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More "Acme" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other age. It is one of those marvels that we should recall of which we have a right to be proud; but in our pride we should not fail to ascertain why the Almighty should start us as a nation at the very acme of humanity—redeemed, educated, and made grand by the influences of a divine Christianity. Those men were not mere colonists, nor were they limited in their patriotism. "No pent-up Utica" could confine their ...
— 'America for Americans!' - The Typical American, Thanksgiving Sermon • John Philip Newman
... water came in and furnished what was thought the acme of a propagator, and tanks of elaborate workmanship, and made of the finest material down to the commonest wood, were made so a circulation of hot water was kept up over as large an area as the necessity of the owner ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... princes, and that he had advanced from grade to grade in the religious mysteries, even to the highest, in which the great truth of the One Supreme, the omniscient, omnipotent God was imparted, as the sublime acme of all human knowledge, thus attributing to Moses before his flight into Midian, an almost modern conception of an ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... in a week or so, where, or anywhere, I shall be always most happy to receive tidings from you. G. Dyer is in the height of an uxorious paradise. His honeymoon will not wane till he wax cold. Never was a more happy pair, since Acme and Septimius, and longer. Farewell, with many thanks, dear S. Our loves ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... see the men and women of the Renaissance in the works of all its painters; heavy in Ghirlandajo, vulgarly jaunty in Fillipino, preposterously starched and prim in Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; and mediaeval stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the little boys, companions of the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... qualities of a fight, or (save in the treatment of prisoners) be more brutal or less brutal when fought between two little savage tribes, than when fought between two colossal groups of Christian nations, civilized to the highest point. War is the acme of the endeavor of man. Each side determines that it will win at all costs and at all hazards; that nobody's comfort, happiness, or safety shall receive the slightest consideration; that everybody's strength and courage must be worked to ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... aenigmatical, technical, biographical, romantical, chemical, and obstetrical, with fifty other branches of it, (most of them ending, as these do, in ical,) has, for these two last centuries and more, gradually been creeping upwards towards that acme of their perfections, from which, if we may form a conjecture from the advantages of these last seven years, we ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... souls rise above the distress—they have to, in order to survive." "Every man I have met out here has the amazing guts to wear his crown of thorns as though it were a cap-and-bells." They have shredded off their weaknesses, and attained that "corporate stout-heartedness" which is "the acme of what Aristotle meant by virtue." For himself, he discovers that the plague of his former modes of life lay in self-distrust. It was the disease of the age. The doubt of many things which it were wisdom to believe had ended in the doubt ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... continents closer together in the bonds of sympathy that bind humanity to man. The midnight terrors of Ashtabula and Chatsworth evoked tears of pity from every fireside in Christendom, but the true story of Johnstown, when all is known, will stand solitary and alone as the acme of man's affliction by the potent forces to ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... concept of God, the God of the Old Testament and of theology, was vastly different, and remained to the end unrevolutionized by his heart's insight. This background conception of God comes to extreme expression in his De servo arbitrio ["The Unfree Will"] of 1525: "This is the acme of faith, to believe that God who saves so few and condemns so many is merciful; that He is just who at His own pleasure has made us necessarily doomed to damnation, so that . . . He seems to delight in the tortures of the wretched ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... received their exact portion of the bitter stuff, which had been allowed to foam copiously in order to eke out, the five desperadoes solemnly touched glasses and Slops Barnett, who had visited in Princeton, led them in that whispered toast that is the acme of devilment: ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... his forty-fourth or forty-fifth year, having been born in 1806 or 1807. He is the grandson of the famous Prestidigateur, or Conjurer Comus, who, about four or five-and-forty years ago, was in the acme of his fame. During the Consulate, and a considerable portion of the Empire, Comus traveled from one department of France to the other, and is even known to have extended his journeys beyond the Rhine and the Moselle on one side, and beyond the Rhone ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... laughed over the insignificant incident, and Miss Starland took care as they descended that her own merriment continued. General Yozarro, thus warned, finished his imprecations, and met them with his usual smiles and graciousness. In his snowy suit, sombrero in hand, he was the acme of cool politeness and courtesy. Had not Miss Starland identified his voice unmistakably, she could not have believed what ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... various specks on the tops of the furthest hills, and with the help of your glasses discover them to be the 19th. Sir Herbert (Stewart) was immensely pleased with them and pointed them out to me as being the very acme of Light Cavalry."[2] ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... to this stage was 'A Trip to Scarborough,' Which was only a species of 'family edition of Vanbrugh's play, 'The Relapse;' but in 1777 he reached the acme of his fame, in 'The ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... He would have given anything in the world to be able to drive away this implacable dream. He longed for heavy sleep to crush his thoughts. So long as he remained awake, he had sufficient energy to expel the phantom of his victim; but as soon as he lost command of his mind it led him to the acme ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... flower of the German Empire, including the magnificent troops of the Imperial Guard. It was first and last a fighting army. The men were all young, and they struck me as being as keen as razors and as hard as nails. Their equipment was the acme to all appearances ordinary two-wheeled farm-carts, contained "nests" of nine machine-guns which could instantly be brought into action. The medical corps was magnificent; as businesslike, as completely equipped, and as efficient as a great city hospital—as, indeed, it should ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... were of a better race of man and a greater and united fatherland. It was this feature that made his work unique in the world, and his disciples are fond of reminding us of the fact that it was just about one generation of men after the acme of influence of his system that, in 1870, Germany showed herself the greatest military power since ancient Rome, and took the acknowledged leadership of the world both in education ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... profession, once he has come to man's estate, such as being a policeman, or a performer on the high trapeze. The poet would not have been the "Peoples' Laureate," had his fairy god- mother granted his boy-wish, but the Greenfield baker. For to his childish mind it "seemed the acme of delight," using again his own happy expression, "to manufacture those snowy loaves of bread, those delicious tarts, those toothsome bon-bons. And then to own them all, to keep them in store, to watch over and guardedly exhibit. The thought of ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... incredible as coming as from a Frenchman; it was a matter to solemn for any compliments or polite exaggerations; he said in tones of wonder and conviction, "They are as good as ours." It was his acme of all ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... plenty of black flour at 9 dollars a-hundred, and salt salmon, four for 1 dollar." What lively visions of scurvy these provisions conjure up! The acme of extravagance was not arrived at, however, until the poor miner came to purchase auxiliaries to his rocker. At Sailor's Bar "rocker irons were at an ounce of gold each (16 dollars), and at Hill's Bar, 30 dollars each." This "iron" is simply ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... and misery reached its acme on the receipt by his father of his first school character, which document his father sent back for Walter's own perusal, with a letter which, if not actually reproachful, was at least uneasy ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... in a street much nearer to his own home than the spurts from spot to spot had led him to suppose. It was new to him, but he recognized it as the acme of fashion by those two sure signs; railings with most of their spikes in place, and cards scored with, the word "Apartments." He had discovered such streets as this before when in Shovel's company, and they had watched the toffs ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... their clutches; it was necessary, therefore, that he should make a show of ease and confidence and of playing above board—the very height of art in such affairs. To delude the pit is an every-day triumph, but to deceive Mademoiselle Mars, Frederic Lemaitre, Potier, Talma, Monrose, is the acme of art. ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... wrong, does not generally contribute to the light-heartedness of such parties. Moreover, the very young element was hardly represented, and there was a dearth of those sprightly boys and girls who think it the acme of delicate wit to shut up an aunt in the ice-box and throw the billiard-table out of the window. Neither Lady Maud nor her father liked what Mr. Van Torp called a 'circus'; and besides, the modern youths and maids who delight in practical jokes were not the people ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... merino!—it was something made up,—the gayest, prettiest, jauntiest dressing gown; with bunches of tiny carnations all over it, as bright as Faith's own. Though that be saying much, for at this hers reached their acme. ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... movement in Judea was observed and reported at the metropolis. The crucifixion of our Savior was sanctioned by a Roman deputy; and the persecuted Christians were allowed an appeal to Caesar. Soon therefore, did the religion of Jesus make its way to Rome. The power of Rome had also reached its acme; and as the spirit of Christianity was diverse from that of the world, the learning and power of the Empire soon combined against it. That this religion would be crushed and vanish away as a dream of ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... say your mother could never understand how seeing the very acme of cultivation in all countries should have really made my eyes ache, and long for something as simple as green grass or pure water, to rest them on. I came down here to find it among my cousins, and I found in your sisters only just such women as ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... surroundings, and by contrast with the womenfolk about her, she was regarded as the most beautiful of her sex. Her manner, reserved to the point of stiffness, and paralyzing, as it did, the glibbest masculine tongue among them, was also looked upon as the acme of perfection and all that was desirable in young ladyhood; each individual humbly admitting that while he never before had met a real lady, he knew one ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... at Monte Carlo stands in one of the loveliest settings on earth. Facing the blue Mediterranean and enhanced by the exquisitely kept marble villas of Monaco, it may justly be called the acme of gambling institutions. It has become an institution through the years. ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... disobey, although to sit opposite to his master in a carriage, seemed to him the acme of presumption. He took his seat with a look of most comic embarrassment, and stared at the prince as though he suspected him of being ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... handkerchiefs, the delicate scent which clung to them, the glossy braids of her ever exquisitely arranged hair, and the very set of that perfectly plain sailor hat with its band of white ribbon, were all the acme of perfection. Oh, they all betokened wealth and taste, taste and wealth. No wonder the girls worshiped Gwin. She never boasted of her wealth, she never brought it prominently forward; but for all that it pervaded her from the top ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... rose the strains Of vocal concord and mellifluence, As swelled in chorus those seraphic throats In falling cadence and ecstatic flight, Surpassing heaven's grandest melody In all that appertains to choral song! The acme of celestial harmony Which angel ears discerned with glad surprise; But sweeter than that song, the glad refrain Wafted from angel tongues innumerable, To earth and the inhabitants thereof, "Peace! Peace on ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... do so in times of adversity and danger, for such a course would look like cowardice with which my king and husband assuredly cannot be charged. Charles V. and Christina of Sweden were at liberty to abdicate, for when they did so they were at the acme of their power, and yet they ever repented of it; they felt that all nations were scornfully exclaiming: 'Behold the faithless, suicidal servant of God! Behold the stigma on that anointed brow! The crown sanctifies the head that ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... walk, seeking to see, hear, feel, everything newly, I devise secret words for the things I see: words that convey to me alone the thought, or impression, or emotion of a peculiar spot. All this, I know, to some will seem the acme of foolish illusion. Indeed, I am not telling of it because it is practical; there is no cash at the end of it. I am reporting it as an experience in life; those who understand will understand. And thus out of my journeys I have ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... is too much for her passion.[26] She makes an exemplary nun in a sea-side convent, and dies early of disease caught while nursing others. He, his wretchedness and hatred of life reaching their acme, exiles himself to Louisiana, and gets himself adopted by the tribe of the Natchez, where Chactas is ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... lady, used only to the very acme of comfort, had welcomed the idea of visiting Rosebud's home in the wilds. Moreover, until the final stage of the journey, she thoroughly enjoyed herself. It was not until traveling from Beacon Crossing, and the camping out at the half-way house, that the roughness of the country was brought ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... the room, which were such an ugly colour, a pale yellow green, that they have offended our artistic eyes ever since we have been here. I am said to have wasted my whole morning watching my two-days-old chickens, supposed to be the acme of intelligence and precocity. The afternoon was spent in shingling the hen-house. It was only roofed over with tar-paper laid on to the rafters, which answers well if the wind doesn't blow the paper about, or that it has not any holes; but as the hen-house ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... were scarcely less affected, though they were better able to control their emotion. The joyous renunciation of five thousand dollars a year struck these hard men of business as something almost uncanny. They would have considered it the acme of folly in an ordinary man, but in a preacher they felt ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... prices, of fastidiousness and frivolity is neither pleasant nor instructive. Extravagance and sensuous enjoyment formed the main object with all, among the parvenus as well as among the Licinii and Metelli; not the polished luxury which is the acme of civilization, but that sort of luxury which had developed itself amidst the decaying Hellenic civilization of Asia Minor and Alexandria, which degraded everything beautiful and significant to the purpose of decoration and studied enjoyment with a laborious pedantry, a precise ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... temptations of the shop-window. As she hurried along, the Marquis de Monpavon, vivacious and superb, with a flower in his buttonhole, saluted her at a distance with the grand flourish of the hat so dear to the vanity of woman, the acme of elegance in the way of street salutations, the hat raised high in air above a rigid head. She answered with the polite greeting of the true Parisian, hardly expressed by an imperceptible movement of the figure and a smile in the eyes; and, seeing that exchange of worldly courtesies amid the ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... strong works near Calcutta; collected a vast number of vessels of all kinds, and improvised a regular marine establishment; and raised nine new battalions of sepoys, and a numerous corps of native artillery. In the meantime the army under Colonel Leslie was marching towards the acme of action. In his progress he was directed to conciliate and captivate the goodwill of the rulers and people in every district through which his line of inarch lay; but at the same time he was to fight his way where he could not win it by conciliation. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Its glints speedily dim in the air. To be gobbled up by some hungry fish is the ordinary fate of the species. Possibly splendour is bestowed upon the shrimp as a means by which certain fish distinguish a particularly choice dainty, and the fish show the very acme of admiration by "wolfing" it. Thus are the examples of high ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... electioneering tricks and gutter legislation which for years had been committed by the Magyars to the end that the Autonomists and they should have all the amenities of some one else's house, it surely is the acme of ingratitude to call this tottering benefactor "Hote insalue." If the Autonomists did not desire to reap advantages from any Magyar corruption, they might at any time since November 17, 1868, have ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... using was narrow, but fifty paces away in the direction of Argeles was a track which left our road to lead to a farm. For this spot the driver was making. There he would be able to turn with the acme ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... sufficiently trying? Why, after so much pains and expense have been employed to make the occasion beautiful and impressive, should the "practical joker" take it upon himself to spoil it all by an ill-timed "pleasantry" which is the acme of rudeness and discourtesy? It is a curious character that can enjoy perpetrating what are really ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... offended? That he should ask the question, was the acme of his offense. As if she could tell how he had offended. Was there ever so impertinent a question and questioner? "How had he been so unfortunate as to offend?" Any other man would have said "unhappy," whether he meant it or not, but ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Blackmantle of Brazen-nose." "A speech, a speech!" vociferated all the party. "Yes, worthy brother cracks," replied I, "you shall have a speech, the very acme of oratory; a brief speech, composed by no less a personage than the great Lexicographer himself, and always used by him on such occasions at the club in Ivy-lane. Here's all your healths, and Esto ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... instruction will do best constantly to aim at that original Centre, whence alone Art may be produced ever anew; whereas, at the stage last mentioned, it must necessarily stand still, or degenerate into cramped mannerism. For even that higher passion is opposed to the idea of having reached the acme of energy, whose image and reflex Art is called ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... felt heretical was when in the presence of the gaitered calves of a Protestant dean. He wore his sleeves tight and his stock high, as in the days when William the Sailor was king in England, and his long gold-topped Prince Regent cane was the very acme of dignity. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Britannia in her day was looked upon as the ne plus ultra in naval architecture, the very acme of marine engineering. The highest speed she developed was eight and one-half knots or about nine and three-quarters miles an hour. She covered the passage from Liverpool to Boston in fourteen and one-half days, which was then regarded as a marvellous ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... of state and clergy would be a mere waste of time. The only alternative was flight. That would mean the wreck of Rezanov's avowed purposes in coming to this quarter of New Spain, and perhaps of others she dimly suspected. It would mean the very acme of misery for his Sitkans, and an indefensible blow to the Company. It might even prove the fatal mistake in his career, for which his enemies were ever on the alert. He was not communicative about himself ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... lank height of his father, and his blunt elongation of face and features, informed by his mother's spirit. The result in his expression was an absolute ferocity instead of severity of gloom, a fury of resentment against his fate, instead of that bitter leaning towards it which is the acme ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... The genius of Elizabeth Butler has seized upon the morning "Roll Call," in the Crimean snows of 1855, as the subject of a great painting in which to depict the excess of human suffering and devotion—the acme of English ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... platysma. He is always most kind in aiding me in all ways, but he is so overworked that it hurts my conscience to trouble him, for I have a conscience, little as you have reason to think so. Help me if you can, and forgive me. Your murderer case has come in splendidly as the acme of prostration from fear. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... apprise you," wrote Nelson to Addington, "that General Villettes, although a most excellent officer, will do nothing but what he receives, 'You are hereby required and directed;' for to obey, is with him the very acme of discipline. With respect to Sicily, I have no doubt but that the French will have it. My former reasons for inducing General Villettes to keep the Neapolitan troops in Malta, was to prevent what has happened; but, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... sympathy. In the same way, his sway over the literary mind is destined to be one of no secondary degree. "Deeds are the offspring of words," says Heine; "Goethe's pretty words are childless." Not so with Hawthorne's. Hawthorne's repose is the acme of motion; and though turning on an axis of conservatism, the radicalism of his mind is irresistible; he is one of the most powerful because most unsuspected revolutionists of the world. Therefore, not only is he an incalculable factor in private character, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... operations—animating everything, qualifying everything. Romantic invention lacking in peoples without imagination. The role of analogy and of association through "constellation."—The evolution of myths: ascension, acme, decline.—The explanatory myths undergo a radical transformation: the work of depersonification of the myth. Survivals.—The non-explanatory myths suffer a partial transformation: Literature is a fallen and rationalized mythology.—Popular imagination and legends: ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... whole world there are perhaps two, at the most three pianoforte virtuosos who really deserve to be called great. To listen to them is the acme of musical delight. But right next to this comes the performance of any musical person, whether a child or grown up, on the pianola. It is better than the playing of any virtuoso not absolutely of the very first rank, ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... sun to dry, Luther recommended as the best cure for all manner of "pestilent humors"). At any rate, the difference between their aspect and that of the sail-boat is that of a beetle and a butterfly. The acme of ugliness is reached in the freight ferry-boats, floating fragments of railroad, whose cars look like the joints of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... from Moore lately, and was sorry to be made aware of his domestic loss. Thus it is—'medio de fonte leporum'—in the acme of his fame and his happiness comes ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... first brought me to myself. Withdrawing from my narrow quarters I hastened down to them and added one more white face to the three I found congregated in the doorway. In the diabolical ingenuity we had seen displayed, crime had reached its acme and the cup of human depravity seemed full. When we had regained in some measure our self-possession, we all advanced for a closer look at the murderous object dangling before us. We found it to be a heavy leaden weight painted on its lower end to ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... experience the acme of patriotic fervor was reached during a reunion of the Loyal Legion at Philadelphia some years ago. The exercises were held in the Academy of Music, and the band occupied the orchestra pit in front of the stage, which was crowded ...
— The Experiences of a Bandmaster • John Philip Sousa
... sun on the brown, moist skin is not only tolerable but delightful—refreshing and purifying the body, while even light cotton clothing saturated to the dripping stage with perspiration represents the acme of discomfort, and if unchanged a good deal ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the forenoon, when the principal street of the neighboring town was just at its acme of life and bustle, a stranger of very distinguished figure was seen on the sidewalk. His port as well as his garments betokened nothing short of nobility. He wore a richly-embroidered plum-colored coat, a waistcoat of costly velvet, magnificently ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was also an exceptional man at twenty. On the average, after about thirty years of age, the elasticity of the body to rise to the strain of emergency diminishes, and, when forty years is reached, a man, medically speaking, reaches his acme. After that, degeneration of the fabric of the body slowly and maybe imperceptibly sets in. As the difficulties of exploration in cold regions approximate to the limit of human endurance and often enough exceed it, it is obvious that the above ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... oranges! so fresh and sweet, So large and lovely—and so cheap! They lay in one delicious heap, And added to the sumptuous feast For each and all in taste expert The acme of all fine dessert; So, singling out the very least As in itself an ample treat, While sparkling repartee and jest Exhilarated host and guest, Of rarity so delicate In dreamy reverie I ate, By magic pinions as it were Transported from this realm of ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... asleep in the morning she should handle his prick, get him up, turn her bum, put it into her cunt, work him gently, make him spend which would awake him, hold him in, pretend she herself was in the acme of delight, but on coming to her senses, upbraid him ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... hand, many obvious improbabilities will be endured, as belonging to the ground-work of the story rather than to the drama itself, in the first scenes, which would disturb or disentrance us from all illusion in the acme of our excitement; as for instance, Lear's division of his kingdom, and the ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... been lighted at nights, while the Roman streets remained dark and dangerous. In the neighbourhood of the city was the celebrated park called Daphne, where the voluptuous and almost incredible dissipation of the ancient world perhaps reached its acme. Like Alexandria, Antioch was furiously addicted ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... characteristics, as the swelling of the joints in acute rheumatism, the sore-throat in scarlatina, or the eruption on the skin in smallpox, and their course is more or less strictly limited by distinct periods of increase, acme, and decline. No such rule obtains in the case of consumption, scrofula, and rickets, which are instances of chronic constitutional diseases. In them too the local manifestations of the general disease vary also: the lungs being affected ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... or three hundred acres of land, besides the ground that is included in the gardens of the two Trianons. These Trianons are small palaces erected in the gardens, as if the occupants of the chateau, having reached the acme of magnificence and splendour in the principal residence, were seeking refuge against the effect of satiety in these humbler abodes. They appear small and insignificant after the palace; but the Great Trianon is a considerable house, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Life becomes a religious metaphysic. As values and norms mean so much when a reality is granted them by the truest of the neo-Kantians, they come to mean infinitely more when they are acknowledged as somehow constituting the foundation and the acme of all existence. Eucken's main desire is to establish such norms and values beyond the possibility of dispute and beyond the constant changes of Life-systems. They mean for him what is present within ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... honey, and cherry brandy had seemed to her the best in the world, so also that song, at that moment, seemed to her the acme of musical delight. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... more extraordinary than the subsequent neglect into which, for above half a century after his death, he fell.[2] Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, Condorcet, Turgot, and the Encyclopedists, were then at the acme of their reputation; and their doctrines as to the natural innocence of man, and the universal moulding of human character by political institutions, not of political institutions by human character, were too much at variance with Montesquieu's deductions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... speaking, though, the plot thickens. Captain Tolliver is in the secondary stages of real-estate dementia, and spreads the contagion daily. There's no quarantine regulation to cover the case, and Lattimore seems doomed to the acme of prosperity. This is the age of great cities, saith the Captain, and that Lattimore is not already a town of 150,000 people is one of the strangest, one of the most inexplicable things in the world, in view of the distance ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... that doth hedge a king" and the fatherhood of the sovereign reach their acme in Peru, where the Inca was king, father, even god, and the halo of "divine right" has not ceased even yet to encircle the brows of the absolute monarchs of ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... swaggering comedian. In like manner words of contempt spoken of ourselves by ourselves, unless they are absolutely heartfelt and come from a mind thoroughly convinced of the fact of its own misery, are truly the very acme of pride, and a flower of the most subtle vanity; for it rarely happens that he who utters them either believes them himself or really wishes others to believe them: on the contrary, the speaker is mostly only anxious rather to be considered humble, and consequently virtuous, and ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... of passion followed when he applied to his father for assistance during a precarious passage through the risks and dangers of an expanding business, and was met with reluctant excuses that seemed the very acme of ingratitude. He hurled forth an indignant reminder of all the services he had performed for the family—services at once degrading and gratuitous; and he demanded if a year's dabbling in such delectable detail were not a sufficient warrant ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... sure, that baptism in the desert, with the only drop of water they had to drink, seemed to me the very acme of religious fervor and sacred self-sacrifice. I wonder what I should think of the book were I to read it now, which Heaven forefend! The really powerful impression made upon my imagination and feelings at this period, however, was by ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... makes otherwise most sensible and intelligent people amongst them degrade themselves so that one can't make head or tail of them. If you consider how essential to such a masterpiece is inoculation in the tender age of childhood, the missionary system appears no longer only as the acme of human importunity, arrogance and impertinence, but also as an absurdity, if it doesn't confine itself to nations which are still in their infancy, like Caffirs, Hottentots, South Sea Islanders, etc. Amongst these races it is successful; but in ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... pronounced the acme not only of Goethean but of all modern art, was written professedly as an attempt in the Homeric[7] style, motived by Wolf's "Prolegomena" and Voss's "Luise." It is Homeric only in its circumstantiality, in the repetition of the same ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... story-telling quality is exceeding strong and the artistic work above criticism. When we look at "David in Prayer" (No. 258), beside his incongruous four-post bedstead, we cannot but feel that here penitence and sincerity is forcefully depicted. The acme of Rembrandt's religious work was reached, however in "Christ, with the Sick Around Him" (No. 236) (etched about 1650), which is often called the finest piece of etched work that has ever been produced. It is a combination of pure etching and dry-point, ...
— Rembrandt and His Etchings • Louis Arthur Holman
... lines, let us multiply them by some three to get the equivalent of the "skipping octosyllables." There will remain fifty to a hundred and fifty, with, in the prose, some extra matter not in the verse. But the acme of the contrast is reached in these words of the prose, which answer to some forty lines of the poet's watering-out. "Great was the joy that they made each other that night, for long had each suffered ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... which could hardly be defended on purely dramatic grounds; and still later, occupying some hundred and twenty lines of the very last scene, we have the chatter of Osric with Hamlet's mockery of it. But the acme of audacity is reached in Antony and Cleopatra, where, quite close to the end, the old countryman who brings the asps to Cleopatra discourses on the virtues and vices of the worm, and where his last words, 'Yes, forsooth: I wish you joy ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... like a diver," he answered, "who has to come to the surface every now and then for fresh air. Life down at Salthouse is very nearly the acme of stagnation. Our only excitement day by day ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... were the actors; scenes which called forth all the energy of man's nature; and in the depths of this western wilderness, many hundreds of Alexanders and Caesars, who have never been heard of. At the time I emigrated to Ohio the deadly hatred of the red men toward the whites had reached its acme. The rifle, the tomahawk and the scalping knife were daily at work; and men, women and children daily fell victims to this sanguinary spirit. In this state I found things when I reached the small village opposite the ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... have I seen such a splendidly equipped Domestic Science room as the one in the McKinley Park School. Its beautiful open, airy Assembly Hall with its hardwood floors and stage for private theatricals and other social affairs is the acme of modern refinement. In this hall the "Mothers' Club" holds its meetings, and the children have their ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... coming nearer, or the seagulls lighting on the water just ahead, or the white clouds in the blue sky, and with no sense of danger, but only the care-free buoyancy of youth and good spirits, is to many the very acme of enjoyment. At least, it was to Manson, to whom such an experience was entirely new. When they reached Spoon Island he went into raptures over it, for it was a rarity, even among the many beautiful ones he had visited. As its name implied, it was shaped like a spoon, about five hundreds rods ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... making the terms glorious, he would the more emphatically urge us to yield this fruit of faith. The whole world regards the priest's office—his service and his dignity—as representing the acme of nobility and exaltation; and so it truly does. Now, if one would be a priest and exalted before God, let him set about this work of offering up his body to God; in other words, let him be humble, let him be nothing in the ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... son Yungcheng (1722-1736), who was followed by Kienlung (1736-1796), during whose reign the dynasty reached the acme of splendour. Under Kienlung, Turkestan was added to the empire. The Grand Lama of Tibet was also enrolled as a feudatory; but he never accepted the laws of China, and no doubt considered himself repaid by spiritual homage. No territory has since been added, ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... metaphors—the ship of state, guiding the helm, and the rest of it—is much more frequently expressed by military metaphors. Even the posts of duty are the "spoils" of office. The State which to Plato was a deliberately harmonised music is to us a deliberate discord, and the acme of politics, whose crowning glory should be a peaceful measure, is by the vulgar not so inaccurately regarded as attained at a General Election, the nomenclature of which positively bristles with bayonets. Seats are won as towns were of old, and, as in ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... the terrace; then I would stroll in alone, take a seat alone, and show a desire to be alone. They have a very clever way of serving strawberries at the Carlton. A vine, growing from ten to twelve large luscious berries is brought on in a silver pot. It is the acme of luxury. You pick the fresh berries from the vine on your table, the Terrace supplies quantities of cream, and you pay half a sovereign—$2.50—for a dish of strawberries. One dish is enough for the average customer. Every afternoon ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... is so flourishing in spite of his back-date customs. It's at the very acme of its prosperity now. Why, the plant must be worth an easy half million. Yes, and more. Lord, but it would sell now! One, two, three,—Augenblick! By the way, speaking of selling,—what was ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... the widow of Palass Poucette. She looked very fresh and friendly indeed, and she was the very acme of neatness. If she was not handsome, she certainly had a true and sweet comeliness of her own, due to the deep rose-colour of her cheeks, the ivory whiteness round the lustrous brown eyes, the regular shining teeth which ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... is the building burning? Why this haste?" Hester raised her eyes to those of the preceptress. Miss Burkham was the acme of all that was cultured and elegant. No imagination was strong enough to picture her, other than deliberate, low-voiced, serene of countenance. Hester who knew more of bluntness than irony, replied fearlessly, "No, there is no fire. ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... in military order, mounted on great horses, riding bareback, their rifles held aloft in their right hands, the left hand grasping the flowing mane, their naked bodies hideously adorned with paint, their long scalp-locks braided and trimmed with plumes and quills. They were the very acme of grandeur in a warfare as splendid as it was barbaric. And I, who live to write these lines, account myself most fortunate that ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... would heed him in coloured clothes: half-pay Hulin is haranguing Gardes Francaises in the Place de Greve. Frantic patriots pick up the grape-shots; bear them, still hot, (or seemingly so,) to the Hotel de Ville:—Paris, you perceive, is to be burnt!—Paris wholly has got to the acme of its frenzy; whirled, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... eager than Len Haley. An instinctive fear seemed to possess the lad that his uncle would be prowling about the mountains and apprehend him when he least expected it; hence, to go flying away to Baltimore in a big automobile was to him the acme of delight. ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... is generally used for charging, better work can be done under some conditions by using special charging barrows of larger capacity and dumping from the end and ahead of the wheel. Two forms of charging barrow are shown by Figs. 16 and 17. The Acme barrow will hold 4 cu. ft. and the Ransome barrow is made in 3 to 6 cu. ft. capacities. Where inclines are necessary these barrows can often be hauled up the incline by power. A sprocket chain in the plane of ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... all being warmed simultaneously, more or less, as the planet approaches or departs from the sun. It means also that about the same conditions that Secretary Deepwaters suggested as desirable for the earth, prevail here, and that Jupiter represents, therefore, about the acme of climate naturally provided. On account of its rapid rotation and vast size, the winds have a tornado's strength, but they are nothing at this distance from the sun to what they would be if a planet with its ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... the words over his tongue; "it has a fine sound, laddie, a fine sound. That street must be the very acme of fashion." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Hassan ibu Sabbah, the ambitious and revengeful founder of the sect of the Assassins. The scene is laid partly at Naishapur, in the Province of Khorasan, which about the period of the First Crusade was at its acme of civilization and refinement, and partly in the mountain fortress of Alamut, south of the Caspian Sea, where the Ismailians under Hassan established themselves towards the close of the 11th century. Human nature is always the same, and the passions of love and ambition, of religion and ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... jurisprudents from Jersey and Guernsey have resorted to it. Medical students generally complete their education at Paris, where it is commonly considered in France, that, both in theory and practice, the various branches of this faculty have nearly attained the acme of perfection. The students, who amount to just five hundred, are under the care of twenty-six professors, many of them men of distinguished talents. The Abbe de la Rue fills the chair of history; M. ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... hyperaesthesia at the acme of development show the same volume of intensity and the same quality of excitement, and may, therefore, under given circumstances interchange. Both will in certain pathologic ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... ultimately married. She was very solicitous in the poor lad's behalf, and it was decided that he should have a berth on the mate's ship, and in the presence of the youth she easily extracted a pledge from her lover that he would have him kindly treated. He felt in all probability the acme of joy in serving this amiable female, but soon there came one of those accidents that break the current of human affairs. The boy thought he was safe after dark in paying a visit to the vessel he had practically shipped to serve aboard of, and took every precaution to avoid ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... But the Acme Film Company, caught with the rest of the world in the pressure of hard times, wanted to economize. The manager had pointed out to Luck, during the course of an evening's discussion, that these Indians ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... the hand of a thief in his pocket, turned suddenly round and caught him in the act, exclaiming, "Who are you?" The mob which gathered round applauded to the very echo, and thought it the most capital joke they had ever heard, the very acme of wit, the very essence of humour. Another circumstance of a similar kind gave an additional fillip to the phrase, and infused new life and vigour into it just as it was dying away. The scene occurred in the chief criminal court of ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... them assumes a reddish tint. The mesenteric glands are enlarged. M. BRETONNEAU has seen one as large as a hen's egg: they generally equal in size that of a pigeon. The disease spreads and affects an additional number of glands. It reaches its acme generally on the 9th day; after which sometimes all, and always a part of the affected glands return to their natural condition, by resolution of the inflammation. Those which are to run the full course ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... solitary. "'Tis here," he says of his library, "I am in my kingdom, and I endeavor to make myself an absolute monarch. So I sequester this one corner from all society—conjugal, filial, civil." This is a detestable habit. It is the acme of selfishness, to shut yourself up with your books. To write over your study door "Let no one enter here!" is to proclaim your work divorced from life. Montaigne gloried in the inaccessibility of his asylum. His house was ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... half-divorced from this, they are a thing to fill one with a kind of horror; with a sacred inexpressible pity and fear. The most tragical thing a human eye can look on. It was said to the Prophet, "Behold, I will show thee worse things than these: women weeping to Thammuz." That was the acme of the Prophet's vision,—then ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... are affected by the pollen of certain other species, for the germen swells. It is here manifestly impossible to select the more sterile individuals, which have already ceased to yield seeds; so that this acme of sterility, when the germen alone is affected, cannot have been gained through selection; and from the laws governing the various grades of sterility being so uniform throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms, we may infer that the cause, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... lives, and seldom broke bones. They were chiefly opportunities for the display of brilliant enamelled and gilt armour, at the very acme of cumbrous magnificence; and of equally gorgeous embroidery spread out over the vast expanse provided by elephantine Flemish horses. Even if the weapons had not been purposely blunted, and if the champions had really desired to slay one ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to one of rapt devotion. She could look like Hecate Hibernicized, and in one comprehensive second drop into a chair, "smooth her wrinkled front" and side curls, shake out her rumpled draperies, and rise from an instant's searching of the Scriptures with features expressive of the very acme of Christian peace and benediction. "Mrs. General" was a pet-name the lady had won from a wifely and lovable trait that prompted her to aggrandize her placid lord above his deserts. Him she ever addressed (in public), and of him she ever spoke, as "the general," irrespective of the fact ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... occasions the choir were entertained by the rector—once during the summer when they made merry out in the green woods, and once in the winter when they were entertained in the school-room. Leone had thought these parties the acme of grandeur and perfection; now she sat in that brilliant circle and wondered into what world ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... courtesan, much afflicted, returned to Rome, there to weep for her poor daughter. She set out in the thirty-ninth year of her age, which was, according to some authors, the summer of her magnificent beauty, because then she had obtained the acme of perfection, like ripe fruit. Sorrow made her haughty and hard with those who spoke to her of love, in order to dry her tears. The pope himself visited her in her palace, and gave her certain words of admonition. But she refused to be comforted, saying that ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... himself in bringing sons and daughters through the cleansing and glorifying fires, without which the created cannot be made the very children of God, partakers of the divine nature and peace. Then from the lowest, weakest tone of suffering, up to the loftiest pitch, the divinest acme of pain, there is not one pang to which the sensorium of the universe does not respond; never an untuneful vibration of nerve or spirit but thrills beyond the brain or the heart of the sufferer to the brain, the heart of the universe; and God, in the simplest, ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... Dinah the acme of delight, and for ever after the jingle of horse-bells was to recall it to her mind. The sight of the gay red trappings, the trot of the muffled hoofs, the easy motion of the sleigh slipping over the white road, and above all, Isabel, clad in purple and seated beside ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... one would gather that consecutive fifths and octaves and a number of other things were never indulged in by composers, and to cap the climax one would naturally accept the harmony exercises contained in the books as being the very acme of what we loved best in music. Thus we see that any investigation into the music of antiquity must be ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... "clamorous smack" wherewith the Jehu of an eight-horse wagon salutes the lips of his rosy inamorata, (scarcely less audible than the crack of his heavy thong on Smiler's dull sides,) may have been perfectly consistent with the acme of politesse some centuries bygone. We speak here somewhat confidently. Hear what an amorous votary of the Muses in the olden time, Robert Herrick, saith with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... Dan's simple code of ethics a man's loyalty to his wife occupied a very definite and unassailable position, the realisation came to him fraught with the acme of bitterness and self-contempt. Nor did he propose to yield to the madness in his blood. Hour after hour, as he tramped blindly across country, he thrashed the matter out. This love which had come to him was a forbidden thing—a thing which must ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... with downright blackguardism. It is not for him to watch the progress of the coming ribaldry, and to hit the well selected moment when talk and turbulence and boisterous merriment are on the eve of bursting forth upon the company, and carrying them forward to the full acme and uproar of their enjoyment. It is quite in vain to say, that he has only sanctioned one part of such an entertainment. He has as good as given his connivance to the whole of it, and left behind him a discharge in full of all its abominations; and, therefore, be they who ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... not the reader so completely at my mercy—did I not think him or her not only the gentlest but also the most deserving of all the progeny of Japhet—did I not think that it would be the very acme of ingratitude to impose upon him or her, I would certainly transcribe a centaine, or so, of these juvenile poems. It is true, they are very bad—but, then, that is a proof that they are undeniably genuine. I really have, in some things, a greatness of soul. ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... extended her aid to us for diplomatic purposes—to guard her own interests and humble her adversary, England—could look on with neutral eyes at her awful struggles, could keep America calmly aloof from all her entanglements. Not so Mr. Jefferson. Such a return for her services seemed to him but the acme of selfishness and ingratitude. It was not bad statesmanship that made him bear so long with the blunders, the impertinences, the fatuity of Monsieur Genet; it was the remembrance of all the benefits showered upon us by the country which that charlatan represented. ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... dolefully toward the river, as though disliking very much to give up when the acme of the sport had just ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... a negro orator, he possessed far more common sense than the old Puritan before whom he stood. He opposed his plea as the acme of absurdity. The attack on the Federal Arsenal would be treason. It would array the whole Nation against him. It would hurl the army of the United States with the militia of Virginia on ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... Ficus family in various tropical countries I have visited, but these I think were more curious than any I had ever seen. One hardly knew where they began and where they ended, for they all seemed joined together, and roots and branches seemed one and the same thing. It was the acme of vegetable confusion. Even the river could not stop their progress, and we were constantly gliding between their roots and branches. The growth of ferns, orchids and parasites on the branches and roots of these ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... coincidence which should place her in the same room for her second social affair in the Prouty House as that to which she had been assigned upon her first. The bureau had been new then and, to her inexperienced eyes, had looked the acme of luxurious magnificence. She recalled as vividly as though the lapse of time consisted of days, not years, the round eager face, that had looked out of ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... quantity of coarse flour, meal, sugar, coffee, salt and tea. It may be said, that in one respect they were like modern campers out, except that they took the wrong season of the year for what so many boys consider the acme of enjoyment. ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... intendants to manage them; that these intendants themselves engaged in operations of reclamation; that they abused their power by despoiling the peasants, and that dishonest farmers made a practice of evading taxes and tribute by settling within the bounds of a manor. These abuses reached their acme during the reigns of Uda and Daigo (888-930), when people living in the vicinity of a manor were ruthlessly robbed and plundered by the intendant and his servants, and when it became habitual to elude the payment of taxes by making ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... guardians of the Lake of Memory while he asks for a drink of cold water from that Lake. In another the dead person himself is thus addressed: "Hail, thou who hast endured the Suffering, such as indeed thou hadst never suffered before; thou hast become god from man!" (3) Ecstacy was the acme of the religious life; and, what is especially interesting to us, Salvation or the divine nature was open to all men—to all, that is, who should go through the necessary stages of preparation for ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... collected, children and older human brutes spit, hiss, yell, snarl, bite noses and ears, scratch, gouge out eyes, pull hair, mutilate sex organs, with a violence that sometimes takes on epileptic features and which in a number of recorded cases causes sudden death at its acme, from the strain it imposes upon the system. Its cause is always some form of thwarting wish or will or of reduction of self-feeling, as anger is the acme of self-assertion. The German criminalist, Friedrich, says that probably ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... New Orleans. Bixby was captain now on a splendid new Anchor Line steamboat, the City of Baton Rouge. The Anchor Line steamers were the acme of Mississippi River steamboat-building, and they were about the end of it. They were imposingly magnificent, but they were only as gorgeous clouds that marked the sunset of Mississippi steamboat travel. Mark Twain made his trip down the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Did I or did I not do right, in shewing him how truly I admire and love his virtues? Was I or was I not guilty of any crime, when, in the very acme of the passions, I so totally disregarded the customs of the world? Or rather, for that is the true question, could it produce any other effect than that which I intended? I am persuaded it could not. Nor, blame me who will, do I repent. And yet, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... has undoubtedly been ruined for after use by singing at this time. The reason for encouraging the boy to keep on singing is, of course, that the choirmaster, having trained a voice for a number of years, dislikes losing it when it is at the very acme of brilliancy. For this feeling he can hardly be blamed, for the most important condition of successful work by a male choir is probably permanency of membership; and the leader must exercise every wile to keep the boys in, once they have become useful members of the organization. But in justice ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... I can only guess. There is but one person who can perhaps judge of you correctly,—a man older than myself by many years—whose life is the very acme of spiritual perfection—whose learning is vast and unprejudiced. I must see and speak to him before I try any more of my, or rather his, remedies. But we have lingered long enough out here, and unless you have something more ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... boot, an adventitious bursa is formed, which, when thickened by chronic inflammation, constitutes a prominent swelling or bunion. It is a common affection in civilised and especially in urban communities, and reaches its acme of development in adult women. It may occur on one or on both sides, and is ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... desire impelled him to spend two years in Italy (1786-1788). The rest of his years Goethe spent in Weimar, his life enriched above all else by his friendship with Schiller. In this second Weimar period Goethe reached the acme of his powers. Even his declining years, although marked by loneliness and bringing him a full measure of grief (his wife, Christiane Vulpius, whom he had met shortly after his return from Italy, died in 1816, followed in 1830 by his only son), exemplified ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... chivalry was associated a new and purer spirit of love, an inspired homage for genuine female worth, which was now revered as the acme of human excellence, and, maintained by religion itself under the image of a virgin mother, infused into all hearts a mysterious sense of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... such circumstances was greater than that aroused by her own individual troubles. The thought that she had added to a fellow-sufferer's life-burden cut her to the quick, and she was unsparing in her self-reproaches. She then reached the very acme of mental torture, as is seen by this ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... hated everything earthly and was glad to see it all punished and destroyed. I felt so alone and so strangely. And as a delicate spirit often grows melancholy in the very lap of happiness over its own joy, and at the very acme of its existence becomes conscious of the futility of it all, so did I regard my suffering with mysterious pleasure. I regarded it as the symbol of life in general; I believed that I was seeing and feeling the everlasting discord ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... manufacturers who prepare special brands, generally according to German recipes, and sell them to the delicatessen and the grocery stores. If they were to rely upon me for business, they would soon go bankrupt. To my palate the dill pickle appeals as almost the acme of disagreeableness. ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... be meted out that "peine forte et dure," that acme of humiliation and disgrace, so intensely horrible that many a little girl in that room solemnly averred and believed she would kill herself before submitting to it. Pupasse's voluminous calico skirt would be gathered up by the hem and tied up over her head! Oh, the horrible monstrosity ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... him no explanations. It stood as usual, large and prim and precise, the very acme of solid, sober wealth and assertive moral rectitude. He was strongly tempted to call and ask for Miss Brandt, but it was only ten o'clock in the morning, and the house looked so truly an embodiment in stucco of Mrs. Grundy and Jeremiah Pixley, that ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... he can do it. Very often, he has not the least idea of what he wants to do. He has learned many things in school, but little or nothing of the industrial world in which he must live. To many boys and girls, especially to those from the poorest families, an "office job" is the acme of desire. It means to them, pitifully enough, a respectability they have never been quite able to encompass. As a result, perhaps, of our slow-changing educational ideals, they ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... manhood is where it always has been and always will be until we reach that pitch of universal luxury and sloth and vice which extinguished Rome. Those commercial and financial pursuits should make a man less a man is the very acme of absurdity. If our men were drawn into a righteous war to-morrow or a hundred years hence, they would fight to the glory of their country and their own honour. But if they swagger out to whip a decrepit and wheezy old man, when the excitement is over they will wish that the whole episode could ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... escaping from his foolish mind. By the beginning of his second session he was as able a toper as a publican could wish. The somewhat sordid joviality of Allan's ring, their wit-combats that were somewhat crude, appeared to him the very acme of social intercourse. To emulate Logan and Allan was his aim. But drink appealed to him in many ways besides. Now when his too apprehensive nerves were frightened by bugbears in his lonely room he could be off to the Howff and escape them. And drink inspired him ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... Lettuce.—Crossman's New Improved, Early White Cabbage, Early Curled Simpson, Black-Seeded Simpson, Early Prize Head, Big Boston, Grand Rapids, All the Year Round, Yellow-Seeded Butter Musk Melons.—Extra Early Hackensack, Fine Large Green Nutmeg, Baltimore Acme Cantaloupe, Jenny Lind, Montreal Market, Bay View, Cosmopolitan, Long Island Beauty, Paul Rose or Petoskey, Delmonico, Early Christiana, Banana, Tip Top Water Melons.—Cole's Early, Green Gold, Florida Favorite, ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... was born and flourished; and was himself eminently a picture of the age in which he lived. But of more importance even than this, to a right understanding of Dante, is the consideration that the scholastic philosophy was then at its acme even in itself; but more especially in Italy, where it never prevailed so exclusively as northward of the Alps. It is impossible to understand the genius of Dante, and difficult to understand his poem, without some knowledge of the characters, studies, and writings of the schoolmen of ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... at the acme of his wishes. After having pompously announced that the seat of the soul is in the meninges (cerebral membrane), could there be any thing to fear from the liberal thinker of Ferney? He had only forgotten that the patriarch was above all ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... born "scrapper," and never so happy as when annoying others. A fight appeared to be the acme of pleasure with him, and it was seldom that he could be seen without some trace of a mix-up on his face in the shape of scratches, or a suspicious hue about one ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... a great joy!' Up went her arm, down came the blind the house was dark again. He drew a long breath. 'Another ten minutes,' he thought, 'then I'll go in and shut up. By Jove! The limes are beginning to smell already!' And, the better to take in that acme of his well-being, he tilted the swing, lifted his feet from the ground, and swung himself toward the scented blossoms. He wanted to whelm his senses in their perfume, and closed his eyes. But instead of the domestic vision he expected, the face of the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... story of the kind is told in the New Forest, where the Isle of Wight is regarded as the acme of stupidity. When the Isle of Wight people first began to walk erect, instead of on all fours, they are said to have waggled their arms and hands helplessly before them, saying, "And what be we to do ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... evening of delicious coolness, there so coveted, that a cavalier issued on horseback from the gates of the castle, which was then at the acme of its pride and strength. Numerous retainers stood on either side by the drawbridge their heads bared to the evening sun, until the horseman should have passed, but he went forth unattended; and the men resumed ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... the strength of these beliefs. Indeed, in many cases violation proved to be "sure death," not by the hand of man, but from sheer fright. As a result, just as woman was considered to have both the tendency and power to impart her characteristics through contact, so the sexual act, the acme of contact, became the most potent influence for the ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... At the acme of his agony, his eyes still closed, he heard an exquisite voice saying, "Are you asleep, Gwynplaine?" He opened his eyes with a start, and sat up. Dea was standing in the half-open doorway. Her ineffable smile was in her eyes and on her lips. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... exalt visionary meditation over calm ratiocination, but to place reliance on inward experience instead of on external authority, which makes its appeal necessarily to the reason. Here we see elements of revolt. For, as Dr. L. Ginzberg well says, 'while study of the Law was to Talmudists the very acme of piety, the mystics accorded the first place to prayer, which was considered as a mystical progress towards God, demanding a state of ecstasy.' The Jewish mystic must invent means for inducing such a state, for Judaism cannot endure a passive waiting for the moving spirit. The mystic soul must ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... that baptism in the desert, with the only drop of water they had to drink, seemed to me the very acme of religious fervor and sacred self-sacrifice. I wonder what I should think of the book were I to read it now, which Heaven forefend! The really powerful impression made upon my imagination and feelings at this period, however, was by my first reading of Lord Byron's poetry. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... less applicable to the irreducible bases of chemistry, such as sodium, potassium, &c., or to the various forms of crystals, or the geological strata which compose the crust of our globe, than it is to the human body itself, the acme and perfection of animal organization. I admit that there are certain great powers, such as magnetism, electricity, and chemistry, whose action may be traced, even by the limited means which science at present possesses, in admirable gradation, from purely unorganized to the most ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... it may not have attained its acme, was sound and auspicious in the beginning of the fourth century, when the solar line became extinct. Pihiti, the northern portion of the island, was that which most engaged the solicitude of the crown, from its containing the ancient capital, whence it obtained its ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... very generally said or thought to be all wrong, does not generally contribute to the light-heartedness of such parties. Moreover, the very young element was hardly represented, and there was a dearth of those sprightly boys and girls who think it the acme of delicate wit to shut up an aunt in the ice-box and throw the billiard-table out of the window. Neither Lady Maud nor her father liked what Mr. Van Torp called a 'circus'; and besides, the modern youths and maids who ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... as this. Thirty-five centuries ago Darius, son of Hydaspis, suffered a simple luxation of the foot; it was not diagnosed in this land of Apis and of the deified discoverer of medicine. Among the wise men of Egypt, then in her acme of civilization, there was not one to reduce the simple luxation which any student of the present day would easily diagnose and successfully treat. Throughout the dark ages and down to the present century, the hideous and unnecessary apparatus employed, each decade ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the industry, the skill, and the talent of a people, without allowing them to have any share in the election of those who impose those taxes—in a word, taxation without representation is the very acme of tyranny and despotism. It was this species of tyranny that produced the glorious revolutions of South America, of Spain, and of Portugal, and which has emancipated the inhabitants of those beautiful countries from slavery both of body ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... take this acme; and then end. Fassmann, a fellow not without sarcasm and sharpness, as you may still see, has one evening provoked Gundling to the transcendent pitch,—till words are weak, and only action will answer. Gundling, driven to the exploding ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... made the bedrock of his character once he gains assurance that he is playing a useful and respected part in a superior and successful organization. To give men working as a group the feeling of great accomplishment together is the acme ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... number to send through and then wandering off somewhere out of sight so that when the person is finally connected he has to wait several minutes while the secretary locates the man who started the call. It is the acme of discourtesy to keep any one waiting in this manner. It implies that your time is much more valuable than his, which may be true, but it is hardly gracious to shout it in ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... perhaps was ever a more sudden or a more combustible kind of convert than myself. I beamed with gospel light; it shone through me. I was the beacon of this latter age: a comet, sent to warn the wicked. I mean, I was all this in my own imagination, which swelled and mounted to the very acme ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... man a Church with a Diety at its head and a religion peculiarly of principles. He left the moral code of Christianity untouched in its loveliness. After the death of St. Paul," continues Burton, "Christianity sank into a species of idolatry. The acme of stupidity was attained by the Stylites, who conceived that mankind had no nobler end than to live and die upon the capital of a column. When things were at their worst Mohammed first appeared upon the stage of life." The work was published in its unfinished state ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... feared was going to be ill, and I have reason to thank Heaven that I am provided with the constitution that I have, for it is certain that I need it. On Sunday night a violent storm cooled the atmosphere, and on Monday morning the nurse was good enough to forgive me, and came back: so that the acme of my trial did not last too long. On Tuesday the children were removed to the country, and though the physician and my own observation assured me that F—— required sea-bathing, it is an unspeakable relief to me to see her out of the city, and to find this place ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... progress. It was clear to a pair of uncommonly sharp eyes that Miss Phipps's leniency would some day come to an end, and that she would then find herself in the position of being obliged either to speak French or not to speak at all. To a born chatterbox the latter alternative seemed the acme of misery, so it behoved her to prepare for speech before the dread verdict was given, which she did in a manner astonishing to her companions. Of French grammar she had the poorest opinion, but she was sharp as a magpie to ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... simultaneously, more or less, as the planet approaches or departs from the sun. It means also that about the same conditions that Secretary Deepwaters suggested as desirable for the earth, prevail here, and that Jupiter represents, therefore, about the acme of climate naturally provided. On account of its rapid rotation and vast size, the winds have a tornado's strength, but they are nothing at this distance from the sun to what they would be if a planet with its present rate of rotation and size ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... White Vienna Leek.—Large Carentan Winter Lettuce.—Crossman's New Improved, Early White Cabbage, Early Curled Simpson, Black-Seeded Simpson, Early Prize Head, Big Boston, Grand Rapids, All the Year Round, Yellow-Seeded Butter Musk Melons.—Extra Early Hackensack, Fine Large Green Nutmeg, Baltimore Acme Cantaloupe, Jenny Lind, Montreal Market, Bay View, Cosmopolitan, Long Island Beauty, Paul Rose or Petoskey, Delmonico, Early Christiana, Banana, Tip Top Water Melons.—Cole's Early, Green Gold, Florida Favorite, Pride of Georgia, Hungarian Honey, Seminole, Black Spanish, Phinney's Early, ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... composed in due proportions as it is, of cream and of skim milk—the very acme of perfection—is the only food, which of itself alone, will nourish and warm and fatten. It is, for a child, par excellence, the ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... want mahogany—I want Circassian walnut. He gave them their flat-silver, too, Puritan design, for an engagement present. Think of it, mamma, me having that stuck-up Irma Sinsheimer for a relation! It always made her sore when I got chums with Amy at school and got my nose in it with the Acme crowd, and—and she'll change her tune now, I guess, me ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... miracles and heaven-sent compensations all that I have won and discovered with my good right hand. And with my left hand too; for with that I read, and it is as true and honourable as the other. By what half-development of human power has the left hand been neglected? When we arrive at the acme of civilization shall we not all be ambidextrous, and in our hand-to-hand contests against difficulties shall we not be doubly triumphant? It occurs to me, by the way, that when my teacher was training my unreclaimed spirit, her struggle against ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... performer on the high trapeze. The poet would not have been the "Peoples' Laureate," had his fairy god- mother granted his boy-wish, but the Greenfield baker. For to his childish mind it "seemed the acme of delight," using again his own happy expression, "to manufacture those snowy loaves of bread, those delicious tarts, those toothsome bon-bons. And then to own them all, to keep them in store, to watch over and guardedly exhibit. The thought of getting ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... teetering knobless bureau reflecting upon the singular coincidence which should place her in the same room for her second social affair in the Prouty House as that to which she had been assigned upon her first. The bureau had been new then and, to her inexperienced eyes, had looked the acme of luxurious magnificence. She recalled as vividly as though the lapse of time consisted of days, not years, the round eager face, that had looked out of ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... that Lake. In another the dead person himself is thus addressed: "Hail, thou who hast endured the Suffering, such as indeed thou hadst never suffered before; thou hast become god from man!" (3) Ecstacy was the acme of the religious life; and, what is especially interesting to us, Salvation or the divine nature was open to all men—to all, that is, who should go through the necessary stages of ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... his inherited concept of God, the God of the Old Testament and of theology, was vastly different, and remained to the end unrevolutionized by his heart's insight. This background conception of God comes to extreme expression in his De servo arbitrio ["The Unfree Will"] of 1525: "This is the acme of faith, to believe that God who saves so few and condemns so many is merciful; that He is just who at His own pleasure has made us necessarily doomed to damnation, so that . . . He seems to delight in the tortures ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... alike all troublesome recollections gathered into one blue haze of heavenly abstractions: orders executed with fidelity, cheques on the bankers to be crossed and passed and cashed, are no more remembered. That is the acme of ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... still merely excitement. "Looping the loop" amid shrieks of simulated terror or dancing in disorderly saloon halls, are perhaps the natural reactions to a day spent in noisy factories and in trolley cars whirling through the distracting streets, but the city which permits them to be the acme of pleasure and recreation to its young people, ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... woman's constancy, single-heartedness, and such chimerical stuff—the kind of stuff, that, with youth, takes the place of the recently discarded nursery fiction. I think of the hundreds of women that I have loved, beginning in my early boyhood, passing through my adolescence to the acme of my powers, and even now as I stand on the verge of my desuetude! Surely some one of these many women would have been constant, if women have any constancy in their make-up. Show me a woman howling out her life on my grave, and then I'll believe Bainbridge. ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... the sterilising sun on the brown, moist skin is not only tolerable but delightful—refreshing and purifying the body, while even light cotton clothing saturated to the dripping stage with perspiration represents the acme of discomfort, and if unchanged a good ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... it was brief. For there flew to the rescue of his beleaguered brother Mr. Hiram Orme, the millionaire proprietor of the great Acme works. Vulgar and proud, he lived ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... that their quarry might be crouching near, hunting as well as hunted. Not that the pair of ruffians who had been thus hired would have hesitated for that thought, as I imagine. For it is strange, yet certain, that the zenith of courage and the acme of villainy can alike be bought for the price of a lady's glove. Among such outcasts as those from whom Bauer drew his recruits the murder of a man is held serious only when the police are by, and death at the hands of him ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... nothing. These people, these lives, were nothing to them, for a passionate love is the acme of selfishness. ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... the acme of daring. I couldn't believe I had actually said it. But again I received no rebuke; instead came a remark that set me palpitating, that I treasured for ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Chamaeleon we come to the acme of difference between the sexes. The upper part of the skull of the male C. bifurcus (Fig. 35), an inhabitant of Madagascar, is produced into two great, solid, bony projections, covered with scales like the rest of the head; and of this wonderful modification of structure the female exhibits only ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... simple code of ethics a man's loyalty to his wife occupied a very definite and unassailable position, the realisation came to him fraught with the acme of bitterness and self-contempt. Nor did he propose to yield to the madness in his blood. Hour after hour, as he tramped blindly across country, he thrashed the matter out. This love which had come to him was a forbidden thing—a thing which must be fought and thrust outside ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... social import. Armed with a fair skin, a few freckles, an almost too high color at times, strange, deep, night-blue, cat-like eyes, a long nose, a rather pleasant mouth, perfect teeth, and a really good chin, she moved always with a feline grace that was careless, superior, sinuous, and yet the acme of harmony and a rhythmic flow of lines. One of her mess-hall tricks, when unobserved by her instructors, was to walk with six plates and a water-pitcher all gracefully poised on the top of her head after the fashion of the Asiatic and the African, her hips moving, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... successor's money, or his brother's money, or the Marconi Company's money, or the Liberal Party's money, or the English Nation's money. It was buried treasure; but it was not private property. It was the acme of plutocracy because it was not private property. Now, by following this precedent, this unprincipled vagueness about official and unofficial moneys by the cheerful habit of always mixing up the money in the pocket with the money ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... deepened my distrust of what was known about me as religion. As the struggle between slavery and freedom deepened, this feeling of mine increased. During my first year at college the fugitive-slave law was passed, and this seemed to me the acme of abominations. There were, it is true, a few religious men who took high ground against slavery; but these were generally New England Unitarians or members of other bodies rejected by the orthodox, and this fact increased my distrust of ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... forenoon, when the principal street of the neighboring town was just at its acme of life and bustle, a stranger of very distinguished figure was seen on the sidewalk. His port as well as his garments betokened nothing short of nobility. He wore a richly-embroidered plum-colored coat, a waistcoat of costly velvet, magnificently adorned with golden foliage, a pair of splendid ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... split up, long ago, into cliques, and we all became so select, that, at last, we reduced each clique to one member. Behold the very acme of selectness!" Hadria stood before them, in an ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... of the most profound thinkers of that or of any other age. It is one of those marvels that we should recall of which we have a right to be proud; but in our pride we should not fail to ascertain why the Almighty should start us as a nation at the very acme of humanity—redeemed, educated, and made grand by the influences of a divine Christianity. Those men were not mere colonists, nor were they limited in their patriotism. "No pent-up Utica" could confine their patriotism, for those men grasped the fundamental principle of human rights. ...
— 'America for Americans!' - The Typical American, Thanksgiving Sermon • John Philip Newman
... though apparently not an essential destiny in form and figure. For the care and dispersal of the spores, achievement must surely be somewhat impaired. Whatever the measure of such inefficiency, among the Stemonitales Amaurochaete shows the acme, as Reticularia ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... feeling inclined to tear my hair at such stupidity. “Can’t you see the difference? That was in daylight. Our customs allow a woman to show her feet, and even a little more, in the morning. It would be considered the acme of indecency to let those beauties be seen at a ball. The law allows a woman to uncover her neck and shoulders at a ball, but she would be arrested if she appeared décolleté on ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... guided throughout its development to maturity by an unconscious memory, Dr. Creighton says that "Professor Bain calls reproduction the acme of organic complication." "I should prefer to say," he adds, "the acme of organic implication; for the reason that the sperm and germ elements are perfectly simple, having nothing in their form or structure to show for ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... been to school before, and of this school he often bragged as the acme of desirability and wickedness. He was always telling boys what they did at "his old school," and he quite inflamed the minds of such as fell under his influence by marvellous tales of the wild and wilful things which he and his former school-fellows had done. Many and many a scheme ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... Georgia Railroad Commission and arraigned the lease of the State road as illegal and unhallowed, he declared in a burst of indignation; "I would rather be buried at the public expense than to leave a dirty shilling." It was the acme of his desire to live and die like ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... hiss, yell, snarl, bite noses and ears, scratch, gouge out eyes, pull hair, mutilate sex organs, with a violence that sometimes takes on epileptic features and which in a number of recorded cases causes sudden death at its acme, from the strain it imposes upon the system. Its cause is always some form of thwarting wish or will or of reduction of self-feeling, as anger is the acme of self-assertion. The German criminalist, Friedrich, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... appears less calm; to a superficial observer he would seem to show signs of fatigue. But after a few minutes he undertakes some much more difficult work, and becomes so deeply absorbed in this, that he shows us he has reached the acme of his activity (additions and writing down the results). When this work is finished, his activity comes to an end in all serenity; he contemplates his handiwork for a long time, then approaches the teacher, and begins ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... popularity. In American literature, Weems stood first. To Weems are we indebted for the hatchet tale, the story of the colt that was broken and killed in the process, and all those other fine romances of Washington's youth. Weems' literary style reveals the very acme of that vicious quality of untruth to be found in the old-time Sunday-school books. Weems mustered all the "Little Willie" stories he could find, and attached to them Washington's name, claiming to write for "the Betterment of the Young," as ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... world could e'er cause me to tremble While trusting my all in a heart such as this, Too fond to deceive me; too true to dissemble— 'Twere a foretaste of Heaven, the acme ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... than Len Haley. An instinctive fear seemed to possess the lad that his uncle would be prowling about the mountains and apprehend him when he least expected it; hence, to go flying away to Baltimore in a big automobile was to him the acme of delight. ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... forth all the energy of man's nature; and in the depths of this western wilderness, many hundreds of Alexanders and Caesars, who have never been heard of. At the time I emigrated to Ohio the deadly hatred of the red men toward the whites had reached its acme. The rifle, the tomahawk and the scalping knife were daily at work; and men, women and children daily fell victims to this sanguinary spirit. In this state I found things when I reached the small ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... met out here has the amazing guts to wear his crown of thorns as though it were a cap-and-bells." They have shredded off their weaknesses, and attained that "corporate stout-heartedness" which is "the acme of what Aristotle meant by virtue." For himself, he discovers that the plague of his former modes of life lay in self-distrust. It was the disease of the age. The doubt of many things which it were ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... his hand, and turning again to the road, "if you are so true a philosopher as to think you have money enough, there's no more to be saidI cannot pretend to be entitled to advise you;you have attained the acme'the summit of perfection. And how came Fairport to be the selected abode of so much self-denying philosophy? It is as if a worshipper of the true religion had set up his staff by choice among the multifarious idolaters of the land of Egypt. There is not a man in Fairport ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... its close and the preparation for the marriage, even the details of the settlement were narrated, suspense reached its acme. Then came the letters of reprieve, the deliverance from the bondage of Peterson's vindictive malice, the power of establishing her claim; and when she wept her thanksgiving for salvation, many wept in sympathy; while Regina, borne away in breathless admiration of ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... basque to feet just before we see them, in the seventeenth century, parting down the front and separating to show a petticoat. In Queen Elizabeth's time the acme of this style was reached by Spanish women as we see in Velasquez's portraits. Gradually the overskirt is looped back, (at first only a few inches), and tied with ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... it until the volleys died down to sharpshooting across the lines; and then to hear him laugh when he turned the vegetable snowdrift out into the wooden butter-bowl a little too soon, and a last shot or two blew the fluffy kernels all over the room—all this was the very acme of success in making a pleasant evening. All the time I was ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... lend themselves willingly, as do their kin over the sea, to the ebb and flow of powerful contrary feelings, and rush body and soul from the extreme of joy to the acme of sorrow. The mild serenite, enjoyed by men with classical tendencies was to them unknown, and the word was one which no Norman Conquest, no Angevin rule, no "Augustan" imitation, could force into the language; it was unwanted, for the thing ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... still hot (or seemingly so), to the Hotel-de-Ville:—Paris, you perceive, is to be burnt! Flesselles is 'pale to the very lips' for the roar of the multitude grows deep. Paris wholly has got to the acme of its frenzy; whirled, all ways, by panic madness. At every street-barricade, there whirls simmering, a minor whirlpool,—strengthening the barricade, since God knows what is coming; and all minor whirlpools play distractedly into that grand Fire-Mahlstrom ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... traditions! and what a reflex of Nineveh's palmy days are the winged lions exhumed by Layard! What more authentic tokens of Mediaeval piety and patience exist than the elaborate and grotesque carvings of Albert Drer's day? The colossal Brahma in the temple of Elephanta, near Bombay, is the visible acme of Asiatic superstition. And can an illustration of the revival of Art, in the fifteenth century, so exuberant, aspiring, and sublime, be imagined, to surpass the Day and Night, the Moses, and other statues of Angelo?— But such general inferences are less impressive than the personal experience ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... it was when the feet of the first Pilgrims pressed them. Therein lies for all the world the chief charm of the Old Colony region. Along the old Pilgrim trails you may step from modern culture and its acme of civilization through the pasture lands of the Pilgrims into glimpses of the forest primeval. The Pilgrims' boulders, their kettle-hole ponds, mossy swamps and ferny hillsides, here and there their very forest trees, await you ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... in the Verplanck mansion was high of ceiling, a spacious, stately room, and its quaint, straight-backed chairs, stuffed ottomans, and carved mahogany sofas were the acme of elegance of those days. The highly polished floor had received extra attention from Pompey and his assistants, while the mirrors shone brightly and reflected the candles of the brass sconces ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... silken robes, of which there was at least a couple of yards on the "boards" about their feet. They were old, they were ugly, they leered fiendishly; their faces were plastered with powder in a ghastly fashion, and their coquetry behind their fans was the acme of caricature. But my pen halts when I would describe the gentlemen dancers. I believe that in reality they were not meant to represent fallen humanity at all; but were intended to personify nats, the spirits or princes of the air of Burmese mythology. They carried on their heads pagodas ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... them communication with the highest Adepts." It is with the utmost difficulty that one or two can be induced, even by the throes of a world, to injure their own progress by meddling with mundane affairs. The ordinary reader will say: "This is not god-like. This is the acme of selfishness." .... But let him realize that a very high Adept, undertaking to reform the world, would necessarily have to once more submit to Incarnation. And is the result of all that have gone before in that line sufficiently ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... expect to be at Colebrooke Cottage in a week or so, where, or anywhere, I shall be always most happy to receive tidings from you. G. Dyer is in the height of an uxorious paradise. His honeymoon will not wane till he wax cold. Never was a more happy pair, since Acme and Septimius, and longer. Farewell, with many thanks, dear S. Our loves to ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... being the vast Arabia Stony of your friends and the world aforesaid. To grow bigger every moment in your own conceit, and the world to lessen: to deify yourself at the expense of your species; to judge the world—this is the acme and supreme point of your mystery—these the true PLEASURES of SULKINESS. We profess no more of this grand secret than what ourself experimented on one rainy afternoon in the last week, sulking in our study. We had proceeded to the penultimate point, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... he himself had scraped through somehow at Christ Church, with the aid of a private tutor and the magic of his title, and he hadn't the least doubt that Lynmouth would scrape through in his turn in like manner. And so, though most young men would have found the Dunbude tutorship the very acme of their wishes—plenty of amusements and nothing to do for them—Ernest Le Breton found it to the last degree irksome and unsatisfactory. Not that he had ever to complain of any unkindliness on the part of the Exmoor family; they were really in their own way very ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... mystic freemasonry between the discriminating guests of the Lotus. Perhaps they were drawn one to another by the fact of their common good fortune in discovering the acme of summer resorts in a Broadway hotel. Words delicate in courtesy and tentative in departure from formality passed between the two. And, as if in the expedient atmosphere of a real summer resort, an acquaintance grew, ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... of the woman who tears herself regretfully from the artful temptations of the shop-window. As she hurried along, the Marquis de Monpavon, vivacious and superb, with a flower in his buttonhole, saluted her at a distance with the grand flourish of the hat so dear to the vanity of woman, the acme of elegance in the way of street salutations, the hat raised high in air above a rigid head. She answered with the polite greeting of the true Parisian, hardly expressed by an imperceptible movement of the figure and a smile in the eyes; and, seeing that ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... speculation—simply as speculation—reaches its acme in the Essay on Bacon. The curious naivete with which Macaulay denounces all philosophy in that vigorous production excites a kind of perverse admiration. How can one refuse to admire the audacity which enables a man explicitly to identify philosophy with ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... to the disciples the final acme of disappointment and grief, the vanishing of his body itself, was in reality the first sign of the dawn of an illimitable joy. He was not there because ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... Fanning-Smith's. To use courageous gambling as means to a foothold in business—he regarded that as wise audacity. To use a firm-established foothold in business as a means to gambling—he regarded that as the acme of reckless folly. Besides, when he marked the cards or loaded the dice for a great Wall Street game of "high finance," he did it with skill and intelligence; and Fanning-Smith ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... Standard influence would suddenly sell out their holdings the next day. In 1875 John D. Archbold, a brilliant young refiner who had grown up in the oil regions and who had gained much local fame as opponent of the Standard, appeared in Titusville as the President of the Acme Oil Company. At that time there were twenty-seven independent refineries in this section. Archbold began buying and leasing these establishments for his Acme Company, and in about four years practically every one had passed under his control. The Acme Company was merely a ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... Around the hall stood the grandees of Spain and the magnates of the Church, as obsequious and attentive to him now as they had been proud and disdainful when, a hungry wanderer, he had knocked at the gates of La Rabida to beg bread for his son. It was the acme of the discoverer's destiny, the realization of his dream of glory, the well-earned recompense of ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... "Uncle's" pickled mushrooms, honey, and cherry brandy had seemed to her the best in the world, so also that song, at that moment, seemed to her the acme of ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... matches cost no lives, and seldom broke bones. They were chiefly opportunities for the display of brilliant enamelled and gilt armour, at the very acme of cumbrous magnificence; and of equally gorgeous embroidery spread out over the vast expanse provided by elephantine Flemish horses. Even if the weapons had not been purposely blunted, and if the champions had really desired to slay one another, they ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... upper Fifth Avenue there is spire after spire that does not unduly dwindle, but looks as if tenderly, reverently, protected by the neighboring giants. They are very good and kind giants, apparently. But the acme of the sublimity, the quality in which I find my fancy insisting more and more, is in those two stately hostelries, the Gog and Magog of that giant company, which guard the approach to the Park like mighty pillars, the posts of vast city gates ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... men whom success intoxicates, who long for applause, but who care not for what they are applauded. Count Hector was more than ravished by the noise he made in the world. It seemed to him the acme of honor and glory to have his name or initials constantly in the columns of the Parisian World. He did not betray this, however, but said, with charming modesty, after ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... succeeded by his son Yungcheng (1722-1736), who was followed by Kienlung (1736-1796), during whose reign the dynasty reached the acme of splendour. Under Kienlung, Turkestan was added to the empire. The Grand Lama of Tibet was also enrolled as a feudatory; but he never accepted the laws of China, and no doubt considered himself repaid by spiritual homage. No territory has since been added, ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... fair-haired descendants perhaps of the chieftains that helped Herman overcome Varus, and whose names may be found five hundred years back among the Deutsch Ritters that conquered Northern Europe from heathendom, and thence all the way down to now, occurring in martial and princely connection. It was the acme of martial splendour. ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... not have known him for the man of five minutes agone. Two small, bright red spots glowed in his cheeks; he held himself erect with head thrown back and shoulders squared, and the idolizing Tom thought he looked as a king ought to look at the acme of power and dominion. Miss Hinsdale's word in the hallway was the geniuses touch: a bent, gray man of years—a word—and behold the Great John Harkless, the youth of elder days ripened to his prime of wisdom and strength! People made way for them and whispered ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... of the two listeners were fixed upon the narrator in the acme of expectation. A real ghost-story, from the lips of one they knew, and must believe in, was a thing of dread delight. Like ghosts themselves, they were all-unconscious of body, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... at home, I thank God, four le moment. I hope that it will continue, and that no Lord Stanhope, or a Dr. Priestly, will think a change of Government would make us happier. John is now at the ackma (acme) of Theatrical reputation, and we shall see his name on every rubrick post, I suppose, of all the Booksellers between St. James's and the Temple, with that of Congreve, ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... India, stands the Taj Mahal, the acme of Oriental architecture, said to be the most beautiful building in the world. It was planned as a mausoleum for the favorite wife of Shah Jehan. When the latter was deposed by his son Aurungzebe, his daughter Jahanara chose to share his captivity and poverty rather ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... to me, only just in time to rescue me from the nearer thunder yet of those who had seized the very acme of their opportunity to beat out ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... advocates of civilisation certainly are not the most civilised of individuals. They appear to consider yellow ochre and peacocks' feathers the climax of barbarism—marabouts and kalydor the acme of refinement. A ring through the nose calls forth their deepest pity—a diamond drop to the ear commands their highest respect. To them, nothing can show a more degraded state of nature than a New Zealand ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... from 1824 to 1829, as an ally the sharp and clever Thiers, and the better read, the better informed, and the more judicious Mignet. It was during the Vitelle administration that the Constitutionnel attained the very highest acme of its fame. It was then said to have had 30,000 subscribers, and to have maintained them with the cry of "Down with the Jesuits!" In 1827-28, during its palmiest days, the Constitutionnel had no Roman feuilleton. It depended then on its leading articles, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... And the men were scarcely less affected, though they were better able to control their emotion. The joyous renunciation of five thousand dollars a year struck these hard men of business as something almost uncanny. They would have considered it the acme of folly in an ordinary man, but in a preacher they felt vaguely that it ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... be developed and increased in size by use. It is by their action in exercise that the muscles are enlarged, hardened, and brought to their greatest state of perfection. And it is only by exercise, and by exercise alone, that they can be maintained at the acme of ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... therefore, that he should make a show of ease and confidence and of playing above board—the very height of art in such affairs. To delude the pit is an every-day triumph, but to deceive Mademoiselle Mars, Frederic Lemaitre, Potier, Talma, Monrose, is the acme of art. ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... age which was dominating the North. And so thoroughly did he learn the speech and thought of triumphant commercialism, and the ideals of material prosperity, that the picture of a lone black boy poring over a French grammar amid the weeds and dirt of a neglected home soon seemed to him the acme of absurdities. One wonders what Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi would ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... and purity of tone, softness and wealth of harmony, which is pervaded by some electric quality of inspiration, so stirring, so thrilling that every nerve and every cell in the body responds. They stand unrivaled as the very acme of musical art. I now understand why your lovely home here should be named 'Fairy Fern Cottage.' I fully appreciate the significance of the title. This royal temple of ferns makes the name most fittingly appropriate, and easily ranks this cottage as the eighth wonder of ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... earthly and was glad to see it all punished and destroyed. I felt so alone and so strangely. And as a delicate spirit often grows melancholy in the very lap of happiness over its own joy, and at the very acme of its existence becomes conscious of the futility of it all, so did I regard my suffering with mysterious pleasure. I regarded it as the symbol of life in general; I believed that I was seeing and feeling the everlasting ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of creatures, as it ascends in the scale of creation, leaves death behind it or under it. The metal at its height of being seems a mute prophecy of the coming vegetation, into a mimic semblance of which it crystallizes. The blossom and flower, the acme of vegetable life, divides into correspondent organs with reciprocal functions, and by instinctive motions and approximations seems impatient of that fixture, by which it is differenced in kind from the flower-shaped ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
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