"Narrowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contemplation of the beautiful. Both belong to the whole world, Shakespeare because his characters, humor, art, reflections, are universal in their validity and their appeal. Wherever he is read he becomes the spokesman against narrowness, dogmatism, and intolerance. To translate Shakespeare, he points out, is difficult because of the archaic language, the obscure allusions, and the intense originality of the expression. Shakespeare, indeed, is as much the creator as the user of his mother-tongue. ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... than was her wont. She was naturally a quiet woman. But this man's narrowness and ignorance nettled her. Farrington, however, was not in the least affected by such words; in fact he rather pitied anyone who did not see ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... local manufactures of Oxford, except gentlemen, are boots, leather- breeches, and boats; these last in great perfection. The regattas and rowing-matches on the Isis are very exciting affairs. From the narrowness of the stream, they are rather chases than races; the winners cannot pass, but must pursue and bump their competitors. The many silent, solitary wherries, urged by vigorous skilful arms, give, on a summer evening, a pleasing life to river-side walks, although that graceful flower, the pretty ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... Egyptian influence. [Footnote: See Wolters's edition of Friederichs's "Gipsabgusse antiker Bildwerke," pages 11 12.] The rigid position might be adopted independently by primitive sculpture anywhere. But the fact that the left leg is invariably advanced, the narrowness of the hips, and the too high position frequently given to the ears— did this group of coincidences with the stereotyped Egyptian standing figures come about without imitation? There is no historical difficulty in the way of assuming Egyptian influence, for as early as the seventh century Greeks ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... something of the nature of a shrine to me, I had noticed that one of the windows (a swinging one) overlooking the ravine, moved as the wind took it. Either the lock had given way or it had not been properly fastened. If I could only bring myself to disregard the narrowness of the ledge separating the house from the precipice beneath, I felt that I could reach this window and sever the vines sufficiently for my body to press in; and this I did that night, finding, just as I had ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... nave can be gathered from the illustrations, which bring out well the appearance of height which is bound to impress the spectator standing near the central western door. In the nave aisles also a fine view may be obtained, the comparative narrowness counteracting the lessened height. As one looks down the church towards the west, it will be noticed that the western interior wall is practically entirely filled by the great window, for not only does this stretch across the whole ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... of Egyptian cities were usually laid out regularly, but they were so narrow that, except in the principal ones, two chariots could scarcely pass. This narrowness of the streets, which is frequently observed in the ancient Arab cities, and which has been so long maintained in all hot countries, had the advantage of securing shade at all times on one side of the street. The buildings along the street were ordinarily ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... the slates of the roof into the bricked area, could not shake the casement of her little room. The sense of vast, undefined space, pressing from the outside against the black panes of our uncurtained windows, was fearful to the poor girl, heretofore accustomed to the narrowness of human limits, with the lamps of neighboring tenements glimmering across the street. The house probably seemed to her adrift on the great ocean of the night. A little parallelogram of sky was all that she had hitherto known ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Queen with a letter in her hand, which she was reading with much emotion; it was the letter from the Comtesse Jules; the Queen showed it to me. The Countess expressed in it her grief at leaving a princess who had loaded her with kindness. The narrowness of her fortune compelled her to do so; but she was much more strongly impelled by the fear that the Queen's friendship, after having raised up dangerous enemies against her, might abandon her to their hatred, and to the regret of having lost the ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... a handsome sum—thrice my present salary— if I would accept the office of companion to his daughter. I declined. I think I should have declined had I been poorer than I was, and with scantier fund of resource, more stinted narrowness of future prospect. I had not that vocation. I could teach; I could give lessons; but to be either a private governess or a companion was unnatural to me. Rather than fill the former post in any great house, I would deliberately have taken a housemaid's place, bought a strong pair of gloves, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... McCrae. "We haven't many of the conveniences of civilization out there yet, but we haven't the narrowness or vices either, an' your wife'll be both welcome an' safe in any farmer's home. Now, if it's all settled," continued McCrae, who had the leader's knack of suppressing indecision at the psychological moment, "we'll all turn in with unloading of the stock." ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... still excited interest and a journey of thirty miles made even one of the more important inhabitants the Ulysses of his vicinage—in short, a spot, as so many more that once could be found in Germany, with all the failings and the virtues, all the originality and the narrowness that can flourish ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... back, bore with them their officers. The narrowness of the pass forced the mob into solid formation, and the rear-rank delivered some sort of a wavering volley. The Ghazis drew off, for they did not know what reserves the gorge might hide. Moreover, it was never wise to chase white men too far. They ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... the shorter road. Misinformed by the guides, Brigadier-General Moore's column fell in, an hour and a half sooner than it had expected, with the advanced picket of the enemy, who were thus put on their guard. At the moment when they were discovered, the troops, in consequence of the narrowness of the road, were marching in single file, and to halt them was impossible. In this state of things their leader resolved not to give his opponents time to recollect themselves, but to fall on them with his single division. The spirit ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... fertility of soil; we have the natural resources; we have coal; we have gas; we have wheat land and pasture land and fruit land. Nature has done her share with a prodigality that shames our little human narrowness. Now if we had men to match our mountains, if we had men to match our plains, if our thoughts were as clear as our sunlight, we would be able to stand up high enough to see over the rim of things. In the light of what has happened, our little grabbing ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... and asserting from time to time their desire to lead a free and independent life. This desire was never fulfilled, owing partly to the main direction of the line of race-demarcation running from north to south, parallel to the political frontier, and partly to the narrowness of the strip of territory involved. Had such a boundary extended through Belgium along the Scheldt, for instance, instead of being deflected from Cologne to Boulogne, the same result would have occurred. Belgium owes her independent state to the presence ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... distinct cranially from all other subspecies of P. fasciatus in the narrowness of the interparietal, the greater length of the tympanic bulla and the greater mastoidal breadth. The fine, silky nature of the pelage is shared, to some extent, ...
— Geographic Distribution of the Pocket Mouse, Perognathus fasciatus • J. Knox Jones, Jr.
... appreciate this side of religion without being blind to other aspects of it. Our religion comes not only from Judaea, but also from Greece. The Jewish passion for the divine righteousness lies at its roots. But that passion is consistent with narrowness, bigotry, inhumanity. For the modifications of it which come from the working of the spirit of humanism we have to turn to the Hellenes, for the feeling of the likeness in nature between God and man, the love of the beauty of the created works of God, the joy in whatever ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Tyre, their capital city, and Sidon,) were the first who adapted it to the purposes of commerce, and constructed vessels fit to make voyages to foreign countries; the poverty and narrowness of their land, as well as their vicinity to two or three good ports, and their natural genius for traffic, urging them to seek foreign supplies. We hear of them trading to Arabia, India, Persia, Greece, Africa, Spain, and ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... lights along my prison shine, And a strange Demon,[187] who is vexing me With pilfering pranks and petty pains, below The feeling of the healthful and the free; But much to One, who long hath suffered so, Sickness of heart, and narrowness of place, And all that may be borne, or can debase. I thought mine enemies had been but Man, But Spirits may be leagued with them—all Earth Abandons—Heaven forgets me;—in the dearth 200 Of such defence the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... there in his face—the pioneer endeavour, the reckless effort, the gambler's anxiety, the self-indulgence, the crude passions, with a far-off, vague idealism, the selfish outlook, and yet great breadth of feeling, with narrowness of individual purpose. The rough life, the sordid struggle, had left their mark, and this easy, coaxing, comfortable life of London had not covered it up—not yet. He still belonged ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Narrowness and evenness in the exit tunnel are necessary to it. It always remains half caught in it and even pretty securely fixed by the graters on its back. Only the head and thorax emerge into the outer ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... the essayist fails to achieve ridicule easily accomplishes. James Russell Lowell was the satirist of the abolition movement. With biting scorn and irony he laughed men out of narrowness, ignorance, and selfishness. During the last epoch in his career Lowell achieved world-wide fame as a diplomat, and was universally admired as the all round man of letters. But now that he has gone, in retrospect, ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Sea is remarkably well supplied with lighthouses; and, considering the narrowness of the channel in parts, the strong and variable currents, and the innumerable islands and shoals, the supply does no more than equal ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... concerning so much that fills and moves the world, his mind was dark. He was a good farmer, a helpful neighbour, a devoted parent and husband, and he did well the work in the world which fell to his lot to do. The narrowness and bigotry of his class and church and time were his, but probity of character, ready good will, and a fervent religious nature were his also. His heart was much softer than his creed. He might scoff at his neighbour's religion or politics, but he was ever ready to ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... does not relish more elevated recreations. Still, as there is great diversity of opinion, among persons of equal worth and intelligence, a spirit of candor and courtesy should be practised, on both sides. The sneer at bigotry and narrowness of views, on one side, and the uncharitable implication of want of piety, or sense, on the other, are equally illbred and unchristian. Truth, on this subject, is best promoted, not by ill-natured crimination and rebuke, ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... is the one. To-day these abstractions, even when written with a capital initial, have no power to turn the heads of any but a few of the hyperaesthetical. For Schiller's contemporaries, aweary of rationalistic narrowness and reaching out after new sources of inspiration, the Religion of Art had the great advantage of novelty. It laid hold of them powerfully, remaining, however, a dignified intellectual cult which was quite compatible with ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Duchess of Kent, a stranger in a foreign country, was rather sad and lonely. It was further complicated by narrowness of means. The old king, her father-in-law, died soon after her husband. The duchess was a woman of sense and spirit. Instead of yielding to any natural impulse to retire to Germany, she resolved that her little English princess should have an English rearing. She found ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... made for was one of the disused chambers on the top storey, which we had remarked for its narrowness when we broke the window and thrust ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... letters, both of Swift and Pope, there appears such narrowness of mind, as makes them insensible of any excellence that has not some affinity with their own, and confines their esteem and approbation to so small a number, that whoever should form his opinion of the age from ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... accomplishments, he went to visit his father in the country, who was a plain, rough, honest man, and wise though not learned. The son, who took all opportunities to shew his learning, began to establish a new religion in the family, and to enlarge the narrowness of their country notions; in which he succeeded so well, that he had seduced the butler by his table talk, and ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... long seclusion From better company, have kept your own At Keswick, and, through still continued fusion Of one another's minds, at last have grown To deem as a most logical conclusion, That Poesy has wreaths for you alone; There is a narrowness in such a notion, Which makes me wish you'd change your ...
— English Satires • Various
... and all with thee, by thy narrowness of spirit, to a port from which, when it is once ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... general expect from Comedy I have already shown: it is an applied doctrine of ethics, the art of life. In this respect the higher comedies of Moliere contain many admirable observations happily expressed, which are still in the present day applicable; others are tainted with the narrowness of his own private opinions, or of the opinions which were prevalent in his age. In this sense Menander was also a philosophical comic writer; and we may boldly place the moral maxims which remain of his by the side at least of those of Moliere. But no comedy is constructed of mere ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... of bliss, reading Plato and eating vegetables, are poor substitutes for the rich variety of human emotions which the real world, with all its admixture of evil, actually admits. Hence Shelley's tone irritates when he shrilly summons us to adore his New Jerusalem. Reflecting on the narrowness of his ideals we are apt to see him as an ignorant and fanatical sectary, and to detect an unpleasant flavour in his verse. And we perceive that, as with all honest fanatics, his narrowness comes from ignorance of himself. The story of Mrs. Southey's buns is typical. When he visited Southey ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... followed, treading on his heels; nor a moment too soon. While they were still within the staircase, which their elbows rubbed on either side, they heard the enemy swarm into the room below. Cries of triumph, of "Savoy! Savoy!" of "Ville gagnee! gagnee!" hummed dully up to them, and proclaimed the narrowness of their escape. Then the night air met their faces, they bent their heads and passed out upon the leads; they had above them the stars, and below them all the world of night, with its tramp of hidden feet, its ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... houses; one of those who, not being born magnates themselves, never know how to teach those who are how to behave as such; one of those who would have the greatness of great folk measured by their own narrowness of mind; one of those who, when they try to introduce economy into the household they rule, lead it into meanness. One of this sort, I say, must have been the grave churchman who came out with the duke and ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... which held an array of German books, worn, but prim and tight in their bindings. On a table lay a flat stone; and a small shining oil can stood near it. Bohlmier was now seated, a knife in his hand—a huge knife, with the blade ground and re-ground until it had arrived at a murderous narrowness; and he now held it up, looking placidly along its glimmering ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... not constantly renewed out of new sources is apt to have the narrowness and prejudice of a family. Whereas, America must have this consciousness, that on all sides it touches elbows and touches hearts with ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... "Stuk-Stuk" is nonsense. "What is it, then?" you will ask. It is this: it is a study of the Russian suicide epidemic, which rarely presents anything poetic or pathetic, but almost always results, on the contrary, from ambition, narrowness, with a mixture of mysticism or fatalism. You will object that my study is not successful. Possibly not; but I wished to point you to the right and fitness of investigating purely psychological ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... described the narrowness of the valley up to Kammurd and the lofty ranges of precipitous hills by which it is flanked; and the reader will perhaps recollect my noticing two forts on either side of the river a little above Piedb[a]gh. It was here that the Serjeant halted his party after the first day's march, intending ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... complexion and pretty color of which she was wont to boast. The tones of her flesh had taken the pallid tints so often seen in "devotes." Her aquiline nose was the feature that chiefly proclaimed the despotism of her nature, and the flat shape of her forehead the narrowness of her mind. Her movements had an odd abruptness which precluded all grace; the mere motion with which she twitched her handkerchief from her bag and blew her nose with a loud noise would have shown her character and habits ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... the cause would triumph had never wavered. His patience was inexhaustible, his temper beyond proof. The incapacity of many in whom he had trusted, the jealousies and religious differences which prevented anything like union between the various states, the narrowness and jealousy even of those most faithful to the cause, would have driven ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... addressed them. Then she recommenced her stitching without a word. Her thoughts were in confusion. She had so long held one attitude towards him that she could not readily adjust herself to another. She was cramped with the extreme narrowness of the enthusiasm of youth. At noontime she heard all the talk which went on about him. She heard some praise him, and some speak of him as simply doing his manifest duty, and some say openly that he should have put the wages back ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the subtle adaptability of her father's race, nothing of the cold and rigid narrowness of her mother's class. Price had feared that her lively mind might reveal disconcerting shallows, but these little voids were but the divine hiatuses of youth. He sometimes wondered just how strong her character was. There ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... over, as the ground was not level at the foot of the post and the light had gone out. We had to stop a minute or two, for the glare of the light from the burning paper had made the darkness more impenetrable than before; but the narrowness of the road was an advantage to us, as we knew we could not get far astray. Coming to a good hard road, we arrived at a bridge where there were a few houses, and soon we were walking quickly again on the right way to Liskeard; but how we blessed that countryman who with the best of ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... good side—none at least of which you can have any knowledge; for you cannot appreciate the efforts of industry, the achievements of enterprise, or the discoveries of science: narrowness of education and obscurity of position quite incapacitate you from understanding these points; and as to historical and poetical associations, I will not insult you, mademoiselle, by supposing that you alluded to ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... the hub. Cat Street, School Street running parallel with it from High Street to the north boundary, and Schydyard Street, the continuation of School Street on the southern side of High Street, alleys of the usual medieval narrowness and mean appearance, the buildings on either hand almost touching one another, and the way dark—were the haunts of masters and scholars and all those depending on them. Students, old and young, of high station and low, are crowded in ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... architect will manage to make his second floor upon different levels, so as not to inflict the necessary height of large rooms upon narrow halls and small rooms, which should have only a height proportioned to their size. A ten-foot room with a thirteen-foot ceiling makes the narrowness of the room doubly apparent; one feels shut up between two walls which threaten to come together and squeeze one between them, while, on the other hand, a ten-foot room with a nine-foot ceiling may have a really ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... indeed, and already before the canal proposal there was, a plan in motion for a railway across the isthmus, which seems far enough from meeting the vast and growing necessities of the case. But be that as it may, with what right does any man in Europe, or America, impute narrowness of spirit, local jealousy, or selfishness, to England, when he calls to mind what sacrifices she is at this moment making for those very oriental interests which give to the ship canal its sole value—the men, the ships, the ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... in the history of the world, and that if he falls short of Homer, Dante, and Shakespere, it is chiefly because he expresses less of that humanity, both universal and quintessential, which they, and especially the last, put into verse. Narrowness is his fault. But the intense individuality which often accompanies narrowness is his great virtue—a virtue which no poet, which no writer either in verse or prose, has ever had in greater measure than he, and which hardly ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... her spirits in the confined and scantily furnished chamber that she was to share with Susan. The smallness of the rooms above and below, indeed, and the narrowness of the passage and staircase, struck her beyond her imagination. She soon learned to think with respect of her own little attic at Mansfield Park, in that house reckoned too small for ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... his things when he was at Ben's. She had known of sachets, photographs, and an engraved locket that he wore on his watch-chain. She was no radical. She had seen disaster come upon the old professor and attributed it, not to the narrowness of the trustees, but to the folly of the professor. She disapproved of most of Ben's friends, and would have despised his paper if she ever read it. The only good thing about it in her estimation was, he seemed to be able "to knock a living ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... not mean that limited body which, whether as the Upper Ten Thousand of London or as the Four Hundred of New York, usually arrogates the title. Such narrowness of definition seems peculiarly out of place in the vigorous democracy of the West. By society I understand the great body of fairly well-educated and fairly well-mannered people, whose means and inclinations lead them to associate with each other on terms of equality for the ordinary ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... ideal husband; tender and affectionate as a woman, but withal firm and steady as steel; a strong support in worldly as well as spiritual affairs. Latterly the extreme narrowness of the Calvinistic doctrines, which had made his sermons so unlike his daily practice, had given place to broader views, and a more elevating realisation of the Creator's love. Many hours he spent with Sara in her herb garden, on the moor, or sitting by the crackling fire, conversing on ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... the reader must find out for himself. It is a triumph of ingenuity. The characters are happy in their background of Puritan village life. The drudgery, the flowers, the strictness in morals and the narrowness of outlook all combine to form a harmonious picture."—The ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... the law of his own day presupposes for the date in question. No one can deny the validity of this principle in a court of justice, but no one gifted either with historical imagination or with historical sympathy could wish to introduce it into a historical work. Yet the very narrowness of his outlook made it easier for him to adopt the impartiality of a judge; his criterion of justice is too definite to allow him to indulge in special pleading or to twist facts to suit his theories; and the student still turns to Hallam with a sense of security which he does not feel in ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... died. He left me very badly off. I had to go and live with some old aunts in Yorkshire." She shuddered. "You will understand me when I say that it was a deadly life for a girl brought up as I had been. The narrowness, the deadly monotony of it, almost drove me mad." She paused a minute, and added in a different tone: "And then ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... with this tutor, and I suppose I must have made some progress, but there was no feeling of progress. In comparison with the completeness of my master's terrible erudition it seemed that my small acquirements were nothing, and never could be more than nothing. On the other hand, the extreme narrowness of his literary tastes led me to place a higher value on my own increasing knowledge of modern literature, and conclusively proved to me, once for all, that a classical education does not necessarily give a just or accurate judgment. "If a man," I said to myself, "can be a thorough classical scholar ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... engraved. Then he had laid before the secretary of the King the urgent need of some religious instruction. Acadia had quite a thriving Jesuit mission. This order was not in high favor with Champlain, who deprecated their narrowness. The Sieur Houel recommended the Recollets, and four willing missionaries were finally chosen. The company had fitted up a large vessel and were taking all the stores they could purchase or beg, and quite a number of emigrants of a ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... of Laconia, and about forty stadia from Cape Malea, lies the island of Cythera; the strait between it and the mainland was deemed by the ancients extremely dangerous in stormy weather; and indeed its narrowness, and the rocks that lay off Cape Malea must, to such inexperianced navigators, have been very alarming. The Phoenicians are supposed to have had a settlement in this island: afterwards it became an object of great consequence to the Lacedaemonians, who fortified, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... in keeping with the massiveness of form and the high degree of finish characterizing many of the remains; but as already seen in the discussion of masonry, the latter results were attained by the patient industry of many hands, although laboring with but little of the spirit of cooperation. The narrowness of the largest doors and windows in the ancient pueblos suggests timidity on the part of the ancient builders. The apparently bolder construction of the present day, shown in the prevailing use of horizontal openings, is not due to greater constructive skill, but rather to the ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... is doing by far too little in these respects. His instinctive feeling that disease is a causal process, and that he should therefore keep away from the purposive attitude, leads him too easily to a dangerous narrowness. He treats disease as if it were an isolated process and overlooks the thousandfold connections in which the nervous system stands with the patient's whole life experience in past and future. The physician is thus too easily inclined to underestimate the good which ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... compare the two men, and to weigh their types of character. There was nothing to choose between them in honor or in manliness, though the one was a minister of the Evangel and the other a colonel of his Majesty's Horse, but they were different. Pollock, with all his narrowness of faith and extravagance of action, was a saint, and no one could say that of Claverhouse, even though they might admit he was not the devil of the Covenanting imagination. But John Graham was more human: he might not see visions, and there never came into his face that ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... 1848, Anne Bronte herself justified her novel in a Preface which is reprinted in this volume for the first time. The little Preface is a curious document. It has the same determined didactic tone which pervades the book itself, the same narrowness of view, and inflation of expression, an inflation which is really due not to any personal egotism in the writer, but rather to that very gentleness and inexperience which must yet nerve itself under the stimulus of ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... who in time of persecution stood fast "ready any day to be martyred for the faith and to regard it as the performance of a simple duty and nothing to boast of." And if there is in the type a certain narrowness of sympathy and lack of intelligent interest which offends us, we may ask whether, with our human limitations, narrowness is not to some extent the price we pay for strength; whether where decision of judgment and energy of action is demanded, ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... remedy for the tendency backed by natural selfishness towards undue devotion to gain: such narrowness simply does not work, it is crowded out by competition with the superior efficiency of broader motives. And while, here and there, the type continues to exist, its development in new cases is discouraged ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman
... need for him to admonish. The loss of all the food and the narrowness of his escape had sobered the younger man. He resumed his work with a cautious swiftness of movement that avoided all needless risks yet never hesitated to encounter and rush through the dangers that could not be avoided. ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... decided as she did. It would have been a loss indeed to the world if this kindling and delightful spirit of hers had been choked by the polite thorns, fictions, and platitudes of an artificial, courtly life and by the well-ordered narrowness of a limited standard. She never heard what the Chevalier thought of the book; she never knew that he ever read it even. It is a satisfaction to hear that he married no one else, and while she sat writing and not forgetting in the pleasant library at home, one can imagine the romantic ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... provinces to which the old Roman virtues had taken flight, men were leading happy, useful lives, because the strong hand of the imperial government had come to save them from the inefficiency of aristocratic governors. This narrowness of view accounts ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... Though its surroundings are pretty, the town itself is an ill-arranged collection of steep and narrow streets, one of which—Cheap Street—deserves notice for its quaintness. The spaciousness of the market-place redeems the narrowness of the streets. With the exception of a little faint-hearted sympathy shown to Monmouth, Frome has never helped to make history. Nowadays it does a brisk trade in woollen cloth, and possesses some large printing-works, breweries, ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... bribery as a means to business activity. It was of no use to recall the brilliant moments of character in history, men would not read them. Their ancestry was a back number, the deeds of their ancestors mere old-fashioned narrowness of business. What if a member of the American Congress, Joseph Reed, during the American Revolution did refuse the 10,000 guineas offered by the foreign commissioners to betray the colonies? What if he did say "Gentlemen, I am a very poor man, but tell your King he is not rich enough to ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... love with him, and married her almost against the wish of her mother, who said that it would be a mesalliance. Nekhludoff, although he concealed it from himself and struggled against the feeling, hated his brother-in-law. He disliked his vulgar feelings, his self-confident narrowness of mind, but, principally, because of his sister, who should so passionately, egotistically and sensually love such a poor nature, and to please whom she should stifle all her noble sentiments. It was always painful to Nekhludoff to think of Natalie ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... perfect honesty of purpose and unselfish devotion of General Howard have passed untarnished through the fire of criticism. Not so with all his subordinates, although in the case of the great majority of these there were shown bravery and devotion to duty, even though sometimes linked to narrowness and incompetency. ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... quite a different path that the Heilbronn doctor, Mayer, arrived at his results. To escape from the narrowness of his South German home town, he went, while still a youth, as doctor to a Dutch ship sailing to Java. When in the tropics he treated a number of sailors by blood-letting, he observed that the venous blood was much ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... inherited directness of aim, purity of ideals, and narrowness of vision, from the simple working stock from which he had sprung, and it would have been easy for a man of the world to foresee the limitations existing in such a nature. When mademoiselle therefore began the Clairville history by relating some ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... roof to cover his head, whether it was his own roof or not. If slavery had to be—then the fetters were forged light and hung loosely. And, broadcast, through the people, was the upright sturdiness of the Scotch-Irishman, without his narrowness and bigotry; the grace and chivalry of the Cavalier without his Quixotic sentiment and his weakness; the jovial good-nature of the English squire and the leavening spirit of a simple yeomanry that bore itself with unconscious tenacity to traditions ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... And in genuine forms of minor tradition, a rude and more or less illiterate tone will always be discernible; for all the best fairy tales have owed their birth, and the greater part of their power, to narrowness of social circumstances; they belonged properly to districts in which walled cities are surrounded by bright and unblemished country, and in which a healthy and bustling town life, not highly refined, is relieved by, and contrasted with, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... by various juice control The narrowness or largeness of our soul. Onions will make e'en heirs or widows weep; The tender lettuce ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... They wax furious over the most richly deserved punishment, if inflicted by a teacher's hand; they take the part of their child against legal authority; but, observe, this does not prevent them from laying their own hands heavily on their children. The same obstinate ignorance and narrowness that are exhibited without exist within also. Folly is folly, abroad or at home. A man does not play the fool out-doors and act the sage in the house. When the poor child becomes obnoxious, the same ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Muich Dhui. We are here in the spot which to us, of all this group of scenery, appears to be the most remarkable, as being so unlike any other part of Scotland, or any place we have seen elsewhere. The narrowness of the glen and the height of its walled sides are felt in the constrained attitude in which we look up on either side to the top, as if we were surveying some object of interest in a tenth story window of our own High Street. This same narrowness imparts a sensation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... seriously maintained, that something of a man's character may be conjectured from his handwriting. That neat but crowded and constrained small-hand argued a man of a good conscience, well-regulated passions, and, to use his own phrase, an upright walk in life; but it also indicated narrowness of spirit, inveterate prejudice, and hinted at some degree of intolerance, which, though not natural to the disposition, had arisen out of a limited education. The passages from Scripture and the classics, rather profusely than happily introduced, and written in a half-text ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... hidden palace-hall of marble and gold. Even in matters ecclesiastical, the footsteps of the two friends had moved with one consent; each of them preferred a chapel to a church; each was Puritan in a love of simplicity in the things of religion; each disowned the Puritan narrowness, and the grey aridity of certain schools of dissent. On June 14—with the warranty of her published poem which had told of flowers sent in a letter—Browning encloses in his envelope a yellow rose; and again and again summer flowers arrive bringing colour and sweetness into the dim city room. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... noted as pentagonal in 10, oval in 5, broad oval in 4, the narrowness of the jaw producing the pentagonal shape. The majority are chaniaeprosopic, but 1 is leptoprosopic in total facial and upper facial indices, and 7 are leptoprosopic in upper facial index. The forehead is ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... travelled and thought and felt; whose mind met him even in the unhesitating confidence of knowledge—it is no wonder that he was in a dream. It turned his little world upside down: so brief a time had elapsed since he had cursed woman for bringing crime into his life, in the narrowness of his ignorance thinking them all alike. He was in the presence of a superior, and his own smallness came over him like ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... new and inexperienced or whether they are the oldest, most efficient salesmen. By means of letters, books, demonstrations, and conventions the salesmen are constantly provided with educative experiences and are kept from the narrowness and lack of progress so characteristic of men in the commercial life after they have become thoroughly established and relatively ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... justified by power, but cognizable rather as bad taste. But such reaction was effective only because an age had come—the age of a negative, or agnostic philosophy—in which men's minds must needs be limited to the superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a positive gift. What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way of an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men's moods and manners, as also in the way of determining ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... never obtained either information or sympathy unless she came across Mark. It seemed to her that Gerard cared less for the peace or war of an empire than for a tipsy cobbler taking the pledge. The monotony and narrowness of the world where she had once been so happy fretted and wearied her, though she was ashamed of herself all the time, and far too proud to allow that she was tired of it all. Aunt Ursel at her best had always been a little dry and grave, an authority ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. The other strong points in his work are its sense of narrative, its freedom from hero-worship, its independence of conventional views of Northern leaders. As to the South, it suffers from a certain Narrowness of vision due to the comparative scantiness of the material used. The same ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... was the King's temper, its range was less wonderful than its harmony. Of the narrowness, of the want of proportion, of the predominance of one quality over another which goes commonly with an intensity of moral purpose AElfred showed not a trace. Scholar and soldier, artist and man of business, poet and saint, ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... arms of this washer enter recesses in the face plate. It will be evident that, by turning the sleeve, F, so that the screw works inward, the jaw and all its appendages will be moved bodily in corresponding direction. But its movement is limited by the arms of the washer, G, which, through the narrowness of the recesses, are allowed only just enough play to compensate for slight changes in the jaw. As the above device is applied to every jaw, it follows that any one of them may be nicely adjusted from the outside, so that all are caused to grasp the tool accurately. The spindle, instead of being ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... lived for a long time in Mexico invited me to dinner, and at his house I had the same impression of apparent happiness, comfort, enterprise and wide outlook, in contrast to the cares and the narrowness at home, where only the few had travelled far or collected material which might by comparison offer new points of view and give one a comprehensive experience of life. My psychological education in Danish literature, with its idolising of "thoroughness" had imprinted on ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... tiny channel which would admit at most the slenderest of straws. Inside, this conduit opens at the top of the dome of the hatching-chamber; outside, at the tip of the nipple, it spreads into a wide mouth. This is the ventilating-shaft, protected against intruders by its extreme narrowness and by grains of dust which obstruct it a little without stopping it up. I said it was simply marvellous. Was I wrong? If a construction of this sort is a fortuitous result, we must admit that blind chance is gifted with extraordinary powers ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... Alan Hawke, "his writings to-day are the pride of Genevan scholars; his library was the nucleus of the Geneva University; his defiant spirit broke the chains of Calvin's narrowness, and his resistant, spiritual example caught up has made Geneva the home of the oppressed, the central, radiant point of mental light and liberty for the world! Geneva since 1536 has harbored the brightest wandering Spanish, French, English, and Irish youth! Even grim ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... last analysis, is not so much the possession of unusual vision—some of the most powerful geniuses have a vision quite mediocre and blunt—as the possession of a certain demonic driving-force, which pushes them on to be themselves, in all the fatal narrowness and obstinacy, it may be, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... which never failed to thrill and impress him, as they would have thrilled and impressed any other man in his present position. They seemed to intensify the hopelessness of his own situation. He had a slight feeling of creepiness about the spine as he thought of the narrowness of that escape—though, of course, the policeman might not have identified him. But some day or other it was bound to come—that accidental confrontation which might mean ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... probably the most ancient of the streets. The houses on the south side have gardens reaching to the Abbey walls, a position which would add greatly to their security in early times, and the narrowness of the roadway also goes towards proving its antiquity. This must have been the most frequented thoroughfare, leading as it did in old times to the ford, and afterwards to the bridge and the Abbot's mill beside it. Here were the oldest inns; and though all the ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... lay with the Greeks. The narrowness of the strait rendered the great numbers of the Persians of no avail. The superior discipline of the Greeks gave them a further advantage. The want of concert in the Persian allies was another aid to the Greeks. They were ready to run one another down in the wild desire to escape. ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... I say, the temptations of so international, so universal a vision of wealth. I know that it must be your danger not to fall like many tradesmen into too dusty and mechanical a narrowness, but rather to be too broad, to be too general, too liberal. If a narrow nationalism be the danger of the pastry-cook, who makes his own wares under his own heavens, no less is cosmopolitanism the danger of the grocer. But I come to you in the name of that ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... claiming as was proven true afterwards that the marks in the shoes would certainly identify the remains, did some valuable detective work under the direction of Sheriff Plummer. Mr. Poock was struck by the narrowness of the shoes worn by the dead girl, and opened them to discover the size and width. He recognized the fact that 11 and 22 in the shoe would give him the information desired if he had ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... or near high water, when, unless it blows very hard, it seldom breaks on the bar. The tide of ebb runs with great rapidity, sometimes nearly four miles per hour, owing to the great quantity of fresh water in the Hastings River, and the narrowness of the channel. The flood tide seldom exceeds one mile and three quarters per hour. The tides are however very irregular in their operation, being considerably influenced by local circumstances. The port is perfectly capable to receive vessels of ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... natural that Amy should hint dissatisfaction with the loneliness in which her days were mostly spent. She had never lived in a large circle of acquaintances; the narrowness of her mother's means restricted the family to intercourse with a few old friends and such new ones as were content with teacup entertainment; but her tastes were social, and the maturing process which followed upon her marriage made her more conscious ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... apprenticed to a draper at Poole. I believe, however, that the indentures were cancelled, for he became a preacher before he was twenty years of age. For myself, I always thought him an over-rated man. There was a narrowness of mind; there was a want of sympathy with the works of great poets and artists; and there was an intense hatred of the drama. There was, too, a dogmatic, egotistic manner, which led him always to enunciate his own thoughts as if they were absolutely true and incontrovertible. ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... windows and compared their experiences or gathered news from every passer-by; for they feared to separate from their families, lest a worse shock might overtake some one of them apart from the rest. Besides this, the danger in the streets was greater than at home, because of their narrowness and the likelihood of the walls on either side toppling ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... breaks out in so repulsive a form as in the piece called "Jesuitism" (1850), in the Latter-Day Pamphlets (No. VIII.). Discarding the creed, the practice, and the language of Puritanism, Carlyle still retained its narrowness, its self-righteousness, its intolerance, and its savagery. The moralist, to whom John Knox was a hero, but St. Bernard was not, but only a follower of the "three-hatted Papa," and an apostle of "Pig's-wash," was hardly the man to exhaust the heroic ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... misapprehension, narrowness of conception, or improper bias, in relation to this point, many authors have started wrong; denounced others with intemperate zeal; departed themselves from sound doctrine; and produced books which are disgraced not merely by occasional oversights, but by central and radical ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... edge my thoughts to action, When the miserly press of each day's need Aches to a narrowness of spilled distraction My soul appalled at the world's work's time-greed? How can I pause my thoughts upon the task My soul was born to think that it must do When every moment has a thought to ask ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa
... most powerful, had become the centres of the attracting and joining forces, knots in the political network—while this was going on more or less happily throughout the rest of Europe, in Italy the ancient classic idea lingered in its simplicity, its narrowness and jealousy, wherever there was any political activity. The history of Southern Italy, indeed, is mainly a foreign one—the history of modern Rome merges in that of the papacy; but Northern Italy has a history of its own, and that is a history of separate and independent cities—points ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... its centre, by which the urine escapes. In others, the urine makes its exit between the calculus and the side of the urethra, which it dilates. In this latter way the foreign body becomes loosened in the canal and gradually pushed forwards as far as the meatus, within which, owing to the narrowness of this aperture, it lodges permanently. If the calculus forms a complete obstruction to the passage of the urine, and its removal cannot be effected by other means, an incision should be made ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... may be for that among others. Thence to my brother's, and there took up my wife and Ashwell to the Theatre Royall, being the second day of its being opened. The house is made with extraordinary good contrivance, and yet hath some faults, as the narrowness of the passages in and out of the Pitt, and the distance from the stage to the boxes, which I am confident cannot hear; but for all other things it is well, only, above all, the musique being below, and most of it sounding under the very stage, there is no hearing of the bases at all, nor ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... court, it may at length take that of attending to its business. Then the monopoly of mental power will be added to the power of all other kinds it possesses. On the side of the people there will be nothing but impotence: for ignorance is impotence; narrowness of mind is impotence; timidity is itself impotence, and makes all other qualities that go along with it impotent ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... more harm than good. There was far greater reason to fear that too much would be attempted, and that violent movements would produce an equally violent reaction, than that too little would be done in the way of change. But narrowness of intellect, and flexibility of principle, though they may be serviceable, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be an animosity arising from almost a personal feeling; it being a matter of party, a point of honour, the excitement of a game, or a satisfaction to the soreness or annoyance occasioned by the acrimony or narrowness of apologists for religion, to prove that Christianity or that Scripture is untrustworthy. Many scientific and literary men, on the other hand, go on, I am confident, in a straightforward impartial way, in their own province ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... appeared to her to be so inalienable a part of the old order, with its intrepid faith in itself, with its militant enthusiasm, with its courageous battle against industrial evolution, with its strength, its narrowness, its nobility, its blindness, that, looking ahead, she could discern only the arid stretch of a civilization from which the last remnant of beauty was banished forever. Already she felt the breaking of those bonds of sympathy ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... alternate hope and doubt with Bles Alwyn. Strength and ambition and inarticulate love were fighting within him. He felt, in the dark thousands of his kind about him, a mighty calling to deeds. He was becoming conscious of the narrowness and straightness of his black world, and red anger flashed in him ever and again as he felt his bonds. His mental horizon was broadening as he prepared for the college of next year; he was faintly grasping the wider, fuller world, and its ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... to speak, by the mediation of these little bands, the vocal cords; and this is the justification for speaking of the larynx as the vocal organ. This usage, however, is objectionable, as it tends to narrowness and to divert the mind from other highly important parts of the vocal mechanism. In one sense, the respiratory organs and the resonance-chambers are each as important as ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... remained the objects of his special study, D'Alembert was as free as the other great men of the encyclopaedic school from the narrowness of the pure specialist. He naturally reminds us of the remarkable saying imputed to Leibnitz, that he only attributed importance to science, because it enabled him to speak with authority in philosophy and ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... scarcely covered by the turf beneath his feet. His mind was in an uproar with this whirl of new ideas. As he came in sight of the venerable mansion of his forefathers, and the little realm where the Webbers had so long and so contentedly flourished, his gorge rose at the narrowness of his destiny. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... others which seem rather to charge him with a defect or narrowness of genius, than an excess of it, those seeming defects will be found upon examination to proceed wholly from the nature of the times he lived in. Such are his grosser representations of the gods; and the vicious and imperfect manners of his heroes; but I must here speak ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... of time. His eager eyes searched the narrow confines of the stateroom for some possible weapon with which to assail the door. The stout stool alone seemed available. Swinging this over his shoulder, hampered by the narrowness of space, he struck again and again, with all his strength, the upper panel splintering beneath the third crashing blow. He could see nothing, but felt with his fingers along the jagged ends of the shattered wood, and redoubled ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... at the edge of the stream, which at that point was much swifter than it was farther up. We waded in and discovered that the cause was its extreme narrowness. ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... paper boats, and told him. Jane told Robert. The two tales were only just ended when mother walked in, hot and dusty. She explained that as she was being driven into Rochester to buy the girls' autumn school-dresses the axle had broken, and but for the narrowness of the lane and the high soft hedges she would have been thrown out. As it was, she was not hurt, but she had had to walk home. "And oh, my dearest dear chicks," she said, "I am simply dying for a cup of tea! Do run and see if ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... "unevangelical" young lawyer who was "not far from the kingdom of heaven," and yearned towards the penitent Peter, and from the tenderness of his immaculate purity said to the adulteress, "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." There are some sectarians in whom the arbitrary narrowness, fierceness, and rigidity of their received creeds have so demoralized and hardened conscience and sensibility in their native healthy directions, and artificially inflamed them in diseased channels, that we verily believe, if the decision of the eternal destiny of the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... it will, our Shakespeare, it seems, was bred for some Time at a Free-School; the very Free-School, I presume, founded at Stratford: where, we are told, he acquired what Latin he was Master of: but, that his Father being oblig'd, thro' Narrowness of Circumstance, to withdraw him too soon from thence, he was so unhappily prevented from making any Proficiency in the Dead Languages: A Point, that will deserve some little Discussion in ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... could not see that Euripides was not a man only, he was a spirit of development. Privilege and narrowness in every form he hated; he demanded unlimited freedom for the intelligence. The narrow circle of legends, the conventional unified drama, state religion, a pseudo-democracy based on slavery he fearlessly criticised. Rationalism, humanism, free speculation ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... The narrowness of the territory which the Phoenicians occupied the military strength of their neighbours towards the north and towards the south, and their own preference of maritime over agricultural pursuits, combined ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... barren plain, across which the wind blew most drearily. The sky was rainy and dark, and completed the desolateness of the scene, which in no wise heightened our anticipations of the renowned glen. At length we rejoined the Sorgues and entered a little green valley running up into the mountain. The narrowness of the entrance entirely shut out the wind, and except the rolling of the waters over their pebbly bed, all was still and lonely and beautiful. The sides of the dell were covered with olive trees, and a narrow strip of emerald meadow lay at ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... road to the capital is studded on both sides with pretty villas. The town derives its name, Rio Janeiro, or January river, from an error on the first discovery of the bay, which, owing to the narrowness of its mouth, was mistaken for a river, and named after the current month. Its interior by no means corresponds with its handsome appearance from the bay, the streets being narrow and dirty, and the buildings very tasteless. Clumsy ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... was a man personally upright and kindly, of only moderate interest and capacity for the ordinary practical affairs of life, given to brooding on public events and ideal causes, and viewing them with a fanatic's narrowness and a fanatic's absorption. He was a belated Puritan, and his natural place would have been with Cromwell's Ironsides. His ideas were largely influenced by his reading of the Bible, especially of the Old Testament. Of the modern State and the duties of the modern ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... theology; its belief in a cautious but perpetual patching up of the Constitution; its admiration for industrial wealth. But above all he typifies the two things that really make the Victorian Age itself, the cheapness and narrowness of its conscious formulae; the richness and humanity of its unconscious tradition. There were two Macaulays, a rational Macaulay who was generally wrong, and a romantic Macaulay who was almost invariably right. All that was small in him derives from ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... department would call trouble," answered Ford evasively; and for ten other miles the narrowness of ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... doubts of the practicability of the latter part of this proposal, on account of the narrowness of some streets, and the difficulty of placing the draining-sleds so as not to encumber too much the passage; but I am still of opinion that the former, requiring the dust to be swept up and carry'd away before the shops are open, is very practicable in the summer, ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... shrank from society, ceaselessly afraid of receiving less than his due; privately, meanwhile, he deplored the narrowness of the social opportunities granted to his daughter, and was for ever forming schemes for her advantage—schemes which never passed beyond the stage of nervous speculation. They inhabited a little house in a western suburb, a ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... be roused again by Alexander. The midnight coups d'etat, which rapidly succeeded one another, were a form of government congenial to this gloomy, silent, friendless youth who blinked at the world through his spectacles and was incapable of seeing anything except the narrowness and the intrigues that were a part of his surroundings. More and more he showed himself a despot; he persecuted and imprisoned hundreds of Radicals, who were the overwhelming majority of the population. Espionage was rampant, the finances were in a state of chaos and ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... I lack steadfastness. Of a sudden I could perhaps do something. I understand very well that life is difficult and narrow for every one of us. I know that my godfather sees that, too! But he profits by this narrowness. He feels well in it; he is sharp as a needle, and he'll make his way wherever he pleases. But I am a big, heavy man, that's why I am suffocating! That's why I live in fetters. I could free myself from everything with a single effort: just to move my body with all my strength, and then ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... which the conduct of the Emperor's family had finally produced in his mind. Brothers and sisters alike had come to consider their changed fortunes as having introduced them into the royal hierarchy of the old absolutist Europe, which their narrowness and ignorance led them to regard as still existent. Their behavior was distinctly that of the old dynastic sovereigns, whose lives were their model. The Emperor at last saw his mistake. "Relatives and cousins, male or female," he said in September to Metternich, "are all worthless. ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... nobly dost decline, Of tracing word by word and line by line. Those are the labour'd births of slavish brains, Not the effect of poetry but pains; Cheap vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords No flight for thoughts, but poorly stick at words, A new and nobler way thou dost pursue, To make translations and translators too, They but preserve the ashes; thou the flame, True to his sense, but ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... completion the difficult negotiations which had been entrusted to him. His Italian cunning was not deceived as to the motive of the display of magnificence, and the rough reception of himself which signalized his first audience. He was conscientious and resolute without narrowness of mind, and he understood the immense importance to religion and politics of the restoration of agreement between France and the Court of Rome. He appeared neither astonished nor disturbed with ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... look like child's play: he lifted the Christian churches out of the narrow, religious exclusiveness of the Hebrew synagogue. He dared to wage battle for the new idea that Christianity was not a Jewish sect but a universal religion. He withstood to his face Peter, still trammeled in the narrowness of his Jewish thinking, and he founded churches across the Roman Empire where was neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, male nor female, bond nor free, but all were one man ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Republican party in New York in January, 1873, was as firm as the most ardent partisan could desire. This feeling controlled the State convention at Utica on September 24 to such a degree that its action resembled the partisan narrowness of a ward caucus. Conkling did not attend, but his lieutenants, evidently considering the party vote as a force which only needed exhortation or intimidation to bring out, dropped Barlow, the attorney-general, without the slightest regard to public sentiment, and visited ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Church of England. And in 1868 he declined to sign a petition against the abolition of religious declarations required of persons admitted to Fellowships or proceeding to the degree of M.A. And he was opposed to every kind of narrowness and exclusiveness. When he was appointed to the post of Astronomer Royal, he stipulated that he should not be asked to vote in any political election. But all his views were in the liberal direction. He was a great reader of theology and church history, and as regarded forms of ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... question of clothing presented little difficulty. Sailors' slops could be procured almost anywhere, and no questions asked. The effectual concealment of sex was not so easy, and when we consider the necessarily intimate relations subsisting between the members of a ship's crew, the narrowness of their environment, the danger of unconscious betrayal and the risks of accidental discovery, the wonder is that any woman, however masculine in appearance or skilled in the arts of deception, could ever have played so unnatural ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... desisting from their murderous intent, stand with eyes turned toward the ridge, on the crest of which appears a crowd of moving forms that look like anything but human beings. On their way to the beach, they are forced into single file by the narrowness of the path, and become strung out like the links of a long chain. But not even when they come nearer and are better seen, do they any more resemble human beings. They have something like human heads, but these ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... in bad humor, or frighten him out of calm self-possession. In passing through a narrow gorge, I once drove one ahead of me from rapid to rapid, disturbing him four times in quick succession where he could not very well fly past me on account of the narrowness of the channel. Most birds under similar circumstances fancy themselves pursued, and become suspiciously uneasy; but, instead of growing nervous about it, he made his usual dippings, and sang one of his most tranquil strains. When observed within a few yards their eyes are seen to express remarkable ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... comprehending almost all the infantry of the army, advanced, under the command of the Earls of Gloucester and Hereford, who also had a fine body of men at arms to support their column. All the remainder of the English troops, consisting of nine battles, or separate divisions, were so straitened by the narrowness of the ground, that, to the eye of the Scots, they seemed to form one very large body, gleaming with flashes of armour, and dark with the number of banners which floated over them. Edward himself commanded this tremendous array, and, in order to guard his person, was attended ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 406, Saturday, December 26, 1829. • Various |
