"Phenomenal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the refinement and delicacy which this exquisite fabric made necessary. However this may be, it is certain that in a few years the rise and development of Needlepoint lace-making was little short of phenomenal, and every convent was busy making it and teaching their poorer lay sisters the art. Some of the wonderful Old Point of this period is absolutely finer than the naked eye can see, a powerful magnifying glass being ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... disaster the occasion of fierce assaults on Jefferson Davis and fresh complaints of the treatment of their favorite General. The dogged persistence with which this group of soreheads proclaimed the infallibility of the genius of the weakest and most ineffective general of the Confederacy was phenomenal. The more miserable Johnston's failures the louder these men shouted his praises. The yellow journals of the South continued to praise this sulking old man until half the people of the Confederacy were hoodwinked into ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... respect it promises to prove a great blessing, not only to those who can afford to use it, but to the community at large, in the hope held out that the smoke and soot nuisance may be abated in part, if not wholly subdued, and that gleams of sunshine there may become less phenomenal in the future than they are at the present time. Twenty cents per thousand feet is too high a price to bring gas into general use for domestic purposes in a city where coal is cheap. Ten cents would be too much, and no doubt five cents per thousand would pay a profit. The fact is, the dealers ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... into the realm of song through a period of two thousand years up to modern times, when our record would seem to come to a natural conclusion. But I deem it proper to bring to your attention a set of circumstances which would be called phenomenal, were it not, as we all know, that the greatest of all wonders is that true ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... reeked with expletives. What ought to have been done was discussed with great freedom. An excited crowd gathered around Charles as he was preparing to return home, and plied him with questions. His ignorance was phenomenal, but the look of stupefied wonder with which he regarded his questioners confirmed his words. It was not until he had proceeded a mile on his homeward way, with Midnight in leading behind the tail-board, that, having satisfied himself that there was no one within ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... Dickens and Balzac take much in common; as individuals they strongly resemble each other; their differences are chiefly differences of race. Each was a man of affairs, an active, practical man, with a temperament of almost phenomenal vigor and a prodigious quantity of life to expend. Each had a character and a will—what is nowadays called a personality—which imposed themselves irresistibly; each had a boundless self-confidence ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... lived to enjoy their grace and beauty. Under Ferdinand and Isabella, Spain was a great and thriving nation, almost beyond precedent. Her colonial possessions rivaled those of the entire world; but her glory has vanished, and her decadence has been so rapid as to be phenomenal, until she is now so humbled there are very few to ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... most beautiful studies of childhood—Rebecca's artistic, unusual and quaintly charming qualities stand out midst a circle of austere New Englanders. The stage version is making a phenomenal dramatic record. ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... which lies between the individual and the general—the aim of metaphysical science is to trace the other half which lies between the general and the individual. When we seek to know what is, we proceed by induction—the method of the phenomenal. When, knowing what is, we proceed to determine what hence must be, we proceed by deduction—the method of the Necessary. Thus Science, at first seeking principles, proceeds by induction to establish them; but after these fundamental principles have been established, ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... all this had upon Mrs. Gerhardt, Jennie, and the rest of the family was phenomenal. Mrs. Gerhardt, long weighed upon by the misery which Jennie's error had entailed, was for taking measures for carrying out this plan at once. So buoyant was her natural temperament that she was completely carried away by the glory of Cleveland, and already saw ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... of the combination through withdrawal of its members is avoided. It offers to manufacturers, close crowded by competition, a means of swelling their profits and ensuring against loss; and encouraged by the phenomenal success of the Standard Oil combination, they have not ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... truth free from the illusory and mendacious forms of this coarse, imperfect world, and clothes it in a nobler, purer form created by the mind itself. Thus the forms of art, far from being mere appearances, perfectly illusory, contain more reality and truth than the phenomenal existences of the real world. The world of art is truer than that of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Services of James G. Blaine, by the well-known Col. Russell H. Conwell, is having a most remarkable and phenomenal sale. It is from the well-known publishing house of E.C. Allen & Co., of Augusta, Maine, the home of the distinguished candidate for President of the United States. The book is splendidly illustrated, and is thorough and complete. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... poverty as a lever with which to move the bounty of her friends, in order that she herself may appear bountiful, and, as a rule, her efforts in this direction will be crowned with a success that would be phenomenal, if it were not so common. The history of her earlier years is easily written. Whilst still a child, she begins a collecting career, by being entrusted, on behalf of a church building fund, with a card divided into "bricks," each brick being valued at the price of half-a-crown. Her triumphs ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 24, 1890 • Various
... establish the rationality of faith in the immortality of the soul. It is sought to give the value of objective reality to that which does not possess it—to that whose reality exists only in thought. And the immortality that we crave is a phenomenal immortality—it is the continuation of ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... my surprise at the phenomenal popularity of the book among people familiar with Dickens, Scott and Thackeray, triune transcendent of fiction. I had hoped when "Ben Hur" made its great hit that the golden age of flash fiction was past—that it could henceforth count ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... what it is, aunty," he began, selecting a cigarette with the deft manual gesture of a born surgeon (he was only twelve years younger than I, and his phenomenal record of almost impossible accomplishment made him seem far older than his years; but we kept to the habits of his perambulator days, when I had been tremendously pleased with the title). "I tell you what it is, aunty—I'm hanged if ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... course of the day George took two long shots at ducks, and missed both times; it would have been phenomenal if he hadn't. There was one fall that we could not shoot, and we landed on the bank to unload the canoe. All three of us tried to lift the canoe so as to carry it about thirty yards down to where we could ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... Coley took him over the company's mills, and was not a little disappointed to see that the colonel was not impressed by their size or equipment. In Coley's eyes they were phenomenal, and he was inclined to resent the colonel's lofty manner. The foreman, Mr. Urquhart, a shrewd Scotchman, who had seen the mills of the Ottawa River and those in Michigan as well, understood his visitor's attitude better; and besides, it suited his Scotch ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... begun, the military command of that important post was three times changed. The government college had in three years three directors. In educational circles, especially, the rapidity of such changes has been phenomenal There have been five different ministers of education in my own time, and more than five different educational policies The twenty-six thousand public schools are so related in their management to the local assemblies that, even were no ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... already achieved by study, the colder and thinner becomes the air and the fewer the contacts with the affairs of every day. The Promethean fire of pure mathematics is perhaps the greatest of all in man's catalogue of gifts; but it is not most itself, but least so, when, immersed in the manifoldness of phenomenal life, it is made to ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... number of pages of any novel in the English language. With the tragic fall of the Irish leader we need not now concern ourselves. But how are we to account for the meteoric rise of Parnell, and for the phenomenal power that he wielded? For years he was the most effective figure in British politics. There is only one explanation; and it is the explanation upon which practically all the historians of that period agree. Charles Stewart Parnell made ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... world of common-sense, tried to rationalize it; that is, to realize it in himself. First among the Greeks he believed it to be unique, uncreated, and eternal, and gave his reasons. Recognizing that the phenomenal world exists in change, he investigated the principle and method of this. Change he conceives as a transition from potentiality to actuality, and as always due to something actualized, communicating its form to something potential. Looking at the "world" as a whole, and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... far you are quite right. But very often, when the Realist insists that there must be something to cause in my mind this appearance, which I call my consciousness of a table, he assumes all the while that this something—the real table, the table in itself—is there, inside or behind the phenomenal table that I actually see and feel; out there, in space. But if we were right in our analysis of space, if we were right in arguing that space is made up of intellectual relations[7] and that {51} intellectual relations ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... and dreary question of single or double standard, it will suffice to say that during the early years of the century now about to close, gold coin was leaving England at a rate which not only appeared phenomenal but was held to be ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... the great drama of the time. But for the most part we now find him a considerately cared-for guest of his old-time friend, Colonel Samuel Osgood, at the latter's farmhouse at Andover. Here the distinguished pre-Revolutionist had phenomenal premonitions of the coming manner of his death, related to his sister, Mrs. Warren, to whom the patriot on more than one occasion said, that when God in his Providence should take him hence into the ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... showed like two thick lumps of raw flesh—he prowled about from side to side of the half-poop. On his bare feet he wore a pair of straw sandals, and his head was protected by an enormous pith hat—once white but now very dirty—which gave to the whole man the aspect of a phenomenal and animated mushroom. At times he would interrupt his uneasy shuffle athwart the break of the poop, and stand motionless with a vague gaze fixed on the image of the brig in the calm water. He could also see down there his own head and ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... family, friends, and religion. In these relations of life he would have been and was, as far as he went, tolerant and kind; but in them he was not interested. Love of glory made him a lonely figure. It rendered him a poseur, vain and snobbish, but it also spurred him on to contend, with phenomenal energy, against ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood
... then as if, in dreams, we enter upon our closer relation with the hyper-phenomenal mind? All sorts of things seem to be in it, from the veriest trifles and absurdities up to the highest things our minds can receive, and presumably an infinity of things higher still. They appear to flow into us in all sorts of ways, presumably depending ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... of contents; information will stick to you'—this was the professor's advice. Information acquired in this way may not be profound, but so far as it goes it is definite and useful. For the collector it is indispensable. In this way the Bibliotaph had amassed his seemingly phenomenal knowledge of books. He had handled thousands and tens of thousands of volumes, and he never relinquished his hold upon a book until he had 'placed' it,—until he knew just what its rank was in ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... season as regularly as the late King Edward. The thing is done with thoroughness, but at a minimum of cost. They pay half a franc daily for a room, and another half-franc for the waters, cooking their meals in the general kitchen of the establishment. Where the French peasant believes, his faith is phenomenal. Some of these valetudinarians drink as many as forty-six glasses of mineral water a day! What must be their capacities in robust health? The bourgeois or civilian element is not absent. Hither from Pau and Oloron come clerks and small functionaries with their families. Newspapers are read ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... and equally melodious songs. His collection of amatory poems entitled Liebesfruehling contains some of the sunniest idyls in any language. That his genius was lyrical and not epic, was not a fault; that it delighted in varied and unusual metres, was an exceptional—perhaps in his case a phenomenal—form of development; but I do not think it was any the less instinctively natural. One ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... of the latter moved the men who had made materialism and scepticism to be the dominant philosophy of France in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The aim of Kant was to resolve this age-long contradiction. Free, unprejudiced investigation of the facts and laws of the phenomenal world can never touch the foundations of faith. Natural science can lead in the knowledge only of the realm of the laws of things. It cannot give us the inner moral sense of those things. To speak of the purposes of nature as men had done was absurd. Natural theology, as men had talked ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... one accidental rhyme. Miss Salls is evidently one of those few really powerful poets who come all too seldom into Amateur Journalism, startling the Association with impeccable harmony and exalted images. The present poem grows even more attractive on analysis. The diction is of phenomenal purity and wholly unspoiled by any ultra-modern touch. It might have been a product of Shelley's own age. The metaphor is marvellous, exhibiting a soul overflowing with true spirituality, and a mind trained to express ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Ascending the neighbouring hills, she saw a truly remarkable scene: basins filled with bubbling waters, and vaporous shafts leaping up from the fissures in the hills and plains. By keeping to windward, she was able to approach very near these phenomenal objects; the ground was lukewarm in a few places, and she could hold her hand for several minutes at a time over the cracks whence the vapour escaped. No water was visible. The roar and hiss of the steam, combined with ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... exhibits that could fitly illustrate our diversified resources and manufactures. Singularly enough, our national prosperity lessened the incentive to exhibit. The dealer in raw materials knew that the user must come to him; the great factories were contented with the phenomenal demand for their output, not alone at home, but also abroad, where merit had ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... 1869 to take a professorship of languages in a small Ohio college. Soon after he was called to Cornell, and in 1882 he became Professor of German in Columbia. His proficiency in the English language was phenomenal. His mastery of scholarly English in the essay form was to be expected, but his ready command of the delicately shaded style required of a literary novelist has not been equaled by any other naturalized ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... miles to the south lies Hinchinbrook Island, 28 miles long, 12 miles broad, and mountainous from end to end: there also the rain-clouds revel. The long and picturesque channel which divides Hinchinbrook from the mainland, and the complicated ranges of mountains away to the west, participate in phenomenal rain. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... fancied herself just like her—beautiful, ambitious, poor, with a future of her own carving. Of course such a case is phenomenal. No other young ...
— Different Girls • Various
... seems all well split up. No one in China has ever heard of Greece; no one in Italy of India. What do the Greeks know about Northern Europe, or the Chinese about the Indians or Persians?—And yet we find in Italy, in Persia, in India, in China, men appearing,— phenomenal births,—evolved far above their fellows: six of them, to do the same work: Founders of Religions, all contemporary more or less; all presenting to the world and posterity the same high passwords and glorious countersigns. Can ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... boats there was intense rivalry. In the holds the layers of salted fish rose steadily under the phenomenal fishing. The salt-barrels were emptied and crowded out by the cod, hake, and pollock. It was these boats that Ellinwood watched with the eye of a hawk, for back in Freekirk Head he knew that Bill Boughton stood ready to pay a bonus for the first cargo to reach port. Now was the time when ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... from the little coast-town of Stavanger. There was none of the crudity of a provincial dither in his manners or his appearance. He spoke with a quiet self-possession and a pithy incisiveness which were altogether phenomenal. ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... of the Brotherhood, District No. 6, F. I. M. X. T. S. Z., was about to hold a meeting. The Council was composed of seven eminent Freaks—Sim Boles, the Double-Jointed Wonder; Bony Perkins, the Ossified Man; Duffer Leech, the Man with the Phenomenal Skull; Miss Tilly Boles, the Beautiful Mermaid of the Southern Sea; Mrs. Smock, the Bearded Circassian Beauty; Mr. Billy O'Fake, the Wild Man from Borneo, and the President of the Brotherhood, Runty, the Dwarf. These ladies and gentlemen were the leaders, nay, the fathers and mothers ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... one's knowledge have become so closely interrelated and so well organized that they form a well-knit system of thought, one's ability to remember may be surprising. Spencer and Darwin were examples of men whose ideas were thus organized. Neither of them possessed phenomenal memories to start with; but their observations so generally found a group of close relations to sustain them, and these groups were associated with one another in such a close and orderly way, that the outline of the whole ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... spiral, without once taking my eyes off it. I hardly know how to describe the peculiar sense of vague horror inspired in me by the sight of that streak of smoke pencilling its way upwards among the dark trees. And the sensation of increasing heat as we approached was phenomenal. It was like walking towards ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... income once was safe, if small; It's larger, but unpaid, Despite "the quite phenomenal Development of Trade." The "Bogus Man" is on the track, And queer "Financial Gents" Have promised me in white and black Their ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... and whose position in the high favor of the kaiser has been a subject of much unfavorable comment, and even of open abuse in Berlin, is Baron Holstein, popularly known as the "Austern-Freund" or "Oyster-Friend," owing to his altogether phenomenal capacity for the absorption of bivalves, and his strongly developed fondness for good cheer! Baron Holstein, like Baron Kiderlen-Waechter, was formerly one of the confidential secretaries of Prince Bismarck, and a daily guest at ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... she could be seen, her raking masts being short and stout, and her yards of enormous proportionate length—her foreyard measuring no less than seventy-eight feet—with a truly astonishing spread of beautifully cut canvas. In light winds and smooth water she developed a speed that was absolutely phenomenal, easily running away from her two consorts on the passage down the creek under her flying jib and main sail only. She was pierced for three guns of a side, and was further fitted with a very ingenious arrangement ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... the consequent disturbance among the molecular particles of the substance is great. Whenever such resistance is encounted in a circuit, the electricity is converted into heat, and when the resistance is great, the heat is, in turn, converted into light, or rather the heat becomes phenomenal in light; that is, the substance which offers the resistance glows with the transformed energy of the impeded current. Upon this simple principle all the apparatus for the production of electric ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... the thirty-seven years he lived were spent in actual service in the camp or on the battle-field. He was a brigadier-general at twenty-three and a major-general at twenty-five. In the height of his popularity and his phenomenal success as a cavalry leader, he was a picturesque and familiar figure to friend and foe alike, as in his broad cavalier's hat, his gold-bedizened jacket, and high cavalry boots, with his long hair streaming in the wind, he would ride like a tornado, to the accompaniment ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... what you think and what you reckon, but as thinking and reckoning are not evidence, I will now give you a chance to come out with something positive, one way or the other, and shall require you to produce it. I will ask the accused to stand up and repeat the phenomenal kick of last night." The twins stood up. "Now, Mr. Rogers, please ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... we obtain a product which satisfies every fact of feeling on the one hand, and of observation on the other. The manner in which this synthesis may be effected is perfectly simple. We have only to suppose that the antithesis between mind and motion—subject and object—is itself phenomenal or apparent: not absolute or real. We have only to suppose that the seeming duality is relative to our modes of apprehension; and, therefore, that any change taking place in the mind, and any corresponding change taking place in the brain, are really not two changes, but one change. When a ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... universe, which manifestations constitute a portion of the Finite. Whoever attempts to give any philosophical account of the generation of the universe, tracing its phenomena, as an aggregate, to some ultra-phenomenal origin, must include in his scheme a fundamentum for all those opposite and contradictory manifestations which experience discloses in the universe. There always have been, and still are, many philosophers who consider ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... even went in for the luxury of having three shooting irons, two revolvers and a double-barrel slug pistol, so that when either of the weapons got hot while he was holding Baggara horsemen at bay, there was always one cooling, ready to hand. He also, which I believe is a phenomenal record with any campaigner, took with him thirteen pairs of riding breeches, a half dozen razors and an ice machine. Even our commander-in-chief, when campaigning, denies himself more than two shirts and never travels with ice machines. But the thirteen pairs impressed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... crop, with his crucibles, and a sermon on the duty that lay nearest him,—which resolved itself into that of paying innumerable afternoon calls with his father and brothers, on acquaintances selected—as he declared in his haste—for their phenomenal stupidity. His father pointed out how selfish it was for a young fellow to indulge his own little fads and fancies, when he might make himself useful in a nice manly ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... "the 'Uncle Tom' times are dead and gone. The play has had its day. To be sure, if it was resurrected and put on with what might be called an elaborate presentation, with a phenomenal cast, it might catch on for a brief spell. Of course, the cast would be an easy enough matter to get, as casts go. Stars nowadays, such as they are—Heaven save the mark!—are more plentiful than stock. But let them rest at that. I have known ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... thanks are due to the Rev. A. Frewen Aylward for the use of the poem "Adsum," and to Messrs. Harmsworth Bros, for permission to include Mr. Rudyard Kipling's phenomenal success, "The Absent-Minded Beggar," in this collection; also to Messrs. Harper and Brothers, of New York, for special permission to copy from "Harper's Magazine" the poem "Sheltered," by Sarah Orme Jewett; to Messrs. ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... need not take me in the ontological sense unless you prefer to; for although ontological language is instinctive in such matters, yet Buddhists or Humians can perfectly well describe the facts in the phenomenal terms which are their favorites. For them the soul is only a succession of fields of consciousness: yet there is found in each field a part, or sub-field, which figures as focal and contains the excitement, and from which, as from a centre, the aim seems to be taken. Talking of this ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... interest in us, they were all trying to break the sprint record in our direction, it being the line of least resistance. And, say! We certainly had misjudged the Reverend Ponsonby Diggs. He may have been fat, but how he could run! His work was phenomenal. I think he must have been on a track team himself at some earlier part of his career, for the way he steamed away from the gang would have reminded you of the Lusitania racing the Statue of Liberty. He lost his cap. He shed his long black coat. He rolled over the fence at the rear of ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... in the Ethiopian card-room, and neither threats nor fair words could draw him away. The judge had not held such cards for years, and it was in vain that I talked to him of consequences. The Ten decided to remain and watch a game which was pronounced little short of phenomenal, and my client gave orders for the smaller brake and requested the Celebrity to drive. And this he was nothing loth to do. For the edification as well as the assurance of the party Mr. Allen explained, while we were ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was in rare form.—Don't run away with the idea that he's eating his heart out because you came in just ahead in the race for Miss Treherne. For my part—but, never mind!—You had phenomenal luck, and you will be a phenomenal fool if you don't arrange for an early marriage. You are a perfect baby in some things. Don't you know that the time a woman most yearns for a man is when she has refused him? ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... far from them as they can, and to suppose that this world is no show, and happiness and misery not mere appearances, but the keenest realities that we can know. The difference between virtue and vice, between wisdom and folly, is only phenomenal, yet there is difference enough. 'What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!' Burke cried in the presence of an affecting incident. Yet the consciousness of this made him none the less careful, minute, patient, systematic, in examining ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... beyond the river at the farther side of the town. The market-house tower and the slender spires of half a dozen churches were sharply outlined against the green background. The face of the clock was visible, but the hours could have been read only by eyes of phenomenal sharpness. Around them stretched ruined walls, dismantled towers, and crumbling earthworks—footprints of the god of war, one of whose temples had crowned this height. For many years before the rebellion a Federal arsenal had been located at Patesville. Seized by ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... been an extraordinary one. He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem, which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the Mathematical Chair at one of our smaller universities, ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... began to give up all hope of being able on this occasion to reach the city of Manoa. The fury of the Orinoco began to alarm them; they did not know what might happen in a country subject to such sudden and phenomenal floods. Tropical rains fell with terrific violence, and the men would get wetted to the skin ten times a day. It was cold, it was windy, and to push on farther seemed perfectly hopeless. Raleigh ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... truth: phenomenal, relative truth; that which is arrived at through the senses, and belongs to the domain of the "what Knows". Essential, absolute truth can be known only through a response thereto of the essential, the absolute, the "what Is", in man's nature. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... which helps us to the geographical principle not yet acknowledged in Rome, that the earth is round. I saw there the Book of the Balance of Wisdom by Alhazan, who delved into the laws of nature until there is nothing phenomenal left. I saw there the Philosophy of Azazzali the Arab, for which both Christian and Moslem should be grateful, since it has given Philosophy its true place by exalting it into a handmaiden of Religion. I saw there books treating of trade and commerce, of arms and armor, and ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... was partly due to his memory which is said to have been phenomenal; for, in an age when cyclopaedias were unknown, a cyclopaedic memory must have counted for half the battle in these scholastic disputes where authority could be met only by authority; but in this case, memory was supported ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... storm. La Esposa del Vengador had an unprecedented success, and at least thirty subsequent dramas, in prose and in verse, have made this mathematician, engineer, and financier one of the most famous men of his day. His art and his methods are purely Spanish. I have already referred to the phenomenal success of Perez Galdos's Electra within the last few months. It must, however, be ascribed chiefly to the moment of its presentation rather than to any superlative merit in the drama. It is well written, which is what may be said of almost all Spanish plays, for the language is in itself so dignified ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... fall is only five feet in a distance of 145 M. This lower, navigable portion of the Hudson was the only feasible route through the Atlantic highlands, and in consequence it has been one of the most significant factors in the development of the United States. New York City likewise owes its phenomenal development largely to this ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... sophomore named Browning, who, handicapped at the start with a colossal ignorance regarding all things pertaining to the gridiron, learned with wonderful rapidity, and gave every promise of turning himself into a phenomenal guard or tackle. ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... who was an object of considerable curiosity to several of the guests on account of his phenomenal success in having eleven plays at the same time being performed in London, New York, Berlin, Paris, and every other European city, was, to those who did not know him before, an agreeable surprise. Heaven knows what exactly people expected of him; perhaps the men feared 'side' and ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... and I try to dissuade them. It sometimes impresses me as a lions' den, and I have the desire to cry out 'Beware' to those who may be entrapped into going over before they are ready, or know what to expect. Of course there are cases of phenomenal success, but they are exceptions to the ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... exploring the canyons of the Colorado was undertaken for no spectacular effect or pecuniary reward, but was purely a scientific venture in perfect accord with the spirit of his early promise. As G. K. Gilbert remarks in a recent number of Science** it was "of phenomenal boldness and its successful accomplishment a dramatic triumph. It produced a strong impression on the public mind and gave Powell a national reputation which was afterwards of great service, although based on an adventurous episode by no means essential to his career ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... mistress of a prince, and her diamonds were mentioned. All the women were soon acquainted with them from the current descriptions, but nobody could cite the precise source of all this information. There were finger rings, earrings, bracelets, a REVIERE of phenomenal width, a queenly diadem surmounted by a central brilliant the size of one's thumb. In the retirement of those faraway countries she began to gleam forth as mysteriously as a gem-laden idol. People now mentioned her without laughing, ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... sort of dwelling,—half house, half boat. It might have passed for an abandoned barge, or wharf boat, too rotten to float and too worthless to break up,—the relic and record of some by-gone tide of phenomenal height. When I approached nearer it proved to be an old-fashioned canal-boat, sunk to the water line in the grass, its deck covered by a low-hipped roof. Midway its length was cut a small door, opening upon a short staging or portico which supported one end ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... intrigue. That liberty, therefore, of standing above the story and taking a broad view of many things, of transcending the limits of the immediate scene—nothing of this is sacrificed by the author's steady advance in the direction of drama. The man's mind has become visible, phenomenal, dramatic; but in acting its part it still lends us eyes, is still an ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... the successful formation of the Manhattan Traction Company, as he was also with the general progress of the Consolidated Companies. Its expansion and success were phenomenal, and it was, of a certainty, coming into its own. The volume of business had quadrupled; its list of stockholders was nearly complete, and already included a sufficient proportion of those who controlled the world's pulse to make the acquisition ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... known to produce anything directly except nervous action, for the will influences even the muscles only through the nerves. Though it were granted, then, that every phenomenon has an efficient and not merely a phenomenal cause, and that volition, in the case of the particular phenomena which are known to be produced by it, is that cause; are we therefore to say with these writers that since we know of no other efficient ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... modern demand for flowers has created the supply, or the supply has found an appreciative public, we need not stay to discuss. The fact remains that the last four or five decades have witnessed a phenomenal extension in the use of flowers by all classes of the community, for the decoration of the house no less than for beautifying the garden. Primarily, this advance of refinement in the popular taste is traceable to the ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... rising from the mortal state into the immortal, and his phenomenal resurrection—the manifestations of his change that are related as having been objectively witnessed. What took place in the invisible world—his real resurrection—is now more emphasized by Christian thinkers than the phenomenal resurrection in the visible world. So conservatively orthodox a writer as Dr. G. D. Boardman goes so far as to say: "After all, the real question in the matter of his resurrection is not, 'Did Christ's body rise?' That is but a subordinate, incidental issue." ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... confession identical with Bedloe's. He was 'one of the most acute and audacious of the Jesuit agents,' says Mr. Pollock.* Yet Mr. Pollock argues that for Prance to tell the tale which he did tell, in his circumstances of cold and terror, required a most improbable 'wealth of mental equipment,' 'phenomenal powers of memory, imagination, and coolness,' if the tale was false.** Therefore Prance's story of the murder was true, except in the details as to the men whom he accused. On December 24, he was taken to the places which he described (certainly lying ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... and Church Federation are destroying the sectarian spirit and the field is getting ripe unto the harvest for the restoration of the unity of the early church with its converting power. The success of this movement for Christian union on the primitive gospel has been phenomenal. In eighty years its adherents have increased from ten thousand to about one and a third millions. The per cent of gain in membership, from 1890 to 1905, in the six American religious bodies that number a million each was as follows: ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... that snakes evinced parental love for their offspring, but never until a recent spring had I been able to verify this information and give it my unqualified endorsement. In March (1896), on one of the bright warm days of that phenomenal month, one of my dogs attracted my attention by his manoeuvres on my lawn. I noticed him walking "stiff legged" about a circumscribed spot, now and then darting his muzzle towards the ground. On going to him I discovered that he had found a lot ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... to the yield on surrounding acres, the corn crops secured by the boys are little short of phenomenal. In Pike County, Alabama, where the number of boys engaging in corn club contests increased from one in 1910 to two hundred and seventy in 1912, the average number of bushels per acre grown by the boys rose from 50.5 to 85.3. In the entire State there were one ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... cries. He began to make a set speech, and his voice, haranguing with vehement inflections in the shining whiteness of a cloud, had an amazing and uncorporeal character; the quality of abstract surprise; of phenomenal emotion shouted into empty space. And for me it had, also, the ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... formulas and conventions. Express your views, men, of what you seek in women; thus best do you give them laws. Learn, women, what you should demand of men; thus only can they become themselves. Turn both from the contemplation of what is merely phenomenal in your existence, to your permanent life as souls. Man, do not prescribe how the Divine shall display itself in Woman. Woman, do not expect to see all of God in Man. Fellow-pilgrims and helpmeets are ye, Apollo and Diana, twins of one ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... springing to his feet. "Believe in Orestes Anson? Why, I believe he's simply the greatest—the most stupendous—the most phenomenal figure we've got!" ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... regular, temperate, industrious, saving, of curbing desire, and of avoiding vice. The very foundations of character rest on regularity, on good habits so inflexibly formed that it is painful to break them. Franklin's success in laying these foundations was phenomenal. His Poor Richard's Almanac, begun in 1733, was one of his chief agencies in reaching the common people. They read, reread, and acted on such proverbs as the following, which he published in this Almanac ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... captain of generous military capacity,—with such odds, seemingly insuperable, William of Orange met the chief captains of his generation, and made head against them, creeping forward, as the tides do, till they own the shore. When these facts are co-ordinated, his achievements become phenomenal. His resiliency was tremendous. In some significant regards, his military career finds ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... time ripe for beginning his public exhibitions. He engaged Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, and announced that Tom Thumb was to be seen there. The rush of visitors was tremendous. The aristocracy of London thronged the hall night after night, and a phenomenal success was assured. Barnum did not look beyond such work. True, Everett had spoken of an audience with the Queen, but Barnum had no idea that it would ever be granted. One day, however, he met Mr. Murray, ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... take as much share in the ant, and in the dwellers on Saturn, as in his own stomach and toes. In this way the whole universe becomes a constituent part of his 'ego;' thus his desires cease individually to exist, and are assimilated with the entire phenomenal world, and he longs for nothing beyond this. The 'ego' ceases because nothing is left outside the individual 'ego;' but this Nirvana, this highest step in the perfection of humanity, is, as you can see, not the negation of everything, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... the dividing frontiers of different sciences and shaped the course of his work."[44] It has come to be recognised that "India through her habit of mind is peculiarly fitted to realise the idea of unity and to see in the phenomenal world an orderly universe," to realise that "there can be but one truth, one Science which includes all other branches of knowledge,"[44] and that the store of world's knowledge would be incomplete without India's special contribution ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... he added, 'has not been dyed as you seem to think. It was laid by a Cingalese hen in my poultry-yard just as you see it there. It is a phenomenal egg.' ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... to climatic conditions, did not mature an animal into marketable form, ready for the butcher's block. Yet it was an exceptional country for breeding, the percentage of increase in good years reaching the phenomenal figures of ninety-five calves to the hundred cows. At this time all eyes were turned to the new Northwest, which was then looked upon as the country that would at last afford the proper market. Railroads were pushing into the domain of the buffalo and Indian; the rush ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... only unprecedented but phenomenal. It could not have been made except under wise laws, honestly and impartially administered. It could not have been made except under an industrial system which stimulated enterprise, quickened capital, assured to labor its just reward. It could not have been made under the narrowing policy which ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... is "that speculative system which by absolutely identifying the Subject and Object of thought, reduces all existence, mental and material, to phenomenal modifications of one eternal, self-existent Substance which is called by the name of God.... All ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... importance in American viticulture is Concord, which came from the seed of a wild grape planted in the fall of 1843 by Ephraim W. Bull, Concord, Massachusetts. The new variety was disseminated in the spring of 1854, and from the time of its introduction the spread of its culture was phenomenal. By 1860 it was the leading grape in America and it so remains. Concord furnishes, with the varieties that have sprung from it, seventy-five per cent of the grapes grown in eastern America. The characters which distinguish the vine are: Adaptability to various soils, fruitfulness, ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... distinguished from that of matter; a science of which [25] the object is to explain the principles and causes of all things existing," Brande calls metaphysics "the science which regards the ultimate grounds of being, as distinguished from its phenomenal modifications." "A speculative science, which soars beyond the bounds of [30] ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... productive of utility, as he can now have more full understanding of the subjects which we have to discuss. Sir Colin is all that can be in manhood, and I could wish no better colleague in the executorship of this phenomenal Will; but he has not had the privilege of a lifelong friendship with the testator as I have had. And as Rupert Sent Leger had to learn intimate details regarding his uncle, I could best make my confidences alone. To-morrow we shall have plenty of formality. I was delighted ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... not slow to understand its import. The Spanish boat was making really a phenomenal run, and had reached a point where it was evident that if they maintained their speed they would soon be past the dangerous line. That once reached they could show the Yankee boat ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... age. "Cavalleria Rusticana" is two years older than "Pagliacci" and as truly its progenitor as Weber's operas were the progenitors of Wagner's. They are the offspring of the same artistic movement, and it was the phenomenal ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... more of that light and knowledge that I need, Stella. In short, it is to commune more with the Father; it is to realize in a greater degree the presence of the Divine within, and to have my mind freed from the illusion of the phenomenal world; for by so doing I become qualified to become a healer of disease, and also fitted to help many a poor sin-sick life. Now, Stella, having clearly made known my purpose to you; I want to tell you that it is better for you that I leave this time. It will ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... Lusitanians recovered, and proclaimed the Duke of Braganza King. When we add to this the loss of much of the Netherlands, and of the island of Jamaica, and concessions here and there to France and to Italy, it will be obvious that a process of contraction had soon followed that of Spain's phenomenal expansion! ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... in the purity of its moral conceptions. By his side in this later time stands his rival Civa, the chief figure in a sect or system which shared with Vishnuism the devotion of the later Hindus. The rise of these two gods is to be referred probably to the dissatisfaction in the later times with the phenomenal character which still clung, in popular feeling, to the older deities. Varuna, once supreme, sank after a while to the position of a god of rain, and Indra, Agni, and Soma were frankly naturalistic, while the impersonal Brahma was too vague to meet popular demands. What the later generation ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... decided what she would do next. On the opposite bank of the arroyo was a line of heads, like those of infantry above a parapet, and she comprehended that, in the same way that news of a cock-fight travels, the gallery gods of Little Rivers had received a tip of a sporting event so phenomenal that it changed the sluggards among them into early risers. They were making themselves comfortable lying flat on their stomachs and exposing as little as possible of their precious bodies to the danger of that ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... haughtily signified her readiness to give the required aid, if in the meantime the gods would take charge of her steed. Odin immediately despatched four of his maddest Berserkers to hold the wolf; but, in spite of their phenomenal strength, they could not restrain the monstrous creature until the giantess had thrown it ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... they belonged; as astrology did to astronomy. Alchemy and astrology—twin sisters—were the parents of the modern offspring, known in chemistry and astronomy as exact science. These latter, however, deal with shadows and phenomenal illusions, while the former concern the living realities, which produce them. Therefore, there can be "no new thing ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... the escape of slaves, her skill in avoiding arrest, her courage in every emergency, and her willingness to endure hardship and face any danger for the sake of her poor followers was phenomenal. ...
— Harriet, The Moses of Her People • Sarah H. Bradford |
