"Fluctuating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... distinct points. It was particularly in these confused conferences, where neither party was entirely sincere, that the volatile word was thought preferable to the permanent letter. Already so many watery lines had been traced, in the course of these fluctuating negotiations, that a few additional records would be if necessary, as rapidly effaced as ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... control. To do this effectually it was necessary to abolish the culture and trade in all other places, which they succeeded in doing by treaty with the native rulers. These agreed to have all the spice trees in their possessions destroyed. They gave up large though fluctuating revenues, but they gained in return a fixed subsidy, freedom from the constant attacks and harsh oppressions of the Portuguese, and a continuance of their regal power and exclusive authority over their own subjects, which is maintained in all the islands except Ternate ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... became aware of a phenomenon untold before. Yet so quietly did it come, and so naturally, that it gave me no disturbance, nor forced itself upon me. A luminous ring, a ring of pale fire, in shape a long, narrow, and fluctuating oval, became discernible in the sky south of my stand-point, midway (I thought) ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... the point of conspiring the destruction of poor Mrs. Middleton, when, by accident, he met with Miss Hamilton. From this moment ended all his resentment against Mrs. Middleton, and all his attachment to Miss Warmestre: no longer was he inconstant: no longer were his wishes fluctuating: this object fixed them all; and, of all his former habits, none ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... they first come to Sierra Leone in the capacity of apprentices to the old hands, who are considered as headmen or masters: these headmen, according to their influence, or station in their own country, have a proportionate number of apprentices attached to them, fluctuating from five to twenty, to teach them what they call "White man's fashion." The profit of the labour of the youths is always received by the headmen, who returns them a small portion of it. When an apprentice goes back to his own country, after ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... Residency, which forms the most southerly province of Sumatra. At the time we write of, the only European residents of the place were connected with Government. The rest of the population was composed of a heterogeneous mass of natives mingled with a number of Chinese, a few Arabs, and a large fluctuating population of traders from Borneo, Celebes, New Guinea, Siam, and the other innumerable isles of the archipelago. These were more or less connected with praus laden with the rich and varied merchandise of the ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... the Anthonys were drawing to a close. All manufacturing industries of the country were in a ruinous state. The unsound condition of the banks with their depreciated and fluctuating currency had created financial chaos. Overproduction of cotton goods on a credit basis, inordinate speculation, reduction of duties on importations, produced the inevitable result, and the commercial world began to totter on its foundations. The final ruin is foreshadowed in the letters ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... first thought might occasionally be the case. But he had always considered that the chief part, and latterly the whole, of the materials with which natural selection works, was afforded by individual variations, or that amount of ever fluctuating variability which exists in all organisms and in all their parts. Other writers have urged the same objection, even as against individual variability, apparently in total ignorance of its amount and range; and quite recently Professor ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... with regard to this subject, because he was himself the greatest of letter writers. The epistle was the shape in which his versatile and beautiful mind most gracefully ran and moulded itself. His fluctuating and unstable character no less than his vanity and love of distinction, seemed to minister occasion to those varied forms of diction and expression in which the genius of animated letter writing may be said to delight. Read his 'Familiar Letters,' if not in Latin, yet in translation, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... and sure. The blessed consciousness of His love, and the joyful answer of my heart to it, may become the basis upon which my whole being shall repose, the underlying thought that gives security, serenity, steadfastness to my else fluctuating life. I may so plant myself upon Him, as that in Him I shall be strong, and then my life will not only grow like a tree and have its leaf green and broad, and its fruit the natural outcome of its vitality, but it will rise like some stately building, course by course, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... fluctuating, owing to the influx of strangers seeking health, traders, and Indians; but the permanent inhabitants of the village are about one thousand and fourteen, as per ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... up, in due season, in a harvest of vigorous revenge. The whites suspected this; and were as anxious as their dusky neighbours to obtain the friendship and sanction of the revolutionary government at home. That government was fluctuating in its principles and in its counsels; it favoured now one party, and now the other; and on the arrival of its messengers at the ports of the colony, there ensued sometimes the loud boastings of the whites, and sometimes quiet, ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... with an ardor which devoured space, and, raising billows of dust from the ground, which trembled beneath them, they were in an instant mingled with the Spanish cavalry, and both were swallowed up in an immense and fluctuating cloud. ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... later Dennison brought up the card of Miss Margaret Clay. Rachael turned it slowly in her hands, pondering, with a quickened heartbeat and a fluctuating color. Magsie had been often a guest in Rachael's house a year ago, but she had not been to see Rachael for a long time now. They were to meet, they were to talk alone together—what about? There was nothing about which Rachael Gregory ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... law is shown, however, most strikingly by a process going on throughout the country—the growth of private rights, and especially of rights in land. Under the old despotic systems, the place of law was taken by a number of vague and fluctuating customs, liable to be infringed at every moment by the arbitrary fancies of the rulers. Society was 'worn to the bone.' It had become an aggregate of villages, each forming a kind of isolated units. In some districts even the villages had been ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... that the scholar who had learned their rules should "strictly conform to them; and that he should industriously avoid that random Method of dividing by the Ear, which is subject to mere jumble, as it must be continually fluctuating according to the various Dialects of different Countries."—British ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... man in Mr. HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL'S Quinneys' (MURRAY), is undoubtedly a "card," not unrelated, I should say, to Mr. BENNETT'S Machen. He is an entertaining fellow with his enthusiasms, his truculences, his fluctuating standards of honesty. Mr. VACHELL didn't quite get me to believe in Joe's expert knowledge, which indeed seemed to be turned on and off in rather an arbitrary way as the exigencies of the story rather than the development and experience of the character dictated; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... place. The only thing you can do seems to me to work hard, and always take the highest line about things. The highest line, that is to say, not the line you may feel to be highest, but the line that you recognize to be so. Not what your fluctuating emotions may commend, but that which the best moral tact seems to pronounce best. You can't always expect to feel enthusiasm for the best, so be true not to your sensations, but your deliberate ideals—that is the highest sincerity; all the higher ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... extreme urgency in pushing, and Mr. and Mrs. Kirkpatrick's affectionate persistency in pulling, Cynthia had yielded, and had gone back to finish her interrupted visit in London, but not before the bruit of her previous sudden return to nurse Molly, had told strongly in her favour in the fluctuating opinion of the little town. Her affair with Mr. Preston was thrust into the shade; while every one was speaking of her warm heart. Under the gleam of Molly's recovery everything assumed a rosy hue, as indeed became the time when actual roses were ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... metal predominates over the other to such an extent as to form the "backbone" of the value of the mine, the value of the subsidiary metals is often deducted from the cost of the principal metal, in order to indicate more plainly the varying value of the mine with the fluctuating prices of the predominant metal. For example, it is usual to state that the cost of copper production from a given ore will be so many cents per pound, or so many pounds sterling per ton. Knowing the total metal extractable from the ore ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... from the right to the left, and withdrew others from the left to the right of their line, though for what end this marching and countermarching was undertaken I am at a loss to conceive. While thus fluctuating it was curious to observe their dread of every spot where a cannon-ball had struck. Having seen the shots fall, I kept my eye upon one or two places, and perceived that each company as it drew near to those points hung back; and then assuming as it were ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... national feeling;[1] he suffered a committee to be appointed in parliament, and the commissioners in London received instructions to protest against the trial and condemnation of the king. But these instructions disclose the timid fluctuating policy of the man by whom they were dictated. It is vain to look in them for those warm and generous sentiments which the case demanded. They are framed with hesitation and caution; ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... move was to set down, in orderly fashion, the list of the gem's attributes. I grouped together the fluctuating nature of its pale blue colour, its power of reproducing those who had gone into the Blind Spot, its combination of perfect solidity with extreme lightness; its quality of coldness to the touch of a male, and warmth to that of a female; and finally its ability to induct—I think this is ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... downward one, that they plane a deal board by pulling the tool toward them instead of pushing it, and that in building a house they first construct the roof and, having raised that into position, proceed to work downwards. In money the currency of the country consists of taels of fluctuating value. The tael became thinner and thinner until 2,000 of them piled together made less than three inches in height. The common cash consists of brass coins of varying thicknesses, with a round, square, or triangular hole in the centre, as in ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... interest; of an interest altogether peculiar, and not in this degree exampled in existing literature. These things can be but imperfectly stated here, and must be left, not in a state of demonstration, but at the utmost, of loose fluctuating probability; nevertheless, if inquired into, they will be found to have a precise enough meaning, and, as we ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... high upon the south wall a great dial was affixed, and on the dial a marking hand that indicated the current price of wheat, fluctuating with the changes made in the Pit. Just now it stood at ninety-three and three-eighths, the closing quotation of ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... his regular income of forty-five pounds a year, secured to him by his friends and patrons, was quite insufficient, with his new wants and desires, to cover his expenditure, and the profits derived from his books being fluctuating and altogether inconsiderable, he experienced the worst pangs of poverty in the terrible knowledge of being constantly in debt. To improve his position, he formed a thousand plans, some practicable and some visionary; but all ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... paper, not containing a promise to pay a dollar, but a simple declaration that this is a dollar—therefore, separates the paper from any connection with value. And yet we see that fiat money has some, although a fluctuating, value at certain times: if the State receives it for taxes, if it is a legal acquittal of obligations, then, to that extent, a certain quantity of it is given a value equal to the wealth represented by the taxes, or the debts. Jevons remarks on this point(247) that, if "the quantity of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... learning that the sole staple of the drama was "human characters acting from the direct and energetic influence of human passions." Yet Sir Walter was right; only Dryden's opinions and judgments kept fluctuating all his life long, too much obedient to the gusts of whim and caprice, or oftener still to the irregular influences of an impatient spirit, that could not brook any opposition from any quarter to its domineering self-will. For in not many months ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... evidence, and that far inferior in degree, you have never hesitated to act, when your own temporal interests were concerned. You never feared to commit the bark of your worldly fortunes to that fluctuating element. In many cases you believed on the testimony of others what seemed even to contradict your own senses. Why were you so much more ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... home several days. He held many consultations with his mother upon the financial condition of the family, and talked once with his father upon the same subject, but only once. He found a change in that quarter which was distressing; years of fluctuating fortune had done their work; each reverse had weakened the father's spirit and impaired his energies; his last misfortune seemed to have left hope and ambition dead within him; he had no projects, formed no plans—evidently he was a vanquished man. He looked worn ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... us. No doubt all the world, in all its moods, is human, as those for whose abode and instruction it was made. No doubt, it would be void of both beauty and significance to our eyes, were it not that it is one crowd of pictures of the human mind, blended in one living fluctuating whole. But these meanings are there in solution as it were. The individual is a centre of crystallisation to this solution. Around him meanings gather, are separated from other meanings; and if he be an artist, by which I mean ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... made playthings of them for centuries, and with every pebble given and taken were things said which should have meant more and more, had the play been earnest. Had Moses any idea of offering himself to Sally? No; but he was in one of those fluctuating, unresisting moods of mind in which he was willing to lie like a chip on the tide of present emotion, and let it rise and fall and dash him when it liked; and Sally never had seemed more beautiful and attractive to him than that afternoon, because there was a shade of reality and depth about her ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... his men wisely took the matter in their own hands and started back for the brig. Nine days later, through forced marches and heroic efforts of his sledge-mates, themselves partially disabled, Kane was carried on board the Advance fluctuating between life and death. Hardly conscious, his mind clouded, and his swollen features barely recognizable, his general condition was such that the surgeon regarded his ultimate recovery as ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... were absorbed or superseded by a higher code. It is necessary for me to repeat that I am not holding up the sixteenth century as a model which the nineteenth might safely follow. The population has become too large, employment has become too complicated and fluctuating, to admit of external control; while, in default of control, the relapse upon self-interest as the one motive principle is certain to ensue, and when it ensues is absolute in its operations. But as, even with us, these so-called ordinances of nature in time of ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... a mile from the spot which he himself occupied. Between this and the abbey lay a level lawn, chequered with moonlight and the mighty shadows of Snowdon. Of the abbey itself many parts appeared in the distance; sullen recesses which were suddenly and partially revealed by the fluctuating glare of the fire; aerial windows through which the sky gleamed in splendour, unless when it was obscured for a moment by the clouds which sailed across; pinnacles and crosses of sublime altitude in the remote distance; and in the immediate foreground the great gateway of the abbey ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... face partly averted from the baronet's gay party, and her gaze fixed intently upon the stage. Sir Harry could only see half the rose of one cheek, and the soft sweep of golden hair which lightly shaded it; and feasting his fancy on that bit of fluctuating color, entangled in the meshes of a tremulous screen of curls, he settled himself to await the close ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... week as he followed that thin, fluctuating streak of pay gravel along the ledge. Sometimes it was rich enough to set the pulse pounding in his temples; sometimes it was so poor that he was disgusted to the point of abandoning the work. But every day he worked, it yielded him something—though there was a week when he ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... without a rival—have succeeded in shocking the world with a small number of pretended instances of our barbarity. The only wonder is, that considering the extent of our country, the variety of our population, its fluctuating character, and the publicity of all our transactions, the number of cases is so small. It speaks well for us. Yet of these, many are false, all highly colored, some occurring half a century, most of them many years ago; and no doubt a large proportion of them perpetrated by foreigners. ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... of citizens and burgesses, these are supposed to be the mercantile part or trading interest of this kingdom. But as trade is of a fluctuating nature, and seldom long fixed in a place, it was formerly left to the crown to summon, pro re nata, the most flourishing towns to send representatives to parliament. So that as towns encreased in trade, ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... exact rendering of that which was given him by his contemporaries. They called him Louis the Pious. And so, indeed, he was, sincerely and even scrupulously pious; but he was still more weak than pious, as weak in heart and character as in mind; as destitute of ruling ideas as of strength of will, fluctuating at the mercy of transitory impressions or surrounding influences or positional embarrassments. The name of Debonnaire is suited to him; it expresses his moral worth and his political incapacity both ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... and fluctuating, hope that was nearly torture, and then came a dialogue, and with it the ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... any need for violating it. General Freedom of the Press Friedrich did not grant, in any quite Official or steady way; but in practice, under him, it always had a kind of real existence, though a fluctuating, ambiguous one. And we have to note, through Friedrich's whole reign, a marked disinclination to concern himself with Censorship, or the shackling of men's poor tongues and pens; nothing but some officious report ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... his lips and looked wise. "Well, all I can say is, he's doing as well as could be expected. Temperature normal, pulse fluctuating, appetite good, respiration improved by a good many cusswords, mustard plaster itching like all get out,—but otherwise he's at the point of death. I was in to see him after breakfast. He was sitting up in ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... time in expectation that you would return into Jersey, as the scene of military operations was directed to your part of the world, and would unavoidably drive you from your study and repose. Military operations are so fluctuating and uncertain as to render it exceedingly difficult to fix upon a retreat which may not be broken in upon in the course of a campaign. New-Haven bid fair to be the seat of calmness and serenity, of course well suited for a studious and contemplative mind, and therefore made choice ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... literary reputation is the most uncertain and fluctuating of all. The popularity of an author seems to depend quite as much upon fashion or whim as upon a change in taste or in literary form. Not only is contemporary judgment often at fault, but posterity is perpetually ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... great exertions, and without a single confederate out of Italy, save the false and fluctuating emperor, got an army into the field superior to that of the allies in point of numbers, and still more so in the character of its commander. This was Gaston de Foix, duke de Nemours, and brother of the queen of Aragon. Though a boy in years, for he was but twenty-two, he was ripe in ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... endeavour to wear any Disguise are so very liable to be mistaken; for Partiality or Prejudice generally sit as Judges: If the former mount the Judgment-seat, how many different Terms do we make use of to express that Goodness in another, which our own fluctuating Imaginations only have erected? If the latter, how do we vary Expressions to paint that Wickedness which we are resolve to prove inhabits the Mind we think proper to condemn?" "Nay, but (said Mr. Dellincourt) how are we concerned either ...
— Remarks on Clarissa (1749) • Sarah Fielding
... difficulties, which Smith, though not blind to their existence, treated in a vacillating and inconsistent fashion. Variations of supply and demand cause fluctuations in the price; but what finally determines the point to which the fluctuating prices must gravitate? We follow the process by which one wave propagates another; but there is still the question, What ultimately fixes the normal level? Upon this point Ricardo could find no definite statement in his teacher. 'Supply and demand' was a sacred phrase ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Rajah to his mountains, and cutting off all access to the plains, except through the British territories. To the inhabitants (about 5000 souls) this was a matter of congratulation, for it only involved the payment of a small fixed tax in money to the treasury at Dorjiling, instead of a fluctuating one in kind, with service to the Rajah, besides exempting them from further annoyance by the Dewan. At the present time the revenues of the tract thus acquired have doubled, and will very soon be quadrupled: every expense of our detention ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... Romans, and other Eastern peoples of antiquity so also, in later times, among the peasants of nearly every country of Europe. These national or popular costumes are in most cases adjudged by competent critics to be more becoming, more artistic, than the fluctuating styles of modern civilized apparel. At the same time they are also, at least usually, less obviously wasteful; that is to say, other elements than that of a display of expense are more readily detected ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... be firm, and any light thing lashed to a solid one will be solid; and reeds shaken with the wind may be turned into brazen pillars that cannot be moved. If we have Christ in our hearts, He will be our consolation first and our stability next. Why should it be that we are spasmodic and fluctuating, and the slaves of ups and downs, like some barometer in stormy weather; now at 'set fair,' and then away down where 'much rain' is written? There is no need for it. Get Christ into your heart, and your mercury will always stand at one height. Why ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... coal by consumers during the spring and summer months in anticipation of the winter requirements, in order to equalize the present highly fluctuating seasonal demands on the mines and railroads, and to eliminate the recurring shortages of coal in the winter months. This was particularly recommended by the United States Bituminous Coal Commission in a ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... it is a tendency of the mind to be forever changing. If left to itself, it would be in ceaseless fluctuation, the whim of every passing fancy. This tendency to fluctuate comes with more or less regularity, some psychologists say every second or two. True, we do not always yield to the fluctuating tendency, nevertheless we are recurrently tempted, and we must exercise continuous effort to keep a particular object at the focus. The power to exert effort and to regulate the arrangement of our states of mind is the peculiar gift of man, and is a prime function of ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... the trench: and on walked deliberately the fluctuating rope, the staff now travelling the gorsey ground, now bounding like a kangaroo yards high, to come ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... members of the family in the mansion house, of which Louisa Grant was now habitually one, were by no means indifferent observers of these fluctuating and tardy changes. While the snow rendered the roads passable, they had partaken largely in the amusements of the winter, which included not only daily rides over the mountains, and through every valley within ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... given in water by the mouth. Fomentations of warm water may be made over the loins and between the thighs, and the oiled hand inserted into the rectum may press moderately on the anterior part of the bladder, which can be felt as an elastic fluctuating bag of an oval shape ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... inform the mind, or mend the heart, Is known; as grateful nations oft have found Far as the rude barbarian marks the bound. Philosophy, no idle pedant dream, Here holds her search by heaven-taught Reason's beam; Here History paints, with elegance and force, The tide of Empires' fluctuating course; Here Douglas forms wild Shakspeare into plan, And Harley[68] rouses all the god in man. When well-form'd taste and sparkling wit unite, With manly lore, or female beauty bright, (Beauty, where faultless symmetry and grace, Can ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... to their car with the Graysons, but in the afternoon he detached himself somewhat, and came in touch with the fluctuating crowd that passed down the aisle—it was always a part of his duty, as well as his inclination, to know the thoughts and feelings of outsiders, because it was outsiders who made the world, and it was from them, too, that the ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... permanent though perhaps not easily defined impression. It may be asked was this conversion? was it genuine? and in a child so young? We answer it would be very difficult to prove that it was not. One thing is certain, that from this time there was a settled purpose to serve the Lord, which spite of fluctuating feeling and periods of wintry coldness was steadily kept in view; ever and anon gathering strength until it ripened into maturity. The sapling, because it bends to the breeze is not therefore destitute of ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... of blowing off, to insure which it should be impossible to diminish the amount of water sent into the boiler by the feed pump, and the excess should be discharged overboard through a valve near the water level of the boiler, which valve is governed by a float that will rise or fall with the fluctuating level of the water. If the float be a copper ball, a little water should be introduced into it before it is soldered or brazed up, which will insure an equality of pressure within and without the ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... little world of three acres—lawn and fountain, shrubbery and terrace, to themselves, and Alice never asked if there was any other world without. She was now quite a scholar, as Mr. Simcox himself averred. She could read aloud and fluently to Maltravers, and copied out his poetry in a small, fluctuating hand, and he had no longer to chase throughout his vocabulary for short Saxon monosyllables to make the bridge of intercourse between their ideas. Eros and Psyche are ever united, and Love opens all the petals of the soul. On one subject alone, Maltravers ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and after much putting up and pulling down, he leaves at last but little standing on the soil. He had not laid down for himself a previous rule for determining what should be admitted as historical evidence, or the rules he had prescribed for himself were of an uncertain, fluctuating character. Neither do we discover in Dr Thirlwall the faculty, existing at least in any eminent degree, of realising to himself, or vividly representing to others, the intellectual condition of a nascent people, far removed from ourselves in habits ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... malice of your smile, That faint and fluctuating glint Between your eyelids, does it hint ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... itself, but in our position with regard to it. And, indeed, without such a correction of appearances, both in internal and external sentiment, men could never think or talk steadily on any subject; while their fluctuating situations produce a continual variation on objects, and throw them into such different and contrary ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... became somewhat softer, much less painful, and was readily palpated and percussed; there was a distinct resistance about the size of a hand, quite firm, and not fluctuating, and accompanied by marked dullness, around McBurney's point and downward, and only in this region severe stabbing pain; in ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... and fluctuating; but its nature is not doubtful. . . . In spirit she is resigned: at heart she is, I believe, a true Christian. . . . May God support her and all of us through the trial of lingering sickness, and aid her in the last ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... so do the ideas concerning the other world. There is no regular dogma; and since even the conceptions of religions with well-defined dogmas are constantly changing, religions which are handed down by oral tradition only, and in the vaguest way, must necessarily be fluctuating. Following the natural laws of thought, religious conceptions split into numerous local varieties, and it is the task of the scientist to seek, amid this variety of exterior forms, the common underlying idea, long forgotten by everyone ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... vivacity of his audience, requiring perpetual amusement and variety, compelled a man, as great even as Demosthenes, to curtail his arguments, and rarely, indeed, to pursue a theme with the requisite fulness of development or illustration; a point in which the superior dignity and the far less fluctuating mobility of the Roman mind gave ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the people go? Would he not have wondered at our patience and long-suffering, and have said, "'Tis time to change our master!—'Tis time to part!"—And had he been an American born, would he not have shewed his wisdom by adopting the language of independency? Happy then for America in these fluctuating times, she is not without her Solomons, who see the necessity of heark'ning to reason, and listening to the voice ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... mythologies. Hear the verdict of one who confessedly stands at the head of the roll of oriental historians: "In no single respect—if we except the fact that it is miraculous—has that story a mythical character. It is a single story, told without variations; whereas myths are fluctuating and multiform: it is blended inextricably with the civil history of the times, which it everywhere reports with extraordinary accuracy; whereas myths distort or supersede civil history: it is full of prosaic detail, which myths studiously eschew: it abounds with practical instruction of ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... of a porcupine on a single tree is often easy to assess. The effect of a fluctuating population of porcupines on a mixed forest is not so easy to assess, but is of more intrinsic interest. It is desirable that studies designed to evaluate the latter effect continue while the population remains low and also when the next cyclic increase begins. Publication of Spencer's ...
— Mammals of Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado • Sydney Anderson
... greatness, and with many claims to goodness, had hit the line of truth which so many of the "god-likes" of the republic, under the influence of their passions, and stimulated by the transient and fluctuating interests of the day, entirely overlooked, or which, if seeing, they recklessly disregarded. A less impracticable subject for excitement,—the primum mobile of all American patriotism and activity, if we are to believe ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... the fluctuating fortunes of these savage nations. War, famine, pestilence, together or singly, bring down their strength and thin their numbers. Whole tribes are rooted up from their native places, wander for a time about these ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... Handel would have sent the steadfast funds up above par and maintained them on an inverted pedal with all the other markets fluctuating iniquitously round them like the sheep that turn every one to his own way in the Messiah. He thought something of the kind ought to have been done, and in the absence of Handel and Dr. Morell we determined to write an oratorio that should ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... invitation to this purpose, until his mistress positively commanded him to be gone, in an angry tone; when, turning towards the bed on which the body still lay, half awake to sensation, half drowned in the meanders of fluctuating delirium, he uttered a deep and savage growl, curled up his nose and lips, showing his full range of white and sharpened teeth, which might have matched those of an actual wolf, and then, turning round, sullenly followed the domestic out ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... the great Art revival in England has been noticed; in the Elizabethan oak work of chimney pieces, panelling, and furniture, are to be found varying forms of the free classic style which the Renaissance had brought about. These fluctuating changes in fashion continued in England from the time of Elizabeth until the middle of the eighteenth century, when, as will be shewn presently, a distinct alteration in the ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... on her a suitable jointure, but declined to tie up any portion of his property for the benefit of children by the marriage. He declared that so much of his fortune was invested either in mines, the produce of which was extremely fluctuating, or in various funds, over rapid transfers in which it was his amusement and his interest to have control, unchecked by reference to trustees, that entails and settlements on children were an ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... their future existence together as man and wife: something which he recognised as an interior voice chimed in, from time to time, with provoking interrogations, mostly unanswerable. A plaintive need of happiness, melancholy, obscure, but recurrent, mixed in his fluctuating thoughts. Finally, it pursued him, haunted him, and caught him with the strange tenacity of an incorporeal grasp. Sara, now dethroned from her place of power, loomed in all his dreams. Irresistibly, he was drawn toward the forbidden ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... brought to bear in order to secure that; but the text says that the deepest ground upon which it can be rested is nothing less divine and solemn than this, the actual communication to men, to feeble, vacillating, fluctuating wills, and treacherous, wayward, wandering hearts, of the strength and fixedness which are given ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... specie basis is very gratifying, but the fact can not be denied that the instability of the value of our currency is prejudicial to our prosperity, and tends to keep up prices, to the detriment of trade. The evils of a depreciated and fluctuating currency are so great that now, when the premium on gold has fallen so much, it would seem that the time has arrived when by wise and prudent legislation Congress should look to a policy which would place our currency at par with ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... Tiberius to Nero inclusively, had risen to a high military rank, by which, with a spirit of enterprise, and large promises to the soldiery, it was not difficult to snatch the reins of government, while they were yet fluctuating in the hands of Otho. His ambition prompted to the attempt, and his boldness was crowned with success. In the service of the four preceding emperors, Vitellius had imbibed the principal vices of them all: but what ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... because of high income inequality, a large proportion of the population remains poor. Gabon depended on timber and manganese until oil was discovered offshore in the early 1970s. The oil sector now accounts for 50% of GDP. Gabon continues to face fluctuating prices for its oil, timber, and manganese exports. Despite the abundance of natural wealth, poor fiscal management hobbles the economy. The devaluation of the CFA franc - its currency - by 50% in January 1994 sparked ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... this change being, that the prismatic cloud itself is always in rapid, and generally in fluctuating motion. "A light veil of clouds had drawn itself," says Professor Tyndall, in describing his solitary ascent of Monte Rosa, "between me and the sun, and this was flooded with the most brilliant dyes. Orange, red, ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... century after Christ, occupied in the main the belt of flat country between the Baltic and the mouths of the Rhine. Between them and the old High German Swabians lay a race intermediate in tongue and blood, the Franks. The Low Germans were divided, like most other barbaric races, into several fluctuating and ill-marked tribes, whose names are loosely and perhaps interchangeably used by the few authorities which remain to us. We must not expect to find among them the definiteness of modern civilised nations, but rather such a vagueness as that which ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... hand, to be strong abroad I must seem strong at home: the vast design I have planned, and, as by a miracle, begun to execute, will fail at once if it seem abroad to be intrusted to an unsteady and fluctuating power. That design (continued Rienzi, pausing, and placing his hand on a marble bust of the young Augustus) is greater than his, whose profound yet icy soul united Italy in subjection,—for it would unite Italy in freedom;—yes! ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... that of a man whom he paid heavily to serve him as his tool and menial,)—where a beautiful Neapolitan danseuse condescended to live as his mistress;—he was a diplomat for himself if not for his country, and kept his finger on the pulse of European politics as well as on the fluctuating fevers of new creeds. But he never troubled himself seriously as to the possible growth of any "movement", or "society", or "crusade"; as experience had taught him that no matter how ardently thinkers may propound theories, and enthusiasts support ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... despised Annie because she was a girl, and because she had no self-assertion. If she had shown herself aggressively disagreeable, they would have made some attempt to conciliate her; but as it was, she became at once the object of a succession of spiteful annoyances, varying in intensity with the fluctuating invention of the two boys. At one time they satisfied themselves with making grimaces of as insulting a character as they could produce; at another they rose to the rubbing of her face with dirt, or the tripping up of her heels. ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... could be furnished us by fair and commercial means was ridiculous. The trade sometimes ceased, as during the late war. The demand was more or less according to circumstances. But how was it possible, that to a demand so exceedingly fluctuating the supply should always exactly accommodate itself? Alas! We made human beings the subject of commerce; we talked of them as such; and yet we would not allow them the common principle of commerce, that the supply must accommodate itself to the ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... Anglo-Saxon troh]. A small boat broad at both ends. Also, the hollow or interval between two waves, which resembles a broad and deep trench perpetually fluctuating. As the set of the sea is produced by the wind, the waves and the trough are at right angles with it; hence a ship rolls heaviest when she is in the trough ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... short as it was, afforded by the precedence of her hostess in the matter of salutation, gave Mrs. Royston the opportunity to catch her breath and find her voice. She had not seen this man since, five years ago, he had left her home her expectant bridegroom. But beyond a fluctuating flush in her fair cheek, a dilation of her blue eyes, a flutter of those eyelids which he had always esteemed a special point of her beauty, being so smooth, so full, so darkly lashed, she conserved an ostensible calm, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... contrasted, as at this time, with the tall, massive frame of another. The lines in her father's face were soft and waving, with a frequent undulating kind of trembling movement passing over them, showing every fluctuating emotion; the eyelids were large and arched, giving to the eyes a peculiar languid beauty which was almost feminine. The brows were finely arched, but were, by the very size of the dreamy lids, raised to a considerable distance from the eyes. Now, in Mr. Thornton's ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... almost in the agonies of earthly dissolution, with rigid body, rigorous limbs, and fluctuating spirit, was brought to full health by the application to his moribund body of a piece of the true cross, about the year 1244; and later in the century miracles took place at his tomb. M. Littre, in his Fragment de Medecine Retrospective, describes seven miracles which occurred at ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... fluctuating hypotheses of physics, three main problems arise in connecting the world of physics with the world of ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... other hand the natural conditions and the use of water for power and irrigation, which are among the older vested rights, require the Lake to be used to some extent as a storage reservoir, which implies a fluctuating level. ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... At length the fluctuating groups began to swim before the eyes of our hero as they gradually closed; nor did he re-open them till the morning sun was high on the lake without, though there was but a faint and glimmering twilight in the recesses of Uaimh an Ri, or ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... soon drove the recollection of these vague conjectures from mens minds. When the war ended, and the independence of the States was acknowledged, Mr. Temple turned his attention from the pursuit of commerce, which was then fluctuating and uncertain, to the settlement of those tracts of land which he had purchased. Aided by a good deal of money, and directed by the suggestions of a strong and practical reason, his enterprise throve to a degree that the climate and rugged face of the country ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... shifting and altering, and though we ourselves vary and change, there is a supreme spirit of steadfastness in the midst of this huge unrest, and an abiding, unshaken, immovable principle of good guiding this vanishing world of fluctuating atoms, in whose eternal permanence of nature we largely participate, and our tendency toward and aspiration for whose perfect stability is one of the very causes of the progress, and therefore mutability, of our existence. Perhaps the most painful of all the forms in which change confronts ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... went on slowly with a meditative air.. "I love her, ... yes!—as a man must always love the woman that baffles him, ... the woman whose moods are complex and fluctuating as the winds on the sea,—and whose humor sways between the softness of the dove and the fierceness of the tiger. Nothing is more fatally fascinating to the masculine sense than such a creature,—more especially ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the midst of such a scene that the family of the squatter assembled to make their final decision, concerning the several individuals who had been thrown into their power, by the fluctuating chances of the incidents related. Every being possessing life and liberty had been afoot, since the first streak of grey had lighted the east; and even the youngest of the erratic brood seemed conscious that ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... ready for him. The old gun, too, was available still, so that he was not altogether disabled from attending to the duties of the chase, and in a short time afterwards, "luck" being in his favour, he had won back some of his lost possessions. But he was too often in that fluctuating state of alternating excitement and depression which is the invariable accompaniment, in a greater or less degree, of the gambler's sin, whether carried on in the depths of the Arctic wilderness, the well-named "hells" of London, or ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... condition left everyone in suspense: had the mighty Duke of Romagna, the powerful condottiere who had taken thirty towns and fifteen fortresses in five years, been seated, sword in hand, upon his charger, nothing would have been uncertain of fluctuating even for a moment; far, as Caesar afterwards told Macchiavelli, his ambitious soul had provided for all things that could occur on the day of the pope's death, except the one that he should be dying himself; but being nailed down to his bed, sweating off the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... found himself more perplexed and anxious over their apparent uncertainty than he had ever been over some of his greatest financial schemes. Facts and figures can to a certain extent be relied upon, but the fluctuating humours and vagaries of a man and woman in love with each other are beyond the most precise calculations of the skilled mathematician. For it often happens that when they seem to be coldest they are warmest—and cases have been known ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... applicants until all are satisfied. This is the great event of our day. At the grocery stores on the opposite side of the road, news telegrams are shown on a board, and with these we eke out the knowledge of our fluctuating fate. Close by, too, is posted up a proclamation by the officer commanding the troops in the Island. He bids us not to walk too near a fort or to convey to any casual person such knowledge as we may have gained ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... things eternal?—Powers depart, Possessions vanish, and opinions change, And passions hold a fluctuating seat; But, by the storms of circumstance unshaken, And subject neither to eclipse nor wane, Duty exists; immutably survive For our support, the measures and the forms Which an abstract intelligence supplies; Whose kingdom is where time ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... of cargoes, to be carried to three different destinations. Which would be the best choice? The most profitable from an energy standpoint, as far as the ship was concerned, considering the relative values of the cargoes? What about relative spoilage rates as compared with fluctuating markets? ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... seem singular how the life of a sailor—a life so full of vicissitude and enterprise, of hair's-breadth escapes, of contact with wild men and wild usages, and of intercourse with a form of nature so vast, so fluctuating, so mysterious, and so terribly sublime as the ocean, which, in its calm and silence, forms an emblem of all that is peaceful and profound, and, in its tempestuous rage, of all that is unreconciled and anarchical in the mind of ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... one cloud to another, feeling not merely how they retire to the horizon, but how they melt back into the recesses of the sky; every interval being filled with absolute air, and all its spaces so melting and fluctuating, and fraught with change as with repose, that as you look, you will fancy that the rays shoot higher and higher into the vault of light, and that the pale streak of horizontal vapor is melting away from the cloud that it crosses. Now watch for the next barred sunrise, and take this vignette ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... then, that the reputation of Gall and his discoveries of mental organs in the brain has been so fluctuating? Why have the discoveries that came forward with so imposing a prestige at the beginning of this century so entirely lost that prestige in the colleges in sixty years, that the writings of Gall and his disciples are generally neglected? ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... be said of the last hundred years of Spain's history, it has been an advance, a continuous struggle for life and liberty. There had been fluctuating periods of progress. Charles III., a truly wise and patriotic monarch, the first since Ferdinand and Isabella, made extraordinary changes during his too short life. The population of the country rose a million and a half in the twenty-seven ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... cloth is woven by the negro women for the wear of the slaves. All this shows a desire to make the most of the recources of the country, and to protect the planter against the embarrassments which often arise from the fluctuating prices of the great staple of the south—cotton. But I have no time to dwell upon this subject. To-morrow ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... consolation there, for the European system was in a ferment, and rumours of peace and of war were succeeding each other with such rapidity and assurance that it was impossible to know which to trust. It was obvious that a fortune lay either way, for every rumour set the funds fluctuating; but without special information it was impossible to act, and no one dared to plunge heavily upon the strength of newspaper surmise and the gossip of the street. Warner knew that an hour's work might resuscitate the ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his hands to their proper dwelling-place—his pockets—he jerked his thumb toward a long white boat, which we had not seen through the blinding scud. Bereft of its brethren, or sisters—for all fluctuating things are feminine—that boat survived, in virtue of standing a few feet higher than the rest. But even so, and mounted on the last hump of the pebble ridge, it was rolling and reeling with stress of the wind and the wash of ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... splendors of the under-world. The white, chalky bottom is visible from the surface at a depth of one hundred feet. Over that brilliant floor the filtered sunshine spreads a cloth of gold continually flecked with sailing shadows and fluctuating tints. The singular clearness of the medium removes that lovely violet drapery which surrounds like a pavilion the submarine palace, and allows a wider scope of vision. But the scene here is not the play of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... lived by the chase and by the rude cultivation of their long, narrow farms; and it was held by a garrison of three or four hundred British regulars, with auxiliary bands of American loyalist and French Canadian rangers, and, above all, with a formidable but fluctuating reserve force of Indian allies. [Footnote: Haldimand ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... but owing to the avenues formed by the mountains it is frequently impossible to tell the true direction of the currents, as they often vary within short distances and brief differences of time. This is truer in light fluctuating puffs of air than in steady breezes; though the squalls of even the latter are familiarly known to be uncertain and baffling in all mountainous regions and narrow waters. On the present occasion, Hutter himself (as he shoved the ark from her berth at the side of the platform) was ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... perceptible lack of virility, a fluctuating vagueness of outline about the characterisation of some of his men. In his treatment of crowds, in his description of a mob, personified as 'some huge beast purring to itself in stupid contentment,' he can have few rivals. In tracing the influence of women over his heroes he evinces no ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... all the other charts. Population fluctuating slightly at the moment, completely static for the past five centuries. A slight decrease in agriculture, matched by an increase in synthetic food production. A slight population movement toward the ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... a manner accepted into it, even as if Providence had made him a special instrument to achieve the discoveries which the Lords of the Congregation had then so much at heart. And while he was walking along in this fluctuating mood, he came suddenly upon a man who was sitting, as he had so shortly before been himself, sad and solitary, gazing on the sea. The stranger, on hearing him approach, rose hastily, and was moving quickly away; but my grandfather called to ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... despite, folly is made crime. But since sin must ever be arraigned for itself, and error is prone to plead for mercy, I leave no word here that can be misconstrued or misapplied. Certain it is that Elizabeth Whitman was marked as one of strangely fluctuating moods, as the truly gifted ever are, and of a wild, incomprehensible nature, little understood by those who should have known her best, and with whom she was most intimate. Over this, in tracing her history, it were well to pause, were it not that thus we might give countenance to this ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... degrees included under the one name of Lotanu, and this term was extended to comprise successively the entire valley of the Jordan, then that of the Orontes, and finally even that of the Euphrates. Lotanu became thenceforth a vague and fluctuating term, which the Egyptians applied indiscriminately to widely differing Asiatic nations, and to which they added another indefinite epithet when they desired to use it in a more limited sense: that part of Syria nearest to Egypt being in this case qualified as Upper Lotanu, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... watched for some time the fluctuating appearance of public affairs, and it was not until war was not only certain, but actually in progress, that he called upon Rubineau ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... Wind the same as yesterday and fluctuating—very heavy dew last night and very cold. The last two days have been warm and suit our purpose for meat-drying admirably. The two invalids are still very unwell, but trust they will be better by the time the meat is thoroughly dry and cause us no unnecessary detention ...
— McKinlay's Journal of Exploration in the Interior of Australia • John McKinlay
... the roaring of the fire filled our ears; and we had scarce reached the passage before the stairs window fell in, a branch of flame shot brandishing through the aperture, and the interior of the pavilion became lit up with that dreadful and fluctuating glare. At the same moment we heard the fall of something heavy and inelastic in the upper story. The whole pavilion, it was plain, had gone alight like a box of matches, and now not only flamed sky-high to land and sea, but threatened ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... LIFE discordant elements arrests, Rejects the noxious, and the pure digests; Combines with Heat the fluctuating mass, And gives a while solidity to gas; 40 Organic forms with chemic changes strive, Live but to die, and die but to revive! Immortal matter braves the transient storm, Mounts from the ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... gentler elements predominated in her character, and her father knew what she needed, when he gave her the playful advice to "have more of Cato." Without Christian principle she might have been a victim of morbid sensitiveness, or even at the mercy of fluctuating impulses; but religion supplied the tonic she needed, and by the grace of God aiding her own efforts, we see her possessed of firmness of purpose and moral courage enough to rebuke many of us who ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... makes him pay taxes; it ventures to expropriate him for the public good. He wants a jus utendi et abutendi; the State says "agreed"—but adds that there are abuses and abuses. Then Stirner cries "stop thief!" "I am the enemy of the State," says he, "which is always fluctuating between the alternative: He or I.... With the State there is no property, i.e., no individual property, only State property. Only through the State have I what I have, as it is only through the State that I am what I am. My private property is only what the State leaves me of ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... great disadvantage, relatively speaking, to any man, and especially to a very careless, and a very sanguine man, to have possessed an uncertain and fluctuating income. That disadvantage is greatly increased, if the person so circumstanced has conceived himself to be in some degree entitled to presume that, by the exertion of his own talents, he may at pleasure increase that income—thereby becoming induced to make promises to himself ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... read them younger than I, I think;) and how one gradually grew up into a different knowledge of them, and so forth—would it not be interesting to many people? I should like to know if you descry anything in this. It is one of the dim notions fluctuating within me.[144]. . . The profits, brave indeed, are four hundred pounds more than the utmost I expected. . . . The same yearnings have been mine, in reference to the Praslin business. It is pretty clear to me, for one thing, that the Duchess was one of the most uncomfortable ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... last for days. I don't mean to say that the fog did not vary a little in its density. Now and then it would thin out mysteriously, revealing to the men a more or less ghostly presentment of their ship. Several times the shadow of the coast itself swam darkly before their eyes through the fluctuating opaque brightness of the great white cloud clinging ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... excellent water, which contributed much to recover me. After this I advanced farther into the island, and at last reached a fine plain, where at a great distance I perceived a horse feeding. I went towards it, fluctuating between hope and fear, for I knew not whether in advancing I was more likely to endanger or to preserve my life. As I approached, I perceived it to be a very fine mare, tied to a stake. Whilst I was admiring its beauty, I heard from beneath the voice of a man, who immediately ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... nations (including the US) prohibit mineral resource exploration and exploitation south of the fluctuating Polar Front (Antarctic Convergence) which is in the middle of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and serves as the dividing line between the very cold polar surface waters to the south and the warmer waters ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... garrisoned by the spirit of the empire. It still stood, but it stood dismantled; there were evident breaches in its walls, and the fugitives of Opposition, rallying with the hope of success, advanced again to the storm, headed by their great leader, and sustained by the capricious and fluctuating multitude. The premier was harassed by the incessant toil of defence—a toil in which he had scarcely a sharer, and which exposed him to the most remorseless hostility. Yet, if the historian were to choose the moment for his true fame, this was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... have understood had he not been sleeping the sound sleep of a man whose temperature is fluctuating between 102 and 104 degrees. But whether he heard or not made no difference to Shears, ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... it is equally evident, that, while the gold and silver which flowed in upon them from these sources strengthened the people for the work they were to do and the burdens they were to bear, the comparisons they were daily making between fluctuating paper and steadfast metal were not of a nature to strengthen their faith in money that could be made by a turn of the printing-press and a few strokes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... molten, driving darkly through a vast storm of words. Such revelations, no doubt, come closer to reality than the poignant epigrams of Racine. In life, men's minds are not sharpened, they are diffused, by emotion; and the utterance which best represents them is fluctuating and agglomerated rather than compact and defined. But Racine's aim was less to reflect the actual current of the human spirit than to seize upon its inmost being and to give expression to that. One might be tempted ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... benefits in American trade unions resembles closely the growth of the insurance systems described in the preceding chapter. The first unions to adopt death benefits, for example, paid for a time a sum fluctuating in amount. The benefit was in each case the sum raised by per capita assessments, and the yield varied according to the membership. Thus, the Iron Molders paid a fluctuating benefit from 1870 to 1879.[88] Upon the death of ...
— Beneficiary Features of American Trade Unions • James B. Kennedy
... in different positions, or in a different rhythm, or with different emphasis, simply because they imitate different teachers, and because no norm, no certainty as to the best methods for the teaching, has been determined. But the process of learning is still more fluctuating and still more dependent upon chance than the process of teaching. The apprentice approaches the instruction, in any chance way, and the beginner usually learns even the first steps with a psychophysical attitude which is left ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... appreciated. In Europe almost all the disturbances of society arise from the irregularities of domestic life. To despise the natural bonds and legitimate pleasures of home, is to contract a taste for excesses, a restlessness of heart, and the evil of fluctuating desires. Agitated by the tumultuous passions which frequently disturb his dwelling, the European is galled by the obedience which the legislative powers of the state exact. But when the American retires from the turmoil of public life to the bosom of his family, he finds in it the ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... her arrival in this country the ill effects of her steerage voyage had left her too miserable to work. She then obtained employment as a finisher in a skirt factory, where her best wage was $7. But her earnings in this place had been so fluctuating that she was uncertain what her total income had been before the last thirteen weeks. At the beginning of this time she had left the skirt factory and become a finisher in a waist factory, where she earned from $10 to $12 a week, working nine and a ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... Merritt's left. Davies's and Irvin Gregg's brigades on my right and left flanks met with some resistance, yet not enough to deter them from, executing their orders. In front of Merritt the enemy held on more stubbornly, however, and there ensued an exceedingly severe and, at times, fluctuating fight. Finally the Confederates gave way, and we pursued them almost to Spottsylvania Court House; but deeming it prudent to recall the pursuers about dark, I encamped Gregg's and Merritt's divisions in the open fields to ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... Society, which affords much rational amusement to the public, a few hints may at present suffice. The largeness of its income is a frightful consideration. It is too tempting as the subject for jobs, and it is too fluctuating and uncertain in its amount, not to render embarrassment in the affairs of the Society a circumstance likely to occur, without the greatest circumspection. It is most probable, from the very recent formation of this Institution, that its Officers and Council ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... She was as honest as her sons. The question, dim-lucent, showed her, if but in shadow, something of the truth concerning herself—not so that she could grasp it, for she saw it as in a glimmer, a fluctuating, vanishing flash—namely, that she cared more about salvation than about God—that, if she could but keep her boy out of hell, she would be content to live on without any nearer approach to him in whom she had her being! God was to her an awe, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... the prompt marketing of the four per cent. bonds, to disabuse those who have been led to believe that the President and you favor the remonetizing of silver, with a view of paying our national debt in a metal so fluctuating as silver has become since the principal nations of Europe have demonetized it. We remain, dear ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... coming from readjustment in the cooerdination of industrial processes themselves. We hear much of standardization and stabilization. An economic technique and the control of fluctuating conditions might do much to increase the efficiency of industry in every way. This idea of the application of scientific procedure to life we see extending to the control of the energies of the human factor. We have already ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge |
