|
|
|
More "Imperfect" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the trouble of walking to this spot, Captain Waverley, both because I thought the scenery would interest you, and because a Highland song would suffer still more from my imperfect translation were I to introduce it without its own wild and appropriate accompaniments. To speak in the poetical language of my country, the seat of the Celtic Muse is in the mist of the secret and solitary hill, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Mamba, and then endeavoured to tell something of his doings in English; but his knowledge of that language was so very imperfect that they could make nothing of it. They understood him, however, when he cautiously and lovingly drew the Testament from its hiding-place and gave it into ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... elves were like I have failed to gather, so vague and imperfect is his vocabulary, and so unobservant of all minor detail does he seem to have been. They were clothed in something very light and beautiful, that was neither wool, nor silk, nor leaves, nor the petals of flowers. They stood all about ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... good or bad. Drill is the usual method adopted by all classes of people for habit formation. It is because of the recognition of the value of repetition that the old maxim of "Practice makes Perfect" has been so blindly adhered to. Practice may make perfect, but it also may make imperfect. All that practice can do is to make more sure and automatic the activity, whatever it is. It cannot alone make for improvement. A child becomes more and more proficient in bad writing or posture, in incorrect work in arithmetic and spelling, with practice ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... When they look at things, they put their hands in their pockets. No doubt that is one reason why their knowledge is often so vague, inaccurate, and useless. It is probable, too, that our knowledge of phenomena beyond the reach of the hand is equally imperfect. But, at all events, we behold them through ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... all-pervading unity. Whoever speaks timidly and hesitatingly of the essential harmony between the Old Testament and the New, either refuses to acknowledge both as given by inspiration of God, or he apprehends this great fundamental truth only in a confused and imperfect manner. If God spake by Moses and the prophets, as well as by Christ and his apostles, it is vain to allege any contradiction in doctrine or spirit between the former and the latter. So absolutely certain is it that the Saviour ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... appear a boy, un petit garcon?" she inquired, gazing eagerly at Flo's long, slender frame. Her voice was old and thin, like the high quavering of an imperfect tuning-fork, and her eyes were sharp as talons in their ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... half of our poor can neither read nor write. The test of signing the name at marriage is a very imperfect absolute test of education, but it is a very good relative one: taking that test, how stands Leeds itself in the Registrar-General's returns? In Leeds, which is the centre of the movement for letting ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... observation. Thus, their quality proves that charcoal was the fuel invariably employed, and the large percentage of metal left in them shows that the process then in use of extracting the iron was very imperfect. They are said to vary in richness according as they belong to an earlier or later period—so much so, that some persons have ventured on this data to specify their relative ages; but other causes may have produced this difference. As to their quantity, it was once so great, that, ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... this third inhabitant of the sixth floor attic was no other than Jean Didier, whose name had been entered in the bureau of police—when they tried to get some imperfect statistics of missing men—as "Jean Didier, glazier; fought with the insurgents, wounded at the barricade of the Rue Soleil d'Or, May 28th, 1871; denounced as Communist by Andre Fort; executed on the spot." Nevertheless, for once the police were wrong. Jean was not shot, though it was true ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... these relate at ease: Narrations clear and neat will always please; Like me, to this attention criticks pay; Then sleep, on either side, from night till day. If awkward, vulgar phrase intervene, Or rhymes imperfect o'er the page be seen, Condemn at will; but stratagems and art, Pass, shut your eyes, who'd heed the idle part? Some mothers, husbands, may perhaps be led, To pull my locks for stories white or red; So matters stand: a fine affair, no doubt, And what I've failed to do—my ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... see the two together, the giant trying, in his kind, but imperfect way, to anticipate the wishes of the other, with whom he had so often disputed and quarreled in days past. Now all that was forgotten, and Koku gave up being with Tom to wait ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... friendships with an imperfect man, with a man in bad health, of violent passions, of any characteristic that evidently disturbs his own life, and so may have disturbing influence on thine. Shake not any man by the hand, because thereby, if there be any evil in the man, ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Abbot rose, To speak the Chapter's doom On those the wall was to enclose, Alive, within the tomb: But stopped, because that woful maid, Gathering her powers, to speak essayed. Twice she essayed, and twice in vain; Her accents might no utterance gain; Nought but imperfect murmurs slip From her convulsed and quivering lip; 'Twixt each attempt all was so still, You seemed to hear a distant rill - 'Twas ocean's swells and falls; For though this vault of sin and fear Was to the sounding ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... of Nature, they walk in as quiet and unadorned as at a morning rehearsal; marching like a vender of clumsy Italian images, "with all their imperfections on their head," and an additional load attributable to the imperfect head of the manager. Remember the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... masculine perfection. Their pledge is to build up a new, god-like race on earth, which ultimately will dominate, crush out, survive, and replace all humanity which has become degenerate. Nothing mentally or physically or politically imperfect is permitted inside that wire fence. My eye-glasses bar me out; your shanks exclude you—also your politics, because you're ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... the Captain and the lady, when we were retired, was to the following effect:—They both talked loud enough for me to hear them—the lady from anger, the Captain with design; and thou mayest be sure there was no listener but myself. What I was imperfect in was supplied afterwards; for I had my vellum-leaved book to note all down. If she had known this, perhaps she would have been more sparing of ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... life, but even at my present age, is not hard for the Almighty, Who art able to do above all that we ask or think. But what I yet am in this kind of my evil, have I confessed unto my good Lord; rejoicing with trembling, in that which Thou hast given me, and bemoaning that wherein I am still imperfect; hoping that Thou wilt perfect Thy mercies in me, even to perfect peace, which my outward and inward man shall have with Thee, when death shall be swallowed up ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... the moral state of the Pelasgi our accounts are imperfect and contradictory. They were not a petty horde, but a vast race, doubtless divided, like every migratory people, into numerous tribes, differing in rank, in civilization [8], and in many peculiarities of character. The Pelasgi in one country might ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... her young friend unmercifully, as they walked homeward, and she extracted a very brief and imperfect history of the adventure that had formed the first acquaintance, and of the interview by which it had been renewed. But Evelyn did not heed her; and the moment they arrived at the rectory, she hastened to shut herself in her room, and write the account ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... half tone pictures of the delicate details being washed out. The first defects are avoided by pouring a solution of boric acid on the transitory support before applying the tissue and developing at a low temperature with salted water. The second from an imperfect knowledge of the properties of gelatine acted on by light in presence of a salt of chromic acid. One should bear in mind that the degree of solubility of gelatine so acted on, as also its degree of impermeability—which is important in certain processes of photogravure—is proportionate to the degree ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... Their imperfect surfaces reflect the lofty catafalque, an open canopy of solemn alapaca, lined with tasteful satin of creamish lead, looped at the curving roof and dropping to the four corners in half transparent tapestry. Beneath the roof, the half light shines ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... they fall ill and die, kith or kin can seldom reach them. Again, as French is persistently spoken in the home, and German only learnt under protest at the primary school, the young annexe enters upon his enforced military service with an imperfect knowledge of the latter language, the hardships of his position being thereby immensely enhanced. No one here hinted to me of any especial severity being shown to French conscripts on this account, but we can easily understand the disadvantage under which they labour. ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... ever,' what correspondence between such a creature and acts that are done without reference to God can there ever be? They are not worth calling 'fruit.' At the most they are 'wild grapes,' and there comes a time when they will be tested and the axe laid to the root of the trees, and these imperfect deeds will shrivel ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... fresh horses being fine animals, the ammunition in excess of our needs. Conroy was enthusiastic, and somewhat loquacious, but I cut his conversation off rather sharply, and ordered the men into their saddles. With brain clarified by sleep I realized the importance of the work before us, and how imperfect my plans were. I could merely ride forth to Elmhurst, hoping to pick up some clew to aid me. As we rode rapidly along the deserted road leading to Farrel's I reviewed over and over again every remembered detail, only to conclude that I must get ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... presence of Indians, when such a tribe of Germans is brought before you. Then go still further back into the pre-historic times, and form an image of the pile-builders and their mode of life, and of the cave-dwellers and their imperfect weapons and tools, and you will have to confess that these are separated from the present Europeans by a greater gap than are the uncultured inhabitants of the earth of to-day. And yet these cave-dwellers and pile-builders ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... a day's notice—and for two or three days we had nobody but Rex's orderly, such a handy, imperturbable soldier, who made beds, cooked the dinner, hung pictures, and blew the organ with equal urbanity. He didn't know much—and in the imperfect state of our cuisine had few appliances—but he affected to be au fait at everything—and what he had not got, he "annexed" from somewhere else. One of our maids uniformly set tumblers and wine-glasses ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... paragraphs and half-finished sentences, which have been found committed to paper, as materials for the remainder. The fastidious and cold-hearted critic may perhaps feel himself repelled by the incoherent form in which they are presented. But an inquisitive temper willingly accepts the most imperfect and mutilated information, where better is not to be had: and readers, who in any degree resemble the author in her quick apprehension of sentiment, and of the pleasures and pains of imagination, will, I believe, find gratification, in contemplating sketches, ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... perfected in heaven.'" "According to that," said Cortlandt, "you will some day be setting the axis of heaven right, for in order to do work there must be work to be done—a necessary corollary to which is that heaven is still imperfect." "No," said Bearwarden, bristling up at the way Cortlandt sometimes received his speeches, "it means simply that its development, though perfect so far as it goes, may not be finished, and that we may be the means, as on earth, of helping it along." "The conditions constituting ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... spin, begin, swim, strike, stick, sing, sting, fling, ring, wring, spring, swing, drink, sink, shrink, stink, come, run, find, bind, grind, wind, both in the preterit imperfect and participle passive, give won, spun, begun, swum, struck, stuck, sung, stung, flung, rung, wrung, sprung, swung, drunk, sunk, shrunk, stunk, come, run, found, bound, ground, wound. And most of them are also formed in the preterit by a, ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... subject to a fixed number of words hampered the treatment, and it was thought best to enlarge many points which in the allotted space could have hardly more than mention. Acting on this wish, the monograph has been nearly doubled in size, but still must be counted only an imperfect summary, since facts in these lines are in most cases very nearly unobtainable, and, aside from the few reports of Labor Bureaus, there are as yet almost no sources of full information. But as there is no existing manual ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... as they exist in what is natural, they seem by reason of their covering or clothing to be natural and some of them seem to be material. They are infinite in number and variety, and more or less simple or composite, and also more or less imperfect or perfect. There are means for forming and perfecting natural civil life; likewise for forming and perfecting rational moral life; as there are for forming and ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... thousand souls there are sufficient dregs to fill all the public-houses on an occasion of ceremonial excitement. Constance saw the bar of the Vaults crammed with individuals whose sense of decent fitness was imperfect. The barman and the landlord and the principal members of the landlord's family were hard put to it to quench that funereal thirst. Constance, as she ate a little meal in the bedroom, could not but witness the orgy. A bandsman ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... near when Deity shall appear to destroy all unbelievers in their respective religions. For myself, I cannot but believe that the world has only yet begun. It is impossible that the Creator should destroy the world in its present imperfect state. No—the world will go on yet thousands of years on years in the path of improvement unto (shall I say?) perfection. At any rate, I belong to those whose aspirations are for the future and not for the past. I am not enamoured with Hebrew patriarchal innocence, or Grecian classic polish ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... understood from those people respecting the existence of the desired passage to the westward in this neighbourhood, though the impossibility of Captain Lyon's proceeding farther in that direction, combined with our imperfect knowledge of the language, still left us in some doubt as to the exact position of the strait in question. While, therefore, Captain Lyon was acquainting me with his late proceedings, we shaped a course for Igloolik, in order to continue our look-out upon ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... practice of using the name of one author as the characteristic designation of another. It is, at best, the sign of an imperfect fame, implying rather the imitation of a scholar than the independent position of a master. We can, nevertheless, in no other way indicate in advance the place which the subject of our sketch occupies in the literature of Germany. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... been greatly cultivated, and in some respects highly developed. There are various recognised schools of painting, but I shall not weary my readers with any attempt, necessarily imperfect as it would be, to describe them in detail. China and the Buddhist religion have profoundly influenced painting as the other arts of Japan. Indeed, the early painters of Japan devoted themselves almost entirely to religious subjects. Most of their work was executed on the walls, ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... indeed, if Theodosius had purchased, by the loss of honor, a secure and solid tranquillity, or if his tameness had not invited the repetition of injuries. The Byzantine court was insulted by five or six successive embassies, and the ministers of Attila were uniformly instructed to press the tardy or imperfect execution of the last treaty; to produce the names of fugitives and deserters, who were still protected by the Empire; and to declare, with seeming moderation, that, unless their sovereign obtained complete and immediate satisfaction, it would be impossible for him, were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... with apparently a single lens, surrounded, except at the apex, by dark-reddish pigment-cells. In some cases, as in some species of Lepas, the larvae, when first excluded from the egg, have not an eye, or a very imperfect one. ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... imperfect distinction divydes the partes of a period, and is marked with tuoe punctes, the one under the other, thus : and is red with half the pause of a perfect punct; as, al have synned, and fallen from the glorie of god: but are justifyed frelie be ...
— Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue - A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles • Alexander Hume
... has a cause. But this does not mean that the cause is an intelligent one, as God is supposed to be. If it is argued that he is regarded as intelligent on the analogy of human causation then he might also be regarded as imperfect as human beings. If it is held that the world as a whole is not exactly an effect of the type of effects produced by human beings but is similar to those, this will lead to no inference. Because water-vapour is similar to smoke, nobody will be justified in inferring fire from water-vapour, ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... principles is in the departing from them. I will give you a cheque, Mr. Brooks, only I beg you to think over what I have said. Abandon this doling principle as soon as it is possible. Give your serious attention to the social questions and imperfect laws which are at the back of all ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... water give the basis for a determination of the heat produced by the current. Knowing the resistance of the conductor immersed, the watts can be calculated. This gives the bases for the determination of the heat-equivalent of electric energy. This is but an imperfect calorimeter, as it constantly would lose heat by the surrounding atmosphere, and would cease to operate as a calorimeter when the water was as hot as the wire normally would be, for then it would not absorb ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... many having knowledge of the battles of our Civil War does the name Pickett's Mill suggest acts of heroism and devotion performed in scenes of awful carnage to accomplish the impossible? Buried in the official reports of the victors there are indeed imperfect accounts of the engagement: the vanquished have not thought it expedient to relate it. It is ignored by General Sherman in his memoirs, yet Sherman ordered it. General Howard wrote an account of the campaign of which it was an incident, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... error; while, on the other, was the curious fact that no such island—not even a rock, or indeed shoal water—appeared on the chart in the position indicated. This circumstance, coupled with my knowledge of the imperfect character of the instruments in use by navigators of the period at which the cryptogram had been written, caused me now to experience no little curiosity and anxiety as to what the approaching ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... velocity and penetration of an ounce spherical ball, with the heavy powder charge, were immense, but beyond 50 yards the accuracy was imperfect. ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... this most imperfect attempt to give some slight idea of the fishing in these waters, it is certainly not out of place to allude to the immense importance and necessity of preserving the fishing for the future. It is but lately ...
— Fishing in British Columbia - With a Chapter on Tuna Fishing at Santa Catalina • Thomas Wilson Lambert
... voice of the Ry of Rys to do his bidding, to say his say. No minister of a Czar was ever more dreaded or loved. His words were ever few, but his deeds had been many. Now, as he looked at Fleda, his old eyes gleamed, and he showed a double row of teeth, not one of which was imperfect, though he was seventy ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... years the methods of striking a light were very primitive, just as they were in Europe; many families possessed no adequate means, or very imperfect ones. If by ill fortune the fire in the fireplace became wholly extinguished through carelessness at night, some one, usually a small boy, was sent to the house of the nearest neighbor, bearing a shovel or covered pan, or perhaps a broad strip of green bark, on which ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... is on the other side of the Cathedral. It is 188 feet high, 53 feet round the base, and about 14 feet out of the perpendicular. It is now, I believe, generally understood that this obliquity was occasioned by the imperfect state of the foundations and the sinking of the soil, which is light and sandy, and which caused it to settle down on one side while the building was still uncompleted; and this defect was afterwards provided for by its architect. This is evident from the ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... presumption is against all laws which punish the voluntary acts of adult men when those acts injure no one except themselves. The social censure, or the judgment of opinion, rightly extends much further, though it is often based on very imperfect knowledge or realisation. It is probable that, on the whole, opinion judges too severely the crimes of passion and of drink, as well as those which spring from the pressure of great poverty and are accompanied by great ignorance. ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... desires an example of imperfect and arrested knowledge in some of the common affairs of life, let him collate the statements of scientific experts concerning the physiological effects upon mankind, of tea. He will then admit that "in a multitude of ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... inaccuracy had done its baleful work, a spirit of infidelity and of hostility either to the essentials or the details of the new religion must have impelled such as were either imperfect Christians, or no Christians at all, ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... saddle" was sounded, repeated the question in a voice that would have drawn confidences from a geyser. The man only smiled. Dirkovitch, at the far end of the table, slid gently from his chair to the floor, No son of Adam, in this present imperfect world, can mix the Hussars' champagne with the Hussars' brandy by five and eight glasses of each without remembering the pit whence he has been digged and descending thither. The band began to play the tune with which the White Hussars, from the ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... their songs? The love of the soil and of what grows on it is not acquired by sketching with a paint-brush—it is only in its service; and without loving it, how paint it? This is why all that the best painters have produced in this direction is still so imperfect, not true to life, nearly always merely sentimental. There is no ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... a plan or invention, be it a statue or picture; and the way they think it over and anticipate it—very often actually seeing the picture in a finished state in imagination—all amounts to foresight and hypnotic preparation in a crude, imperfect form. If any artist who is gifted with resolution and perseverance will simply make trial of the method here recommended, he will assuredly find that it is ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... this volume to the reader, with feelings which, I trust, will be in some degree appreciated when it has been read and reflected upon. A hasty perusal, and an imperfect apprehension of its contents, can never produce such impressions as it has been my design to make by the statements I have laid before the world. I know that misapprehensions exist in the minds of some virtuous people. I am not disposed to condemn their ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... moment in The New Machiavelli, and again in his next book, Marriage, he has a passing vision of some greater movement of which we are but the imperfect instruments. He develops and then drops the idea of a "hinterland," not only to the individual mind but to the general consciousness. The "permanent reality," he calls it, "which is never really immediate, which draws continually ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... injunction not to return to Costaguana), he had pursued his studies in Belgium and France with the idea of qualifying for a mining engineer. But this scientific aspect of his labours remained vague and imperfect in his mind. Mines had acquired for him a dramatic interest. He studied their peculiarities from a personal point of view, too, as one would study the varied characters of men. He visited them as one goes with curiosity ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... none of them were perfect, except one or two vertebrae of a very large species of kangaroo. Pursuing this lode of osseous earth we traced it to several other recesses and in the lower side of an indurated mass (the upper part having been the floor of our first landing place) we found two imperfect skulls of Dasyuri, the teeth being however very well preserved. This was, doubtless, an unvisited cave; for the natives have an instinctive or superstitious dread of all such places, and it is not therefore probable that man had ever before visited that ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... known to the writer: one in the Royal Library at Brussels, the second in the Royal Irish Academy Collection (M. 23, 50, pp. 109-120), and the third in possession of Professor Hyde. As the second and third enumerated are copies of one imperfect exemplar it has not been thought necessary to collate both with the Brussels MS. which has furnished the text here printed. M. 23, 50 (R.I.A.) has however been so collated and the marginal references initialled B are to that imperfect copy. The latter, ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... Geological Record is one of the greatest difficulties...During the earliest period the record would be most imperfect, and this seems to me sufficient to account for our not finding intermediate forms between the classes in the same great kingdoms. It was certainly rash in me putting in my belief of the probability of all beings having descended from ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... proceed further than this point, but shall leave to-morrow. Mr. Fenwick has some very important information to communicate, and if he has not found time to write you, I would advise your going on to New York immediately. At best, hurried business letters give but imperfect notions of things. An hour's interview with Mr. Fenwick will enable you to comprehend the present state of affairs more perfectly than the perusal of a volume of letters. Some new aspects have presented themselves that I particularly wish ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... on Mars as Ki-kans, or a unit of light derived from a platinum wire one millimetre thick, carrying 100 volts current. We could see the varying radiations, and came upon rayless sections, which from admixture of impurities or imperfect chemical perfection, were deprived of ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Pyramid, and happily possessed of a golfing-ground and a marble swimming- bath. That ubiquitous nuisance, the "amateur photographer," can there have his "dark room" for the development of his more or less imperfect "plates"; and there is a resident chaplain for the piously inclined. With a chaplain and a "dark room," what more can the aspiring soul of the modern tourist desire? Some of the rooms at the Mena House are small ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... songsters, possess inferior powers of execution, and cannot equal the Finches in their capacity of learning and performing the notes of other birds. Even the Mocking-Bird, as compared with many other species, is a very imperfect imitator of any notes which are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... Regent Morton's famous epitaph spoken by Knox's grave, is an imperfect echo of what the Reformer ten days before, in bidding farewell to the Kirk (Session) of Edinburgh, had said of his own past career:—'In respect that he bore God's message, to whom he must make account for the same, ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... of the lava is more thinly wooded and better grassed than the granite; but the roughness of the surface and scarcity of water rendered it less convenient travelling. From one of the higher ridges we had a wide but imperfect view of the country. The air being hazy, only a few of the marked features of the ranges to the north were visible; to the east a high hill twenty-five miles distant rose beyond an undulating wooded ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... disadvantage because of her imperfect German. She could not repress Karlchen when he was unduly kind as she would have done in English, and with his mother presiding, as it were, at their opening friendship, she did not like to begin by looking lofty. Luckily the princess ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... my lost, benighted soul been wand'ring?— What means this mist, that hangs about my mind, Through which reflection's painful eye discerns Imperfect forms and horrid shapes of woe?— The cloud dispels, the shades withdraw, and all My dreadful fate appears.—Oh! where's my lord?— My life! my Essex! Oh! whither have they ...
— The Earl of Essex • Henry Jones
... her that she lived in his soul, as much as he did in hers, that his existence without her must be barren and imperfect. She did not ask when and how, she only prayed that she might become his, expecting it as confidently as light in the morning, spring after winter. Nothing appeared so irrefutable as this faith; it was the belief of her loving soul. Then, when the inevitable had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the interstice of the two beneath it, the whole forming a connic figure about 10 feet high with a small apperture in one side which answers as a door. leaves bark and straw are sometimes thrown over the work to make it more complete, but at best it affords a very imperfect shelter particularly without straw which is the state in which we have ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... which turns, in the serious scenes, upon the incidents of her own story. It was offered to both the winter-managers, and remained among her papers at the period of her decease; but it appeared to me to be in so crude and imperfect a state, that I judged it most respectful to her memory to commit it to the flames. To understand this extraordinary degree of activity, we must recollect however the entire solitude, in which most of her hours were at that ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... almanack given away at Christmas by the local grocer; on the advertisement of Jones' soap, and thinks with discontent of Polly Perkins, who in a natural way is as pretty a girl as can be looked for in this imperfect world. Thus it is that woman has had to take to shorthand and typewriting. Modern woman is being ruined ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... this ambition appealed to her. Nay, at times it certainly did so, for she liked the brilliant and the commanding. On the other hand, it seemed imperfect as an ideal of life. In its undercurrents her thought was always more ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... Sharpsburg, five miles from the city of Pittsburg, and there used as fuel, but not with such triumphant success as to attract much attention to the experiment. Failures of supply, faults in the tubing, and imperfect appliances for use at the mills combined to make the new fuel troublesome. Seven years ago a company drilled for oil at Murraysville, about eighteen miles from Pittsburg. A depth of 1,320 feet had been reached when the drills ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... become wonderfully conceited as to its own progressive excellences, and the individuals who form the concrete entertain the same complacent opinion of themselves. There are, of course, even in my brief and imperfect experience, many exceptions to what appear to me the prevalent characteristics of the rising generation in "society." Of these exceptions I must content myself with naming the most remarkable. Place aux dames, the first I name is Cecilia Travers. She and ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Irene, erected about 740 A.D., is generally considered to be the first example of a dome built on a high drum, though S. Sophia of Salonica, an earlier structure, has a low imperfect drum. After this date the characteristics of the Byzantine dome are the high drum divided by ribs or hollow segments on the interior, polygonal on the exterior, and crowned by a cornice which ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... give the go-by to all positive, finite, limited interests whatever. The vague pretensions of an abstract expression acted on him with all the force of a prejudice. "The ideal," he admits, [32] "poisons for me all imperfect possession"; and again, "The Buddhist tendency in me blunts the faculty of free self-government, and weakens the power of action. I feel a terror of action and am only at ease in the impersonal, disinterested, and objective line of thought." But then, again, with him "action" meant chiefly literary ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... Penitential books and observed the evidences they afford of the vitality of heathen practices and rites among the people in England in the early Middle Ages will not be too harsh in characterizing the still imperfect fruits of the Catholic missions ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... her feet and looked at him hard. His eyes by this time were accustomed to the imperfect light, and he could see that if she was urgent she was yet beseechingly kind. She shook her head impatiently and came near enough to lay her fan on his arm with a strong pressure. "If that were so it would be a weary world. I know enough, ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... to the Iliad, we have, if not positive proof, at least very good reason for believing it intended as a series of lyrics; but, granting the epic intention, I can say only that the work is based in an imperfect sense of art. The modern epic is, of the supposititious ancient model, but an inconsiderate and blindfold imitation. But the day of these artistic anomalies is over. If, at any time, any very long poem were popular in reality, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... way of the English Channel and lay storm-bound for twelve days under the Scilly Islands, a circumstance which bears witness to the imperfect means of navigation of the day and to the courage of seamen. The ships once able to put to sea, the voyage was rapid, and in twenty days Davis was off the south-west coast of Greenland. All about ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... Cuvier, the classification of animal life had been most imperfect and unsatisfactory. The basis adopted by Ray was open to criticism. Comparative anatomy, rising into importance during the eighteenth century, continued through that period in a state of infancy. Linnaeus and Buffon rendered valuable service; ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... not surprised to see somebody sitting aft, on the deck, with his legs dangling over the mud. You see I rather chummed with the few mechanics there were in that station, whom the other pilgrims naturally despised—on account of their imperfect manners, I suppose. This was the foreman—a boiler-maker by trade—a good worker. He was a lank, bony, yellow-faced man, with big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and his head was as bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in falling ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... received. They seem to forget the meaning of the words, and to think only of the music. They do not sing sufficiently with their hearts. That was not the case with us in that storm-driven boat. The music was, I daresay, very imperfect, but never did men enter more heartily into the spirit of the psalm than did we ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... might almost be called hyper-refinement, a wonderfully good eye for form, and last, but not least, the most scrupulous conscientiousness about detail. On the other hand his sense of colour was somewhat imperfect, and his hand was almost totally untrained, so that while he had all the enthusiasm of the true artist, his work always had the defects ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... obtained but a very imperfect idea of the exciting scene which had transpired before her. When she saw Vernon fall, and then Maxwell, she realized that she was safe. With an effort,—for her excited nerves had taken away her strength,—she rose from her position on the floor, by the side of her lifeless hostess. ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... sometimes several influences combine to affect it greatly and suddenly. Recent inventions, chemical and mechanical, moreover, have considerably altered the conditions of production. While, therefore, it is the best standard yet devised and put into actual practice, it is very imperfect. A standard better than a single metal, more stable than a single commodity, is desirable ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... leaves or sheaves of grass, and among these they saw figures moving and disappearing, watching their approach, yet always ready to disappear in the recesses of the woods. Sounding carefully the depth of water with their imperfect tackle, they anchored off the main beach, and sent a boat on shore from each vessel, Luis being in command of one. The natives at first hovered in the distance, but presently came down to the shore to meet ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the genuine from the spurious Plays: And, with equal Judgment, tho' not always with the same Success, attempted to clear the genuine Plays from the interpolated Scenes: He then consulted the old Editions; and, by a careful Collation of them, rectified the faulty, and supplied the imperfect Reading, in a great number of places: And lastly, in an admirable Preface, hath drawn a general, but very lively, Sketch of Shakespear's poetic Character; and, in the corrected Text, marked out those peculiar Strokes of Genius which were most proper ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... the time is too imperfect to justify a positive conclusion. It is possible, however, that the success of the revolution effected by Henry IV. was due in part to a reaction in the church's favour; and it is certain that this prince, if he did not owe his crown to the support of the church, determined ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... retired, leaving Aladdin alone in the hall. He took the lamp, which he carried about him, rubbed it, and presently the genie appeared. "Genie," said Aladdin, "I ordered thee to leave one of the four- and-twenty windows of this hall imperfect, and thou hast executed my commands punctually; now I would have thee make it like the rest." The genie immediately disappeared. Aladdin went out of the hall, and returning soon after, found the window, as he wished it to be, like ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... was there again that the really fine and poignant irony came in. Through her intercourse with Jane and Laura, Rose offered herself for comparison, and showed flagrantly imperfect. But for that, owing to Tanqueray's superhuman powers of abstraction, she might almost have passed unnoticed. As it was, he owned that her incorruptible simplicity preserved her, even at her worst, from being ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... prayer are often seeming denials. Beneath the outward request He hears the voice of the inward desire, and He responds to the mind of the Spirit rather than to the imperfect and perhaps mistaken words in which the yearning seeks expression. Moreover, His infinite wisdom sees that a larger blessing may be ours only by the withholding of the lesser good which we seek; and so all true prayer trusts Him to give His own answer, not ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... very convenient and expeditious mode of cooking; but though one of the most common, it is as commonly performed in a very imperfect manner, and meets with less attention than the comfort of a good meal requires. A fryingpan should be about four inches deep, with a perfectly flat and thick bottom, and perpendicular sides. When used it should be half filled with ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... frontiers, or, to speak more accurately, something of an irritation. But that menace or irritation was never conceived of as we conceive of the menace of a foreign power. It was merely the trouble of preventing a fringe of imperfect, predatory, and small barbaric communities outside the boundaries from doing harm to a vast, rich, thickly populated, ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... Latin Poems, as make several lines unintelligible; and that in the volume of Poems on Affairs of State, the same mistakes are as frequent; and in those, some pieces are attributed to our author, which he never wrote. Most of his Poems printed in Dryden's Miscellanies are so imperfect, that whole stanzas are ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... Covenant here come into consideration? The answer is suggested by ver. 17. The Ark of the Covenant is no more remembered, because Jerusalem has now, in a perfect sense, become the throne of God. The Ark of the Covenant comes into consideration, therefore, as the throne of God, in an imperfect sense. It can easily be proved that it was so, although there have been disputes as to the manner in which it was so. The current view was this, that God, as the Covenant God, had constantly manifested ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... handed me the cutting he said: "I am Destilia!" His story was so strange that I asked him a good many questions about it. He answered me quite frankly on every point, but always adhering stoutly to the main point—namely, that it was no phantom or mirage, no dream or imperfect vision in a fog. "We were four in all who saw it," he said—"three from the bridge and the Englishman, Caulfield—from the bows—whose account exactly agreed with what we saw. Captain Mirolani and Falamano and I were all awake and in good trim. We looked with our night-glasses, ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... and the archivists and annalists will pile up facts forever like so many articulates or mollusks or radiates, until the vertebrate historian comes with his generalizing ideas, his beliefs, his prejudices, his idiosyncrasies of all kinds, and brings the facts into a more or less imperfect, but still organic series of relations. The history which is not open to adverse criticism is worth little, except as material, for it is written without taking cognizance of those higher facts about which men must differ; of which Guizot ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... inclinations, at least by their enthusiasm and partial view of their own purposes; and even the description of disinterested reporters and eye witnesses may be distorted and exaggerated, either by their own peculiarities of excited imagination, or from their imperfect opportunities for observation. But in cases where numerous witnesses are questioned, and cross examined under the solemnities of judicial proceeding, each one knowing that others equally well informed have been or ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... feel secure; he would never believe in the stability of life, or forget what depths of pain lie beneath small happiness and feelings of content and safety. It seemed to him as he looked back that their happiness had never been so great as his pain was now. There had always been something imperfect in their happiness, something they had wanted and had not been able to get. It had been fragmentary and incomplete, because they were so young and had not known ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... little journeys from one patch of grass to another, by a hundred obstacles, which, trifles though they might be to animals of a higher species, were yet of fatal importance to creatures constituted like itself, he began to find an imperfect, yet remarkable analogy between his own destiny and that of this small unit of creation. He felt that, in its petty sphere, the short life of the humble animal before him must have been the prey of crosses and disappointments, as serious to it, as the more severed and destructive ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... all that my approaching departure from England, at the time last mentioned, left in my power: upon the present occasion I have offered arguments for, and endeavoured to anticipate those against, the deductions I then made public; and however imperfect may have been my success in either, the welfare of society at large is too deeply involved in the establishment of my opinions with respect to the custom I condemn, (if those opinions be correct,) for me to hesitate while ...
— Remarks on the Subject of Lactation • Edward Morton
... soft divisions their tender fingers should strike on the yielding strings."[11] Life was lacking in physical comforts, and still more in refinement. The dining-hall became at night the sleeping place of a promiscuous crowd of retainers. There was a very imperfect separation of the sexes at any time. Men and women ate with their fingers, and threw the refuse of their meal on the table, or amidst the straw on the floor, to be devoured by the cats and dogs which swarmed about. Read the directions for ladies' table manners given by Robert de ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... lustre in her eyes that told of unnatural excitement. It gave a strange brilliancy to her beauty, and might have deceived an unpractised observer. The old man looked at her long and curiously, his imperfect sight excusing the closeness ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the Notes of my Celtic Fairy Tales, No. xvii.). This is a specifically Celtic formula, and would seem therefore to claim Cinderella for the Celts. But the welding of the Sea Maiden ending on to the Cinderella formula is clearly a later and inartistic junction, and implies rather imperfect assimilation of the Cinderella formula. To determine the question of origin we must turn to the purer type given by the other two ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... the greetings of her Majesty to the Duke, and was heard with great attention. Alexander attempted a reply in French, which was very imperfect, and, apologizing, exchanged that tongue for Italian. He alluded with great fervour to the "honourable opinion concerning his sincerity and word," expressed to him by her Majesty, through the mouth of her envoy. "And indeed," said he, "I have always had especial care of keeping ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... behind it, and made a lunge in the direction of a muttered curse. The curse gave way to a roar of pain and rage, and Colden's second follower dropped, spurting blood in the darkness, his shoulder gashed horribly by the blunt end of Peyton's imperfect weapon. Harry now ran back to the parlor, to deal with Colden in the light, the latter's greater length of weapon giving a greater searching-power in the darkness. In the parlor Elizabeth stood waiting in suspense. Sam was sitting on the floor and staring stupidly at Williams, who was now awake and ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... inversion of conservative principles was, that the movement of Slavery is towards barbarism, while the movement of all countries in which labor is not positively chattellized is towards freedom and civilization. True conservatism, it must never be forgotten, is the refusal to give up a positive, though imperfect good, for a possible, but uncertain improvement: in the United States it has been misused to denote the cowardly surrender of a positive good from a fear to resist the innovations of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... describe what followed? Not adequately, only by imperfect hints. These two faced each other, Rosa and the apparition. She uttered no word. But I, in my stupor, knew that she was interceding with the spectre for my life. Her lovely eyes spoke to it of its old love, its old magnanimity, and in the name of that love and that magnanimity ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... nightmare of the nations, in which Europe had gone mad, revelling in superhuman bloodshed and destruction,—a conflict in which more than earthly forces had been let loose, accomplishing a carnage so immense that the mind could only form a dim and imperfect conception of it. And now this red tide of desolation had swept up to the western verge of the Continent, and was there gathering strength and volume day by day against the hour when it should burst and oversweep the narrow strip ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... rooms with imperfect ceilings it is easy to disguise this by using a paper with a small design in the same tone. A perfectly plain ceiling paper will show every defect in the ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... means employed by Nature to diversify species, a means which comes into play whenever the environment changes. The cause of the great diversity shown by animal species is indeed ultimately to be sought in the environment. As the imperfect and earliest forms developed they spread over the earth and invaded the utmost corners of it:—"One can imagine what an enormous variety of habitats, stations, climates, available foods, environing media, etc., animals and plants have had to endure, ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... to be discussed in this chapter are of the highest interest, but are treated by me in an imperfect and fragmentary manner. Mr. Wallace, in an admirable paper before referred to (1. Anthropological Review, May 1864, p. clviii.), argues that man, after he had partially acquired those intellectual and moral faculties which distinguish him from the lower animals, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... him, mother?" said Jock. "I should think he was quite to be trusted with it. I see! I was reading an account of this method of his to Dr. Lucas one day, and he was much interested and tried to tell me something about my father; but it was after his speech grew so imperfect, and he was so much excited and distressed that I had to lead ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of Delvile were as vehement as had been his entreaties, which yet, however, were not at an end; the concession she had made was imperfect, unless its performance were immediate, and he now endeavoured to prevail with her to be his before ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... informs us that it need not be, and on the whole ought not to be—that cunning is the weapon which Heaven has given to the saints wherewith to withstand the brute male force of the wicked world.' This charge was in fact based on a careless reading, or an imperfect recollection, of the twentieth discourse in 'Sermons on Subjects of the Day.' The discourse in question is a somewhat nauseous glorification of the servile temper, but it only says that the meekness of the saints is (by Divine providence) so successful ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... expected naturally to see a youth of imperfect constitution, and cachectic or dyspeptic tendencies, who was in training to furnish one of those biographies beginning with the statement that, from his infancy, the subject of it showed no inclination for boyish amusements, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... that in those woods that have passed through the engraver's hands, some which promised best, so far as their texture or grain is concerned, have been tried upon very imperfect or ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... one is a bookman because he has many books, for he may be a book huckster or his books may be those without which a gentleman's library is not complete. And in the present imperfect arrangement of life one may be a bookman and yet have very few books, since he has not the wherewithal to purchase them. It is the foolishness of his kind to desire a loved author in some becoming dress, and his fastidiousness ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... say womankind, I speak of a sex so frail, so variable, so changeable, so fickle, inconstant, and imperfect, that in my opinion Nature, under favour, nevertheless, of the prime honour and reverence which is due unto her, did in a manner mistake the road which she had traced formerly, and stray exceedingly ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... gaping crowd on the landing received the visitor when he stepped ashore and asked to see the captain of the guard. To that dignitary he delivered a despatch handsomely enveloped in yellow silk, saying, in imperfect Greek: ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... necessarily brief and imperfect digest gives only the headings of an article which filled nearly two columns of the Times, and it is needless to say that such an article in the leading columns of the most serious and respectable newspaper in the world produced an intense ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... another, feasted from morning to night on the repetition of my own praises, and enjoyed the various conjectures of criticks, the mistaken candour of my friends, and the impotent malice of my enemies. Some had read the manuscript, and rectified its inaccuracies; others had seen it in a state so imperfect, that they could not forbear to wonder at its present excellence; some had conversed with the author at the coffeehouse; and others gave hints that they had lent ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... dwelt on in speaking, as to be equivalent to a dissyllable - u, is characteristic of the solemn Glendower; but the imperfect line ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Billardiere, "at the exactitude with which the latitude had been determined by this navigator, at a time when instruments were very imperfect. The same remark applies to nearly all Leuwin's ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... who has produced it, but as one who has experienced art; and his own experience is really the subject-matter of his criticism. If he is a philosophic critic, he will know that his experience is itself necessarily imperfect. As some one has said: "We do not judge works of art; they judge us"; and the critic is to be judged by the manner in which he has experienced art, as the painter is to be judged by the manner in which he has experienced the visible world. ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... things), logical, free from pleonasm or tautology, smooth, certain, free from bombast, agreeable or sweet, truthful, not inconsistent with the aggregate of three, (viz., Righteousness, Wealth and Pleasure), refined (i.e., free from Prakriti), not elliptical or imperfect, destitute of harshness or difficulty of comprehension, characterised by due order, not far-fetched in respect of sense, corrected with one another as cause and effect and each having a specific object.[1694] I ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... secret about it; you didn't confide your—your trouble to me, and it would be perfectly honourable of me to tell it. I wont{sic} unless you make me, but if you can't be polite and keep peace with Cora—at least while papa is sick I think it may be necessary. I believe," she finished with imperfect gravity, "that it—it ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... up in despair my effort to appear genteel, and devoted myself to the bouquet. I cut almost flowers enough to dress a church, and then remorselessly excluded every one which was in the least particular imperfect. In making the bouquet I enjoyed the benefit of my nephews' assistance and counsel and took enforced part in ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... II; and the variations between them will be found in the notes. About one third of this article, taken from the former of those MSS., is printed in Malcolm's London, vol. ii. p. 89, but it conveys a very imperfect idea of the whole composition; for not only has the orthography of the extract been modernized, but the most interesting descriptions do not occur. The annexed is therefore, it is presumed, the only correct copy which has ever been published, and it cannot fail to be deemed an exceedingly curious ...
— A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483 • Anonymous
... practice more than advanced the theory of Morality. If I could flatter myself that this Essay has any merit, it is in steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite, in passing over terms utterly unintelligible, and in forming a temperate yet not inconsistent, and a short yet not imperfect system of Ethics. ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... of the debate, the admissions of the ministerial speakers, and the delays which have been submitted to, we would almost be inclined to doubt the sincerity of the government in wishing to pass even this measure, imperfect as it is. There seems to exist an extraordinary and ominous good feeling between the opposing parties. Sir James Graham is described by Mr O'Connell as having "stated the case of the promoters of the bill in a manner which could ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... Earth from the heavens; till pressed by weight of sky In densest volume to the earth they pour Their cataracts; no lightning could endure Such storm unquenched: though oft athwart the gloom Gleamed its pale fire. Meanwhile a watery arch Scarce touched with colour, in imperfect shape Embraced the sky and drank the ocean waves, So rendering to the clouds their ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... imperfection? You are different from Smith, Smith is different from Jones. But it is simply a difference of imperfect construction. One is more foolish than another, one is more irresponsibly moved to laughter ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... hastily written and imperfect sketch of the newspaper periodical press, of printers, editors, booksellers, and authors, I must close this portion of my present reminiscences. I have depended on a memory somewhat tenacious as my authority, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... I am rather glad that you have got the next door, as the locality is highly respectable. Tell Hen that I copied the Runic stone on the Castle Hill, Edinburgh. It was brought from Denmark in the old time. The inscription is imperfect, but I can read enough of it to see that it was erected by a man to his father and mother. I again write the direction for your next: George Borrow, Esq., Post Office, Tobermory, Isle of Mull, Scotland. God bless you ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... been out all night looking for a job in their galley punt. At morning dawn they find a captain who employs them to get his ship a good berth, or to take him to the Ness. Perhaps the captain says—and this is an actual case—in imperfect English, 'I have no money to pay you, but I have forty pounds of tobacco, vill you take dat? Or vill you have it in ze part payment?' The boatmen consult; hungry children and sometimes reproachful ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... a fairly representative collection of French, Italian, German books, all equally well-read and annotated, each in its own language, the French and Italian being excellent, but the German imperfect, although, as she told me, she liked both the language and the literature very much the best of the three. "German suggested ideas to me," she said, "and that is why I paid less attention to the construction of the language, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... were of importance as having been used by Dionysius Exiguus in his collection. That the Canon of Holy Scripture was settled at this council is a traditional commonplace in theology, but hardly borne out by the facts. The council only drew up one of the several imperfect lists of sacred books which appeared in antiquity. The following canons show the influx of heathenism into the Church, resulting from the ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... much surprise as it was possible for him to show when at last she stood with outstretched hand before him. He had only an imperfect recollection of an ill-clad, untidy-looking child, with pale tear-stained cheeks, and dark unhappy eyes. The march of the years had been a thing whose effects he had altogether underestimated. The girl who stood now facing him was slight, and there was something of ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... conception of democracy was meager, narrow, and self-contradictory; and just because his ideas prevailed, while Hamilton toward the end of his life lost his influence, the consequences of Jefferson's imperfect conception of democracy have been much more serious than the consequences of Hamilton's inadequate conception of American nationality. In Jefferson's mind democracy was tantamount to extreme individualism. He conceived a democratic society to be composed ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... Tchertkof at Krekshin, and there for the first time he wrote a formal will, attested by the signature of witnesses. How this will came to be written I do not know, and I do not intend to discuss it. It afterward appeared that it also was imperfect from a legal point of view, and in October, 1909, it had all ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... represent by one idol, with three heads growing out of one body, with this mysterious signification, that they all proceed from the same principle. By which it may be inferred, that in former times they have heard of Christianity; and that their religion is an imperfect imitation, or rather ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... yeast must be good and fresh, if the bread is to be digestible and nice. Stale yeast produces, instead of vinous fermentation, an acetous fermentation, which flavours the bread and makes it disagreeable. A poor thin yeast produces an imperfect fermentation, the result being ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... divine! Pardon a muse sae mean as mine, Who in her rough imperfect line, Thus daurs to name thee; To stigmatize false friends of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Here ends an imperfect narrative of the relief. What the deliverers saw on Thursday morning was a little white town lying in the midst of a wide shallow basin of green moorland; and it reminded one of a town that had been long deserted and in ruins. I am not exaggerating when I say that by far the greater number ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... arguments good for the purpose of conservatism are available for the purpose of innovation. This is an error. A conservative reasoner may urge the uncertainty of all prevision, or the fact that the actual constitution, though theoretically absurd or imperfect, works well, as reasons of some weight, though not of overwhelming weight, for leaving things as they are, but it must puzzle any sensible man to see how either the uncertainty of prevision or the fair working of existing institutions can be twisted into reasons for taking a political ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... therefore, a response to obvious and pressing necessity. However slow or imperfect may have been the adjustment of internal organizations to the conditions of the trade, still the groove was defined and consequently the amount of possible floundering largely limited. Not so with the next step, namely the national federation of trades. In the sixties we ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... court, among those skeleton names that appear as the remains of beauty in the morning journals after a ball to the wandering prince, in the reports of railway collisions and steamboat explosions. No news comes of her. And so imperfect are our means of communication in this world that, for anything we know, she may have left it long ago ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... skill or machinery, by which the genuine is produced, the same quality of work cannot be done. Therefore, in a counterfeit, the lines are imperfect, giving the paper a dull or hazy aspect, that may be all the better appreciated by comparing it with the genuine. The lines in the counterfeit will be found now and then irregular in size, and broken: not uniform in course, sometimes heavy, sometimes light: no two stamps ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... angelic sweetness, and made more tender still by love, a love that was passionate in spite of marriage, like his for Beatrix. Perhaps the noblest men retain some clay in their constitutions; the slough still pleases them. If this be so, the least imperfect human being is the woman, in spite of her faults and her want of reason. Madame de Rochefide, it must be said, amid the circle of poetic pretensions which surrounded her, and in spite of her fall, belonged to the highest nobility; she presented ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... even developed a certain jealousy in him. His work began to suffer from interruptions. Yet they had glowing and entertaining moments together that could temper his rebellious thoughts with the threat of irreparable loss. "One must love, and all things in life are imperfect," was how Mr. Britling expressed his reasons for submission. And she had a hold upon him too in a certain facile pitifulness. She was little; she could be stung sometimes by the slightest touch and then her blue eyes ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... sudden alteration when the courtiers disported themselves with their expressions, avowing that it was no wonder he who could build a change, could change a building. I have, I am afraid, given but a very imperfect idea of the character of my kind and noble patron. I had met him in the afternoon at the Exchange on the 21st of November, 1579, being Saturday. Parting from him, I returned to Lombard Street. While sitting with my wife and children ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... Dixon. You have missed the grandeur of van Manderpootz's concept. See here, this creature, imperfect as it is, represents the predatory machine. It is the mechanical parallel of the tiger, lurking in its jungle to leap on living prey. This monster's jungle is the city; its prey is the unwary machine that follows the ...
— The Ideal • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... should you think of the probable musical genius of a young man who was particularly fond of jingling a set of sleigh-bells? Should you expect him to turn out a Mozart or a Beethoven? Now, I think I recognize the poetical instinct in Number Seven, however imperfect may be its expression, and however he may be run away with at times by fantastic notions that come into his head. If fate had allotted him a helpful companion in the shape of a loving and intelligent wife, he might have been ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... contract a self-reliance and a self-esteem, which are not only moral evils, but serious hindrances to the attainment of truth. And next to none, perhaps, or none, who will not be reminded from time to time of the disadvantage under which they lie, by their imperfect grounding, by the breaks, deficiencies, and irregularities of their knowledge, by the eccentricity of opinion and the confusion of principle which they exhibit. They will be too often ignorant of what every one knows and takes for granted, of that multitude of small truths which fall upon the mind ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... tried to hide it in a laugh. Margret walked on beside her, her hand on the cart's edge. Somehow this creature, that Nature had thrown impatiently aside as a failure, so marred, imperfect, that even the dogs were kind to her, came strangely near to her, claimed ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... organization had been called upon by the President of the United States to do. It was a herculean task; practically impossible with any large degree of efficiency in view of the almost insurmountable obstacles to be contended with. But step by step the imperfect machinery was set up, and it began to function in the home camps. Then the overseas work was introduced by the first troops going to France, and the difficulties ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... of your own emotion (if you feel it) at the sight of the Alps," says Ruskin, "and you find all the brightness of that emotion hanging like dew on a gossamer, on a curious web of subtle fancy and imperfect knowledge." Such a result of our examination would but add to our confusion. Ruskin's mind was so permeated with adoration of mountain scenery that his attempts at cool analysis of his own sensations failed, as would those of a priest who, worshipping before the altar, tried at the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... with clarity and skill. Old second or third mortgages, presumably paid, for which satisfactions were never recorded; tax liens that have not been cleared; or possible interests of minority heirs under a will dating back a generation or more; are some of the most common causes for imperfect titles. But if one is patient and the seller is willing to cooperate, such clouds ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... something of your fellows of both sexes, before settling into a state that must have been otherwise precarious, however excellent the woman who is your mate. My System with you would have been otherwise imperfect, and you would have felt the effects of it. It is over now. You are a man. The dangers to which your nature was open are, I trust, at an end. I wish you to be happy, and I give you both my blessing, and pray God to conduct and strengthen ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bulk of the fish go to Mediterranean ports direct, to Catholic countries, chiefly, and also to Brazil. The small size and imperfect curing which the Labrador summer allows make the fish almost unsalable in English and American markets. Many of the cod are of the black, Greenland variety, which are far less palatable, and are usually thrown away or cured ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... and I think that Christian people do far too little realise the solemn truth that it is not all the same then whether a man has kept his Master's commandments or neglected them. I believe that whilst a very imperfect faith saves a man, there is such a thing as being 'saved, yet so as through fire,' and that there is such a thing as having 'an abundant entrance ministered unto us into the everlasting kingdom.' He whose life has been very slightly influenced ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... of Browning's art. "The concrete and material content of a life of perfected knowledge and volition means one thing, only, love," teaches Hegelian philosophy. This, too, is the entire message of Browning's poetry. Man must love God in the imperfect manifestation which is all he can offer of God. He must relate the imperfect ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... of perfection at praying, that with the assistance of young and powerful lungs, I was fully able to distance him at any English prayer in which we joined. But in Latin, I must allow, that owing to my imperfect knowledge of its pronunciation, and to some twitches of conscience I felt on adventuring to imitate, him by overleaping this impediment, he was able to throw me back a considerable distance in his turn; so that when we both started for a De Profundis, I was always sure to come in second. Owing ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... attracted by him, added a special interest to her general charm. Fitzpiers was in a distinct degree scientific, being ready and zealous to interrogate all physical manifestations, but primarily he was an idealist. He believed that behind the imperfect lay the perfect; that rare things were to be discovered amid a bulk of commonplace; that results in a new and untried case might be different from those in other cases where the conditions had been ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... the resentment and bitterness of this unusual mood would be washed away, and that Rachael, after a nap and a bath, would feel more like herself, but nevertheless she went off to her game in a rather worried frame of mind, and gave but an imperfect attention to the question ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... that he must really belong by descent to a southern race, that a physical cause might lie beneath this strange restlessness, like the imperfect reminiscence of something that had passed in earlier life. The aged ministers of heraldry were set to work (actually prolonging their days by an unexpected [134] revival of interest in their too well-worn function) at the search for some obscure ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... like the heads of diamond nails, could be; what the moon, looking so absolutely content with light—why, she knew less about them than you and I! but the greatest of astronomers might envy the rapture of such a first impression at the age of sixteen. Immeasurably imperfect it was, but false the impression could not be, for she saw with the eyes made for seeing, and saw indeed what many men are too wise ...
— Harper's Young People, December 9, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... at dinner Talbot called me "Leander," which instantly attracted the notice of the ladies, and an explanation was demanded; but for a time it was evaded, and the subject changed. Emily, however, joining together certain imperfect reports which had reached her ears, through the kindness of "some friends of the family," began to suspect a rival, and the next morning examined me so closely on the subject, that fearing a disclosure from other quarters, I was ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... carpenter. Indeed there is about the whole scene the spirit of scene-shifting. It therefore touches whatever nerve in us has since childhood thrilled at all theatrical things. But the picture will be imperfect unless we realise something which gives it unity and marks its chief difference from the climate and colours of Western Europe. We may say that the back-scene remains the same. The sky remained, and in the depths of winter it seemed to be blue with summer; and so clear that I almost flattered ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... feet long and eighteen feet wide, is farther down the valley. The spring and the pool are about a thousand feet apart, and are connected by an aqueduct through the hill, which, owing to imperfect engineering, is seventeen hundred feet long. From a Hebrew inscription found in the lower end of this passageway it was learned that the excavation was carried on from both ends. A little below the Pool of ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... liberty; his erroneous doctrine against the sufficiency of the written Word, the perfection of the law, the office of Christ, and His blessed evangel; his corrupted doctrine concerning original sin, our natural inability and rebellion to God's law, our justification by faith only, our imperfect sanctification and obedience to the law; the nature, number, and use of the holy sacraments; his five bastard sacraments, with all his rites, ceremonies, and false doctrine, added to the ministration of the true sacraments without the word of God; his cruel judgment ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... the rhubarb of restitution and satisfaction, with divers other safe roots, seeds, and flowers, fit and necessary to help to carry away by degrees the incredible confluence of ill humours and all such malignant matter as offended), but also to put pen to paper and appear in print (as in this imperfect and impolished piece, which as guilty of an high presumption here in all humility begs your Lordship's pardon) wherein my chief scope is to personate the Good Samaritan, that, as he cured the wounded traveller ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... and imperfect are the accounts of Leonardo's life written some time after his death by Vasari and others, any notes or letters which can throw more light on his personal circumstances cannot fail to be in the highest degree interesting. The ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... as a curiosity a selection, though an imperfect one, from the catalogue of the flying leaves and small cheap journals, political and satirical, that sprung into existence after the revolution, mostly in Berlin and Vienna; not more than three or four of them ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... challenged for following the promising appearances: Isa. xxx. 1, 2, 3, 11. It is therefore daring presumption to set up providence for a rule in opposition to the written law of God. Hence it must be concluded, either that the preceptive will of God in the scriptures is imperfect, or the laws therein repealable by providence; or then that providence cannot be the ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... majestic in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the dramatic means to wholly represent the part. And it is more pathetic and perhaps more instructive to consider the small dog in his conscientious and imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the dog is feudal and religious; the ever-present polytheism, the whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules them on the one hand; on the other, their singular difference of size and strength among ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... preoccupation with death in the plays of M. Maeterlinck's youth and a greater ghoulishness in the verse of Mr. Hardy's youth. It is of Mr. Hardy's verses that one thinks oftenest as one reads these verses of Synge, and not only because of certain likenesses in subject-matter, but because of the imperfect mastery of both over the verse forms and a certain epigrammatic gnomic quality common to both. The verses of Synge are not relatively so important in comparison with the rest of his writing as Mr. Hardy's verses are in comparison with the ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... where progress is so swift and books so short-lived, the Greeks of the great age had such genius and vitality that their books lived in a way that no others have lived. Let us get away from the thought of Euclid as an inky and imperfect English school-book, to that ancient Eucleides who, with exceedingly few books but a large table of sand let into the floor, planned and discovered and put together and re-shaped the first laws of geometry, till at last he had written one of the great simple books of the world, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... him into fits, claiming that he was not much on paralysis, but he was hell on fits. The entrance of the piece of sandwich into the stomach—that is, the small pieces that we were able to blast off with the imperfect appliances at hand in the tool box of a wrecking car—was signaled by the worst rebellion that has been witnessed in this country since 1860. The stomach, liver, lungs, spleen and other patent insides got up an indignation meeting, with the stomach in the chair. In ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... be understood too literally. As a matter of fact, the rubato is too important an element of expression not to have been partially anticipated in the works of some of Chopin's predecessors, just as Wagner's leading motives had imperfect prototypes in the works of some preceding composers. As early as 1602, the Italian, Caccini, describes what he calls the "Stile Nobile, in which the singer," he says, "emancipates himself from the fetters of the measure, by prolonging or diminishing the duration ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... with Mr. Peel, before dinner, concerning the state of things in Canada, and I was mortified to find that he had but an imperfect idea ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... the Authorized Version. Fulke, however, irritated by what he considers a superstitious regard for the number of words in the original on the part of the Rhemish translators, puts the whole question on a common-sense basis. He charges his opponents with making "many imperfect sentences ... because you will not seem to add that which in translation is no addition, but a true translation."[189] "For to translate out of one tongue into another," he says in another place, "is a matter of greater difficulty than is commonly taken, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... may be considered as made up of earnest yearnings after objects whose value increases with the difficulties of obtaining them, and which seem greater and more desirable, from our imperfect knowledge of their nature, just as the objects of the outward vision are magnified and exalted when seen through a natural telescope of mist. Imagination fills up and supplies the picture, of which we can only catch the outlines, with colors brighter, and forms more perfect, than those of reality. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... 1829, $58,362,136. While these sums were devoted to increasing the resources and improving the condition of the country, and in discharging its pecuniary obligations, those claims which were derived from what are termed the imperfect obligations of gratitude ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... it absolutely impossible to produce a work on this subject that shall be any thing like complete. My first publication I acknowledged to be very imperfect, and the present, I am as ready to acknowledge, is still more so. But, paradoxical as it may seem, this will ever be the case in the progress of natural science, so long as the works of God are, like himself, infinite and inexhaustible. In completing one discovery we never ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... the corn-deity," with many others, the whole list containing what may be regarded as the chief sanctuaries of the land, to the number of thirty-one. Numerous other similar and more extensive lists, enumerating every shrine and temple in the country, also exist, though in a very imperfect state, and in addition to these, many holy places are referred to in the bilingual, historical, and other inscriptions. All the great cities of Babylonia, moreover, were sacred places, the chief in renown and importance ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... with in the use of candles, chiefly on account of the irregular burning of candles when exposed to the slightest draught, and to the imperfect combustion, which left a charred piece of wick which it was necessary to remove to make the candle burn once more. Then, again, the extinction of a burning candle involved some skill, and instruments were devised to effect this without ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... of borrowing such words is that they often come to be used in a different sense from their use in their native language; and people with an imperfect knowledge of these languages will say rather vulgar or shocking things when using them in the English manner in those languages. Thus, to speak of a person of a certain "calibre" in French is exceedingly vulgar; and refined people do not use the word chic as freely ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... And they are all imperfect—contentedly imperfect, How can people sing incorrectly? It ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... of the twentieth, were we able to return along the vista of a hundred years. Our manners and customs are so vastly different from those of our great-grandfathers that we should feel out of place indeed had we to go back, even for a short time, to their uncouth and imperfect ways. Their extraordinarily complex method of governing themselves, and their intricate political machinery would be very distressing to us, and are calculated to make one think that a keen pleasure in governing or in being overgoverned—not a special aptitude or genius for ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... wondering as to their odd direction. Some among them, no doubt, were rather more intelligible, and Kate had heard without wonder that she was blank about Lord Mark. This young lady's account of him, at the same time, professed itself as frankly imperfect; for what they best knew him by at Lancaster Gate was a thing difficult to explain. One knew people in general by something they had to show, something that, either for them or against, could be touched or named or proved; and she could think of no other case of a value taken as so great and yet ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... dealing with this very period. After carefully examining, one after another, most of the theories put forward, I have adopted those hypotheses which, while most nearly approximating to the classical legends, harmonise best with the chronological framework—far too imperfect as yet—furnished by the inscriptions dealing with the closing years of Nineveh; I do not consider them all to be equally probable, but though they may be mere stop-gap solutions, they have at least the merit of reproducing in many cases the ideas current among those ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... nature with an imperfect moral sense and a complete inability to discriminate between meum and tuum, I was irresistibly impelled at an early age to adopt the precarious profession of housebreaker. I have just served a sentence of three years, and was on the point of resuming my career when I read Mr. Lloyd George's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... field is wasteful. It is difficult to reduce all the lime to a fine powder and to make even distribution over the surface. Any excess of water from rains puddles some of the lime, destroying practically all its immediate effectiveness. Distribution with shovels is necessarily imperfect. ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... islet stones The dingy kidling, with its tinkling bell, Leapt frolicksome, or old romantic goat Sat, his white beard slow waving. I moved on With low and languid thought, for I had found That grandest scenes have but imperfect charms Where the eye vainly wanders, nor beholds One spot with which the heart associates Holy remembrances of child or friend, Or gentle maid, our first and early love, Or father, or the venerable name Of our adored country. O thou Queen, Thou delegated ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... work she began, she would toil on untiringly till it was completed; and then what triumph shone in her eyes! At such times they became darkly brilliant with the joy that filled her heart. But she possessed little talent for invention; what she had seen done, after a few imperfect attempts, she could do again, but she rarely struck out any ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... gentlemen were speaking loudly. 'Yes,' said the surveyor-general, 'we are building a future empire here, and would like more recognition from the Home government of our services. We are doing a great work with imperfect means.' 'Ah!' exclaimed the officer, 'what do you need?' 'We need more money and more officials to direct the stream of immigration.' So they went on gabbling, while by this time there were over fifty of us in the waiting-room and round the door outside. Getting ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... idea which in all the length of my travels has been at once my fellow and my guide—a key wherewith to unlock the hidden things of strange new lands—is a conception, however imperfect, of the grandeur of our race, already girdling the earth, which it is destined perhaps eventually ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... habit was constantly extending by the advice and example of physicians, first induced the author to undertake the discussion of this subject before the respectable Society to which he has the honor to belong. Whether the attempt has been successful, the public will judge. That it is imperfect, will not be denied; but it is believed to have claims as ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... will long remain a subject of debate, but no one can rise from his works without recognising a moral grandeur in him that far out-tops the very human flaws that may even serve to make him more penetrative to our own imperfect hearts. ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... 'un, and grapes too." Andrew now threw out the wash-up water, pitching it on to Whiskey, who went away whimpering aggrievedly, much to the delight of his master, and illustrating that even the favourite pet of a youth has something to put up with in this imperfect life. ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... appeared to me to realise sufficiently that the conduct of public affairs, notably in this democratic age, is at best a very rough unscientific process; that it is occasionally necessary to make a choice of evils or to act on imperfect evidence; and that at times, to quote the words which I remember Lord Northbrook once used to me, it is even better to have a wrong opinion than to have no definite opinion at all. So early as 1868, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... appearances presented in a man affected with tuberculosis of the lungs and larynx. The pallor of the larynx is characteristic. There is weakness of the internal thyro-arytenoid muscle on the right side, which results in imperfect tension of the vocal band on that side, so that the voice is uncertain and harsh. Such illustrations are introduced to impress the normal by contrast. The reader is strongly advised to compare these figures with others in the body of the work, ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... perfect. For, otherwise, we are compelled to confess that God understands an infinite number of creatable things, which he will never be able to create, for, if he created all that he understands, he would, according to this showing, exhaust his omnipotence, and render himself imperfect. Wherefore, in order to establish that God is perfect, we should be reduced to establishing at the same time, that he cannot bring to pass everything over which his power extends; this seems to be a hypothesis most absurd, and ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... to being hammered. Like other human institutions, they are imperfect. Therefore the criticisms are not always unjust. Further, there is no more reason why the services should be immune to attack than any other organic part ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... significance of each of these tiny musical "words" (or figures, as we are to call them),—small and apparently imperfect as they are,—can best be tested by concentrating the attention upon each as if it stood alone upon the page; it is such vitality of the separate particles that invests a musical masterwork with its power and ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... facts which I have advanced, or even the general laws deduced from them, will suffer any serious change; and they are of sufficient importance to justify their publication, though much may yet remain imperfect or undone. Indeed, it is the great beauty of our science, CHEMISTRY, that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausting the subjects of research, opens the doors to further and more abundant knowledge, overflowing ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... deep pessimism at its darkest. The imperfect, that is everywhere. That is all that you can see or work at. That is the warp and woof of all your occupations and institutions, your politics, your science, your religion. They are all nearly as bad as they are good. Your science has forever to disown its past. Your politics ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... are the only depositary of the power of ordering foreign relations, foreign governments are often aggrieved by acts of the courts of a State which the United States have but imperfect means of ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... Isolde is what I hold it to be, the loftiest paean of pure and holy love ever conceived by a poet, when others see in it only a "story of vulgar adultery," steeped in sensuality? The moral law is the same to all men, and differences of judgment upon moral acts are due to imperfect understanding. But I cannot hope to make my own position clear without descending to the foundations of all art, of all life, without asking: what is drama? what are its aims, and how does it express them? what is human life which it reflects? Wagner felt ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... The inhabitants of the imperfect world had closed in once again and the sharp instruments of torture they used were being thrust into the invisible bodies of the two humans. Each time, Lambert was unable to restrain his cries, for it seemed that he was being ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... that the text of none of the penitential psalms is perfectly preserved. We must, therefore, content ourselves in our illustrations with more or less imperfect extracts. It is to be noted, too, that often the exact meaning of the lines escapes us, owing to the obscurity of terms employed or to the gaps in the texts themselves. With few exceptions the psalms appear in the double style characteristic of so large a section of ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... Moses and Mohammed, of Isaiah and Apollo, of the Principia, Paradise Lost, and the Apocalypse, of Rothschild, Napoleon, and Bismarck. Some geniuses expend themselves in poems, some in paintings, others in predictions. All are alike imperfect and fallible. Once in centuries, perhaps, we are astonished by the advent of a master, while occasional less perfect attempts and shrewd guesses keep the fires of ambition alive ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... interesting points of observation. Thus, their quality proves that charcoal was the fuel invariably employed, and the large percentage of metal left in them shows that the process then in use of extracting the iron was very imperfect. They are said to vary in richness according as they belong to an earlier or later period—so much so, that some persons have ventured on this data to specify their relative ages; but other causes may have produced ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... more. A difficulty does not destroy a thesis that is solidly founded. Once a truth is clearly established, not all the difficulties in the world can make it an untruth. A difficulty as to the truth revealed argues an imperfect intelligence; it is idle to complain that we are finite. A difficulty regarding the infallible Church should not make her less infallible in our mind, it simply demands a clearing away-Theological difficulties should not surprise a novice in theological ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... betoken fire, has ever looked into the existing literature of the supernatural for proof, he will know what I mean. This literature is enormous, but it is practically worthless for evidential purposes. Facts enough are cited, indeed; but the records of them are so fallible and imperfect that at most they lead to the opinion that it may be well to keep a window open upon that quarter in ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... grimy-looking shop near Seven Dials, over which, in weather-worn yellow lettering, the name of "C. Cave, Naturalist and Dealer in Antiquities," was inscribed. The contents of its window were curiously variegated. They comprised some elephant tusks and an imperfect set of chessmen, beads and weapons, a box of eyes, two skulls of tigers and one human, several moth-eaten stuffed monkeys (one holding a lamp), an old-fashioned cabinet, a flyblown ostrich egg or so, some fishing-tackle, and an ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... the purposes of the present discussion, all parties are agreed; but the moment the assailants of interest take the next step in their argument, we shall find that their errors begin—errors resulting, as we shall see, from an imperfect analysis of facts. For them the two types of correspondence between productive effort and product are, firstly, the manual labourer, who performs some daily task such as riveting plates or bricklaying, ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... us therefore see how this celebrated author describes the general or abstract idea of a triangle. 'It must be (says he) neither oblique nor rectangular, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenum; but all and none of these at once. In effect, it is somewhat imperfect that cannot exist; an idea, wherein some parts of several different and inconsistent ideas are put together' ESSAY ON HUM. UNDERSTAND. B. iv. C. 7. S.9. This is the idea which he thinks needful for the enlargement of knowledge, which is the subject of ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley
... was mistaken in thinking himself more happy or more true when he expressed it. As he was filled with passion it was easy for him to discover it at the back of what he had written: but no one else would have recognized it through the imperfect vocabulary with which he designated its variations. Many artists whom he condemned were in the same case. They had had, and had translated profound emotions: but the secret of their language had died ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... and wrist, and the general faulty touch of his pupil, gives some wonderful etude or a piece with great stretches and arpeggios for the left hand, and gives himself unwearied trouble over it, it is a proof of abundant painstaking; but it is labor thrown away, and only makes the imperfect mode of ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... faon que notre sang circule.' This have I learnt from a pretty hard course of experience, and would, from sincere benevolence, impress upon all who honour this book with a perusal, that until a steady conviction is obtained, that the present life is an imperfect state, and only a passage to a better, if we comply with the divine scheme of progressive improvement; and also that it is a part of the mysterious plan of Providence, that intellectual beings must 'be ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... that he can so present the group on his canvas that one glance suffices to take in the whole picture, with the lights and shadows, attitudes, costumes, and details of every kind, which are sadly wanting in our description—too long, though so imperfect—of the party gathered thus unexpectedly round our young baron's table. The beginning of the repast was very silent, until the most urgent demands of hunger had been satisfied. Poor de Sigognac, who had never perhaps at any ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... the inhabitants of the earth, with whom our intercourse, commercial and political, would of itself furnish occupation to an active and industrious department. The constitution of the judiciary, experimental and imperfect as it was even in the infancy of our existing Government, is yet more inadequate to the administration of national justice at our present maturity. Nine years have elapsed since a predecessor in this office, now ...
— A Compilation of Messages and Letters of the Presidents - 2nd section (of 3) of Volume 2: John Quincy Adams • Editor: James D. Richardson
... briefly, the mills to which I have last alluded. It must suffice to say that the devoted labors of Col. Barrows, President of the Willimantic Thread Co., have succeeded in creating, out of Irish labor, social conditions of industrial life which approach ideal perfection as nearly as the work of imperfect man can possibly do. And, better still, the high morality and intelligence of Col. Barrow's 1,600 operatives, the comfort and seemliness of their homes, the cleanly and cheerful character of the mill work, even the refinements of the music and art schools attached to the mill, can be proved, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... from all physical defect or malformation, and of good moral character. They must be able to read and write, although in special cases, when a boy shows general intelligence and is otherwise qualified, he may be enlisted notwithstanding the fact that his reading and writing are imperfect. Each boy presenting himself for enlistment must be accompanied by his father, mother, or, in case neither is living, by his legally appointed guardian, and must voluntarily sign an agreement to serve in the navy till twenty-one years of age. Upon enlistment ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... more is mentioned in history than their names, places of abode, and age wherein they existed, and scarcely that. Again, there are many others, of whom the most that can be said is only a few faint hints, which of necessity must render their lives (if they may properly be so called) very imperfect, from what they might and would have been, had they been collected and wrote near a century ago, when their actions and memories were more fresh and recent; several persons being then alive, who were well acquainted with their lives and proceedings, ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... yielding jot or tittle to the world's opinion. That was what it meant, and he who was proudly conscious of having succeeded thus, could well afford to regard the lives of others as half-finished and imperfect; he alone was at one with himself, his life ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... lives irregularly—bolts his food so that his blood supply is imperfect. That is a foolish man treating himself as he would not treat any other valuable ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... that the founder of Christianity should not only be revered by his disciples as a sage and a prophet, but that he should be adored as a God. The Polytheists were disposed to adopt every article of faith, which seemed to offer any resemblance, however distant or imperfect, with the popular mythology; and the legends of Bacchus, of Hercules, and of AEsculapius, had, in some measure, prepared their imagination for the appearance of the Son of God under a human form. But they were astonished that the Christians should abandon the temples ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... prominent members of the House of Lords would be imperfect which should omit to give some account of Lord Westbury, the present Lord-High-Chancellor. Having been Solicitor-General in two successive Administrations, he was filling for the second time the position of Attorney-General, when, upon the death of Lord Campbell, he was raised to the wool-sack. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... feel a divine appetite, and am looking for the appearance of my Lord to the destruction of all the carnal mind.—At Stockton lovefeast, the Lord opened my mouth, both in the Chapel, and at a neighbouring house; I was constrained to speak. May the imperfect hints thrown out be as bread cast upon the waters, and what I said amiss the Lord forgive. The peace of God ruled my heart.—The mournful tidings of Cousin Mary's death has reached us. The day before, she was up sewing. How sudden a transition from time to eternity! Although ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... that work will call it perfect too. For example, having seen some work (which I suppose to be as yet not finished), if we know that the intention of the author of that work is to build a house, we shall call the house imperfect; while, on the other hand, we shall call it perfect as soon as we see the work has been brought to the end which the author had determined for it. But if we see any work such as we have never seen before, and if we do not know the ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... at the time of the discovery of such principles, the mechanical arts may be too imperfect to render their application likely to be attended with success. Such was the case with the principle of the hydrostatic paradox; and it was not, I believe, until the expiration of Mr. Bramah's patent, that the ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... age, tall, lean, wiry, had been a farmer all his life. His wife had died three years before, and a year later, he had lost his farm through an imperfect title. Understanding machinery and being a fair carpenter, he then came to the city, with $200 in his pocket, joined the Carpenter's Union, and tried to make a living at that trade. Between dull business, ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... the effect of a panic upon a multitude can have but an imperfect idea of such a thing. The best disciplined troops have been enervated and made cowards by it. Armies have been routed by it, even where no enemy appeared to furnish an excuse. Like electricity, it operates instantly; like sympathy, it ...
— A sketch of the life and services of Otho Holland Williams • Osmond Tiffany
... development. Development of young bees slow in cool weather or weak swarms. Temperature above 70 deg. for the production of young. Thin hives, their insufficiency. Brood combs, danger of exposure to low temperature, 49. Cocoons of drones and workers perfect. Cocoons of queens imperfect, the cause, 50. Number of eggs dependent on the weather, &c. Supernumerary eggs, how disposed of, 51. Queen bee, fertility diminishes after her third year. Dies in her fourth year, 52. Drones, description of. Their proper office. Destroyed by the bees. When first appear, 53. None in ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... the geographical position of the United States relatively to a Central-American canal. If one be made, and fulfil the hopes of its builders, the Caribbean will be changed from a terminus, and place of local traffic, or at best a broken and imperfect line of travel, as it now is, into one of the great highways of the world. Along this path a great commerce will travel, bringing the interests of the other great nations, the European nations, close along ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... here as elsewhere that I never acquired the power of really talking French. I have been able to order my dinner and take a railway ticket, but never got much beyond that. Of the merest rudiments of the sciences I was completely ignorant. My handwriting was in truth wretched. My spelling was imperfect. There was no subject as to which examination would have been possible on which I could have gone through an examination otherwise than disgracefully. And yet I think I knew more than the average young men of the same rank who began life at nineteen. I could have ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... here, my brother? Who art thou, to change the fate of nations and the hearts of emperors, which are in the hand of the King of kings? If thou wert weak, and imperfect in thy work—for unfaithful, I will warrant thee, thou wert never—He put thee there, because thou wert imperfect, that so that which has come to pass might come to pass; and thou bearest thine own burden only-and yet not thou, but He who ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... unfolded all the amorous ideas of her mind, explained at length all she knew of the great mystery she was going to enact with me, and of all the contrivances she had had recourse to in order to acquire her imperfect knowledge, the whole interlarded with the foolish talk natural to her age. I made out that she was afraid of my not finding her a maiden, and of my reproaching her about it. Her anxiety pleased me, and I gave ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... middle sort of beings, who, because they cannot be angels, ought to thwart their ambition, and not endeavour to become infernal spirits. It is too well exemplified in the present time, where the faults and errors of humanity, checked by the imperfect timorous virtues, have been overpowered by those who have stopped at no crime. It is a dreadful part of the example, that infernal malevolence has had pious apologists, who read their lectures on frailties in favour of crimes; ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... he divided into thirty-one books (of which the first thirteen are lost, while the text of those which remain is in some places imperfect), began with the accession of Nerva, A.D. 96, where Tacitus and Suetonius end, and was continued to the death of Valens, A.D. 378, a period of 282 years. And there is probably no work as to the intrinsic value of which ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... the "pitch-tree." On the contrary in speaking of the Canarium, Blanco states that it yields a resin called "pili-pitch." I do not know the reason for this confusion of terms, but presume it to be due to imperfect knowledge of Spanish on the part of those ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... answered his summons at the gate. Not till he had thrice rung did he hear a heavy step on the gravel walk within; then the wicket within the gate was partially drawn aside, a dark eye gleamed out, and a voice in imperfect English asked ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... believe that this ambition appealed to her. Nay, at times it certainly did so, for she liked the brilliant and the commanding. On the other hand, it seemed imperfect as an ideal of life. In its undercurrents her thought was always more or ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... theology does not tend to form, as for instance the experimental, and again the philosophical; but that is because it is theology, not because of the gift of infallibility. But, as far as this goes, I think it could be shown that physical science on the other hand, or mathematical, affords but an imperfect training for the intellect. I do not see then how any objection about the narrowness of theology comes into our question, which simply is, whether the belief in an infallible authority destroys the independence of the mind; and I consider that the ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... part of the tables, chairs, and so on were of wood, with the ornaments in embossed metals. All this shows the Assyrians to have been an artistic people, and to have reached an interesting stage in their arts, though their works are coarse and imperfect when judged by Greek standards or by our own idea of what is beautiful. If we had the space to consider all the various designs of the bas-reliefs in detail, you would learn from them a great many interesting facts concerning the domestic life of this ancient and interesting people. ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... Fund people, the French officers and cavalry, and the ambulance waggons retraced their way to Paris, whilst our caravan went on in the charge of a detachment of German dragoons. Not for long, however, for the instructions received respecting us were evidently imperfect. The reader will have noticed that we left Paris on its southeastern side, although our destination was Versailles, which lies south-west of the capital, being in that direction only some eleven miles distant. Further, on quitting Creteil, instead of taking ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... The rhetorician cannot put the judge or juror in possession of all the facts which prove an act of violence, but he may truly persuade them of the commission of such an act. Here the idea of true opinion seems to be a right conclusion from imperfect knowledge. But the correctness of such an opinion will be purely accidental; and is really the effect of one man, who has the means of knowing, persuading another who has not. Plato would have done better if he had said that true opinion was ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... Our knowledge of these events is imperfect, our only information being derived from the very scanty details given in the Eponym Canon; up to the present we can do no more than trace the general course ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... calls for. But, in view of the near termination of the present session of Congress, and the widespread interest which must have been awakened by Mr. Wickliffe's resolutions, I prefer sending even this imperfect answer to waiting the period necessary for the collection of fuller and ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... of civil war, come again to our own. We might have been utterly crushed but for our proud and pampered stomachs, which in turn gave the bone, brain and brawn for the conquests of peace. So here's to our Mammys—God bless them! God rest them! This imperfect chronicle of the nurture wherewith they fed us is inscribed ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... to explain it to ourselves, and in the beginning we frame a great many very imperfect explanations. Sometimes we imagine that this power is located in some tree or rock or river; sometimes it is an animal; sometimes it is supposed to exist in invisible spirits or demons; sometimes the sky or the ocean represents it, or one of the elements, like fire, is conceived to be its ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... criticism of Allston's works would be very imperfect which did not speak of his "Belshazzar's Feast,"—because, though the picture was never finished, it occupied so large a part of the life and thoughts of Allston, that it demands some mention. It had been an object of great interest among Allston's friends before it had been seen ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... innocent, of course you are not. We are all more or less imperfect creatures, I suppose, but—well, all is, if I were your grandma, I wouldn't let you bother your head about such things. It is hard enough for the preachers to settle some things for us and themselves, so how do you suppose ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard
... five it was increased seven per cent., and in eight it decreased twelve per cent. But whatever may be the variations in the mere quantity of urine voided under the influence of alcohol, the alterations in quality pretty uniformly show an increase in the products of imperfect internal metamorphosis or oxidation, such as uric acid, oxalates, casts, leucocytes, albumen and potassium, with less of the normal products, as ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... good in us his image? Imperfect and sinful as we are, is not all the foundation of our being his image? Is not the sin all ours, and the life in us all God's? We cannot be the creatures of God without partaking of his nature. Every motion of our conscience, every admiration ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... as inaccuracy had done its baleful work, a spirit of infidelity and of hostility either to the essentials or the details of the new religion must have impelled such as were either imperfect Christians, or no Christians at all, to ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... Chapter forty-seven. Poltics. The word poltic surprises by himself—' And down went Mr. Pickwick's remark, in Count Smorltork's tablets, with such variations and additions as the count's exuberant fancy suggested, or his imperfect knowledge ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... nature seems to be made necessary by the manifold knowledges and skills of our highly complex civilization. We should transplant the human sapling, I concede reluctantly, as early as eight, but not before, to the schoolhouse with its imperfect lighting, ventilation, temperature. We must shut out nature and open books. The child must sit on unhygienic benches and work the tiny muscles that wag the tongue and pen, and let all the others, which ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... examined it closely: it was of cedar, curiously inlaid with some darker wood, and raised, about a foot from the ground, on a carved stand of the same. The lock was silver, though tarnished from age; at each end were the imperfect remains of handles also of silver, broken perhaps prematurely by some strange violence; and, on the centre of the lid, was a mysterious cipher, in the same metal. Catherine bent over it intently, but without ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... probably strike an English litterateur like Mrs. Jameson with much force; little else was to be expected in a country, situated as Canada was then, with a small population, no generally diffused education, and imperfect facilities of communication with the great world beyond. In this comparatively isolated position, ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... nature exceptionally rich and strong in its conception of religious truths and human needs, only to find him on the morrow floundering hopelessly in the mire of rudimentary science, or getting, by repeated perusals, but an imperfect idea of some author's words, which it seemed to her he ought to have ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... considered the most perfect gem of its kind in existence. One stands in its court-yard and finds himself in the chaste and exclusive companionship of snowy marble and blue sky. One feels almost ill at ease, as though conscious of being an imperfect thing, marring perfection by his presence. "Quiet as a nun, breathless with adoration," one enthusiastic visitor exclaims, in an effort to put his sentiments and impressions of the Moti Mesjid into words. Like this adoring traveller, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... between the Huguenot by faith and the Huguenot by politics was imperfect. Tignonville, like most men of rank of the younger generation, was a Huguenot by politics; and he was in a bitter humour. He felt, perhaps, that it was men such as this who had driven the other side to excesses such as these; and he hardly repressed ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... together in a small hut, and sometimes having an imperfect, and sometimes no floor, and seldom raised from the ground, ill ventilated, and surrounded ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... open-mouthed, gasping. Then those that were nearest me began to edge away, and at the very next station they all bundled out of the carriage before the train stopped, as though I had some infectious disease. And the thing was just a rough imperfect rendering of some mere commonplaces, passing the time of day as it were, with which the heathen of Aleppo used to favour the servants of the American missionary. Indeed," said Professor Gargoyle, "if it were not for women ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... storms of a hot summer day in this high region, if one is prepared for them, are full of pleasant interest; they rise so majestically, sweep along with such power, and pass away so triumphantly, leaving behind them such a calm sweetness in the air, that a journey to this wilderness would be imperfect in interest without ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... tea, poor coal. One wonders, in looking at their blackened, smouldering grates, in a freezing day, what the fire is there at all for,—it certainly warms nobody. The only thing they seem likely to be lavish in is funeral expenses, which come in the wake of leaky shoes and imperfect clothing. These funeral expenses at last swallow all, since nobody can dispute an undertaker's bill. One pities these joyless beings. Economy, instead of a rational act of the judgment, is a morbid monomania, eating the pleasure out of life, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... say much of the Y.M.C.A. They need no encomium of mine, but I am prepared to stand by them to the last ditch. They were doing, not talking, and were wise enough to use even those agents whom they knew to be imperfect, as God Himself does when He uses us. The folly of judging for all cases by one standard is common and human, but it is not God's way. This conviction was brought home to me in a very odd manner. I had gone to lecture at an English Y.M.C.A. hut at the invitation of the efficient director, who ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... hast seen what is the form of perfect and imperfect good, now I think we must show in what this perfection of happiness is placed. And inquire first whether there can be any such good extant in the world, as thou hast defined; lest, contrary to truth, we be deceived with an empty show of thought. But it cannot be ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... everything into knowledge, doubtless drew from me, as it did from other sources, many of its materials. What I owe, even intellectually, to her is, in its detail, almost infinite; of its general character a few words will give some, though a very imperfect, idea. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... us as we proceed with our subject. Air is absolutely necessary for combustion; and, what is more, I must have you understand that fresh air is necessary, or else we should be imperfect in our reasoning and our experiments. Here is a jar of air. I place it over a candle, and it burns very nicely in it at first, shewing that what I have said about it is true; but there will soon be a change. See how the flame is drawing upwards, presently fading, ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... say?" exclaimed the maid, leading, or rather dragging off her master, who had a very imperfect idea of the use ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... she hurried past the visitor with averted face. It was well done, and, thus disguised by the thick veil, another man than Paul Harley might have failed to recognize one of whom he had never had more than an imperfect glimpse. But if Paul Harley's memory did not avail him greatly, ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... words to use respecting the man who had shown so much true manliness of disposition; but there are times when we all show what a great deal of the imperfect there is in our natures, and this was one of those times with Oliver, who, judging by the mate's acts, formed the conclusion that, seeing their case was desperate, and a way out to save his own life, he ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... The notes which were taken by his hearers, have by some of them (too partial in his favour) been thought worth revising and transcribing; and these transcripts have been frequently lent to others. Hence copies have been multiplied, in their nature imperfect, if not erroneous; some of which have fallen into mercenary hands, and become the object of clandestine sale. Having therefore so much reason to apprehend a surreptitious impression, he chose rather to submit his own errors to the world, than to seem answerable for those of other men. And, with ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... a human being. He might be in place, therefore, in a symbolical poem like Faust, but in a purely human drama like Othello he would be a ruinous blunder. Moreover, he is not in Othello: he is a product of imperfect observation and analysis. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... safety of navigators. The use of the thermometer ought certainly not to lead us to neglect the use of the lead; but experiments sufficiently prove, that variations of temperature, sensible to the most imperfect instruments, indicate danger long before the vessel reaches the shoals. In such cases, the frigidity of the water may induce the pilot to heave the lead in places where he thought himself in the most perfect ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... and constant absorbment, at the time of its preparation, occasioned it to appear with so many undramatic effects, from my inexperience of theatrical requisites and demands, that, when I saw it, I myself perceived a thousand things I wished to change. The performers, too, were cruelly imperfect, and made blunders I blush to have pass for mine,-added to what belong to me. The most important character after the hero and heroine had but two lines of his part by heart ! He made all the rest at ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... who wins the world's honors to-day must not be overtrained mentally or physically; not, as John Randolph said of the soil of Virginia,—"poor by nature and ruined by cultivation," hollow-chested, convex in back, imperfect in sight, shuffling in gait, and flabby in muscle. The work of such a man will be musty like his closet, narrow as the groove he moves in, tinctured with the peculiarities that border on insanity, and out of tune ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... feel badly." "He looks badly." The former sentence implies defective nerves of sensation, the latter, imperfect vision. Use ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... that, in the most fundamental of all social operations, the building up of the family, the issues involved in the nuptial contract, lie beyond the best exercise of human thought, and the unseen forces of providential government make good the defect in our imperfect capacity. Even so would it seem to have been in that curious marriage of competing influences and powers, which brings about the composite harmony of the British Constitution. More, it must be admitted, than any other, it leaves open doors which lead into blind alleys; for ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... the inscriptions upon any of these Butsu-soku- seki will be found of more significance than the above imperfect attempts at an explanation of the emblems. The inscriptions upon the monument at Dentsu-In are typical. On different sides of the structure,—near the top, and placed by rule so as to face certain points of the compass,—there are engraved five Sanscrit characters which are ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... and gold was brought to a greater perfection in this ware than ever before, and it established for the makers a wide-reaching reputation. Possibly this reputation might have remained preeminent had not the short-sighted manufacturers begun to sell at a lower rate their imperfect pieces, or seconds. Great quantities of these flooded the market and immediately the fame of ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... dagoba at the top was reached they had passed through a course of religious instruction, as it were, and were ready, with enlightened eyes, to enter and behold the image of Buddha, symbolically left imperfect, as beyond the power of human art to realize or portray. From base to summit the whole hill is really a great picture-bible of ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... its verse and its prose. "The Modern Muse", exhibiting Mr. Kleiner in a somewhat humorous mood, is very forceful in its satire on the altered ideals of the poetical fraternity, but is marred by the noticeably imperfect rhyming of "garret" and "carrot", it is barely possible that according to the prevailing New York pronunciation this rhyme is not so forced as it appears, but we are of New England, and accustomed to hearing the sounds ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... can hardly think that shame has any share in the concealment of your guilt; for no shame can exceed that which you have already suffered. Besides, confession is all the amends you can make; and mankind know experimentally how frail and imperfect human nature is, and will allow for ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... These works are very imperfect, because they have exposed points. The angles are not protected by the fire from the sides. To remedy this difficulty, the next most usual work is the star fort, made in the form of a regular or irregular ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that they were primordially twiners is forcibly suggested. The internodes of all, without exception, revolve in exactly the same manner as twiners; some few can still twine well, and many others in an imperfect manner. Several leaf-climbing genera are closely allied to other genera which are simple twiners. It should also be observed, that the possession of leaves with sensitive petioles, and with the consequent power of clasping an object, would be of comparatively little use to a ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... of every man paints his character,' says Goethe; and scanty and imperfect as are the recorded details of General Lyon's life, enough is known to prove him to have been high-minded and brave as a soldier, with a perseverance and a penetration that analyzed at once the platforms of contending factions, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Bridge" is printed in Ritson's Gammer Gurton's Garland, and in Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes of England; but both copies are very imperfect. There are also some fragments preserved in the Gentleman's Magazine for September, 1823 (vol. xciii. p. 232.), and in the Mirror for November 1st of the same year. From these versions a tolerably perfect copy has ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... used threats, or expressions of loud resentment. All was arranged with him on system, and it was his practice to do "the needful" on every occasion, without wasting words about it. It was, therefore, with a bitter smile that he listened to my imperfect answers concerning the state of commerce in France, and unmercifully permitted me to involve myself deeper and deeper in the mysteries of agio, tariffs, tare and tret; nor can I charge my memory with his having looked positively angry, until he found me unable to explain the exact effect which ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... misfortunes removed from the company of those who first seduced him into his vices, he began to have some ideas of the use of life when he was going to leave it; and his thoughts had received certain ideas (though very imperfect ones) of death and a future state, when the punishment appointed by Law sent him to experience them. He died on the 23rd of August, 1726, being then upwards of ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... passion, the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater!—the passion for making them prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light. If I have not shrunk from saying that we must work for sweetness and light, so neither have I shrunk from saying that we must have a broad basis, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... short distance when the head of the column emerged from the heavy forest, and discovered the enemy to be advancing in line of battle. Nearly all the Twelfth Corps had emerged from the forest at that moment" (this is a very imperfect statement of the facts); "but, as the passage-way through the forest was narrow, I was satisfied that I could not throw troops through it fast enough to resist the advance of Gen. Lee, and was apprehensive of being whipped ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... have constituted "the Western recension." If, in codices of this family also, the self-same termination is now all but universally found, the fact is to be accounted for, (Griesbach says,) by the natural desire which possessors of the Gospels will have experienced to supplement their imperfect copies as best they might. "Let this conjecture be accepted," proceeds the learned veteran,—(unconscious apparently that he has been demanding acceptance for at least half-a-dozen wholly unsupported as well ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... great men who are worshipped in our temples, by reason of our indebtedness to them for the arts of life, could not but become impaired if their posterity were suffered to eclipse their fame by new discoveries, or presumptuously amend what might appear imperfect in their productions. It is therefore, by an edict of the Emperor Suen, forbidden to invent anything; and by a statute of the Emperor Wu-chi it is further provided that nothing hitherto invented shall be improved. My predecessor in the small office I hold was ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... such a translation must be very imperfect; but it is equally manifest that much divine truth maybe communicated by it, and probably with more accuracy than is commonly done by preaching, either with an ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... Bentham for his philanthropy, plain powerful sense, and lucid forcible writing; but as for John's politics, they are, as Beatrice tells the prince he is, "too costly for every-day wear." His theories are so perfect that I think imperfect men could never be brought to live under a scheme of government ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... on which it stands, yet enough, in this level country, to give it a prospect of a score or two of miles in all directions. The Conqueror fell in love with the situation at first sight, and gave a stolen monastery in exchange for it. The home so won has provided a shelter—at times very imperfect, indeed—to British sovereigns for eight centuries. From the modest erection of William it has been steadily growing—with the growth of the empire, we were near saying, but its chief enlargements occurred ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... nay, suppose them to observe some doubtful clause, it is ten to one they would refuse from delicacy to object to it. I know I am speaking within the mark, for I have seen such a case occur, and the Mexican, in spite of the advice of his lawyer, has signed the imperfect paper like a lamb. To have spoken in the matter, he said, above all to have let the other party guess that he had seen a lawyer, would have "been like doubting his word." The scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who have been brought up to understand ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ready. Three times the duke repeated the same question, raising his voice still more each time; and three times I made him the same reply, always in the same respectful manner. "Oh, you fool!" said he at last, "you do not understand, then."—"That arises evidently, Monseigneur, from your Excellency's imperfect explanations!" Upon which he explained that he was speaking of a new carriage which had come from Paris that very day, a fact of which I was entirely ignorant. I was on the point of explaining this ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... in action. If we believe in democracy, we must recognize in politics the instrument, however imperfect, through which democracy works. Brand Whitlock knew politics, first as a political reporter, then as candidate for mayor in four campaigns, in each of which he was successful. Under his administration the city of Toledo became a better place to ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... compel those we employ to do work that demoralizes them or does not tend to elevate or lift them, we are forcing them into service worse than useless. "If we induce painters to work in fading colors, or architects with rotten stone, or contractors to construct buildings with imperfect materials, we are forcing our Michael Angelos ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... uncultivated. When they look at things, they put their hands in their pockets. No doubt that is one reason why their knowledge is often so vague, inaccurate, and useless. It is probable, too, that our knowledge of phenomena beyond the reach of the hand is equally imperfect. But, at all events, we behold them through a ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... soldiers to find relief from their monotony. War is a dreary thing. With one fixed idea in the mind—to wait, to watch for some careless head over the mounded earth, and then to kill—war is drearier than slave labor, more nagging than an imperfect marriage, more dispiriting than unsuccessful sin. The pretty brass utensils of the dwellings had been pillaged. Canvas, which had once contained bright faces, was in shreds. The figures of Christ and his friends that had stood high in the niches ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... laugh went round till it reached the Vice-Chancellor. There it stopped. He was far too well bred to allow a single muscle of his face to move. "He throws a cold blanket on everything," my neighbour said; and my knowledge of English was still so imperfect that I accepted many of these metaphorical remarks in their literal sense, and became more and more puzzled about my host. It was evidently a pleasure to my friends to see how easily I was taken in. On the walls of the houses at Oxford I saw the letters ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... us the answer to the question as to the connection between the sudden and the gradual in sanctification: between its being a thing once for all complete, and yet imperfect and needing to be perfected. What God sanctifies is holy with a Divine and perfect holiness as His gift: man has to sanctify by acknowledging and maintaining and carrying out that holiness in relation to what God has made holy. ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... whilst the sphynx, satyr, unicorn, centaur, hypogriff, hydra, dragon, griffin, cockatrice, &c. &c. &c. were either the creations of fancy, or fabled accounts of creatures of whose real form, origin, nature, and qualities, but the most imperfect knowledge ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... Macalister (ibid. p. 121) has tabulated his observations, and finds that muscular abnormalities are most frequent in the fore-arms, secondly, in the face, thirdly, in the foot, etc.) Such resemblances are either perfect or imperfect; yet in the latter case they are manifestly of a transitional nature. Certain variations are more common in man, and others in woman, without our being able to assign any reason. Mr. Wood, after describing numerous variations, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... that one having for his vehicle the horse (Uchchaisrava), (Indra), patting me on the head with his hand, said these words, 'Now even the celestials themselves cannot conquer thee,—what shall I say of imperfect mortals residing on earth? Thou hast become invulnerable in strength, irrepressible, and incomparable in fight.' Then with the hair of his body standing on end, he again accosted me saying, 'O hero, in fighting with weapons none is equal unto thee. And, O perpetuator ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... carriage and began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box, and though I am quite unmusical the sounds filled me with the strangest emotions. I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a comer. It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... Presbyterian merchant, of a religious turn, it is probable a quantity of tracts would have been made to answer the purpose; but, belonging to a sect whose practice was generally as perfect as its theory is imperfect, Friend Abraham White's conscience was not to be satisfied with any such shallow contrivance. It is true that he expected to make many thousands of dollars by the voyage, and doubtless would so have done, had not the accident befallen ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... in the morning, cheered by the pleasant feeling of being once more in that Paris which is so imperfect, but which is the only true town in the world, I called on my dear Madame d'Urfe, who received me with open arms. She told me that the young Count d'Aranda was quite well, and if I liked she would ask him to dinner the next day. I told her I should be ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... chemistry apply By sweet affinities to human flesh, Driving the foe and stablishing the friend,— O, that were much, and I could be a part Of the round day, related to the sun And planted world, and full executor Of their imperfect functions. But these young scholars, who invade our hills, Bold as the engineer who fells the wood, And travelling often in the cut he makes, Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names. The old men studied magic in the flowers, And human fortunes in astronomy, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... be trusted with it. I see! I was reading an account of this method of his to Dr. Lucas one day, and he was much interested and tried to tell me something about my father; but it was after his speech grew so imperfect, and he was so much excited and distressed that I had to lead ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... practice was not wholly confined to the poorer classes, for he was often consulted by well-dressed members of the foreign colony—on account, probably, of his linguistic attainments. A foreigner with an imperfect knowledge of English naturally prefers a doctor to whom he can speak in his own tongue. Therefore, as Weirmarsh spoke French, Italian and Spanish with equal fluency, it was not surprising that he had formed quite a ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... several weeks, built shed-fashion, open to the fire on the west. If the wind changed, they could turn it round. It was formed by two forked stakes and a cross-bar, with rafters slanted from this to the ground. The covering was partly an old sail, partly birch-bark, quite imperfect, but securely tied on, and coming down to the ground on the sides. A large log was rolled up at the back side for a headboard, and two or three moose-hides were spread on the ground with the hair up. Various articles of their wardrobe were tucked around the sides and corners, or under the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... want to point out that even in the realm of science, where progress is so swift and books so short-lived, the Greeks of the great age had such genius and vitality that their books lived in a way that no others have lived. Let us get away from the thought of Euclid as an inky and imperfect English school-book, to that ancient Eucleides who, with exceedingly few books but a large table of sand let into the floor, planned and discovered and put together and re-shaped the first laws of geometry, till at last he had written one of the great simple books of the world, a book which ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... her cheek against his saddle bags, which he had placed for her the last thing. Very white and small her face looked as she slept, her hands folded under her chin.... Peter watched, his eyes becoming accustomed to the faint light. The white cap lay near, a different and imperfect white compared to her flesh; and the soft deep night of her hair seemed to him of sufficient loveliness for any world. A girl asleep—and such a faith had they known. There was a beauty about it all that rebuked the actuality ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... dire necessity of the admonition. The halting tongue, the slip in name or incident, the turning back to forge an omitted link in the chain, the repetition, the general weakness of statement consequent on imperfect grasp: these are common features of the stories one hears told. And they are features which will deface ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... holy services subsequently had at the altars of the greatly revered martyr St. Vitus. We may, therefore, ascribe it to accident merely, and to a certain aversion to this demoniacal disease, which seemed to lie beyond the reach of human skill, that we meet with but few and imperfect notices of the St. Vitus' dance in the second half of the fifteenth century. The highly colored descriptions of the sixteenth century contradict the notion that this mental plague had in any degree diminished in its severity, and not a single fact is to be found ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... being entirely moulded by hand, and showing no trace of the use of the potter's wheel. The body consists of a mixture of clay mixed with fine pebbles, or pounded flint, and sometimes ground chalk or shells. For finer work sharp sand has been employed. The firing is most primitive and imperfect. After drying in the sun the vessel was probably baked in the ashes of a fire of brushwood piled over and about it. The decoration, like the other processes, bespeaks a simple culture. It is usually in the nature of lines, or dots, varied now and then by thumb ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens
... be noted of Montesquieu, and as often of Voltaire, that each of them is constantly led astray by imperfect knowledge of foreign, and especially of barbarous and savage nations. Since the voyages and conquests of the Renaissance, accounts of strange countries had abounded in Europe, written in many cases by men anything but accurate, if not, in the ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... though it reaches but to a very little part of the World, it did at least give us a satisfactory account of those things to which 'tis said to reach. But I find not, that it gives us any other then a very imperfect information even about mixt Bodies themselves: For how will the knowledge of the Tria Prima discover to us the Reason, why the Loadstone drawes a Needle and disposes it to respect the Poles, and yet seldom precisely points ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... Enquiring what the reason of this might be, the general woice was that it proceeded from the nature of the Aurelian wine, which they alledge to have such influence on the sperm of man as to produce a creature imperfect in their legs. Others sayd it was the purity of the air about Orleans whence the city has the name of Aurelia. But what influence the air can have in this point is hardly explicable. Monsieur Ogilvy more rationally informed me ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... fact, even the very imperfect and indirect kind of contact which can be established by telegraphing over great distances is largely lacking. The French and the Russians are in touch. The commanders can and do pursue a combined plan. But the communication of results and the corresponding ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... without a motive, suggested a stroll on the lawn. If there was dew upon the grass none of them heeded it, and it was but seldom anyone enjoyed the privilege of pacing that sod when Mr. Schuyler was at home. Every foot had cost him many dollars, and it remained but an imperfect imitation of an English lawn. There was on the one side a fringe of maples, and it was perhaps by Mrs. Schuyler's contrivance that eventually Hetty found herself alone with Cheyne in their deeper shadow. It was not, however, a surprise to her, for she had seen the man's desire ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... mind, and a general feebleness of body, were all the apparent consequences of this stroke. She was not herself sensible of the nature of the attack, or clear in her ideas of any thing that had passed immediately previous to it. She had only an imperfect recollection of her daughter's illness, and of some hurry about Mr. Vivian's going away. She was, however, well enough to go into her dressing-room, where Vivian went to pay his respects to her, with Lord Glistonbury. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... legislation. It is possible that in some cases it places too much faith in law as a means of emancipation from economic bondage; but, in the main, its legislative point of view is sane and conservative. It believes that such ills as are due to bad or imperfect legislation can be, at least partly, relieved by good or more perfect legislation. Nor does it limit its interest to measures that concern the farmer alone. It is unalterably opposed to class legislation, and aims to keep its ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... his admirer, after Athens was abandoned, and Decelea fortified by the enemy—the admirer of one whose sole aim in life was tyranny? But, as the divine Plato says, as long as his chin was beardless, he was beloved by all; but, when he passed from boyhood to manhood, when his imperfect intelligence had reached its maturity, he was hated by all. Why, then, giving modest names to immodest sentiments, do men call personal beauty virtue, being in reality lovers of youth rather than lovers of wisdom? However, it is not my intention ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... and justly celebrated for its health, beauty, and wealth. If it loses the two first of these distinctions, how long will it retain the last? Business and population will turn away from an unhealthy and unattractive town. Defective sewerage and imperfect drainage are sapping the health; and the occupation of the suburbs by houses, manufactories, workshops, and stores, is destroying the beauty of the city. Will the merchants of Boston, whose reputation for intelligence, sagacity, and enterprise has gone out to the ends of the world, permit a false ...
— Parks for the People - Proceedings of a Public Meeting held at Faneuil Hall, June 7, 1876 • Various
... followed? Not adequately, only by imperfect hints. These two faced each other, Rosa and the apparition. She uttered no word. But I, in my stupor, knew that she was interceding with the spectre for my life. Her lovely eyes spoke to it of its old love, its old magnanimity, and ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... instance, or in these or those instances, education for the people has failed. And I have never traced even this to its source but I have found that the term education, so employed, meant anything but education—implied the mere imperfect application of old, ignorant, preposterous spelling-book lessons to the meanest purposes—as if you should teach a child that there is no higher end in electricity, for example, than expressly to strike a mutton-pie ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... that he may devote himself to the boundless pursuit of universal benevolence. Mr. Godwin gives no quarter to the amiable weaknesses of our nature, nor does he stoop to avail himself of the supplementary aids of an imperfect virtue. Gratitude, promises, friendship, family affection give way, not that they may be merged in the opposite vices or in want of principle; but that the void may be filled up by the disinterested love of good, and the dictates of inflexible justice, which is ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... strained, and imperfect generalizations. A historian should always remember that he is a sort of trustee for his readers. No matter how copious may be his notes, he cannot fully explain his processes or the reason of his confidence in one witness and not in another, his belief in one honest man against a half dozen ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... interesting, as there appears some reason for believing that before long we may see another outburst of the same star. In the years 945, 1264, and 1572, brilliant stars appeared in the region of the heavens between Cepheus and Cassiopeia. Sir J. Herschel remarks, that, 'from the imperfect account we have of the places of the two earlier, as compared with that of the last, which was well determined, as well as from the tolerably near coincidence of the intervals of their appearance, we may suspect them, with Goodricke, to be one ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... at Greenwich, and a length of about thirty miles was cut out and condemned. This, however, did not wholly remedy the difficulty, for the defective insulation became frequently and painfully apparent while the cable was being submerged. Still further evidence of its imperfect condition was afforded when it came to be cut up for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... those that would be used in counting, but are for specific use, being varied according to the thought it was intended to express. For example, naiooktaich there is 1, is present tense; naiooktaichcus, there was 1, is imperfect; and encoodaichdedou, there will be 1, is future. The variation in person is shown ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... no part of this country which has not its broad characters and tendencies, different from anything ever seen before, imperfect while they are doomed to isolation, during which they show only a maimed and grotesque vitality. The religious tendency is different, the humor is different, the imagination differs from anything beyond the Atlantic. And the East differs from the West, the North from the South; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... to breathe between its lips the living soul. But as he stooped, Hephaistos, jealous of the divine gift about to be conferred upon the mortal race, sent from his forges smoke and vapour, which obscured the vision of the Almighty Workman. So that the imperfect image received that which was meant ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... exclaims, "Ah, madam, how different is the morality of a blind man from ours; and how the morality of the deaf would differ from that of the blind; and if a being should have a sense more than we have, how wofully imperfect would he find our morality!" This is plainly a crude and erroneous way of illustrating the important truth of the strict relativity of ethical standards and maxims. Diderot speaks as if they were relative simply and solely to our five wits, and would vary with them only. Everybody now has learnt ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... rock, a wood, or a valley, however the scenery may be diversified, always conveys a perfect and distinct image to the mind; but a temple, an altar, a palace, or a pavilion, requires a detail, minute even to tediousness, and which, after all, gives but an imperfect notion of the object. I have as often read descriptions of the Vatican, as of the Bay of Naples; yet I recollect little of the former, while the latter seems almost familiar to me.—Many are strongly impressed with the scenery ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... it, is an imperfect system. But it is the only system that has banished famine. Under communism and feudalism there was hunger. Under capitalism the world has been able to feed twice as many mouths as could be ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... and in Washington, during those years when he needed help. She had not broken down until after the birth of his daughter, but that was twenty years ago, and she had been an invalid ever since. He spoke of this long period of imperfect happiness in a matter-of-fact way, and Betty assumed that by this time he was used to it. He alluded to his wife once as "a very dear old friend," but Betty guessed that she was nearly obliterated ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... a question of daily bread," said Morten, with energy. "Hungry people can't sit down and try to become a majority; while the grass grows the cow starves! They ought to help themselves. If they do not, their self-consciousness is imperfect; they must wake up to the consciousness of their own human value. If there were a law forbidding the poor man to breathe the air, do you think he'd stop doing so? He simply could not. It's painful for him to look on ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... works do not justify, although they are virtues and pertain to the righteousness of the Law, in so far as they are a fulfilling of the Law. So far also this obedience of the Law justifies by the righteousness of the Law. But this imperfect righteousness of the Law is not accepted by God, unless on account of faith. Accordingly it does not justify, i.e., it neither reconciles, nor regenerates, nor by itself renders us ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... it generally practised, men would become a race of pigmies. It iz no crime for brothers' and sisters' children to intermarry, and this iz often practised; but such near blood connections often produce imperfect children. The common peeple hav hence drawn an argument to proov such connections criminal; considering weakness, sickness and deformity in the offspring az judgements upon the parents. Superstition iz often awake ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... small white seed like rice—and reaped their harvest in the late summer, storing the crop in their dry cellars under ground. He told me also the story of the ant lion—a big beetle that lives in the jungles of the grain and the grass—of which I remember only an outline, more or less imperfect. ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... describe with some exactness the forest of Wolmer, of which three-fifths perhaps lie in this parish, my account of Selborne would be very imperfect, as it is a district abounding with many curious productions, both animal and vegetable, and has often afforded me much entertainment both as a sportsman and as ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... crime still remains one of the most perplexing and obstinate of social problems. It is much more formidable than pauperism, and almost as costly. A social system which has to try hundreds of thousands of offenders annually before the criminal courts is in a very imperfect condition; the causes which lead to this state of things deserve careful consideration from all who take an ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... rushing about the back of her store at the moment that Susan chanced to choose for her nervously murmured remarks, and had to have them repeated several times. Then she laughed heartily and merrily, and assured Susan in very imperfect and very audible English, that forty girls were already on her list waiting ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... is to know what we really like. It is probably impossible to look at a famous work with eyes clear from preconceived impressions: copies, engravings, photographs, have familiarized us in some measure with the finest things in the world. However imperfect an idea may be given by reproductions of great pictures—great in size as well as merit—whether we have seen a Marcantonio or a Raphael Morghen or only a carte de visite—a notion of their chief features is acquired: we recognize them from the farther end of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... clever young men of strong bias and manifest indisposition to respect or attend to, or even to be patient with, any aspect of the subject but their own in this complicated and eventful question, and who, partly from overlooking great and material elements in it, and partly from an imperfect apprehension of what they had to do, have failed to present even the matters of fact with which they deal with the necessary exactness and even-handedness. It seems to us that in a work intended ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... men and women of the human family? In the home from which he came he had dwelt from all eternity in the bosom of the Father, and had enjoyed the companionship of the highest angels. What could he find in this world of imperfect, sinful beings to meet the cravings of his heart for fellowship? Whom could he find among earth's sinful creatures worthy of his friendship, or capable of being in any real sense his personal friend? What satisfaction could his heart find in this world's deepest and ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... early four-toed ancestor in the Eocene age, has increased in size and in perfect adaptation of feet and teeth to a life on open plains, and has reached its highest perfection in the horse, the ass, and the zebra. In birds, also, we see an advance from the imperfect tooth-billed and reptile-tailed birds of the secondary epoch, to the wonderfully developed falcons, crows, and swallows of our time. So, the ferns, lycopods, conifers, and monocotyledons of the palaeozoic and mesozoic rocks, have ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... were not for the art of writing and printing! This it is that makes libraries the only sure and lasting memory of the human race, for its individual members have all of them but a very limited and imperfect one. Hence most men of learning as are loth to have their knowledge examined as merchants to lay ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... one journey, and went twenty miles from the first range of hills, till his further course was interrupted by a river running north, which is a curious circumstance, being in the mountains. He described it as wide as the Thames at Kingston. Some native iron he found, and also an imperfect limestone, and the dung of an unknown animal. Samples of everything he there found will be sent by the GREENWICH (whaler), and I did hope to have been able to add something farther from another journey he was about undertaking, and for ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... him, having been the proper time in the bath, he takes them out to be dried, sorted, cleaned, and packed. The bath has to be of just the right temperature, as, if it be too hot or too cold, the chimneys are liable to explode. In either case the process of annealing is imperfect. By working the tables at a certain rate, the baths are kept at the right temperature by the immersion of the red hot glass. Oil or tallow is used in the bath. Any greasy substance will do, though ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... the costume of women who work in some of the Derbyshire lead-mines; they are capital figures, to which the pencil can scarcely do justice; indeed, though this sketch was drawn from nature, it conveys but an imperfect idea of beings, (nondescripts,) who would assuredly delight Cruikshank. The dress of these women, of whom the writer saw several emerged from mines a few miles from the Peak, seems contrived to secure them from the cold and wet attendant upon their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... which are formed— 1. Present, Imperfect, and Future Indicative, 2. Present and Imperfect Subjunctive, 3. The Imperative, 4. The Present Infinitive, - (Active and Passive.) 5. The Present Active Participle, the Gerund, and Gerundive. II. Perfect Stem, ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... Europe was in a continual state of warfare. Little princes and great lords were constantly skirmishing and struggling for trifling additions of territory, or wasting each others borders. Geography was very imperfect; no police existed; roads, such as they were, were dangerous; and posts were not established. Events were only known by rumour, from pilgrims, or by letters carried In couriers to the parties interested: the public did not ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... our results with a much greater confidence than in any other case (except perhaps Clement of Rome, where we have the equally accurate and scholarly guidance of Dr. Lightfoot [Endnote 40:1]) that we are not led astray by imperfect materials. I have availed myself freely of Credner's collection of variants, indicating the cases where the existence of documentary (or, in some places, inferential) evidence for Justin's readings ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... the divine essence. Therefore to be unbegotten belongs also to the essence; thus it is not proper to the Father. But if it be taken in a privative sense, as every privation signifies imperfection in the thing which is the subject of privation, it follows that the Person of the Father is imperfect; ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... Seat—from which, this evening, I watched the sun set behind the distant Lomonds—that I might acquaint myself with the features of the surrounding country, and the effect of the city as a whole. And amid much confused and imperfect recollection of picturesque groups of ancient buildings, and magnificent assemblages of elegant modern ones, I carried away with me two vividly distinct ideas—first results, as a painter might perhaps say, of a "fresh eye," which no after survey has served to freshen ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... constructed. How he conceived this process has never been satisfactorily explained. He traced the various forms and phenomena of the world to numbers as their basis and essence. The "Monad" or unit he regarded as the source of all numbers. The number Two was imperfect, and the cause of increase and division. Three was called the number of the whole because it had a beginning, middle, and end. Four, representing the square, is in the highest degree perfect; and Ten, as it contains the sum of the four ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... machine which was to do the more difficult work of sewing the sole to the upper was the invention of a mere boy, Lyman R. Blake. The first model, completed in 1858, was imperfect, but Blake was able to interest Gordon McKay, of Boston, and three years of patient experimentation and large expenditure followed. The McKay sole-sewing machine, which they produced, came into use, and for twenty-one years was used almost universally both in the United ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... us, it is that the infinite God, the Power, whatever we name it, that is the thought and life of this universe, is expressed just as perfectly in the tiniest atom as in the most magnificent galaxy. There is no such thing as an imperfect atom in this universe. The infinitesimal atoms below us, and the tiny orbits through which these atoms and molecules sweep, are as much in the grasp of the Eternal Law as the movements of the ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... clear and distinct; in this clearness and distinctness we find the principle of certitude. Mind, then, exists, and is known to us as a thinking substance. But the idea of an infinite, perfect Being is also present to our intellect; we, finite, imperfect beings, could not have made it; unmake it we cannot; and in the conception of perfection that of existence is involved. Therefore God exists, and therefore the laws of our consciousness, which are ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... on the original miry earth, produced filmy bladders or bubbles, and these, becoming surrounded with a prickly rind, at length burst open, and as from an egg, animals came forth. At first they were ill-formed and imperfect, but subsequently they elaborated and developed." This has the genuine ring of the language ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... can not do better than to conclude this brief and imperfect sketch with the notice which appeared in the Cleveland Herald on the evening of the day of his decease. Speaking of the event ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... he observed, "it is really more a toy than a real camera, although it served admirably last night. I have had a great deal of amusement with it, pretending to feel people's pulses, but in reality snapping their photographs. It takes very small, imperfect pictures, of course, as you can see from the print there on your desk, and only one to each loading, but it can be carried in the palm of one's hand, and it uses a peculiarly sensitive plate that will register a snap-shot even by electric light. It had fortunately just been ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... Yankee is nothing more than the word English so transformed by the imperfect pronunciation of the natives of Massachusets—Yenghis, Yanghis, Yankies. The orthography of this much-used epithet, which is not given, we believe, in any English or American work, was communicated to M. Philarete {261} Charles ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... fact pointed out the fitness of New Holland for English settlement; and projects of its occupation, and of the colonization of the Pacific islands by English emigrants, became from that moment, in however vague and imperfect a fashion, the policy of the English crown. Statesmen and people alike indeed felt the change in their country's attitude. Great as Britain seemed to Burke, it was now in itself "but part of a great empire, extended ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... of the boat up to the path, so that I can step on. She is laden with flour from the valley of the Genesee, and may have started on her voyage shortly after the canal was made. She is succinctly manned by the captain, the driver, and the cook, a fiery- haired lady of imperfect temper; and the cabin, which I explore, is plainly furnished with a cook-stove and a flask of whiskey. Nothing but profane language is allowed on board; and so, in a life of wicked jollity and ease, we glide imperceptibly down the canal, unvexed ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... reduce all men to their own miserable level—"I will make a scientific simile" he would say, "[i]n the manner, if you will, of Dr. Darwin—I consider the alledged errors of a man of genius as the aberrations of the fixed stars. It is our distance from them and our imperfect means of communication that makes them appear to move; in truth they always remain stationary, a glorious centre, giving us a fine lesson of modesty if we ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... way from Lowell to Boston, and won a handsome wager for his owner, while intent only on a dinner for himself. Humanity is served out of all proportion to the intention of service. Even the noble souls, never wanting in history, who follow not a bait, but belief, see only in imperfect survey the connections and relations of their deeds. Each is faithfully obeying his own inward vocation, a voice unheard by other soul than his own, and the inability to calculate consequences makes the preeminent grandeur of his position; or he is urged by the high inevitable impulse to publish ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... see what an impulse these far-reaching conceptions would give to Comte's meditations. There were conceptions of less importance than these, in which it is impossible not to feel that it was Saint Simon's wrong or imperfect idea that put his young admirer on the track to a right and perfected idea. The subject is not worthy of further discussion. That Comte would have performed some great intellectual achievement, if Saint Simon ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... Antonio, where they expected first to burn powder. Nor were they deceived in their expectations. They found the Texian militia encamped before the town, which, as well as its adjacent fort of the Alamo, was held by the Mexicans, the Texians were besieging it in the best manner their imperfect means and small numbers would permit. An amusing account is given by Mr Ehrenberg of the camp and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... man, with a glance at his comrades' faces, gave way. I could not have told why, but from the start of the dispute I felt that this girl held her bandits, or whatever they were, in imperfect obedience. They obeyed her, yet with reserve. When pressed to the point between submission and mutiny, they yielded; but they yielded with a consent which I could not reconcile with submission. Even whilst answering deferentially ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... robbing its writings of every natural charm, as the best means of making men feel its supernatural power. The fresh sense of "letters" disappears in this conventional form. These many books of many ages have been bound up together, with the most imperfect classification either as to period or character. A verse-making machine has been driven through them all alike, chopping them up into short, arbitrary, artificial sentences, formally numbered in the body of the text. The larger divisions into chapters ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... unpared nails, scabbed hands or wrists, a tanned skin, a rotten carcass, crooked back, she stoops, is lame, splay-footed, "as slender in the middle as a cow in the waist," gouty legs, her ankles hang over her shoes, her feet stink, she breed lice, a mere changeling, a very monster, an oaf imperfect, her whole complexion savours, a harsh voice, incondite gesture, vile gait, a vast virago, or an ugly tit, a slug, a fat fustilugs, a truss, a long lean rawbone, a skeleton, a sneaker (si qua latent meliora puta), ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... producing any countervailing evil. But the presumption is against all laws which punish the voluntary acts of adult men when those acts injure no one except themselves. The social censure, or the judgment of opinion, rightly extends much further, though it is often based on very imperfect knowledge or realisation. It is probable that, on the whole, opinion judges too severely the crimes of passion and of drink, as well as those which spring from the pressure of great poverty and are accompanied by great ignorance. The causes of domestic anarchy are usually of such ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... assistants were congregated. Sheridan sat by some fagots, examining a topographical map of the country he had so well traversed; possibly with a view to design further aggressive movements in the morning. He is opposite me now as I pen these paragraphs by the imperfect blaze of his bivouac fire. He is good humored and talkative, like all men conscious of having achieved a great work, and has been good enough to sketch for me the plan of the day's operations, from which I have compiled much of the statement above. Close by lies Custer, trying ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... fruit, we thought, of our shaggy democracy,—as interesting a phenomenon in that regard as it has been our fortune to encounter. Where is the rudeness of a new community, the pushing vulgarity of an imperfect civilization, the licentious contempt of forms that marks our unchartered freedom, and all the other terrible things which have so long been the bugaboos of European refinement? Here was a natural product, as perfectly natural as ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... peace. But this he could not do. Not only was he under tribute to the Khazarui (a powerful tribe of mingled Finnish and Turkish blood), and harried by the Turks, in the South; overrun by the Finns and Lithuanians in the North; but in his imperfect political condition he was broken up into minute divisions, canton incessantly at war with canton, and there could be no peace. The roving bands of Scandinavian traders and freebooters were alternately his persecutors and ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... not mathematically accurate formulae; but they are generous, if imperfect, statements of great truths, and not unbecoming in the mouth of the man who, as the member of an unpopular sect, learnt to be cosmopolitan rather than bitter, and expressed his convictions in the well-known words addressed to Swift: 'I am of the religion of Erasmus, a Catholic; ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... or mother wit, as it is called, about the Spaniards, which renders them intellectual and agreeable companions, whatever may be their condition in life, and however imperfect may have been their education: add to this they are never vulgar, nature has endowed them with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... Violet Grandon will remember "Lohengrin," the perfect evening to the rather imperfect day. In good truth the day disappoints madame as well. Gertrude comes down with Violet, and there is a little shopping to finish. Laura and Gertrude cannot agree in one or two points concerning the wedding. ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... method. It is open and easy when the facts are in our possession. There are no secret springs, no occult forces, in the historic development of culture. Whatever seems hidden or mysterious, is so only because our knowledge of the facts is imperfect. No magic and no miracle has aided man in his long conflict with the material forces around him. No ghost has come from the grave, no God from on high, to help him in the bitter struggle. What he has won is his own by the right ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... water-tight, secondly, by providing for the rapid escape of rain water from the cemetery,[432] and, finally, if they did not push the art of embalming so far as the Egyptians, they entered upon the same path. The bodies we find in the oldest tombs are imperfect mummies compared with those of Egypt, but the skeleton, at least, is nearly always in an excellent state of preservation; it is only when handled that it tumbles into dust. In the more spacious tombs the body lies upon a mat, with its head upon a cushion. In most ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... allow them the time to make anything but hasty sketches, and they require that practice with the pencil without which natural talent is of little avail; the consequence is, that the engravings, which have appeared in too many of the Narratives of Journeys and Expeditions, give not only an imperfect, but even an erroneous, idea of ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... of blood, the perpetrators of violence—have been treated as only worthy of secondary consideration. Such are the lines on which social structure has, in most cases, proceeded, with the result that while external security was for long periods assured, internal security remained as imperfect and ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... Cooking places for the different castes and latrines were constructed in each yard; a military guard room, food and clothing stores were also supplied. Little can be said in favour of this prison, as the wards were ill-ventilated, and the sanitary arrangements were very imperfect. All the prisoners were in a somewhat lax system of association, except those undergoing punishment in cells. Prior to the receipt of the convicts from Bencoolen, Penang itself, as a penal settlement, had already been supplied from India with a number of transported criminals ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... astonished at the ease and rapidity with which they would accumulate interesting and valuable matter. Transcribing and printing, it is admitted, are expensive processes, and little could be effected by them at first; but merely to make known to the world by hasty, imperfect, even blundering, lists or indexes, that things unsought and unknown exist, would be ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... composed till last year, for he was more disposed to versify in sorrow than in joy. There were a good many written during his loneliness, for his reflections had a tendency to flow into verse, and pouring them out thus had been a great solace. The lines were often imperfect and irregular, but not one that was not deep, pure, and genuine, and here and there scattered with passages of exquisite beauty and harmony, and full of power and grace. No one could have looked at them without owning in them the marks ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which we are giving a very imperfect report, was garnished by both ladies with sundry vituperative epithets, which it would be inconsistent with the dignity of our ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... administration of justice, all the information we could collect was very imperfect and confined. Whenever any of the lowest class of people had a quarrel amongst themselves, the matter in dispute was referred to the decision of some chief, probably the chief of the district, or the person to whom they appertained. If an inferior ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... with analogies and working models: although they must necessarily be imperfect, so long as they are only analogies, yet the making or imagining of models (not necessarily or usually a material model, but a conceptual model) is a recognised way of arriving at an understanding of recondite and ultra-sensual processes, ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... were particularly aggravating. The December frost was a very imperfect one, and the mill-dam never bore properly, so the boys swarmed over our pond, which was shallow and safe. Very few of them could even hobble on skates, and those few carried the art no farther than by cutting up the slides. But thaw came on, so that ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... turned towards mine. Although I hated myself even for thinking such a thing, still, while I looked at the woman before me, the idea would force itself into my mind that one sad change, in the future, was all that was wanting to make the likeness complete, which I now saw to be so imperfect in detail. If ever sorrow and suffering set their profaning marks on the youth and beauty of Miss Fairlie's face, then, and then only, Anne Catherick and she would be the twin-sisters of chance resemblance, the living ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... than sense. My turn will soon come. When the job is finished we shall see to whom all this belongs." When the work was completed and they had pronounced all things good, in stepped the Devil, and in the twinkling of an eye rendered imperfect all that they had so labored to create perfect;'turning everything topsy-turvey, seducing the first pair of human beings, sowing the seeds of original sin, and at one stroke securing the wholesale damnation ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... sweet with these words to close this imperfect record of the labours of the Lord's beloved handmaid; especially when we look back to the time twenty years' before, when the "blessed hope" was first made the source of new strength and power to her soul. May not the words of the letter quoted above be adopted with little ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... in his imperfect English and little innocent fashion. "Where we got to? Why not give me hot tea? Why ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... structure of the brain, or of the physiological functions of its separate parts; its elementary organs, the microscopic ganglion-cells, were almost unknown, as was also the cell-soul of the Protista; very imperfect ideas were held as to ontogenetic development, and as to phylogenetic there were none ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... features faded gradually away, and the countenance, though no longer wild, assumed the sadness which it had worn through a long course of grief and pain. On beholding this natural consequence of death, the thought perhaps occurred to him that her soul, no longer dependent on the imperfect means of intercourse possessed by mortals, had communed with his own, and become acquainted with all its guilt and misery. He started from the bedside and covered his face with his hands, as if to hide it from those dead eyes.... ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... excellent mean to preserve this peace, if it be secured with much correspondence with heaven by prayer, Phil. iv. 6, 7. If you would disburden your hearts daily at the throne of grace, peace should guard and keep your heart, and then your peace would be perfect indeed. But because your faith is here imperfect, your requests few and infervent, your follies and iniquities many, therefore is this promised perfection a stranger to the most part of Christians. Always what we want here, we must expect to have ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... vague metaphorical expression such as the "over-soul." The symbolic ritual of the Mass, for instance, has far more truth in it than any metaphorical expression such as the "life-force." And although both the Cross and the Mass are inadequate and imperfect symbols with regard to the vision of "the sons of the universe," because they are associated with the idea of an historic incarnation, yet in comparison with any modern rationalistic or chemical metaphor they ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... world, or rather, with a certain portion of it. For we by no means sense all that is sensible, and, as I have already indicated, our sense impressions are often delusive. The gamut of our senses is very limited, and also very imperfect both as to extent and quality. Science is continually bringing new instruments into our service, some to aid the senses, others to correct them. The microscope, the microphone, the refracting lens are instances. It used to be said with great certainty that you cannot see through a brick wall, ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... has been referred to imperfect and exaggerated accounts of monstrous Polypi infesting the northern seas; how far may not the Cuttle-fish have given rise to this fiction? In hot countries (our readers will remember that in a late paper, Mirror, vol. xvii. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... unsatisfactory. They will tell you that Christ died for men, and that He is the Saviour of the World, but they do not seem to comprehend the spiritual character of Christianity, nor the full extent of the requirements and application of the law of Christian love. These imperfect views may not be entertained by all Christian Indians, but they were very common amongst those with whom I conversed. Their ignorance upon theological, as well as upon other subjects, is, of course, extreme. One Indian asked me very innocently if I came from the land where Christ was born, ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... was for their good. Having been thoroughly educated in the German methods of teaching, she was a firm believer in vacation benefits, also in muscular training, which she considered quite as essential for girls as for boys. In her imperfect English, and also by personal illustration, she had tried, ever since her connection with this school, to awaken the teachers, Miss Ashton in particular, to a greater sense of its importance. To be sure, there was a gymnasium in the building, and a regular teacher, ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... school and college, and finds inviting and ever-widening opportunities and possibilities throughout the entire course of life. The mere acquisition of knowledge, or the simple development of the intellect alone, may be of little value. Many who have received such imperfect or one-sided education, have proved to be but ciphers in the world; while, again, intellectual giants have sometimes been found to be but intellectual demons. Indeed, some of the worst characters in history have been men of scholarly ability and ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... patience never knew, nor used, Trembling for ire, his sandy locks he tore, Our from his lips flew such a sound confused, As lions make in deserts thick, which roar; Or as when clouds together crushed and bruised, Pour down a tempest by the Caspian shore; So was his speech imperfect, stopped, and broken, He roared and thundered when he should ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... be called—of scattering diplomas and medals of gold, silver and bronze right and left, after the fashion of largesse at a mediaeval coronation, heretofore followed at international expositions. These prizes were decided on and assigned by juries whose impartiality—by reason of the imperfect representation upon them of the nations which exhibited little in mass or little in certain classes, and also of their failure to make written reports and thus secure their responsibility—could not be assured, and whose action, therefore, was defective in real weight and value. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... verb and dormiebat below are in the imperfect tense to denote a state of things existing at the past time indicated by ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... a living creature, whole and great, God's image, praising God whose type it is; We are imperfect worms, vile families, That in its belly have our low estate. If we know not its love, its intellect, Neither the worm within my belly seeks To know me, but his petty mischief wreaks:— Thus it behoves us to ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... his country. He makes a proposal of much advantage to the king, which is rejected. The king's great ignorance in politics. The learning of that country very imperfect and confined. The laws, and military affairs, and ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... this old woe step on the stage again, Act itself o'er anew for men to judge; Not by the very sense and sight indeed, Which take at best imperfect cognizance. Since, how heart moves brain, and how both move hand, What mortal ever in entirety saw? Yet helping us to all we seem to hear, For, how else know we save by worth ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... 'We learn here on earth those things the knowledge of which is perfected in heaven.'" "According to that," said Cortlandt, "you will some day be setting the axis of heaven right, for in order to do work there must be work to be done—a necessary corollary to which is that heaven is still imperfect." "No," said Bearwarden, bristling up at the way Cortlandt sometimes received his speeches, "it means simply that its development, though perfect so far as it goes, may not be finished, and that we ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... extraordinary that June should be of the party, and, improbable as it seemed, she had fancied that the woman had covertly followed the Iroquois in her own canoe, and had got in their advance, merely to give her the notice which had probably saved her life. But in all this she was mistaken, as June, in her imperfect manner, now found means to ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... any movement of itself, but is only moved by another power, then its life is said to fail, and the animal to be dead. Whereby it is clear that those things are properly called living that move themselves by some kind of movement, whether it be movement properly so called, as the act of an imperfect being, i.e. of a thing in potentiality, is called movement; or movement in a more general sense, as when said of the act of a perfect thing, as understanding and feeling are called movement. Accordingly ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... buttoned frock-coat that covered his heart, and bowed profoundly. It was obvious that he resented our presence and desired to wipe us out of our hostess's consideration. I glanced ironically at Dale's disgusted face, and smiled at the imperfect development of his sense of humour. Indeed, to the young, humour is only a weapon of offence. It takes a philosopher to use it as defensive armour. Dale burned to outdo Mr. Papadopoulos. I, having no such ambition, laid my hand on his arm and went forward ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... forgiven. It is their best part only that remains unrealised and unread, their purest aspirations which we follow with leaden wings, their deepest thoughts that we still strive to plumb with the short line of our imagination or experience, and to weigh in our imperfect balances. ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... we go to the plantation-houses for our meals, camp-arrangements being yet very imperfect. The officers board in different messes, the adjutant and I still clinging to the household of William Washington,—William the quiet and the courteous, the pattern of house-servants, William the noiseless, the observing, the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... reception of the ships that brought corn from Egypt; which was indeed a work without dispute very great in itself, and of very great advantage to the navigation. Yet was not this work brought to perfection by him, but was the one half of it left imperfect, by reason of his want of application to it; the cause of which was this, that he employed his studies about useless matters, and that by spending his money upon such pleasures as concerned no one's benefit but his own, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... is precisely here that we face one of the fundamental difficulties of the poet's task; a difficulty that affects, indeed, all human intercourse. For words are notoriously an imperfect medium of communication. They "were not invented at first," says Professor Walter Raleigh in his book on Wordsworth, "and are very imperfectly adapted at best, for the severer purposes of truth. They bear upon them all the weaknesses ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... to form, as for instance the experimental, and again the philosophical; but that is because it is theology, not because of the gift of infallibility. But, as far as this goes, I think it could be shown that physical science on the other hand, or again mathematical, affords but an imperfect training for the intellect. I do not see then how any objection about the narrowness of theology comes into our question, which simply is, whether the belief in an infallible authority destroys the independence of the mind; ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... dispensation, we have discovered many women of superior excellence, availing themselves of all the means they enjoyed, and presenting a pre-eminence of character proportioned to their comparatively few advantages and imperfect revelation; but amidst the splendours of the "Sun of Righteousness" we shall witness, in the females who adorned this new era, a greater elevation of ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... systematic array of doctrines, we have no choice left, if we desire to know what his opinions concerning the future life were, when deduced and arranged, but to exercise our learning and our faculties upon the imperfect discussions and the significant hints and clews in his extant epistles. Bringing these together, in the light of contemporary Pharisaic and Christian conceptions and opinions, we may construct a ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... inhabitants had deserted it, that he might avenge those that had there been destroyed. From thence he now marched to Jerusalem; whereupon those Jews whose camp lay there, and who had besieged the Roman legion, not bearing the coming of this army, left the siege imperfect: but as to the Jerusalem Jews, when Varus reproached them bitterly for what had been done, they cleared themselves of the accusation, and alleged that the conflux of the people was occasioned by the feast; that the war was not made with their approbation, but by the rashness of the strangers, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... thought so,' said Mr. Ney, 'must have a very imperfect knowledge of what is to his own advantage. The interest paid by foreign debtors can in no respect compare with the advantages offered by employment of the money in Freeland, those advantages being, as you know, equably distributed among all ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... immediately sent for. The utmost exertions of medical skill were applied in vain. The powers of life were manifestly yielding to the force of the disorder; speaking, which was painful from the beginning, became almost impracticable: respiration became more and more contracted and imperfect, until half past eleven on Saturday night; when, retaining the full possession of his intellect, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... people, or into Canada to discover why French republicans dislike the institutions of a Saxon monarchy. To be sure, the advantage is on the side of the French academicians; for, instead of sending forth a mass of confused, contradictory, and ill-written reports, based upon imperfect evidence, and leading to no definite conclusion, the literary commission, as Llorente informs us, was silent altogether; whereupon Llorente attributing, not unnaturally, this preternatural silence on the part of the three French savans, to the impossibility of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... that region, perhaps from her Tagalog name, or from the fact that she bore the characteristic impress of things in the country, representing something like a triumph over progress, a steamer that was not a steamer at all, an organism, stolid, imperfect yet unimpeachable, which, when it wished to pose as being rankly progressive, proudly contented itself with putting on a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the happy steamer was genuinely Filipino! If a person were only reasonably considerate, she might even have been taken for the Ship of State, constructed, ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... procured at this late day—upon the arrival of our National Centennial year, are often imperfect and fragmentary in character—merely scattered facts and incidents gathered here and there from the traditional recollections of our oldest inhabitants, or from the musty records of our State and county ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... habit all his life of enjoying things, even imperfect things—and there had been many imperfect things—he had enjoyed them all with moderation, so as to keep himself young. But now he was deserted by his power of enjoyment, by his philosophy, and left with this dreadful feeling that it was all done with. Not even the Prisoners' Chorus, nor Florian's ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... forms are found first (that is, farthest back), and are followed by remains of creatures higher in the scale of life; that is to say, not so simple in structure. In using the words "higher" or "lower," we do not mean that there is anything imperfect about the humbler creatures; they are exactly suited to the life which has been given to them to live, but their form is very simple compared with that of "higher" animals, just as a three-legged stool is much more simple in its construction, ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... in good time because she wanted to walk without hurry, and to ponder. The morning, though imperfect and sunless, had in it some quality of the spring, which the buoyant youth of Rachel instantly discovered and tasted in triumph. Moreover, the spirit of a festival was abroad, and visible in the costume and faces of passers-by; and it was the first festival ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... is nothing more than the word English so transformed by the imperfect pronunciation of the natives of Massachusets—Yenghis, Yanghis, Yankies. The orthography of this much-used epithet, which is not given, we believe, in any English or American work, was communicated to M. Philarete {261} Charles by one of the best-informed ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... taking any notice of what had been done by Archimedes and Apollonius. He saw the importance of determining accurately the specific gravity of different substances, and himself attempted to form a table of them by a rude process of his own, without knowing of the more scientific though still imperfect methods previously employed by Archimedes, Ghetaldus,[123] and Porta. He speaks of the [Greek: heureka] of Archimedes in a manner which implies that he did not clearly apprehend either the nature ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... great men of the eighteenth century, however brief, would be certainly most imperfect if I omitted the name of the Earl of Charlemont, who, had his courage been equal to his honesty of purpose, might have been enrolled not merely as an ardent, but even as a successful patriot. He was one of the Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores,—one ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... known as cinnabar is of a dark-red colour, and gives a beautiful appearance to the galleries. Sometimes when a hewer detaches a block of ore with his pick mass of quicksilver, the size of a pigeon's egg, rolls out, and leaping along the floor, divides into thousands of small drops. Owing to the imperfect apparatus with which the ore is sublimated, nearly one-half is lost. Formerly criminals only were employed in these mines. They were conducted at sunrise from prison by a subterranean passage into the mine, and ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible. My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eye-witnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other. The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... cleverness. The commissary regarded me with astonishment, and I thought a slight suspicion entered his official mind....Oh! scarcely that, for the photographs distributed broadcast by the police department were too imperfect; they presented an Arsene Lupin so different from the one he had before him, that he could not possibly recognize me by it. But, all the same, he was troubled, confused ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... also a word, a feeling, an idea which has in it a direct operative force. The dramatic genius of Browning was in the main of the static kind; it studies with extraordinary skill and subtlety character in position; it attains only an imperfect or a laboured success with character in movement. The dramatis personae are ready at almost every moment, except the culminating moments of passion, to fall away from action into reflection and self-analysis. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the letter with apprehension, as she recognized the down-slanting calligraphy of Sarah Gailey. Yes, the address was imperfect—"Miss Lessways, c/o Osmond Orgreave, Esq., Lane End House, Knype-on-Trent," instead of "Bursley, Knype-on-Trent." On the back of the envelope had been written in pencil by an official, "Try Bursley." Sarah ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Baxter tells us much of the Association in Worcestershire which he had helped to form in 1653, and adds that similar associations sprang up afterwards in Cumberland and Westmorland, Wilts, Dorset, Somersetshire, Hampshire, and Essex. These Associations are to be conceived as imperfect substitutes for the regular Presbyterian organization, and most of the ministers belonging to them were eclectics or quasi-Presbyterians, like Baxter himself, making the most of untoward circumstances, while the stricter Presbyterians, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... kindness, come to our aid for this one night: we felt sure a Humbug audience—what am I saying?—a Homburg audience would appreciate this, and make due allowance for a performance undertaken in such a spirit, and with imperfect rehearsals, etc.—in short, the usual patter; and the usual effect, great applause. Indeed, the only applause that I have heard in this theater to-night. Ashmead ahead of Gounod, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... wrote, just before taking up duty, "will be, if possible, to form Christian men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make; I mean that, from the natural imperfect state of boyhood, they are not susceptible of Christian principles in their full development upon their practice, and I suspect that a low standard of morals in many respects must be tolerated amongst them, as it was on a larger scale in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... whose spirit he does not, to my mind, quite understand. The mystic tenderness of Franck escapes him, and he brings out only what is dramatic. And so that performance of Les Beatitudes, though in many respects fine, left an imperfect idea ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... could have imagined; I told her so, and she was not so tolerable twenty years ago that she needed to have taken it for flattery, but she did, and literally gave me a box on the ear. She is very lively, all her senses perfect, her languages as imperfect as ever, her avarice greater. She entertained me at first with nothing but the dearness of provisions at Helvoet. With nothing but an Italian, a French, and a Prussian, all men-servants, and something she calls an old secretary, but whose age till he appears will be doubtful; she receives ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... picture on the postcard; on the coloured almanack given away at Christmas by the local grocer; on the advertisement of Jones' soap, and thinks with discontent of Polly Perkins, who in a natural way is as pretty a girl as can be looked for in this imperfect world. Thus it is that woman has had to take to shorthand and typewriting. Modern woman is being ruined ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... surprise at this change of mind, and was glad of McLean's company and judgment during the impending selections. A picture of a cow-puncher and himself discussing a couple of dolls rose nimbly in Barker's mental eye, and it was with an imperfect honesty that he said, ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... Rys to do his bidding, to say his say. No minister of a Czar was ever more dreaded or loved. His words were ever few, but his deeds had been many. Now, as he looked at Fleda, his old eyes gleamed, and he showed a double row of teeth, not one of which was imperfect, though he was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... not receive at least one letter from him during the last month of his life.' The following is his last letter to Reeve. The writing is painfully bad, the letters often half formed, or crowded one on top of another; even the orthography is imperfect; but the words and ideas flow ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... could not do. Not only was he under tribute to the Khazarui (a powerful tribe of mingled Finnish and Turkish blood), and harried by the Turks, in the South; overrun by the Finns and Lithuanians in the North; but in his imperfect political condition he was broken up into minute divisions, canton incessantly at war with canton, and there could be no peace. The roving bands of Scandinavian traders and freebooters were alternately his persecutors and protectors. After burning his villages for some fancied ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... the medieval universities seem to have studied grammar, logic, and rhetoric; arithmetic and geometry; astronomy, theology, and music. Thus their work, however imperfect and faulty, judged by modern lights, it may have been, brought them face to face with all the leading aspects of the many-sided mind of man. For these studies did really contain, at any rate in embryo, sometimes it may be in ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... a gude man tae her through the dark an' through the licht, an' she hes tried tae repay him as a puir imperfect wumman can, an' her hert is warm to him, but there hes aye been ae thing wantin'—an' it hes been that wife's cross a' her life—there wes nae ither man, but her husband wesna, isna, canna be her ain a'thegither an' for ever—for the want ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... upright and the most wicked,—that the latter is a mere atom, and not accounted of in God's sight. That there is an infinite difference between God and the best of men, is all true; for God is infinite in all his attributes, and man is very imperfect at the best. But to argue from this that God is inferior to man, so that he cannot discern difference in character here, even as man can plainly discern it, seems but mad-house reasoning. What would we think of the man who ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... particular occasions, but it was to be exempt from the hardships of feudal service; to have the right of disposing both of person and property, and to be governed by laws intended to promote the general good, and not to gratify the ambition and avarice of individuals. These laws, however rude and imperfect, tended to afford security to property and, encourage men to habits of industry. Thus commerce, with every ornamental and useful art, began first in corporate bodies, to animate society. But in those dark ages, force was ...
— A Walk through Leicester - being a Guide to Strangers • Susanna Watts
... works. To secure a good price for the poet, I wrote the sketch, being furnished with facts by his brother; it was done, however, in great haste, when I was 'not in the vein,' and, of course, was very slight and imperfect. It served, however, to put me at once on a friendly footing with Campbell, so that, when I met him for the first time a few years subsequently in England, he received me as an old friend. He was living at that time in his rural ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... of the queen was directed to the affairs of Ireland, which had been conquered by Henry II. in the year 1170, but over which only an imperfect sovereignty had been exercised. The Irish princes and nobles, divided among themselves, paid the exterior marks of obedience, but kept the country in a constant state ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... California shows an alarming tendency among the people to take the law into their own hands. The papers ascribe this state of things to the imperfect and corrupt manner in which the officers of the law have discharged their functions. Acts of violence and crime are frequent in all parts of the country, and the mining communities, with few exceptions, administer summary punishment wherever the offender is captured. Sacramento City has ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... working hard to complete a new factory which he had left unfinished, while the buildings of the Jesuit establishment made good progress under the hand of workmen specially brought from France. What still remained imperfect was the fortification. The English had destroyed the French settlements at Mount Desert and Port Royal. What was to hinder them from ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... paces farther, turned his horse around again and took the road toward Kohlhaasenbrueck, in order, as seemed to him wise and just, to hear first what the groom had to say. For in spite of the injuries he had suffered, a correct instinct, already familiar with the imperfect organization of the world, inclined him to put up with the loss of the horses and to regard it as a just consequence of the groom's misconduct in case there really could be imputed to the latter any such ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... who had not been a good man because he had never had a chance, who had never really earned his spurs as a Western badman, because he was of too small calibre, who was after all a vessel that had come imperfect from the hands of the potter. Now Jimmie answered, his voice hushed, his eyes wide, his ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... Parkins spent an agonised half hour, counting everything. Mr. Ludwig appears to be one of those unsolved mysteries which go to make up an imperfect world." ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... distinction or solemn didactic declamation, in which the disembodied principles of all arts and sciences float before the imagination in undefined profusion, the eye turns with impatience and indifference to the imperfect embryo specimens of them, and the hopeless attempts to realise this splendid jargon in one poor work by one poor author, which is given up to summary execution with as little justice as pity. 'As when a well-graced ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... In the attitude of the latter to the land in which he lives or has been born, there is always an inherent something of the soil for which even trained powers of comparison, and a special perceptive faculty, are but imperfect substitutes. On the other hand, the visitor from over-sea is, in many respects, better placed for observation than the inhabitant. He enjoys not a little—it has been often said—of the position of posterity. He takes in more at a glance; he ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... these are proofs except the papers you have in your hands, and the imperfect events which you witnessed. I am so much an admirer of your wife myself, that I am ready to believe this statement against the rest; and to believe that, however strange may have been her conduct in ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... one side, lay ready to be let down. A well-dressed mason, a trowel in one hand and a hammer in the other, came forward, and with much grace spoke an address in verse, of which in prose we can give but an imperfect rendering. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... expect displeasure from death, seeing it is made by the hand of the same master," was a favourite reflection of Michael Angelo's upon mortality. This Deposition was never completed, flaws appeared in the marble, and perhaps whilst working in the imperfect light Michael Angelo's impatient chisel cut too deep. He began to break up the work, but luckily his servant Antonio, successor to Urbino, begged the fragments from his master. Francesco Bandini, a Florentine exile settled in Rome, wished for ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... having found his disciples firmly adhering to Hinayanism without knowing that it was a modified and imperfect doctrine, he had to lead them up to a higher and perfect doctrine that he might lead them up to Buddhahood. With this object in view Shakya Muni preached Vimalakirtti-nirdeca-sutra[FN117], Lankavatara-sutra, and other sutras, in which he compared Hinayanism with ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... the very imperfect maps of Diaz and Clavigero, Tezcuco is placed near the mouth of a rivulet which discharges itself into the lake of Mexico: In the former, the buildings are represented as extending two miles and a half along the rivulet, and coming close ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... walks, it is in the garden or library; if he rides, it is surrounded by guards and followed by his household train. He took his last walk in the streets when he was a prelate, and thenceforth knows no more of the city than he can see through his carriage-windows; and now even that imperfect view is more than half cut off by the officers of the guard, who ride their great black horses close ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... causing death from choking) by the action of a small cartilaginous shield (the epiglottis), which at the right moment bends back and protects the orifice. Now the kangaroo is born in such an exceedingly imperfect and undeveloped condition, that it is quite unable to suck. The mother therefore places the minute blind and naked young upon the nipple, and then injects milk into it by means of a special muscular envelope of the mammary gland. Did no special provision ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... which few would have ventured; and I even arrived to such a pitch of perfection at praying, that with the assistance of young and powerful lungs, I was fully able to distance him at any English prayer in which we joined. But in Latin, I must allow, that owing to my imperfect knowledge of its pronunciation, and to some twitches of conscience I felt on adventuring to imitate, him by overleaping this impediment, he was able to throw me back a considerable distance in his turn; so that when we both started for a De Profundis, I ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... British Government and its Allies, or you will certainly miss the truth. By which statement I do not mean that each Government is equally accurate, still less equally full in its relation; but that, unless you compare all the statements of this sort, you will have most imperfect evidence; just as you would have very imperfect evidence in a court of law if you only listened to the prosecution and refused to listen ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... thought's space being untrue to the ideal each one of us bears in his breast; never yielding jot or tittle to the world's opinion. That was what it meant, and he who was proudly conscious of having succeeded thus, could well afford to regard the lives of others as half-finished and imperfect; he alone was at one with himself, his life alone was ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... open, the room within empty. It was obviously Baumgartner's bedroom. There was a camp bedstead worthy of an old campaigner, a large roll-top desk, and a waste-paper basket which argued either a voluminous correspondence or imperfect domestic service; it would have furnished scent for no short paper-chase. Otherwise the room was tidy enough, and so eloquent of Baumgartner himself, in its uncompromising severity, that Pocket breathed more freely ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... with the same Success, attempted to clear the genuine Plays from the interpolated Scenes: He then consulted the old Editions; and, by a careful Collation of them, rectified the faulty, and supplied the imperfect Reading, in a great number of places: And lastly, in an admirable Preface, hath drawn a general, but very lively, Sketch of Shakespear's poetic Character; and, in the corrected Text, marked out those peculiar Strokes of Genius which ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... the pistol and binoculars were his books, an oddly assorted library that included the child's pictorial history already mentioned, Dryden's translation of the Iliad, an imperfect copy of The Three Musketeers, and The Descent of Man. These, indeed, made up the full list of books belonging to the keep, and Constans had been permitted to appropriate them, nobody else caring to waste time over ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... Captain and the lady, when we were retired, was to the following effect:—They both talked loud enough for me to hear them—the lady from anger, the Captain with design; and thou mayest be sure there was no listener but myself. What I was imperfect in was supplied afterwards; for I had my vellum-leaved book to note all down. If she had known this, perhaps she would have been more sparing of her ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... sent forth a few vessels, to explore the western shores of Africa, while he prepared a great armament to attack the moors of Barbary, the art of navigation was still very imperfect, nor had the Portuguese ever ventured to sail beyond Cape Non. But what most powerfully contributed to give impulse and direction to the national ardour, was the enlightened enthusiasm, with which prince Henry ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... were not in those days, as they are now, at the beck and call of every purse, and the attainment of each little masterpiece was a separate triumph. In particular I shall never forget the excitement of reaching at length the exorbitant price the bookseller asked for the only, although imperfect, edition of the poems of S. T. Coleridge. At last I could meet his demand, and my friend and I went down to consummate the solemn purchase. Coming away with our treasure, we read aloud from the orange coloured volume, in turns, as we strolled along, until at ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... what endless practices are held, Before bright pencils mark the April earth—— Where grasses learn how gaiety is spelled, And jonquils trace the golden writs of mirth; Some slow, imperfect patterns must be wrought Some, cast aside in dark, abandoned crypts, Before the swift, impulsive hands are taught To ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... is imperfect solution of the tougher solids and a filling of the stomach before the hunger sense can naturally be appeased, is the additional evil to insure serious consequences to the stomach ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... wish here to give you the substance of a speech made by one of Mokanna's head-men, who came after Mokanna's surrender into the English camp. I am told that the imperfect notes taken of it afford but a very faint idea of its eloquence; at all events, the speech gives a very correct view of the treatment which the ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... state of the case," rejoined Frank, "was, that our good-natured friend the squire, from an imperfect knowledge of the natural boldness of my disposition, (call it impudence, if you will,) supposed me incapable of facing the battery of laughter my extraordinary appearance would have exposed me to, had I come within ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... soldiers, but was literally "made in Congress." Stanton grimly made the best of it, though he unwaveringly condemned some of its most conspicuous provisions. His business was to retrieve his blunder of the previous year, and he was successful. Imperfect as it was, the Conscription Act, with later supplementary legislation, enabled him to replace the wastage of the Union armies and steadily to augment them. At the close of the war, the Union had on foot a million men with an enrolled reserve of ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... adversaries. The third party (tiers parti), as we call it nowadays, wished to hold the balance continually wavering between the Catholics and the Protestants, conceding to the former and the latter, alternately, that measure of liberty which was indispensable for most imperfect maintenance of the public peace, and reconcilable with the sovereign power of the kingship. On such conditions was the government of Charles ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... having few relatives, and none able to assist her, she is dependent for her support on such efforts as she is still capable of making. These, were she a person of common fortitude, energy and hopefulness, would be very small, for to her great privation is added very imperfect general health. Yet she has struggled on in the hope of gaining such a competency as should ultimately secure 'a home that she may call her own.' I commend Miss Davenport to all who feel for the afflicted and ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... deep as it was possible to make it descend, in which he could see all the various strata and deposits of which the earth is composed. How far he could send down this piercing cylinder of light he did not allow himself to consider. With a small and imperfect machine he had seen several feet into the ground; with a great and powerful apparatus, such as he was now constructing, why should he not look down below the deepest point to which man's knowledge had ever reached? Down so far that he must follow his descending light with a telescope; ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... see, a description of your journal: it is a description of only one portion of it. It is a complex and wonderful creation. Every morning it is a mirror of the world, more or less distorted and imperfect, but such a mirror as it never had held up to it before. But consider how much space is taken up with mere trivialities and vulgarities under the name of news. And this evil is likely to continue and increase until news-gatherers learn that more important than the reports ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... present day, the frequent occurrence of the termination "watte" in the names of places on the map of Ceylon, is in itself an indication of the importance attached to them by the villagers. The term "garden," however, conveys to an European but an imperfect idea of the character and style of these places; which in Ceylon are so similar to the native gardens in the south of India, as to suggest a community of origin. Their leading features are lines of the graceful areca palms, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... mangled when his other message of 'Christ for us' has been taken, as it too often has been, to be the whole of his Gospel. They who take either of these inseparable elements to be the whole, rend into two imperfect halves the perfect oneness of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... to admit that He has in His mind an infinite number of things which might be created, but which, nevertheless, He will never be able to create, for if He were to create all things which He has in His mind, He would, according to them, exhaust His omnipotence and make Himself imperfect. Therefore, in order to make a perfect God, they are compelled to make Him incapable of doing all those things to which His power extends, and anything more absurd than this, or more opposed to God's omnipotence, I do not ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... the end of August of that year in consequence of the proximity of German troops to his French residence. The painstaking compilers of the indictment against Bazaine give rather a different account of the character and antecedents of M. Regnier. Their information is that he received an imperfect education, sufficiently proven by his extraordinary style and vicious orthography. He studied, with little progress, law and medicine; later he took up magnetism. He was curiously mixed up in the events ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... laws regulating or limiting the hours of labor of women and children, prohibiting it entirely in mines; several anti-truck laws; two laws against the screening of coal before the miner is paid, and in Massachusetts, laws against imposing fines for imperfect weaving and deducting the fine from the wages paid. Pennsylvania thinks it necessary to enact by statute that a strike is lawful when the wages are insufficient or it is contrary to union rules to work, which latter part is clearly unconstitutional. There is ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... group on his canvas that one glance suffices to take in the whole picture, with the lights and shadows, attitudes, costumes, and details of every kind, which are sadly wanting in our description—too long, though so imperfect—of the party gathered thus unexpectedly round our young baron's table. The beginning of the repast was very silent, until the most urgent demands of hunger had been satisfied. Poor de Sigognac, who had never perhaps at any one time had as much ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... think," said Nekayah, "that the monastick rule is a more holy and less imperfect state than any other? May not he equally hope for future happiness, who converses openly with mankind, who succours the distressed by his charity, instructs the ignorant by his learning, and contributes, by his industry, to the general system of life: even though he ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... upon the right flank of the Burgundian army, who, alarmed at their war cries of Vive la France! and Denis Montjoie! which mingled with those of Liege! and Rouge Sanglier! and at the idea thus inspired, of treachery on the part of the French confederates, made a very desultory and imperfect resistance; while the Duke, foaming and swearing and cursing his liege Lord and all that belonged to him, called out to shoot with bow and gun on all that was French whether black or white,—alluding to the sleeves with which Louis's soldiers had ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... the real author of it was a certain Joshua Sylvester. Unwilling to displace the brave knight from the niche he had graced so long, I hunted up Sylvester's old folio, and the result of my search may be found in these imperfect remarks. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... anything else but a form of the Beautiful—I have carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships to the more circumscribed space of my desk, and by that act, I suppose, I have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the ineffable ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... good and fresh, if the bread is to be digestible and nice. Stale yeast produces, instead of vinous fermentation, an acetous fermentation, which flavours the bread and makes it disagreeable. A poor thin yeast produces an imperfect fermentation, the result being a ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... reports of them as can be got at, are full of striking passages and impressive phrases; they are speeches which even now one cannot read without interest. But it would seem that Shippen often marred the effect of his ideas and his language by a rapid, careless, and imperfect delivery. He appears to have been one of the men who wanted nothing but a clear {290} articulation and effective utterance to be great Parliamentary debaters, and whom that single want condemned to comparative failure. Those who remember the late Sir ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... the depths below. George hesitated, thinking, perhaps, to attempt a rescue; but it was too late. The Two Hundred and Tenth, coming on in close divisions, trampled it down beyond all hope of recovery. Advancing some distance, the line halted. The formation of the Second Division must have been imperfect, on account of the nature of the ground. This ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... so weak, he was always able and ready to help Robert in any difficulty not unfrequently springing from his imperfect preparation in Greek; for while Mr. Innes was an excellent Latin scholar, his knowledge of Greek was too limited either to compel learning or inspire enthusiasm, And with the keen instinct he possessed in everything immediate between man and man, ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... symbolize our aspirations, our theorizings, our souls and our consciences, and fondly dream we are painting pictures. Or we shall copy with a hopeless effort after literalness the first face or weed we meet, and call the imperfect, mechanical ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... agreed that before the stormy weather came on, their little vessel should be employed in making a voyage round the island. A complete survey of the coast had not yet been made, and the colonists had but an imperfect idea of the shore to the west and north, from the mouth of Falls River to the Mandible Capes, as well as of the narrow bay between them, which opened ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... measurements of heads and noses, and it seems probable that deductions drawn from these physical characters are of more value than any evidence based on the use of a common speech. But it is hard to reconcile the theory with the facts of history even in the imperfect shape in which they have come down to us, or to believe that Sakas, Yuechi, and White Huns (see historical section) have left no traces of their blood in the province. If such there are, they may ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... Rosini; besides Baldinucci (ch. iv. p. 83), who says, "Raphael gave great testimony of his esteem when, in after years, he employed his own brush in Rome to finish a work begun by Fra Bartolommeo in that city and left imperfect." ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... curious proof of the slow and imperfect intercourse of communication between Scotland and London, if Baxter had not been particularly informed of Lauderdale's horrible cruelties to the Scotch Covenanters:—and if Baxter did know them, ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and poets," after being a hanger-on of the profligate Duke of Wharton, after aiming in vain at a parliamentary career, and angling for pensions and preferment with fulsome dedications and fustian odes, he is a little disgusted with his imperfect success, and has determined to retire from the general mendicancy business to a particular branch; in other words, he has determined on that renunciation of the world implied in "taking orders," with the prospect ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... greetings of her Majesty to the Duke, and was heard with great attention. Alexander attempted a reply in French, which was very imperfect, and, apologizing, exchanged that tongue for Italian. He alluded with great fervour to the "honourable opinion concerning his sincerity and word," expressed to him by her Majesty, through the mouth of her envoy. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of our own middle ages, who state that a man must be born a magician; in other words, that the gift is constitutional, though developed by practice and art. Now, that this gift and its practice should principally obtain in imperfect states of civilization, and fade into insignificance in the busy social enlightenment of cities, may be accounted for by reference to the known influences of imagination. In the cruder states of social life not only is imagination more frequently predominant over all other ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... us, because it is imperfect, and unconsciously we tell the best account of things, but I fancy I was wondering on this text when there came at my door the sharp rap of bony, hurried knuckles. "Enter!" I said, and in marched the corporal of the guard. His hand went ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... which it is his merit so effectively to have opened room in the mental scheme, to be known by us, if at all, through our affinities of nature with it, which, however, in our dealings with ourselves and others we may assume to be objective or real:—and then, over against our imperfect realisation of that ideal, in ourselves, in nature and history, amid the personal caprices (it might almost seem) of its discovery of itself to us, as the appropriate attitude on our part, the dialectical spirit, which to the last will have ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... facile discerneres, 'it was not easy to determine whether she was less concerned about her money or her reputation,' since she was reckless in regard to both. Respecting the imperfect subjunctive, see Zumpt, S 528, note 2. [140] Praeceps is used of steep and precipitous places, and of persons who fall or throw themselves headlong down from or into anything. Hence Sempronia praeceps abierat is, 'she had thrown herself ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... wisdom a little while unto thyself. Thus grows the fruit; first, the seed must be buried in the earth for a little space; there it must be hid and slowly grow, that it may reach maturity. But if it produce the ear before the jointed stalk, it is imperfect—a thing from the garden of Adonis. Such a sorry growth art thou; thou hast blossomed too soon: the winter cold will ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... 243. of his work "that not one of the books of the New Testament, nor all of them together, were intended to be a forensic defence of Christianity. On the contrary, the historical books are brief, and imperfect memoirs, which were not designed, nor supposed to contain all the faces, and which do not set forth, nor profess to set forth the evidences of the religion. The Epistolary parts are the counsels, instructions and affectionate sentiments which the occasions ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... of my life more choice to me (Though brief, yet in itself so round and whole) Than all the imperfect residue can be;— The Artist saw his statue of the soul Was perfect; so, with one regretful stroke, The earthen model into fragments broke, And without her the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... universe was constructed. How he conceived this process has never been satisfactorily explained. He traced the various forms and phenomena of the world to numbers as their basis and essence. The "Monad" or unit he regarded as the source of all numbers. The number Two was imperfect, and the cause of increase and division. Three was called the number of the whole because it had a beginning, middle, and end. Four, representing the square, is in the highest degree perfect; and Ten, as it contains the sum of the ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... as he considered it; for in life no trouble is surmounted but another appears to confront us; nor is the most perfect success of an imperfect world without its drawback. Now that he held the elixir his, now that in fancy he had it in his grasp, the problem of the mode and the quantity which had seemed trivial and negligible a few days or hours before, ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... easily got to believe that the picture brought over from Paris, and now hanging in Lady Castlewood's drawing-room, was a perfect likeness of her son, the young lord. And the domestics having all seen the picture many times, and catching but a momentary imperfect glimpse of the two strangers on the night of their arrival, never had a reason to doubt the fidelity of the portrait; and next day, when they saw the original of the piece habited exactly as he was represented ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... highways to get a perfect transportation system for this country. If there were no railroads we would have little transportation. If there were no waterways there would be insufficient transportation. If we had an abundance of railways and waterways and lacked the use of highways, we should have imperfect transportation. We should fail to bring it to every man's door, and it must be brought to every ...
— Address by Honorable William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce at Conference of Regional Chairmen of the Highway Transport Committee Council of National Defence • US Government
... a time it is the right and duty of every one to point out whatever he deems erroneous and imperfect in that instrument, and press ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... be exhibited in a kind of formula. The following is no doubt very imperfect, but it may be somewhat suggestive. The first includes the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... intended to have dedicated my imperfect illustrations of this beautiful Romance to the young gentleman in question. As I cannot find, however, that he is known among his friends by any other name than "The Tripe-skewer," which I cannot but consider as a soubriquet, or nick-name; ...
— The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman • Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray
... Grace had made to her young pupil the first imperfect revelation of God's character and government, declaring that he would punish with eternal fire those who should lie, swear, or steal, the child had held these sins in the greatest abhorrence, and was scrupulously careful to avoid them. She ...
— Step by Step - or, Tidy's Way to Freedom • The American Tract Society
... was strictly the one which we are here recommending, that of "using the best known means for accomplishing the particular end." Those who adopt the principle do most honour to their sagacity; while their shallow admirers, by abandoning the principle, and clinging to their necessarily imperfect mode of applying it, at once libel their good sense, and dishonour those whom they profess to revere. As society is rapidly advancing, paternal affection would undoubtedly have prompted them to advise their descendants to take the benefits of every ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... escape the threatening storm that hovers over our heads. The leading causes of the clamour against her have been, if you must know, Nature; her beauty; her power of pleasing; her birth; her rank; her marriage; the King himself; her mother; her imperfect education; and, above all, her unfortunate partialities for the Abbe Vermond; for the Duchesse de Polignac; for myself, perhaps; and last, but not least, the thorough, unsuspecting goodness ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... canoe is by no means perfect under canvas and vice versa. The best cruiser is not a perfect racer, while neither of them is at all perfect as a paddling cruiser where much carrying is to be done. And the most perfect canoe for fishing and gunning around shallow, marshy waters, would be a very imperfect canoe for a rough and ready cruise of one hundred miles through a strange wilderness, where a day's cruise will sometimes include ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... bells, at the sound of which the faithful fall upon their knees. When, therefore, he learnt that the Republic had just been proclaimed in France he fancied that the whole world would enjoy a life of celestial beatitude. His knowledge, though imperfect, made him see farther than other workmen; his aspirations did not stop at daily bread; but his extreme ingenuousness, his complete ignorance of mankind, kept him in the dreamland of theory, a Garden of Eden where universal justice reigned. His paradise was for a long time a delightful ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... existing literature of the supernatural for proof, he will know what I mean. This literature is enormous, but it is practically worthless for evidential purposes. Facts enough are cited, indeed; but the records of them are so fallible and imperfect that at most they lead to the opinion that it may be well to keep a window open upon that ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... can lead him on into anything. I don't suppose he ever gave a thought to the O'Moores, anywhere further back than those kings. He had a vague idea that they must have been going on, simply because it must have seemed to him that a world without an O'Moore in it would be necessarily imperfect. It was Bob Repton's questions, as to what they were doing at the time of the flood, that brought him suddenly up; then he didn't hesitate for a moment in taking them back to Adam, or before him. ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... and knell, which he called 'some simpler bell.' I have seen all his odes already published in his own handwriting; they had the marks of repeated correction: he was perpetually changing his epithets. Dr. Warton, my brother, has a few fragments of some other odes, but too loose and imperfect for publication, yet containing ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... to King James, and published by O'Daniel in 1603, is still reprinted by the Bible Societies. The first Protestant translation of the Old Testament, made under Bishop Bedel's eye, and with such revision of particular passages as his imperfect knowledge of the language enabled him to suggest, though completed in the reign of Charles I., was not published before the year 1680. It was Bedel, also, who caused the English liturgy to be recited in Irish, in his Cathedral, as ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... surmise proved false; find peace within, Favour from Heaven, our witness, from the event. And what is faith, love, virtue, unassayed Alone, without exteriour help sustained? Let us not then suspect our happy state Left so imperfect by the Maker wise, As not secure to single or combined. Frail is our happiness, if this be so, And Eden were no Eden, thus exposed. To whom thus Adam fervently replied. O Woman, best are all things as the will Of God ordained them: His creating hand ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... Stubbs, with a good ear and voice, but an imperfect acquaintance with the music. Leon and the guitar were equal to the situation. The actor dispensed his throat-notes with prodigality and enthusiasm; and, as he looked up to heaven in his heroic way, tossing the black ringlets, it seemed to him that the very stars contributed a dumb applause to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... now enumerate a few duties, adopting the usual division of them into duties to ourselves and ourselves and to others, and into perfect and imperfect duties. * ...
— Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals • Immanuel Kant
... Visited," with that stanza, "But thou that didst appear so fair:" [1] than which I think no lovelier stanza can be found in the wide world of poetry. Yet the poem, on the whole, seems condemned to leave behind it a melancholy of imperfect satisfaction, as if you had wronged the feeling with which, in what preceded it, you had resolved never to visit it, and as if the Muse had determined, in the most delicate manner, to make you, and scarce make you, feel it. Else, it is far superior to the other, which has but one ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... also reduce the size and weight of the brain.[7] Dr. Arthur Keith when dealing with the so-called Piltdown skull in his book "The Antiquity of Man" says to the same effect that the size of brain is a very imperfect index of mental ability in that we know that certain elements enter into the formation of the brain which take no direct part in our mental activity, so that a person who has been blessed with a great robust body and strong, massive limbs requires a greater outfit of mere tracts and nerve cells ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... keep up the vital processes which closely resemble combustion, of which oxygen is the prime supporter. If the supply is insufficient, the fire of life wanes. The healthy condition of the lungs also requires that they be completely expanded by the air inhaled. The imperfect breathing of many persons fails to accomplish the required inflation, and the lungs become diseased for want of their natural action. Full, deep breathing and pure air are as essential to health, happiness, and the right performance of our duties, whether individual, ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... state by the thirty-fourth abbot, Anthony Bohier, who, in the annals of the convent, bears the character of having been "a magnificent restorer and repairer of ancient monasteries." Admirable as is the structure, the original design of the architect was never completed. The western front remains imperfect; and this is the more to be regretted, as that part is naturally the first that meets the eye of the stranger, who thus receives an unfavorable impression, which it is afterwards difficult wholly to banish. The intention was, that the ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... 2: The purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue, not suddenly, but gradually. Wherefore it does not lay upon the multitude of imperfect men the burdens of those who are already virtuous, viz. that they should abstain from all evil. Otherwise these imperfect ones, being unable to bear such precepts, would break out into yet greater evils: thus ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... and grace to improve it to the full. For it is scandalous that a bird of the crow's cloth should be a thief; and so, although I reckon him among my friends,—in truth, because I do so,—I am always able to take it patiently when I see him chastised for his fault. Imperfect as we all know each other to be, it is a comfort to feel that few of us are so altogether bad as not to take more or less pleasure in seeing a neighbor's character improved under a course of moderately ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... became lambs—such transformations occur in last agonies; tigers lick the crucifix; when the dark portal opens ajar, belief is difficult, unbelief impossible. However imperfect may be the different sketches of religion essayed by man, even when his belief is shapeless, even when the outline of the dogma is not in harmony with the lineaments of the eternity he foresees, there comes in his last hour a trembling of the soul. There is something which will ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Northumberland, accompanied Mr. Desbarres. He has made a draught of Harbour Grace and the Bay of Carbonera, both of which are in a great measure commanded by the Island, which lies off a point of land between them. Hitherto we have had a very imperfect knowledge of these places, but Mr. Cook, who was particularly careful in sounding them, has discovered that ships of any size may lie in safety both in Harbour Grace ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... been turned awry. He looked at her searchingly; and as he looked the mere man in him asserted itself for a moment. She was dressed in coarse garments; it struck him that her grief had a touch of commonness about it; there was something imperfect in the dramatic setting. His recent experiences had had a kind of grandeur about them; it was not thus that he had remembered her in the hour when he had called upon her in the plains, and the Indian had heard his cry. He felt, and was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to be dwelt on in speaking, as to be equivalent to a dissyllable—[Symbol: written as a U-shape, below the line], is characteristic of the solemn Glendower: but the imperfect line ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... says, p. 243. of his work "that not one of the books of the New Testament, nor all of them together, were intended to be a forensic defence of Christianity. On the contrary, the historical books are brief, and imperfect memoirs, which were not designed, nor supposed to contain all the faces, and which do not set forth, nor profess to set forth the evidences of the religion. The Epistolary parts are the counsels, instructions and affectionate sentiments which the occasions of the infant churches, ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... what purpose do we feel! why within our limited sphere of action, our short and imperfect existence have we such boundless capacity for enjoying and suffering? no doubt for some good purpose. But I cannot think as I used to think: my ideas are perplexed: it is all pain of heart and confusion of mind; a sense of bitterness, and wrong, and sorrow, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... human nature is imperfect, and frailty so common, we must expect in every family some occasion to arise that will tax the patience and the love of the parent to the uttermost. No rule can be given that will meet every crisis; common sense, justice, forbearance, faith and love may be used in vain; and reproof, ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... with the material world, or rather, with a certain portion of it. For we by no means sense all that is sensible, and, as I have already indicated, our sense impressions are often delusive. The gamut of our senses is very limited, and also very imperfect both as to extent and quality. Science is continually bringing new instruments into our service, some to aid the senses, others to correct them. The microscope, the microphone, the refracting lens are instances. It ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... our neighbours. Our own cathedrals are mouldering by unregarded dilapidation. It seems to be part of the despicable philosophy of the time to despise monuments of sacred magnificence, and we are in danger of doing that deliberately, which the Scots did not do but in the unsettled state of an imperfect constitution. ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... it was thought best to enlarge many points which in the allotted space could have hardly more than mention. Acting on this wish, the monograph has been nearly doubled in size, but still must be counted only an imperfect summary, since facts in these lines are in most cases very nearly unobtainable, and, aside from the few reports of Labor Bureaus, there are as yet almost no sources of full information. But as there is no existing manual of reference on this topic, the student of social questions will accept ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... company of Norman men and women, you will, I know, extend a kindly greeting, if only because of their nationality. To your courtesy, possibly, you will add the leaven of interest, when you perceive—as you must—that their qualities are all their own, their defects being due solely to my own imperfect presentment. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... only heard imperfect reports of it; but it is said that she gave offence some eighteen months ago to an old woman who had held an office of trust in the family, and who, after some incoherent threats, disappeared. This peculiar affection ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... of the elements which we have, so far, examined, and that will be now described and will bring to an end this series of observations. A piece of close and detailed work of this kind, although necessarily imperfect, will have its value in the future, when science along its own lines ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... earlier Elizabethan prose, if we except the name of Hooker, in whom it culminates, is to a great extent the history of curiosities of literature—of tentative and imperfect efforts, scarcely resulting in any real vernacular style at all. It is, however, emphatically the Period of Origins of modern English prose, and as such cannot but be interesting. We shall therefore ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... it to speedy irretrievable disaster. We are probably all agreed that the conduct of a small grocery does not require fineness of intellect; most English readers, I think, will follow me in believing that success in such a sphere of life implies at least an imperfect intellectual development. On the other hand enterprises truly Rhodian do call for ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... soul of the true artist for ever labors to evolve the beautiful. This is what the thought of a picture means to him—how to express beauty, which he finds underlying even the imperfect individual of Nature's decaying birth. To the high insight this is always discernible. None are so fallen that some ray of God's light may not touch them, and this possibility, the faith in light for ever, radiates from the spirit of the artist, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... be the duty I owe Your Imperial Majesty to express my firm, clear, and profound conviction that economic prosperity of the people even when coupled with a somewhat imperfect military organisation will be more useful in case of war than the most complete military preparedness combined with economic weakness. In the latter case, the people, however eager they may be to sacrifice both their life and property, can bring ...
— The Shield • Various
... could fight and triumph. But the Christian faith was obscured and enfeebled, it clung to the vessel's rigging instead of defending its powerful hull; the flood was rising meanwhile, and the dikes were breaking one after, another. The religious belief of the Savoyard vicar, imperfect and inconsistent, such as it is set forth in Emile, and that sincere love of nature which was recovered by Rousseau in his solitude, remained powerless to guide the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... to believe that this ambition appealed to her. Nay, at times it certainly did so, for she liked the brilliant and the commanding. On the other hand, it seemed imperfect as an ideal of life. In its undercurrents her thought was always more ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... propounded, except by the assurance that books of which they had recommended him to study parts were dangerous to faith as wholes. But as they could not prove the fallacies alleged to exist in such books, their warnings availed nothing. He had been converted to dogmatism by imperfect reasoning; by larger and deeper reasoning he found his way beyond dogmatism. He passed from the church after an open declaration that its tenets were not based upon true reason or fact; and that he felt ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... removed unto Euelme, and some of them returned to Woodstock the Sunday se'nnight after, (the book of Valuations wanting something that was for haste left imperfect,) but lodged not in any of those rooms where they had lain before, and yet were not unvisited (as they confess themselves) by the devil, whom they called their nightly guest; Captain Crook came not untill ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... before his howls ceased, and the lodgers were placated with cookies the very next day—but that, too, was "good business"! Her "respectability" had become a deep satisfaction to her. She occasionally referred to herself as "a perfect lady." Her feeling about "imperfect" ladies was of most virulent disapproval. But she had no more spirituality than a hen. Her face was as good-humored, and common, and pretty as ever; and she had a fund of not too refined, but always funny, stories to tell Maurice; ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... "Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more: By Sinol's death, I know I am thane of Glamis; But how of Cawdor? the thane of Cawdor lives, A prosperous gentleman; and, to be king Stands not within the prospect of belief, No more than ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... habitually, or even only occasionally, raided. In some quarters, especially from north-east round to north-west, our present understanding of the terms of ancient geography, used by Semitic scribes, is very imperfect, and, when an Assyrian king has told us carefully what lands, towns, mountains and rivers his army visited, it does not follow that we can identify them with any exactness. Nor should the royal records ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... those who had sorrowed and suffered before her, Passions long extinguished, and hopes long dead and abandoned, As the emigrant's way o'er the Western desert is marked by Camp-fires long consumed, and bones that bleach in the sunshine. Something there was in her life incomplete, imperfect, unfinished; As if a morning of June, with all its music and sunshine, Suddenly paused in the sky, and, fading, slowly descended Into the east again, from whence it late had arisen. Sometimes she lingered in towns, till, urged by the fever ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... himself for the same purpose into lower worlds, and we call that part a personality, because the Latin word persona means a mask, and this personality is the mask which the ego puts upon himself when he manifests in worlds lower than his own. Just as the ego is a small part and an imperfect expression of the Monad, so is the personality a small part and an imperfect expression of the ego; so that what we usually think of as the man is only in truth a fragment ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... uttering of the words, which were accompanied by a gesture, they came forth out of the porch of the palm wood by the margin of the sea and full in front of the sun, which was near setting. Before them the surf broke slowly. All around, with an air of imperfect wooden things inspired with wicked activity, the crabs trundled and scuttled into holes. On the right, whither Attwater pointed and abruptly turned, was the cemetery of the island, a field of broken stones from the bigness of a child's hand to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... very much of the nimbus which they carry about with them elsewhere. At home you hear them whistle and shout, and bully their servants and domestics, and see them immersed in everyday household affairs. You see them eat and drink and look bored. You see them with imperfect or unaccomplished toilets, and often with muddy boots, especially when they look after their own horses. You begin to realize that ideals also are as much subject to the petty necessities of life as ordinary ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... question—to think, that is, as Wagner thought; these millions to make sublime sacrifice of themselves that Wagner's art-schemes might prosper. All this, be it noted, was to be the barest basis and beginning of the perfect State. How this point could be reached by our imperfect human race was a question he scorned to discuss: he simply assumed that it could be reached, and proceeded to further argument. The point had to be attained in the first place; then humanity—by which he meant German humanity—was ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... we seem to have little chance of understanding, we may obtain a broad conception of the way in which the earth and its living inhabitants came to be what they are. No one is more conscious than the writer that this account is extremely imperfect. The limits of the volume have permitted me to use only a part of the material which modern science affords, but if the whole of our discoveries were described the sketch would still remain very imperfect. The evolutionary conception of the world ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... beat high and thick within him as he came into the royal apartments. His education abroad, conducted, as it had been, on a narrow and limited scale, had given him but imperfect ideas of the grandeur of a Court; and the philosophical reflections which taught him to set ceremonial and exterior splendour at defiance, proved, like other maxims of mere philosophy, ineffectual, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... that Renaissance was not a man; that renaissance was a term used to signify what was at best but an imperfect rejuvenation of art. The guide said that after Titian's time and the time of the other great names we had grown so familiar with, high art declined; then it partially rose again—an inferior sort of painters ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... such punishment would do much to deter ignorant and incompetent men from seeking high commands in the field. But the discipline of the volunteer army of a republic must, it appears, inevitably be, especially in respect to officers of high rank, quite imperfect, although it may become in respect to the great mass of the troops, as ours ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... West the canons were of importance as having been used by Dionysius Exiguus in his collection. That the Canon of Holy Scripture was settled at this council is a traditional commonplace in theology, but hardly borne out by the facts. The council only drew up one of the several imperfect lists of sacred books which appeared in antiquity. The following canons show the influx of heathenism into the Church, resulting from the changed status of ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... as it is, it agrees with the spirit of Humanism, bent ever on harmonising the two great traditions of the past. Of the workmanship little need be said, except that it is wholly Lombard, distinguished from the similar work of Della Quercia at Bologna and Siena by a more imperfect feeling for composition, and a lack of monumental gravity, yet graceful, rich in motives, and instinct with a certain wayward ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... methods of striking a light were very primitive, just as they were in Europe; many families possessed no adequate means, or very imperfect ones. If by ill fortune the fire in the fireplace became wholly extinguished through carelessness at night, some one, usually a small boy, was sent to the house of the nearest neighbor, bearing a shovel or covered pan, or perhaps a broad strip of green bark, on which to bring back coals for relighting ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... was upon her, tainted as she is with that Vampire baptism. "Well," said I to myself, "if it be that she sleep all the day, it shall also be that I do not sleep at night." As we travel on the rough road, for a road of an ancient and imperfect kind there was, I held down my ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... sailed in the fleet under Keeling, in 1615, which carried out Sir Thomas Roe, already related in Sect. IV. of this chapter; and the present short article almost exclusively relates to the new factory at Cranganore on the Malabar coast, in which Hawes was left as one of the factors. This is a very imperfect and inconclusive article, yet gives some idea of the manners and customs ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... hurried past the visitor with averted face. It was well done, and, thus disguised by the thick veil, another man than Paul Harley might have failed to recognize one of whom he had never had more than an imperfect glimpse. But if Paul Harley's memory did not avail him greatly, ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... the Nith, and much more than in the Trough of the Clyde, a great portion of the ground was uncultivated, but the hills being less wild, the river more stately, and the ground not heaved up so irregularly and tossed about, the imperfect cultivation was the more to be lamented, particularly as there were so many houses near the river. In a small enclosure by the wayside is a pillar erected to the memory of Dr. Smollett, who was born in a village at a little distance, which we could see at the same time, and where, ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... her Lord Gerald mounted the attic stairs. It was for the first time in her life, and she was so imperfect in the geography of the upper floor, that she had to open one or two doors before she found 'the barrack,' with Bernard lying kicking his heels fiercely at the beam across the low room. The amazing presence of Geraldine suspended this occupation. 'How did ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... friendly a friendship, that they continually advised together in all their studies, and particularly in what concerned these books of Polity—this Dr. Spencer, the Three perfect books being lost, had delivered into his hands—I think by Bishop Whitgift—the imperfect books, or first rough draughts of them, to be made as perfect as they might be by him, who both knew Mr. Hooker's handwriting, and was best acquainted with his intentions. And a fair testimony of this may appear by an ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... mushroomlike bodies (cotyledons), each 2 to 3 inches in diameter, and attached by a narrow neck. (Pls. XII, XIII.) When fully everted, it is further recognizable by a large, undivided body hanging from the vulva, and two horns or divisions which hang down toward the hocks. In the imperfect eversions the body of the womb may be present with two depressions leading into the two horns. In the cases of some standing the organ has become inflamed and gorged with blood until it is as large as a bushel basket, its surface has a dark-red, bloodlike hue, and ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... was not afraid to travel alone in so dreary a place, adding, that if his countrywomen were to be overtaken by a stranger like him, on the wilds of a mountain, they would scream and fly; all which he acted very vividly, by way of making out his imperfect speech, and trying her courage ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... In concluding this imperfect sketch, I may remark that I have omitted many things concerning the natural history and habits of the Salmon, fearing to trespass too much on the patience of my readers; but I have wished, in addition to communicating some facts in the natural history of this fish, ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... never seen the effect of a panic upon a multitude can have but an imperfect idea of such a thing. The best disciplined troops have been enervated and made cowards by it. Armies have been routed by it, even where no enemy appeared to furnish an excuse. Like electricity, it operates instantly; like sympathy, it is ...
— A sketch of the life and services of Otho Holland Williams • Osmond Tiffany
... that the really fine and poignant irony came in. Through her intercourse with Jane and Laura, Rose offered herself for comparison, and showed flagrantly imperfect. But for that, owing to Tanqueray's superhuman powers of abstraction, she might almost have passed unnoticed. As it was, he owned that her incorruptible simplicity preserved her, even at her worst, from ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... foreign conquest, he was seeking to divert his attention from urgent matters at home; that he had seen a vision of impending ruin; and that his actions were the frantic efforts of a man to turn a steed, over which he has imperfect control, from the gulf he sees yawning ahead. The only other explanation is that Wolsey sacrificed England's interests in the hope of securing from Charles the gift of the ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... lecture on geography, which, though very imperfect, has yet exceeded the usual limits of our lessons; many interesting circumstances relating to the various countries I have mentioned, have been entirely omitted, as I was fearful that by telling you too much on the subject I should prevent ...
— A Week of Instruction and Amusement, • Mrs. Harley
... is true that I have never cared greatly for 'On the Heights,' which in its dealing with royalties seems too far aloof from the ordinary human life, and which on the moral side finally fades out into a German mistiness. But I speak of it with the imperfect knowledge of one who was never able to read it quite through, and I have really no right to speak of it. The book of his that pleased me most was 'Edelweiss,' which, though the story was somewhat too catastrophical, seemed to me admirably good and true. I still think it very ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... one with its vigorous colorful revelation of poor children swarming in feverish activity like vivid ants in alleys of red sand. From the tenement windows leaned rotund, moon-shaped mothers, as constellations of this sordid heaven; women like dark imperfect jewels, women like vegetables, women like great ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... much may be learned from the records of failures as from those of success. Where a device has been once fairly tried and found to be imperfect or impracticable, the knowledge of that trial is of advantage in further investigation. Regardless of the lesson taught by failure, however, it is an almost every-day occurrence that some device ...
— Steam, Its Generation and Use • Babcock & Wilcox Co.
... glad to see him the first leisure day—as she has something of consequence to communicate and is sorry to hear that he has been so much indisposed as to deprive his friends of the pleasure of his company for this last fortnight—May you enjoy every happiness this imperfect estate affords is the ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... intents and purposes, the country was a virgin wilderness whose camping sites were many and open to the first comer. Only after their households had been long established as squatters did these pioneers awake to an imperfect understanding that further formality was required before these, their homes, could be legally their own. Living isolated these men, even then, blundered in their applications or in the proving up of their claims. Such might be legally subject to eviction, but Bob in his recommendations gave ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... us? who rather double honour gain From his surmise proved false; find peace within, Favour from Heaven, our witness, from the event. And what is faith, love, virtue, unassayed Alone, without exteriour help sustained? Let us not then suspect our happy state Left so imperfect by the Maker wise, As not secure to single or combined. Frail is our happiness, if this be so, And Eden were no Eden, thus exposed. To whom thus Adam fervently replied. O Woman, best are all things as the will Of God ordained them: His creating hand Nothing imperfect or deficient left Of all that ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... edification is the object intended in the study of those languages, that end is more easily and more effectually accomplished by a thorough acquaintance with English literature, than by the very imperfect knowledge which college exercises give of the classics. Tugging at the Chained Prometheus, with the aid of grammar and lexicon, may be good intellectual discipline, but how many of the subjects of that discipline ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... tenor and the composer of "The Death of Nelson." Lamb praised him again in his Elia essay "Imperfect Sympathies," and later wrote an amusing article on Braham's recantation of Hebraism (see "The Religion of Actors," Vol. I.). "Kais," composed by Braham and Reeve, was produced at Drury Lane, February ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... on questions of domestic and foreign policy had resulted in the growth of the Federalist and Republican parties, but party organization was imperfect. In 1796 Adams (Federalist) was elected President, and ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... from the wagon, and saw by the light of the lantern the imperfect and yet peculiar marks of Snowfoot's rather smooth-worn shoes, and ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... psalm-tune. 'Excuse me, minister,' said the precentor, 'but I've got a kittlin' in my throat this morning.' 'Kittlin'!' hissed the holy man in scornful wrath: 'it's mair like a big tom-cat.' Ladies and gentlemen, after these few and decidedly imperfect remarks, I resume my seat, merely expressing the hope that our friend will feel himself as much at home here as the deil did ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... He plunged the girl into Vasari, he locked up her time and her thoughts in grammars, dictionaries, commentaries, all the works of all the scholiasts of Italian art, kept her bending double over the ungrateful toil, the ennui and labor of translating Italian words, groping in the darkness of her imperfect knowledge. The whole burden of the book fell upon her; when he had laid out her task, he would leave her tete-a-tete with the volumes bound in white vellum, to go and ramble about the neighborhood, paying visits, gambling at some ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... same question, raising his voice still more each time; and three times I made him the same reply, always in the same respectful manner. "Oh, you fool!" said he at last, "you do not understand, then."—"That arises evidently, Monseigneur, from your Excellency's imperfect explanations!" Upon which he explained that he was speaking of a new carriage which had come from Paris that very day, a fact of which I was entirely ignorant. I was on the point of explaining this to his Excellency; but without deigning to listen, ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... sufferedst thou not the jewellers complete the lattice-work of the oriel, [530] so there might not remain a place in thy palace [531] defective?" "O King of the Age," answered Alaeddin, "I left it not imperfect but of my free will, nor did I lack of ableness to complete it. However, I could not brook that Thy Grace should honour me [with thy presence] in a palace [532] wherein there was somewhat lacking; wherefore, so thou mayst know that it was not for lack of ableness ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... author at the fifth repetition than she had at the first. Of their parts individually they know but very little; of the play as a whole they are absolutely ignorant. On the first representation, by which the reputation of a play is decided, they are so confused and imperfect, owing partly to their imbecility but more still to their indolence, that the sense of the author is mutilated, his characters travestied, and his piece rather burlesqued than performed. The reality of the scene depends on the passions excited in the actor listening ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... character would be imperfect indeed if it contained no word concerning his genius as a coloniser. One of his main determinations, early in life, was "to discover and conquer unknown lands, and take possession of them in the Queen's ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... stated in De Anima iii, 7, movement is twofold. One is "the act of something imperfect, i.e. of something existing in potentiality, as such": this movement is successive and is in time. Another movement is "the act of something perfect, i.e. of something existing in act," e.g. to understand, to feel, and to will and such like, also to have delight. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... applied to the first hole on the left, and the fore-finger of the right to the lowest hole on that side. In this manner, though the notes are only three, they produce a pleasing, yet simple music, which they vary much more than one would think possible, with so imperfect an instrument. Their being accustomed to a music which consists of so few notes, is, perhaps, the reason why they do not seem to relish any of ours, which is so complex. But they can taste what is more deficient than their own; for, we observed, that they used to be well pleased ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... is too full of repose, and the Ottoman race has become too degenerate through indulgence, to exhibit many striking specimens of physical beauty. The face is generally fine, but the body is apt to be lank, and with imperfect muscular development. The best forms I saw in the baths were those of laborers, who, with a good deal of rugged strength, showed some grace and harmony of proportion. It may be received as a general rule, that the physical ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... practical builder despite a parental command to follow art—such a tale can at least claim the merit of originality. Mr. J. D. BERESFORD would be fully justified in claiming this and much more for An Imperfect Mother (COLLINS). Here is an interesting, fascinating and certainly unusual story, in which only two characters are of any real moment, Cecilia, the imperfect mother, embodiment of the artist temperament, egotistical almost to inhumanity, who abandons ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 31, 1920 • Various
... lie buried in darkness and oblivion. As we have had an opportunity of acquiring some knowledge of one of the most valuable and flourishing of the British settlements in that quarter, we propose to present the world with a particular, but imperfect, detail of its most memorable ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... the base. So thought Sir Charles Hay, who was put under arrest for saying that all the money was being spent in fighting sham battles and planting out cabbages. However, a reconnaissance of Louisbourg had been made by Gorham of the Rangers, whose very imperfect report induced Holbourne and Loudoun to get ready to sail. But, just as they were preparing to begin, too late, a Newfoundland vessel came in with captured French dispatches which showed that Admiral La Motte had united his three squadrons in Louisbourg harbour, ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... old, plucky, honest, vigorous and straightforward style. He died in June, 1868, from a paralytic stroke, and was succeeded by his nephew, the present Raja. What Sir JAMES BROOKE might have accomplished had he not been hampered by an opposition based on ignorance and imperfect knowledge at home, we cannot say; what he did achieve, I have endeavoured briefly to sketch, and unprejudiced minds cannot but deem the founding of a prosperous State and the total extirpation of piracy, slavery and head-hunting, a monument worthy ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... sees in infinite longing for some higher greatness which it has either lost or otherwise cannot reach, finds the art, and the humanity, and the creations, and the affections which seem to others so exquisite most imperfect and ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... VII., and of her second or third husband (for, if I don't mistake, she had three); but indeed, my lord, these things are so much out of my memory at present, that I speak with great diffidence. I cannot even recollect any thing else to your lordship's purpose; but I flatter myself, that these imperfect notices will at least be a testimony of my readiness to obey your lordship's commands, as that I am, with great respect, my lord, your lordship's ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... hot-headed and even froward. There was something, he saw, in this idea of the melting-pot, if only the mingling could be managed by gods that saw the future. You couldn't make a wonder of a bell if you poured your metal into an imperfect mould. The mould must be flawless and the metal cunningly mixed; and then how clear the tone, how resonant! It wasn't the tarantella only that led him this long wandering. It was the quality of the dancers; and through all the changing steps and measures Anne and Lydia, too, ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... restraints, slaughter and bondage were the usual results of war, the idea of property was but very partially defined, and though there were strong indeterminate sentiments of right there is no word in Homer signifying law. Upon the whole, though a very imperfect, it was a wonderful and noble ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... it comes from the loom is in an imperfect condition for use. When worsted fabrics leave the loom they require but few and simple finishing operations, and in this respect differ much from woolen cloths, which require elaborate finishing operations. The finishing processes of woolen and worsted cloths are ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... the coloured almanack given away at Christmas by the local grocer; on the advertisement of Jones' soap, and thinks with discontent of Polly Perkins, who in a natural way is as pretty a girl as can be looked for in this imperfect world. Thus it is that woman has had to take to shorthand and typewriting. Modern woman is ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... creature, whole and great, God's image, praising God whose type it is; We are imperfect worms, vile families, That in its belly have our low estate. If we know not its love, its intellect, Neither the worm within my belly seeks To know me, but his petty mischief wreaks:— Thus it behoves us to be circumspect. Again, ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... ragged, bare-headed boy or two lying on the grass on the upper side of the Green. It came to pass that late one Saturday afternoon, at the commencement of August, in the year 1866, I was standing where the street opens on this Green, or imperfect square. My eyes were fixed on the dilapidated house, the appearance of which awakened in my mind all kinds of odd ideas. "A strange-looking place," said I to myself at last, "and I shouldn't wonder if strange things have been done ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... page 985, "were the first who invented the science of the stars, and gave names to the planets, not at random and without meaning, but descriptive of the qualities which they conceived them to possess; and it was from them that this art passed, still in an imperfect state, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... added to the general excitement, without stirring up any of the courage which makes brave men face disaster. Public credit was shaken; commercial operations were stunned; wage-earners were thrown out of employment; the forces of crime found themselves released even from those imperfect bonds which then kept them in check. The King and his brother did, indeed, prove their courage in danger and their readiness of expedient; and they were well helped in their efforts to cope with the calamity by many of the leading nobility. But as a whole ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... the study of languages, together with the imperfect material and the complicating conditions that have arisen by the spread of civilization over the country, combine to make the problem ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... been variously christened. Some believe it to be the fragment of a Niobe; others of a Diana. It is generally allowed to be a noble sample of Greek sculpture. Hereabouts, also, is the well-known imperfect statue of Icarus (113), brought in fragments from the Acropolis. The urn marked 122 is a sepulchral vessel, with figures in bas-relief; 123 is a sepulchral column, with an Athenian name upon it; and then the visitor will pass rapidly the fragments ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... the unspoken question, cried from the eyes that were on mine in a thousand tones. I could trace the play of her face but dimly by the light of the smoky lantern, but her eyes I seemed to see bright and near. I had looked for scorn there, and, it might be, amusement. I seemed to see (perhaps the imperfect light played tricks), besides lure and raillery, reproach, sorrow, and, most strange of all, a sort of envy. Then came a smile, and ever so lightly her finger moved in beckoning. The song came no more through the closed ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... majority may have in common—that dominant interest, let us say, in line and mass. Such being the case, this Tuscan quality comes to an end with the local art of the middle ages, and can no longer be found, or only imperfect, after the breaking up and fusion of the various schools, and the arising of eclectic personalities in the earliest sixteenth century. After the painters born between 1450 and 1460, there are no more genuine Tuscans. Leonardo, once independent ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... accounted for. It is far easier to indulge in broad generalizations than to devote oneself to a close study of nature or man. It is not the rules, it is the exceptions which ought to retain our attention, for only exceptions will teach us how imperfect are ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... first range of hills, till his further course was interrupted by a river running north, which is a curious circumstance, being in the mountains. He described it as wide as the Thames at Kingston. Some native iron he found, and also an imperfect limestone, and the dung of an unknown animal. Samples of everything he there found will be sent by the GREENWICH (whaler), and I did hope to have been able to add something farther from another journey he was about undertaking, and for which purpose I had established a chain of depots ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... his own safety from treachery, he proceeded to a learned and reverend father of the church, to whom he communicated frankly who he was, and what was his object. Burr was master of the Latin language, and had an imperfect knowledge of the French. The priest was an educated man, so that a conversation was held with but little difficulty. He endeavoured to dissuade Burr from the enterprise. Spoke of it as impossible to accomplish. He represented the distance as great, and ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... the wide field of theology confined themselves to the points at issue at the moment. And as a text-book for instruction, it was obvious that while on some points they were precise and clear, on others they were vague and imperfect. The first five Articles left no room for doubt. When the compilers came to the controversies of their day, for all their strong language, they left all kinds of questions unanswered. For instance, they actually ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... and that one of the principal objects which we have in view in meeting together from time to time is to learn what should be thought, and what ought to be known; and by comparing our own judgments of things with those of our neighbours, to arrive at a just modification of our rough and imperfect ideas. ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... It is not even sufficient to have learned the Caribee or Carina, the Guamo, the Guahive, the Jaruro, the Ottomac, the Maypure, the Salive, the Marivitan, the Maquiritare, and the Guaica, ten dialects, of which there exist only imperfect grammars, and which have less affinity with each other than the Greek, German, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... his existence getting now and then from Almayer a venomous glance which I observed with great surprise. In the course of the whole evening he ventured one single remark which I didn't catch because his articulation was imperfect, as of a man who had forgotten how to speak. I was the only person who seemed aware of the sound. Willems subsided. Presently he retired, pointedly unnoticed—into the forest maybe? Its immensity was there, within three hundred ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... taken off again, leaving the imprinted design behind. It is well to have the ink fairly thick, and rely on warmth to impart the necessary fluidity; otherwise the design may come away with the paper in patches, and be imperfect. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... a Connecticut hardware merchant of an inventive turn of mind, went to a store to buy a life preserver. He could find only imperfect ones, but they drew his attention to the study of rubber, and presently he was thinking of it by day and dreaming of it by night. Rubber became a passion with him. He felt sure some way could be found to make it firm yet flexible regardless of temperature, ...
— The Romance of Rubber • United States Rubber Company
... File of one greene in yeares; as being aged under eight. Hence, worthy Reader, shew not thy self too-too-rigid a Censurer. This his version is little dignified, and therefore likely will it appears to thee much imperfect. It ought to be his own, or why under the Title is his name written? Peradventure thou wilt say, what is it to me? yet heare: Such is it really, as that I presume the Author may therein be rendred faithfully: with this courteously be then satisfied.—This small Treatise in its use, will ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway
... An imperfect sketch of the scene at the house of Colonel Burr was published in the year 1802, in a pamphlet under the signature of Aristides. The following is extracted from it. The note of reference here given is also extracted. Its correctness was never publicly denied by either of ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... respecting this first dramatic production of American genius, and the pleasure which it has already afforded in the theatres of New York and Maryland, persuade Mr. Wignell that his excuses on this occasion will be acceptable to the public and that even in so imperfect a dress, the intrinsic merit of the comedy will contribute to the amusement and command the approbation of the audience." Of Wignell and his associates, an excellent impression may be had from a first hand description by W. B. ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... said Mamba, and then endeavoured to tell something of his doings in English; but his knowledge of that language was so very imperfect that they could make nothing of it. They understood him, however, when he cautiously and lovingly drew the Testament from its hiding-place and ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... with an air of relief. "Then that sufficiently accounts for my very imperfect recollection of the affair"—with a glance at George to direct the latter's attention to the explanation. "Proceed, Senor Montalvo," continued the Governor; "tell us all that you know ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... so imperfect in the light of the nineteenth century, was very noble in the dark days of the seventeenth. Upon the arrival of Goetwater at New Amsterdam, the clergy of the Reformed church remonstrated against his being permitted to preach. The governor, adhering to his policy ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... union was, therefore, a response to obvious and pressing necessity. However slow or imperfect may have been the adjustment of internal organizations to the conditions of the trade, still the groove was defined and consequently the amount of possible floundering largely limited. Not so with the next step, namely the national federation ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... while shaving; never did I use such unsatisfactory shoe-polish. I finally gave up in despair my effort to appear genteel, and devoted myself to the bouquet. I cut almost flowers enough to dress a church, and then remorselessly excluded every one which was in the least particular imperfect. In making the bouquet I enjoyed the benefit of my nephews' assistance and counsel and took enforced part ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... fresh and sweet, and not too much salted. Coffee A, or granulated sugar is best for all cakes. Much care should be taken in breaking and separating the eggs, and equal care taken as regards their freshness. One imperfect egg would spoil the entire lot. Break each egg separately in a teacup; then into the vessels in which they are to be beaten. Never use an egg when the white is the least discolored. Before beating the whites, ...
— Recipes Tried and True • the Ladies' Aid Society
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
