"Circumscribed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were not firing and the gunners were in a little circumscribed world of their own, dissociated from the movement around them as they busily dug pits for their ammunition. In due course someone might tell them to begin registering on a certain point or to turn loose on one which they had already registered. ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... traveller who traverses the immeasurable deserts of America, when fortunately he obtains a hut wherein to shelter himself; in those moments he certainly enjoys himself; nor does he then complain of its being too small. It is indeed the lot of man to be always circumscribed to a narrow space, even when he wanders over the most extensive regions; even when the huge sea envelops him all around, and wraps him close to its bosom, in the act, as it were, of swallowing him up in a moment: still he is separated from all the circumjacent immensity ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... out of the room. This is his own word. Bounded! He assured me with intensified solemnity that he bounded; and the sight of the short and muscular Fyne bounding gravely about the circumscribed passages and staircases of a small, very high class, private hotel, would have been worth any amount of money to a man greedy of memorable impressions. But as I looked at him, the desire of laughter at my very lips, I asked myself: how many men could be found ready ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... into tribes, more or less numerous, according to circumstances, and designated from the localities they inhabit; for although universally a wandering race with respect to places of habitation, their wanderings are circumscribed by certain well-defined limits, beyond which they seldom pass, except for purposes of war or festivity. In short, every tribe has its own district, the boundaries of which are well known to the natives generally; and ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... his sweetheart is of no importance. Men are so circumscribed in their utterances—so tongue-tied in love. They all say one thing; so it need not be set down here what Bob Hendricks said. It was what the king said to the queen, the prince to the princess, the duke to the lady, the gardener to the maid, the troubadour to his dulcinea. And ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... issued on the 28th October Sir Frederick Roberts was announced as the dominant authority for the time being in Eastern and Northern Afghanistan. He occupied this position just as far as and no further than he could make it good. And he could make it good only over a very circumscribed area. Even more than had been true of Shah Soojah's government forty years previously was it true of Roberts' government now that it was a government of sentry-boxes. He was firm master of the Sherpur cantonment. General ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... Shaw's ideas of propriety and her own helpless dependence on others, had always made her insist that a footman should accompany Edith and Margaret, if they went beyond Harley Street or the immediate neighbourhood. The limits by which this rule of her aunt's had circumscribed Margaret's independence had been silently rebelled against at the time: and she had doubly enjoyed the free walks and rambles of her forest life, from the contrast which they presented. She went along there with a bounding fearless step, that ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... booksellers and publishers. There are many of this professional order, whose character and influence might justly demand a detailed account. Spence himself would find among them anecdotes worthy consideration in the world of letters. I must, however, write within circumscribed limits. The first in my immediate recollection is Everet Duyckinck. He was a middle-aged man, when I, a boy, was occasionally at his store, an ample and old-fashioned building, at the corner of Pearl-street and Old Slip. He was grave in his demeanor, and somewhat ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... which consists of two distinct social structures, connected, and, as it were, encased, one within the other; two governments, completely separate, and almost independent, the one fulfilling the ordinary duties, and responding to the daily and indefinite calls of a community, the other circumscribed within certain limits, and only exercising an exceptional authority over the general interests of the country. In short, there are twenty-four small sovereign nations, whose agglomeration constitutes the body of the Union. To examine the ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... avoided, by finishing his darks with the greatest care and softness, while the figures in the light masses are often left in mere outline: the lights are also reduced in size as they enter the shade; while the darks in the light portions of his prints are circumscribed to a mere point, for the purpose of giving a balance and solidity. The shadows of the several objects likewise assume a greater delicacy as they enter into the masses of light. In these respects, the Hundred Guilder print ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... it was possible to be tired of the most interesting "peculiarities" when once their novelty was exhausted, and that so-called "characters" in the country fail to satisfy the requirements of intimate or long companionship. Their world is too narrowly circumscribed. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... his oar as a salute, which she returned with the slightest possible inclination of her head, and then continued pacing up and down, while he pursued his course till he entered the voe, and reached the castle landing-place, where he was hid from view. Miss Wardhill continued her circumscribed walk backwards and forwards across the top of the tower, now stopping to look up the Sound at the ship, now casting her glance round the horizon, speaking frequently to herself, and more than once sighing ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... contempt and drudgery. For they were debarred henceforth from fulfilling the supreme function of Hindu womanhood, i.e. securing the continuity of family rites from father to son by bearing children in legitimate wedlock, itself terribly circumscribed by the narrow limits within which inter-marriage is permissible even between different septs of the same caste. Happily those I saw were probably still too young to realise the full significance of the ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... one of that vast race of blase young noblemen whose opportunities of enjoyment had never been circumscribed, except by the absence of the capacity to enjoy, and who, as a natural sequence, were continually oppressed with a sense of satiety, enervated by the noonday sunshine of unbroken prosperity, and thoroughly weary of their own existence. When his brother-in-law had been appointed ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... Our vision is so circumscribed, our theories are so small—the garment of them not large enough to wrap us in; our faith so continually fashions itself to the fit of our dwarf intellect, that there is endless room for rebellion against ourselves: we must not let our poor knowledge limit our not so poor intellect, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... of the first segments, which are placed outside the coil, so that the grub's hard cranium makes a rampart for the hinder extremity, which is less well defended. Here the Wasp's sting enters and here only can it enter, within a narrowly circumscribed area. One stab only of the lancet is given at this point, one only because there is no room for more; and this is enough: the larva ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... half the diameter of the zodiacal circle as drawn, and Kepler at once saw a similarity to the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter, the radius of the inscribed circle of an equilateral triangle being half that of the circumscribed circle. His natural sequence of ideas impelled him to try a square, in the hope that the circumscribed and inscribed circles might give him a similar "analogy" for the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. He next tried a ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... seclusion, as could hardly be procured elsewhere— certainly not within a reasonable distance of London. It was a lovely place by nature, with no end of capabilities for the practice of the Prince's pleasant faculty of landscape-gardening, with which he had already done wonders in the circumscribed grounds of Buckingham Palace and the larger field of Windsor. There were not only woods and valleys and charming points of view—among them a fine look at Spithead; the woods went down to the sea, and the beach belonged to the estate. Such a quiet country home ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... appearance of national and imminent danger, made unknowingly an apology for the most exceptionable part of the king's conduct. That the liberties of the people were no longer exposed to any peril from royal authority, so narrowly circumscribed, so exactly defined, so much unsupported by revenue and by military power, might be maintained upon very plausible topics: but that the danger, allowing it to have any existence, was not of that kind, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... community in which he has lived, or the nation. We are, beyond question, entering on a period where the welfare of the community takes precedence over the interests of the individual and where the liberty of the individual will be more and more circumscribed for the benefit of the community as a whole. Man's activities will hereafter be required to be not only for himself but for his fellow-men. To my mind there is nothing in the signs of the times so ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... over a continent so varied in its conditions, and where they range from the lowest levels to the limit of perpetual snow on the Andes, and from the tropics to the wintry Magellanic district; also that a majority of genera inhabit very circumscribed areas—these facts, as Dr. Wallace remarks, clearly pointing ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... period of peace; but these had at length merged into two great kingdoms, under the names of Arragon and Castile. The form of both governments was monarchical; but the genius of the former was purely republican, and the power of the sovereign so circumscribed by the Junta, the Justicia, and the Holy Brotherhood, that the vices or follies of the monarch were of less consequence, in a national point of view, in Arragon, than in any other kingdom. It was not so with Castile. From the death of Henry the Third, ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... thought, however," persisted la Peyrade, "that a newspaper, however circumscribed its action, would be a lever which depended for its force on the number ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... uneasiness of a plotter. In these days of concerted energy, of the co-operation of numerous hands and brains; in the days when the most far-reaching effect can only be accomplished through the summons of a manifold physical and mental endeavor, the existence of these loud heroes is circumscribed ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... or more sacred than to be "given" to Oliver—to belong to him as utterly as she had belonged to her father? What could make her happier than the knowledge that she must surrender her will to his from the day of her wedding until the day of her death? She embraced her circumscribed lot with a passion which glorified its limitations. The single gift which the ages permitted her was the only one she desired. Her soul craved no adventure beyond the permissible adventure of being sought in marriage. Love was all that she asked of a universe that was overflowing ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... it to you, I believe man incapable of tasting certain kinds of happiness, which are, so to speak, too complete, too immense for his circumscribed faculties; I think, too, that certain beings are too divinely endowed not to feel sometimes that they are alone here below, and that they feel at times vague regrets for their exquisite delicacy, which exposes them to so many deceptions, to so many chills ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... made a smoother and better table than the first rough one that they put together. They also made a rough partition of split cedars, to form a distinct and separate sleeping-room for the two girls; but as this division greatly circumscribed their sitting and cooking apartment, they resolved, as soon as the spring came, to cut and draw in logs for putting up a better and larger room to be used as a summer parlour. Indiana and Louis made a complete set of wooden trenchers out of butter-nut, a fine ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... from home, held back—because of certain inhibitions. Sometimes he thought he would ask for her in marriage—which was ridiculous, and showed that life in the Far East, especially in a prison colony, affects the brain. At other times, he thought how very awkward it would be, in such a little, circumscribed community as that, if he did not ask her in marriage. Suppose she babbled—as she might well do. There is no accounting for the feeble-minded. But as the days grew on, madder and wilder he became, earlier and earlier ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... himself. The college man, over whom there came a feeling of desolation on settling down in a small country village with one store, comes eventually to find contentment, sitting on the counter or on a drygoods box, swapping stories with others like himself who have leveled down to a very circumscribed life and living. Leveling down may be accomplished without effort or thought, but eternal vigilance is ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... repulse that he visited Italy. His mind being still occupied with schemes of finance, he proposed to Victor Amadeus, duke of Savoy, to establish his land-bank in that country. The duke replied that his dominions were too circumscribed for the execution of so great a project, and that he was by far too poor a potentate to be ruined. He advised him, however, to try the king of France once more; for he was sure, if he knew any thing of the French character, that the people would be delighted ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... of the poets was at this time somewhat circumscribed. Confined to the conventional life of the court and the city, they enjoyed little opportunity for the contemplation of nature. The policy of Louis XIV. proscribed national recollections, so that the social life of the day ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... the forest, as it is now circumscribed, are three considerable lakes, two in Oakhanger, of which I have nothing particular to say; and one called Bin's, or Bean's Pond, which is worthy the attention of a naturalist or a sportsman. For, being crowded at the upper end with willows, and with the carex cespitosa, it affords such a safe and ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... defeat him, we could have crossed the Chickahominy if necessary at several points that were discovered by scouting parties which, while the engagement was going on, I had sent out to look up fords. This means of getting out from the circumscribed plateau I did not wish to use, however, unless there was no alternative, for I wished to demonstrate to the Cavalry Corps the impossibility of the enemy's destroying or capturing so large a body ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 3 • P. H. Sheridan
... and below us stretches a grassy slope like a Swiss "alp." Save for the turmoil of wind behind us and our dripping garments I could believe that I had just wakened from a bad dream, so startling is the change. The explanation is, however, sufficiently simple: the area of the tourmente is circumscribed and we have got out of it, the gully merely a passage between the two mighty ramparts of rock which mark the limits of the tempest and now ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... stood Sydney-house, known by the white front, and the recess in which it is concealed; and here Jonathan Wild is said to have lived the greatest part of his time. The north side of Newgate consists of two court-yards, which are far too circumscribed for the numerous inhabitants, this prison always exhibiting a multitudinous calendar of human depravity. The men's court is only 49 feet 6 inches, by 31 feet 6, and the women's of the same length, and about half the width. The whole square is entirely surrounded by the wards, 103 ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... easy rate, if it be true that, in one year, twelve thousand men were baptized at Rome, besides a proportionable number of women and children, and that a white garment, with twenty pieces of gold, had been promised by the emperor to every convert. The powerful influence of Constantine was not circumscribed by the narrow limits of his life, or of his dominions. The education which he bestowed on his sons and nephews secured to the empire a race of princes, whose faith was still more lively and sincere, as they imbibed, in their ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... fair as I can, always reserving the privilege where things are about even, of giving my own side a shade the better of it. The main tap-root reason why women confide over-much and too much in other women is because leading more circumscribed lives than men commonly lead they are driven back upon themselves and into themselves and their sisters for interests and ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... I remind you, Caleb Fink," said the owner of the emporium, "that your sphere is circumscribed to your duties? Attend to those phials, and drain them well before you bottle the citrate of magnesia. The last was spoiled by your unpardonable carelessness. I have ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... thee with their circumscribed souls—thou art always suspected by them! Whatever is much thought about is at last ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... terms of everything that is formed or figured are the form and figure of that thing, and without which the thing would be formless and unfigured. Now numbers and proportions being applied to matter, it is circumscribed and as it were bound up by lines, and through lines by surfaces and solids; and so were settled the first types and differences of bodies, as foundations from which to create the four elements, fire, air, water, and earth. For it was impossible that, out of an unsteady and confused matter, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... of useful discovery which has been achieved on this continent since the foundation of the government. There are those who discover and invent, and who do not patent. There are discoveries which cannot be circumscribed by the filling-out of blank forms, and an official restriction on their use. This is emphatically the case with discoveries in the exact sciences, which, while they have added immeasurably to the knowledge of mankind, have also attained results ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... as good speakers of the vernacular on the Bowery as elsewhere in the greater city. Yet every inexperienced newspaper reporter thinks that it is incumbent on him to hold the Bowery up to ridicule and laughter, so he sits down, and out of his circumscribed brain, mutilates the English tongue (he can rarely coin a word), and blames the mutilation ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... any part of the year, in which case he thought that it might be leased on capital terms to one of the fellows engaged with the coal: Sir Hugo had seen enough of the place to know that it was as comfortable and picturesque a box as any man need desire, providing his desires were circumscribed within a coal area. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... subtribes moved from east to west and from west to east, from north to south and from south to north, and many were irregular in their course, but the movements, so far as they can now be discerned, were all within a circumscribed area. ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... geographical position. It is destined in the near future to merit the name of the granary of the country, being already largely and successfully devoted to agriculture. This pursuit is followed in no circumscribed manner, but in a large and liberal style, like that of our best Western farmers in the United States. Immense tracts of land are also devoted to stock-raising for the purpose of furnishing beef for shipment to England in fresh condition. This province contains nearly a million square miles, ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... of all other therapeutic agents upon the system by the Law of Action and Reaction. Applied to physics, this law reads: "Action and reaction are equal but opposite." I have adapted the Law of Action and Reaction to therapeutics in a somewhat circumscribed way as follows: "Every therapeutic agent affecting the human organism has a primary, temporary, and a secondary, permanent effect. The secondary, lasting effect is contrary ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... didn't need each other. And yet local pride is strong, and I led the hand-clapping that greeted his appearance. He was visibly embarrassed, and ultra-dignified. Education had a representative above reproach in him. Pompously, after the manner of the circumscribed instructor, he began, and for a limited time the travelling was easy. But he made the fatal error of keeping on his feet after his ideas were exhausted. He lost the trail and wandered aimlessly in the barren, ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... cabinet in July 1940 when Roosevelt was attempting to defuse a foreign policy debate that threatened to explode during the presidential campaign.[3-4] For a major cabinet officer, Knox's powers were severely circumscribed. He had little knowledge of naval affairs, and the President, himself once an Assistant Secretary of the Navy, often went over his head to deal directly with the naval bureaus on shipbuilding programs and manpower problems ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... animal over the vegetable kingdom is obvious. The cabbage, should its environment tend to become worse, must live it out, or die; the rabbit may move on in quest of a better. But, after all, the swift-footed creatures are circumscribed in their wanderings. The first large river almost inevitably bars their way, and certainly the first salt sea becomes an impassable obstacle. Better locomotion may be classed as one of the prime aims of the old natural selection; for in that primordial day the race was to the swift as surely ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... grosser labor required of them; if they are kept idle out of crop time for fear they should not be available in crop time; if their mental improvement is discouraged by the planter instinct, unchanged in nature though circumscribed in scope; if on many estates they are herded in barracks whose promiscuous life debases still lower their already low morality; if their labors are directed for absentee masters by hired overseers, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... (Professor Andover—dignified, staid and circumscribed; a misogynist if there ever was one) took huge delight in accentuating the satire of his character's advice to the bevy of school ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... "great dancers and merry-makers; the young fellows will collect in groups and dance as though in competition one with the other; one lad will dash out from the circle of his companions, rush into the middle of a circumscribed space, and scream out 'Wow, wow!' Another follows him and screams; then a third does the same. These men will dance with their knees almost rigid, jumping into the air until their excitement becomes very great and their ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... men of better culture than the ordinary rural clergy, most of whom show plainly enough by their ideas and the vigorous expressions which they rarely hesitate to use in any company that they are sons of the soil. As priests, situated as they are, this coarseness of manners and circumscribed range of ideas, so far from being a disadvantage, forms a bond of union between them and the people. A man to be deeply pitied is he who, having a really superior and cultivated mind, is charged with the cure of souls in some forlorn parish ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... the pupil is free to draw upon the entire stock of his accumulated resources, whereas in the question-and-answer method he is circumscribed. In the question-and-answer plan he is encouraged to remember; in the other he is encouraged to think. In our theories we exalt thinking to the highest pinnacle, but in our practice we repress thinking and exalt memory. We admonish our pupils to think, sometimes with a degree ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... found inadequate in its application, and unsatisfactory in its sanctions—calculated, it may be, to amuse the philosopher in his closet, and attract the admiration of young and inexperienced minds, but too weak to sustain the shock of human passions, and too circumscribed to reach the heights of human hopes and fears. The condition of women improves, undoubtedly, as a people advances towards civilization; but there is a period in the process, at which voluptuousness, more cruel than indifference, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... circumscribed the adventure so as to exclude dancing from it. Imogene was not to dance. One might go to the veglione and look on from a box; if one ventured further and went on the floor, decidedly one was not ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... that Israel Putnam was already quite a traveler; but it must be added that he had so far traveled mainly within a circumscribed area. Over and over again this faithful soldier had plodded the trails and military roads, and pushed his way through the swamps, morasses, forests, of the wilderness region of New York, which by the end of 1761 he should have known almost as well ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... themselves with the tribute. In order to raise this, they had recourse to native authority. They supported the power of the Grand Dukes and of the priesthood; and the despotism of the Golden Tribe, much as it circumscribed further improvement, strengthened the oppressed in their faith in their religion, fidelity to their rulers, and love to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... a most unusual circumstance along this coast, and not a sail nor a trail of smoke broke the gray monotony of water and sky. The limits of the horizon, too, had become much circumscribed. On land, as well as on sea, the remote distance had completely disappeared, and it seemed as though the globe had assumed a more ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... forbade: nor circumscribed alone Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined; Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne, And shut the gates of mercy ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Court, with his circumscribed range of thought and experience, in that moment saw Jean Jacques as he really was. Here was a man whose house of life was beginning to sway from an earthquake; who had been smitten in several deadly ways, and was about ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... always baffled men in the contemplation of sexual love is the seeming inadequacy of its cause, the immense discrepancy between the necessarily circumscribed region of mucous membrane which is the final goal of such love and the sea of world-embracing emotions to which it seems as the door, so that, as Remy de Gourmont has said, "the mucous membranes, by an ineffable ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... devoting the night to excursions, and to the luxury of the bath, in which it also indulges occasionally by day. This partiality for shade is doubtless ascribable to the animal's love of coolness and solitude; but it is not altogether unconnected with the position of the eye, and the circumscribed use which its peculiar mode of life permits it to make of ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... of limited intelligent beings circumscribed by a boundless space, and placed upon a speck of matter which is whirled around the sun in an endless captivity, bound by this inexorable law of gravitation, like a stone in a sling. About us in this ethereal ocean floats a host of similarly made ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... innumerable. There are some which have a general and almost constant operation upon the collective bodies of society. Of this description are the love of power or the desire of pre-eminence and dominion—the jealousy of power, or the desire of equality and safety. There are others which have a more circumscribed though an equally operative influence within their spheres. Such are the rivalships and competitions of commerce between commercial nations. And there are others, not less numerous than either of the former, which take ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... no order in my narrative: I wander; but how can one go far in the small and circumscribed region of earliest memories, bound each to each by some inwardly felt affinity, which neither time nor world wanderings can dissever? One thing suggests another and the connection must be found in the things themselves. Cranberry picking carried me forward into springtime; now ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... Saint Marks of old. In his high-school days that church had for its preacher one of a fast-vanishing race, a man mighty in exhortation, even though narrowly circumscribed in scholastic equipment. His preaching was redolent of the camp meeting, and he counted that sermon lost which did not evoke a shout or two from the ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... reign. Therefore it is that the many friends whom I have in Madrid have not been able to tempt me from this place; therefore it is that I spend my life in the sweet companionship of my faithful townspeople and my books, breathing the wholesome atmosphere of integrity, which is gradually becoming circumscribed in our Spain to the humble and Christian towns that have preserved it with the emanations of their virtues. And believe me, my dear Pepe, this peaceful isolation has greatly contributed to preserve ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... The scene, though circumscribed in limit, was picturesque in effect, and might have been happily illustrated by the pencil of the painter. The immediate area of the parade was filled with armed men, distributed into three divisions, and forming, with their respective ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... incurred a widespread unpopularity that was easily generalized into distrust of their office. So when Jefferson asserted in his Summary View, in 1774, that the King "is no more than the chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws and circumscribed with definite powers, to assist in working the great machine of government,"[35] he voiced a theory of executive power which, impudently as it flouted historical fact, had the support of the draftsmen of the first American constitutions. ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... in their secular role ruled much of the Italian peninsula for more than a thousand years until the mid 19th century, when many of the Papal States were seized by the newly united Kingdom of Italy. In 1870, the pope's holdings were further circumscribed when Rome itself was annexed. Disputes between a series of "prisoner" popes and Italy were resolved in 1929 by three Lateran Treaties, which established the independent state of Vatican City and granted Roman Catholicism special status in Italy. ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... and Two and Three who ever liveth And reigneth ever in Three and Two and One Not circumscribed and all circumscribing Three several times was chanted by each one Among those spirits, with such melody That for all merit it were ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... but a precarious and transitory existence; fisheries alone succeeded, and French commerce continued insignificant, circumscribed, and domestic, notwithstanding the increasing requirements of luxury at court. This luxury contented itself with the use of the merchandise which arrived from the Low Countries, Spain, and Italy. National industry did all in its power to surmount this ignominious condition; she specially ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... indefatigable, but also unprofitable, erudition. They have been the homes of men whose lives were one long day of toil—a continual course of labour, the sole reward of which was a secret consciousness of worth, and a fame, circumscribed it is true, yet still spreading wide amongst the elect of science in all civilised countries. Lost, not in the day-dreams of romance, but in the depths and amongst the mazes of science, it was but seldom that these men ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... building upon them as he rose from form to form, and the mature student constantly enlarging his plan throughout his life and adding to it the treasures gained by wider reading. A sure method, though necessarily circumscribed, at least in the beginning. We can imagine how men so rooted and grounded must have shaken their heads over 'learning made easy', when the press had begun to diffuse cheap dictionaries, which spared ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... to the dictum of the great Latreille, entomology was confined to a wearisome and interminable nomenclature, and if we except the Hubers, two unparalleled observers, although limited and circumscribed, the only writer who filled the interregnum between Raumur and Fabre ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... was not generally in use; but, as the working hours of the builders extended with the height of the building, the forge could not be so long wanted, and then a sad confusion often ensued upon the circumscribed floor of the mortar gallery, as the operations of Watt and his assistants trenched greatly upon those of the smiths. Under these circumstances the boundary of the smiths was much circumscribed, and they were personally annoyed, especially in blowy weather, with the dust ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whole nature of existing things which thou hast made Cannot contain Thee, the primordial nature, For Thou fillest it, and yet remainest more than it; O Logos of God, living and holding all in the hollow of Thy hand, Although as true flesh Thou art circumscribed, And dwellest, mystically, in faithful souls, Establishing for Thyself an immortal habitation, Yet accept the house which I have built for Thee, Which shows clearly the disposition of my soul. My husband who, alas! has ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... Arabella and the Elizabeth ploughed briskly northward with a moderately favourable wind for two days and nights without ever catching a glimpse of their quarry. The third dawn brought with it a haze which circumscribed their range of vision to something between two and three miles, and deepened their growing vexation and their apprehension that M. de Rivarol ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... That he observe narrowly what Pond or River soever he fisheth in, whether it be slimy, muddy, stoney or gravelly; whether of a swift or slow Motion; As likewise that he know the Nature of each Fish, and what Baits are most proper for every kind: Not to let his Knowledg be circumscribed to one or two particular Rivers, whither he is invited to Angle and take his Observations by the Vicinity of his House; but to let his Knowledge be general, and consequently his Sport will be so too. His Ignorance otherwise will oblige him to be a Spectator in another River, ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... sinister mysteries lurked behind this phantom? The illimitable, circumscribed by naught, nor tree, nor roof, nor passer-by, was around the dead man. When the unchangeable broods over us—when Heaven, the abyss, the life, grave, and eternity appear patent—then it is we feel that ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... even the drawing-room is too much a family room to allow it to be entirely emancipated from the law of use, but in houses which are not circumscribed in space, and where one or more rooms are set apart to social rather than domestic life, it is natural and proper to gather in them things which stand, primarily, for art and beauty—which satisfy the needs of the mind as distinct from those of bodily comfort. ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... poverty in which she had so long lived had narrowed her mind, and abased her heart and her sentiments. Her feelings and her thoughts were so circumscribed, that she was in truth always less even than Madame Scarron, and in everything and everywhere she found herself such. Nothing was more repelling than this meanness, joined ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... possibilities, and the domestic variety is no exception to the rule. A man who is linked to some one that toward him remains a cipher lacks surroundings inciting to psychological growth, nor is he more favorably circumstanced because all his ancestors have been similarly circumscribed. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... of inability to form an independent judgment of the truths of Scripture, operates at present in creating a prejudice against all attempts to go beyond the boundaries by which Scriptural knowledge is assumed to be circumscribed. Nevertheless, regarding it as a duty to employ the opportunities and the ability which God has given me in making such an attempt, I have endeavoured to place the doctrine of the salvation and immortality of all men on a Scriptural basis, and I have now only to ask for an unprejudiced ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... expected or looked for. I confess that, before the war, I was no believer in the great qualities of those who are called "the people." They seemed to me to be living lives either selfish, sometimes brutal, always sordid; or else mean, narrow, and circumscribed by senseless conventions. I believed that society, if it progressed at all, would be forced forward by the few, that the many had not in them the qualities necessary for advance, were incapable of the far visions which make advance desirable. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... of the caisson disease are pain, which may be relatively mild, as when confined to a circumscribed area of one extremity, or of frightful intensity, as when it appears in the ears, knees, back, or abdomen; anaesthesia and paralysis, usually of paraplegic type; bladder symptoms, assuming the form of retention ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... animate and inanimate, in the visible physical world, as circumscribed to this secluded settlement, on the morning when opened the first scene in the closing act of our story's changeful drama. But in the moral world, so far as the interests and feelings of most of our leading personages were involved, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... gold must be somewhat circumscribed, and therefore the injunction, so severe and so unalterable, which holds good at tin and silver weddings, that no presents must be given of any other metal than that designated by the day, does not ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... stated without disguise that the illness of the poet was mainly the effect of poverty. His dwelling, the Peterborough physician argued, was altogether unfit for a human habitation, being dark, damp, and ill ventilated, with, a space so circumscribed as to be worse than a prison for the two families. He insisted, therefore, that to make recovery possible a better home should be found for Clare himself, and, if possible, for his wife and child, pending the removal of his aged and ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... exist. Population would then have distributed itself over the land in the most advantageous way, and no body of people would be better off than any other by reason of the location of their abode. A long period would be needed to bring about this adjustment even within the circumscribed area where influences that make for change are very active and where obstacles are far smaller than they are in ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... horribly the evening before, he had not troubled her since; the tramp of his feet as he paced up and down the circumscribed space that was left to them of the chamber, being the only evidence she had till she dropped off to sleep that she was not without company. But with the daylight he was gone, and feeling almost panic-stricken with ghostly fears and loneliness, ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... unnoticed in the neighbourhood. Confining herself strictly within the boundaries of the Park, which neither her father nor the bride and bridegroom were likely to enter, she conceived that she might enjoy, on her husband's arm, those solitary rambles of which every day circumscribed the extent; without affording reason to the General to suppose, when, discerning every morning from his lofty terraces the mansion of his falling enemy, that, in place of the man he loathed, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... That woman has too long rested satisfied in the circumscribed limits which corrupt customs and a perverted application of the Scriptures have marked out for her, and that it is time she should move in the enlarged sphere which her great Creator has ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... that he need not have been so cautious, for after a little more of this obscure investigation he learned that he was in a very circumscribed area, surrounded on all sides by a most heterogeneous collection of tubs, full and empty, rough cases, bales, ropes, blocks, and iron tackle, such as might be used in a fishing-boat; and the next thing his hands encountered ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... narrowest and deepest gorge is hundreds of feet deep in the shale. East Row Beck drops into this canyon in the form of a waterfall at the upper end, and then almost disappears among the enormous rocks strewn along its circumscribed course. The humid, hothouse atmosphere down here encourages the growth of many of the rarer mosses, which entirely cover ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... seventeen countries As for the second point, although it is easier to realize, it is less useful, and, consequently, I am not in favor of American monarchies. Here are my reasons: The real interests of a republic are circumscribed in the sphere of its conservation, prosperity and glory. Since freedom is not imperialistic, because it is opposed to empires, no impulse induces Republicans to extend the limits of their country; injuring its own center, with only the object of giving their neighbors ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... Gibbs told the captain that he might go whaling if he felt like it, the old sailor had experienced a change of mind. He had become a most ardent student of whales. In his very circumscribed experience when a young man he had seen whales, but they had generally been a long way off; and as the old-fashioned method of rowing after them in boats had even then been abandoned in favor of killing them by means of the rifled ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... be soon of those in that advance! We are burning them to bones by our hot fire. They are almost circumscribed: if fully so The battle's ours! ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... instinct whose promptings were sure, had already found expression in more than one creation moulded into an innate chasteness of perfected parts and wedded to nature with an unerring fidelity. But the range of nature was circumscribed, save only in the one exception of a work throbbing with the sufferings and sorrows of a shadowed side of modern life. To this lyric, however, there came as basis a fundamental conception that made aim to grapple with the pro-foundest problems compassed by the mysteries of life and death, ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... could not hope now to fall upon the arch-guerilla with the full weight of first surprise, yet from the nature of the situation in which he had been engaged during the last three weeks his theatre and resources were of necessity circumscribed. The situation even yet presented possibilities, and the brigadier settled to remain longer in Luckhoff than he had originally intended, sending a patrol to reconnoitre the Orange River. This patrol met with some success. ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... subject of the superb autocracy that overshadows half of Asia and of Europe. But it may be urged, on the other side, that liberty is not the sum or the substitute of all the things men ought to live for; that to be real it must be circumscribed, and that the limits of circumscription vary; that advancing civilisation invests the State with increased rights and duties, and imposes increased burdens and constraint on the subject; that a highly instructed and intelligent community may ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... ever have thought that a soul, which seemed to be in the utmost misery, should ever find a happiness equal to this? Oh, happy poverty, happy loss, happy nothingness, which gives no less than God Himself in His own immensity, no more circumscribed to the limited manner of the creature, but always drawing it out of that, to plunge it wholly into His ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... impossible for any of their light to reach us; one consequence of which was that when standing at the break of the poop it taxed one's eyesight to the utmost to see as far as the bows of the ship; the wind was freshening, with frequent rain squalls that, combined with the intense darkness, circumscribed the visible horizon to a radius of about half a cable's length on either hand; and through this all but opaque blackness the ship was thrashing along at a speed of fully ten knots, with a continuous crying and storming of wind aloft through the rigging ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... fringed with fir to their topmost acclivities. Perhaps the Norwegian forests alone equal these in grandeur and extent. Those which cover the Swiss highlands rarely convey such vast ideas. There, the woods climb only half way up their ascents, and then are circumscribed by snows: here, no boundaries are set to their progress, and the mountains, from their bases to their summits, display rich ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... not think that you need say anything more," said the doctor, taking over the case with an easy air of command. "Your cough is quite sufficient. It is entirely bronchial by the sound. No doubt the mischief is circumscribed at present, but there is always the danger that it may spread, so you have done wisely to come to me. A little judicious treatment will soon set you right. Your waistcoat, please, but not your shirt. Puff out your chest and say ninety-nine in a ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle |
