"Shifting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view—at the fully-matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable—at the cautious selections and rejections—at the painful erasures and interpolations,—in a word, at the wheels and pinions, the tackle for scene-shifting, the step-ladders and demon-traps, the cock's feathers, the red paint, and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... yellow butterfly, if you meet one in October, has so toned down his spring yellow that you might fancy him a pale green leaf floating along the road. There is a shining, quivering, gleaming; there is a changing, fluttering, shifting; there is a mixing, weaving—varnished wings, translucent wings, wings with dots and veins, all playing over the purple heath; a very tangle of many-toned lights and hues. Then come the apples: if you look upon them from an upper window, so as to glance along the level plane of the ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... his rigid hands incarcerated in yellow kid gloves. On the back seat was a lady who triumphed over the June heat. Her stout form was armoured in a skin-tight silk dress of the description known as "changeable," being a gorgeous combination of shifting hues. She sat erect, waving a much-ornamented fan, with her eyes fixed stonily far down the street. However Martella Garvey's heart might be rejoicing at the pleasures of her new life, Blackjack had done his work with her exterior. He had carved her countenance to the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... sitting, or pacing up and down. It was the scene on the poop-deck over again; only, here being no fear of restraining keepers, the wild beasts were a little more free in their movements. It is impossible to convey, in words, any idea of the hideous phantasmagoria of shifting limbs and faces which moved through the evil-smelling twilight of this terrible prison-house. Callot might have drawn it, Dante might have suggested it, but a minute attempt to describe its horrors would but disgust. There are depths ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... it. Mr. Tuckerman relates, in the "North American Review," though without naming the place or the persons, a story in which they were brought out in a singular manner. He was there fifteen or twenty years since, a guest at Verplanck's table. He describes the June sunshine which played through the shifting branches of tall elms on the smooth oaken floor of the old dining room, the plate of antique pattern on the sideboard and the portraits of revolutionary heroes on the walls. As they sat down to dinner, an old lady, bowed with ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant
... for his visitor to open. Trimmer was not in a hurry. He eyed the man across the table calmly, his small, shifting ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... dawned, clear and cool; a day with an air like liquid amber, that properly belonged to September,—the weather prophet really shifting it into August from pure kindness, having taken a sticky dogday out and pitchforked it ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of the gaily gowned ladies with their furbelows and parasols in shifting groups under the beeches, the sunlight falling through the leaves in broken golden shapes upon the shining silks and satins of the dresses, the merry chatter of the younger folk and the more demure coquetry of the older ones, are still a pleasant picture ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... pantomime, and make Harlequin and Columbine happy. What, if reality be not so, gentlemen and ladies; and if, after dancing a variety of jigs and antics, and jumping in and out of endless trap-doors and windows, through life's shifting scenes, no fairy comes down to make US comfortable at the close of the performance? Ah! let us give our honest novel-folks the benefit of their position, and not be ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the hardest job I ever struck," he growled, shifting impatiently from shade to shade, and dratting the flies and dust; and even sank so low as to envy the missus ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... Hamakua; I sat in a grove of Pandanus, A stranger at my arrival, A rock was my shelter from rain. 5 I found it a wearisome wait, Cautiously shifting about. ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... the words were still in his mouth he sensed the meaning of the thing; shifting his position to the other window he saw that the illuminated windows below belonged to different rooms; there was a wall between Nora and the two men, and it was at this she was kneeling, one ear held to ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... reached Thespiae, (18) and from that base made the territory of Thebes his objective. Finding the great plain fenced round with ditch and palisade, as also the most valuable portions of the country, he adopted the plan of shifting his encampment from one place to another. Regularly each day, after the morning meal, he marched out his troops and ravaged the territory, confining himself to his own side of the palisadings and trench. The appearance of Agesilaus at any point whatever ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... invasion; but within the fringe of foreign settlements which they planted along the coast from Dublin to Limerick, the various Irish kingdoms maintained themselves according to their ancient customs, and, as English tribes had done before in Britain, waged frequent war for the honour of a shifting and dubious supremacy. The island enjoyed a fair fame for its climate, its healthfulness, its pasturage, its fisheries; English chroniclers dwelt on "the far-famed harbour of Dublin, the rival of our London in commerce," and told of ships ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... hut. While still a long way off, he saw, lighted by the sunset rays, what he quickly recognized as a canoe drawn half out of the water almost at his door. He warily drew nearer. Presently he stopped, and stood slowly and softly shifting his footing about on the oozy soil, at a little point of shore only some fifty yards away from his cabin. His eyes, peering from the ambush, descried a man standing by the pirogue and searching with his gaze the wide distances that would soon be hidden in the ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... it shall cease. The tide of passion has again risen, and lashed by repression to tenfold fury, the shores of life have again been strewn with new victims; but knowledge—calm, will-less knowledge—has gradually invaded all hearts; and the restless, shifting sea (which is passion) shrinks to ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... Variation.—The process by which ideas are born and propagated in human society is strangely analogous to the methods of biological evolution. The laws of survival, of adaptation, of variation and mutation prevail, and the evidence of conspicuous waste is ever present. The grinding and shifting of human nature under social law is similar to the grinding and shifting of physical nature under organic law. When we consider the length of time it takes physical nature to accomplish the ultimate of fixed values, seventy ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... Creek is a mere streamlet, and the flow of the tide is restricted to its mouth. With our rubbers we may ford it dry-shod; but if you choose to cross the bridge, we must wade through shifting sand, and our walk will be the longer. In midsummer the bed is dry, and almost obliterated by the drift. On the approach of autumnal rains, the farmers plough a passage for the water, to prevent their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... Brooks, despite his illness, was indeed working out of the back door of his yellow trundle bed at the moment, and looking anxiously about. But the engineer stood pale and quiet, coolly studying the flustered growler, and when Burleigh's shifting eyes sought that young scientist's face, what he read there—and Burleigh was no fool—told him he would be wise to change the tune. The aid had pushed out in front of the troop and was signaling to Dean, once more in saddle and scanning through his glass the ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... young upstart tufa and sandstone that was not thought of when the Laurentians were built. One really cannot have much respect for a rock that he can kick to pieces. The gay young buttes in this land of quickly shifting horizons are not without their charm; they look well in certain lights, and they are decidedly better than no hills at all. Although immature, they have an air of pretending to be very ancient, to be the ruins of mountains. ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... half-high, suspend Their shifting vapours, and contend With rocks that suffer not defeat; And snows, and suns, and mad winds meet To battle where the cliffs ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... The shifting wind brought quite a snow-storm, that covered us over about three inches deep. My company being very cold, I advised to stop at a house, the dim light of which was so tempting to the shivering company. I went to the door and asked permission to enter, giving our number, ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... eternal year: 2 King. Whose full and all-unwrinkled face Nor sinks nor swells with time or place; 3 King. But everywhere and every while Is one consistent solid smile, 1 King. Not vexed and tost, 2 King. 'Twixt spring and frost; 3 King. Nor by alternate shreds of light; Sordidly shifting hands ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... case, none too apparent; but if one exists, it does not in the least arise from the actual language which Wordsworth has used. If in anything, it consists in a slight shifting of the focus of apprehension, a sudden and scarcely perceptible emphasis on the detail of actual fact, which is a deviation from the emotional key of the poem as a whole. In the next instance the lapse is, ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... country-side, and besides the residents in the hotels (whose uses to vagabonds are purely financial) there is on this shore a drifting and incalculable population, heterogeneous, yet with a note of character common to all. A population cosmopolitan and shifting, living from hand to mouth, vagrants of the road or of the street corner, finding life a warm and easy thing in this long garden shut between hills and sea. So warm and lovely and easy a garden is it that it ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... suddenly sank his voice,—"Hist, who comes here? Look—Richard Bame, the Puritan! O, Ben, Ben, Your Mermaid Inn's the study for the stage, Your only teacher of exits, entrances, And all the shifting comedy. Be grave! Bame is the godliest hypocrite on earth! Remember I'm an atheist, black as coal. He has called me Wormall in an anagram. Help me to bait him; but be very grave. We'll talk of Venus." As he whispered thus, A long white ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... critical, anxious moment, emphasized by the agitation of bright feminine plumes and the shifting of masculine backs into the corners of the pews. None got so far as to define to themselves why there should be an apparent incompatibility between ruggedness and orthodoxy—but there were some who hoped and more who feared. Luther had been ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... left her lips when for some reason unexplained that probably had to do with the shifting of the centre of gravity, Little Bonsa appeared to glide or fall out of her box with a startling suddenness, and project herself straight at Barbara, who, with a faint scream, fearing lest the precious thing should be injured, ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... the damp air, throwing fitful lurid lights on the faces close by: dark faces, flushed and excited, with sullen eyes and dishevelled hair, above which the black smoke from the sizzling resin formed weird and shifting haloes. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... linger about the orchard; and, sitting upright on the topmost stone in the wall, or on the tallest stake in the fence, chipping up an apple for the seeds, his tail conforming to the curve of his back, his paws shifting and turning the apple, he is a pretty sight, and his bright, pert appearance atones for all the mischief he does. At home, in the woods, he is the most frolicsome and loquacious. The appearance of anything unusual, if, after contemplating it a moment, he concludes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... or lagoon, opposite Cape Carnaveral. It extends along nearly the entire eastern coast of Florida, varying in width from three to six miles, and is separated from the Atlantic by a narrow sand ridge, which is pierced at different points by shifting inlets. It is very shoal, so much so that we were obliged to haul our boat out nearly half a mile before she would float, and the water is teeming with stingarees, sword-fish, crabs, etc. But once afloat, we headed to the southward with a ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... hill world had never the same face for five minutes. Its very form changed as the roads turned. The swing of your stride put in play a vast, mysterious scene-shifting that disturbed the sky. Moving through it you stood still in the heart of an immense being that moved. Standing still you were moved, you were drawn nearer and nearer to ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... American international copyright with Charles Dickens, who strongly declared his conviction that nothing would induce an American to give up the power he possesses of pirating British literature. But he was a man who, seeing clearly what was before him, would not realise the possibility of shifting views. Because in this matter the American decision had been, according to his thinking, dishonest, therefore no other than dishonest decision was to be expected from Americans. Against that idea ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... the point towards his antagonist's face, so that Sir Piercie, in order to assail him, was obliged to make actual passes, and could not avail himself of his skill in making feints; while, on the other hand, Halbert was prompt to parry these attacks, either by shifting his ground or with the sword. The consequence was, that after two or three sharp attempts on the part of Sir Piercie, which were evaded or disconcerted by the address of his opponent, he began ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... "reform" in the actual use of the words. On the contrary, it adds another tangle in the skein which children at school must untangle. It either forms another class of regular verbs, or swells the already almost unmanageable list of irregular verbs. In either case it is shifting the burden from the shoulders of adults to those of children, already, as the reformers tell us, overburdened and overworked. When a man really and sincerely asks himself the question, "Do I pronounce lashed as though written lasht?" and tests his own practice ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... as Jeremy watched, sprang into the air, wavered, faltered, hesitated, then rocked into a steady glow, only shifting a little with the haze. On either side of him were rough, wooden stalls, and these were illuminated with gas, which sizzled and hissed like angry snakes. The stalls were covered with everything invented by man; here a sweet stall, with thick, ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... doing over here?" Joan drew a little nearer as she spoke, her horse shifting to keep ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... said exemption shall not be claimed or held in a shifting stock of merchandise, or in any property, the conveyance of which by the homestead claimant has been set aside on the ground of fraud ...
— Civil Government of Virginia • William F. Fox
... Thanksgiving Day there was an air of repressed excitement about the Cardew house. Mademoiselle, in a new silk dress, ran about the lower floor, followed by an agitated Grayson with a cloth, for Mademoiselle was shifting ceaselessly and with trembling hands vases of flowers, and spilling water at each shift. At six o'clock had arrived a large square white box, which the footman had carried to the rear and there exhibited, allowing a palpitating cook, scullery maid and divers ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Kansas, shall open the eyes of thinking men to the real designs and objects of those in office. An opposition is necessarily transitory in its nature, if it be not founded on some principle which, reaching below the shifting sands of politics, rests upon the primary rock of morals and conscience. In such a principle only is found the nucleus of a party which the adverse patronage of a corrupt executive can but strengthen by attracting from it its baser elements. Such an opposition ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... r-rock!" he whispered, shifting to English mixed with accented French. "Pour vous—et le bb! Le p'tit bb an' ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... and the day fair, though I could not but be aware, as we bowled along towards the bar, that a retreating storm had left some indications of its past presence in the tossing foam that sprang upwards as the waves dashed upon that treacherous heap of shifting sand. The pilot sat in the stern-sheets of the dancing boat, steering steadily with an oar. His brother tended the sail, and I was crouched amidships. As we approached nearer the scene of commotion, our younger companion assumed a station in the bow of the boat ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... and feeling more familiar as his merits were known, he hitched his chair up against that of the Scottish lad, who was seated next him, and who, in shifting his place, was awkward enough to disturb, in his turn, Alice Lee, who sate opposite, and, a little offended, or at least embarrassed, drew her ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... of Guayaquil is so called from a river of this name which is famous for its shifting sand-banks, on which as the water recedes alligators are left in great numbers. The Bay of Choco is on the same coast (Columbia), and is the scene of continual storms. The greatest riches in washed gold are deposited in the provinces ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... Mr. Deputy?" asked Rnine. "Mathias de Gorne has committed no offence against the law. There's nothing criminal in trampling the soil around a well, in shifting the position of a revolver that doesn't belong to you, in firing three shots or in walking backwards to one's father's house. What can we ask of him? The sixty thousand francs? I presume that this ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... river itself either (if after rain) pale brown, streaked with pale blue sky reflections; or (after a drought), low, grey, luminous throughout its surface, you might think, were it not that the metallic sheen, the vacillating sparkles of where the sun, smiting down, frets it into a shifting mass of scintillating facets, gives you the impression that this other luminousness of silvery water must be dull and dead. And, looking up the river, it gradually disappears, its place marked only, against the all-pervading pale blue haze, by the brownish grey ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... turning out, so to speak, the very lining of my mind to you. The anchor cannot be a material one, for there is no security there; it cannot be purely intellectual, for that is a shifting thing too. The well of the spirit is emptied, gradually and tenderly; we must find out what the spring is that can fill it up. Some would say that one's faith could supply the need, and I agree in so far as I believe that it must be a species of faith, in a life where our whole ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... minutes later, a short, compact-looking man of forty-odd entered the gunroom, shifting a brief case to his left hand and extending his right. Rand advanced to meet him and ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... till three o'clock again. Once I thought I was on the track of it. I have come to the conclusion now that it's one of those codes that depend upon shifting quantities. I shall start again to-night on a different idea. Shall I ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the neo- romantic; the art of pianoforte-playing, the individuality, the originality, or rather the genius—which, in the expression of a passion, unites, mingles, and alternates so strangely with that amiable tenderness [Innigkeit] that the shifting image of the passion hardly leaves the draughtsman time to seize it firmly and securely, as he would fain do; even the position of the phrases is unusual. All this, however, would be ambiguous praise did not the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... war-the "glory" and the "splendor" of it preached by the German philosophers and British Jingoes, who upheld it as the great strengthening tonic for their race, and as the noblest experience of men. Every line these German soldiers wrote might have been written by one of ours; from both sides of the shifting lines there was the same death ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... several of the sailors were on deck, shifting one of the heavy anchors. They went about it in their usual way, all taking hold, and "heaving" together with a "chanty," or song, to enliven their work. But they did not make much progress, and one of the mates ...
— Tom Swift and his Wizard Camera - or, Thrilling Adventures while taking Moving Pictures • Victor Appleton
... shifting, sonorous, pulsing crowd glimpses could be had of Jerry's high hat, battered by the winds and rains of many years; of his nose like a carrot, battered by the frolicsome, athletic progeny of millionaires and by contumacious fares; of his brass-buttoned green coat, ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... they have no rigid trunks; they remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple as grasses, and so continually shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire plain is moving and alive. For the wind sends waves rising and falling over the whole surface, waves of leaves instead of waves of water, green ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... outset it was plainly impossible for a soul to approach the ruins. Apart from the almost certain mangling such a venture would entail upon the explorer, the least stirring or shifting of the great heap of rubbish flung about the base of the wall would certainly risk the immediate collapse of ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... adjacent islands for a few days, taking in wood and water. On the evening of the 25th, he took his departure for the New World. The trade winds were so favorable, that the little squadron swept gently on its course, without shifting a sail, and arrived on the 15th of June at one of the Caribbee Islands, called by the natives Mantinino. [116] After stopping here for three days, to take in wood and water, and allow the seamen time to wash their clothes, the squadron passed ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... cries the Rider on the White Horse, "to bring Peace indeed, but a peace of which the world cannot even dream; a peace built upon the eternal foundations of God Himself, not upon the shifting sands of human agreement. And until that Vision dawns there must be war; until God's Peace descends indeed and is accepted, till then My Garments must be splashed in blood and from My Mouth comes forth not ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... nevertheless, tenderly done, and the big hand that stroked her white head was so evidently that of a friend, that the poor creature resigned herself to the enjoyment of that warmth of which she stood so much in need. Meanwhile Dick, without shifting his position, stretched forth his long arm, collected all the wood within reach, and placed it on ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... promiscuous huddle of adventures followed, scenes perpetually shifting; now nothing heard from the lady, but sighs, groans, exclamations, faintings, dyings—From the gentleman, but vows, promises, protestations, disclaimers of purposes pursued, and all the gentle and ungentle pressures of ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... troubles himself, which is a playball to a thousand chances, knows no security in life—what incentives has such a class to providence, to "respectability," to sacrifice the pleasure of the moment for a remoter enjoyment, most uncertain precisely by reason of the perpetually varying, shifting conditions under which the proletariat lives? A class which bears all the disadvantages of the social order without enjoying its advantages, one to which the social system appears in purely hostile ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... experience in such matters. We furnish the building, provide the furniture, fuel, lights, fill the shelves of the library with excellent standard books of history, travels, biography, fiction and miscellaneous works, and have a way of shifting the books between stations occasionally, so that the men will not always have the same titles before their eyes. We furnish a piano for the amusement hall, and all of the permanent fixtures of the place, but the men are required to do their share, which gives them personal interest in the institute, ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... her direct gaze, and, shifting uneasily on his feet, began to fuss with the leather bags he was carrying. ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... what ye knows, too, Tessibel," Myra said, shifting her eyes from her companion's face to the box where the infant lay, but Tess did not ask the name. Suddenly Myra leaned over and whispered something in the other girl's ear, and Tessibel started as if she had been ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... summer-day is past, when all Nature slumbers, and when the ancients feared to sing, lest the great god Pan should be awakened. Soft changes, the gradual shifting of every shadow on every leaf, begin to show the waning hours. Ineffectual thunder-storms have gathered and gone by, hopelessly defeated. The floating-bridge is trembling and resounding beneath the pressure of one heavy wagon, and the quiet fishermen change their places to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... two people who are living apart from the world. It is surprising how much depends upon their fluctuations—how the temper, the health, the desire of life and capacity of enjoyment, are affected by the aspect of the morning, the turn of the day at noon, the intermittent shower, the shifting of the wind, the cold, the heat. When people are occupied, these things have little influence upon them, and very often none at all. But to the listless and idle—especially when they are constrained ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... beheld the stranger's black eyes upon herself. He, too, wished to know why she stayed in Mexico, but in his sharp, shifting look there was a penetration quite different from that of the guileless Michel. He bestrode a magnificent horse that seemed made for armor, whereas he himself would surely have been crushed under so much as a ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... hand, have the whole country before them, and their overwhelming growth during past years was one of the conspicuous phenomena in the business life of the nation. I love to watch their operations spread over the map, and I love to watch the growth of American cities, the shifting of their shopping centers, the consequent vicissitudes, the decline of some houses, the rise of others. American Jews of German origin are playing a foremost part in the retail business of the country, large or ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... showers of spray from her bow, and leaving a swirling, bubbling, foaming wake astern. Were there ever waters so blue, or woods so green, or rocky shores so boldly and variously cut, or mountains so clear in outline and so jewel-like in shifting colors, as these of Mount Desert? Was there ever an air which held a stronger, sweeter cordial, fragrant with blended odours of the forest and the sea, ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... Provencaux who compose the bregado, the pilgrim company, that starts for Bethlehem; and Bethlehem is a village, always within easy walking distance, here in Provence. Yet it is not wholly simplicity that has brought about this shifting of the scene of the Nativity from the hill country of Judaea to the hill country of Southeastern France. The life and the look of the two lands have much in common; and most impressively will their common character be felt by one who walks here by ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... off the rock, Mickey applied his ear to the earth. If the Apaches were moving about, the noise made by their feet was so slight that he could not be certain whether they were actually branching out and groping for him, or whether they were the sounds produced by the natural shifting of the feet of a group of ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... themselves above the surface here and there, like the bones of perished monsters. Arid and inhospitable mountain ranges rose before him, furrowed with dry channels of ancient torrents, white and ghastly as scars on the face of nature. Shifting hills of treacherous sand were heaped like tombs along the horizon. By day, the fierce heat pressed its intolerable burden on the quivering air; and no living creature moved on the dumb, swooning earth, but tiny jerboas scuttling through the parched bushes, or lizards vanishing ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... preferences, remove or lighten certain hardships, and in the net offset some $3.5 billion of the revenue loss; and third, that budgetary receipts at the outset be increased by $1.5 billion a year, without any change in tax liabilities, by gradually shifting the tax payments of large corporations to a more current time schedule. This combined program, by increasing the amount of our national income, will in time result in still higher Federal revenues. It is a fiscally responsible ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John F. Kennedy • John F. Kennedy
... maintain itself in this abstract domain, ends by holding as chimerical the world of ideas in which it has met with nothing to which to cling. It is seized with giddiness and falls. Whither does it fall? To the ground. It is always thither one falls. Wearied with its efforts to find footing on shifting clouds, the human mind comes back to the positive by a violent reaction. Here is the secret of that haughty and derisive materialism of certain modern Germans, who jeer and scoff at the lofty pretensions of philosophy. ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... high-pitched opinions.' This was a euphemism. What it really meant was that outside of protection no high-pitched opinions on any other subject were available. The tenets of party throughout this embarrassed period from 1846 to 1852 were shifting, equivocal, and fluid. Nor even in the period that followed ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... familiar with the French half-breeds of the outlands she would have been suspicious of the man's sudden taciturnity under stress of anger—suspicious, also, of the gradual shifting that had been going on for days among the crews of the scows. A shifting that indicated Vermilion was selecting the crew of his own scow with an eye to a purpose—a purpose that had not altogether to do with the scow's safe conduct through white-water. But Chloe had taken no note of ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... the plane, and one glanced off its polished side, but John's first nervous jerkiness in handling the machine had probably saved him. The target had been so high in air, and of such a shifting nature that the Uhlans had little chance to ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... mingled feelings I found myself one evening standing once more on the quay at Rathmullan, looking down the lough as it lay bathed in the shifting colours of the spring sunset, trying to detect in the distance the familiar little clump of trees behind which nestled Knockowen House. Was this journey one of peace or of war? Did hope lurk for me behind yonder trees; or had I come all this ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... source: fossil fuel: 100% note: Greenland is shifting its electricity production from fossil fuel to hydroelectric power production (2000) hydro: ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... the shifting sunshine at the camp door, with the odors of hemlocks and balsams about us, the lake rippling below, I had an examination. I found that the lad's lameness was a trouble to be cured easily by an operation. I hesitated. Was it my affair to root this youngster out of ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... honesty of Philopoemen showed itself clearly to be a real, uncounterfeited virtue. For first of all, there was not a man among them who would undertake to make him this offer of a present, but every one excusing himself, and shifting it off upon his fellow, they laid the office at last on Timolaus, with whom he had lodged at Sparta. Then Timolaus came to Megalopolis, and was entertained by Philopoemen; but struck into admiration ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... side of the great Nubian desert and the Belly of Stones, the events of real importance to him were occurring without his knowledge. On the deserted track between Berber and Suakin the wells of Obak are sunk deep amongst mounds of shifting sand. Eastward a belt of trees divides the dunes from a hard stony plain built upon with granite hills; westward the desert stretches for fifty-eight waterless miles to Mahobey and Berber on the Nile, a desert so flat that the merest ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... is the feature of society. The world is like a magic lantern, or the shifting scenes in a pantomime. TEN YEARS convert the population of schools into men and women, the young into fathers and matrons, make and mar fortunes, and bury the last generation but one. TWENTY YEARS convert infants into lovers, and fathers ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... Thomas Baltzar, a violinist of Lubec, who, in 1656 introduced the practice of shifting in London, where he wholly eclipsed David Mell, a much admired clockmaker fiddler, although the latter, as a contemporary stoutly averred, "played sweeter, was a well-bred gentleman, and was not given to excessive drinking as Baltzar ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... with a score of 63.11. The next variety comes from British Columbia, the Attick, 62.02. As I have said, of some of these I have not had sufficient nuts, and some of them are more thoroughly dry than others. I am sure there will be some shifting in place. However, for the better walnuts that I have and the ones I have plenty to test with I feel that there will be little change from where I have placed them. I have made another grouping. For large size the Walker scores the highest with 36.20 points. Now as to cracking ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... scrub, he leaves by a gentle or abrupt descent the dry uplands, and passes into a lower, greener, and perhaps to his inexperienced eye more fertile seeming tract. This is the valley, often miles broad, through which the stream has moved in ever-shifting channels in the course of centuries. He finds it hard to realize that, when the summer heats melt the Himalayan snows, and the monsoon currents, striking against the northern mountain walls, are precipitated in torrents of rain, ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... score a victory this time and stop the mouths of the jokers of Rouen. You see, he was only just a man after all, and couldn't stand ridicule any better than other people. He talked high, and his splotchy face lighted itself up with all the shifting tints and signs of evil pleasure and promised triumph—purple, yellow, red, green—they were all there, with sometimes the dull and spongy blue of a drowned man, the uncanniest of them all. And finally he burst out in a ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... along the river and died away in the dark forest on either hand. Harris and Reed settled back in their canoe and yielded to the fascination of the slowly shifting scene. Carmen chose to occupy the same canoe with them, and perforce Rosendo acted as patron. They therefore took the lead. Between his knees Reed held the rifle upright, in readiness for any animal whose curiosity might bring it to ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... as regards life itself, such an effort of abstraction is more than human. For the most part poetry looks on life from a point inside it, and the total view differs, or may even be reversed, with the position of the observer. The shifting of perspective makes things appear variously both in themselves and in their proportion to other things. What lies behind one person is before another; the less object, if nearer, may eclipse the greater; where there is no fixed standard of reference, how can it be determined ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... degrees of latitude in breadth, being about 2,100 miles in its greatest length. In some places it is arable. Some idea may be formed of the terror with which this 'Sea of Sand,' with its vast billows of shifting sands, is regarded, from the legend that in one of the storms 360 cities were all buried within the space of twenty-four hours." So also Gilmour's "Among the Mongols," ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... between the poet and the general public which has been developing for half a century. The great mass of the reading world, to whom the arts should minister, have now forgotten that poetry is a consolation in times of doubt and peril, a beacon, and "an ever-fixed mark" in a crazed and shifting world. Our poetry —and I am speaking in particular of American poetry — has been centrifugal; our poets have broken up into smaller and ever ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... her manner. But happening presently, while they waited, to glance at the droll old woman, he found her eyes fixed on him in a singularly piercing, if singularly impassive, gaze. She looked away again with no change of expression, shifting her weight from one hip to the other, and something in the attitude suggested to Gregory that she had spent a great part of her life in waiting. She had a capacity, he inferred, for indefinite waiting. Karen came happily running down the stairs, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... class; my persuasion is, that they originate in some brain now far distant; that that brain had no distinct volition in anything that occurred; that what does occur reflects but its devious, motley, ever-shifting, half-formed thoughts; in short, that it has been but the dreams of such a brain put into action and invested with a semi-substance. That this brain is of immense power, that it can set matter into movement, that it is malignant and destructive, I believe; some material force must have ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the poor, dumb, patient stream went winding and winding along through its shifting pathway; in some places its waters were parted, and then again, lower down, they would meet once more. I could see that the stream from year to year was finding itself new channels, and flowed no longer in its ancient track, but I knew ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... came to the fore in Max Halbe, a West Prussian and an individuality deeply rooted in the soil of his forefathers. That soil and his close kinship with nature gave Halbe a firmer foundation than the shifting quicksands of metropolitan life offered. These were the premises upon which he set out to build. But he would not have been a child of his time had he not seen life through the temperament of his generation. With all his sturdy mental and moral fibre he ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... Mullein Hill?" he began, shifting the big blue copy of the "Edinburgh Review" from under ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... and Tennessee, who had always sent their cotton to New Orleans and Mobile, turned to the markets at Charleston and Savannah. The cotton receipts at those two ports doubled in a single year, while the receipts at New Orleans fell off nearly 100,000 bales. The shifting of the center of cotton production farther westward enabled New Orleans to make up for its losses, but the South Atlantic ports easily maintained and increased their trade. They also competed with New Orleans and the cities on the Ohio River for the merchandise ...
— Outline of the development of the internal commerce of the United States - 1789-1900 • T.W. van Mettre
... demands which our preconceptions make upon him, should be even more indispensably a poet than those who deal in measured verse and rhyme. His material, or instrument, which serves him in the stead of shifting and transitory language, is a pure, white, undecaying substance. It insures immortality to whatever is wrought in it, and therefore makes it a religious obligation to commit no idea to its mighty guardianship, save such as may repay the marble for its faithful ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to the Lion being reported as incapable of immediate repair, I directed Lion to shape course northwest. At 11:20 A.M. I called the Attack alongside, shifting my flag to her at about 11:35 A.M. I proceeded at utmost speed to rejoin the squadron, and met them at noon ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Owing to the shifting of its current, and its snags and sand-bars, its navigation is less safe and pleasant than any other western river, but these difficulties are every year lessened by genius ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... hitched his chair out farther from the wall, and placed his feet comfortably upon the rungs; then, shifting his tobacco from one cheek to the other, he asked if any one present had heard the story of Nelson and the ghost. No one had heard it, and, after some coaxing, this is ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... approached nearer and nearer the shore. Every stitch of canvas that could be set was hoisted. The wind shifted to the very worst quarter from which it could blow. The ship stood on, however, close-hauled, first on the starboard tack, and then, the wind shifting half a point or so, for the purpose of taking advantage of it, she was put about. Every sheet and brace was flattened aft; still, judging by the roar of the breakers, she was no further off the threatening coast than ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... the changes resulting in the course of one or two centuries would not make material differences. Exactly the opposite opinion, however, has been expressed by many writers, viz, that the North American Indian tribes were nomadic. The picture presented by these writers is of a medley of ever-shifting tribes, to-day here, to-morrow there, occupying new territory and founding new homes—if nomads can be said to have homes—only to abandon them. Such a picture, however, is believed to convey an erroneous idea of the former condition of our Indian tribes. As the question has significance ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... the Atlantic coast of America may well be a terror to navigators. They present an inexorable wall, against which forbidding and angry waves incessantly dash, and around which shifting winds continually rave. The approaches to safe harbors are few in number, intricate and difficult, requiring the skill of ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... dim room a sinister thought had seized upon him, oppressing and paralysing him; a vague foreboding that his fate would resemble that of this pale woman. But he chased the dark clouds away. His star did not vary in its light as does the shifting and drifting human mind; it was like ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... and gardens, blackening all the vegetables where they alighted. My annuals were discoloured with them, and the stalks of a bed of onions were quite coated over for six days after. These armies were then, no doubt, in a state of emigration, and shifting their quarters; and might have come, as far as we know, from the great hop plantations of Kent or Sussex, the wind being all that day in the easterly quarter. They were observed at the same time in great clouds about Farnham, and all along ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... national suffrage convention. This snowy-haired, white-bearded patriarch embodies in his voice, his presence, his interest in every passing event, in his appreciation of every beauty of earth and sky, in the shifting panorama of nature, the loyal spirit of freedom, the true spirit of manhood that has dominated ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... unemployed should be simply driven away. We feel in closer contact with the world of facts when he enumerates the works of peace for the prince: the cleaning of towns, building of bridges, halls, and streets, draining of pools, shifting of river-beds, the diking and reclamation of moors. It is the Netherlander who speaks here, and at the same time the man in whom the need of cleansing and clearing away is a ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... slept, and the facades of tumble-down tenements in which he had first beheld the light of day, he was a modest source of income. Any lumber-yard or any tenement sufficiently dilapidated would serve as a model; and the fact that in the shifting architectural life of New York the actual original scenes of the incidents had been demolished and built upon by new apartment-houses, or new railroad stations, or new factories seventy-five stories high, was an unobstructing triviality. Accounts of his manner of conducting himself in ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of tradition, and humour is the determined foe of everything that is conventional and traditional. The Pharisaical spirit loves precedent and authority; the humorous spirit loves all that is swift and shifting and subversive and fresh. One of the reasons why the orthodox heaven is so depressing a place is that there seems to be no room in it for laughter; it is all harmony and meekness, sanctified by nothing but the gravest of smiles. ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... my breakfast while Uncle Jake was changing his boots and shifting his outer clothing. He would accept only one of my small cheese sandwiches. "I got some bread and butter here," he said, but I 'took partic'lar notice,' as Tony puts it, that he ate none of the bread and butter. And he refused to take a second ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... glanced across at me, then stooped to dig a live coal out of the ashes. He held it for half a minute before packing it into the bowl of his pipe, shifting it imperceptibly in his toughened hand as he studied the backlog. When his tobacco ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... pedal gently with his right foot, his gaze shifting alternately from the instrument board to the looming hulk of stone before him. As the little spacecraft moved in closer, he tapped the reverse pedal with his left foot. He was now ten meters from the surface ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... felt as though she were in that dream yet. Life sounded in her ears much as this night did. She heard its cries. She knew its large-mass features. But back of it were subtleties that shaded and changed one into the other like the shifting of dreams. Why had she been so attractive to men? Why had Lester been so eager to follow her? Could she have prevented him? She thought of her life in Columbus, when she carried coal; to-night she was in Egypt, at this great hotel, the chatelaine of a suite of rooms, surrounded by every ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... there for gloom, or for any foreboding of a total or partial eclipse? It was pleasanter to trust in his star, which dazzled us from its height, so many wonders had it wrought!... And how many of us, despite the ever-shifting sky of France, when we see it clear, are tempted to think that no change threatens, and are every day surprised by some sudden storm! Who, when he hears that some apparently healthy person has dropped dead, is not astonished? We were in just such case, when, March ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... transferred to mosaics. And this new style of Italy spreads into France and England. Sir Christopher Wren builds St. Paul's,—more Grecian than Gothic,—and fills London with new churches, not one of which is Gothic, and all different. The brain is bewildered in attempting to classify the new and ever-shifting forms of the revived Italian. And so for three hundred years the architects mingle the Gothic with the classical, until now a mongrel architecture is the disgrace of Europe; varied but not expressive, resting on no settled principles, neither on vertical ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... bodies over in our course; till tired and dizzy, I suddenly planted myself, let go both holds, and dashing in right and left together, sent him whirling like a comet, impetuous and hot, into the void beyond. But my own head here fell heavily upon my breast; and the whole scene, smoke, fire, and shifting shapes, with all their mingled hissing, and battering, oaths, shrieks, and imprecations, shut ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... of the boy was so evident and so far beyond Mr. Hamlin's expectation that he instantly halted him, gazed into his shifting eyes, and gave ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... to a slight eminence between their house and the stream; and, shifting his glance, Melville saw an Indian horseman standing as motionless as if he and his animal were carved in stone. He seemed to have reined up on the crest of the elevation, and, coming to a halt, was doing the same as the brother and ...
— The Story of Red Feather - A Tale of the American Frontier • Edward S. (Edward Sylvester) Ellis
... "valid," and the most concrete being. He who nowadays undertakes to justify the notion of pre-existence, will find himself in a very different situation from these earlier times, as he will no longer be able to count on shifting conceptions of existence. See Appendix I. at the end of this Vol. for a fuller discussion of ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... 'natural' consequences of the true faith in Christ, in that higher region where the supernatural is the natural. Peter's grasp of Christ's nature wrought upon his character, as pressure does upon sand, and solidified his shifting impetuosity into rock-like firmness. So the same faith will tend to do in any man. It made him the chief instrument in the establishment of the early Church. On souls steadied and made solid by like faith, and only on such, can Christ build His Church. Of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... question, I must ask you to listen to some more psychological remarks. At our last lecture, I explained the shifting of men's centres of personal energy within them and the lighting up of new crises of emotion. I explained the phenomena as partly due to explicitly conscious processes of thought and will, but as due largely also to the subconscious incubation and maturing of motives deposited ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... even breathe. If you gaze intently at the multitude you can see that they are almost as uneasy as a daylight crowd; but the tumult is subdued. Everywhere, in the strong light, you can watch sleepers turning to and fro, shifting their beds and again resettling them. In the pit-like courtyards of the houses ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... the wheel was a halfbreed—David MacPherson—who is said to be a natural-born pilot, and the best in the country. Although he never was on the Upper Slave before, and it is an exceedingly difficult stream with its interminable, intricate, shifting shallows, crooked, narrow channels, and impenetrable muddy currents, his "nose for water" is so good that he brought us through at full speed without striking once. Next time he Will be qualified to ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... small wayside station in a clearing in the forest his railway journey ended. Beside the one small stone building two elephants were standing, incessantly swinging their trunks, flapping their ears and shifting their weight restlessly from leg to leg. Frank, on getting out of his carriage, learned with pleasure from their salaaming mahouts (drivers) that these animals were to be his next means of transport, a novel one that harmonised with the surroundings. On the back of each great beast ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... Gordon did not long remain ignorant; nor was he backward in making the best arrangements possible to meet the danger. By shifting the ballast in each of the vessels entirely to one side, he caused them to lean in such a manner as that their artillery could be elevated to a surprising degree, and the shot rise even to the summit of the hill. The guns were then stuffed, rather than loaded, with ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... great Cathedral which rose above the low horizon of their roofs, and opened its doors to poor and rich alike. The buildings that have so long outlived their inhabitants may be taken as the background—like the permanent stone scenery in a Greek theatre—to the shifting kaleidoscope of many-coloured life ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... and deliberately dealt him a frightful blow on the nose. All the pain he had endured was as nothing compared with the exquisite agony of this. With a roar that was almost lionlike in its ferocity, he again hurled himself at the man. But the man, shifting the club from right to left, coolly caught him by the under jaw, at the same time wrenching downward and backward. Buck described a complete circle in the air, and half of another, then crashed to the ground on ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... under water or raised by wave action above sea-level, forming an impediment to navigation. When a river enters a tidal sea its rate of flow is checked and the material it carries in suspension is deposited in a shifting bar crossing the channel from bank to bank. Where the channel is only partly closed, a spur of this character is called a "spit." A bar may be produced by tidal action only in an estuary or narrow gulf (as at Port Adelaide) where the tides sweep the loose sand backwards and forwards, depositing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... himself, would seem divided, as pole from pole, from the gently-reasoning, the benevolently-meditative Vauvenargues. Nevertheless, they are seen in warm relation of friendship to each other, and the letters exhibit their characteristics. Mirabeau shamelessly pours out the catalogue of his shifting and venal loves, in confidences which Vauvenargues invariably receives with discretion, unupbraiding, but not volunteering any like confidence in his turn. A single example must be quoted: Mirabeau, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... to each of us. The young orchards—there were not many orchards in Kansas then—were all a blur of pink on the hill slopes. A thousand different blossoms gemmed the prairies, making a perfect kaleidoscope of brilliant hues, that blended with the shifting shades of green. Along the waterways the cottonwood's silvery branches, tipped with tender young leaves fluttering in the soft wind, stood up proudly above the scrubby bronze and purple growths hardly ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... ever come into his life. How she had raged at him in that last memorable talk; how vital, how vigorous she was, uncompromising, direct, courageous! And as a swimmer, who miles away from shore in the cruel shifting green water, might think with aching longing of the quiet home garden, the kitchen with its glowing fire and gleaming pottery, the pleasant homely routine of uneventful days, and wonder that he had ever found safety and comfort anything less than a miracle, Warren thought of the wife he had sacrificed, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... The work of shifting the baggage from one diligence to the other was performed under an archway. There was a door leading from this archway into a large office, where the two companies of passengers were assembled, waiting for the coaches to be ready. All these passengers were loaded with carpet bags, knapsacks, ...
— Rollo in Rome • Jacob Abbott |
