural, moral and political knowledge he is master of, can acquire no certain knowledge of any part of his duty, as to moral good or evil, but by a gradation of labour, slow and multiplied deductions, and much less is he able to bind the strong man and cast him out. And yet all this is no way dishonouring to the great author of nature as to the works of his hands, for although ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... example in her own person, as well as by indirect eulogiums on certain people who were endowed with those qualities and blessings she most admired, on the present occasion Catherine did not unburden herself in terms to her mother; but by a regular gradation of complaints, aimed more at the world than at her husband, she soon let the knowing dowager see their application, and in the end completely removed the ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... to the religion of the cross by their bearing witness to its truth even unto death; but in process of time the habit grew of attaching a sort of mysterious efficacy to their merits; hence this third gradation in religious worship, namely, prayers to God that "He would hear his suppliants, and grant their requests for the sake of his martyred servant, and by the efficacy of ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... very white, and just a little hard inside, compared with Luxury's soft palm; a face honest, fair, and rather large than small; not beautiful, but exceedingly comely; a complexion not pink and white, but that delicately blended brickdusty color, which tints the whole cheek in fine gradation, outlasts other complexions twenty years, and beautifies the true Northern, even in old age. Gray, limpid, honest, point-blank, searching eyes; hair true nut-brown, without a shade of red or black; and a high, smooth forehead, full of sense. Across it ran one ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... site of his palace at some distance from the stronghold; where the river bent suddenly round a spur of the mountain, and watered a wider extent of land. The spur of the hill ran down, by an easy gradation, into the valley; and beyond it the hills separated into the wide plain of Merodasht that stretched southward many farsangs to the southern pass. Upon this promontory the king had caused to be built a ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... beautiful Gradation of Thoughts to shew how amiable Virtue is. We love a virtuous Man, says he, who lives in the remotest Parts of the Earth, though we are altogether out of the Reach of his Virtue, and can receive from it no Manner of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... by this change of scenes the passions are interrupted in their progression, and that the principal event, being not advanced by a due gradation of preparatory incidents, wants at last the power to move, which constitutes the perfection of dramatick poetry. This reasoning is so specious, that it is received as true even by those who in daily experience feel it to be false. The ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... spade is a tool and not a machine, but if a pair of scissors, a lever, or a crane are tools, and are considered as performing single simple processes, and not a number of organically relative processes, we may by a skilfully arranged gradation be led on to include the whole of machinery under tools. This difficulty is of course one which besets ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... chain of the Pyrenees which forms the embattled isthmus of the peninsula, in the centre of those blue pyramids, covered in gradation with snow, forests, and downs, there opens a narrow defile, a path cut in the dried-up bed of a perpendicular torrent; it circulates among rocks, glides under bridges of frozen snow, twines along ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... unwelcome words had stuck: he was Werther, it was true—a man who came too late. Another word was soon fulfilled; for the hot weather came, sudden, tropical, ferocious. Without gradation, the vernal days and languid noons were gone in a twinkling. The change came like another act of a play. One morning—though the dawn stirred cool and fragrant as all dawns before—the "boy" laid out Rudolph's white tunic, slipped in the shining buttons, smeared pipe-clay ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... resumption of the prevailing westerly winds it suddenly ceases, the air clears, and neither before nor after it is the atmosphere "steamy" or enervating. The average annual rainfall of the Pacific coast diminishes by regular gradation from point to point all the way from Puget Sound to the Mexican boundary. At Neah Bay it is 111 inches, and it steadily lessens down to Santa Cruz, 25.24; Monterey, 11.42; Point Conception, 12.21; San Diego, 11.01. There is fog on the coast in every month, but ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... upholding all creation: Who ever dost Thyself unmoved abide, Yet, day by day, the light, in due gradation, From hour to hour, through all ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... present day succeeds to the art of past centuries not immediately nor by an insensible gradation. It is preceded by an interval of absolute deadness in matters artistic. Sixty years ago art in almost every branch was a sealed book to the majority of even well-educated persons, and contentedly contemplated by them as such. All love ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... considerations urged in favor of the measure referred to are that in almost all the land districts, and particularly in those in which the lands have been long surveyed and exposed to sale, there are still remaining numerous and large tracts of every gradation of value, from the Government price downward; that these lands will not be purchased at the Government price so long as better can be conveniently obtained for the same amount; that there are large tracts which even the improvements ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... breakfast this morning, but if I were as indifferent to my breakfast as a philosopher should be, I should be doubtful. As to the conversation at breakfast, I can recall some of it easily, some with an effort, some only with a large element of doubt, and some not at all. Thus there is a continual gradation in the degree of self-evidence of what I remember, and a corresponding gradation in the ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... have only a general correspondence with the Greek Polemarch, Lochagus, etc.] who in their turn had to see that the required movement was executed by the men under their command: for such was the regular gradation of authority and responsibility in the Spartan army. Thanks to this perfect organization, in a very few minutes every man was in his place and ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... enough about Oriental etiquette not to introduce the matter on which he had come at the outset of the conversation. He passed and received the necessary compliments first, endured a discussion of local trade prospects, and then by an easy gradation led up to the powers of the local Kady. He did not speak Arabic himself, and Rad el Moussa had no English. But they had both served a life apprenticeship to sea trading, and the curse of the Tower of Babel had very little power over them. In ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... servitude, the most rigorous, is a blessing; that it accords with the creative intent of God, and with his revealed institutions; that a nation cannot be homogeneous, and should not aim at it; that there is a law and scale of gradation, on which the top is privilege and authority, the bottom labor and obedience. These are the radical theories of the respective sections of the land. Men often are profoundly ignorant of the principles which control their policy, as a ship is unconscious of the rudder that steers her. ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... than the greatest in an other. Thus, the heaviest wood is less heavy than the lightest of the metals; and the least valuable of the metals is perhaps of more value than the choicest wood. (2.) The comparative degree may increase upon itself, and be repeated to show the gradation. Thus, a man may ascend into the air with a balloon, and rise higher, and higher, and higher, and higher, till he is out of sight. This is no uncommon form of expression, and the intension is from comparative to comparative. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the darkness, ignorant of what was going to happen. He felt her hand clasping his. Without perceiving any gradation, he lost all consciousness of his body; he was no longer able to feel his limbs or internal organs. His mind remained active and alert. Nothing particular appeared ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... pipe, and running up and down the vents with a sliding finger, until finally he brought up against a high, shrill note, to which he gave the full force of his lungs, and, after holding it in loud blast for a moment, startled us by breaking off, without gradation, into a silence as sudden as if the music had snapped short off, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... the spray; up in the oaks the small knots, like bark rolled up in a dot, will be acorns. Purple vetches along the mounds, yellow lotus where the grass is shorter, and orchis succeeds to orchis. As I write them, so these things come—not set in gradation, but like the broadcast flowers in ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... modes of address as 'Dear,' 'Dearest,' 'Sweetest,' 'Darling,' and the like; but only for a moment. Usually, the overburdened heart hits at once upon the exact word or phrase which best expresses its ecstatic feeling. And so with less impassioned matters. There is a well-recognised gradation in the methods of epistolary salutation. The stranger is addressed as 'Sir,' the person of whom something is known as 'Dear Sir.' 'My Dear Sir' accompanies a rather better acquaintance; 'Dear Mr. Brown' marks an approach to intimacy; ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... the first and the second of these subjects of the apostolic petition. Whereas, if we take it as meaning, not the object on which the emotion is fixed, but the emotion itself, then all the three stand in a natural gradation and connection. We have, first, the Christian emotion; then the object upon which it is fixed; 'the glory of the inheritance'; then the power by which the latter is brought and the former is realised. We shall consider the second and third of these petitions ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... of life before long the merchant would pass for a reincorporation of his soul, and probably, because of his sins as an oppressor of the poor, come back as a turtle or a jackass; certainly not as a revered cow—he was too unholy. In the gradation of humans he was but a merchant of the caste of the third dimension in the great quartette of castes. It would not be like killing a Brahmin, a sin in the sight ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... of human experience. In connection with Goethe's Leipzig period we gave a specimen of the best work he was then capable of producing; when we place beside it such a poem as the following, we are reminded of the saying of Emerson that "the soul's advances are not made by gradation ... but rather by ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... qualifications of the brutes; though to possess any of the sensitive faculties in a higher degree, would render him miserable, ver. 173, &c. VII. That throughout the whole visible world, an universal order and gradation in the sensual and mental faculties is observed, which causes a subordination of creature to creature, and of all creatures to Man. The gradations of sense, instinct, thought, reflection, reason; that reason alone countervails all the other ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... consisted in remaining immovable. With the break of day, however, a gray light spread over the scene, and the travellers found themselves surrounded by a circle of lofty mountains, rising one above the other in magnificent gradation, and superbly dominated ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... the most interesting parts of the exhibition to the general visitor, as he sees here at a glance the various classes of the highest order of the animal creation, all grouped after their kinds, and in that gradation of development which nature has assigned them. Those specimens which are placed on the floor in the central space of the room include some large varieties of the Bears, and a few small specimens of Seals, including the young of the harp seal, with the white ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... anything. Nowadays, not only does the mind and policy of Parliament (subject to the exceptions before named) possess the common sort of moderation essential to the possibility of Parliamentary government, but also that exact gradation, that precise species of moderation, most agreeable to the nation at large. Not only does the nation endure a Parliamentary government, which it would not do if Parliament were immoderate, but it likes Parliamentary government. A sense of satisfaction permeates the country because most or the country ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... the act of Parliament nominating them to that authority; but in all other respects, except where the act and other subsequent acts have not broken in upon it, the whole course of the service remains upon the ancient footing, that is, the commercial footing, as to the gradation and order ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... as we possess the power to struggle, hope is the last feeling to desert the human mind. Men are endowed with every gradation of courage, from the calm energy of reflection, which is rendered still more effective by physical firmness, to the headlong precipitation of reckless spirit: from the resolution that grows more imposing and more respectable as there is greater occasion for its exercise, to the ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... can only be sold at a reduced price. There are few who would care to use either yellow or white fruit for canning or cooking in any way, but many prefer them for slicing, or like to use them with the red for this purpose; we have sorts showing every gradation from white or light yellow in color through shades of red to dark purple-red, and still others which show distinct colors in ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... make a morning call on an Esquimaux acquaintance, one must creep through a long tunnel; his house is all walls and no door, except such a one as an apple with a worm-hole has. One might, very probably, trace a regular gradation between these two extremes. In cities where the evenings are generally hot, the people have porches at their doors, where they sit, and this is, of course, a provocative to the interchange of civilities. A good deal, which in colder regions is ascribed to mean dispositions, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... intertissued with white and yellow flowers, like a broidery of pearls and gold. The whole scene was bathed in the exquisite light, and rich with the delicate perfumes of a glorious evening, which filled the sky over his head with every perfect gradation of rose and amber and amethyst, and breathed over the quiet landscape a sensation of unbroken peace. But peace did not remain long in Eric's heart; each well-remembered landmark filled his soul with recollections of the days when he had returned ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... land of a dream. Near at hand, a cucumber-tree, with its great broad green leaves and its deep red cones, leaning over the rocks, and spanning this illusive gray landscape from the zenith to the immediate foreground, gave the only touch of color to the scenic simulacrum in many a gradation of neutral tone. The jurymen hovered about under the boughs for a time, and then came back, still harassed and anxious, to their den, with perhaps some new question of doubt. For those without could perceive that once more they were crowding about the bier and talking together ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... different individuals to such a wide extent that the average wool-sorter leaves many an artist behind in his perception of colour-shades. The same odour is perceptible by one person and unrecognisable by another. In the gradation of sound, too, the same differences of perception will be commonly noticed. But quite apart from the scale or range of perception, the quality of a sense-impression is found to vary with different ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... primitive simplicity of her tropical home had not been one of easy gradation, but a precipitate plunge. The convulsion which ensued from the culmination of events long gathering about little Simiti had hurled her through the forest, down the scalding river, and out upon the tossing ocean with such swiftness that, as ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... over Venice. The tower of St Mark's, the domes of Sta. Maria, and the forest of spires and minarets that rise from all parts of Venice, were drawn in black outline against the burnished horizon. The sky passed, by an admirable gradation, from cherry red to enamelled blue; and the water, calm and limpid as a glass, gave back the exact reflection of this immense iridescence. Nearer the town the lagoon was like a vast mirror of bronze. Never had I seen Venice so lovely and ...
— A Summary History of the Palazzo Dandolo • Anonymous
... surroundings were exactly the same; others are more skillful in their peculiar method of throwing the tongue at an insect they wish to catch. Still others will be differently colored. They might be arranged to show a considerable gradation between the lightest and the darkest of the group, though there may not be anywhere in the row a considerable gap. It is variation in animals of the same parentage and same surroundings which in the mind of Mr. Darwin made evolution ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... the same word, and called the places we have spoken of—glens. A fine observer—the Editor of Gilpin's Forest Scenery—has said: "The gradation from extreme width downwards should be thus arranged,—strath, vale, dale, valley, glen, dell, ravine, chasm. In the strath, vale, and dale, we may expect to find the large, majestic, gently flowing river, or even ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the machinery of the various portcullises and drawbridges followed; next an overhauling of the bolts, chains, and other defences of the gates. Then came an inspection of the ordnance, from cannons down to drakes, through a gradation of names as uncouth to our ears, and as unknown to the artillery descended from them, as many of the Christian names of the puritans are to their descendants of the present day. At length, to conclude the inspection, lord Herbert ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... power was enlarged. The New England town was always the centre of political life, and each member of the town learned early his inalienable right to a participation in all the benefits which the community could confer. In town-meeting he learned to vote and to be voted for; a gradation of offices from fence-viewer or hog-reeve to selectman gave training in administration to all who had any capacity for organization or leadership; the discussion of town affairs sharpened the wits, and, better still, educated ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... persons should be marched off to the dens of the wild beasts: "Tell them off," said he, "from the bald man to the bald man." Yet these were prisoners committed, not for punishment, but trial. Nor, had it been otherwise, were the charges against them equal, but running through every gradation of guilt. But the elogia or records of their commitment, he would not so much as look at. With such inordinate capacities for cruelty, we cannot wonder that he should in his common conversation have ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... two classes of verbs, strong and weak. Strong verbs are conjugated partly by means of gradation, weak verbs by adding ...
— An Icelandic Primer - With Grammar, Notes, and Glossary • Henry Sweet
... currency, when they could not venture on an additional loan or tax, because the real operation of such issue is not understood by the people, and the pressure of it is irregularly distributed, and with an unperceived gradation. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the Governor in a trap. Moreover, it was a trap which he had not only entered voluntarily, but which he had set himself; he had played into the Prince's hands, and was frantic to see his adversary tranquilly winning the game. It was almost melancholy to observe the gradation of his tone from haughty indignation to dismal concession. In an elaborate letter which he addressed "to the particular states, bishops, councillors, and cities of the Netherlands," he protested as to the innocence of his intentions, and complained bitterly ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... crossed with other species. On the other hand, not only is it not proved that all species give rise to hybrids infertile inter se, but there is much reason to believe that, in crossing, species exhibit every gradation from perfect sterility ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... of a strong protecting government. One substantial fact has been established, owing to our having crossed over ten degrees of latitude in the centre of the continent, or from 5 deg. south to 5 deg. north latitude, which is this: There exists 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 ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... of the Seven Gables" Hawthorne attained a connection of parts and a masterly gradation of tones which did not belong, in the same fulness, to "The Scarlet Letter." There is, besides, a larger range of character, in this second work, and a much more nicely detailed and reticulated portrayal of the individuals. Hepzibah is a painting on ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... flowers of the Rose the stamens exhibited almost every conceivable gradation between their ordinary form and that of the carpels, while some of the ovules contained pollen in greater or less abundance. Speaking generally, the most common state of things in these flowers was the occurrence on the throat of ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... the lower portion of the mountain, evidently accumulated at a later period, and slanting at an angle of 45 deg., displayed distinct strata of light brown, a deep band of grey, then dark brown, light brown, a thin layer of grey, and then a gradation of beautiful warm burnt sienna colour, getting richer and richer in tone towards the base. Here at the bottom, all round the mountain, and in appearance not unlike the waves of a choppy sea in shallow water, rose hundreds of broken-up, pointed hillocks, ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... have been characterized. But if he is neither an idealist, nor a philistine, nor a pleasure lover, surely he is compounded of such elements, and does not escape their implications. He desires something most of all, even though his highest ideal be only an inference from the gradation of his immediate purposes. This highest ideal represents what he conceives to be the greatest worth or value attainable in the universe, and its adoption is based upon the largest generalization that he can make or borrow. The ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... doubtful. Were we to trust internal evidence—the evidence of style and handling—we should be inclined to name this not the earliest but the latest and ripest of Pisano's works. It may be suggested in passing that the form of the lunette was favourable to the composition by forcing a gradation in the figures from the centre to either side. There is an engraving of this bas-relief in Ottley's Italian ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... signal to shorten sail is made, he will probably take in sail in a gradation the ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... colour has never been formulated. So far as we understand it, its principles correspond curiously to those of melodious sound. It is as impossible to produce the best effect from one tone or colour, as to make a melody upon one note of the harmonic scale; it is skilful variation of tone, the gradation or even judicious opposition of tint which gives exquisite satisfaction to the eye. In music, sequence produces this effect upon the ear, and in colour, juxtaposition and gradation upon the eye. Notes follow notes in melody as shade ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... them, were swept away. But who will be bold enough to say that there was to be found at that time one who was in every way perfect, and who brought his work, whether in invention, or design, or colouring, to the standard of to-day, and contrived the sweet gradation of his figures with the deep shades of colour, in a manner that the lights remained only on the parts in relief, and likewise contrived those perforations and certain extraordinary refinements in marble statuary that are seen in the statues of to-day? The credit of this is ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... By this gradation of exorbitant claims and oppressive measures, have they at length arrived, my lords, at the summit of insolence; by these steps have they ascended once more the towering throne of universal monarchy; nor was any thing wanting to complete ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... Epilepsy shows every gradation, from symptoms which cannot be described in language, to severe grand mal. Gowers says: "The elements of an epileptic attack may be extended, and thereby be made less intense, though not less distressing. ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... itself in a regular order: the largest fragments are on or nearest the head; the smaller are farther away, diminishing in regular gradation, until the farthest extremity, the tail, consists of sand, dust, and gases. There is a continual movement of the particles of the tail, operated upon by the attraction and repulsion of the sun. The fragments collide and crash against each other; by a natural law ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... but ill assist, for one of the most striking features is the great and sudden depth which you look down, the effect of which we know the pencil cannot at all convey. The side on which we stand, however, though steep, is not absolutely precipitous; on the contrary, the gradation of crag and projection, by which it descends to the bottom, is one of the finest things in the view. Close on our right a lofty peak presents its rocky face to the valley, to which it bears down in a magnificent mass, shouldering ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... excreted by the two cement-ducts, through two rows of orifices, one on each side of the surrounded portion of the peduncle; and I actually traced, in one case, the yellow pulpy substance coming out of the cement-ducts. The upper apertures are in gradation larger than those below them, and they stand a little further apart from each other; these are figured as seen from the outside, much magnified, at Pl. I, fig. 6 d. I did not succeed in finding the cement-glands, but I followed the ducts, of rather large size, running for a considerable ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... they were shorter than on the evening of the 3d. These are caused by the tops of the great cumuli of the storm, when sunk below the horizon, intercepting the sun's rays, which still shine on the upper atmosphere. The gradation was very marked, and accorded with the different distances of the central vortex on the 3d and 4th—although, on the 4th, the nearest distance must have been over four hundred miles to the southern boundary of ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... no person being capable of laughing, who is incapable of thinking. For some people suddenly break out into violent spasms, ha, ha, ha! and then without any gradation, change at once into downright stupidity; as for ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... before he went abroad, and better known by his conduct after, to be a man of the most distinguished honor that ever served his Majesty; he served his Majesty in a military situation for many years, and afterwards in that high civil situation in India. It is known that through every step and gradation of a high military service, until he arrived at the highest of all, there never was the least blot upon him, or doubt or suspicion of his character; that his temper for the most part, and his manners, were fully answerable to his virtues, and a noble ornament ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Gradation and the Topical Method of Historical Study; Historical Literature and Authorities; Books for Collateral Reading. By Professor W. F. Allen, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... the introduction of a federal system of "Home Rule all round" if such a scheme had been honestly contemplated. The first thing to keep in mind is that the internal constitution of the Dominions presents a whole gradation of constitutional types. There is the loose federal system of Australia, in which the Commonwealth powers are strictly limited and defined, and all residuary powers left to the States. There is the close ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... he murmured, caressingly. "And here and there are marvelous touches, you probably perceive them, sir. It attracted great attention on the Boulevard, as we came along. And then a gradation of tones! That's what it is to know how to paint. I don't say it because I am her father, sir; but as one man of taste addressing another I cannot help observing that you have there an exquisite work. It is hard to produce ...
— The American • Henry James
... and for measure of capacity, the litre, a cubic decimeter. The weights were derived from these measures; the gramme being the weight of one cubic centimeter of distilled water. The system of decimal gradation was applied to all of these; that is, each denomination represented a tenth part of the one above it, and ten times as much as the one next below it, the Latin and Greek numerals being prefixed as we have already described with reference ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... sometimes feeding on the same, sometimes on different plants. In every such case the valleys that are nearest to each other furnish the most nearly allied forms; and a full set of the varieties of each species presents a minute gradation of forms between the more divergent types found in the more widely ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... perceiving and abhorring evil, however remote from the immediate sphere of sensations with which that individual mind is conversant. Imagination or mind employed in prophetically imaging forth its objects, is that faculty of human nature on which every gradation of its progress, nay, every, the minutest, change, depends. Pain or pleasure, if subtly analysed, will be found to consist entirely in prospect. The only distinction between the selfish man and the virtuous man is, that ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... explored, a similar succession of events, culminating in the production of mineral veins, has been proved to have taken place,* (* "Mineral Veins" page 16.) and it appears that the origin of such veins is the natural result of the plutonic intrusion. There is, also, sometimes a complete gradation from veins of perfectly crystallised granite, through others abounding in quartz at the expense of the other constituents, up to veins filled with pure quartz, as at Porth Just, near Cape Cornwall; and, again, the same vein will in some parts be filled with felspar; in others, contain irregular masses ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... period before the Glacial epoch or between different glacial epochs in England, when the Englishman was a savage, using rude stone tools, was then fully ascertained, and, what was more significant, there were clearly shown a gradation and evolution even in the history of that period. It was found that this ancient Stone epoch showed progress and development. In the upper layers of the caves, with remains of the reindeer, who, although he has migrated from these regions, still exists in more northern climates, were found ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... device of the professor's, the light emanating from a series of electric lamps shaded by coloured glass screens, so tinted as to permit, by the simple manipulation of certain concealed mirrors, the effect of every description of light, from that of the unclouded midday sun, through every gradation of morning or afternoon light, to that of sunset, the softest dusk of evening, or even the light of ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner. Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour. Round the sides of his head—without the slightest gradation of grey to break the force of the extraordinary contrast—it had turned completely white. The line between the two colours preserved no sort of regularity. At one place, the white hair ran up into the black; at another, the black hair ran down into ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... increased by the consciousness, felt by the same side of being supported in its demands by right, by reason, and by the Constitution; and the consciousness, on the opposite side, of contending against the force of all these solemn considerations. It is farther to be considered, that in the gradation between the smallest and largest States, there are several, which, though most likely in general to arrange themselves among the former are too little removed in extent and population from the latter, to second an opposition to their just and legitimate pretensions. Hence it is by no ...
— The Federalist Papers
... Now if this be true of different colours, it must be no less so of the different shades of the same colour, that each of them produces a distinct idea, independent of the rest. For if this should be denied, it is possible, by the continual gradation of shades, to run a colour insensibly into what is most remote from it; and if you will not allow any of the means to be different, you cannot without absurdity deny the extremes to be the same. Suppose therefore a person to have enjoyed his sight for thirty years, and to have become perfectly ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune. It happened, however, on several occasions, that persons of rank were driven to America by political and religious quarrels. Laws were made to establish a gradation of ranks; but it was soon found that the soil of America was opposed to a territorial aristocracy. To bring that refractory land into cultivation, the constant and interested exertions of the owner himself ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... ended, the Chorus entered with slow and dignified pace—seven men and women from one side, six from the other, all in a kind of Oriental costume, picturesque and handsome. The tallest came first, and so on in gradation, so that when ranged in front of the curtain they formed a kind of pyramid. The central figure then began the prologue, an explanation. Then the basso commenced singing an air, during which the Chorus divided, falling back to the sides and kneeling, while ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... supposed to be. The public gets only a portion of the picture, and from an enormous group of cases, a few contrasted ones are picked out for the sake of the dramatic effect. The limelight of public notice is upon them and the softer lights and shadows are omitted. The public does not see the gradation. On the one hand we see the rich woman, the millionaire art dealer, the financial pirate being leniently dealt with, on the other hand we see the little milliner, the Italian fruit vender, and the ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... to awaken the sympathy of human beings; and Raphael, in learning how to portray it, had found the way to the heart. In mere grandeur of invention he was surpassed by Michael Angelo. Titian excelled him in coloring, and Correggio in the beautiful gradation of tone; but Raphael knew how to paint the soul; in this he stood alone. This was the great secret of a power which seemed to operate like magic. In his paintings there is something which makes music on the chords of every heart; for they are the expression of a ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... not; it is not improbable that the lady Mason might persuade or compel her to desist, or, perhaps, she could not easily find accomplices wicked enough to concur in so cruel an action; for it may be conceived, that those who had, by a long gradation of guilt, hardened their hearts against the sense of common wickedness, would yet be shocked at the design of a mother to expose her son to slavery and want, to expose him without interest, and without provocation; and Savage might, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... mother,—perhaps all three, for Private Searing, although he had repeatedly refused promotion, was not without a certain kind of ambition,—he heard a rushing sound in the air, like that made by the wings of a great bird swooping down upon its prey. More quickly than he could apprehend the gradation, it increased to a hoarse and horrible roar, as the missile that made it sprang at him out of the sky, striking with a deafening impact one of the posts supporting the confusion of timbers above him, smashing it into matchwood, and bringing down the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... Captain Hewitt, a leader of the ton, who, after ruining himself and family at the gambling table, ran away from them, and was not since heard of. His wife being left to herself, and having probably been tainted by his evil example, by an easy gradation became first embarrassed, then a prostitute, then a thief, and on the occasion above mentioned exhibited one of the most distressing spectacles of vice and misery ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... It was impossible with paper to establish the nice gradation necessary to equalize the pressure. And then, also, too much paper made ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... and the hunger of the north wind bites their peaks into barrenness; and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, death-like, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight. And, having once traversed in thought this gradation of the zoned iris of the earth in all its material vastness, let us go down nearer to it, and watch the parallel change in the belt of animal life: the multitudes of swift and brilliant creatures that glance in the air and sea, or tread the ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... selection of successive, slight, but profitable modifications. We can thus understand why nature moves by graduated steps in endowing certain animals of the same class with their several instincts. I have attempted to show how much light the principle of gradation throws on the admirable architectural powers of the hive-bee. Habit no doubt often comes into play in modifying instincts; but it certainly is not indispensable, as we see in the case of neuter insects, which leave no progeny to inherit the effects of long-continued habit. On the ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... discovered, cannot be known. He that misses his end will never be as much pleased as he that attains it, even when he can impute no part of his failure to himself; and when the end is to please the multitude, no man, perhaps, has a right, in things admitting of gradation and comparison, to throw the whole blame upon his judges, and totally to exclude diffidence and shame by a haughty consciousness of ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... recurrence of the same motive in music; the use of a single hue to color the different objects in a painting, as in a nocturne of Whistler: these are simple illustrations of harmony. An almost equally simple case is gradation or lawful change of quality in space and time—the increase or decrease of loudness in music of saturation or brightness of hue in painting, the gentle change of direction of a curved line. In these cases there is, of course, a dynamic ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... in the vowel-sounds are also introduced, in the case of strong verbs, by the usual 'gradation' due to their method of conjugation. To meet this difficulty in some measure, numerous (but not exhaustive) cross-references have been introduced, as when, e.g. 'Bar, bare' is given, with a cross-reference to Beren. Further help in this respect is to be had from the ...
— A Concise Dictionary of Middle English - From A.D. 1150 To 1580 • A. L. Mayhew and Walter W. Skeat
... may degrade, but, at the same time, it elevates. Where this caste was distinguished by master and slave, the distinction was most marked, because there was no intermediate gradation. It was the highest and the lowest. It was between the highest and purest of the races of the human family, and the lowest and most degraded; and this relation was free from the debasing influences of caste ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... were invited, sitting at a lower table, while the masters had the higher one on the dais, and a third was reserved for the apprentices after they should have waited on their masters—in fact it was an imitation of the orders of chivalry, knights, squires, and pages, and the gradation of rank was as strictly observed as by the nobility. Giles, considering the feast to be entirely in his honour, though the transfer of his indentures had been made at Salisbury, endeavoured to come out in some of his bravery, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... frendshipps by extraordinary application; then his ascent was so quicke, that it seemed rather a flight, then a growth, and he was such a darlinge of fortune, that he was at the topp, before he was seene at the bottome, for the gradation of his titles, was the effecte, not cause of his first promotion, and as if he had bene borne a favorite, he was supreme the first moneth he came to courte, and it was wante of confidence, not of creditt, that he had not all at first, ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... wood carbonized to a certain degree, but retaining distinctly its woody texture. Dr. MacCulloch, On Rocks, p. 636., observes: "In its chemical properties, lignite holds a station intermediate between peat and coal; while among the varieties a gradation in this respect may be traced; the brown and more organised kinds approaching very near to peat, while the more compact kinds, such as jet, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... eyes of the travellers that original aspect of the lunar landscapes, raw in tone, without gradation of colours, only white and black, for diffused light was wanting. Still the sight of this desolate world was very curious on account of its very strangeness. They were moving above this chaotic region as if carried along by the breath ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... required, the change from the utmost resilience to the utmost rigidity is effected in the time necessary to close the fists. Every gradation, however, between the closed fists and the tips of the open fingers is at the option ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... our mental growth begin? When or where did the English language begin, or the French, or the German? Was there a first English word spoken? From the first animal sound, if we can conceive of such, up to the human speech of to-day, there is an infinite gradation of ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... Morgan's view of the successive stages of culture is one which could not well have been marked out in all its parts except by a student of American archaeology. Aboriginal America is the richest field in the world for the study of barbarism. Its people present every gradation in social life during three ethnical periods—the upper period of savagery and the lower and middle periods of barbarism—so that the process of development may be most systematically and instructively studied. Until we have become familiar with ancient ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... certainly, no poetry can be masterly. Like a young man rich in this world's goods coming of age, he must go into affairs, and ascertain his outlook. There must be no disguises. An exact estimate of realities, as towards himself, he must have—a delicately measured gradation of certainty in things—from the distant, haunted horizon of mere surmise or imagination, to the actual [127] feeling of sorrow in his heart, as he reclined one morning, alone instead of in pleasant company, to ponder ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... together again, and then he could see from the way Miss Dudley and 'Manda Grier behaved, just what they thought. He had many minds about the matter himself, and had gone from an extreme of self-abhorrence to one of self-vindication, and between these he had halted at every gradation of blame and exculpation. But perhaps what chiefly kept him away was the uncertainty of his future; till he could give some shape to that he had no courage to face the past. Sometimes he wished never to see either of those girls again; but at other times he had a ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... show the nature of compound leaves is to mount a series showing every gradation of cutting, from a simple, serrate leaf to a compound one (Figs. 24 and 25). A teacher, who would prepare in summer such illustrations as these, would find them of great use in his winter lessons. The actual objects make an impression that the cuts ...
— Outlines of Lessons in Botany, Part I; From Seed to Leaf • Jane H. Newell
... with Roumanians are of daily occurrence; many of the gipsies do not even know their own language; and their number is rapidly diminishing. Intellectually they are talented, but lazy. Many of the men, and still more of the women, are very handsome. Although every gradation of shade is to be found amongst their faces, pretty much as one sees in the negro race in the United States, the features of the Roumanian gipsies are generally well-formed Indo-European. Nothing is more ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... in hot weather outside blinds that shield the glass from the direct rays of the sun keep the rooms cooler than any form of inside shutters; they allow a gradation of light and a free circulation of air. You can even leave the window open during a summer shower without danger of being drenched. Last but not least they are inexpensive. The wrong side of the outside blinds appears ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... rocks may be known by not effervescing when a drop of nitric, sulphuric or other acid is applied to them, or by the grains not being readily scratched or broken by ordinary pressure. In nature there is every intermediate gradation, from perfectly loose sand to the hardest sandstone. In MICACEOUS SANDSTONES mica is very abundant; and the thin silvery plates into which that mineral divides are often arranged in layers parallel to the planes of stratification, giving a slaty ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... Grey, and I have therefore been to Windsor this morning to resign my hard task. The Queen, as usual, was very gracious.... I have left a paper with her in which I state that we were prepared to advise free trade in corn without gradation and without delay; but that I could support Sir Robert Peel in any measure which he should ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... normal", "average" (from 90 to 110), "superior", "very superior", "exceedingly superior"; but this is arbitrary and really unscientific, for what the facts show is not a separation into classes, but a continuous gradation from one extreme to the other. The lower extreme is near zero, and the upper extreme thus far found is ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... leisure, in his old Camp, 20th June, while Friedrich, from the first gray of morning, and diligently all day long, was withdrawing from the trenches of Prag,—Friedrich's people, self and goods getting folded out in the finest gradation, and with perfect success; no Daun to hinder him,—Daun leisurely doing TE-DEUM, forty miles off, helping on the WRONG side by that exertion! [Cogniazzo, ii. 367.]—"Poor Browne, he is dead of his wounds, in Prag yonder," writes Westphalen, in his Leitmeritz Journal, "news came to us ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... from the quantity of stones, etc., so we were compelled to sit down quietly and smoke our pipes until we could see to pick our way. In the tropics there is but little dawn; the sun springs up without heralding his approach by a lengthened gradation from darkness to night, as obtains in more temperate climes, and but little patience was requisite to enable us to commence our search. As many of our readers are doubtless aware that in Australia no journey is ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... would necessitate such absolute torpor of the brain and spinal cord as certainly would be quite incompatible with the exigencies of civilized life. There is a certain alternation between the periods of activity of the two systems, but this varies in infinite gradation; from the digestive torpor of the savage, analogous to that of ruminating animals, up to the unconscious digestion of healthy men of temperate habits and marked intellectual and physical activity, to whom all ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... sense;" and the other connected with our moral nature, and regulated by our "moral sense," or conscience. In both of these departments, however, the methods which Nature employs in guiding to the practical application of the pupil's knowledge are precisely the same, consisting of a regular gradation of three distinct steps, or stages. These steps we have found to follow each other in the following order. There is always first, some fundamental truth, or idea—some definite part of our knowledge of which use is to be made;—there is next an inference, ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... this gradation in temptation. The profits of the world and pleasures of sin are held out as allurements. The apostasy of others suggested. The difficulties, dangers, and sufferings of the Lord's people, are contrasted with the prosperity of sinners. The recollections of our sins ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... habits which govern the individual's life—those habits that touch his existence as an organism—are the most persistent and imperative. Beyond these come the higher wants—later-formed habits of the individual or the race—in a somewhat irregular and by no means invariable gradation. Some of these higher wants, as for instance the habitual use of certain stimulants, or the need of salvation (in the eschatological sense), or of good repute, may in some cases take precedence of the lower or more elementary wants. In general, the longer the habituation, ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... language, as Dryden observed. Lapse of time, however, is not the chief cause of variation in the sense of words. The matters which terms are used to denote are often so complicated or so refined in the assemblage, interfusion, or gradation of their qualities, that terms do not exist in sufficient abundance and discriminativeness to denote the things and, at the same time, to convey by connotation a determinate sense of their agreements and differences. In discussing ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... different forms of diet as enumerated herein is to be found in the mechanical gradation of the substances in accordance with the progressive ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann |
