"Pendulum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... explain it. Surely what has hastened our present paganism has been the removal from the forefront of our consciousness of Jesus the Saviour, the divine Redeemer, the absolute Meeter of an absolute need. Of such preaching of Jesus we have today very little. The pendulum has swung far to the left, to the other exclusive emphasis, too obviously influenced by the currents of the day. It was perhaps inevitable that He should for a time drop out of His former place in Christian preaching ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... For the pendulum had swung, and it was no longer the Federalist merchants of New England, but the planters of the South, and particularly of South Carolina, who were discontent with the policy of the government. New England had turned to manufactures ...
— Andrew Jackson • William Garrott Brown
... and undone. She looked down at the ash-gray, haggard face on the pillow, trying to find in those ravaged features her splendidly life-loving father. It was so quiet that she could hear the big clock in the dining-room ticking loudly, and half-consciously she began to count the swings of the pendulum: ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... wooden bars above the zinc trough, into which their blood fell drop by drop. He repeated each different movement with the regularity of clockwork, the blows from the knife-handle falling with a monotonous tick-tack as he broke the birds' skulls, and his hand working backwards and forwards like a pendulum as he took up the living pigeons on one side and laid them down dead on the other. Soon, moreover, he worked with increasing rapidity, gloating over the massacre with glistening eyes, squatting there like a huge ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... fitful breeze blew at sunset, I had a magnificent exhibition of aeronautics. The birds came upwind slowly, beating their way obliquely but steadily, long legs stretched out far behind the tail and swinging pendulum-like whenever a shift of ballast was needed. They apparently did not realize the unevenness of the wind, for when they backed air, ready to descend, a sudden gust would often undercut them and over they would go, legs, wings, and neck sprawling in mid-air. After ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... pockets, every stroke of the pick a dollar. Not that it was all like the first rich pocket we had struck. It proved a most erratic and puzzling paystreak—one day rich beyond our dreams, another too poor to pay for the panning. We swung on a pendulum of hope and despair. Perhaps this made it all the more exciting, and stimulated us unnaturally, and always we cursed that primitive method of mining that made every bucket of dirt the ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... animals. The woodchuck unrolls and creeps out of his den to see if his clover has started yet. The torpidity leaves the snakes and the turtles, and they come forth and bask in the sun. There is nothing so small, nothing so great, that it does not respond to these celestial spring days, and give the pendulum of ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... His shoulders were humped and his short legs bowed from continual riding, and his head was slung far forward on a gaunt neck; so that when he turned his head from one to another in speaking it was with a peculiar pendulum motion. The marshal had a reputation which was strong over three hundred miles and more of a mountain-desert. This was strange, for the marshal was a very talkative man, and talkative men are not popular on the desert; but it has been ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... war, he was among the bravest. Help her to make a scrap book that she may pass her knowledge on to others. While authorities in history say that a race once great, can never attain greatness again, as truly as the pendulum swings this mixed race will surely come into its own. The colored race comes from several lines of white ancestry, and as fruit is grafted to a finer degree of species, so the colored race will some day show its latent powers. The child of today is to be the mother of the ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... providence, I shall arrive at something better." It would not be long before he would be looking back to the last three years, and saying, "The life of the Custom House lies like a dream behind me," in almost the identical words that he used of Boston wharfs and the Brook Farmers. The pendulum of temperament had swung again to the other extreme, and he was now all for ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... quiet, and she was hove to, coming to and falling off her four points as regularly as a pendulum, and the helm lashed a little to the lee, the old man turned in again, and I managed to light a pipe in the lee of the deck-house, for there was nothing more to be done till the gale chose to moderate, and the ship was as easy as a baby in its cradle. Of course the ...
— Man Overboard! • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... a clock with weights and chains And pendulum swinging up and down! A dresser filled with shining delft, Speckled and white ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... matters worse, it was doubtful if she could climb back upon the limb. Muscular as she was, that was a feat that took real practice to accomplish. She swung there, like a pendulum, neither able to get ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison
... contain sets of dancing figures, which issue from the dial-plate when the hour is struck; or like those, where a ship sails across the face of the clock, and is seen tossing up and down on the waves, as often as the pendulum vibrates. ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and forth, muttering with frenzied rapidity. With one hand the Unspeakable Perk stopped him, as one might intercept the runaway pendulum of a clock, setting the other on his forehead. Then he bent and brought his goblin eyes to bear on the dark face. The features were distorted, the eyelids tremulous over suffused eyes, and the teeth set. Opening the man's loose shirt, Perkins thrust his hand within. It might have been supposed ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... was there—and with an impatient, petulant stamp of her little foot she threw the journal from her and returned to the dining-room. It was then half-past eight, and, hardly able to contain herself with excitement, Bessie sat down by the window, and almost, if not quite, counted every swing of the pendulum that pushed the hands of the clock on to the desired hour. She could not eat, and not until curiosity was gratified as to what it was that had detained Thaddeus, and what, more singular still, was bringing him home instead of sending him to business at nine ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... and I followed her, leaving Sinfi below. I re-entered the bedroom. There was the woman, her face buried in the pillow, rocking and rolling her body half round with the regularity of a pendulum. Between the peals of half-smothered hysterical laughter that came from her, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Amelia, 'bolden'd, saw and heard How bravely sang the bird, And all things in God's bounty did rejoice, She who, her Mother by, spake seldom word, Did her charm'd silence doff, And, to my happy marvel, her dear voice Went as a clock does, when the pendulum's off. Ill Monarch of man's heart the Maiden who Does not aspire to be High-Pontiff too! So she repeated soft her Poet's line, 'By grace divine, Not otherwise, O Nature, are we thine!' And I, up the bright steep she led me, trod, And the like thought pursued ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... little duties were faithfully done each day, and many of her sisters' also, for they were forgetful, and the house seemed like a clock whose pendulum was gone a-visiting. When her heart got heavy with longings for Mother or fears for Father, she went away into a certain closet, hid her face in the folds of a dear old gown, and made her little moan and prayed her little prayer quietly ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... Square was perfectly silent an hour afterward. In the surgery the lamp was turned down, the cat was winking and yawning at the fire, and the doctor sat in a chair in front of the fading glow and listened to the measured breathing of the boy behind him. It dropped at length, like a pendulum that is about to stop, into the noiseless beat of innocent sleep, and then the good man got up and looked down at the little ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... be sure, when Alb brought the motor-boat to our rescue at Urk, the way Nell's big hazel eyes lit up at sight of him, set my heart vibrating again like a pendulum, and I found myself much in the same condition I had been in at first; unable to decide which, after all, was the more indispensable of the two girls. But this return to chaos did not make for peace of mind, because, though I could not bear to lose either, I should be lucky if I contrived ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... there in No Man's Land between the trenches, the tanks looked to our Kansas eyes like worn out threshing machines and spelled more clearly than anything else in the landscape the extent of the French failure in the Champagne drive of the spring of 1917. It may be profitable to know just how far the pendulum of war had swung toward failure in France last spring, before America declared war. To begin: The French morale went bad! We heard here in America that France was bled white. The French commission told us how sorely France needed the American war declaration. But to say that ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... efforts to improve the rivers, however, met with indifferent success and many failures were recorded, the pendulum of public confidence in this aid to inland commerce swung away, and highway improvement by means of stone roads and toll road companies came into favor in the interval between the nation's two eras of river improvement and ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... for him to go on to explain the emergency she would be called on to meet. Briefly, it arose from his own error in allowing Dorothea too much liberty of judgment. While he was in favor of a reasonable freedom for all young people, it was evident that in this case the pendulum had been suffered to swing so far in one directionthat it would require no small amount of effort on his part and Diane's—chiefly on Diane's—to bring it back. In the interest of Dorothea's happiness it was essential ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... it no other name), of the slumberers—in the midst of many deep thoughts, I say, I came to the conclusion that in my present circumstances the worst thing I could do was to think! I remembered the fable of the pendulum that became so horrified at the thought of the number of ticks it had to perform in a lengthened period of time, that it stopped in despair; and I determined to ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... wavered all day long, the pendulum of her mind now swinging to one side, now to another. The result was that she felt quite worn out ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... their origin and history demonstrates their essentially vicious character. Is there any sensible reason why one's daughter should be encouraged to imitate the dances of the Apache and the negro debauchee? Perhaps, after all, the pendulum has merely swung just a little too far and is knocking against the case. The feet of modern progress cannot be hampered by too much of the dead ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... pendulum of an observatory clock, the bob-point of which touches at each vibration the mercury which transmits intelligence of its movements to distant points, Carleton now swung himself to Cincinnati. In Louisville he gave an account, from reports, of the battle of Perryville. It was written in the ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... time we were near the edge of the cliff, I will not say the abyss, whence it was intended to draw us into the war. I remember that I was obliged at that time, from 1853 to 1855 to alternate like a pendulum, so to speak, between Frankfort and Berlin because the late king, thanks to the confidence he had in me, used me as the real advocate of his independent policy whenever the insistence of the western powers that we too should ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... flower fades, or a heart ceases to beat, it is only a weight run down. The whole universe is but one immense time-piece, throbbing with innumerable wheels, heavy with weights, and wearing itself away! Desire is a restless pendulum, one end linked to the heart, and ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... development. He helped me to see myself as God sees the "unprofitable servant," and to be ashamed. He started me working for all I was worth, and made religion real fun—a new field brimming with opportunities. With me the pendulum swung very far. The evangelical to my mind had a monopoly of infallible truth. A Roman Catholic I regarded as a relic of mediaevalism; while almost a rigour went down my spine when a man told me that he was a "Unitarian Christian." Hyphenation was loyalty compared ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... to follow the ether still further into its hiding-places. Suspended before you is a pendulum, which, when drawn aside and liberated, oscillates to and fro. If, when the pendulum is passing the middle point of its excursion, I impart a shock to it tending to drive it at right angles to its present course, what occurs? The two impulses compound themselves to a vibration oblique in direction ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... tangle by showing that the action of Venus produced a swinging of this sort in the moon; for one hundred and thirty years she would be running ahead and then for one hundred and thirty years more falling back again, like a pendulum. Two motions of this sort were combined together. They were claimed to explain the whole difficulty. The moon, having followed Hansen's theory for one hundred years, would not be likely to deviate from it. Now, it was deviating. What could ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... the project which spelled his ruin was first conceived by Mr. Lawton, but I believe that he started to put it into active operation over three years ago. He went into it with his usual cold nerve, and then, when the pendulum did not swing his way he kept heaping more and more of his securities on the pyre of his ambition and pride in himself, until he was forced to obtain large loans. That he did seek and obtain such loans ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... whatever.[11] Yet when M. de Faremont, on the nineteenth of January, tried the same experiment with a stick of sealing-wax and a glass tube, well prepared by rubbing, he obtained no effect whatever. So also a pendulum of light pith, brought into close proximity to her person at various points, was neither attracted nor repulsed, in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... describes the manner in which they stayed their hand whenever it could have slain, and the silent struggle which the Moderates of Chinese politics must have waged to avert the catastrophe by merely gaining time and allowing the Desperates to dash themselves to pieces when the inevitable swing of the pendulum took place. Finally, it will not escape notice that many remarks borne out all through the narrative tend to show that British diplomacy in the Far East was at one time at ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... from its councils. To-day, for reasons none can explain, it is pro-foreign to the verge of servility. To-morrow, for reasons equally obscure, the pendulum swings back, and—the students are heaving mud at the foreigners in the streets. Vexatious, irresponsible, incoherent, and, above all, cheaply mysterious, is the rule of the land—stultified by intrigue and counter-intrigue, chequered with futile reforms ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... brown tints met in a kind of lake color, being wide open, and almost lost in their long lashes, while flood and fire, sun and frost, had beaten upon the slender encasement of her gentle life, that still kept time like some Parian clock saved from a conflagration, in whose crystal pane the golden pendulum still moves, though the hands point astray in the ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... observed that, beyond the elevation which the ports will admit of, the sights can no longer be taken by the tangent or any other top sight, as the upper sill of the port interferes. The gun must therefore be laid by the quoin and pendulum. ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... a counterpart of the one which I had just left. It was of the same size, had the same kind of furniture, and appeared to be equally well stocked with china; one prominent article it possessed, however, which the other room did not exhibit—namely, a clock, which, with its pendulum moving tick-a-tick, hung against the wall opposite to the door, the sight of which made me conclude that the sound which methought I had heard in the stillness of the night was not an imaginary one. There it hung on the wall, with its pendulum ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the news of Ellan: some of it sad enough, God knows (about the downfall of my father's financial schemes); some of it deliciously wicked, such as it would have required an angel not to rejoice in (about the bad odour in which Alma and my husband were now held, making the pendulum of popular feeling swing back in my direction); and some of it utterly heart-breaking in its assurances of the love still felt for ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... her real name—found herself alone, the tall clock in her boudoir struck ten, although the hour was nearer two. She rose at once, and taking a little key from her bosom, unlocked and opened the door of the old-fashioned timepiece. But instead of hanging weights and a swinging pendulum, the opening revealed another open door beyond, through which ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... Alma of an old glove just about ready to breathe out and flatten from the print of a recent hand. Fifteen years of debit and credit and days which swung with pendulum fidelity within the arc of routine had creased ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... let us think earnestly of the few brief chances remaining to us—they grow fewer every hour. On one side is the endless, glorious heritage of the purely aspiring, Immortal Spirit; on the other the fleeting Mirage of this our present Existence; and, midway between the two, the swinging pendulum of HUMAN WILL, which decides our fate. God does not choose for us, or compel our love—we are free to fashion out our own futures; but in making our final choice we cannot afford to waste one moment of our ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... dream, became the embodiment of every vision. I measured the periods of its recurrence by the clock that stands in the corner of our room. I counted the tickings of its silence, and I counted the tickings of its continuance. Every swing of the pendulum became a distinct period of existence. Minutes, hours, were nothing. Forty-four tickings, I said, and that bow, wow! will be heard again! Fifteen tickings, I said, and it will cease; and so I went on until the hours seemed to spread out into a boundless ocean of ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... Another movement of the pendulum, And, lo! the desert-haunting wolf shall come, And, seated on the spot, shall howl by night O'er ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... the sole aim of life, life is soon left without an aim. It becomes a habit, a sort of intoxication which we cannot do without. And how vitally important it is that we should do without it.... Happiness is an instant in the universal rhythm, one of the poles between which the pendulum of life swings: to stop the pendulum it ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... second sill he rested, then stretched his scaler diagonally forward to the left. As he put his feet upon this, he swung like a pendulum across the space. It was a severe grueling of nerves, but his judgment of placement was good. When the ladder stopped swinging he clambered up another story, as he had learned to do on truant afternoons wasted at the firemen's training school, ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... never uttered a reproach. I felt all this as well as Harry, but he, of course, undisciplined and untrained, possessed more ardor and a more decided temperament than I: his aberrations were wider; and, as the pendulum must always swing back to the right as far as it bounded to the left, he came in his repentance as much closer to his cousin than did I as his deviations had exceeded mine. No wonder Jack loved him—not with impetuosity, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... in the Personal column of one or more of the newspapers, and she felt ashamed that the thought had not struck her before. She almost, but not quite, decided to insert such an advertisement at once; but, as she pondered, she questioned the wisdom of such an action. Her mind swung, like a pendulum, from one side to the other, and at last she fell asleep, still undecided, ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... of the observation craft. But the Fokkers were satisfactorily dealt with by the de Haviland and the F.E.8. pusher scouts and the F.E. "battleplane," as the newspapers of the period delighted to call it. Next the pendulum swung towards the British, who kept the whip hand during the summer and autumn of last year. Even when the Boche again made a bid for ascendancy with the Halberstadt, the Roland, the improved L.V.G., and ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... fragrance and pleasantness out of their surroundings, dreary as these looked; even as a flower can find its proper perfume in any soil where its seed happens to fall. The great spider, hanging by his cordage over the Doctor's head, and waving slowly, like a pendulum, in a blast from the crack of the door, must have made millions and millions of precisely such vibrations as these; but the children were new, and made over every day, ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the view. But the clerical golfer, being a man of quick temper, poured forth a torrent of abuse, exclaiming, "How could I hole the ball with that blockhead over there working his umbrella as if it were the pendulum of an eight-day clock!" When this is the kind of thing that is happening, I advise the golfer to try variations in his stance for putting, effecting the least possible amount of change at a time. There is a chance that at last he will drop into his natural stance, or something ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... trapeze, a sight to have induced any passing citizen to question his sanity. With might and main I sought to check the swing of the pendulum, for if I should come within reach of the window behind I doubted not that other knives awaited me. It was no difficult feat, and I succeeded in checking my flight. Swinging there above Museum Street I could ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... the mantel, that ticked off the hours when Charlie sighed and when Charlie died, draw on toward midnight. The shadows that the fire-flame makes grow dimmer and dimmer. And thus it is that Home, boy home, passes away forever,—like the swaying of a pendulum,—like the fading of ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... door, there were four other people. Of these only one drew his attention. This was a tall, extremely emaciated peasant with a morose-looking, hairy face. He was sitting on the bed, nodding his head and swinging his right arm all the time like a pendulum. Pashka could not take his eyes off him for a long time. At first the man's regular pendulum-like movements seemed to him curious, and he thought they were done for the general amusement, but when he looked into the man's face he felt frightened, and realised that he was terribly ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the Hero's breast, Who thus with modest mien the Seer addrest: Say, friend of man, in this unbounded range, Where error vagrates and illusions change, What hopes to see his baleful blunders cease, And earth commence that promised age of peace? Like a loose pendulum his mind is hung, From wrong to wrong by ponderous passion swung, It vibrates wide, and with unceasing flight Sweeps all extremes and scorns the mean of right. Tho in the times you trace he seems to gain A steadier movement and a path more plain, And tho experience will have taught him then To mark ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... could not satisfactorily master. Many different methods were tried. Some experimenters placed the center of gravity far below the wings, in the belief that the weight would naturally seek to remain at the lowest point. It is true, that, like the pendulum, it tended to seek the lowest point; but also, like the pendulum, it tended to oscillate in a manner destructive of all stability. A more satisfactory system, especially for lateral balance, was that of arranging the wings ...
— The Early History of the Airplane • Orville Wright
... grave mystery which seemed to envelop all visible things with a sudden shadow of premonitory fear. The silence prevailing was painful—almost terrible. A great ormolu clock in the room, one of the Holy Father's "Jubilee" gifts, ticked the minutes slowly away with a jewel-studded pendulum, which in its regular movements to and fro sounded insolently obtrusive in such a stillness. Gherardi abstractedly raised his eyes to a great ivory crucifix which was displayed upon the wall against ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... a huge pendulum his body swayed, and in an agony of suspense he watched the fatal rope. With writhing body he swayed far out, and then he ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... my turn.' However, she said it half-heartedly as she stopped drawing the shining jewels lightly through her slim fingers, and began gently to swing the fleur-de-lys back and forth like a pendulum that glanced bewitchingly in ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... because they are determined by parameters of another nature than that of the magnitude to be measured. Such experiments are made possible by the phenomena of gravitation. We could employ, for instance, the pendulum by adopting, as the unit of force, the force which renders the constant of gravitation equal to unity. The unit of time thus defined would be independent of the unit of length, and would depend only on the substance which would give us the unit of mass ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... improvement made in this lighthouse since the twelfth century was a pair of forge-bellows worked by an indented pendulum and a stone weight, which had been added to the light ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... at once; she was watching the dog. But 'Dolph, it appeared, bore Mr. Hucks no malice. He walked around for thirty seconds smelling the furniture, found a rag mat, settled himself down on it, and sat wagging his tail with a motion regular almost as a pendulum's. Tilda, observing it, heaved a small sigh, and perched herself on the packing-case, where she confronted Mr. Hucks fair and square across ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... remember the old household remedies, tonics or laxatives or what not, with which the children were all dosed at intervals, whether they were ill or not. That was in the days when all drugs were good: when one "took something" internally for everything that happened to him. Now the pendulum has swung to the other side—that is all. If we can ever settle down to the rational way of regarding these things, we shall discover, what sensible medical men have always known, and what druggists as well as mere laymen can ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... the ground would seem to indicate that he is not very far removed from the true thrushes. But he has one undeniable wren-like trait, that of twitching, wagging, and thrashing his long tail about to help express his emotions. It swings like a pendulum as he rests on a branch, and thrashes about in a most ludicrous way as he is feeding on the ground upon the worms, insects, and fruit that constitute ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... murder, as in the Denshawai hangings, it is a sound rule. A man who has gone to the trouble of being born, bred, and ordinarily domiciled in, say, Kamskatcka is more likely to understand the affairs of Kamskatcka than a man whose life oscillates daily like a pendulum between Clapham and the Strand. The old natural philosophers accepted the theory of actio distans, that is to say they assumed that a body could act effectively where it was not. This was Unionism in science, and ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... to repeat every Sunday the same gospel, find also that 'dry times' alternate with times of exaltation. Even among the voters the repetition of the same political thoughts is apt to produce weariness. The main cause of the recurring swing of the electoral pendulum seems to be that opinions which have been held with enthusiasm become after a year or two stale and flat, and that the new ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... how other men had so stood, as he was standing now, face to face with the great uncertainty, the crisis, the turning-point—the pivot on which life itself revolved. The pendulum of the mighty clock swings solemnly to and fro; with every vibration a moment; with every moment each man's shrouded fates move another step in their inexorable progress. And the end? What was the goal towards which those dark relentless shapes ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... coiled away, and laid down in regular man—of—war fashion; while an ugly gruff beast of a Spanish mulatto, apparently the officer of the watch, walked the weather—side of the quarter—deck, in the true pendulum style. Look—outs were placed aft, and at the gangways and bows, who every now and then passed the word to keep a bright look—out, while the rest of the watch were stretched silent, but evidently broad awake, under the lee of the ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... also be used appropriately in each of the primary grades. Simple Aesopic fables in prose seem best for the first two grades. More complex forms might be chosen for the third grade, for example, "The Story of Alnaschar," "The Good Samaritan," "The Discontented Pendulum," "The Musical Ass," "The Swan, the Pike, and the Crab," and "The Hen with ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... by this outburst, but for that matter he seemed unaffected by anything. His dead gaze followed his employer's to-and-fro striding as a cat's follows a pendulum, but without the cat's curiosity about a pendulum. He never interrupted when Potter was speaking; and Canby noticed that whenever Potter talked at any length Tinker looked thoughtful and distant, like a mechanic so accustomed to the whirr and thunder ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... behind the cloudy shrine of the unknown. Now, there are times when this human clock well-nigh runs down; when it seems that volition is dead; when the past is all gilded, the future all shrouded, and the soul grows passive, hoping nothing, fearing nothing. Yet when the slowly swinging pendulum seems about to rest, even then an unseen hand touches the secret spring; and, as the curiously folded coil quivers on again, the resuscitated will is lifted triumphantly back to its throne. This newborn power is from God. But, ye wise ones of earth, tell us how, and by whom, is the key applied? ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... No whisper had come from outside regarding his past, and it was only when he himself talked that any light was thrown upon his former years. He seemed, in consequence, to be enviably free and ready for anything. Unfettered by tradition or association, he was a pendulum, balanced to swing potently in either direction. And what darkened Belding's horizon was the thought that Clark, at any moment, ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... pendulum of Peg's emotions swung back again. After all, what was her own happiness compared with his? And her thoughts flew to the latest and as yet unfinished novelette lying on her bed at home in which the Lady Gwendoline Maltravers had just dropped gracefully on to her aristocratic ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... she was, she rolled very heavily. It almost seemed as though she would go right over, but she never did. It was quite impossible to walk about, so I stood near the engines where it was warm, and amused myself with watching the pendulum, which was fixed opposite to me, swinging slowly backwards and forwards as the vessel rolled, and marking the angle she ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... Dingle Cottage; the flames leapt and danced in the polished grate, and the soft lamplight fell with mellowing gleam around. Click, click, went Aunt Debby's needles as she sat by the warm glow, knitting industriously; tick, tick, said the little clock, its pendulum swinging steadily to and fro. The cat purred in sleepy content on the rug; and Aunt Judith's gentle voice fell soothingly on the ear as she read some book aloud from her low seat ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... exclaimed No. 1, 'and you will see what a fool I have made of myself. You must know that it is impossible to follow the pendulum of the clock with the hand, and to repeat "Here she goes—there see goes," just as it swings to and fro, that is when people are talking all round you, as it puts you out. One day I was with a set of jolly fellows in a dining-room, with a clock just like this ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... grim red-brick quadrangle, guarded by stone lions disrespectfully throwing somersaults over the escutcheons of the noble family. Then, our services accepted and we insinuated with a candle into the stable-turret, we should find it to be a mere question of pendulum, but one that would hold us until dark. Then, should we fall to work, with a general impression of Ghosts being about, and of pictures indoors that of a certainty came out of their frames and 'walked,' if the family would only own it. Then, should we work and work, until ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... clock, which was one of those grotesque objects that were produced so plentifully under the Empire. A girl in gilt bronze was holding a cup and ball, and the ball formed the pendulum. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... ever when half asleep heard the same words repeated over and over again? In Francine's brain the words "too late! too late!" were repeated with the regularity of a pendulum. The old woman had struck a cruel blow. The girl had believed for a few moments that she was dishonored and this thought now haunted her vaguely. She placed her feet on the floor, then glided toward the ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... Babylonish civilization nor of the directions in which it spread; we can grasp both the strong differences and the close bonds of connection between Assyria and Chaldaea, and understand the swing of the pendulum that in the course of two thousand years shifted the political centre of the country backwards and forwards from Babylon to Nineveh, while from the mountains of Armenia to the Persian Gulf, beliefs, manners, arts, spoken dialects, and written characters, preserved so many striking ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... up to the top flat, where the chimes were played, I had to pass through the vault in which the great pendulum was slowly swinging in its ghostly-like tick-tack, tick-tack; while the great ancient clock was keeping time with its sudden and startling movement. The whole scene was almost as uncanny as the witches' cell underneath. ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... that he never worried; that he never took his business to bed with him. When his head touched the pillow there was oblivion until he awoke refreshed to greet the problems left over from yesterday. Such a mind must be a reliably co-ordinated piece of machinery, with a pendulum in place of a heart. It is overawing to average mortals who have not the temerity to say "Nonsense!" to great egos. Yet the best adjusted clocks may have a lapse in a powerful magnetic storm, and in an earthquake ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... will go upon this; and is resolved after all to take a pendulum, and measure the true distance betwixt the ringing of the bell, and the rap at the door;—and, after finding it to be no more than two minutes, thirteen seconds, and three-fifths,—should take upon him to insult over me for such a breach in the unity, or rather ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... progressing, for these two constitute the gospel reign of Christ. He is "the resurrection and life of the world," as well as "judge of quick and dead." Both are to be accomplished in the last day, and that day is now progressing. A general resurrection, at the last vibrating pendulum of time, cannot I humbly conceive, be substantiated by the oracles of truth, any more than a general judgment. I am rather inclined to think that the judgment of the world by Jesus Christ expresses the whole, including the resurrection and all; even as the high priest, clothed with the breastplate ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... rhyming in prose, where one clause answers to another in measure and quantity, like the tagging of syllables at the end of a verse; the close of the period follows as mechanically as the oscillation of a pendulum, the sense is balanced with the sound; each sentence, revolving round its centre of gravity, is contained with itself like a couplet, and each paragraph forms itself into a stanza. Dr. Johnson is also a complete balance-master in the topics of morality. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... hear now the shouts of the crowd outside. And turning as I lay there, through the casement I could see the blackened, still smoking ruins of Maida's tower; the broken iron terrace; the spider bridge melted away, hanging loose and dangling like an aimless pendulum. ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... their owner's nose and, as they had a way of doing when the old man was abstracted, swung like a pendulum from his fingers. ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... and west span of the crystal roof. Mr Dent's clock might have been set to the precise time of the Greek Slave, and it would yet have been nearly two seconds wrong by the time of the Liverpool Model. The pendulum swinging so steadily within its case had a longer and more stately stride than most of its congeners. It took a second and a half of time to complete its step from side to side. But notwithstanding this, if a string had ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... regions, where you landed, yes, they are, but we rule the northern sphere of action. Our forces actually form a soft equilibrium that keeps fate's pendulum from straying from its neutral position, so that a military action previously would not have been predictable, with either side being capable of winning. Under such conditions war is avoided, but now you have arrived. The Zards, ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... Catholic party generally. Southampton was arrested, and again there followed the further encouragement of the Protestant camp by the rising fortunes of the Huguenots and the temporary reverses to French Catholicism; so the pendulum swung this way and that. Elizabeth's policy changed almost from day to day. She was tormented with temporal fears of a continental crusade against her, and by the spiritual terrors of the Pope's ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... series of accidents which came near resulting fatally to the whole party. Contrary to my strict injunctions, the men hauling the rope gave a sudden and violent pull, wrenching the pole from my grasp, and communicating to the plank a motion like that of a pendulum, which sent me flying out into space, with the immediate prospect of being dashed by the retrograde swing against the solid wall of rock. Happily, I preserved my presence of mind, and grasped instantly the only chance of escape. Tilting myself back as far as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please,—you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets,—most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... three-legged stool, folded his arms, with his elbows on his knees, drew a long breath, and blinked at the clay floor for a while; then he twisted the stool round on one leg, until he faced the old-fashioned spired wooden clock (the brass disc of the pendulum moving ghost-like through a scarred and scratched marine scene—Margate in England—on the glass that covered the lower half) that stood alone on the slab shelf over the fireplace. The hands indicated half-past two, and Johnny, who ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... its mercury pendulum, ticked upon the wall; the noise of the heavy rumbling in the streets was softened into a low monotone, and now and then a bit of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... it ever departs from the sun on either side varies approximately from sixteen to twenty-eight degrees. Its motion resembles a pendulum, swinging from one side of the sun ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... could not bear to hear the clock cuckoo and fixed the pendulum so that it would not work, saying that she always had the time in her head. And it was indeed wonderful how true this was—at any minute she could tell what time it was, although it was of very little consequence ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... the aspect of Venus due to her varying positions in her orbit are not confined to those which cause her to oscillate with a pendulum movement eastward and westward from the sun. The discovery that she undergoes phases exactly like those of the moon, followed that of the existence of Jupiter's satellites as the second great result achieved by the use of the telescope in the ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... imbecile intentness to the dead silence around me. Is this death? was my indistinct wondering thought. Then I felt as if mighty wings were fanning me. "Kind wings, caressing, kind wings!" were the recurring words in my brain, like the regular movements of a pendulum, and interiorily under an unreasoning impulse, I laughed at these words. Then I experienced a new sensation: I rather knew than felt that I was lifted from the floor, and fell down and down some unknown precipice, amongst the hollow rollings ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... certain that the poor painter grew weaker and weaker from day to day, from hour to hour. And notwithstanding Doctor Splendiano Accoramboni's assurance that, after the vital process had reached a state of perfect equilibrium, he would give it a new start like the pendulum of a clock, they were all very doubtful as to Salvator's recovery, and thought that the Doctor had perhaps already given the pendulum such a violent start that the mechanism was ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Barbicane, "but not the whole of it. By a certain movement of liberation, a sort of balancing on its centre, the moon presents more than the half of her disc to the earth. She is like a pendulum, the centre of gravity of which is towards the terrestrial globe, and which oscillates regularly. Whence comes that oscillation? Because her movement of rotation on her axis is animated with uniform velocity, whilst her movement of translation, following an elliptical orb round ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... ridiculous. Whenever the next deal furnishes the player who offers the gambit sufficient strength to capture the rubber, he gains, when his loss has been under 600, but at best it is not more than an even chance that he will win, and when the pendulum swings in the adverse direction, the only result of the performance with the flag is to increase the size of the adversaries' rubber by the amount of the sacrifice. This continued indefinitely is bound to ...
— Auction of To-day • Milton C. Work
... reached the curving side of the landing lock. But the platform at the manhole entrance jutted diagonally below him, fifteen feet down and twelve along the bellying curve. Darl measured the angle with a glance as he hung outstretched, then his body became a human pendulum over the sheer void. Back and forth, back and forth he swung, then, suddenly, his grasp loosened and a white arc flashed ...
— The Great Dome on Mercury • Arthur Leo Zagat
... disagreeable feeling evidently forced her to repeat this movement with everyone. At first it became half a play, but soon a disturbing habit and finally an intolerable impulse. Whenever she talked with anyone, she lost control of her eyes and was obliged to enter into a kind of pendulum movement from eye to eye. The situation became so unendurable that the thought of suicide began to occur to her. I hypnotized her four times, suggesting to her complete indifference as to the face of those with whom she spoke and ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... the blows that rained upon him, now from this side, now from that, White Fang swung back and forth like an erratic and jerky pendulum. Varying were the emotions that surged through him. At first, he had known surprise. Then came a momentary fear, when he yelped several times to the impact of the hand. But this was quickly followed by anger. His free nature asserted ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... 1) the nature and habits of oviparous animals, the possibility of aerial flight, certain abnormalities of vision, the secular process of imbalsamation: 2) the principle of the pendulum, exemplified in bob, wheelgear and regulator, the translation in terms of human or social regulation of the various positions of clockwise moveable indicators on an unmoving dial, the exactitude of the recurrence per hour of an instant in ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... becomes darker. A very pretty and uncommon object to copy is that of an old-fashioned clock, a veritable "my grandfather's clock," an upright tall eight-day clock that has a long chain and a heavy pendulum concealed within its tall case, and that shows a big square face with large figures printed on it. I will give you a few details about my cork clock, and I think you will make one and set it upon a bracket to be admired by all beholders. This miniature clock stands 7-1/2 inches high. Its two cases ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... been compared with that of a mountain—a very indefinite method indeed. A better method was that of Astronomer Airy and Mr. Dunkin, who went down into the Harton coal pit 1,260 feet to see how much difference that depth would make in the movements of a pendulum. It gained 2-1/4 seconds in 24 hours, and the weight of the earth was inferred to be over 6-1/2 times as great as that of water; but it is manifest that such a method could yield nothing much more accurate than the mountain experiment which indicated a weight 4-3/4 times that of water. The ball ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... any man believe that in one second of time, in one beat of the pendulum of a clock, a ray of light travels over 192,000 miles, and would therefore perform the tour of the world in about the same time that it requires to wink with our eyelids, and in much less than a swift runner occupies in taking a single stride? What mortal can be made ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... many who had a military air within their civil garb. For the pendulum of war had swung right across from Cadiz to Dantzig, and swept northwards in its wake the merchants of death, the men who live by feeding soldiers and ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... between Mr. Caldwell and me; it was the primal struggle between the leader and the follower; between the representative and the represented. And it is a never-ending conflict. When the leader gains a small advantage the pendulum of civilization swings toward aristocracy; and when the follower, beginning to think, beginning to struggle, gains a small advantage, then the ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... at best but a succession of moods that, like a pendulum, ever vibrate between mirth and sadness. Circumstances will almost invariably force the vibrations to greater extremes, but just as surely will its opposite mood return. Though clouds darken to-day, the sun will shine to-morrow; ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... into the open door of the house, and showed the tinman a large wooden clock put up without a case between two windows, the pendulum and the weights being "exposed and bare." This clock he had bought for ten dollars of a travelling Yankee, who had set out to supply the country with machines. It had only kept tolerable time for about two months, ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... next instant a chill ran down his back, for a raven perched on the black doll and pecked so fiercely at it with its hard beak, that bird and image swayed to and fro like a pendulum. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was not a clever woman, but this move on her part, the result not of a virtuous belief in virtue or of a sudden swing of her mental pendulum towards the effective, such as some women have—was amazing in its effect, because it was ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... too swollen to be healthy: owing to the ruling out of Home Rule, it included a number of men only partial adherents of the full Liberal programme; and a diminution of its proportions owing to the traditional swing of the pendulum was certain. But in January 1910 the losses were more than even sanguine Tory prophets predicted. Tories came back equal in strength to the Liberals: Labour was only forty, so that the Irish party held the balance in ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... troubled ourselves for Padus, the Po, "a river broader and more rapid than the Rhone," and the times when Hannibal led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum ferry-boat was swinging back and forward every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... first and eagerly to have taken possession of it. The two Consuls began their reign by employing a vast amount of ceremony and form in order to accomplish a few quite arbitrary acts. The majority of these were directed against the Spaniards, who, suffering now from the swing of the pendulum of fate, were as much oppressed as they had formerly oppressed. Indeed, the situation of those Spaniards who still remained in Paraguay was now pitiable in the extreme. Persecuted on all sides by the high officials, they could expect, in the face ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... fate, with anguish fraught, Should be to wet the dusty soil With the hot tears and sweat of toil,— To struggle with imperious thought, Until the overburdened brain, Weary with labor, faint with pain, Like a jarred pendulum, retain Only its motion, not its power,— Remember, in that perilous hour, When most afflicted and oppressed, From labor there ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... should be beautiful; and it is acknowledged to be so in the examples given by the bending osier and the waving grain,—also by the few who have seen full drawings of all the forms. And the mathematician finds in it a new beauty, from its marvellous correspondence with the motions of a pendulum,—the algebraic expression of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... a little, both elbows resting upon her slim knees, both feet swinging pendulum-like high above the floor, watching with a small frown of curiosity growing upon her forehead, while he stooped without a word of explanation and dragged a bulky package from the table and placed it beside her. Then she sighed aloud, an audible sigh ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... lurching of the stage like an inverted pendulum; darkness continually thickened before his vision; waves of sickness swept up to his head. He must keep the horses on the road, forward ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... among a group of young men in a distant doorway, one with a face so individual and of an expression so extraordinary that all interest in the people about her had stopped as a clock stops when the pendulum is held back. She could see nothing else, think of nothing else. Not that it was so very handsome—though no other had ever approached it in its power over her imagination—but because of its expression of haunting melancholy,—a melancholy so settled and so evidently the result of long-continued ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... a system of levers to do our walking with, and they act precisely as do all levers. One leg is a lever to pry the body over the other leg, and the latter becomes a pendulum and swings back by force of gravity. When you walk three miles and feel as if you could walk ten, you are walking that way. When you are tired out, you are taking irregular steps ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... non-existent. Life and death, corruption and integration, are parts of one undulatory process. Cut the wave where you will its curve claims to be finished in both directions and suggests a before as well as an after. If, in the very nature of things, the pendulum sways between confusion and order, chaos and cosmos, each extreme intrinsically demands the other, not only as its consequent, but as its antecedent; and the first chaos, no less than any succeeding one, will seem the ruin of a previous cosmos. Therefore we are driven back upon a process ab ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... into the receiver, though we had a piece of very fine wire-gauze put at the bottom of the pipe, between the receiver and the pipe through which we were forcing the current. In one of these experiments I was watching the flame in the tube, my son was taking the vibrations of the pendulum of the clock, and Mr. Wood was attending to give me the column of water as I called for it, to keep the current up to a certain point. As I saw the flame descending in the tube I called for more water, and Wood unfortunately turned the cock the wrong way, the current ceased, the ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... face, the hands at twelve, occupied the topmost third of the case, which was of thick plate-glass bound and backed with gilt metal. There was no apparent means of opening the case. From what one could see, however, the workmanship was perfect, exquisite. The compensating pendulum alone was ornamented—with a conventional sun in diamonds, and one could imagine the effect when it swung in brilliant light. At present it was at rest, held up to the right wall of the case by a loop of fine silk passed ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... "it swings back and forth with a certain degree of rapidity. Now we want to know what this rapidity depends upon, and then we could make a pendulum so that it would oscillate faster or slower, ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... man is the something more than middle-aged Register of Deeds, a rusty, sallow, smoke-dried looking personage, who belongs to this earth as exclusively as the other belongs to the firmament. His movements are as mechanical as those of a pendulum,—to the office, where he changes his coat and plunges into messuages and building-lots; then, after changing his coat again, back to our table, and so, day by day, the dust of years gradually gathering ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sitting down alone in the old familiar house which had ceased to be his, taking a calm if somewhat dismal survey of affairs. The pendulum of the clock bumped every now and then against one side of the case in which it swung, as the muffled drum to his worldly march. Looking out of the window he could perceive that a paralysis had come over Creedle's occupation of manuring the garden, owing, obviously, to a conviction ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... undue dignity of a throne, and not rested upon. It seems to produce an inability for any sort of recreation, and a scorn of the necessity or the pleasure of being amused. Every one will admit that recreation is one swing of life's pendulum; and in proportion to the swing in that direction will be the strength of the swing in the other direction, and ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... staff inadequately informed upon the situation, were cancelled during the night and before the Battalion had acted on them. The fact is, I expressly remained in the forward position until at least rations had been delivered to the men, and by the time that had been done the staff pendulum had swung again. The salient of Baquerolle Farm, which it had cost valuable lives ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... hearing! Peggy held her head high for the rest of that evening, and felt as if nothing would have power to depress her for the future. But, alas, when the pendulum is at its highest it begins to swing downwards. Peggy's heart sank as she watched Robert drive away from the door the next morning, and it went on sinking more and more during the next twenty-four hours, as she realised the responsibility which weighed upon her shoulders. ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... good sport, and he wanted Becky to be happy. But it was not easy to sit there and see those two—with the pendulum swinging between them of joy and dreams, and the knowledge of a ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... is continued without interruption for hours and hours. This may sound as if the spectacle was monotonous; but such is not the case. On the contrary, there is a certain fascination in the regular, rhythmical movement from side to side—like the double pendulum of some gigantic, unseen clock. The shaman specially captivates the attention of the observer, being the very incarnation of enthusiasm. He swings his rattle with energy and conviction, as if bent on rousing the gods out of their indifference, while he stamps his right foot on the ground to add ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... not remarkably original in invention. Indeed some of his plagiarisms are scarcely paralleled for their audacity in all literary history: For instance, in his tale of "The Pit and the Pendulum," the complicate machinery upon which the interest depends is borrowed from a story entitled "Vivenzio, or Italian Vengeance," by the author of "The First and Last Dinner," in "Blackwood's Magazine." And I remember having been shown by Mr. Longfellow, several years ago, a series ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... something under twenty-five shillings; but to a man with just one penny in his pocket this left no choice but between recklessness and panic, and the Commandant's spirits swung from one to the other like a pendulum. Panic asserted itself in the small hours, when he awoke in his bed and wondered what would happen when pay-day came, should it bring no pay with it ... and to a man lying sleepless in the small hours, the worst seems not only possible but likely. Then, as daylight ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... plaster; I don't like the wood fires, which demand as many petits soins as the women, and which warm no part of one but one's eyelids, I don't like the language, with its strong phrases about nothing, and vibrating like a pendulum between 'rapture' and 'desolation;' I don't like the accent, which one cannot get, without speaking through one's nose; I don't like the eternal fuss and jabber about books without nature, and revolutions without fruit; I have no sympathy with tales that ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... return, to lift the curtain, come what might. He struck a match, and looked at the dial. It was a quarter past ten o'clock. Then, to occupy his mind, he began to try and count the three hundred seconds, fancying that he could see a pendulum swinging before his eyes in the dark. At twenty minutes past ten he would ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... quarter to, now!" she exclaimed, pointing to a clock with weights at the end of brass chains and a long pendulum. "And didn't you ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... astonish the imagination by the variety of their notes and their aptness; where one bird serves for a clock, and another makes a sound like a postilion cracking of a whip, and a third imitates a knife-grinder, and a fourth the motion of a pendulum; where one laughs when the sun rises, and another cries when the sun sets! Oh, strange, illogical country, land of paradoxes and anomalies, if ever there was one on earth—the learned botanist Grimard was right ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... respecting the experiment of Foucault, by which the diurnal rotation of the earth is said to be rendered visible to the eye. Foucault is a young Parisian, who, whilst engaged in some investigations with a pendulum in his mother's cellar, made this discovery, as he claims it to be. We saw the experiment repeated here on the same scale as it has recently been shown at the Pantheon at Paris. A brass sphere, weighing about five pounds, was suspended from the lofty ceiling ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... as the swing of the pendulum: if it goes beyond the centre of gravity on one side, it must go as far beyond on the other. It is only after a time that it finds the true point of rest and ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... realizing that this was no jaunt of ten or twenty miles, held to his steady, machine-like lope that measured the distance of each swing with the accurate regularity of a pendulum; while the lean, loose body of his rider, resting easily in the saddle, yielded without resistance to the horse's every movement so that those laboring muscles, working so smoothly under the yellow hide, ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... heard a sound like that of a swinging pendulum. I raised my head and listened attentively. There was no clock either in my room or in the neighboring ones—but I could still hear the sound. At the same moment my lamp began to flicker. The oil was apparently exhausted. I was ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... his own pirns. There was a plate-rack on one wall, and near the chimney-piece hung the wag-at-the-wall clock, the timepiece that was commonest in Thrums at that time, and that got this name because its exposed pendulum swung along the wall. The two windows in the room faced each other on opposite walls, and were so small that even a child might have stuck in trying to crawl through them. They opened on hinges, like a door. ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... has gone altogether too far. The pendulum has swung in that direction out of all measure. We are married too much. And as a natural consequence we are divorced too much. The whole case is in a nutshell: if there were no marriages, there would be no divorces, and that great abuse would ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... or never" with Bobby. He meant to do something; and after he had made up his mind how and where it was to be done, it was no use to stand thinking about it, like the pendulum of the "old clock which had stood for fifty years in a farmer's kitchen, without giving its owner any ...
— Now or Never - The Adventures of Bobby Bright • Oliver Optic
... largely in the runner's favor. The stages of the game must be taken into consideration, and what may be a perfectly commendable play in one situation may be altogether reckless and foolhardy in another. Therefore, the most important faculty of all, the pendulum which regulates, and the rudder which guides, is judgment. An illustration may make my meaning clear. In the ninth inning, with a runner on first base and the score a tie, it may be a good play for the runner to attempt to steal second, because ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... under the sun, says Ecclesiastes. Wretched man is never to know the entire truth but will be always at daggers drawn with his destiny. After classic Paganism came romantic Christianity; after the romantic will the pendulum swing back—or—alas! is there coming another horde of atheists with a ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... MORT-MAL, old score, gangrene MOSCADINO, confection flavoured with musk MOTHER, Hysterica passio MOTION, proposal, request; puppet, puppet-show; "one of the small figures on the face of a large clock which was moved by the vibration of the pendulum" (Whalley) MOTION, suggest, propose MOTLEY, parti-coloured dress of a fool; hence used to signify pertaining to, or like, a fool MOTTE, motto MOURNIVAL, set of four aces or court cards in a hand; a quartette MOW, setord hay or sheaves of grain MUCH! expressive of irony and incredulity MUCKINDER, ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... erect position, there is a constant slight oscillation of the body backward and forward, like the movement of a pendulum; while, in the stooping posture, the muscles on the posterior side of the spinal column are kept in a state of continued tension and contraction, to prevent the body from falling forward. This enfeebles the muscles of the back, ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... went. Dudley whistled a tune, and swung his foot like a pendulum, as he followed her with ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... sifted cinders on the kitchen fire, and was gone with the maids to exchange just a few constitutional words with the gardener; and the whole house was drowsy with that by-time when light and shadow seem to mix together, and far-away sounds take a faint to and fro, as if they were the pendulum ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the quiver of her lips? Perhaps so. Still, no one would have known it as he stood there, swinging his hunting-crop like a pendulum from ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. But when you are as old as I am; when you have a thousand times wearied of heaven, like myself and the Commander, and ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... so, an it please your pagehood," said the leech. "Bonthron's intellect, such as it is, hath a solid character: it Will but vacillate to and fro like a pendulum which hath been put in motion, and then will rest in its proper point of gravity. Our memory is, of all our powers of mind, that which is peculiarly liable to be suspended. Deep intoxication or sound sleep ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott |
