"Phenomenon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... scientific spirit, I suppose. And he is new, and awfully interesting—even if he is only a station-agent." Wherefrom it will be perceived that her thoughts had veered from the cactus owl, to another perplexing local phenomenon. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... for a time. But there's no telling how long. This is a most remarkable natural phenomenon—one of the most remarkable I ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... exhaust of every running gas-engine. In the open air, where only a whiff or two would be inhale now and then, they are not dangerous. But in a closed room they may kill in an incredibly short time. In fact, the condition has given rise to an entirely new phenomenon which some one ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... prevailed during that summer in the Potomac River, and persisted in the water supplied to the filters even after about four days of sedimentation in the reservoirs. During the second summer (1907) the same phenomenon of suddenly and rapidly increasing losses of head appeared again, but without any unusual turbidity in the applied water. Investigation, however, showed the presence of large quantities of organisms, particularly melosira ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXXII, June, 1911 • E. D. Hardy
... in France, and particularly in the capital, having afforded me an opportunity of becoming tolerably well acquainted with its state before the revolution, my curiosity was strongly excited to ascertain the changes which that political phenomenon might have effected. I accordingly availed myself of the earliest dawn of peace to cross the water, and visit Paris. Since I had left that city in 1789-90, a powerful monarchy, established on a possession of fourteen centuries, and on that sort ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... 2,000 feet higher than the South Pass in the Rocky mountains, and several peaks in view rose several thousand feet still higher. Thus, at the extremity of the continent, and near the coast, the phenomenon was seen of a range of mountains still higher than the great Rocky mountains themselves. This extraordinary fact accounts for the Great Basin, and shows that there must be a system of small lakes and rivers here scattered ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... sounded their instruments, and filled the air with shouts and lamentations, to rouse her from her lethargy. Such puerile conceits as these form a striking contrast with the real knowledge of the Mexicans, as displayed in their hieroglyphical maps, in which the true cause of this phenomenon ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... such continual pumping, and becoming anxious for the family supply of water, came out to see what was the matter. Seeing a small figure curled up under the spout of the pump, drenched to the skin and black as Othello, she stooped down to investigate the phenomenon. Oh, what was my despair when she discovered who it ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... disgracefully uneven contest as this. When he had had his say, of course I explained matters, pointed out that this German bully was a nuisance to the whole army, and that you being, as I myself could vouch, a sort of phenomenon with the sword, had taken the matter up to save your brother officer from being killed. I assured him that I had the highest authority for your being one of the best swordsmen in Europe, and that therefore I doubted not that you were a match for this German. ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... had aims that were incomprehensible, and virtues that were inconceivable to his contemporaries. But his contemporaries were able enough to appreciate his sordid exterior, and his cruel and treacherous spirit. To the whole nobility of France he was a fatal and unreasonable phenomenon. All such courts as that of Charles at Blois, or his friend Rene's in Provence, would soon be made impossible; interference was the order of the day; hunting was already abolished; and who should say what was to go next? ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... curious but logical, strange yet logical phenomenon took place under these singular conditions. Every object thrown out of the projectile would follow the same trajectory and only stop when it did. That furnished a text for conversation which the whole evening could not exhaust. The emotion of the three travellers increased as they approached ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... of the Bible had, before him, been taught in France by Rashi (Solomon Yitschaki) and Samuel ben Meir, and continued by German rabbis, who, at the same time, were preachers of morality—a noteworthy phenomenon in a persecuted tribe. "How pure and strong its ethical principles were is shown by its religious poetry as well as by its practical Law. What pervades the poetry as a high ideal, in the application ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... vaguely troubled. "There is no such thing as an isolated moral phenomenon," he said, as if he were repeating something from a former sermon; "when you attempt to remedy one evil you find it related to a whole moral series. But perhaps I did not make the connection plain. My address doesn't seem to be as closely reasoned as it did when ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... upon which industry is established will be undermined. No court has ever yet adequately solved these differentials and some dislocation of industry results. I would expect to see develop out of this type of minimum wage the same phenomenon that existed in some parts of Australia, where certificates of inability to earn the minimum, and therefore permission to undertake employment at less than this wage had to be issued in order that employment might be found for the aged and ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... he would volunteer an imitation of somebody, generally of Incledon. His imitation was vocal; I made pretensions to the oratorical parts; and between us, we boasted, that we made up the entire phenomenon." LEIGH HUNT'S BYRON. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... which, when nothing pressing was doing, was regularly assailed by both parties; that far more dependence was placed in a bludgeon than a pistol; and that the man who registered a vote without a cracked pate was regarded as a kind of natural phenomenon,—some faint idea may be formed how much such a scene must have contributed to the peace of the county, and the happiness and welfare of all concerned ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... then that the most unlooked-for phenomenon, which was so considerably to influence Madame Desvarennes's life, occurred. At the moment when the mistress seemed provided by chance with the heiress so much longed for, she learned with surprise ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... with the superb group of the children of Mr. Edward Boit, exhibited two years later, it offers the slightly "uncanny" spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn. It is not simply precocity in the guise of maturity—a phenomenon we very often meet, which deceives us only for an hour; it is the freshness of youth combined with the artistic experience, really felt and assimilated, of generations. My admiration for this deeply distinguished ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... Man's a phenomenon, one knows not what, And wonderful beyond all wondrous measure; 'T is pity though, in this sublime world, that Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes Sin's a pleasure;[x] Few mortals know what end they would be at, But whether Glory, Power, or Love, or Treasure, The path is through perplexing ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... were two box-beds opposite the fire, and in the wall which faced the door there was a very small window, containing four panes of glass, each of which had a knot in the middle of it. One of them also presented the phenomenon of a flattened nose, for the boy with the ragged head had rushed down and stationed himself there to observe the result of the unexpected ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... "Yes," answered the philosophers, "a very little matter will do it." They then took some earth and covered the skull with it, when immediately down went the gold, and the opposite scale ascended. "This is very extraordinary," said Alexander, astonished. "Can you explain this phenomenon?" "Great king," said the sages, "this fragment is the socket of a human eye, which, though small in compass, is yet unbounded in its desires. The more it has, the more it craves. Neither gold nor silver nor any other earthly ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... towards the ridge, holding his umbrella in front of him as a screen. This was rather after the fashion of the ostrich, which, to avoid being seen, buries its head in the sand; nor was it likely that the beast, if irritated at sight of a man, would acquiesce in the phenomenon of an umbrella at large, and strolling on its own responsibility. But as yet the bull's back ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... cells, as in Figs. 7 to 10, of Plate I, each of these two cells contains almost the same quantity of paternal as maternal chromatin. We do not say exactly as much, for the paternal and maternal influences are not divided equally in the descendants. This phenomenon may be explained by what Semon calls alternating ecphoria in mnemic dichotomy. (Vide infra.) As cell division continues in the same way during embryonic life, it follows that each cell, or at least each nucleus of the future organism, will contain on the average half its substance ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... conqueror, who, without other weapon than a wooden cross, vanquished the eternal tulisanes of darkness, and would have utterly destroyed them were spirits not immortal. This marvel, this incredible phenomenon, is the blessed ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... feet, terminating in a bold and lofty peak; and the cave is situated about half-way up the face of the precipice. The cave is arched at the entrance, a black yawning mouth in the white face of the limestone. It is a natural phenomenon, but appears to have been enlarged by cave-dwellers. It has been explored by a local antiquary, and has yielded evidence of having been inhabited ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... or three years," he said, "but if I were dying of hunger, I would rather in the present condition of your good prince, and not being of any service to him, go and eat grass and grub up roots, than accept a morsel of bread from him."[111] Hume might well call this a phenomenon in the world of letters, and one very honourable for the person concerned.[112] And we recognise its dignity the more when we contrast it with the baseness of Voltaire, who drew his pension from the King of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... still going on. It seems to me that nothing matters and yet I scribble verses. I don't read them to Mariana and she is not very anxious to hear them, but you have sometimes praised my poor attempts and most of all you'll keep them to yourself. I have been struck by a common phenomenon in Russia... But, however, let the verses speak ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... the ignorance of the age! To oppose a plan of government like the new Constitution. Like it, did I say?—There never was one like it:—neither Minos, Solon, Lycurgus nor Romulus, ever fabricated so wise a system;—why it is a political phenomenon, a prodigy of legislative wisdom, the fame of which will soon extend almost ultramundane, and astonish the nations of the world with its transcendent excellence.—To what a sublime height will the ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... was this dignitary, Andreas Celichius by name, who at Magdeburg, in 1578, gave to the press his Theological Reminder of the New Comet. After deprecating as blasphemous the attempt of Aristotle to explain the phenomenon otherwise than as a supernatural warning from God to sinful man, he assures his hearers that "whoever would know the comet's real source and nature must not merely gape and stare at the scientific theory that it is an earthy, greasy, tough, and sticky vapour and mist, rising into the upper air ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... maddening sheet of water, which feat, as well as the usual one of a trip in the Maid of the Mist, seems necessary, in its apparent peril, to a full appreciation of the awful and stupendous grandeur of this phenomenon of nature. ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... lay for a long time, his soul steeped in profound peace, waiting for the Great Spirit to speak to him through some phenomenon of nature. There was only one wish in his heart; that through him his people might become prosperous and great. At last he fell asleep and dreamed that the Great Spirit stood before him in the form of a white buffalo and spoke thus: 'Where ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... hard by the Lorraine border. The district, always French in feeling, had lately suffered much from Burgundian raids; and this young damsel, brooding over the treatment of her village and her country, and filled with that strange vision-power which is no rare phenomenon in itself with young girls, came at last to believe with warm and active faith in heavenly appearances and messages, all urging her to deliver France and her King. From faith to action the bridge is short; and ere long the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... appeared quite unaltered and free from distortion, magnification or reduction, as if seen through plain window-glass; and yet the reflections of the candle-flame in the spectacles showed the flame upside down, proving conclusively that the glasses were concave on one surface at least. The strange phenomenon was visible only for a moment or two, and as it passed out of my sight it passed also out ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... superior enlightenment of the northern races, of their attachment to liberty, of their higher civilization, and other very fine and very easily-quoted things of the same kind, which, at the present moment, are admitted as truths by many, and esteemed as unanswerable explanations of the phenomenon. According to this opinion, therefore, the southern races were more ignorant, less civilized, more readily duped by priestcraft and kingcraft; above all, readier to bow to ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... some fifty meetings before election came, had gradually conducted them to the belief that they were expressing their own personal sentiments. The mechanical echo in public thus developed into an opinion in private. My own political experience has since demonstrated to me that this is a phenomenon very ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... justify me, I should think it a piece of extreme impertinence to inquire where YOU were bred; though one might justly plead, in excuse for it, a natural curiosity to know where and how such a phenomenon was produced. It is commonly said that your lordship's education was of that particular kind, concerning which it is a remark of that great judge of men and manners, Lord Clarendon (on whom you have, therefore, with a wonderful ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Ramses saw a phenomenon which arrested his attention. Near the temples the houses were more beautiful, and more people were moving ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... Italy. While residing near Florence, my attention was often attracted by a heap of fifty or one hundred very clean, empty, snail-shells, in a ditch, or under a bush; and I indulged in many vain speculations, before I could account for so strange a phenomenon. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... applied science is accomplished because of the observation by some thoughtful mind of some common phenomenon of nature, and the later application of those ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... weeks passed. Then, one day, a comet of amazing brilliancy shot suddenly into our social orbit, and things happened. That this interesting stellar phenomenon was a Russian grand duke, a nephew of the Czar, but added to the piquancy of ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... unbroken line of cliffs, but an undulating shore, with bulging rocks, and lines of reef. After a mile or two of that the coast ran out seaward, and they passed close to a most extraordinary phenomenon of vegetation. Great tangled woods crowned the shore and the landward slopes, and their grand foliage seemed to flow over into the sea; for here was a broad rocky flat intersected with a thousand little channels of the sea; ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... countless fires, and a purplish haze, like a low flame, was visible in every direction. I directed the attention of my companion to this strange appearance. Notwithstanding the intensity of her anxiety, she immediately entered into an explanation of the phenomenon, and attributed it to a peculiarly phosphoric state of the sea, caused by myriads of creatures which possess the quality of the glowworm, and rising to the surface of the water, made the latter seem as ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... 50 per cent more than iron and in both brass and iron the expansion is nearly proportional to the increase in temperature. This phenomenon is utilized in expansion pyrometers by enclosing a brass rod in an iron pipe, one end of the rod being rigidly attached to a cap at the end of the pipe, while the other is connected by a multiplying gear to a pointer moving around a graduated dial. ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... which was published in 1794, the second part in 1795, and the third in 1801, is an exposition of Deism on a purely scientific basis; the visible creation was everything to Paine in his reasonings, the religious hopes, fears and aspirations of men were nothing at all—this universal human phenomenon was curtly dismissed by him as a universal human delusion. Many of his comments on the Bible were rather crude anticipations of the modern Higher Criticism. But in dealing with the Bible, Paine showed the animus of a prosecuting counsel rather than the impartiality ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... German philosopher has not attempted a scientific classification of the subject. It would perhaps be best done by a man without appreciation of humour, because only then could one hope to escape being at the mercy of preferences; it would have to be studied purely as a phenomenon, a symptom of the mind; and nothing but an overwhelming love of classification would carry a student past the sense of its unimportance. But here I would rather attempt not to find a formula or a definition for humour, but to discover what it is, like argon, by eliminating other characteristics, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... touching these halos, and the arcs of the great all-round circle could be seen faintly on either side. Below was a dome-shaped glare of white which contained an exaggerated mock sun, which was as dazzling as the sun himself. Altogether a fine example of a pretty common phenomenon down here." And the next day: "We saw the party ahead in inverted mirage ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... appearance of a hired chaise,—a job and pair, as Shanty called it, appeared coming over the moor, directly to the shed, and so quick was the approach, that the Laird and the blacksmith had by no means finished their conjectures respecting this phenomenon, before the equipage came to a stand, in ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... interest had been centred in him ever since he had fallen, at a prayer-meeting, into a mysterious rigidity and suspension of consciousness, which, lasting for an hour or more, had been mistaken for death. To have sought a medical explanation for this phenomenon would have been held by Silas himself, as well as by his minister and fellow-members, a wilful self-exclusion from the spiritual significance that might lie therein. Silas was evidently a brother ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... above-named juniors, while not bad books to read for mere amusement, have a very particular interest for the student of the history of the novel. Taken in connection with their author's earlier work, they illustrate, for the first time, a curious phenomenon which has repeated itself often, notably in the case of Bulwer, and of a living novelist who need not be named. This is that the novel, more almost than any other kind of literature, seems to lend itself to what may be called the timeserving or "opportunism" of craftsmanship—to call out ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... They seemed to admire our complexions. One of these women, more forward than the rest, opened the bosom of one of our fairest young men, to see if his body was as white as his face. She appeared to be highly amused with the discovery, and called her companions to come and view the phenomenon. He shewed a similar curiosity as it concerned her, but she shrunk from it with the apparent delicacy of polished life, before so many men. The colour of these merry girls was that of the inside ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... pursuing along the banks of the Ganges a deer that he had struck with his arrow, king Santanu observed that the river had become shallow. On observing this, that bull among men, viz., Santanu, began to reflect upon this strange phenomenon. He mentally asked why that first of rivers ran out so quickly as before. And while seeking for a cause, the illustrious monarch beheld that a youth of great comeliness, well-built and amiable person, like Indra himself, had, by his keen celestial weapon, checked ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... thereby attached to the rock and used as bench-marks in the tunnels. From these bench-marks, using specially designed instruments, very accurate observations of the behavior of the tunnels could be made, and from these the very interesting phenomenon of the rise and fall of the tunnels with the tide was verified, the tunnels being low at high tide and the average variations being about 0.008 ft. in the average tide of about 4.38 ft.: the tidal oscillations are entirely independent ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 • Charles M. Jacobs
... a miserly old hunks, who hates to hear any voice but his own. His nephew, Sir Dauphine, wants to wring out of him a third of his property, and proceeds thus: He gets a lad to personate "a silent woman," and the phenomenon so delights the old man, that he consents to a marriage. No sooner is the ceremony over, than the boy-wife assumes the character of a virago of loud and ceaseless tongue. Morose, driven half-mad, promises to give his ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... description, and the available observations of earlier dates were extremely scanty. We can but look with astonishment on the genius of the man who, in spite of such difficulties, was able to detect such a phenomenon as the precession, and to exhibit its actual magnitude. I shall endeavour to explain the nature of this singular celestial movement, for it may be said to offer the first instance in the history of science in which we find ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... phenomenon interesting enough to warrant investigation, and I began study of it by looking up the statistics of suicide in the national capital. It seemed to me that if the decrease in 1898 was due to a general economic cause, it would not be particularly noticeable in ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... themselves, seeing that the pendulous part is a source of continual trouble and worry, from its trailing through every sauce and tart that may be at table, till it becomes a kind of geological phenomenon, in the illustration which it affords of the succession of deposits and incrustations. Or the swelling falls mainly into a lower part of the dress, taking the form of a monstrous prolongation of skirts, and insuring that the fair Martyrs shall act as scavengers upon every ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... told by Zabara seems to imply a phenomenon of the existence of which there is no other evidence. There seems to have been in Spain a small class of Jews that were secret converts to Christianity. They passed openly for Jews, but were in truth Christians. The motive for the concealment is unexplained, ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... that, save in the army, there had not been much response from tired-out, exhausted France, to the appeals of its once irresistible and beloved leader. But the spirit of the army was that of devotion itself. There was a kind of a blind madness in it of which men spoke afterward as a phenomenon that could only be recognized, that could never be explained or understood. They could not account for it. Yet it was a powerful factor, the most powerful, indeed, that enabled the Emperor to accomplish so much, and fall short of complete triumph by ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... indeed, half a dozen were counted at the same time from the car windows. These are created just as water-spouts are formed on the ocean, and to encounter one is almost equally serious. One must visit either Egypt or Mexico to witness this singular phenomenon. As Zacatecas is approached, large flocks of sheep and herds of mules and horses are grouped in the fields, overlooked by picturesquely draped horsemen. The cultivation of the land and its apparent fertility ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... more, I am sure, by some means which they possess of transferring thought without the mediation of any senses familiar to us. Sometimes I imagine that their extraordinary eyes play a large part in the phenomenon. But, however that may be, they certainly are able to read some of my thoughts, when we are in close relations and working together. One of them is especially gifted in this way, and what do you think? ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... any innocence; the allowance bestowed on you when you came into the world was bound to come to the top some day; but it was buried so deep that it is only now reappearing at the age of sixty-six. Fished up by love's barbed hook.—This phenomenon is ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... belief that a particularly fine, clear day is apt to be followed by a storm. Meteorologists can probably give satisfactory scientific reasons for this phenomenon, but, be that as it may, how often do we find a parallel in human affairs. A period of prosperity and happiness in the life of a man or of a nation is almost invariably followed by calamities, small or great; ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... sharpened by acrimony of feeling, it were in my power to select passages of commendation, which would not less surprise the Reader than they have done myself: while the history of this performance may be said to exhibit the singular phenomenon, of a traveller, usually lauding the countries through which he passes, receiving in return the reluctant approbation of those whose institutions, manners, and customs, have been praised by him. It is admitted, by the most sedulous and systematic of my opponents—M. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... I guess I'm not an uncommon phenomenon of the times. I was a good citizen before the War, law-abiding and everything. If you'd told me then I'd be in this galley to-day, I'd probably have knocked you for a goal. I had a flourishing young business of my own and was engaged to be married... When ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... season of stress that is testing the fitness of political systems and the validity of political philosophies. Each stress stems in part from causes peculiar to itself. But every stress is a reflection of a universal phenomenon. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to the King, as soon as he had done speaking, "if the son of a chief of villains, brought up and nourished amidst guilt, could have been capable of virtuous sentiments, this phenomenon would have contradicted experience, and even proved it deceitful. I will here venture to recall to your Majesty a fable of our ancestors which tradition has ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... second line. The place had been a wilderness a moment before; but the crowd which instantaneously sprang up round the wreck could not have been less than two hundred strong. (One observes the same uncanny phenomenon in London, when a cab-horse falls down in a deserted street.) However, it melted away at the rebuke of the first officer who hurried to the spot, the process of dissolution being accelerated by ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... thoughts, illustrations, legends, and twisted knots of reasoning which a fine artistic sense would have omitted, were all as Jewish as the Talmud. There was also a Jewish quality in his natural description, in the way he invented diverse phrases to express different aspects of the same phenomenon, a thing for which the Jews were famous; and in the way in which he peopled what he described with animal life of all kinds, another remarkable habit of the Jewish poets. Moreover, his pleasure in intense colour, in splashes and blots of scarlet and ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... examining with a degree of astonishment that all my reasoning power failed to lessen, obtruded itself on my attention though quite motionless. The persistence and fixity of the phenomenon excluded any idea of hallucination. I am totally exempt from all nervous disorders capable of influencing the sense of sight. The cause of such visual disturbance is, I think, generally due to stomach trouble; and, thank God! I have an excellent stomach. Moreover, visual illusions ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... said, must have seen it, for its rays fell on them. It remained at that height for about fifteen minutes by the clock, and then rose as usual, and nothing else extraordinary happened during that day. Though accustomed to the coast, he had never witnessed nor heard of such a phenomenon before. I suggested that there might have been a cloud in the horizon invisible to him, which rose with the sun, and his clock was only as accurate as the average; or perhaps, as he denied the possibility of this, it was such a looming of the sun as is said to occur ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... irritated, for within him a really incomprehensible phenomenon was taking place. He was burning for this unknown woman. He was positively obsessed by her. He who had renounced all carnal relations years ago, who, when the barns of his senses were opened, contented himself with driving the disgusting ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... during which the same phenomenon continued, each day the salt pans and coppers being further off from the beach. At last the men perceiving that the rocks did not rise higher from the water again became alarmed, and broke out into open mutiny. By this time I had cured a sufficiency of provisions, and I made no objection, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... seen so little of the world at any other hours than between noon and midnight, that she has a very obscure sense of other periods of daily time. She scarcely knows what morning is. Sunrise is to her as much of a phenomenon as a total eclipse of the sun to any other person. She cannot tell what mankind in general mean by breakfast-time, for she has scarcely ever seen the world so early. And really half-past seven was not very far from the middle of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... hoop to play with, asked "why a hoop, or a plate, if rolled upon its edge, keeps up as long as it rolls, but falls as soon as it stops, and will not stand if you try to make it stand still upon its edge?" Was not the boy's understanding as well employed whilst he was thinking of this phenomenon, which he observed whilst he was beating his hoop, as it could possibly have been ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... was a one-legged dancer named DONATO. Within sixteen weeks there were as many one-legged dancers. We don't speak by the card, of course, but one-legged dancers became a drug in the market. Already we hear of "A Dynamic Phenomenon" at the Pavilion. Little Mrs. ABBOTT is an active, spry little person, yet her "vis inertiae" is, at present, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... enlist the services shrink with disgust from the moral leprosy covering the servitor. Of such was the witness put forward to corroborate the informer, and still not corroborating him. Of such was that phenomenon, a police spy, who declared himself an unwilling witness for the crown! There was no reason why in my regard he should be unwilling—he knew me not previously. I have no desire to speak harshly of Inspector Doyle; he said in presence of ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... OF LIGHT This astronomical phenomenon may be defined as an apparent motion of the heavenly bodies; the stars describing annually orbits more or less elliptical, according to the latitude of the star; consequently at any moment the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... They would sometimes find an English boat or canoe in some spot perfectly inexplicable to them. They could not believe that anyone could pass the fortifications of Ticonderoga unseen and unheard, and would start the wildest hypotheses to account for the phenomenon, even to believing that some waterway existed which was unknown alike to them ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... left of that direction, because snakes and elephants do not turn to the left but always to the right. Consequently the house will be more secure and less likely to be shaken down by Shesh Nag's movements, which cause the phenomenon known to us as an earthquake. Below the foundation-stone or brick are buried a pice, an areca-nut and a grain of rice, and it is lucky if the stone be laid by a man who has been faithful to his wife. There should be no echo in a house, as an echo is considered to be the voice ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... never meant to conform. I therefore anticipate his discovery, that it is an attempt, probably more novel than happy, to reverse the method usually adopted by writers, whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon of the mind or the passions, by the operation of persons or events; and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... climes has revealed itself to my sleeping vision with a splendour of coloring and distinctness of outline which made the waking life seem duller and less real by contrast. I know of no parallel to this phenomenon unless in the pages of Bulwer Lytton's romance entitled—"The Pilgrims of the Rhine," in which is related the story of a German student endowed with so marvellous a faculty of dreaming, that for him the normal conditions of ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... Amici admired forty years ago; and another grudging two for a gallop through the Noorden Plantation, of which the rich town is proud. There must be something about my appearance which convinces people that, whatever evil is afoot, I, at least, am innocent. I have noticed this since boyhood, the phenomenon being most conspicuous when I was least deserving; whereas, with Alb, it is the other way round. His darkly handsome face, with its severely clear-cut features, his black hair and brows, his somber eyes, ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... imported at all by private agency, and must be provided by the government, which, in re-selling the goods below cost price, plunges thereby a little further into insolvency. The bread subsidies, now almost universal throughout Europe, are the leading example of this phenomenon. ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... life to be as dependent for its manifestation of particular molecular arrangements as any physical or chemical phenomenon; and wherever he extends his researches, fixed order and unchanging causation reveal themselves, as plainly as in the rest ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... out in the yard before he could hear more. Standing for a minute in the windy sunshine, he wondered at the curious phenomenon presented by men in evident possession of their faculties who relied for the dispersion of human care on means invisible and mystic. The fact that in this case he himself had appealed to the illusion rendered ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... 1st, 1852,] we have had presented to our view, the beautiful phenomenon of FROSTED TREES, the most astonishing and brilliant that I ever remember to have noticed. The previous storm and mist had thickly covered every exposed object,—the loftiest trees, the minutest blade, hill ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... companions had grasped the phenomenon, and had hard work to keep their mounts from ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... so did his ardor in favor of the great object of his affections grow with its growth, and become more manifest as an ordinary observer would be apt to think the motive of its existence at all had nearly ceased. This is a moral phenomenon that I have often had occasion to observe, and which, there is some reason to think, depends on a principle of attraction that has hitherto escaped the sagacity of the philosophers, but which is as active in the ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... may be for the sake of advertising, or for stock market purposes, or because some correspondent abroad needs the gold and is willing to pay for it. Any one of these or many like reasons may explain the phenomenon, occasionally seen, of gold exports at a time when conditions plainly indicate that the exporter is shipping at ...
— Elements of Foreign Exchange - A Foreign Exchange Primer • Franklin Escher
... explained by science, says Bloom. It's only a natural phenomenon, don't you see, because ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to see a Smith or a Walker become something so different to themselves. These men have a great weight to carry, and cannot always shake off the burden of their origin and live among begotten statesmen as though they too had been born to the manner. But perhaps the most wonderful ministerial phenomenon,—though now almost too common to be longer called a phenomenon,—is he who rises high in power and place by having made himself thoroughly detested and also,—alas for parliamentary cowardice!—thoroughly feared. Given sufficient audacity, a thick skin, ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... the difference more conspicuous than in their conduct. I have noticed curiously enough that English Colonials, especially in such particulars as speech and manners, follow their quondam sister colony, rather than the mother country. And this, not only in Canada, where the phenomenon might be explained by climatic, geographic, and historic reasons, but also in such antipodean places as Australia and South Africa, which are so far away as to apparently have very little in common ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... that nothing is so truly astonishing to a morally depraved people as the phenomenon of a race of men in whose word perfect confidence may be placed[84].... The natives are conscious of their inferiority in nothing so much as in this. They require to be taught rectitude of conduct much more than ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... seemed affected. He had watched, with turned-back head, the phenomenon from beginning to end, and at the close, with a long indrawing of breath, had looked once at Laurie, licked his dry lips with a motion that was audible in that profound silence, and once more dropped his eyes. The ladies had been silent, ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... heartlessly you talk! What do I care what the lawyers say? Can't you see how miserable I am, and how hollow everything seems all at once? I don't believe in any one, and I don't feel as if I knew anything, except that love is an inexplicable phenomenon of matter. I shall become ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... He fancied that under stress of emotion and physical weakness his eyes were deceiving him; but the line of golden fire grew brighter and more definite. It was broken but unwavering, and black shadows began to take form as part of this phenomenon. Then he remembered the giant peak of Fernando Noronha, that mis-shapen mass which thrusts its amazing beacon a thousand feet into the air. The rising moon was gilding El Pico long ere its rays would illumine the lower land—that was all—yet he hailed the sight ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... of the chief of them. For the fact is—as we found to our amazement—that Santa Claus (you must, by the way, call him St. Nicholas; after all, it is his proper name) comes to Belgium and Russia, not on December 25th, but on December 6th. All our attempts to explain this phenomenon by the difference in the Russian calendar, though ingenious, have failed; it doesn't work out at all. Still, for some reason, that is how it is, and we cannot but be grateful to St. Nicholas for this delicate ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... and thought longingly of the fire and supper awaiting him in his comfortable rooms, he was startled by hearing a deep, rich voice boom out almost at his feet. To make the phenomenon still more remarkable, the voice shaped itself into ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... extraordinary deviation from the ordinary course of animal development. Both physically and mentally evolution seemed to take an enormous leap, instead of proceeding by its usual minute steps, and in the advent of man we have a phenomenon remarkable alike in the development of the body and ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... and vein of the economic organism of Italy is swathed and pressed and choked by this German isolator, which nobody dares to pull away. For if we turn from the economic to the political aspect of this curious phenomenon, we shall find that the companies enumerated give work to scores of thousands of operators and employees, through whose willing instrumentality they become vast electoral agencies. "It is obvious," we are authoritatively assured, "that the influence of such companies in administrative ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... on the ground of sensuality, though it embraced a broad denunciation of the sensual tendencies of the age in art, music, poetry, the drama, and social life generally. Sensuality was regarded as the phenomenon of the age. "It lies," said the writer, "on the drawing-room table, shamelessly naked and dangerously fair. It is part of the pretty poem which the belle of the season reads, and it breathes away the pureness of her soul like the ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... laughing, carrying out rebellions and little plots as though the centuries that stretch ahead were still her willing slaves, has in the end become to onlookers a veritable nightmare. Puzzled by a phenomenon which is so disconcerting as to be incapable of any clear definition, they have ended by declaring that an empty Treasury is an empty rule, adding that as it is solely from this monetary viewpoint that the New China ought to ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... moderately prepossessing. All this had the women to complain of in him before the cataclysm that, for the time at least, had played havoc with his good looks. All this he knew and bore with philosophic and whimsical stoicism. But all this and more could not account for the phenomenon of averted eyes and constrained, if not freezing, manner when, in the dusk of the late autumn evening, issuing suddenly from his quarters, he came face to face with a party of four young women under escort of ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... whole range of nature, there is no elementary power so simple, but that it is capable of dividing and diverging into opposite directions. The whole play of vital motion hinges on harmony and contrast. Why, then, should not this phenomenon recur on a grander scale in the history of man? In this idea we have perhaps discovered the true key to the ancient and modern history of poetry and the fine arts. Those who adopted it, gave to the peculiar spirit of modern art, as contrasted with the antique or classical, the name of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... can be illustrated by scenes acted in pantomime, with very simple properties. Indeed, we had not even a curtain when Miss La Creevy painted Kate's miniature, when the Savage and the Maiden danced their inimitable dance, when Mrs. Kenwigs and Morleena held a reception for Mrs. Crummles, the Phenomenon and the ladies of their company, when after they had recited from their star parts, Morleena had the soles of her shoes chalked and danced her fancy dance, and Henrietta Petowker took down her back hair and repeated ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... his cigar. There was always something, some sacrifice to make, and seldom for art's sake. It is all very well to witness a play from the other side of the footlights; everything appears to work out so smoothly, easily and without effort. To this phenomenon is due the amateur dramatist—because it looks simple. A play is not written; it is built, like a house. In most cases the dramatist is simply the architect. The novelist has comparatively an easy road to travel. The dramatist is beset from all sides, now ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... his utter astonishment, he saw her suspended in the air in an inverted position, traced on the horizon in the clearest colours, and with the most distinct and perfect representation. He sailed in the direction in which he saw this visionary phenomenon, and actually found his father's vessel by its indication. He was divided from him by immense masses of icebergs, and at such a distance that it was quite impossible to have seen the ship in her actual situation, or seen her at all, if her spectrum, or image, had not been thus ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... for true human nature requires that the self-directing faculty in us should have a share in the manifestation, and the expression of this faculty is always dignified. All moral baseness is an actual human phenomenon, but I hope not real human nature, which is always noble. All the faults of taste cannot be surveyed that have been occasioned in criticism or the practice of art by this—confusion between actual human ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of easement and be shot comfortably, when I was aware that the surface of the ground near by was heaving—the white, snowy ground heaving. I was close enough to madness between cold and pain, and I regarded the phenomenon as a dream. But with that hands came out of the heaving ground, eyes gleamed. A rope was lashed about my middle and I was drawn toward our trenches." The cigarette puffed vigorously ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... great extent otherwise. But from the bottom of the dykes to the edge of yonder sparkling water, there is a bare beach, full three miles in extent. What does this mean? What are these dykes for, if the enemy is so far off? The answer to this query discloses a remarkable phenomenon. The tide in this part of the world rises sixty or seventy feet every twelve hours. At present the beach is bare; the five rivers of the valley—the Gasperau, the Cornwallis, the Canard, the Habitant, the Perot—are empty. Betimes the tide will roll in in one broad unretreating ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... be entirely unrelated to the corresponding stimulus words; in the case of such reactions the stimulus words seem to act, as Aschaffenburg has pointed out, merely as signals for discharge. This subdivision contains several types of reactions which seem to be dependent upon the phenomenon of perseveration; it contains also the rather ...
— A Study of Association in Insanity • Grace Helen Kent
... trains depart, and to rise up and shake itself alive and go on board. One is haunted sometimes by the fancy that some day, when the air in the room is unusually bad and the trains are delayed, a curious phenomenon will be seen. The petrifaction will be carried a little farther than usual, and, when the bell rings and the official calls out, "Train made up for Babel, Hinnom, and way stations?" no women will come forth from the "Ladies' Room," no eye will move, ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... banjosephine obligato in A-sia minor, by that justly renowned impresario, Signor Conde Tin-pani Rivers, specially engaged for this performance; with a pleasing and pan-hellenic song-and-dance turn by Miss Travis Bessemer, the infant phenomenon, otherwise ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... imagination. Certain people can increase or inhibit the beating of their hearts at will, i.e., by means of an intense and persistent representation. The renowned physiologist, E. F. Weber, possessed this power, and has described the mechanism of the phenomenon. Still more remarkable are the cases of vesication produced in hypnotized subjects by means of suggestion. Finally, let us recall the persistent story of the stigmatized individuals, who, from the thirteenth century down to our own day, have been quite numerous and present some ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... by their mere mass, the decayed exuviae of even the smaller and humbler forms of life are sometimes abundant enough to exercise a perceptible influence on soil and atmosphere. "The plain of Cumana," saya Humboldt, "presents a remarkable phenomenon, after heavy rains. The moistened earth, when heated by the rays of the sun, diffuses the musky odor common in the torrid zone to animals of very different classes, to the jaguar, the small species of tiger-cat, the cabiai, the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... sprightly conversation would be too much for any man, and mercifully divide the two. And this leaves them helpless before a little American girl, laughing, talking, jesting, teasing, till, bewildered by such a phenomenon, they are swept down so easily that one is reminded of Attila's taunt to the Romans, "The thicker the grass, the quicker it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... was on the edge of a stupendous bergschrund, as the phenomenon is termed by Swiss climbers—a deep chasm formed by the ice and snow shrinking or falling away from the side of a mountain, where the latter is too steep for it to cling. And then, after a little examination to ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... I said to myself at first, but even as I thought that, I felt that it could not be; and at last I was lifting my hand to touch Mr Frewen, and draw his attention to the strange phenomenon, when the sawing suddenly ceased. My companion drew a long breath; and at the same moment, as I felt drawn toward the window by some strange attraction, to try and make out why it was so dark, there was the sound of another deep breath, and I felt it ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... a three-sided square of squatting Wakungu, all inhabited in skins, mostly cow-skins; some few of whom had, in addition, leopard-cat skins girt round the waist, the sign of royal blood. Here I was desired to halt and sit in the glaring sun; so I donned my hat, mounted my umbrella, a phenomenon which set them all a-wondering and laughing, ordered the guard to close ranks, and sat gazing at the novel spectacle! A more theatrical sight I never saw. The king, a good-looking, well-figured, tall young man of twenty-five, ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... he desired, Faber was now bent on finding, or bringing about in Juliet Meredith. He would fain get nearer to her. Something pushed, something drew him toward the lovely phenomenon into which had flowered invisible Nature's bud of shapeless protoplasm. He would have her trust him, believe him, love him. If he succeeded, so much the greater would be the value and the pleasure of the conquest, that it had been gained in spite of all her prejudices ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... seem to thrive upon it; soon this desire for food will diminish, his body emaciate, his eye become ulcerated, and in a few weeks he will die; but mix bran or sawdust with the sugar or oil, and the health and vigor of the animal will be maintained for months. A similar phenomenon will be manifested, if grain only be given to a horse, without hay, straw, or material ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... is, Larry," I answered. "And don't think I have any idea that the phenomenon is supernatural in the sense spiritualists and table turners have given that word. I do think it is supernormal; energized by a force unknown to modern science—but that doesn't mean I think it ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... patriotic philologers insist upon deriving it from "rus sanum," healthy country. Its older names were Roscia, and Ruscianum; it is not marked in Peutinger. Countless jackdaws and kestrels nestle in this cliff, as well as clouds of swifts, both Alpine and common. These swifts are the ornithological phenomenon of Rossano, and I think the citizens have cause to be thankful for their existence; to them I attribute the fact that there are so few flies, mosquitoes, and other aerial plagues here. If only the amiable birds could be induced to extend their attentions ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... some masculine shirt," she nodded as he sank back apparently overcome with admiration at her intelligence. "And that," she added, "no doubt is intended to illustrate the phenomenon of adhesion." ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... is exemplified quite as clearly by the phenomenon of generation as by the process of decay and death. In both we behold the opposition between the appearance and the essence of the being, between the world as it exists in our intellect as representation, and ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... words used synonymously? Or is it meant that this airy gentry shall come in a Minuet step, and go off in a Jig? The phenomenon of a tripping crank is indeed novel, and ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... frightened at the phenomenon, breaks the lasso and scampers away among the ridges. Gode has galloped in pursuit. I ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... told my mother about our adventure the night we drove home from Lady Colin Ferner's party, and asked her if she remembered ever having heard anything that could possibly account for the phenomenon. After a few moments' reflection, this is the story ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... soror! I hope to have a letter sororis to answer sorori, then to see sororem," etc. Later, after his sister is married, he addresses her as "the box that contains everything pleasing; the elixir of virtue, grace, and beauty; the jewel, the phenomenon of Normandy; the pearl of Bayeux, the fairy of St. Lawrence, the virgin of the Rue Teinture, the guardian angel of Caen, the goddess of enchantments, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... different from any love which he had felt before for a woman, that it ought to have had some other name. It was a love of the soul, of that which was immortal, of God in her; it was a love too, of no mere temporary phenomenon, but of reality outlasting death into eternity. There was thus a significance, there was a grandeur in it wanting to any earthly love. It was the new love with which men were henceforth to love women—the ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... dropping down into the first friendly chair that bumped against her knees, sat staring blankly out across the monotonous city roofs that flanked her open window,—trying very, very hard for the first time in her life, to consider the General-Phenomenon-of-Being-a-Trained-Nurse. ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... mental activity largely to her influence. His mother died while he was still too young to recollect her, but her place was fortunately supplied by a kindly and sensible stepmother; not such a rare phenomenon as some people think. His father belonged to a class of men only to be found on the coast of Maine, who are at once fishermen, farmers and navigators; a much more intelligent and cultivated class than the agricultural ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... and his daughters by inducing people to pay him more for his services than they are worth. In the extreme instances of reaction against convention, female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage; and when Nature throws up that rare phenomenon, an unscrupulous libertine, his success among "well brought-up" girls is so easy, and the devotion he inspires so extravagant, that it is impossible not to see that the revolt against conventional respectability ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... wife about Phoebe and her brother, and spoke of her with a certain admiration that raised Rosa's curiosity, and even that sort of vague jealousy that fires at bare praise. "I should like to see this phenomenon," said she. "You shall," said he. "I have to call on Mrs. Manly. She lives near. I will drop you at the little shop, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... a man more than twice her age. Since then her preference for youthfulness had been growing, a phenomenon not unusual in women of her type. At thirty-seven, she looked upon her husband as senile, patriarchal, as far removed from her generation as the Pilgrim fathers. Men of her own age bored her. They were interested in business, ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... when addressed to the eye rather than to the ear, that is, when written or printed rather than spoken, is partly a spatial phenomenon; and, as will appear presently, the arrangement of words and sentences on the formal page is a real factor in the rhythm of verse. Moreover, most of the rhythms of motion, such as walking, the ebb and flow of ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... future revolution. Familiarity with the use of force in civic strife is also a fatal cause of its perpetuation; but familiarity implies its renewed employment: it can hardly be the result of the first experiment in murder. The repetition of this ghastly phenomenon in Roman politics can only be accounted for by the belief that the Gracchan emeute was of its very nature an event that could not be isolated: that Gracchus was a pioneer in a hostile country, and that his opponents preserved all their inherent weakness ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... development has been subordinated to the necessities of national defense, and hence it is only in times of war there is any real manifestation of national spirit. It is only then that the citizens of the Iron Age feel a transitory brotherhood. It is a paradoxical phenomenon, possible only in the Iron Age, that the highest instances of national sacrifice are evoked by warfare—the most barbarous of human enterprises. To make normal that spirit of unity which is now only manifested in abnormal moments ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... somewhat extraordinary. I have thought of another extraordinary phenomenon somewhat ...
— Rollo's Museum • Jacob Abbott
... Grumkow—does not draw his; presents it undrawn, with unconditional submission and apology: "Slay me, if you like, old Friend, whom I have injured!" Whereat Dessau, uttering no word, uttering only some contemptuous snort, turns his back on the phenomenon; mounts his horse and rides home. [Pollnitz, ii. 212, 214.] A divided man from this Grumkow henceforth. The Prince waited on her Majesty; signified his sorrow for past estrangements; his great wish now to help her, but his total inability, being ousted by Grumkow: We are for Halle, Madam, where ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... "Observations Concerning God's Works in Nature" (Betrachtungen uber die Werke Gottes in der Natur), which he recommended to the priests for wide distribution among the people. He saw the hand of God in even the most insignificant natural phenomenon. God was to him the Supreme Being whom he had jubilantly hymned in the choral portion of the Ninth Symphony in the words of Schiller: "Brothers, beyond you starry canopy there must dwell a loving Father!" Beethoven's relationship to God was that of a child toward his loving father ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... opposing habits, but of their respective acts, does not, like Jansenism, represent the universality of sin without theological charity as a physical and fundamental necessity, but merely as a historical phenomenon which admits of exceptions. Thus he writes in his treatise On the Spirit and the Letter: "If they who by nature do the things contained in the law, must not be regarded as yet in the number of those whom Christ's grace justifies, but rather as among those whose ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... a poor system, Perk thought, that hadn't devised sufficient shielding for the observatory so that they could watch this phenomenon more directly. "We'll have to work on that problem," he told himself and since his recommendations would carry much weight after this tour of duty, he could be sure that any such system that he ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... and stood gazing with a look of stupid wonder at the bell ringing without hands, while I went to the door and let in the company before she could be fairly made to understand the connection between the ringing and the phenomenon of admission. ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the time say that the constant rolling fire of cannon and musketry resembled the rattling peals of thunder following the lightning flashes in a furious electric storm. An English officer present mentions the phenomenon, that though the flashes of the guns were plainly visible in front, the firing seemed to be from the wood and swamp a mile or two away on the left. They did not hear the sound from the front, but only ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... Hackers display an intense tropism towards oriental cuisine, especially Chinese, and especially of the spicier varieties such as Szechuan and Hunan. This phenomenon (which has also been observed in subcultures that overlap heavily with hackerdom, most notably science-fiction fandom) has never been satisfactorily explained, but is sufficiently intense that one can assume the target of a hackish dinner expedition to be the best local Chinese place and be right ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... now all armed, even to Mr. Parker. The scientist had recovered from his first fright, when he spied the Indians coming over the snow, as he was "observing" some natural phenomenon. Tom, even in his excitement, noticed that the professor was curiously examining his gun, evidently more with a view to seeing how it was made, and on which principle it was operated, rather than to discover ...
— Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice • Victor Appleton
... sage, Who, plodding on from youth to age, Has proved all other reasoners fools, And bound all Nature by his rules,— So fares he in that dreadful hour When injured Truth exerts her power Some new phenomenon to raise, Which, bursting on his frighted gaze, From its proud summit to the ground, Proves the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... out of the cold dungeon air into the warm sunshine. The heather bloomed in pride and beauty, and the shepherd-boy sat on a barrow and blew his pipe, which he had carved for himself out of a sheep bone. Fata Morgana, the beautiful aerial phenomenon of the wilderness, appeared with hanging gardens and waving forests, and the wonderful cloud called "Lokeman driving his sheep" ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... Tausig, visits him, and he thinks of him as his son, saying, "My childless marriage is suddenly blest with an interesting phenomenon." But the young Tausig gives him unlimited cares, and "devours my biscuits, which my wife doles out grudgingly even to me." His allusions to Minna are always full of tender solicitude, though it is evident that she wears upon him. His temper, ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... fair to take them as seriously as they take themselves, but when any considerable number of apparently earnest citizens unite in a petition to the Governor of their State, to commute the death sentence of a convicted assassin without alleging a doubt of his guilt the phenomenon challenges a certain attention to what they do allege. What these amiable persons hold, it seems, is what was held by Alphonse Karr: the expediency of abolishing the death penalty; but apparently they do not hold, with him, that the ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... "Impossible!" "I am sure of it." "She looks twenty-five." "She has had seven children." "It is incredible." "And what is more, they are all seven alive, as she is a very good mother. I go to the house, which is a very quiet and pleasant one, occasionally, and she realizes the phenomenon of the family in the midst of the world." "How very strange! And have there never been any reports about her?" "Never." "But what about her husband? He is peculiar, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... their own proper size, nor could we suppose that the atmosphere would have an effect upon one object, which it had not upon another; yet there appeared to be no other way of accounting for the phenomenon, unless indeed this wild country were the parent of a race of giants, for the men whom we saw resembled moving towers rather than mortals. I need not observe that our astonishment was very great; nor, in was it much diminished when, on a nearer approach, we discovered the truth, and witnessed ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... with such heat; but, to his surprise, this piece underwent no such change. In amazement, he examined it, and found that while it had charred or shriveled, like leather, it had not softened at all. The bystanders attached no importance to this phenomenon, but to him it was a revelation. He renewed his experiments with enthusiasm, and in a little while established the facts that India-rubber, when mixed with sulphur and exposed to a certain degree of heat for a certain time, would not melt ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... sloppily. A soaking rain was steadily descending, and the streets presented a continuous scene of puddles. The boys dashed through it without umbrellas (I never saw one of them carry an umbrella in my life, and don't believe the phenomenon ever was seen), their clean surplices on their arms; on their way to attend ten-o'clock morning prayers in the cathedral. The day was a holiday from school, ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... districts, cataracts or prospects, when they are mentioned, will have their phantasms or pictured images occur to him, and he will be aware of them, like the intrusion of a sudden flash. From this phenomenon the generally received opinion of the rapidity of Thought may in ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... had stared a little while at this extraordinary phenomenon, "thank God it did not travel farther, and fall upon ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... expected that I should begin a lecture on the relations between thought and language with some definition of both these things; but thought, as Sir William Grove said of motion, is a phenomenon "so obvious to simple apprehension, that to define it would make it more obscure." {17} Definitions are useful where things are new to us, but they are superfluous about those that are already familiar, and mischievous, so far as they are possible ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... babbled and purled out of Miss Foster's mouth like a bright spring out of moss. It was simply wonderful. Henry did not understand quite precisely how the phenomenon affected him, but he was left in no doubt that his feelings were pleasurable. She had a manner of looking—of looking up at him and to him, of relying on him as a great big wise man who could get poor ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... eyes were fixed on the tip of the finger she had passed through the loop of string that tied the letters together, and she watched it as the packet twisted round and round and pinched it redder and redder. "I suppose you never wanted to be a woman," she said, considering this phenomenon with ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... suspicion that she had married that very curious phenomenon—a born artist. Had her mother suspected it she would have been shocked. Had her father dreamed it he would have been delighted. And Catherine herself? well, she was still a ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... conditions come, salvation would become an accomplished reality. Naturally the terms I use here are exceedingly summary. You may interpret the word 'salvation' in any way you like, and make it as diffuse and distributive, or as climacteric and integral a phenomenon as you please. ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... These are adjacent to high roads and would soon have fallen a prey to the road surveyor or local builder. Hence the authorities of this Trust stepped in; they secured for the nation these characteristic examples of a unique geological phenomenon, and preserved for all time a curious and picturesque feature of the country traversed by the old Bath Road. All that the Trust requires is "more force to its elbow," increased funds for the preservation of the natural beauty of our English scenery, and the increased ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... directed many a traveler, not from Acadia only, across the prairie until it has earned the titles pilot-weed, compass or polar plant. Various theories have been advanced to account for the curious phenomenon, some claiming that the leaves contained sufficient iron to reader them magnetic - a theory promptly exploded by chemical analysis. Others supposed that the resinous character of the leaves made them susceptible to magnetic influence; ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... few moments before had been dry waving grass, was like magic. We rode on, and as we went the lake seemed to move with us, or rather to recede as we advanced, keeping always the same distance ahead. The phenomenon lasted for about a quarter of an hour, and then cleared away as magically ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... man, leaning against a rock, and smoking his pipe in contemplative silence; his face bronzed with the sun and the roughness of many seasons, and his grey hairs not hidden by his long blue cap. Herbert saluted him, and, pointing to the phenomenon, requested ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... more debased than by this rendering of [Greek: en] by 'at', instead of 'in';—'at' the 'phenomenon', instead of 'in' the 'noumenon'. For such is the force of 'nomen', name, in this and similar passages, namely, 'in vera et substantiali potestate Jesu': that is, [Greek: en logo kai dia logou], the true 'noumenon' or 'ens intelligibile' of Christ. To bow at hearing the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
