"Meagreness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... proved the extremely keen and widespread interest. England would have been forced to act on her declaration at a time when the American Government could not afford to ignore the interests of the cotton industry, with its influence on domestic politics. The full effect of the meagreness of the crops, and on the other hand the increase of consumption in the United States, and consequent rise in price, was not yet realized by the public, nor even in cotton circles. The cotton industry viewed with ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... has still the sterile guise of the campaign, where the hills are bare around the hospitals, and the railway taverns are whittled to skeletons. I have really seen whole houses, little more than shells, reduced to meagreness by the pocket-knife. The name of almost everybody on the continent is cut somewhere in the South; Virginia has more than enough names carved over her fireside altars to inscribe ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... in past ages, in poverty. Little beyond the most meagre of diet can he commonly provide them, and it is the joint anxiety of ensuring even this, that wears and disfeatures him and them, as much doubtless as its meagreness. Bread, of barley or wheat or rye, is the great staple, supplemented by what milk can be spared from the town's demands. Eggs and butter go oftener to the market. Vegetables, such as lentils and beans, are also important, a few potatoes, occasional fruits and berries, ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... certitude of a god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friends—in the clear, white light of his logic they are exposed as frauds and shams. He sees through them, and all that he sees is their frailty, their meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness. No longer do they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms, like all the other little humans, fluttering their May-fly life-dance of an hour. They are without freedom. They are puppets of ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... colours of his own Western sky the glory of prairie, foot-hill, and mountain, the greatness and promise of the new land, and the worth of the work he was trying to do. But his two years of missionary experience had made him feel the hardship, the isolation, the meagreness, of the life which she would have to share with him. The sunset colours were still there, but they were laid upon ragged rock, lonely hill, and wind-swept, empty prairie. It took him days of hard riding and harder thinking to give ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... present would not be a fit occasion to enter with any minuteness into the history of Russian letters, or to give, in fact, more than a passing allusion to its chief features; the translator hopes that he will be excused for the meagreness of the present notice. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... memories dating back to early childhood—the remembrance of a servant's face. Here is the tale, Marie. A thousand times I have gone over it to myself, only to be disappointed at its meagreness. My parents must have died when I was too young to have remembered them, judging from what this attendant seems to have told me. I have that impression resisting all arguments. My recollections all centre about a gray-haired man of the confidential-servant class. He was my companion and humored ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... inference that they were contemporaneous, or nearly so, may well be left to take care of itself. The attempt has been made to treat with levity the whole subject of the antiquity of man because of the numerical meagreness of the facts adduced in support of it. But as to this, it need only be observed that as a new theme for investigation, its facts must necessarily be meagre, as must be the facts of any science in its inchoate condition, and that they are steadily growing in volume, so that it is not safe to venture ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... hunger for learning, her own strength and weakness, and while she had lost to the Widow Plosell, she had clearly seen that it was not her fault but Gus Carline's meagreness of mind and shallowness of soul. Instead of losing her confidence, she ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... my mission. All that wild day in the snow it had seemed the merest farce. The three words Harry Bullivant had scribbled had danced through my head in a crazy fandango. They were present to me now, but coolly and sanely in all their meagreness. ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... see it. Everybody was anxious to make use of the last opportunity he would have for entitling himself to say—'I too have seen Kant.' This went on for many days—during which, from morning to night, the house was thronged with the public. Great was the astonishment of all people at the meagreness of Kant's appearance; and it was universally agreed that a corpse so wasted and fleshless had never been beheld. His head rested upon the same cushion on which once the gentlemen of the university had presented an address to him; and ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... There was something grotesque in their decrepitude. Their toothless mouths, their hooked noses, the meagreness of the active one, and the hanging yellow cheeks of the other (the still one, whose head trembled) would have been laughable if the sight of their dreadful physical degradation had not been appalling to one's eyes, had not gripped ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... he was minded to use this victory for all that it was worth. It is matter of regret that practically no account is given us of the steps by which the measures that he sought to have enacted were attained. This very meagreness, however, is strong evidence that the measures were enacted without much friction. Apparently, the only object of the delegates now was to suit their action to the monarch's will. They therefore adopted as their guiding star the propositions ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... many other facts encourage those who look to the speedy Christianizing of this land. And yet we cannot, I repeat, ignore the fact of the relative meagreness of the results. It is a sad truth that the total Protestant Indian community, at the present time, is only one ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... heat of this long ride, we felt our total lack of water and the meagreness of our supply of food. Our thirst became so oppressive as we were marched here from Culpeper, some four miles with scarcely a halt to rest, under our heavy loads, and through the heat and deep dust of the road, that we drank ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... years of the second century," [137:3] when Victor of Rome attempted to force the Western usage with respect to Easter on the Asiatic Christians. In this he uses the expression "he that leaned on the bosom of the Lord," which occurs in the fourth Gospel. Nothing could more forcibly show the meagreness of our information regarding the Gospels than that such a phrase is considered of value as evidence for one of them. In fact the slightness of our knowledge of these works is perfectly astounding when the importance which is attached to them ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... religious thought and religious life. They carry in them the evidence of a great reaction and a scornful indignant rising up against what were going about and were currently received as adequate ideas of religion. The dryness and primness and meagreness of the common Church preaching, correct as it was in its outlines of doctrine, and sober and temperate in tone, struck cold on a mind which had caught sight, in the New Testament, of the spirit and life of its words. The recoil was ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... afford to spend at that rate.' Violet Fane is certainly lavishly extravagant of incident, plot, and character. But we must not quarrel with richness of subject-matter at a time when tenuity of purpose and meagreness of motive seem to be becoming the dominant notes of contemporary fiction. The side-issues of the story are so complex that it is difficult, almost impossible, to describe the plot in any adequate manner. The interest centres round a young girl, Helen Davenant by name, who contracts a private ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... looks at the ancient tents, the humble equipment, the ring of small shockheads, a great tenderness comes over him. The Die-Hards are so tiny, so poor, so pitifully handicapped, and yet so bold in their meagreness. Not one of them has had anything that might be called a chance. Their few years have been spent in kennels and closes, always hungry and hunted, with none to care for them; their childish ears have been habituated to every coarseness, their small ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... caught for food in numbers, many on the roof of the house. In order to pass the time and keep up their courage, the Dutch sometimes had entertainments, at which the cheerfulness of the partakers had to make up for the meagreness of the fare. After the return of the sun the bears again came very close, so that there was a number of hunting adventures with them, all of which came off successfully. Several bears made themselves at home in the vessel abandoned by the crew, casting everything about, and broke up the hatch of ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... room! Though its walls were narrow, and its furniture simple even to meagreness, it was a palace in her regard to the luxurious chambers she had left. It was all her own. She need not veil her heart there. No semblances were required. No intrusion feared. It seemed to her, for a time, as if she had been so lifted ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... court; the chair on the extreme right was for the "prisoner's friend," that on the left awaited the Judge-Advocate. About five yards in front of the table, in the centre of an empty space, stood two more chairs turned towards it. Otherwise the room was as bare as a guard-room. And this austere meagreness gave it a certain dignity of its own as of a place where nothing was allowed to distract the mind from the serious business in hand. At the door stood an orderly with a red armlet bearing the imprint of ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... at Narni, at Spoleto, at Assisi, at Perugia, at Cortona, at Arezzo. But we have generally to clip our vows a little when we come to fulfil them; and so it befell that when my blest springtime arrived I had to begin as resignedly as possible, yet with comparative meagreness, at Assisi. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... in retrospect. The truth was that, as she said herself, she was not in her element. "I've not a sympathy with inanimate objects," she remarked to Isabel at the National Gallery; and she continued to suffer from the meagreness of the glimpse that had as yet been vouchsafed to her of the inner life. Landscapes by Turner and Assyrian bulls were a poor substitute for the literary dinner-parties at which she had hoped to meet the genius and renown ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... appliance of every theatrical accessory;—of architecture, lighting, music, the illusion of decorations changing in a moment as if by enchantment, machinery and costume;—by all this, we are now so completely spoiled, that this earlier meagreness of stage decoration will in no wise satisfy us. Much, however, might be urged in favour of such a constitution of the theatre. Where the spectators are not allured by any splendid accessories, they will be the more difficult to please in the main thing, namely, the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... His shoulders were vast, and his lower limbs thick-set, double-jointed, and slightly curved outward, in that formation which takes so much from beauty to give so largely to strength. But Lydon, except that he was slender even almost to meagreness, was beautifully and delicately proportioned; and the skillful might have perceived that with much less compass of muscle than his foe, that which he had was more seasoned—iron and compact. In proportion, too, as he wanted flesh, he was likely to possess activity; and a haughty smile on his resolute ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... for its master, as a devout Catholic gazes upon the image of the Virgin Mother. Since they had entered the tent he had scarcely spoken more than a single sentence at a time. Only once had he given a glimpse of himself. Then he had apologised for the meagreness of the meal. "To-morrow," he had said, "we will have game, the country is full of it; but to-day—" he had looked down as he had spoken—"to-day I felt somehow as though I could not kill anything. Life is ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... building, find the rapidly advancing dormitory and boarding hall at Pleasant Hill, Tenn., and for the slightly increased accommodations in the Grand View Normal Institute, but we see clearly that enlargement only necessitates greater enlargement. The meagreness of the supply renders the destitution more manifest. The little which has been done, and well done, only gives louder voice to the ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... fear, had long since begun to be deteriorated by acquaintance with other models of feminine loveliness than it was my happiness to know in America. I often found, or seemed to find, if I may dare to confess it, in the persons of such of my dear countrywomen as I now occasionally met, a certain meagreness, (Heaven forbid that I should call it scrawniness!) a deficiency of physical development, a scantiness, so to speak, in the pattern of their material make, a paleness of complexion, a thinness of voice,—all of which characteristics, nevertheless, only made me resolve so much ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for cookery, and, to say the truth, had fairly incurred her present meagreness by often choosing to go without her dinner rather than be attendant on the rotation of the spit, or ebullition of the pot. Her zeal over the fire, therefore, was quite an heroic test of sentiment. ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Peri excluded from Paradise, and I often longed to assume the costume of a boy in order to learn Latin, Greek, and mathematics, which were then regarded as essential to a liberal education for boys, but were not thought of for girls. To give some idea of the educational meagreness alluded to above, I may mention the fact that during my schooldays I never remember to have seen a map, while all my knowledge of geography was derived from passages learnt by rote." I quote this from one of the most delightful ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... evidence that the land connection between Ireland and Scotland continued to a considerably later period than between it and England, to which, and as far as can be seen to no other possible cause is to be attributed two very striking characteristics of its fauna, namely, its excessive meagreness and its strikingly northern character. Not only does it come far short of the already meagre English fauna, but all the distinctively southern species are the ones missing, though there is nothing in the climate to account for the fact. The Irish hare, for instance, ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... true woman! the feeling creature of circumstances, at the Restoration she resumed it, and when the new court of Charles the Second would not endure her obsolete haughtiness, the dowager-queen left it in all the full bitterness of her spirit. An habitual gloom, and the meagreness of grief, during the commonwealth, had changed a countenance once the most lively; and her eyes, whose dark and dazzling lustre was ever celebrated, then only shone in tears. When she told her physician, Sir Theodore ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... fact. The Australians, for instance, have no term to express the relationship between mother and child. This is because the physical fact is of no significance, and not as Mr. Thomas thinks because of the meagreness of the language.[325] Our field anthropologists do not quite understand the savage in this respect. It is of no use preparing a genealogical tree on the basis of civilised knowledge of genealogy if such a document is beyond the ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... economy the meagreness of our understanding is especially remarkable; we have not yet grasped the obvious fact—a fact of immeasurable import for all of the social sciences—that with little exception the wealth and capital possessed by a given generation are not produced by its own toil but are the inherited ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... Harem ready to vary the monotony by engaging in this unromantic business; and the agitation among the "sealed" sisterhood, though by no means boisterous, is lively, though all have tact to appear indifferent in the presence of their awful lord. The meagreness of the royal allowance of pin-money is the consideration that renders the prize important in the eyes of each of the competitors; and yet it is strange, in all the feminine vanity and vexation of spirit that the occasion engenders, how little of jealous bitterness and heartburning ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... seek and nothing find,— That makes me sigh and sigh. Lord Lackfood presses me, Of hunger sure I'll die; My wife, my child go supperless, My butler is Sir Meagreness." ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... we fuller details, that the men of Bernicia and Deira made a harder fight for their lands and their churches than the West Saxon annals would lead us to suppose. Still, after making all allowance for the meagreness of our authorities, there remains the indubitable fact that a heathen kingdom was established in the pure English land of Baeda and Cuthberht, while the Christian faith and the Saxon nationality held their own for ever ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... dismal subjects of my lonely meditations. I did the poor girl wrong. That night she neither sung nor danced; and when I saw her again, I was shocked at the visible alteration for the worse which her appearance exhibited She was now grown thin, almost to meagreness; her cheeks were very wan, her lips whitened, and her beauty greatly faded in ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... while fragrant warm delights are simmering for supper. His wife, Amarita by name, stood at the stove, piloting apple turnovers in a pool of fat. At a first glance she and her husband seemed an ill-matched pair, he with a thin face and precise patch of whisker at the ear, a noticeable and general meagreness of build, and she dark and small, with a face flashing vivid intelligence. Elihu's mother—a large, loosely made, blond old lady—sat by the window, out of range of the lamplight even, knitting by feeling, and doubling her pleasures through keeping her glance out of ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... Pathology are almost as much in the background as anatomy in the Hippocratic collection. As a formal discipline and part of medical education we find no trace of these studies among the pre-Alexandrian physicians. But the meagreness of the number of ascertained facts did not prevent much speculation among a people eager to seek the causes of things. Of that speculation we learn much from the fragments of contemporary medical writers and philosophers, from the medical works of the Alexandrian period, and to some ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the fountain, and the peasants suspended their operations to look at him. He looked at them, and saw in them, without knowing it, the slow sure filing down of misery-worn face and figure, that was to make the meagreness of Frenchmen an English superstition which should survive the truth through the best part of ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... two bushels of wheat could have been bought for a quarter of a dollar in Illinois. Yet if, notwithstanding this, we should allow a tenfold value in exchange to the dollar of Philip's day, we should be surprised at the meagreness of his revenues, of his expenditures, and of the debts which at the close of his career brought him to bankruptcy; were the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the Fourth of July festival, in honor of our nation's independence, with its speeches, its drums, its toasts, and its cannon; the 'table d'hote,' or in plain English, the hotel dinner-table, so remarkable for the multitude of its dishes and the meagreness of their contents; the harvest-feast, the exact opposite of the last-named, even to the mellow thirds and fifths that come floating over the valleys from the old-fashioned dinner-horn, calling in the tired laborers; its musical ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... some few and vague ideas. This meagreness was not due to a disinclination on Manning's part, but only to the fact that he never quite grasped my interest in mere surroundings. Yes, said he, it was a pretty flat country, and some brush. Yes, there were mountains, some ways off, though. Not many trees, but ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... returned home she spread her new garments on the bed and regarded them with much satisfaction. Helena had expended no less thought on these than on her own, and none whatever on the meagreness of Don Roberto's check. There was a brown tweed with a dash of scarlet, a calling-frock of fawn-coloured camel's hair and silk, a dinner-gown of pale blue with bunches of scarlet poppies, and a miraculous ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... subsequent reigns nothing worth repetition is recorded except the fall of the dynasty. This, however, is due more to the meagreness of the language of that day than to the insignificance of the seventeen kings. Is it not probable that they were occupied in making good their claim to the nine provinces emblazoned ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... not going to strip our lives bare of beauty, or to consign ourselves to the meagreness of the anchoretic regimen; we shall have beautiful homes and abundant pleasures; but we must learn to make our spiritual interests supreme, and not suffer our thought to be blurred and our faith enfeebled and our love stifled in ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... tell you?" he demanded, with a recrudescence of fierceness. "Of the meagreness of a child's life? of fish diet and coarse living? of going out with the boats from the time I could crawl? of my brothers, who went away one by one to the deep-sea farming and never came back? of myself, unable to read or write, cabin-boy at the mature age of ten on the coastwise, old-country ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... fear. He seemed to be coming against me, with head high and with ravening hunger, so that it seemed that the air was affrighted at him. And a she-wolf,[2] who with all cravings seemed laden in her meagreness, and already had made many folk to live forlorn,—she caused me so much heaviness, with the fear that came from sight of her, that I lost hope of the height And such as he is who gaineth willingly, and the time arrives that makes him lose, who in all his thoughts weeps and is ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... The meagreness and brevity of the sketch I have here given of my visit to Singapore and the Malay Peninsula is due to my having trusted chiefly to some private letters and a notebook, which were lost; and to a paper ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... not merely a more common-sense treatment that we want; for here is sufficient simplicity, but a simplicity barren of all satisfaction. And singularly enough, it seems, with all its meagreness, to pass easily into an ostentatious display. In these houses there is no thought of "architecture"; that is considered as something quite apart, and not essential to the well-building of the house. But for this very reason matters ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... softness about his body, as if this might have been a man who loved comfort and ease, who had always chosen the primrose path, had never learned the salutary lesson of self-denial. The incipient stoutness of limb contrasted strangely with the drawn meagreness of his body, which was contracted by want of food. Paul Alexis was right. This man had died of starvation, within ten miles of the great Volga, within nine miles of the outskirts of Tver, a city ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... may well give attention. The curse of graft among her public officials ("squeeze" it is called over here) is one of the most deep-rooted cancers with which she has to contend. Officers have been paid small salaries and have been allowed to make up for the meagreness of their stipends by exacting all sorts of fees and tips. Before the coming parliament is very old, however, it will {97} doubtless undertake to do away with the fee and "squeeze" system, stop grafting, and put all the more important offices on a strict ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... over her ears, in the fashion of her Aunt Phoebe's miniature. Miss Dorcas beside her looked like one of autumn's brown, quiescent stems left standing by the way. She was firmly built, yet all her lines subdued themselves to that meagreness which ever dwells afar from beauty. The deep marks of hard experience had been graven on her forehead, and her dark eyes burned inwardly; the tense, concentrated spark of pain and the glowing of happy fervor seemed as foreign ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... be multiplied a thousandfold. Like the human body itself, social life must become as complex as it can without losing its centrality. Be it remembered that the truly simple life is not gained by meagreness of possessions and interests, but by singleness of aim controlling a seemingly infinite number of detailed means. But this unity dominating a multiplicity of interests is attainable only through the entire mechanism of external ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... indications alone, whether he is speaking of a place from personal knowledge or only from hearsay. In truth, though there are delightful exceptions, and nearly every part of the book suggests interesting questions, a desperate meagreness and baldness does extend over considerable tracts of the story. In fact his book reminds us sometimes of his own description of Khorasan:—"On chevauche par beaus plains et belles costieres, la ou il a moult beaus herbages et bonne pasture et fruis assez.... Et aucune fois y treuve l'en un desert ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... than this, it has a particular value for the home and the fireside. Every household knows some quiet hour when the family-voices seek to join in the happy harmony of some unpretending hymn, and when the only limit to such grateful music is the failure of memory or the meagreness of the library, which furnishes only the hymns, or, giving the tunes, supplies only a part of the words,—for few families possess both sorts of books in plenty for their convenient use. This volume offers all,—the hymn, solemn, hopeful, sad, or jubilant, and united to it a tune, perhaps remembered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... Oratory Book, with the tunes, only privately printed for local use, came, nevertheless, as a surprise to Messrs. Burns and Westlake, who made merry over the occasional simplicity, not to say meagreness of the harmonies. A quick movement, too, from a Beethoven Rasoumousky quartet, is rather awkward, albeit taken slow, for No. 74, "Death," and Leporello's song for Nos. 22 and 23, is possibly not over suitable, however intrinsically appropriate, looking to the associations it might arouse, ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... been swept from its ceiling; nothing had been removed, except the pair of living skeletons who once acted as his attendants. They had been removed by the Remover of all things; and were succeeded by a pair, so similar in meagreness and oddity of appearance, that I could not have known the change, except for its mention by their master, congratulating himself on being so "fortunate" in finding substitutes. I found Mordecai immersed in day-books and ledgers, and calculating the exchanges ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... contrabandista. "I have as good a right to blame his Majesty for the meagreness of the help his ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... counterfeit presentation by surrounding tongues. Yet, upon the whole, neither the man nor the woman lost dignity by sudden death. Misfortune had struck them gracefully, cutting off their erratic histories with a catastrophic dash, instead of, as with many, attenuating each life to an uninteresting meagreness, through long years ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... himself and his own on several occasions, he has looked at me so earnestly and replied, 'Cast your bread upon the waters.' Although the petty sum of $22,000 was an insufficient return for Congress to make me, and allowanced to its meagreness by men who traduced and vilified the loved wife of the great man who made them, and from whom they amassed great fortunes—for Weed, and Seward, and R. did this last. And yet, all this was permitted by an ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... may make, if an apology be needed, for what modern readers may think the meagreness of the love-passages in Scott. He does not deal in embraces and effusions, his taste is too manly; he does not dwell much on Love, because, like the shepherd in Theocritus, he has found him an inhabitant of ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... not say to herself in the dark, "My dress only?" Mrs. Penniman's announcement struck her by its richness, not by its meagreness. ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... day, and multiplying petty details with convincing logic. But in his preoccupation for mental conditions he is apt to lose sight of the material side of life, and the symmetry of his novels is marred by a meagreness of physical detail and a lack of atmosphere. Zola has laid his finger upon Stendhal's real weakness when he points out that "the landscape, the climate, the time of day, the weather,.—Nature herself, in other words,—never seems to intervene ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... lament the meagreness of our records of the fur-trade and primitive social life in Ontario, for example, before the advent of the U. E. Loyalists, can find their almost exact counterpart in Athabasca to-day. For what that Province was then, viz., a wilderness, ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... reasoning defeats its malice. And this is all the evidence for the charge procured by the bastinadoing of one hundred and twenty persons, in several instances to death. I think its meagreness proves the negative, viz., that the poor victims had nothing really to confess; and this in addition to the positive evidence of those who died under the torture, sealing their ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... as we let our will go and let the unconscious states ensue, see what cunning draughtsmen we are! We entertain ourselves with wonderful forms of men, of women, of animals, of gardens, of woods and of monsters, and the mystic pencil wherewith we then draw has no awkwardness or inexperience, no meagreness or poverty; it can design well and group well; its composition is full of art, its colors are well laid on and the whole canvas which it paints is lifelike and apt to touch us with terror, with tenderness, with desire and with grief. ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... from his entry there, Mr. Malone, following up the inquiry, discovered that he was the second son of Thomas Ford, Esq., and that he was baptized at Ilsington, in Devonshire, the 17th of April, 1586. To this information Mr. Weber has added nothing; and he hopes that the meagreness of his biographical account will be readily excused by the reader who has examined the lives of his (Ford's) dramatical contemporaries, in which we are continually "led to lament that our knowledge respecting them amounts to little better than nothing." It would surely ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... furtively at her several times from his book. The meagreness of her parchment flesh, the thickening mesh of wrinkles, the snow-white hair struck him with almost novel force. But he said nothing. Beenah patiently drew her needle through and through the fur, ever and anon glancing ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... originality, and individuality of the conception thus attained. What we call idealization is often a case of it. In idealization proper, however, what happens is the elimination of individual eccentricities; the result is abstract, and consequently meagre. This meagreness is often felt to be a greater disadvantage than the accidental and picturesque imperfection of real individuals, and the artist therefore turns to the brute fact, and studies and reproduces that with indiscriminate attention, rather than lose strength and individuality in ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... not felt the scantiness of holy association in our Sunday and week-day worship? . . . Much, I know, has been supplied by our hymnology, which has progressed nobly in proportion as the meagreness of our liturgical provision has been realized. But beyond hymns we need actual forms of service, which shall strike the ear and touch the heart by fresh and vivid adaptations of God's Word to the great mysteries of the Gospel faith . . . After-services ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... dope traffic in the nation, the efforts of the FBI and every law enforcement body in the country, to track it down, clean it out. He described what it did to the young, who got caught and were slaves for life, unless they could be cured—and he spoke of the meagerness of the ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond
... the fearless heroism and steady adherence to principle of many comparatively unknown lives, the historian is painfully conscious of the meagerness of the record, as compared with the amount of labor that must necessarily have been performed. In almost every city, village and school district some earnest man or woman has been quietly waging the great moral battle that will eventually make us free; and while it ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the New York State Department of Labor reflect the meagerness of the supply. Here are some dull figures to prove it:—comparing the situation with a year ago, we find in a corresponding month, only one percent more employees this year, with a wage advance of seventeen percent. Drawing the comparison between this year and ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... proportion: Old England is of course here in her might; France has a vast collection, especially of articles appealing to taste or fancy; but Germany and the rest of the Continent have less than I expected to see; and the show from the United States disappoints many by its alleged meagerness. I do not view it in the same light, nor regret, with a New-York merchant whom I met in the Fair to-day, that Congress did not appropriate $100,000 to secure a full and commanding exhibition of American products at this Fair. I do not see how any tangible ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... presents us with an elaborate door-way—perhaps of the fourteenth century—with the sculpture divided into several compartments, as at Rouen, Strasbourg, and other earlier edifices. There is a poverty in the two towers, both from their size, and the meagerness of the windows; but the slim spires at the summit, are, doubtless, nearly of a coeval date with that which supports them. The bottom of the large circular, or marygold window, is injured in its effect by a gothic balustrade of a later period. The interior of this church has certainly nothing very ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... question, it being out of my way; but I think, generally, that great care should be taken to give a certain splendor—a certain gorgeous effect—so that the spectator may feel himself among splendid things; so that there shall be no discomfort or meagerness, or want of respect for the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species" had about it a touch of intellectual adventure. We knew, for instance, that our science teacher had accepted this theory, but we had a strong suspicion that the teacher of Butler's "Analogy" had not. We chafed at the meagerness of the college library in this direction, and I used to bring back in my handbag books belonging to an advanced brother-in-law who had studied medicine in Germany and who therefore was quite emancipated. The first gift I made when I came ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... the corner. He moved resolutely to meet them. He was the boniest, small horse Sheila had ever seen—a shadow of a horse, one-eyed, morose, embittered. The harness hung loose upon his meagerness; the shafts stuck up like the points of a large collar ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt |
