"Pendulum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the column, n, which sends a current into the electro, E, so that the armature of the latter is attracted. In its position of rest this armature holds a series of parts, S, A, L, which have the effect of stopping the pendulum of a clock placed upon the same apparatus. At the moment, then, that the armature is attracted the pendulum is set free and the clockwork is started. As the current, at the same time, sets a bell ringing, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... jugglers, counterfeits, I'll make them serve for perpendiculars As true as e'er were us'd by bricklayers. 1020 They're guilty, by their own confessions, Of felony, and at the sessions, Upon the bench, I will so handle 'em, That the vibration of this pendulum Shalt make all taylors yards of one 1025 Unanimous opinion, A thing he long has vapour'd of, But now shall ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... obtained a deal of first-hand information that he believed would come in handy. Buddy's first mistrust was not long in passing, and, once Gray had penetrated his guard, the boy was won completely, the pendulum swung to the opposite extreme, and erelong suspicion changed to liking, then to approval, and at last to ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... whom the rope with a weight at the end of it had been swung pendulum wise—next appeared at the summit with Harry in his strong grip. But it was a white faced inanimate burden he carried. The boy ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... war of 1812 and subsequent wars, even in the recent terrible war, he was among the bravest. Help her to make a scrap book that she may pass her knowledge on to others. While authorities in history say that a race once great, can never attain greatness again, as truly as the pendulum swings this mixed race will surely come into its own. The colored race comes from several lines of white ancestry, and as fruit is grafted to a finer degree of species, so the colored race will some day show its latent powers. The child ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... what nonsense! It just looks that way to you, Ustinya Naumovna. I keep getting punier; first it's stomachache, then palpitation of the heart—just like the beating of a pendulum. Now I have a sinking feeling, or feel kind of seasick, and things ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... political pendulum swung back again, and Hawthorne was offered the surveyor-ship of the custom-house at Salem, accepted it, and moved his family back to his old home. He held the position for four years, completed his first great romance, and in 1850 gave to the world "The Scarlet Letter," ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... and Horatio Seymour's success preceded many surprises and disappointments which were to be disclosed in the campaign of 1844. Never were the motions of the political pendulum more agitated or more irregular. For three years, public sentiment had designated Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren as the accepted candidates of their respective parties for President; and, until the spring of 1844, the confidence of the friends of the Kentucky statesman ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... A vibrating body is one having a to-and-fro movement, like that of a clock pendulum or the string of a violin on sounding. Bodies to give out sound waves must vibrate rapidly, making not less than sixteen vibrations per second. The upper limit of hearing being about 40,000 vibrations per second, certain bodies may even vibrate ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... pharmacopoeia contains nothing so potent as despair to steady quivering nerves, and steel to superhuman endurance. For Beryl, the pendulum of suspense had ceased to swing, because the spring of hope had snapped; and the complete surrender, the mute acceptance of the worst possible to come, had left her numb, impervious to dread. As one by one the discovered facts spelled unmistakably the name of her brother, allowing ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... couldn't climb, and—oh, Winnie kept losing his shoes, and got stuck in the fence, and you never saw anything so funny! And then Joy couldn't climb, and she just hung there swinging; and now, mother, I couldn't help laughing to save me, it was so exactly like a great pendulum with hoops on. Well, Joy was mad 'cause we laughed and all, and so she said she'd go home. Then—let me see—oh, it was after that, Winnie tumbled into the ditch, splash in! with his feet up in the air, and I thought I should go off ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... and she felt ashamed that the thought had not struck her before. She almost, but not quite, decided to insert such an advertisement at once; but, as she pondered, she questioned the wisdom of such an action. Her mind swung, like a pendulum, from one side to the other, and at last she fell asleep, still undecided, but still thinking ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... the foregoing conclusions and opinions of upwards of forty working biologists, many of whom were brought up, so to speak, in the Darwinian faith, to show that the pendulum of evolutionary thought is swinging away from the narrow and restricted conception of natural selection, pure and simple, as the sole or most important factor, and returning in the direction ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... society: that of blind faith, of reverent religious freedom, and of irreverent scepticism. Now, since the human mind is so made that it must have religion, when this middle element of reasonable religious freedom is withdrawn, society vibrates, like a pendulum, between scepticism and superstition; the extreme of superstition reacting to scepticism, and then the barrenness of scepticism reacting again into superstition. When the persecutions in France had succeeded in extinguishing this middle element, then ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... by the monkeys striking other branches with their feet, until the long string oscillated back and forwards like the pendulum of a clock. This oscillation was gradually increased, until the monkey at the lower end was swung up among the branches of the tree on the opposite side of the igaripe. After touching them once or twice, he discovered that he was within reach; ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... to feel our way. We all took a long breath when a gleam of light came in at some narrow windows scattered along. At the top, in front of the clock works, stood a woman, who began at once to tell us the statistics of the pendulum, to which recital I did not choose to listen. She was not to go down with us, and, panting with fatigue and trembling with fright, we groped our way ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... gradually the pendulum swung back and Magda's audiences were once again as big and enthusiastic as ever. Perhaps even more enthusiastic, since the existence of a romantic and dramatic attachment sheds a certain glamour about ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... disobey us and you will quickly find out," snapped Indigo, swaying her head from side to side on its long, swan-like neck like the pendulum of ...
— Sky Island - Being the further exciting adventures of Trot and Cap'n - Bill after their visit to the sea fairies • L. Frank Baum
... attention was paid to the study of astronomy. Here, as before, they used the Greek knowledge, but they advanced the study of the science greatly by the introduction of instruments, such as those for measuring time by the movement of the pendulum and the measurement of the ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the public benefit would have been appreciated by the great mass of the electors, and they were unfeignedly astonished at the verdict returned by the country. They had not taken into account that swing of the pendulum which has so large an influence in popular constituencies. Nor had they noted the extent to which the unity of the Liberal party, and its consequent strength, had been impaired by the action of advanced sections, who were so passionately bent upon carrying ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... the Figures are Determined. Converting Hours Into Minutes. Changing Speed Hours to Seconds. Pressure as the Square of the Speed. Gyroscopic:Balance. The Principles Involved. The Application of the Gyroscope. Fore and Aft Gyroscopic Control. Angle Indicator. Pendulum Stabilizer. Steering and Controlling Wheel. Automatic Stabilizing Wings. Barometers. Aneroid Barometer. Hydroplanes. Sustaining Weight of Pontoons. Shape ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... street the crazy watchmaker was standing on the edge of his high steps, swinging a weight; it was attached to the end of a long cord, and he followed the swinging of the pendulum with his fingers, as though he were timing the beats. This was very interesting, and Pelle feared it would ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... has not felt some joy without security and without a morrow; when life seems concentrated in one short hour which we would wish to make eternal, and which we feel slipping away minute by minute, while we listen to the pendulum which counts the seconds, or look at the hand that seems to gallop o'er the dial, or watch a carriage-wheel, of which each turn abridges distance, or hearken to the splashing of a prow that distances the waves, ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... struck. Satisfied by his scrutiny, my light limbed companion swung himself nimbly upon it, and twisting his legs round it in sailor fashion, slipped down eight or ten feet, where his weight gave it a motion not un-like that of a pendulum. He could not venture to descend any further; so holding on with one hand, he with the other shook one by one all the slender roots around him, and at last, finding one which he thought trustworthy, shifted him self to it and continued ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... end find it of infinite advantage to them in their ascent and descent. They apply it to the branch of the tree, as though it were a supple finger, and frequently swing by it from the branch like the pendulum of a clock. It answers all the purposes of a fifth hand to the monkey, ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... Uninhabited for nine years, the room had not the air of being resigned to its solitude. The mirror waited for the old lady's glance, and on the onyx clock a pensive Sappho was lonely because she did not hear the noise of the pendulum. ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... dead silence around me. Is this death? was my indistinct wondering thought. Then I felt as if mighty wings were fanning me. "Kind wings, caressing, kind wings!" were the recurring words in my brain, like the regular movements of a pendulum, and interiorily under an unreasoning impulse, I laughed at these words. Then I experienced a new sensation: I rather knew than felt that I was lifted from the floor, and fell down and down some unknown precipice, amongst the hollow rollings of a distant ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... again, and her eyes drooped heavily. It was as if, in watching Arlt's overthrow, her old prescience of impending disaster had come back upon her in fourfold measure, heightened by the intensity of her exhilaration of a few moments before. When a quiet woman is stirred from her usual poise, the pendulum of her nerves swings in a long arc. The Dvorak dance had not deepened Sally's color; the Damrosch song had not caused her to draw her white ostrich boa more ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... process of thought, the whole ebb and flow of emotion, may be revulsed for the rest of an existence. Nothing can ever seem to us as it did: it is a blow upon the fine mechanism by which we think, and move, and have our being—the pendulum vibrates aright no more—the dial hath no account with time—the process goes on, but it knows no symmetry or order;—it was a single stroke that marred it, but the harmony is gone ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various
... into the open door of the house, and showed the tinman a large wooden clock put up without a case between two windows, the pendulum and the weights being "exposed and bare." This clock he had bought for ten dollars of a travelling Yankee, who had set out to supply the country with machines. It had only kept tolerable time for about two months, and had ever since been getting ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... turners of the rope do not make a complete circle with it, but swing it from side to side in a pendulum motion. In this position the player runs in and jumps from one to five times and runs out ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... surrounded by a pediment. A broad flight of stone steps leads to this colonnade; and through the entrance door beneath it to the main central hall, 28 feet square, in which are placed (in niches) the very beautiful electric clock and pendulum presented by Erastus Corning, Esq. The center of this hall is occupied by a massive pier of stone, 10 feet square, passing from the basement into the dome above, and intended for the support of the great heliometer. ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... attracted by the oscillation of a brass lamp suspended from the ceiling of the cathedral at Pisa. Galileo was impressed with the regularity of its motion as it swung backwards and forwards, and was led to imagine that the pendulum movement might prove a valuable method for the correct measurement of time. The practical application of this idea he afterwards adopted in the construction of an ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... with this place sold even at a sacrifice, maybe a hundred thousand dollars more might stop the gap till the pendulum swings back a little. And—it might not! It might simply be throwing ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... in the world it had created! At other times, when the dark coasts were near and the current very swift, pale paradises opened to him where he lay for centuries, nor hot nor cold, neither waking nor sleeping, not in joy and not in sorrow. Then the stopped pendulum swung again, and the dreams came fast and faster. At times his brain turned from its mad clash with gigantic, formless, elemental things to rest in the beaten ways. They that listened heard the adventurer speak, heard the courtier and the poet and the lover, but never once the traitor. Of ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... hot dawn pouring redly into the grey city street, he swayed like a pendulum on the steaming pavement. His side was smeared, caked, with unnamable filth, refuse; a tremulous hand gripped feverishly the shoulder of a policeman who had roused him from a constrained stupor in a casual angle. "I wan' to see life," he mumbled dully, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... ticking cheerful encouragement of our proceedings, lends its name to our society, which for its punctuality and my love is christened 'Master Humphrey's Clock'? Now shall I tell how that in the bottom of the old dark closet, where the steady pendulum throbs and beats with healthy action, though the pulse of him who made it stood still long ago, and never moved again, there are piles of dusty papers constantly placed there by our hands, that we may link our ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... exult—despise—laugh, weep—for here There is such matter for all feeling: —Man! Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear, Ages and realms are crowded in this span, This mountain, whose obliterated plan The pyramid of empires pinnacled, Of Glory's gewgaws shining in the van Till the sun's rays with added flame were filled! Where are its golden roofs? ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... he taught at her University, and his first experiments in the knowledge of the law of gravity were made from her bell-tower, while, as it is said, the great lamp of her Duomo taught him the secret of the pendulum. ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... gentle pendulum-like swing, as he let himself hang to the full extent of his muscles, swayed Philip Hexton; and then, with the greater part of his horror mastered by enforced coolness, he made ...
— Son Philip • George Manville Fenn
... meantime, was trying to oust the notion that had alighted in the brain of Fra Diavolo. "Of course I ought to ask the Confederates higher prices as the risks increase," he said, then paused and shook his head and wig and hat like a mournful pendulum. "But how can I? The South hardly grows any more cotton. It cannot ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... creaking; then a wretched cart on racketty wheels kept passing and passing and seeming as though it would never pass! However, these sounds did not worry me: on the contrary, I was glad of them; they seemed to distract my attention. But now at last it seemed as though all were tranquil. Only the pendulum of our old clock ticked gravely and drowsily in the dining-room and there was an even drawn-out sound like the hard breathing of people asleep. I was on the point of getting up, then again something rustled ... then suddenly ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... not asleep. I saw the flowered cotton curtains of the bed move, and the child peep forth. At first I thought he was looking at the great clock, which was gaily painted in red and green. At the top sat a cuckoo, below hung the heavy leaden weights, and the pendulum with the polished disc of metal went to and fro, and said 'tick, tick.' But no, he was not looking at the clock, but at his mother's spinning wheel, that stood just underneath it. That was the boy's favourite piece of furniture, but he dared not touch ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... you will be able to perceive, if you have any ear for that class of music, a certain superior degree of organisation in the prose; a compacter fitting of the parts; a balance in the swing and the return as of a throbbing pendulum. We must not, in things temporal, take from those who have little, the little that they have; the merits of prose are inferior, but they are not the same; it is a little kingdom, but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to exchange just a few constitutional words with the gardener; and the whole house was drowsy with that by-time when light and shadow seem to mix together, and far-away sounds take a faint to and fro, as if they were the pendulum of silence. ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... Finally, the half of a cocoanut shell, lined, and furnished with soft cushions of thistle down, made a good bed for the little wonder; and the nursery maid, wife of a neighboring clockmaker, and a person of ingenuity, conceived the admirable idea of suspending the cocoanut cradle from the pendulum of a great clock, in order that the infant might be rocked all the time. Madam Tom Thumb was enchanted with the invention. She adhered to the old-fashioned notions, and could not suppose it possible that her little one could sleep without rocking. What the good little mother ...
— Piccolissima • Eliza Lee Follen
... downwards, and the glass filament had to be removed and fastened transversely across the base of the young capsule. We expected that the sub-peduncle would have been motionless in its new position; but it continued slowly to swing, like a pendulum, from side to side, that is, in a plane at right angles to that in which it had descended. This circumnutating movement was observed from 9 A.M. on 22nd to 9 A.M. 24th, as shown at B in the diagram. We were not able ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... up, and the poet was warned by his friends not to appear at the theater or upon the street for fear of the indignation of the mob. The spoilt child of London was paying the penalty of popularity. The pendulum had swung too far and was now ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... tell from watching these rather clumsy operations on the part of the inventor, his apparatus for steadying an aeroplane was surely showing signs of being a success. It consisted of a small iron bar weighing an ounce or so, which was hung as a pendulum from an arm projecting from under the operator's seat. This pendulum was so delicately set that it seemed to respond to the slightest deviation of ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Flying Squadron • Robert Shaler
... the cure either by sudden slight bodily pain, or by a total suspension of all the employments with which these bad habits are associated. If a boy could not read without swinging his head like a pendulum, we should rather prohibit him from reading for some time, than suffer him to grow up with this ridiculous habit. But in conversation, whenever opportunities occur of telling him any thing in which he is particularly interested, we should refuse to gratify ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... Bible and formulate creeds as opposite as the poles. The pendulum of their belief takes in not merely an arc, but ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... tick" says the Dutch clock. Robert fain would know How it's pendulum swinging Made it's ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... hill, and but faintly seen through the smoky haze, came the pendulum-like swing of rank after rank of sturdy legs, with guidons fluttering along the columns and big, ghostly army wagons rumbling behind. Up started the band at the foot of the hill with a rousing march, and up started every ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... a clock with weights and chains And pendulum swinging up and down! A dresser filled with shining delph, Speckled and white and blue ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... very severe, the first of the extraordinary forms of torture, was so called when the sufferer, having hung suspended by the wrists, for sometimes a whole hour, was swung about by the executioner, either like the pendulum of a clock, or by elevating him with the windlass and dropping him to within a foot or two of the ground. If he stood this torture, a thing almost unheard of, seeing that it cut the flesh of the wrist to the bone and dislocated the limbs, weights were attached to the feet, ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the night and before the Battalion had acted on them. The fact is, I expressly remained in the forward position until at least rations had been delivered to the men, and by the time that had been done the staff pendulum had swung again. The salient of Baquerolle Farm, which it had cost valuable lives to reach, ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... cloudy shrine of the unknown. Now, there are times when this human clock well-nigh runs down; when it seems that volition is dead; when the past is all gilded, the future all shrouded, and the soul grows passive, hoping nothing, fearing nothing. Yet when the slowly swinging pendulum seems about to rest, even then an unseen hand touches the secret spring; and, as the curiously folded coil quivers on again, the resuscitated will is lifted triumphantly back to its throne. This newborn power is from God. But, ye wise ones of earth, tell us how, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... the doctor's gaze, when his mind entered that of his distant agent, was a clock. It was a very ordinary sort of an instrument, such as one sees in schools and offices; it had two hands, and a pendulum of ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... string going like a pendulum, she stood back a pace with hands clasped behind her, and snapped at the apple as it swung, sometimes catching it, sometimes missing it, sometimes marking it, sometimes biting it, her body bending and rising with its waggle, and nod, ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... other two. And what is he about? He seems to be floating and soaring, sauntering and curtseying, skimming and dipping, rollicking and frolicking—now up, now down—now describing gyrations, now imitating a pendulum—now trying to be so steady with his fluttering wings, that he looks like a star twinkling in the day-time—in short, playing all sorts of droll antics, indulging in every imaginable pirouette and somersault, in all the world (in his case above the world) like ...
— The Story of a Dewdrop • J. R. Macduff
... the bulkheads and timbers creaked and groaned dismally, the cabin-doors rattled, the rudder kicked as the water swirled and gurgled about it and under her counter with the heave of her, and the jerk of the spars aloft, or the slatting of the braces as she swayed, pendulum-like, from side to side. ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... Chronometry. — N. chronometry, horometry[obs3], horology; date, epoch; style, era. almanac, calendar, ephemeris; register, registry; chronicle, annals, journal, diary, chronogram. [Instruments for the measurement of time]; clock, wall clock, pendulum clock, grandfather's clock, cuckoo clock, alarm clock, clock radio; watch, wristwatch, pocket watch, stopwatch, Swiss watch; atomic clock, digital clock, analog clock, quartz watch, water clock; chronometer, chronoscope[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... methods of reaching the desired result, the chief aim of which is that at the end of each swing of the pendulum the escape teeth shall be made to stop until the pendulum starts to swing back again. This can be achieved by beveling both tooth and pallet until the teeth, instead of recoiling by the downward motion of the pallet, shall slip by and give the pallet a jolt onward, ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... tick of the old clock on the mantel seemed to Kenny's distracted ears a perpetuity of measured taps upon a death-drum. He thought of Poe and the pit and the pendulum. He thought of Joan and told himself fiercely that he did it all for her; for her he was winding around himself a chain foredoomed to clank. And he wondered why on earth the old ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... night on the planets, while they shine with more than reflected light. In addition to the five or six large planets in each group, which, however, are many millions of miles apart, there is in some clusters a small planet that swings backward and forward across the common centre, like a pendulum, but in nearly a straight line; and while this multiplicity of motion goes on, the whole aggregation sweeps majestically around Sirius, its mighty sun. Our little solar system contains, as we know, about one thousand planets, satellites, and asteroids large enough ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... and the open wind struck us full. It was a crazy pendulum wind. A storm was breaking overhead. There were flares of lightning and thunder cracks—from disturbed nature, outraged by the temperature changes of the ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... till evening she knits and sings, While ever the pendulum tireless swings The moments around, with its tick and stroke, Nor hastes for the festal, nor lags for the yoke. And grandmother never repines at her fate Of being the ...
— Fun And Frolic • Various
... I confessed everything to my mother, and, for several months afterwards, was a reformed character. Indeed, the pendulum of my conscience swung too far the other way, and I grew exaggeratedly remorseful and ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... left, a row of mullioned windows looks at sea and cliffs in a flash of lightning. Below is a seaman's chest. Above, on the broken plaster, is scrawled a ship. In the middle, at the rear, there is a clock with hanging pendulum and weights. A gun of antique pattern leans beside the clock. To the right the cabin is recessed, with a door right-angled in the jog and other windows looking on the sea. A parrot sits on its perch with curbed profanity. The gaudy creature ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... trained boys to declaim in elegant periods on any subject whatever, regardless of its content; thus carrying to an extreme the precepts with which the great orators had enforced the importance of style. The Schoolmen swung the pendulum back, letting sound and froth go and thinking only of their subject-matter, despising the classics. In their turn they were confronted by the humanists, who reasserted ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... not to hear him, for his eyes were upon the clock creeping close to eleven, and he watched the swaying pendulum as though it fascinated him. There was no conversation, and each sat thinking his own thoughts until the stranger suddenly pulled down the side of his collar and listened. The clerk eyed him with disfavor. The squeaking of footsteps in the dry snow was heard distinctly. The stranger got up leisurely ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... clothes, the bed-clothes not forgotten, and now our child! I'm within your doors, I sit at your table, I lie in your bed; I exist in your blood; in your lungs, in your brain; I am everywhere and yet you can't get hold of me. When the pendulum strikes the hour of midnight, I'll blow cold, on your heart, so that it stops like a clock that's run down. When you sit at your work, I shall come with a poppy, invisible to you, that will put your thoughts to sleep, and confuse your mind, so that you'll see visions you ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... stay away from the forest lest others should discover the dreadful blue signs before he did, and at the same time he was afraid to go in. He swung like a pendulum between these two difficulties and grew daily more nervous and unhappy. By the end of June he had lost ten pounds of flesh as well as the money he might have made out of poaching and selling the game. By the middle of July he was so haggard that people began to remark on his ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... pendulum of an observatory clock, the bob-point of which touches at each vibration the mercury which transmits intelligence of its movements to distant points, Carleton now swung himself to Cincinnati. In Louisville he gave an account, from reports, of the battle of Perryville. It was written in the ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... There was a plate-rack on one wall, and near the chimney-piece hung the wag-at-the-wall clock, the time-piece that was commonest in Thrums at that time, and that got this name because its exposed pendulum swung along the wall. The two windows in the room faced each other on opposite walls, and were so small that even a child might have stuck in trying to crawl through them. They opened on hinges, like a door. In the wall of the dark passage leading from the outer door into the room was ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... night attracted and repelled her like the swing of a mighty pendulum. She was trying to pray—that much had Bernard taught her—but her prayer only ran blind and futile through her brain. The hour should have been sacred, but it was marred and desecrated by the stark glare of that nightmare moon. She was worn out with long and anxious ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... the other official prestige and Court of St. James's. On such minor and personal incidents (so to call them,) often depend the great growths and turns of civilization. This moment of a woman and a queen surely swung the grandest oscillation of modern history's pendulum. Many sayings and doings of that period, from foreign potentates and powers, might well be dropt in oblivion by America—but never this, if I could have ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the whole of it. By a certain movement of liberation, a sort of balancing on its centre, the moon presents more than the half of her disc to the earth. She is like a pendulum, the centre of gravity of which is towards the terrestrial globe, and which oscillates regularly. Whence comes that oscillation? Because her movement of rotation on her axis is animated with uniform velocity, whilst her movement of translation, following an elliptical orb round the earth, ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... would be looking back to the last three years, and saying, "The life of the Custom House lies like a dream behind me," in almost the identical words that he used of Boston wharfs and the Brook Farmers. The pendulum of temperament had swung again to the other extreme, and he was now all for the imaginative world ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... like a huge pendulum his body swayed, and in an agony of suspense he watched the fatal rope. With writhing body he swayed far out, and then he ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... and Mrs. Mavick excused herself to ascertain the cause of the delay. Evelyn and her suitor were left alone. She was standing by a window looking out, and he was standing by the fireplace watching the swing of the figure on the pendulum of the tall mantelpiece clock. He was the first ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... for the cork resembles old worm-eaten oak when its first freshness has gone and its complexion becomes darker. A very pretty and uncommon object to copy is that of an old-fashioned clock, a veritable "my grandfather's clock," an upright tall eight-day clock that has a long chain and a heavy pendulum concealed within its tall case, and that shows a big square face with large figures printed on it. I will give you a few details about my cork clock, and I think you will make one and set it upon a bracket to be admired by all beholders. This miniature clock stands 7-1/2 inches high. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... strulbrug of Swift (and Swift, being his horrid creator, ought to understand his own horrid creation) was a wreck, a shell, that had been burned hollow, and cancered by the fierce furnace of life. His clockwork was gone, or carious; only some miserable fragment of a pendulum continued to oscillate paralytically from mere incapacity of any thing so abrupt, and therefore so vigorous, as a decided HALT! However, the use of this dreadful word may be reasonably extended to the young who happen to have become essentially old in misery. Intensity of a ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... 'Pendulum sweeping High, and now low! That star—tic, blot it! Tac, let it go! Time he is reaping Hay for his mow; That flower—he's got ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... his head, shrugged his great shoulders, and puffed doggedly at his pipe in silence. My tall clock in the corner ticked the louder, its brass pendulum glinting as it swung to and fro in the light of the slumbering fire. I threw on a fresh log, kicked it into a blaze, and poured out for him a stiff glass of applejack. I had faith in that applejack, for ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... marking their separation. I was not dead; I slept a dreamless sleep. Presently I shall sleep again; as men say, die; then doubtless wake again. Life and death are but sleeping and waking on a larger scale. Our little life is rounded with a sleep. It is the swing of the pendulum, the revolution of the orb. Yes, I am writing my autobiography. So little is known of the private history of Shakespeare, conceive the boon it will be to mankind. I shall leave the manuscripts to my executors, for them to publish after I have lain down ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... her to the spot, and horror, like a presence, rose from the void, and beckoned her down to oblivion. Why not? Why not? The question of despair seemed, like a vast pendulum, to swing her to and fro between the sky and the blackness, so that, blind and deaf and dumb, she felt only the horror, and her own pulse of life suspended over annihilation. And while her fingers clutched tightly at the rock, the thought of Gregory's face, as ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the seventeenth century the pendulum moved from a position of the colony ignoring any Indian rights in the land to a gradual recognition of the Indian right of occupation. This sweep of the pendulum brought the establishment of boundary lines between the whites and the Indians with reservations being ...
— Mother Earth - Land Grants in Virginia 1607-1699 • W. Stitt Robinson, Jr.
... Dock, (Move arms to right, left, right, in pendulum fashion. Stamp right—left.) The mouse ran up the clock. (Run four steps forward.) The clock struck "One!" (Pause a moment to listen on "One"—clap hands) And down he ran. (Run four steps back to place.) Hickory, Dickory, Dock. (Swing arms right, ...
— Games and Play for School Morale - A Course of Graded Games for School and Community Recreation • Various
... continued Mary, "it swings back and forth with a certain degree of rapidity. Now we want to know what this rapidity depends upon, and then we could make a pendulum so that it would oscillate faster or slower, ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... of the styles that followed, and a great many people look upon the periods of Louis XIV, the Regency, Louis XV and Louis XVI as one great period with variations, or ups and downs—the complete swing and return of the pendulum. ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... of the poet, we shall not hear in anyone of their poems the single clear ringing note for which we are listening. When anyone of these men is considering the poetic character, his thought behaves like a pendulum, swinging back and forth ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... life is soon left without an aim. It becomes a habit, a sort of intoxication which we cannot do without. And how vitally important it is that we should do without it.... Happiness is an instant in the universal rhythm, one of the poles between which the pendulum of life swings: to stop the ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... comet at this time was compared by Bessel,[281] who watched it with minute attention, to that of a blazing rocket. He made the singular observation that this fan of light, which seemed the source of supply for the tail, oscillated like a pendulum to and fro across a line joining the sun and nucleus, in a period of 4-3/5 days; and he was unable to escape from the conclusion[282] that a repulsive force, about twice as powerful as the attractive force of gravity, was concerned in the production of these remarkable effects. Nor ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... person than Marshal Jeff Calkins. His shoulders were humped and his short legs bowed from continual riding, and his head was slung far forward on a gaunt neck; so that when he turned his head from one to another in speaking it was with a peculiar pendulum motion. The marshal had a reputation which was strong over three hundred miles and more of a mountain-desert. This was strange, for the marshal was a very talkative man, and talkative men are not popular on the desert; but it has been discovered ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... and miners for another voyage, now without solicitude or fear, but with unbounded hopes of wealth,—especially hardy adventurers and broken-down families of rank anxious to retrieve their fortunes. The pendulum of a nation's thought swings from the extreme of doubt and cynicism to the opposite extreme of faith and exhilaration. Spain was ripe for the harvest. Eight hundred years' desperate contest with the Moors had made the nation bold, heroic, adventurous. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... happy, always will look at yourself from my ground and by my light, as I see you, and consent to be selfish in all things. Observe, that if I were vacillating, I should not be so weak as to tease you with the process of the vacillation: I should wait till my pendulum ceased swinging. It is precisely because I am your own, past any retraction or wish of retraction,—because I belong to you by gift and ownership, and am ready and willing to prove it before the world at a word of yours,—it is precisely ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... things he would like any future visitors to bring him—a piece of gold and silver embroidery; but, before anything else, I found he would like to have toys—such as Yankee clocks with the face in a man's stomach, to wind up behind, his eyes rolling with every beat of the pendulum; or a china-cow milk-pot, a jack-in-the-box, models of men, carriages, and horses—all animals in ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... was surely not to be wondered if the parties should come out of this contest too hostile ever to maintain to each other the relation of employer and employed. This six years of vexatious swinging like a pendulum over the line between bondage and liberty was well calculated to spoil all the gratitude and glory ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... feminine fashion are undoubtedly a source of misgiving and disquietude to those, like ourselves, who favour the extension of civil rights to women. But, amid all the evidences of frivolity and extravagance which pain the judicious, we need never relinquish the hope that, once the pendulum swings backwards into the direction of sanity, its retrogression will probably be beneficial, even though we cannot pronounce ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... doing work owing to its position. For example we may take an ordinary eight-day clock. When the weights are wound up, they have a certain amount of potential energy stored up, which will counteract the friction of the wheels and the resistance of the air on the pendulum. Or, again, we have the example of a water-wheel: first the water in the reservoir, being higher than the wheel, has an amount of potential energy. This is converted into kinetic energy in striking against the paddles, and after this ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... and for a moment we are both silent. We have sat down side by side on the sofa. Vick is standing on her hinder legs, with her forepaws rested on Roger's knee. Her tail is wagging with the strong and untiring regularity of a pendulum, and a smirk of welcome and recognition is on her face. Roger's arm is round me, and we are holding each other's hands, but we are no longer in heaven. I could not tell you why, but we are not. Some stupid constraint—quite ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... tassel swung back and forth with the motion of the uneven road just ahead of the horses' heads, and Landers sat watching it idly. He even caught himself counting the vibrations, as though it were a pendulum, dividing the beats into minutes. Very slow time it was; but somehow it did not surprise him. It all conformed so perfectly with the brown, quiet prairie, and the sun shining, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... hands, one might have supposed she had already passed from the scene of her woe. Even the old-fashioned timepiece that hung upon a nail in the wall seemed to be smitten with the pervading spell, for its pendulum was motionless, and its feeble pulse ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... are absent from its councils. To-day, for reasons none can explain, it is pro-foreign to the verge of servility. To-morrow, for reasons equally obscure, the pendulum swings back, and—the students are heaving mud at the foreigners in the streets. Vexatious, irresponsible, incoherent, and, above all, cheaply mysterious, is the rule of the land—stultified by intrigue and counter-intrigue, chequered with futile reforms ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... convictions, would suffer in so keen a contest waged under such unequal and cruel conditions. It was in truth a year of great passion and great despair. Defeat is bitter when it comes swiftly and conclusively, but when defeat falls by inches like the pendulum in the pit, the agony is a little beyond verbal expression. I remember the first day of my martyrdom. The clocks were striking eight; we chose our places, got into position. After the first hour, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... utilitarian, notwithstanding the blood of the troubadours. There is even a bed in the salle a manger. A piece of furniture, however, from which my eye takes more pleasure is one of those old clocks which reach from the ceiling to the floor, and conceal all the mystery and solemnity of pendulum and weights from the vulgar gaze. It has a very loud and self-asserting tick, and a still more arrogant strike, for such an old clock; but, then, everybody here has a voice that is much stronger than is needed, and it is the habit to scream in ordinary conversation. A clock, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... from day to day, from hour to hour. And notwithstanding Doctor Splendiano Accoramboni's assurance that, after the vital process had reached a state of perfect equilibrium, he would give it a new start like the pendulum of a clock, they were all very doubtful as to Salvator's recovery, and thought that the Doctor had perhaps already given the pendulum such a violent start that the mechanism ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... follow with the inevitableness of a physical law, that the alternate swing of the pendulum between a naturalism which set above everything the material fact and the cry for truth, and a subtle estheticism which set the word above the spirit, would in the end usher in an art that had profited by and learned to avoid both extremes. There was ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... the day when Mr. Dubourg had called at the house, she had been cleaning the mantelpiece. She had rubbed the part of it which was under the clock with her duster, had accidentally struck the pendulum, and had stopped it. Having once before done this, she had been severely reproved. Fearing that a repetition of the offense, only the day after the clock had been regulated by the maker, might lead perhaps to the withdrawal of her leave of absence, she had determined to put matters right again, ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... leave and with your help I'll make as merry as a man may whose sands are all but run. The Lord General—whom the devil roast in his time will make a pendulum of me at daybreak, and gives me the ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... seemed so intensely the present to Ishmael that during it he had thought it could never cease to be, reeled and sank into the past, leaving him with the feeling that time was once more in motion, like a vast clock whose pendulum has stopped for one beat, only to resume its swing again. At once it became possible that everything should go on, the idea of the incursion of the boy Killigrew ceased to be wildly chimerical, and with this acceptance of it Killigrew ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... that the object was no man, but a square case. In a flash of thought he divined what the box contained, and unhesitatingly ran along the ledge towards it. As it descended he seized it with both hands and swung it in towards himself. With pendulum-like motion it descended, and at last touched the rock at his feet. As this took place he grasped the rope with both hands and threw his entire weight upon it, hauling slowly in, hand over hand. So quickly and deftly was this carried out that those lowering overhead were deceived, ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... individuals may yet be subject to the decision of the phrenologist; and if they have escaped the ordeal of the supposed spontaneous rotation of a pendulum under a glass bell, their handwriting is still open to the criticisms of the wise, who discover by it the most minute secrets of character; and some of the old scribes may even now be amenable to this kind of scrutiny. But they are ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... which is always taught in the National system by certificated infant school mistresses. They are semi-theatrical, very pretty, and serve at once as music, discipline, and amusement. Such as "The Clock," in which they beat the hours, swing for the pendulum, etc. There are certain actions in these songs which express listening.... I am very fond of the National system for teaching children, and it has struck me that this song is a little of that type.... I am doubly vexed ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... Botanical Appendix to the account of Captain Flinders' Voyage, published in 1814, the following description of the Ovulum of Cephalotus follicularis is given: Ovulum erectum, intra testam membranaceam continens sacculum pendulum, magnitudine cavitatis testae, and in reference to this description, I have in the same place remarked that, "from the structure of the Ovulum, even in the unimpregnated state, I entertain no doubt that the radicle of the Embryo ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... period so completely broken with tradition as in physics. The correctness of the Copernican theory is proved by Kepler's laws of planetary movement, and Galileo's telescopical observations; the scientific theory of motion is created by Galileo's laws of projectiles, falling bodies, and the pendulum; astronomy and mechanics form the entrance to exact physics—Descartes ventures an attempt at a comprehensive mechanical explanation of nature. And thus an entirely new movement is at hand. Forerunners, it is true, had not been lacking. Roger Bacon (1214-94) had already sought to obtain ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... fell on his shoulders. The fingers bit deeply into the flesh, drawing a groan of pain from Hamlin. He was lifted to his feet—off his feet, so that he dangled in the air like a pendulum. He was suspended by the shoulders, Lawler's fingers gripping him like iron hooks; he was shaken until his feet, powerless to retard the movement, were flopping back and forth wildly, and his teeth rattled ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... good sport, and he wanted Becky to be happy. But it was not easy to sit there and see those two—with the pendulum swinging between them of joy and dreams, and the knowledge of a ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... doubt that even the smallest of the agriculturists are getting some share of the spoils of the tariffs and other measures Bebel mentions, there can also be little question that in such a storm of revolt as he predicts the pendulum would swing too far the other way, and they would suffer unjustly. It is true that the agriculturist produces bread, while the city worker consumes it, but so also do shoe workers produce shoes that are consumed by garment workers, and certainly no Socialist predicts any lasting struggle ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... a conversational bully. Mighty little we troubled ourselves for Padus, the Po, "a river broader and more rapid than the Rhone," and the times when Hannibal led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum ferry-boat was swinging back ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... salts. The male skeleton contrasts with the female as the stronger, larger, heavier and straighter because it is an expression of a greater capacity to utilize, store and keep lime in the system. Women throughout their reproductive period are liable to rapid and pendulum-like fluctuations of their ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... getting down into the receiver, though we had a piece of very fine wire-gauze put at the bottom of the pipe, between the receiver and the pipe through which we were forcing the current. In one of these experiments I was watching the flame in the tube, my son was taking the vibrations of the pendulum of the clock, and Mr. Wood was attending to give me the column of water as I called for it, to keep the current up to a certain point. As I saw the flame descending in the tube I called for more water, and Wood unfortunately turned the cock the wrong way, the current ceased, the flame ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... chill ran down his back, for a raven perched on the black doll and pecked so fiercely at it with its hard beak, that bird and image swayed to and fro like a pendulum. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... force, I understand the force with which a revolving body tends to fly from the centre; and by centripetal force, I understand any force which draws it to the centre, or counteracts the centrifugal tendency. In the conical pendulum, or steam engine governor, which consists of two metal balls suspended on rods hung from the end of a vertical revolving shaft, the centrifugal force is manifested by the divergence of the balls, ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... He accepts them as they are, and is grateful. But even the most obscure of mortals may have his preferences, and a curious chapter in the lives of individuals who have concerned themselves with painting would be the bewildering way in which the pendulum of their appreciation and admiration has swung backwards and forwards from Titian to Velasquez, from Velasquez to Rembrandt, and sometimes back to Titian. It is often ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... Moreover, in rear of Mooi River, further British reinforcements were disembarking at Durban, and being pushed up to the front in a continuous stream. The composition and exact distribution of the troops actually in southern Natal on the 23rd November is given in Appendix 8. The pendulum had thus swung completely over. The armoured train incident was of no importance either tactically or strategically, and that momentary success was the only one achieved by Joubert. The slow and hesitating movements of the Boer columns had but hastened the ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... locket in front of you, holding the end of the chain with both hands. You will soon see that it will swing in harmony with your thoughts. If you think of a circle, it will swing around in a circle. If you think of the movement of a pendulum, the locket ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton
... was struck with the oddity of its appearance and gestures.—Sometimes this mister wight held his hands clasped over his head, like an Indian Jogue in the attitude of penance; sometimes he swung them perpendicularly, like a pendulum, on each side; and anon he slapped them swiftly and repeatedly across his breast, like the substitute used by a hackney-coachman for his usual flogging exercise, when his cattle are idle upon the stand ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... his footsteps ceased to echo in the gallery, and then, he scarcely knew why, he furtively opened the door and peeped out. All was dark; and save for the regular tick of the pendulum on the stairs, the house was still. Mr. Thomasson, wondering which way Julia's room lay, stood listening until a stair creaked; and then, retiring precipitately, locked his door. Lord Almeric, in the gloom of the green moreen curtains ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... extremes. He thought that an oath, if it were only big enough, would frighten away Human Nature, instead of serving only as a challenge to it. Accordingly, each reformation was more intemperate than the last, to be duly followed by a greater swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... in the day) at 9h. 51m. 48s. Now, if the plane of oscillation coincided nearly with the direction of the shock, the only effect would be a temporary change in the period of oscillation; but if it was at right angles to the direction of the shock, the clock might be stopped by the point of the pendulum catching behind the graduated arc in front of which it oscillated. The planes of the first three clocks, it will be seen, were approximately at right angles to the direction of the Woodstock epicentre, and B and C were indeed stopped in the manner just described; while the plane of shock D was nearly ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... man you are to grapple with those old metaphysico-divinity books.... The pendulum is now swinging against our side, but I feel positive it will soon swing the other way; and no mortal man will do half as much as you in giving it a start in the right direction, as you ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... gold Swift sometimes moves slowly through the air, a few feet from the ground, where it poises itself; at others, vacillates like the pendulum of a clock, and again altering its motion, darts about with ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown
... designed by Inigo Jones would be perfect for our more elaborate American country houses. The severe beauty of English paneling and the carving of newel-post and spindles are having a just revival. The pendulum swings—and there is nothing new under ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... at my stomach, after dinner, to see a man going back and forth so, like the pendulum of a clock. But it's just like you: you are always in a fuss about something. You are a queer set: all men are more or ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... 103 8. This set him thinking, and it led to the invention of the pendulum. 9. James Ferguson was a poor Scotch shepherd boy. Once, seeing the inside of a watch, he was filled with wonder. "Why should I not make a watch?" thought he. 10. But how was he to get the materials out of which to make the wheels and the mainspring? He soon found how to get them: he made the ...
— McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... seen, among a group of young men in a distant doorway, one with a face so individual and of an expression so extraordinary that all interest in the people about her had stopped as a clock stops when the pendulum is held back. She could see nothing else, think of nothing else. Not that it was so very handsome—though no other had ever approached it in its power over her imagination—but because of its expression of haunting melancholy,—a melancholy so settled ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... reach it; and thus that we may genially acquiesce in that which it pleases God to send. Midway between two vulgar errors: steering a sure track between Scylla and Charybdis: the grovelling multitude to the left, the romantic few to the right; stand the words of inspired wisdom. The pendulum had probably oscillated many times between the two errors, before it settled at the central truth; 'Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full and deny Thee, and say, Who is the Lord? Or lest I be ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... sure, when Alb brought the motor-boat to our rescue at Urk, the way Nell's big hazel eyes lit up at sight of him, set my heart vibrating again like a pendulum, and I found myself much in the same condition I had been in at first; unable to decide which, after all, was the more indispensable of the two girls. But this return to chaos did not make for peace of mind, because, ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... and observation, and in turn jealously guarded by him until passed on to some younger brother in the profession. Every garden operation was made to seem a wonderful and difficult undertaking. Now, all that has changed. In fact the pendulum has swung, as it usually does, to the other extreme. Often, if you are a beginner, you have been flatteringly told in print that you could from the beginning do just as well ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... discouragement. Perceiving that his guest was making himself tolerably comfortable my friend turned again to his figures, and silence reigned supreme. The fire in the grate burned noiselessly with a mysterious blue light, as if it could do more if it wished; the Dutch clock looked wise, and swung its pendulum with studied exactness, like one who is determined to do his precise duty and shun responsibility; the cat assumed an attitude of intelligent neutrality. Finally the spectre trained his pale eyes upon his host, pulled in ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... square miles. It would advance the science of hydrography, and help to solve some of the difficult problems connected with Equatorial and Polar currents. It would enable us, it is said, by a series of pendulum observations at or near the Pole, to render essential service to the science of geology, to form a mathematical theory of the physical condition of the earth, and to ascertain its exact conformation. It would probably throw light on the wonderful ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... checking our levity, as he calls it; always keeping us in order and snubbing us, nevertheless we couldn't do without him. In fact, we may be likened to a social clock, of which Jim is the mainspring, Bob the weight, I the striking part of the works, and Dobson the pendulum. But we are not particular, we are ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... Clock. This is an eight-day clock; has a movement of the best workmanship, is driven by two strong springs, and keeps accurate time. The dial is 12 inches in diameter and has hour, minute and second hands. Pendulum beats seconds and makes electric contact by means of an adjustable mercury cup. It is mounted in a hardwood case with glass door. ...
— Astronomical Instruments and Accessories • Wm. Gaertner & Co.
... vaulted roof, which had been left swinging by one of the vergers. The habitual meditation of genius combined with an ordinary accident a new idea of science, and hence conceived the invention of measuring time by the medium of a pendulum. Who but a genius of this order, sitting in his orchard, and observing the descent of an apple, could have discovered a new quality in matter, and have ascertained the laws of attraction, by perceiving that the same causes might perpetuate the regular motions of the planetary system; who but ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... in the runner's favor. The stages of the game must be taken into consideration, and what may be a perfectly commendable play in one situation may be altogether reckless and foolhardy in another. Therefore, the most important faculty of all, the pendulum which regulates, and the rudder which guides, is judgment. An illustration may make my meaning clear. In the ninth inning, with a runner on first base and the score a tie, it may be a good play for the runner to attempt to steal second, because ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... Like a pendulum her mood swung back. By accident he had said the one thing which could have moved her, changed her at the moment. The savage side of him appealed to her. What he lacked in brilliance and the lighter gifts of raillery and eloquence and mental give-and-take, he had balanced by his natural ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in the never ceasing wind swirling across the treeless waste, the ugly red station, the rough cow-pens filled with lowing cattle, the huge, ungainly stores, their false fronts decorated by amateur wielders of the paint brush, and the garish dens of vice tucked in everywhere. The pendulum of life never ceased swinging. Society was mixed; no man cared who his neighbor was, or dared to question. Of women worthy the name there were few, yet there were flitting female forms in plenty, the saloon lights revealing powdered cheeks and painted eyebrows. It was ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... from Concord, an offer to every mind—the choice between repose and truth, and God makes the offer. "Take which you please ... between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets," most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation. Here is another aspect of art-duality, but it is more drastic than ours, as it ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... The swing of the pendulum so often noticed in politics was particularly marked in the elections to the papacy of the sixteenth century. In almost every instance the new pope was an opponent, and in some sort a contrast, to his predecessor. In no ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... been in a turmoil. It still was; I could hear now the shouts of the crowd outside. And turning as I lay there, through the casement I could see the blackened, still smoking ruins of Maida's tower; the broken iron terrace; the spider bridge melted away, hanging loose and dangling like an aimless pendulum. ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... down to the traitor's death!" shouted the Sovereign Pontiff. The chest was loosed, and swung like a pendulum lengthwise of the room, down almost to the floor and up nearly to the ceiling. The profanity now turned into a yell of terror. The Martyrs slapped one another's backs and grew blue in the face with laughter. At a signal, a light box was placed where the chest would crush it (which it did ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... be of it. I, for one, raise my voice in protest against the tide of intellectual asceticism which is inclined to accept without question the modern doctrine and methods of "psychotherapy" and mind-cure in place of the more rational and certain measures of hygiene and medicine. The further a pendulum swings in one direction, the further will it swing in the other, when released. And I believe that the modern extreme acceptance of faith and mind-cure in all its forms is but the moral and intellectual and spiritual reaction against the materialism of the past generation. Hail the ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington |
