"Tenacity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his preceptor was to bring about his religious conversion. Gibbon showed an honourable tenacity to his new faith, and a whole year after he had been exposed to the Protestant dialectics of Pavillard he still, as the latter observed with much regret, continued to abstain from meat on Fridays. There is something slightly incongruous in the ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... he was that exception—what then? An idea which had sprung up in Father Esteban's fancy that morning now took possession of it with the tenacity of a growth on fertile virgin soil. The good Father had been devoted to the conversion of the heathen with the fervor of a one-ideaed man. But his successes had been among the Indians—a guileless, ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... good white for ceilings. This size has no smell, while animal size, which putrefies so readily, always exhales a very disagreeable odour. That of potatoes, as it is very little subject to putrefaction, appears, from experience, to be more durable in tenacity and whiteness; and, for white-washing, should be preferred to animal size, the decomposition of which is always ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... interesting of the phenomena to be noted by the student of historical houses is the tenacity of tradition. People may be told again and again that a story attributed to a certain site has been proven untrue, but they still look with veneration on a place which has been hallowed many years, and refuse to give up any alluring name by which they have known it. A notable example ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... long you'll be away, Jack?" demanded the other casually as if it was really a matter of but little moment to him what the answer might be, since he could be depended on to hold to their booty with the tenacity of a leech. ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... powerful frame had made him an impressive figure among a race of men as stalwart as the Boers. But he was now an old man: the powerful body had become shapeless and unwieldy; he had given up walking, and only left his stoep to drag himself clumsily into his carriage, and although he retained all his old tenacity of purpose, his mind had lost much of its former alertness. It needed all Mr. Smuts' mental resources—all that the young Afrikander had so recently learnt at Cambridge and the Temple—to enable the old President to maintain, even by the aid of his State-Attorney's ingenious paper pleadings, a decent ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... back to tell the story of John's martyrdom. It sets vividly forth the inner discord and misery of half-and-half convictions. Herodias was strong enough to get John put in prison, and apparently she tried with all the tenacity of a malignant woman to have him assassinated, by contrived accident or open sentence; but that she ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... trying situation could not last long. The part of the sail on which Reuben had hung, with what might be truly termed his death-clutch, was wanted to be rolled in with the furl, and, by the tenacity of his ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... in his, and clung to him with the fond tenacity of a woman who loves heart and soul, poor thing, to ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... gates by main force, which was relaxed by the war under Madison and the fusion of parties under Monroe, but which swelled again into a furious torrent as the later parties took form. John Quincy Adams adhered, with the tough tenacity of his father's son, to the best principles of all his predecessors. He followed Washington, and observed the spirit of the Constitution in refusing to remove for any reason but official misconduct or incapacity. But he knew well what ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... flickered on to kinky fair hair that looked almost absurdly golden contrasted with the brown tan of the face beneath it. It was a nice face, Magda decided, with a dogged, squarish jaw that appealed to a certain tenacity of spirit which was one of her own unchildish characteristics, and the keen dark-grey eyes she encountered were so unlike the cold light-grey of her father's that it seemed ridiculous the English language could only supply the one word "grey" to describe things that ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... amelioration in the depressed condition of race or class has yet been brought about in disconnection with the powerful agency of such race or class. Human nature forbids it. The selfish tenacity of advantage, resting on what is misnamed 'vested rights,' but having its foundation in vested wrongs, yields only on compulsion. It is only when the depressed race or class, acting in somewhat intelligent ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... Fortunately the anger and terror were assuaged. Observers soon discovered the mutants were sterile, incapable of reproduction. More than that: though the new clumps spread and flourished and grew rapidly, they lacked the tenacity and stamina of the parent. Eventually they withered and dwindled and were in the end no ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... move with an eye on weather and a dozen other factors, he developed in uncanny foresight. Yet he had to improvise at a moment's notice. With life a continuous high-wire act, he trained every surviving fiber to precision, dexterity, and tenacity. Finally, he avoided help. Not pride, self-preservation; the compulsively helpful have rarely the wit to ask before rushing in to knock you on your face, so he learned to bide his time till the horizon was clear ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... countenance! What a noble head!" Yet an experienced physiognomist might have noted that the same lineaments which bespoke a virtue bespoke also its neighbouring vice; that with so much will there went stubborn obstinacy; that with that power of grasp there would be the tenacity in adherence which narrows, in astringing, the intellect; that a prejudice once conceived, a passion once cherished, would resist all rational argument for relinquishment. When men of this mould do relinquish prejudice ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... orthodox to the last degree, sectarianism is rigid, and Joshua's power over the sun remains in some lonely valleys undiscounted.[1404] These are all the marks of isolation and retardation which appear in similar environments elsewhere. Especially religious dogmas tend to show in mountains a tenacity of life impossible in the plains. The Kafirs, inhabiting the high Hindu Kush Mountains of Badakshan, and apparently of Pelasgic, early Greek, or Persian origin, have a religion blended of paganism, Zoroastrianism and Brahmanism.[1405] One intruding faith ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... of my brother who was on the other side in that ancient church fracas? Bless you, I understand. What a good hater your sister is! Such a tenacity in holding bitterness from one generation to another commands admiration of a certain sort. As for Jim, he's a nice little chap, and he is coming to live with me until ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... cannot beat them. It will not be easy. It will be a long job. It will be a terrible war. But in the end we shall march through terror to triumph. We shall need all our qualities, every quality that Britain and its people possess. Prudence in council, daring in action, tenacity in purpose, courage in defeat, moderation in victory, in all things ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... undertaking and try to work good for your countrymen in another way. The undertaking needs another man than you for its execution, because to carry it out will not only require money and care, but, in our country, self-denial, tenacity and faith are also needed. The land is not ready for it; it has been ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... houses, the wretched moss-grown roofs, the shrill concerts of the cocks, cats, and children of the little French provincial town. She dreamt also of the lovely meadows, the scented hay, the little running streams, and the floral researches she had been fond of. This tenacity of her instincts was a safeguard she may have sometimes rebelled against as a chain; it was with her an essential feature, and, despite all vagaries, gave a great unity to ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... swung me into the centre of a tree which projected out from the cliff almost horizontally. Through this tree I went crashing with fearful violence, until I was arrested by my chest striking against a stout branch. This I clutched with the tenacity of despair, and wriggling myself, as it were, along it, wound my arms and legs round it, and held on for some time with the utmost fervour ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... nature of the soil was fully developed by this day's rain. Being in dry weather a loose light sand without any apparent consistency, it was now discovered to have a small portion of loam mixed with it, which, without having the tenacity of clay, is sufficient to render it slimy and boggy: I am quite satisfied that two days' rain will at any time render this country impassable. The mortification and distress of mind I felt at being obliged to take a retrograde direction was heightened by seeing the horses struggling ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... the fields of Kourianof, Russia, a combustible yellowish substance, covering, at least two inches thick, an area of 600 or 700 square feet. It was resinous and yellowish: so one inclines to the conventional explanation that it was pollen from pine trees—but, when torn, it had the tenacity of cotton. When placed in water, it had the consistency of resin. "This resin had the color of amber, was elastic, like India rubber, and smelled like prepared ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... amongst peasants. They are richly endowed with common sense and kindness of heart; their brains can compete favourably with those of the folk of any other country. Their hard struggle with a rebellious soil has given them a quiet determination and tenacity of purpose which are the root of Alpine enterprise and resourcefulness. They possess character and independence in a high degree—mental reflexes of the peaks of freedom, ever before their eyes. But they, children of ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... was silent. It occurred to her to laugh at the absurdity of these quick suspicions, but they had already seized upon her with the curious tenacity of truth; already she had accepted the fact that what yesterday would have been the unbelievable maximum of humiliation and hurt was true to-day, and less than the ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... The Globe was edited by George Brown, a Scotsman by birth, who came with his father in his youth to the western province and entered into journalism, in which he attained eventually signal success by his great intellectual force and tenacity of purpose. His support of the LaFontaine-Baldwin ministry gradually dropped from a moderate enthusiasm to a positive coolness, from its failure to carry out the principles urged by The Globe—especially ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... more, he had determined that when he came to be a man, and had made his way in the world, he should own the house called Gad's Hill Place, with the old associations of its site, and its pleasant outlook over Rochester and over the low-lying levels by the Thames. Was that a child's dream? The man's tenacity and steadfast strength of purpose turned it into fact. The house became the home of his later life. It was ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... it, you will overcome obstacles and win your desires. To force a breach in a wall, you will succeed in the attainment of your wishes by sheer tenacity ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... audacity, his self-reliance, his resource, and some signs of that boundless but prudent ambition which marked his career. He had shown that freedom of tongue, that restless and high-reaching inventiveness, and that tenacity of opinion, which made him a difficult person for others to work with. Like so many of the English captains, he hated Ormond, and saw in his feud with the Desmonds the real cause of the hopeless disorder ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... that manner. Utterly blank and wearisome, and all but hopeless. I have often wondered at the strange tenacity with which we clung to life in conditions that made of it a burden almost insupportable; and with what chance ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... generally remarkable for the tenacity of their ideas and for fidelity to their sentiments. Inconstancy of heart is the special attribute of man; but he deems it his privilege as well, and when woman disputes the palm with him on this ground, he cries aloud as if ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... nor penetrative into the dark mystery of soul, nor is he the poet's friend. Nor is he a friend who assumes that the poet, because a poet, moves in eccentric paths rather than in concentric circles. Hold with all tenacity to the poet's sanity. He is superior, and lives where the eagles fly and stars run their far and splendid courses; but he is still man, though man grown tall and sublime. To the truth of this view of the great poet bear witness Aeschylus, and Dante, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... His bulldog tenacity, his orderly instincts, his providence, so contrary to the methods of the wasteful Indian, his cheerful industry, his indomitable energy and perseverance,—all were so national that in days gone past Varney used now and again to clap him on the shoulder ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... its advocates with more bravery, tenacity, and courage than Birth Control. From the early days of Francis Place and Richard Carlile, to those of the Drysdales and Edward Trulove, of Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant, its advocates have faced imprisonment and ostracism. ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... concerned; and if not unreasonably annoyed, the farming slaveholding states, as Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri, will soon provide for its eventual termination. Doubtless, in the cotton and sugar growing states it will retain its hold with more tenacity, but the influence of free principles will roll onward until the ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... Fatigued by the tenacity of this imaginary aroma, he resolved to steep himself in real perfumes, hoping that this homeopathic treatment would cure him or would at least ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... slip here, and slide there, and come to awkward pauses at precipitous places, in what would be rather an alarming manner, but for the potent presence of the guide, who is always beneath me, ready to be fallen upon. Sometimes, when I am holding on with all the necessary tenacity of grip, as regards my hands, but, "scrambling my toes about" in a very disorderly and unworkmanlike fashion, he pops his head up from below for me to sit on; and puts my feet into crevices for me, with many apologies for taking the ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... Ammonio-Iodide of Silver). J. B. HOCKIN & CO., Chemists, 289. Strand, were the first in England who published the application of this agent (see Athenaeum, Aug. 14th). Their Collodion (price 9d. per oz.) retains its extraordinary sensitiveness, tenacity, and colour unimpaired for months; it may be exported to any climate, and the Iodizing Compound mixed as required. J. B. HOCKIN & CO. manufacture PURE CHEMICALS and all APPARATUS with the latest Improvements adapted for all the Photographic and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... the other," he said to himself presently. "Cheniston's a decent fellow enough, brainy and a thoroughly steady sort of chap, but there is something about this man that I rather admire. It may be his pluck, or his quiet tenacity of purpose—I'm hanged if I know what it is; but on my soul I'm inclined to wish I'd been called upon to give my little girl into his keeping. As for that affair in India, it's not every man who would have had the pluck to shoot the girl, and precious few men would have lived ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... "reiteration." If the idea, or truth, intended to be communicated, be reiterated by the mind,—thought over again,—it will then be remembered:—but if it be not reiterated by the mind, it never can. It is also worthy of remark, that the tenacity with which the memory keeps hold of any idea or truth, depends greatly upon the vigour of the mind at the time, and still more perhaps upon the frequency of its reiteration. If a child, however languid, is forced to this act of reiteration of an idea but once, it will be ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... Cervantes branch had more tenacity; it sent offshoots in various directions, Andalusia, Estremadura, Galicia, and Portugal, and produced a goodly line of men distinguished in the service of Church and State. Gonzalo himself, and apparently a son of his, followed Ferdinand III in the great campaign of 1236-48 that gave Cordova ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... to even the most fossilized thought. One by one, social institutions clung to with fiercest tenacity fell away. Barbaric independence had followed Greek and Roman slavery, which in turn was succeeded by feudal servitude, to reappear once more in the affranchised communes. Each experiment had its season, and sunk into the darkness of the past, to give place to a new one, which must transmit ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... Rule should become law, and if England should be over-run by the charming people of Connaught, the brutal Saxon will be interested to observe some of the ancient customs to which they cling with a touching tenacity. Marriage with the Connaught folks is entirely a matter of pecuniary bargain. The young folks have no act or part in the arrangements. The seniors meet and form a committee of ways and means. How much money has your son? How much has your daughter? The details once understood, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... no," she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr. Bold. Will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" And seizing him by his arm, she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... systematising the leading characteristics even of the most original language, the names of a few prominent ideas in the new idiom sufficed to open a first means of communication. His prodigious memory retained with iron tenacity every word or phrase once acquired; his power of methodising, by the very exercise, became more ready and more perfect with each new advance in the study; and, above all, a faculty which seemed peculiar to himself, and which can hardly be described as other than instinctive, of seizing and comprehending ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... be great throughout the ages to come. You are in such perfect sympathy with your people that you will always be their symbol. Their courage, their tenacity, their stifled grief, their pride, their future greatness, their immortality all live in you. Our hearts are yours to their very depths. Being yourself, you are all of us. And this ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... ready to strike; but his distrust of the English Queen was too justifiably complete. She was in fact saved from the absolute necessity of yielding to the persuasions of Burghley and Walsingham only by the dogged tenacity with which the Hollanders held out. And while they held out, she still ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... doctor, concerning a patient who was dogged by a black monkey. The creature, "whose green eyes glow with an expression of unfathomable malignity," is medically explained to be an illusion; but it is so vividly presented that it fastens on our imagination with remarkable tenacity. Wilkie Collins' short story, The Yellow Mask, included in the series called After Dark, is another experiment in the same kind. A jealous woman appears among the dancers at a ball, wearing a waxen cast of the face of the man's dead wife. The short story, in which ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the window, my eyes alighted on the portrait. It had fallen dead, like a candle after sunrise; it followed me with eyes of paint. I knew it to be like, and marvelled at the tenacity of type in that declining race; but the likeness was swallowed up in difference. I remembered how it had seemed to me a thing unapproachable in the life, a creature rather of the painter's craft than of the modesty of nature, and I marvelled at the thought, and exulted ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... qualities bear a larger part, and there are, of course, many works of genius that are in their own nature essentially intellectual. Yet even the most splendid successes of life will often be found to be due much less to extraordinary intellectual gifts than to an extraordinary strength and tenacity of will, to the abnormal courage, perseverance, and work-power that spring from it, or to the tact and judgment which make men skilful in seizing opportunities, and which, of all intellectual qualities, are most ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... famous Mafia trial, detail by detail, perhaps no one did so with greater fixity of interest than Bernie Dreux. He reveled in it, he talked of nothing else, his waking hours were spent in the courtroom, his dreams were peopled with Sicilian figures. He hung upon Norvin, his hero, with a tenacity that was trying; he discussed the evidence bit by bit; he ran to him with every rumor, every fresh development. As the prosecution made its case his triumph became fierce and fearful to behold; ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... your admirable tenacity I was convinced that you were sitting in ambush, a weapon within reach, waiting for the tenant to return. So you actually thought that ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... rupees for one month, and for a quarter of a month at twelve per cent; tables of the squares of all numbers from one to one hundred, and a set of technical rules for finding the price of a part from the price of the whole. [129] The self-denial and tenacity which enable the Bania without capital to lay the foundations of a business are also remarkable. On first settling in a new locality, a Marwari Bania takes service with some shopkeeper, and by dint of the strictest economy ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... extremely coarse crystalline granite, as may be seen in contrast with the watch, and it is falling into decay at a marvelous rate. Disintegration has penetrated the rock far below the surface and the large crystals are held together with but little more tenacity than prevails in a bed of gravel. Moisture and even roots penetrate it deeply and readily and the crystals fall apart with thrusts of the knife blade, the rock crumbling with the greatest freedom. ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... for this dark place was echoed by the child. Since his conversation with Hermione on the day of scirocco he had not been here, and as the boat glided under the hollow blackness of the vault, and there lay still, he remembered their conversation, the unloosing of her passion, the strength and tenacity of the nature she had shown to him, gripping the past with hands almost as unyielding as the tragic ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... myself wondering at the tenacity of my life," went on Sybil, more hurriedly and with increasing excitement. "Sometimes I feel my strength leaving me, and think the battle is almost over; but somehow it is renewed, and I find myself growing strong ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... anger, and I went after you. But it was clearly understood with myself then that if you repeated the act it would be final in all that appertained to me; that unless you returned, it would be a lifelong separation. You have repeated the act; and, knowing your pride and tenacity of will, I did not anticipate your return. And so I was looking the sad, stern future in the face as steadily as possible, and preparing to meet it as a man conscious of right should be prepared to meet whatever trouble lies in store for him. I ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... celebrated politician the Earl of Mar attached himself, with a tenacity for which those who recollected the hereditary politics of the Erskine family, could find no motives but self-interest. James, Duke of Queensbury, was, it is true, the son of one of the most active ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... this last backward glance at this man of God, seven conspicuous qualities stand out in him, the combination of which made him what he was: Stainless uprightness, child-like simplicity, business-like precision, tenacity of purpose, boldness of faith, habitual prayer, and cheerful self-surrender. His holy living was a necessary condition of his abundant serving, as seems so beautifully hinted in the seventeenth verse ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... and seldom or never invade cultivated fields, being found mostly in wet and rocky waste places. Of Old World origin, too, is the curled-leaf dock that is so annoying about one's garden and home meadows, its long tapering root clinging to the soil with such tenacity that I have pulled upon it till I could see stars without budging it; it has more lives than a cat, making a shift to live when pulled up and laid on top of the ground in the burning summer sun. Our native docks are mostly found ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... can read history as a cosmic joke-book, and not as the Biography of the Devil, as many of us moderns, besides Jean Paul, have found it. How long it has taken, and how much blood has been spilt before this or that most obvious folly has been abolished! With what absurd tenacity have men flown in the face of reason and flouted common sense! So our Optimist, looking into the conditions which made Civil Service Reform imperative, will shed tears either of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... had great qualities, but he was not a great man. He had immense capacity that he could use in aid of others, but he lacked ability to mark out a course for himself, or he lacked tenacity or purpose in pursuing it. His ambition had no limits, and he would swerve from his personal obligations in the pursuit of place. In my administration he was made a judge of the Supreme Court of the State, and ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... the majority of cases, death comes when the torture and vital exhaustion accompanying a rapid change in our physical conditions becomes so intense as to weaken, for one single instant, our "clutch on life," or the tenacity of the will to exist. Till then, however severe may be the disease, however sharp the pang, we are only sick or wounded, as ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... with difficulty have been circulated through it for some time. Its texture was extremely tender, being easily perforated with the finger, was of a livid red colour, and evidently in a sphacelated state. It contained about two gallons of a fluid of the colour of port wine, without any greater tenacity. It has fallen to my lot to have opened two other patients, whose deaths were occasioned by incysted dropsy of the ovarium. In one of these the ovarium was much enlarged with eight or ten cysts on its surface, but there was no adhesion formed by any ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... given to the monument by the removal of the large blocks of stone which formed the basement, leaving the massive superincumbent weight to be supported on a very narrow stalk of conglomerate masonry. It is a striking proof of the extraordinary solidity and tenacity of Roman architecture, defying the laws of gravitation. It is called the sepulchre of the Metelli, the family of Caecilia Metella; but this is a mere guess, as there is no record or inscription to identify it. Next ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... James V., but her fourth found an early grave. Mary, the other sister of Henry VIII., lost her only son in his teens. The appalling death-rate among Tudor infants cannot be attributed solely to medical ignorance, for Yorkist babies clung to life with a tenacity which was quite as inconvenient as the readiness with which Tudor infants relinquished it; and Richard III., Henry VII. and Henry VIII. all found it necessary to accelerate, by artificial means, the exit from the world of the superfluous ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... abdominal organs and their physiological action being kept alive and active, as it were, against time, and the silent and unconscious functional activity of the great sympathetic and its ganglia, show a tenacity of the animal tissues to hold on ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... to all; and although none of them was brilliant, he had several which have a peculiarly impressive effect when displayed in an exalted station. He was indefatigably industrious; worked on an average eight hours a day for fifty-four years; had great tenacity of will; that kind of solid judgment which comes of slowness of brain, and withal a most majestic port and great dignity of manners. He had also as much kindliness of nature as the very great can be expected to have; his temper was under severe control; and, in his earlier ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... "The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, he says, the love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, - all is an old ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... against the opinions of others, had resolutely stood to what he thought was right. It was this stedfastness of character that had brought him through many hard-fought battles. And the process had developed tenacity and determination to what was out of balance with his humility and consideration for the opinions and consciences of others. From his point of view this affair was his and Nell's, and did not concern his friends and acquaintances. His fighting-blood was up. But the words of Bessie, spoken so ...
— The Hero of Hill House • Mable Hale
... by the Reform Bill, and these boroughs were held by Lord Eldon to be incorporeal hereditaments: as truly a part of the private property of the gentry who owned them as church advowsons, or the like. And the gentry held to their law-making power which gave them such a privilege with a tenacity which precipitated two wars before they yielded; but this was naught compared to the social convulsion which rent France, when a population which had been for centuries restrained from free domestic movement, burst its bonds and insisted on levelling the barriers ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... with reading the lessons and reciting the prayers; and what are the effects? Do they become disgusted with the Missal and Breviary by this daily familiarity? We all know the contrary. The very opposite effect is produced. It is astonishing to see with what tenacity children thus educated cling to the superstitions and absurdities of their fathers; and it is because their religion is wrought into the very texture of their minds, in the schools as well as in the churches. ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... and weapons of warfare, they show an ambitious desire, and a skilful ability, to ornament their work and add, to its usefulness, pleasure to the eye. One of their gravest faults, however, is their embarrassing tenacity to the fad of head-hunting, and a strict adherence to the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. This keeps the different households, even of the same tribe, at constant war and makes inevitable an uncomfortable yet pleasing interchange ...
— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness
... Those in Canada are often made much broader, so as to enable two vehicles to pass abreast, and their cost is a little above L400 a mile. The toll here is about three-farthings a mile per horse. They have had the good sense to avoid the ridiculous wheel-tollage to which we adhere at home with a tenacity only equalled by its folly, as if a two-wheeled cart, with a ton weight of cargo, drawn by a Barclay and Perkinser, did not cut up a road much more than the little four-wheel carriage of the clergyman's wife, drawn by a cob pony, and laden with a tin of soup or a piece ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... inspiration. She caught up a flower-pot and smashed in the windows at the end of the green-house. Then she re-entered. She tugged now with renewed strength at Wedderburn's motionless body, and brought the strange orchid crashing to the floor. It still clung with the grimmest tenacity to its victim. In a frenzy, she lugged it and him ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... his county in the House of Lords; but, with his Jacobite ideas, he did not care much for the favor of the House of Hanover, and he was looked upon coldly by the State party in England, because of the tenacity with which he clung to the traditions of his forefathers, and his energetic resistance to the political encroachments of Southerners. And yet he was not a man behind the times, and there was nothing little or narrow-minded about him; but ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... in the following pages will be found to bear upon, and tend forcibly to corroborate, the miseries so patiently endured by the African race, in a vaunted land of freedom and enlightenment, whose inhabitants assert, with ridiculous tenacity, that their government and laws are based upon the principle, "That all men in the sight of God are equal," and the wrongs of whose victims have of late been so touchingly and truthfully illustrated by that eminent ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... themselves as seriously as possible. In fact, they behaved as if it was only now, since they had extricated themselves from the noisy streets of the bustling world, that the chase was beginning; they carried on their insignificant affairs with a gravity and a tenacity which for the most part they had never been able to attain in their earlier activities. Like many another small collection of men, although they were ruled on the principles of absolute monarchy by the head of the institution ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... consisted in swinging the body from right to left, lifting up now one leg and then the other, and waving the head to and fro in a most violent manner. The Beluch get much excited over this dance, which requires some degree of stubborn tenacity, and the spectators urge the dancer to continue when he shows signs of getting tired. All superfluous clothing is discarded in a most alarming manner at various stages of this performance, and the arms are flapped ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... world, and does not fail to suit the taste of the most fastidious of smokers. The finest are of dark color and wholly free from any rank or unpleasant taste. These cigars are uniformly mild and have but little variety of flavor, the ash is dark-colored, firm and strong, clinging with tenacity to the cigar, which is the best evidence of the quality of the leaf. In Paraguay they are considered superior to all other kinds and are smoked continuously without any seemingly ill effect. Page alludes ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... American thrush to sing like his European relative? He surely did not learn it from his cousin over the waters. Those who would have us believe that all animals originated from common centres and single pairs, and have been thence distributed over the world, will find it difficult to explain the tenacity of such characters, and their recurrence and repetition under circumstances that seem to preclude the possibility of any communication, on any other supposition than that of their creation in the different regions where they are now found. We ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... my pillow. Fourteen times have I hungrily eaten my dinner, since the night when I stood in the hall with Sir Roger's hand in mine, raging against my parent. And Sir Roger is here still. After all, there is nothing like the tenacity of boyish friendship, ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... glowed beneath long black lashes were in themselves striking evidence of a passionate nature sternly repressed, and an eloquent contradiction to the firm, tightly compressed lips. Here, thought Gimblet, was a nature which might pursue its object with cold and calculating tenacity, and then at the last moment let the prize slip through its fingers at some ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... cattle. The expression is not too strong and was uttered by an eye-witness, almost at this very date, a friend and a competent diplomat: "You know that, while I am very fond of the dear general, I call him to myself the little tiger, so as to properly characterize his figure, tenacity, and courage, the rapidity of his movements, and all that he has in him which maybe fairly regarded ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... dead. Jeb had not noticed the sun. His face was lowered close to the planking of their frail refuge. The ocean had again become a thing of peace and beauty—and silence. Those who were on upturned boats had realized the impotency of screaming, and merely clung with dogged tenacity; those who had been too much lacerated to reach these places of imperfect shelter, had yielded to the cradling waves and were now asleep. Thus the minutes dragged. Then the sergeant gave ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... kind, and the plucky little colored boy continued to show wonderful tenacity of purpose; for he managed to retain his slipping grip on the turning plank until Hugh could bend over and take a grip of his kinky wool. It may not have been the most pleasant way to effect a rescue, but there was no time ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... Into the fierce and blood-stained turmoil of their lives there entered something unknown to any other pirates: this was religious fanaticism—a fanaticism so engrained in character, a belief held to with such passionate tenacity, that men stained with every conceivable crime held that their passage to Paradise was absolutely secure because of the faith which they professed. Tradition, sentiment, discipline, were summed up in one trite formula; but though we, at this distance of time, may hold it somewhat in derision, ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... infallibility of its wire-drawing of infallible materials, was ready to supply its contingent of martyrs; and to enable history, once more, to illustrate the truth, that steadfastness under persecution says much for the sincerity and still more for the tenacity, of the believer, but very little for the objective truth of that which he believes. No martyrs have sealed their faith with their blood more ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... surface of the, Amazons valley, from the neighbourhood of Para to within the Peruvian borders, and forms part of the great Tabatinga marl deposit. To enable the vessels to stand the fire, the bark of a certain tree, called Caraipe, is burned and mixed with the clay, which gives tenacity to the ware. Caraipe is an article of commerce— being sold and packed in baskets at the shops in most of the towns. The shallow pits, excavated in the marly soil at Mahica, were very attractive to many kinds of mason bees and wasps, who made use of the clay to build their nests ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... be true, but it was part of the civic life, and therefore its rejection was unsocial and disloyal. Yet the account of Tacitus contains several remarks which, in their author's despite, reveal the moral superiority of the conquered over the conquerors. He notes their national tenacity, their ready charity, their freedom from infanticide, their conviction of the immortality of the soul, their purely spiritual and monotheistic cult. Tacitus certainly wrote after the works of Josephus had been published, so that the apology is not an answer to him; ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... tied them, and the locos, beholding with horror and misgivings, the new order of things which was destined to turn out many a holder of fat office, many a pat-riot overflowing with democratic patriotism, whose devotion to the cause of the country was manifest in the tenacity with which he clung to his place, were extremely anxious to devise ways and means to keep the whigs at bay; and as the day drew near, when the assembled Board of Aldermen should have their sitting at the City Hall, various dodges ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... earth, and had become isolated from the rest of mankind, might, after the lapse of ages, be expected to lose the idea of God, if it were not a spontaneous and native intuition of the mind,—a necessity of thought. A fact of history must be presumed to stick to the mind with much greater tenacity than a purely rational idea which has no visible symbol in the sensible world, and yet, even in regard to the events of history, the persistence and pertinacity of tradition is exceedingly feeble. The South Sea Islanders ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... little creature had so much tenacity and will," Fergus said to himself, with a sort of vexed admiration, after one of these conversations; "why, Lilian is a big woman compared to Mrs. St. Clair, and yet my lassie has not a tithe of her spirit. Well, I'll bide my time; but it will not be my ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... his moral theories, however inadequately argued upon, were noble and exalting. He contended for the providence of a God, as well as for the immortality of man. He asserted vice to be the most hateful, virtue the most profitable of all things [193]. He waged war on that vulgar tenacity of life which is the enemy to all that is most spiritual and most enterprising in our natures, and maintained that between life and death there is no difference—the fitting deduction from a belief in the continuous existence of the soul [194]. His especial maxim was the celebrated precept, "Know ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... smaller. It is known that these are constantly floating in the atmosphere, though, owing to their extreme minuteness, the fact can only be ascertained by the most skilful investigation. And the lower forms of animalcules have a singular tenacity of life; they can pass unharmed through processes which would be fatal to creatures of higher organization. One variety is known to survive entire desiccation; another lives upon strychnine; others bear without injury ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... depend of course upon the variety of these paths and upon the frequency with which they are used. Each path is in fact an associated process, the number of these associates becoming thus to a great degree a substitute for the independent tenacity of the original impression. As I have elsewhere written: Each of the associates is a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up when sunk below the surface. Together they form a network of attachments ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... of the Canadian army. During those long and terrible months, in the face of a continued bombardment and of successive counter-attacks, with the line growing thinner, week by week, hacked up by woefully inadequate artillery, the Canadian army had held on with the grim tenacity of death itself. There was nothing that they could do but hold on. To push the salient deeper into the enemy lines would only emphasise the difficulty and danger of their position. The role assigned them was that of simply ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... Georgians were still laboring to save their commander from capture, and Captain S—— and his men to take him, or as much as they could of him. The finale was that the Georgia Major was lugged off and rescued by his men, and that Captain S——, clinging to him with the proverbial Kilkenny tenacity, succeeded in dragging off him his coat, sword and belts, and revolver,—leaving the foe very much in the condition of his own men—that of ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... every man by competent surgeons. Their acquaintance with the country in which they marched, encamped and fought, made them in many instances superior to the white troops. Then to strengthen their valor and tenacity, each soldier of the Phalanx knew when he heard the long roll beat to arms, and the bugle sound the charge, that they were not to go forth to meet those who regarded them as opponents in arms, but who met them as a man in his last desperate effort for life would meet demons; they ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... English column at Fontenoy. At Wagram, also, the heavy mass of infantry led by Macdonald was arrested by the dreadful cross-fire of the Austrian batteries; and if the Archduke Charles had evinced the same tenacity and resolution as Marshal Saxe, the result would probably have been the same, and Wagram ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... forget the human equation in the pluckiest of the plucky. I couldn't afford to forget it, Bunny; I couldn't afford to give a point away. Don't talk as though I hadn't trusted you! I trusted my very life to your loyal tenacity. What do you suppose would have happened to me if you had let me rip in that strong-room? Do you think I would ever have crept out and given myself up? Yes, I'll have a peg for once; the beauty of all laws is in the breaking, even of the kind we ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... in spite of the bitter knowledge that her own had waned, Sue had no misgivings as yet as to the honor, the truth, the loyalty of the man whose name she now bore. Her illusions were gone, her romance had become dull reality, but to one thought she clung with all the tenacity of despair, and that was to the illusion that Prince Amede d'Orleans was the selfless patriot, the regenerator of downtrodden France, which he ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... at any specially poignant impression of art or beauty. But yet, if any one word were to be chosen for the predominant quality of his character and example, I suppose that word would be manly. In his gentle and complying nature there were strains of iron tenacity and will: occasionally even, let it be admitted, of perversity and Scottish "thrawnness." He had both kinds of physical courage—the active, delighting in danger, and the passive, unshaken in endurance. In the moral courage of facing situations and consequences, of readiness ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fangs had torn leg, arm, and breast literally to ribbons. So weak was he from continued exertion and loss of blood that but for the supporting wall I doubt that he even could have stood erect. But with the tenacity and indomitable courage of his kind he still faced his cruel and relentless foes—the personification of that ancient proverb of his tribe: "Leave to a Thark his head and one hand and he ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... fulfilled, he desired to return to the Philippines, but was dissuaded from this step by his friends; he came back to Mexico, where he died (June 3, 1568), aged seventy years. Urdaneta was endowed with a keen intellect, and held to his opinions and convictions with great tenacity. To his abilities and sagacity are ascribed much of Legazpi's success in the conquest of the Philippines. For sketches of his life, see Retana's edition of Martinez de Zuniga's Estadismo de ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... constant temperature of 71.5 degrees, that of the air varying from 77.5 degrees, at 3 p.m., to 62 at daylight the following morning; when we moved on to Nourunga (alt. 340 feet), where I bored to 3 feet 8 inches with a heavy iron jumper through an alluvium of such excessive tenacity, that eight natives were employed for four hours in the operation. In both this and another hole, 4 feet 8 inches, the temperature was 72 degrees at 10 p.m.; and on the following morning 71.5 degrees in the deepest hole, and 70 degrees ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... to point the tenacity of the spirit of the Antique, reaching deep into the modern age? The latest Apicius edition in the original Latin is ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... a certain truth in Hardy's description of Ted Haviland. Ted had all a baby's fascination, a baby's irresponsibility, and a baby's rigid tenacity of purpose. There perhaps the likeness ended. At any rate, Ted had contrived to plan a career for himself at the age of seven, had said nothing about it for ten years, and then quietly carried it through ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... that he had developed, too, some of the worst as well as the best of those Scotch qualities inherited from his parents, expatriated though they had been, and from the staunch clansmen behind them. He had the Scotch loyalty; likewise, the Scotch tenacity of character which never forgot and very seldom forgave; the Scotch obstinacy of purpose and opinion; the Scotch acquisitiveness; a tendency too to 'nearness' in matters of small expenditure which combined oddly with a generosity amounting almost to recklessness ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... upon which Sherman's fame as a soldier so largely rests, was by no means the greatest or most significant of his many achievements. His record as a soldier is filled with examples of his courage, his shrewdness, and his tenacity, while his mingling of gentle ways and grim determination, of restlessness and calm, of forethought, fearlessness, and frankness, make him at once a unique and central figure in the decade of war and reconstruction that forms so important a chapter ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... instrument for occasional spells of firewood-chopping: but at heart he was a reformer, and, unlike most reformers—judging them, of course, by the doubtful value of histories—he started upon himself. Tenacity was William's greatest asset; when he adopted a line of action he "stayed with it," to use his own expressive phraseology. Having found the place spoken of in the letter to Sally, where he could take night lessons in history, reading, and writing, William ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks
... cells, and this process goes on with extraordinary rapidity. Other varieties, particularly bacilli, are propagated by the formation of spores. A spore is a minute mass of protoplasm surrounded by a dense, tough membrane, developed in the interior of the parent cell. Spores are remarkable for their tenacity of life, and for the resistance they offer to the action of heat and ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... litter of pigs that were rootling up the beech-nuts in the woods. They gave her short time to make up her mind. Sentiment? We in the East—the land of the wise men since time was young—we know nothing of sentiment. We can hate with a sullen tenacity of resentment which knows no forgiveness; but love—nay we leave that for the "intense" of other climes. And women in the good old times—positively women—love one man more than another? ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... may wonder that Mrs. Channing should not have been the first to discover it; or that it could have escaped her notice at all, for she had the child with her often for his early religious instruction; but, one of the worst phases of this state of things is, the shrinking tenacity with which the victim buries the fears within his own breast. He dare not tell his parents; he is taught not; and taught by fear. It may not have been your misfortune to meet with a case of this sort; I hope you never will. Mrs. Channing would observe ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... roused me from my reverie; and looking imploringly in my face stood a thinly-clad, shivering little girl, who carried a small bundle, which she held in her hand with a singular tenacity. I gave a searching look into the child's face, while ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... it had been acting the part of a steam tug, and had been dragging, at full speed, a couple of heavily laden vessels. Its intention was to escape to land; but I leaped into the water, and wading up to it, dispatched it with my ax. Such was its tenacity of life, however, that it did not cease its struggles until I had actually severed its head ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... generations. Then came, for the young girl, a change not wholly unexpected, yet destined to alter every plan, and uproot every early association. But to the memories of that loved early life she held with an English tenacity, not altered by transplanting, that is seen to-day in countless New Englanders, whose English blood is of as pure a strain as any to be found in the ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... to the Oriental world. It seems to us, however, that in the noisy concert of acclamations that echoed during the days of the fetes over the inauguration of the line, a less modest place might have been made for those who, with invincible tenacity and rare talent, directed the technical part of the work, and especially those 15 kilometers of colossal boring—the great St. Gothard Tunnel, which ranks in the history of great public works side by side with the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... calumnious gossips and slanderous pamphleteers. His health became precarious. Incessant sleeplessness spoke of an overtasked brain and shattered nerves. Life was full of pain; still he clung to it with a craven-like tenacity. So, at least, Seneca asserts, quoting in support of his statement some very bad verses by Maecenas, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... Lincoln's tenacity of purpose paralleled his former immobility; I believe he would have been nearly the last, if not the very last, man in America to recognize the Southern Confederacy had its armies been triumphant. He would ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... hand, and in his right hand he carried the long sabre of an artillery officer, which he had picked up on the battlefield. He rode like a monkey clinging to the back of a hound, his shoulder hunched, his body bent forward even with the mare's neck, his knees gripping the saddle with a frightened tenacity, his small, black eyes peering into the darkness before him, and his ears alert to the sound ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... doubt probable that, if peace is secured, the economic problems will receive more attention than hitherto. But the Russian character seems less adapted to steady work of an unexciting nature than to heroic efforts on great occasions; it has immense passive endurance, but not much active tenacity. Whether, with the menace of foreign invasion removed, enough day-by-day detailed energy would exist for the reorganization of industry, is a doubtful question, as to which only ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... one of the most memorable sieges in history. The hero, a young Englishman resident in Gibraltar, takes a brave and worthy part in the long defence, and we learn with what bravery, resourcefulness, and tenacity the Rock ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... colonial agriculture is indebted to the travels of naturalists. It yields not only one-third more juice than the creolian cane on the same space of ground; but from the thickness of its stem, and the tenacity of its ligneous fibres, it furnishes much more fuel. This last advantage is important in the West Indies, where the destruction of the forests has long obliged the planters to use canes deprived of juice, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... unseat Billy by bounding, he came to a sudden halt, and then reared wildly; but with catlike tenacity the boy clung to him, and then Sable Satan mad with rage and fright, attempted to tear him from his ...
— Beadle's Boy's Library of Sport, Story and Adventure, Vol. I, No. 1. - Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood • Prentiss Ingraham
... sifted their dust over the immortal figures seated on the marble bench within the precincts consecrated to the Eumenides, but in deathless tenacity, the rich aroma of Sophocles' narcissus, and the soft crocus light linger there still; while from thickets of olive, nightingales break their hearts in song, as thrilling as the melody that smote the ears ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... is a pure white, but gradually changes to yellow. The fibre, which is fine and delicate, is tubular, like that of flax and cotton, and is easily wrought; but its tenacity is not equal to that of other textile materials, although it is substituted in many fabrics for wool, flax, and cotton. A large portion of the crop, which already exceeds two hundred thousand tons, is exported to England as it comes from the field, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... and it had lost half of its bristles in the service of the Berknowles who had clung to it with a warm-hearted tenacity purely Irish. ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... of eminence—as has been my case, and the case of divers others I could recall—it shall not be written down in the list of his errors, unless in aftertimes he shall seek to justify the same. It is necessary to advance roughness in the place of refinement, and stubborn tenacity for steadfastness. No man can be pronounced guilty of offence on the score of some hasty word or other which may escape his lips; such a charge should rather be made when he defends himself by unworthy methods. ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... Sometimes the upper frame of slats, or knives as they were called, were hinged to the big under log at one end, and heavily weighted at the other, and thus the blow was given by the fall of the weight, not by the force of the farmer's muscle. The tenacity of the flax can be seen when it would stand this violent beating; and the cruel blow can be imagined, which the farmer's fingers sometimes got when he carelessly thrust his hand with the flax too far under the descending jaw—a ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... His face was pale, but his heart was filled with a burning sense of humiliation and anger against the man who had assaulted him. It would have been well for Smith if he had controlled himself better, for the boy was not one of the forgiving kind, but harbored resentment with an Indian-like tenacity, and was resolved to ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr
... manipulation and aptitude, which rendered them of indispensable utility in the immense undertakings of the period. Their expertness in all sorts of earthwork, in embanking, boring, and well-sinking—their practical knowledge of the nature of soils and rocks, the tenacity of clays, and the porosity of certain stratifications—were very great; and, rough-looking though they were, many of them were as important in their own department as the contractor ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... phraseology, its proverbs, and its songs, which belong alike to the entire body of the people. This provincial style of the peasant is again, like his physique, a remnant of history, to which he clings with the utmost tenacity. In certain parts of Hungary there are still descendants of German colonists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who go about the country as reapers, retaining their old Saxon songs and manners, while the more cultivated ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Torsion. Flexure. Tenacity. The Most Tenacious Metal. Ductility. Malleability. Hardness. Alloys. Resistance. Persistence. Conductivity. Equalization. Reciprocity. Molecular Forces. Attraction. Cohesion. Adhesion. Affinity. Porosity. ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... achievements as thinkers and as artists, above all in their science and philosophy, that we find the most fundamental and lasting contribution of the Greeks to the unity and progress of mankind. When these became allied to the tenacity, the organizing and legal genius of the Romans, a firm centre of civilized life was established, which has survived the shocks of two thousand years of growth and conflict and will survive the upheaval of the present. The Greek unification was in the world of thought and ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... Cross, and to exchange the sweetest speeches with the widow Thackeray and others, she went on alone—seeing none, heeding none—dreading to meet any face lest it should wear a smile and look the language in which the demon at her side still dealt. HE still clung to her, with the tenacity of a fiendish purpose. He mocked her with her shame, goading her, with dart upon dart, of every sort of mockery. Truly did he ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... as Treasure Island: could I but do the second half in another month! But I can't, I fear; I shall have some belated material arriving by next mail, and must go again at the History. Is it not characteristic of my broken tenacity of mind, that I should have left Davie Balfour some five years in the British Linen Company's Office, and then follow him at last with such vivacity? But I leave you again; the last (15th) chapter ought to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mind when you become an older inhabitant," Ingemar said. "And by your tenacity, I'm ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... and remained for nine months in close confinement at one of the British Andersonvilles of that day. Patrick Calhoun, in many a desperate encounter with the Indians, displayed singular coolness, courage, adroitness, and tenacity. On one memorable occasion, thirteen of his neighbors and himself maintained a forest fight for several hours with a force of Cherokees ten times their number. When seven of the white men had fallen, the rest made their escape. ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... consultations for evil purposes take place; and soon there has developed an epidemic of melancholia. Conjecture is rife. The explanation of it all is that these sharks have designs on human flesh, or they would not follow with such tenacity. There is much speculation as to how the unfortunate men are to be delivered into the grip of their ferocity, and whether the feast will involve the sacrifice of one or all of them. The more dismal the weather, ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... gather, he is to all who have had really extensive experience. Those like Leslie Tarleton, Lord Delamere, W. N. MacMillan, Baron von Bronsart, the Hills, Sir Alfred Pease, who are great lion men, all concede to the lion a courage and tenacity unequalled by any other living beast. My own experience is of course nothing as compared to that of these men. Yet I saw in my nine months afield seventy-one lions. None of these offered to attack when unwounded or not annoyed. On the other ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... one another which the passing world would never have supposed either of them to possess. In such a region, where there are few competitors for human love and regard, the heart clings with hungering tenacity to the few stray affections that spring up, here and there, like flowers dropped by some kindly, careless hand, making a bloom and a blessing for the untrodden wilderness. Nor do they blossom there in vain, since, as ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... bleed for him farther, especially ever since his own Peace of Rastadt made with Louis the year after Kaiser Karl had utterly lost hold of the Crown of Spain; and had not the least chance to clutch that bright substance again. But he held by the shadow of it, with a deadly Hapsburg tenacity; refused for twenty years, under all pressures, to part with the shadow: "The Spanish Hapsburg Branch is dead; whereupon do not I, of the Austrian Branch, sole representative of Kaiser Karl the Fifth, claim, by the law of Heaven, whatever he possessed ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... one of the noblest examples of that strange yet successful revival of Gothic feeling of which the staircase of Christ Church Hall, erected at much about the same time, furnishes so exquisite a specimen. It is that in his tenacity to the past he has preserved the historic interest of his hall. Beneath the picturesque woodwork of the roof, in the quiet light that breaks through the quaint mullions of its windows, the student may still recall ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... Uzbegs have a method of undermining the bastion, by turning the course of some convenient stream right under the very base; this gradually softens the lower stratum of mud, and diminishing its tenacity, the whole fabric comes tumbling down from its own weight. They also have frequently recourse to mining, but for either method to succeed the defenders cannot be on ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... animal, as chance affords, digs with its short strong legs and steel-like claws, tearing asunder roots, and casting aside stones, and the ease and rapidity with which it disappears in soft soil are astonishing. The horrific array of prickles presented as it digs an undignified retreat, and the tenacity with which it holds the ground, have given rise to the fiction that no dog is capable of killing an echidna. No ordinary dog is. He must be cunning, daring, brave, insensible to pain, and resourceful. Then the feat is quite ordinary. Indeed, once ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... that there was a great deal more to it. She fell to studying his hands. The fingers were long and slender, but flat, sinewy, and powerful. They seemed to express tenacity of purpose, a grip of whatever they undertook. Once more she looked at his profile, and again she was struck by ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... the corridor wore its old quietude; the striped curtain in the wing window, and the yellow placard in the suspicious window at the top, still kept their places with provoking tenacity; and I could never, with all my art, seduce the good-natured abbe into any bugbear story about the occupant of the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... further.' A confirmed stay-at-home, he has mingled much in society of all sorts, and exercised a keen but quite unsympathetic observation. His very reserve in company (though, when he catches you alone, he is a button-holder of great tenacity) encourages free speech in others; they have no more reticence in his presence than if he were the butler. He has belonged to no cliques, and thereby escaped the greatest peril which can beset the student of human nature. A man of genius, indeed, in these days is almost ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... doubtless, however, much less in the wealth of my experience than in the tenacity of my impression, the fact that I have lost nothing of what I saw and that though I can't now quite divide the total into separate occasions the various items surprisingly swarm for me. I shall return to some of them, wishing at present only to make my point of when and how the seeds ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... mere name more or less to an unmeaning paper. But the plotters know perfectly well that the People are not for Revision in their sense of the word; if they did not fear this, they would restore Universal Suffrage. By clinging with desperate tenacity to the Restrictive law of May 31st, they virtually confess that their hopes of success involve the continued exclusion of Three Millions of adult Frenchmen from the Registry of Voters. When they prate, therefore, of the people's desire for Revision, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... find the central idea as early as possible, but he must hold it with a firm grip. Both of these things require much tenacity of purpose. In following the order of an author's presentation, considerable detail may have to be traversed before the main thought begins to dawn in the student's mind, and temptations to forget about ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... no home unless light was given to it by her who had been the day-star of his boyhood. The very loneliness and bitterness of his experience had caused his heart, capable of a strong and passionate affection, to centre with greater tenacity upon the gentle being who had shown to him the lovelier side of nature and life, and had awakened in him strivings after all that was highest and best. But this morbid sensitiveness, which is the curse of every proud spirit, and turns even the sweets of life to ashes in the mouth, had him in ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... up his mind not to forego this new advantage which chance threw in his way. Pressure and pressure alone could enable him to attain his end, and he was applying it unmercifully. Well, she had done with him now, it did not matter to her; but she could not help faintly wondering at the extraordinary tenacity and hardness of purpose which his action showed. Then she turned her mind to the consideration of another matter, in connection with which ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... the British empire, than that of Sir Wycherly Wychecombe; its head retaining his manly and protecting affection for all dependent on him, while his wife, beautiful as a matron, as she had been lovely as a girl, clung to him with the tenacity of the ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... am myself endowed with an unusual tenacity of vision. I could, for instance, easily outstare any man I ever met. Yet, as I continued to stare at this man, I was conscious that it was only by an effort of will that I was able to resist a baleful something which seemed to be passing from his eyes to mine. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... that we were going to Scheveningen, in the middle of September, the portier of the hotel at The Hague was sure we should be very cold, perhaps because we had suffered so much in his house already; and he was right, for the wind blew with a Dutch tenacity of purpose for a whole week, so that the guests thinly peopling the vast hostelry seemed to rustle through its chilly halls and corridors like so many autumn leaves. We were but a poor hundred at most where ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... doubt he would have succeeded in accomplishing it, allowing due time for its completion. It was not the wind that would have shaken him from that rope, to which he clung with the tenacity of a spider. Had the support proved true, he could have held on, even though it ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... and new life from the Mexican War, had never died out in the hills. Most likely it would never have died out, anyway; for, the world over, any seed of character, individual or national, that is once dropped between lofty summits brings forth its kind, with deathless tenacity, year after year. Only, in the Kentucky mountains, there were more slaveholders than elsewhere in the mountains in the South. These, naturally, fought for their slaves, and the division thus made the war personal and terrible between ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr. |
