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More "Perfection" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nations, ancient or modern, we find no example of a growth so rapid, so gigantic, of a people so prosperous and happy. In contemplating what we have still to perform, the heart of every citizen must expand with joy when he reflects how near our Government has approached to perfection; that in respect to it we have no essential improvement to make; that the great object is to preserve it in the essential principles and features which characterize it, and that is to be done by preserving the ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... surprize, why the people of Connecticut should complain? They see every man indulged in worshiping God as he pleases, and they see many indulged in neglecting his worship entirely—They see men every where enjoying the liberty of doing what is right—and such liberty they rightly decide is the perfection of freedom. ...
— Count The Cost • Jonathan Steadfast
... I thank my stars we have no city folks putting on airs around our house. I suppose you think her perfection. You looked ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... rays fell upon the calm, stately face of Lady Helena, upon the grave countenance of her son, upon the bright, handsome features of Lord Airlie. They sparkled on the delicate silver, and showed off the pretty china to perfection. The breakfast was upon the table, but the three occupants of the room had been waiting. Lady ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... at certain intervals, in the development of every modern nation, I conceive its most illuminating example to be that intellectual limitation of caste which, during the French Revolution, led to the creation of those political criminal tribunals which reached perfection with Robespierre. ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... whether external or internal, the subtle or the coarse, will be apprehended, and the mind, in its entire substance and its relations to things, will be perfectly intelligent. This is called the investigation of things. This is called the perfection of knowledge [3].' And knowledge must be thus perfected before we can achieve the sincerity of our thoughts, and the ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... dreadful wisdom of their evoked dead, have, so far, culled nothing but inanities and platitudes. I would wish him to enlarge his sympathies by patient and loving observation while he grows in mental power. It is in the impartial practice of life, if anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art can be found, rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this or that particular method of technique or conception. Let him mature the strength of his imagination amongst the things of this earth, which it is his business to ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... them, as he observed, requiring a very delicate process of study to find out; whereas the possible faults in bread, which are not less in number, require no study at all for the defection; they publish themselves through all varieties of misery. But the perfection of barbarism, as regards our island cookery, is reserved for animal food; and the two poles of Oromasdes and Ahrimanes are nowhere so conspicuously exhibited. Our insular sheep, for instance, are so ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... pathetic wreck her life had fallen into. The girl was so patently fit for better things! Her splendid beauty was not a cheap beauty. She was no coarse-blown, gorgeous flower, imperfect at telltale points. It was good blood that had modelled her dark perfection, good blood that had shaped her long ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... asked them how they could be so cruel, they being harmless, inoffensive fellows: that they were putting themselves in a way to subsist by their labour, and that it had cost them a great deal of pains to bring things to such perfection as they were ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... It is a great cause, a mighty project, commanding the noblest enthusiasms and the highest efficiency of effort, the project of bringing this whole world to salvation. And that not the salvation of a mental condition but of the perfection of its whole being, the realization of its highest possibilities, the full noontide of the ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... fragments of Whose teachings have come down to us, are worthy of all imitation. That Life is an undenied and undeniable Gospel. Its teachings cannot be passed by and discarded. All must admit that it would be happiness to follow and perfection to imitate Him. None ever felt for Him a sincere emotion of contempt, nor in anger accused Him of sophistry, nor saw immorality lurking in His doctrines; however they may judge of those who succeeded Him, and claimed to be His apostles. Divine or human, inspired or ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... drawing-master. She could chatter, on occasion, so that a room full of people instinctively listened. And she had read voraciously, especially poetry, where they were content with picture-papers and the mildest of novels. Hester brought nothing to perfection; but there could be no question that in every aspect of life she was constantly making, in comparison with her family, a dashing or dazzling effect all the more striking because of the unattractive milieu out of which ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... gardens are not natives of our cold and variable climate, but of one much warmer; and if we delay to sow the seed of such plants and flowers till the warm days of summer are fully set in, the plant has scarcely time to grow into perfection before the chills of autumn come on, and they perish before their blossoms, fruit, or seeds come to perfection. But this may be obviated by means of a frame and hot-bed, which every young gardener ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... the price of the other for the one. All I can say is that such another live piece of English criticism of English literature as this I do not know anywhere. What is alive is very seldom perfect: to get perfection you must go to epitaphs. But, once more, though I could pick plenty of small holes in the details of the actual critical dicta, I know no picture of the division of literature here concerned from which a fairly intelligent person will derive a better impression of the facts than from this. Addison ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... when he says: "For we know in part, and we prophesy in part; but when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away." This is not a contrast between the imperfections of our day and the perfection of heaven, but between the imperfection of the apostolic church and the perfection of the church of to-day. That which is perfect has come; a perfect revelation of Christian character, a perfect gospel, a perfect ...
— The Spirit and the Word - A Treatise on the Holy Spirit in the Light of a Rational - Interpretation of the Word of Truth • Zachary Taylor Sweeney
... extreme North, the voyagers are obliged to dance and act plays for employment. Perhaps our own woods and fields,—in the best wooded towns, where we need not quarrel about the huckleberries,—with the primitive swamps scattered here and there in their midst, but not prevailing over them, are the perfection of parks and groves, gardens, arbors, paths, vistas, and landscapes. They are the natural consequence of what art and refinement we as a people have,—the common which each village possesses, its true paradise, in comparison with which all elaborately and wilfully wealth-constructed parks and gardens ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... helped to this decision by the extraordinary perfection of the weather. The weather of late had been a revelation to Ginger. It was his first experience of America's Indian Summer, and it had quite overcome him. As he stood on the roof of Mrs. Meecher's establishment on the Saturday morning, thrilled by the velvet ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... part of all the life that had ever been upon the earth she became, not infinitesimal, but newly significant. Widened outlook brought deepened feeling. Newly understanding, she sat there brooding over Ann anew, pain in the perfection of ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... native literature, and who respects himself, ought to own a comprehensive and inclusive library of English literature, in comely and adequate editions. You may suppose that this counsel is a counsel of perfection. It is not. Mark Pattison laid down a rule that he who desired the name of book-lover must spend five per cent. of his income on books. The proposal does not seem extravagant, but even on a smaller percentage than five the average reader of these pages may become the ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... do I become the envied bride of PETER, justly surnamed PARAGON; and much I wonder what in me he found (he, who Perfection so personifies) that he could condescend an eye to cast on faulty, feather-headed EMILY! How solemn is the stillness all around me! (A loud bang is heard behind screen.) Methought I heard the dropping of a pin!—perhaps I should arise and search for it.... Yet why, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... that has been characteristic of the Anglican Church ever since. It has always been restless in the presence of a divided Christendom; the sin of the broken unity has always haunted it. It never has taken the smug attitude of sectarianism, a placid self-satisfaction with its own perfection. It has felt the constant pull of the Catholic ideal and has been inspired by it to make effort after effort for the union of Christendom. It has never lost the sense that it was in itself not complete but a part of a greater whole. It has never seen in the existing ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... sufficiently visible, and I have not unsparingly shewn them; but we must judge men, not according as they approach perfection, but according as their good or bad qualities preponderate—their talents or their weaknesses—the benefits they effected, the evil they wrought. For a man who rose to so great a power, Rienzi's faults were singularly few—crimes he committed none. He is ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... "He bought another rifle the other day—paid forty-five bones for it. That makes four he has now. And they have to manage like the deuce to keep themselves in grub from one remittance day to the next. He's a study. You seldom run across such a combination of physical perfection and child-like irresponsibility. He was complaining about his limited income the other day—'inkum' in his inimitable pronunciation. I suggested that right here in this valley he could earn a considerable number of shekels if he cared ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... official surveys, and what I chiefly aim to establish is the true cause of the results which are already known to the whole world; and it may be a relief to many to know that I shall publish no other, but, like the player at cards, will "stand;" not that I have accomplished perfection, but because I can do no better with the cards in hand. Of omissions there are plenty, but of wilful ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... not for sacred chastity,— Who loves for that?—nor for thy sprightly wit; I love thee not for thy sweet modesty, Which makes thee in perfection's throne to sit; I love thee not for thy enchanting eye, Thy beauty['s] ravishing perfection; I love thee not for unchaste luxury, Nor for thy body's fair proportion; I love thee not for that my soul doth dance And leap with pleasure, when those lips of thine Give musical and graceful utterance To ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... Major was speaking again. "For years the sole aim and goal of the German house of Hohenzollern has been the perfection to a marvelous degree of her policy of militarism. Why, there is not a man in the whole German Empire, who, at the command of his country, could not take his place, a trained soldier, in the tremendous, perfected military machine that is ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... and ornaments, lest they should think it the paid chaplain who spoke and not the honest acquaintance. I know pious men, Highland and Lowland, but my lord of Argile has more than any of them the qualities of perfection. At home yonder, he rises every morning at five and is in private till eight. He prays in his household night and morning, and never went abroad, though but for one night, but he took his write-book, standish, and English ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... and prose writers of the past." By these we may be inspired, as the Pythoness by Apollo. From the genius of the past "an effluence breathes upon us." The writer is not to imitate, but to keep before him the perfection of what has been done by the greatest poets. He is to look on them as beacons; he is to keep them as exemplars or ideals. He is to place them as judges of his work. "How would Homer, how would Demosthenes, have been affected by what I have written?" This is practical counsel, ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... with the solemnity of an altar raised to the goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction to set off the meanest things. . . . It is the perfection of the mock-heroic."* ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... half-finished yet.—All that he does is wise; all that he tries, succeeds; all that he has, he shares; and when he speaks, let no dog bark! When we read about impossible heroes in books we called them 'Gerard'; when we wanted to express the acme of perfection, we called a thing 'Gerardy.' Jill read aloud the Swiss Family Robinson to Pam, and called the good proper papa 'Mr Gerard' all the ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... replied jestingly. "No one is perfect, and I least of all. If you expect perfection in this world you will be disappointed when ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... work and study, and a firm determination to stop short of nothing less than the perfection of art, those early years of Clara Morris's life on the stage went swiftly by, and in her third season she was more than ever what she herself called "the dramatic scrape-goat of the company," one who was able to play any part at a ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... a state in which we shall simply rest from our labours and sit down to enjoy the fruits of them does not promise satisfaction either, and so cannot be the end or ideal. Our desire and our endeavour is not for a moveless, changeless, undeveloping perfection. In fact, so often as the dream of such a state attained has presented itself, it has to thoughtful minds appeared anything but attractive or desirable. Our desire is to go on, and for that we are willing to pay a price—nay, it is for more than merely to go ...
— Progress and History • Various
... defence, namely, of culprits arraigned for heavy crimes, and in this he was, if not unrivalled, at least unequalled. Rivals he had, who, thick as the skins of such men may be presumed to be, not unfrequently writhed beneath the lashes which his tongue could inflict. To such a perfection had he carried his skill and power of fence, so certain was he in attack, so invulnerable when attacked, that few men cared to come within the reach of his forensic flail. To the old stagers who were generally opposed to him, the gentlemen who conducted prosecutions on the part of the Crown, and ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Ridge was to him the perfection of natural beauty. He was warm in his friendships and true to his kinships. Always dignified, there was a heartiness in his greetings that was irresistible. He was as broad as his acres. Riding or driving over his vast estate or in its vicinity, ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... accrue to the reader in finding these masters side by side for comparison and for gauging Dr. Lord's unique life-work by recognized standards, keeping well in view the purpose no less than the perfection of these literary performances, all of which, like those of Dr. Lord, were aimed at setting forth the services of selected ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... hidden fortification, the invisible rampart of the capital; its numerous agents are the detached forts. Fouche was the Vauban of this wonderful system, and since Fouche's time, the art has been steadily approaching perfection. There is to-day, in every dark corner of the city an eye that watches over our fifty-four gates, and an ear that hears the pulsations of all the streets, those great ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... floods," the moon in placid beauty shed her soft influence upon the mind, and mitigated the horrors of the scene. The thunders which bellowed from the abyss, and the loveliness of the falling element, which glittered like molten silver in the moonlight, seemed to complete in absolute perfection the rare union of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... not make vows of living and dying aunt Eleanors, or Lady Gertrudes; all three of them good honest souls! chaste, pious, and plain. It is a charming situation, when a woman is arrived at such a height of perfection, as to be above giving or receiving temptation. Sweet innocents! They have my reverence, if not my love. How would they be affronted, if I were to say pity!—I think only of my two good aunts, at the present writing. Miss Clements, you ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... as for his soles, they are much at reparation, and often faine to be removed. Nature seems to have spent an apprentiship of yeares to make you such a one, for it is full seven yeares ere hee comes to this perfection, and be fit for the saddle: for then (as we,) it seemes to come to the yeares of discretion, when he will shew a kinde of rationall judgement with him, and if you set an expert rider on his backe, you shall see how sensiblie they will talke together, ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... life was just what suited St. Martin, and he was very happy. He lived apart with God, and yet had work to do in training his monks in the way of perfection and teaching the Faith to the ignorant pagans. But he had not yet arrived at the end of God's great plan for him. And if God now called him away from the life he loved to a life he did not want at all, we must not be surprised, ...
— Stories of the Saints by Candle-Light • Vera C. Barclay
... Toussaint. He was also a proprietor of estates in the island. He was the man who planned the renovation of its agriculture after the abolition of slavery, and one of the great instruments in bringing it to the perfection mentioned by Lacroix. In the year 1801, he was called upon by Toussaint to repair to Paris, to lay before the Directory the new constitution, which had been agreed upon in St. Domingo. He obeyed the summons. It happened, that he arrived in France just ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... to rest some soldier told him something of interest. Gunners explained the watch-like perfection of their guns. Snipers told thrilling tales of long shots. The cooks showed him how cleverly the big field stoves came apart, and how they could be assembled ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... O my!" groaned Kate. "Once let a boy begin to dote on a colt, particularly if he calls it his colt, and he can soon see beauty, size, speed, everything else in it, in matchless perfection. It's a kind of disease, a horse-disease that gets into his eye. Tom's got it badly. Please ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... the chlorine combined with the sodium is lost partly as NaCl and partly as CaCl2; none of the innumerable attempts at recovering the chlorine from the waste liquor has been made to pay, and success is less likely than ever since the perfection of the electrolytic processes. (See CHLORINE.) For all that, especially in consequence of the small amount of fuel required, and the total absence of the necessity of employing sulphur compounds as an intermediary, the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... important point where inclination ever ought to be made the rule of conduct. But for years she had hoped that Lucia's affection for Maurice would grow, unchecked and untroubled, till it attained that perfection which she thought the beau ideal of married love; and even now, she held tenaciously to such fragments of her old hope as still remained. This morning, after a night of the most painful anxiety and foreboding, her mind naturally caught at ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... those human beings who possessed the devilish spirit. During that period of three and a half years he was indeed a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; but all this suffering was necessary for his perfection as a new creature. (Hebrews 5:8,9) Because of his faithfulness, his fidelity and loyalty to God even unto death, he won the great victory, became an overcomer. Hence we read: "Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name; that ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... genius, at the same time that a new stimulus is being constantly supplied by the events and experience of each succeeding day, the work will go on, and weapon after weapon, engine after engine, will be thrown into the world's great market, constantly approaching nearer to the perfection of destructive power. And as there is no poison without its antidote, so the originating faculties of the American mind will be as fully exerted in the creation of defences against those very engines of destruction. Armed thus at all points, and containing within ourselves ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... same manner as nature multiplies her works by imitating, or repeating her own act, when she seems most to run into variety. In this manner it was that comedy had its birth, its increase, its improvement, its perfection, and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... see some specimens of that mosaic-work which all ancient writers upon Mexico have celebrated, and which was nowhere brought to such perfection as in Pascuaro. It was made with the most beautiful and delicate feathers, chiefly of the picaflores, the humming-birds, which they called huitzitailin. But we are told that it is now upwards of twenty years since the last artist ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... privet or hawthorn. Japanese money is very thin. Some of the coins are oblong, some square, and others round. The chief circulating coins are of copper or iron. The workmen are very skilful: they manufacture cutlery and sword-blades to perfection. They show great skill also in gold and silver work. Their mirrors are of bronze, the reflecting surface being of silver, and polished, the back and handle ornamented with various devices. Everything, indeed, that a Japanese artisan produces, exhibits ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... and no man might ever hope to know unless he himself chose to reveal it. In his many encounters with the police he had assumed the speech, the characteristics, and, indeed, the facial attributes of each in turn, and assumed them with an ease and a perfection that were simply marvellous, and had gained for him the sobriquet of "Forty Faces" among the police, and of "The Vanishing Cracksman" among the scribes and reporters of newspaperdom. That he came, in time, to possess another name than these was due to his own ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... he says, "to express, by any words at my command, the peculiar charm which Professor Putnam's scholarship and character had for me. I never heard him recite without being impressed with the wonderful perfection of his scholarship. His translation was so faultlessly accurate, and yet in such exquisite taste, his analysis and parsing were so philosophical and minutely exact, and his information upon illustrative ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... it was said that the rope which turned the roller should be new; if possible it should be woven of strands taken from a gallows rope with which people had been hanged, but this was a counsel of perfection rather ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... an inch. "These things are not to be decided by sentiment, dear. There are meanings in marriage far beyond mere romance, far beyond the fate of the two individuals who make the contract. We doctors must uphold the ideal of physical perfection lest the race suffer. Moreover Bettina does not know, she cannot know, what life would mean under such conditions. She does not know her own strength, her own weakness. She must learn something of life ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... picked up various small accomplishments on the Continent—he could talk French and Italian—draw landscapes, sing very tolerably—dance divinely; but, above all, he had been wounded at Waterloo:—what girl of seventeen, well read in poetry and romance, could resist such a mirror of chivalry and perfection! ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... is an ice-chest. In the liquor, for perfection, the water used has first to be frozen. That chest contains ice, and ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... read that story of his about a painter who was always striving to attain perfection, could never let a picture alone, was for ever adding new touches, painting details out and other details in? One day he called in his friends to see his masterpiece. When they came they found a mere mess of paint ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... regime—tall and stately, with her own grey hair crepe, and surmounted by a high cap of the most dazzling blonde. She had been one of the earliest emigrants, and had stayed for many months with my mother, whom she professed to rank amongst her dearest friends. The duchesse possessed to perfection that singular melange of ostentation and ignorance which was so peculiar to the ante-revolutionists. She would talk of the last tragedy with the emphatic tone of a connoisseur, in the same breath that she would ask, with Marie ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... foundations of his compositions has been mentioned; but without following his life from year to year we can have only a very imperfect conception of the actual amount of labour which was involved in bringing to perfection the long list of works that we see appended to the biographies of the composer. When we follow the story of his life in detail, we are struck by the fact of his unceasing toil. Nothing seems to have checked the constant flow of composition; yet many causes were at work to hinder it, such ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... attendance at Balmoral. The Queen and Prince occupied their new home for the first time on the 7th of September; it was not yet completed, but, the Queen wrote, "the house is charming, the rooms delightful, the furniture, papers, everything, perfection."] ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... Margaret grew older, her beauty both of face and form approached nearer to perfection than I had foreseen, closely as I watched her. But neither her mind nor her disposition kept pace with her beauty. I studied her closely, with the same patient, penetrating observation, which my experience of the world has made it a habit with me to direct on every one with whom ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... seventeen, tall and fair, and so exquisitely shaped—you may talk of your Venus de Medicis, your Dianas, your Nymphs, and Galateas; but if Praxiteles, and Roubilliac, and Wilton, were to lay their heads together, in order to make a complete pattern of beauty, they would hardly reach her model of perfection.—As for complexion, poets will talk of blending the lily with the rose, and bring in a parcel of similes of cowslips, carnations, pinks, and daisies.— There's Dolly, now, has got a very good complexion.—Indeed, she's the very picture of health and innocence—you are, indeed, my pretty ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... of conversing these French people carry to great perfection. It is not frivolous, though it is light and sparkling; it is still less argumentative, but it has the knack of bringing out different opinions and different views of them. We pity the French for their want of political liberty, but the ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... rationalistic appeal nor to ritualistic observance, but expressing the whole range of human aspiration toward the unknown. Rational men and women of feeling must combine with reverent men and intelligent women to create a belief and a service which will express all the longings of humanity toward perfection. ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... is not an easy thing in the stress of the visible to remember the greater power of the Invisible. The most earnest Christian worker is sometimes overwhelmed by discouragement or, again, unduly confident because of the perfection of system and method, forgetting that God knows no obstacle, and that He alone can put life ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... remarks of this portion of the poem (184 fol.): "Perhaps the art of landscape-painting in poetry has never been displayed in higher perfection than in these stanzas, to which rigid criticism might possibly object that the picture is somewhat too minute, and that the contemplation of it detains the traveller somewhat too long from the main ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... sweetly-scented flowers, the gravel walks without a weed in them, and the hedges carefully trimmed. Then when Tom and I were shown to the room we were to occupy, I was struck by the white dimity hangings to the beds, the fresh curtains and blinds, the little grate polished to perfection, and a bouquet of flowers on the dressing-table. Tom was not so impressed as I was, though he said it reminded him of his own home. Miss Fanny was considerably younger than Nettleship, a fair-haired, blue-eyed, sweetly-smiling, ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... a form so commanding that a king might exult at the prospect of his crown descending on such a head; of a perfection of strength and masculine excellence that will almost justify the dangerous exultation of health and vigor; of a reason that is riper than his years; of a virtue of proof; of all qualities that we respect, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... the perfection the Parlor Organ has reached, the variety of musical effects of which it is capable, and how desirable an addition it is to the parlor. These instruments have created much interest and enthusiasm by reason of their quality of tone, elegance of ...
— Angel Agnes - The Heroine of the Yellow Fever Plague in Shreveport • Wesley Bradshaw
... discipline is highly respectable. The Military Academy, on which the Army essentially rests, and to which it is much indebted for this state of improvement, has attained, in comparison with any other institution of a like kind, a high degree of perfection. Experience, however, has shewn that the dispersed condition of the corps of artillery is unfavorable to the discipline of that important branch of the military establishment. To remedy this inconvenience, eleven companies have been assembled at the fortification erected at Old Point Comfort as a ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... degree here, if we may judge from the melody of some sorts of their songs. It is also sufficiently comprehensive, though, in many respects, deficient, if compared with our European languages, which owe their perfection to long improvement. But a small specimen is here subjoined, from which some judgment may be formed. I collected a great many of their words, both now and in the course of our former voyage; and being equally attentive, in my enquiries, about the languages of the other islands throughout the South ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... stones; the first crushes the grain, the second brays it, and the third reduces it entirely to powder." It will be seen how exactly this description fits both the arrangement and the use of this mill at the present time. The perfection of mechanical devices and the refinement of methods here exhibited would seem to be in advance of the achievement of this ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... not to please herself, but in obedience to the exigencies of the position which her husband aspired to take. In society her beautiful voice and the perfection of her singing could always gain the social success so gratifying to a young woman; but what was social success to her, who drew nothing from it for her heart or her hopes? Her husband did not care for music. And, moreover, she seldom felt at her ease in salons, ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... more, to give the essence of this Concord philosophy. "The Divine Being exists for himself as one object. This gives us the Logos, or the only-begotten. The Logos knows himself as personal perfection, and also as generated, though in an infinite past time. This is its recognition of its first principle and its unbegotten 'Father.' But whatever it knows in self-consciousness, it creates or makes to exist," and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... think enough has been said on the supposition that we should believe that the body which Christ received was not taken from Mary. But if it was taken from Mary and the human and divine natures did not continue, each in its perfection, this may have happened in one of three ways. Either Godhead was translated into manhood, or manhood into Godhead, or both were so modified and mingled that neither substance kept its proper form. ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... will acknowledge that the slaves of a kind owner may be as well cared for, and as happy, as the dogs and horses of a merciful master; but the latter condition—i.e. that of happiness—must again depend upon the complete perfection of their moral and mental degradation. Mr. ——, in his letter, maintains that they are an inferior race, and, compared with the whites, 'animals, incapable of mental culture and moral improvement:' to this I can only reply, that if they are incapable of profiting ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... onward of your way, that you have forsaken the imitation of ordinary converse. You are gone beyond it; and to continue where you are, is to lodge in the open fields, betwixt two inns. You have lost that which you call natural, and have not acquired the last perfection of art. But it was only custom which cozened us so long; we thought, because Shakespeare and Fletcher went no farther, that there the pillars of poetry were to be erected; that, because they excellently described passion without rhime, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... sure it cares nothing about lovers—less about poets—and thinks the old days, when the world was a heaving splitting chaos, and glaciers were tearing what was already made of it to bits, were vastly superior to the finished perfection of form today. Like all old things. If it has the gods in there, no doubt it wakes them up periodically to remind them how much better things were in their time. Myself, I prefer the sun. It is far ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... it turned to a draught bitter to her and to others. There were more joys in this life than the fierce love for man: the joy over a child, which had been given to her and taken away; the joy of triumph, the joy—but why should she remember the others? Her joy had its own perfection. For all the tears and waste of living, this one passion had been given—a joy that warmed her body in the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... she declared. "She loves it! She grumbles at the milk, and we have the butter from Tredowen. Everything else she finds perfection. She doesn't even mind the five flights ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... imprison'd lies, To watch for glances every hour From her divine and sacred eyes: Heigh ho, for Rosaline! Her paps are centres of delight, Her breasts are orbs of heavenly frame, Where Nature moulds the dew of light To feed perfection with the same: Heigh ho, ...
— Tudor and Stuart Love Songs • Various
... injurious.[734] He confessed, as we have seen, that he was quite wrong in his theory of the Divine origin of Episcopacy, and in his estimate of his own state of mind previous to his conversion in 1738. He very materially modified his doctrine of Christian perfection when he found it was liable to practical abuse, and appended notes to an edition of hymns in which that doctrine was too unguardedly stated.[735] He confessed his error on the subject of Christian assurance in a characteristically outspoken ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... true. I told Nero that if Orpheus put wild beasts to sleep with song, his triumph was equal, since he had put Vespasian to sleep. Ahenobarbus may be blamed on condition that to a small criticism a great flattery be added. Our gracious Augusta, Poppaea, understands this to perfection." ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... more than six months in the composition. That period has been devoted to the task with unremitting ardour and enthusiasm. I have exercised a watchful and earnest criticism on my work as it grew under my hands. I would willingly have sent it forth to the world with that perfection which long labour and revision is said to bestow. But I found that, if I should gain something in exactness by this method, I might lose much of the newness and energy of imagery and language as it flowed fresh from my mind. And, although the mere composition occupied ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... his opponents, the greatest name in human philosophy. He is the supreme authority of the idealistic philosophy—that is, of all philosophy which believes that ideas govern the world, and that the world is progressing towards a perfection which is somewhere and which directs and attracts it. For those even who are not of his school, Plato is the most prodigious of all the thinkers who have united psychological wisdom, dialectical strength, the power of abstraction and creative ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... region, and we send you the enclosed sketch to show our picture of comfort and perfection. I assure you, nightly as we sit down to our evening repast, or later round our wood fire in our "parlour," we congratulate each other, and fancy we would not change places with the highest of the land, the air and life are ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... nothing more than of their gardens; for they say the whole scheme of the town was designed at first by Utopus, but he left all that belonged to the ornament and improvement of it to be added by those that should come after him, that being too much for one man to bring to perfection. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... die in our sins, we shall be obliged to live again on the earth; and it will not be, perhaps, till after many lives that the necessity for fresh births will be exhausted. But when we have attained perfection, the evil spell is broken; and 'then the wise man,' it is said, 'is extinguished as this lamp.' The highest life was one of seclusion and asceticism. The founder of Buddhism was met, during his first preaching, with the objection that his system, if carried out ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... bird's table manners, which were entirely unknown to me and may be to others. At irregular intervals he leaped into the air, now in one direction, now in another, captured an insect, and flew back to the top of the flag. Some of his evolutions were quite wonderful, and all of them were the perfection of grace. He described all kinds of curves and loops. On alighting he uttered a low, hollow chuck suggestive of the sepulchral. Another notch had to be cut in the tally-stick of my ornithological journey—I had learned ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... were so dignified that on two occasions he was mistaken for a bishop. Cowper appreciated snuff, but did not care for smoking, and when he wrote to Unwin, describing his new-made friend in terms of admiration, he concluded—"Such a man is Mr. Bull. But—he smokes tobacco. Nothing is perfection 'Nihil est ab omni parte beatum.'" Bull, however, was not excessive in his smoking, for his daily allowance was but three pipes. In his garden at Newport Pagnell, Bull showed Cowper a nook in which he had placed a bench, where he said he ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... now a luxury to breathe. These spring days are the perfection of delightful weather. Imagine the delicious temperature of our Indian summer joined to the life and freshness of spring, add to this a sky of the purest azure, and a breeze filled with the odor of violets,—the most ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... of a railroad engineer who tells his fireman of a locomotive's moods and teaches him the tricks of management. They might help each other some day. Well equipped, too, was Morgan for the service. No shallow graduate of some mere diploma-manufactory, but one who believed in the perfection of means for an end,—an advocate ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... fairer, fairer far Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs; And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth In form and shape compact and beautiful, In will, in action free, companionship, 210 And thousand other signs of purer life; So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us And fated to excel us, as we pass In glory that old Darkness: nor are we Thereby more conquer'd, than by us the rule Of shapeless Chaos. Say, doth the dull soil Quarrel with the proud forests it hath fed, And feedeth still, more comely ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... childishness of manner as natural at her age,[9] showed an anxiety for every thing which could amuse or gratify her, which afforded a marked contrast to his ordinary apathy. And, though in so young a girl it was rather the promise of future beauty than its developed perfection that her feat-* as yet presented, they already exhibited sufficient charms to exempt those who extolled them from the suspicion of flattery. A clear and open forehead, a delicately cut nose, a complexion ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... seventeenth century, the finer manufactures of woollen and silken goods having been carried to great perfection in France, her exports in these articles were greatly increased. In the political testament of Richelieu, we are informed that a considerable and lucrative trade in these articles was carried on with Turkey, Spain, Italy, &c., and that France ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... alarmed, mother," said Zell bitterly. "We can scarcely start one of the forlornest hash species on ten dollars. I admit I would rather keep house for a good husband, and it seems to me I could soon learn to give him the perfection of a good home," and her eyes filled with wistful tears. Dashing them scornfully away, she added, "The idea of a woman loving a man, and letting his home be dependent on the cruel mercies of foreign servants! If it's a shame that girls ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... can truly be said to cut both ways, or hustle both ways; for if they hustle in, they also hustle out. It may not at first sight seem the very warmest compliment to a gentleman to congratulate him on the fact that he soon goes away. But it really is a tribute to his perfection in a very delicate social art; and I am quite serious when I say that in this respect the interviewers are artists. It might be more difficult for an Englishman to come to the point, particularly the sort of point which ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... end, in wandering mazes lost. Indeed, Bain's words are so untrue that in reflecting men it is just when the attempt to fuse the manifold into a single totality has been most successful, when the conception of the universe as a unique fact is nearest its perfection, that the craving for further explanation, the ontological wonder-sickness, arises in its extremest form. As Schopenhauer says, "The uneasiness which keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in motion, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... humour (for example) has never been suggested. The possibility of such a thing will doubtless be denied. I am quite certain, however, that they are capable of great development, and that they may be brought to attain, if not perfection, at all events a high degree of excellence. The proof, to those who choose to look for it, is plain enough even as matters stand. Use and opportunity are already producing scores of examples of it; ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... of the British sailor, some six thousand feet high and lying twenty-five miles behind the new port.[EN36] Passing it to left on the route to El-Mednah, I heard the fables which imposed upon Abyssinian Bruce: "All sorts of Arabian fruits grew to perfection on the summit of these hills; it is the paradise of the people of Yenbo, those of any substance having country-houses there." This was hardly probable in Bruce's day, and now it is impossible. The mountain is held by the Beni Harb, a most turbulent tribe, for which ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... pot-flowers massed beneath them along the base of the house. It was a fairy world upon which Julius looked forth. Nor did it need suitable inhabitants. Pacing slowly down the centre of the terrace came Richard and Katherine Calmady, hand in hand. Tall, graceful, strong in the perfection of their youth and their great devotion, amid that ethereal brightness, they seemed as two heroic figures—immortal, fairy lovers moving through the lovely wonder of that fairy-land. As they drew near, Katherine ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... packs of Sussex at the present time may be interesting in this connection. Chief is the Southdown Fox Hounds, a very fine, fast pack brought to a high state of perfection by the late master, the Hon. Charles Brand. They hunt the open and hill country between the Adur and Cuckmere, between Haywards Heath and the sea. In the north are the Crawley and Horsham Fox Hounds, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... given to Ellen Huntley. She was a lovely girl, three or four years older than Harry, with pretty features and soft dark eyes. What is more, she was a good girl—a noble, generous-hearted girl, although (you know no one is perfection) with a spice of self-will. For the latter quality I think Ellen was more indebted to circumstances than to Nature. Mrs. Huntley was dead, and a maiden sister of Mr. Huntley's, older than himself, resided with them and ruled Ellen; ruled her with a tight ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... and whether the Ugliness, as it was a Beauty in Witchcraft, did not encrease according to the meritorious Performance in the Black-Trade? These are all Questions of Moment to be decided, (if human Learning can arrive to so much Perfection) ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... the world a good deal by each other, in those months before their marriage, when surprising perfection and new tenderness were daily developed, the gay and busy city ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in others with the character of the latter: generally speaking, it assimilates itself to both. The simplicity of the principal lines betray its analogy to its predecessors; whilst the form of the arch equally displays the approach of greater beauty and perfection. ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... time will come as certainly as the precession of the equinoxes, when the literary method of historical research will be laid aside as out of date, in the case of all original work. People among us who are capable of exercising astral clairvoyance in full perfection—but have not yet been called away to higher functions in connexion with the promotion of human progress, of which ordinary humanity at present knows even less than an Indian ryot knows of cabinet councils—are still very few. Those who know what the few can do, and through ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... here his conquering ancestors were nursed; And Ireland but translated England first: By this reprisal we regain our right, Else must the two contending nations fight; 50 A nobler quarrel for his native earth, Than what divided Greece for Homer's birth. To what perfection will our tongue arrive, How will invention and translation thrive, When authors nobly born will bear their part, And not disdain the inglorious praise of art! Great generals thus, descending from command, With their own toil provoke the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... remainder to Benozzo and the others. I am led to this not only by their different style, but the heads of the prophets, although they are disposed one above the other, as the space demands, show the more dignified style, and perfect execution of the Florentine monk. That perfection ought to be seen also in the Christ, which seems to me to be a little inferior ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... We had now brought our House and Ground to such a perfection that few Noble mens Seats in the Land did excel us. On each side was a great Thorn Gate for entrance, which is the manner in that Countrey: the Gates of the City are of the same. We built also another House in the Yard all open for Air, for our selves ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... not so handsome as Philadelphia. Their architecture is in the most wretched style I ever saw, not meaning to except America, where it is bad, nor even Virginia, where it is worse than in any other part of America which I have seen. The mechanical arts in London are carried to a wonderful perfection. But of these I need not speak, because, of them my countrymen have unfortunately too many samples before their eyes. I consider the extravagance which has seized them, as a more baneful evil than toryism was during the war. It is the more so, as the example is set by ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... and all that IS is necessary, the category of possibility has no application. In this world crimes and horrors are regrettable. In that totalized world regret obtains not, for "the existence of ill in the temporal order is the very condition of the perfection of the eternal order." ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... was open, and the Italians came in stealthily—an art they had learned to perfection. One little turn of the hand-organ and the bear rose to his hind legs. The open door of the cottage was suddenly filled. Round-faced, rosy, fair-haired, and eager were they all—father and mother and six boys. They had evidently been disturbed at a meal, for in their hands ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... prairie. They were simply wild with delight at its vastness and inimitable beauty. Seeing it as they did, in this early summer time, with its rich grasses at the greenest and its brilliant spring flowers at the perfection of their beauty, it was no wonder that they were in such raptures of delight. Twenty miles of travel brought them to Upper Fort Garry. This old historic fort had long played a prominent part in the history of that country. Here ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... she saw Arthur Noyes standing with his back against a closed door. She read pity in his eyes, comprehension, great wonder, and what she did not know then was the love that came to a rare perfection between them and has never faded—and has ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... boys hardly knew how to reply to this absurd reflection. Sam was the first to thoroughly understand them, and so in the richest brogue of his own green isle, which we will not try to produce in all its perfection, he said: ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... the occasional poetry of Jonson has a peculiar merit. His theory demanded design and the perfection of literary finish. He was furthest from the rhapsodist and the careless singer of an idle day; and he believed that Apollo could only be worthily served in singing robes and laurel crowned. And yet many of Jonson's lyrics ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... by means of vessels impregnated by long use with a strong smell, and the remains of sour milk, that sudden souring which developes a spirituous principle. This fermentation of a rare species, and entirely sui generis, can only be brought to the desired perfection by frequent repetition of the process, just as, according to Russel,[5] the thick milk (leban), which the Arabs habitually use for making cheese, can only be obtained by producing the coagulation of the fresh milk by means of a milk previously curdled, or, in other words, by the cohobation ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... clear to her that he would never change his mind on that subject. He wanted to secure to his pupil one of those debuts which are an apotheosis; and he had decided, as he told her, that she should not appear in public till she had reached the full perfection of her voice and her talent,—certainly not before her nineteenth or ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... a boy with straight back and strong legs. The first day she hated him for the tides of pain and hopeless fear he had caused; she resented his raw ugliness. After that she loved him with all the devotion and instinct at which she had scoffed. She marveled at the perfection of the miniature hands as noisily as did Kennicott, she was overwhelmed by the trust with which the baby turned to her; passion for him grew with each unpoetic irritating thing she had to ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... welcome to the castle. He finished his speech by saying: "Enter, your worship, into this paradise, for here you will find stars and suns to accompany the heaven your Worship brings with you. Here you will find arms in their supreme excellence, and beauty in its highest perfection." ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... gathered volume, and with a fine gesture of his hand he said that he could only deliberately affirm that physically, intellectually, and morally, Arthur Hallam approached more nearly to an ideal of human perfection than any one whom he had ever seen. And yet the picture of Hallam at Eton represents a young man of an apparently solid and commonplace type, with a fresh colour, and almost wholly destitute of distinction or charm; while his extant fragments of prose ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... religions this world has ever known, have been but the aftermath of the ethics of one or another holy person; "as soon as character appears be sure love will"; "the intuition of the moral sentiment is but the insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul"; but these laws ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... walls and dark oak furniture. A bed which looked to Tembarom incredibly big, with its carved oak canopy and massive posts, had a presiding personality of its own. It was mounted by steps, and its hangings and coverlid were of embossed velvet, time-softened to the perfection of purples and blues. A fire enriched the color of everything, and did its best to drive the shadows away. Deep windows opened either into the leafless boughs of close-growing trees or upon outspread spaces of heavily timbered park, where ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... lower races of animals. For these purposes, the activity, secrecy, acuteness, and sagacity of man in an uncivilised state are almost incredible; nor could we have supposed, were not the truth shown in numberless instances, that the senses of human beings were capable of so great perfection, their bodies and limbs of such exertion and agility, as they gain by continual practice and early training in the forests of America or Australia. In these bodily excellencies, the inhabitants of the last-named continent might safely challenge the whole ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... accompanying group like sparks from a skyrocket. Those related by the ties of harmony joined; those that were alien fell back and down. And up in the distant, inaccessible heights there rang out with deceiving clarity, like the last vision of earthly perfection, the melody of love, ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Byzantine patriot expatiates with zeal and truth on the eternal advantages of nature, and the more transitory glories of art and dominion, which adorned, or had adorned, the city of Constantine. Yet the perfection of the copy still redounds (as he modestly observes) to the honor of the original, and parents are delighted to be renewed, and even excelled, by the superior merit of their children. "Constantinople," says the orator, "is situate on a ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... best with a hot sun above and a burning sand below. There were—oh, the gallant creatures! I hear their neigh upon the wind; there were—goodliest sight of all—certain enormous quadrupeds only seen to perfection in our native isle, led about by dapper grooms, their manes ribanded and their tails curiously clubbed and balled. Ha! ha!—how distinctly do they ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... and manfulness become stronger; the old, selfish, covetous, savage, cunning, cowardly, brutal Adam dying out, the new, loving, brotherly, civilised, wise, brave, manful Adam growing up in you, day by day, to perfection, till you are changed from grace to grace, and glory to glory into the likeness of ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... sort, and had no air of being studied or achieved; conduct would never offer her a problem to be settled from a book of rules, for the rules were so deep within her that she was unconscious of them. And behind this perfection there was an even ampler perfection of what Mrs. Adams called "background." The big, rich, simple house was part of it, and Mildred's father and mother were part of it. They stood beside her, large, serene people, murmuring graciously ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... was one entire mirror. The throne was one single pearl, hollowed like a shell; the princess sat, surrounded by her maidens, none of whom could compare with herself. In her was all the innocent sweetness of youth, joined to the dignity of maturity; in truth, she was perfection; and so thought the ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... romantic heights with a thud! Then we reflected that as Louis was the greatest man intellectually that Ori had ever met, so John L. Sullivan, the famous fighter, was the greatest man in that line of his time. The islanders, in common with other primitive peoples, admire physical perfection tremendously, and feats of strength are celebrated in fable, song, and story. To Ori there was nothing incongruous in placing John L. Sullivan, the famous prizefighter, and Robert Louis Stevenson, the noted writer—two ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... filled with aught but the scaly products of the sea. Our inspector was regaled with a scant fish-feast, and allowed to digest it over the genuine license. Rafael complained sadly of hard times and poverty;—in fact, the drama of humility was played to perfection, and, finally, the functionary signed our license, with a certificate of our loyalty, and pocketed a moderate ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... him to bed, and Melchior also assisted at the performance. As the old lady looked from mother to child a great pity filled her heart for the dear son of her late master who had staked his happiness on a creature so ethereal that the first wind might blow her away; such delicate perfection as that, if her experience did not deceive her, was hardly adapted to the needs of an everyday German husband. But then did Melchior look ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... become less solicitous about the treatment, and inclined to suspect those who had gone a step beyond him. "He was for many years a valuable attendant at Bethlem, but it would be very easy to advance many degrees from the practice of that establishment, and yet be at an inconceivable distance from perfection."[98] Mr. Dunstan observed, "You carry kind treatment too far at the Retreat—beyond safety. If you had many of our patients they would turn you topsy-turvy presently." Mr. Tuke replied, "It is certainly possible to carry a good general principle ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... of adequate funds, we commenced the concrete base on which this pedestal was to rest; and no structure of that kind, of that magnitude, of that necessity, of that perfection and permanence has ever been accomplished in the works of masonry before. [Cheers.] Commencing on the ninth of October, 1883, it was completed on the seventeenth day of May, 1884—and then commenced the work of the structure proper, of the pedestal, and it went on, and it went ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... money in his purse; London awaited him with expectant arms, the very air was fraught with a magic whereby the impossible might become concrete fact, wherein dreams might become realities; was not she herself, as she stood before him lithe and vigorous in all the perfection of her warm young womanhood—was she not the very embodiment of those dreams that had haunted him sleeping and waking? Verily. Therefore with this magic in the air might he not meet Sir George Annersley at the next cross-roads or by-lane, and ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... thoughts, very possibly enforced work; but there were no more spontaneous affairs of her own individuality, until the one entitled "Almost a Heroine." In this work, which treated of the possible perfection of marriage, the whole womanly nature of the writer asserted itself by virtue of the mere fact of humanity. After this came a number of juvenile stories, some commonplace, others infiltrated with that subtile ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... from Cachar, says:—"The Bhimraj is very common, frequenting thick jungle; it often goes in company with other birds, which it mimics to perfection. It lays about four eggs in a shallow nest made of grass similar to the above; it is very easily tamed. The hill-tribes use the long tail-feathers ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... The breeders are called fanciers. The principal breeders of certain animals such as rabbits, pigeons or poultry, form an association or club and agree to an imaginary type of the animal called the ideal or "Standard of Perfection." ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... humor would dispute the fact that Clementine Willis was a strikingly handsome girl. One might even be moved, by a burst of enthusiasm, to declare her beautiful. There was about her that subtle, elusive charm of perfection in minute detail, possible only to the wealthy who can discriminate between art and that which is artificial, and who can take advantage of all of art's magic resources, without imparting ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... greatest defence and ornament: it is it's antient and natural strength; the floating bulwark of the island; an army, from which, however strong and powerful, no danger can ever be apprehended to liberty: and accordingly it has been assiduously cultivated, even from the earliest ages. To so much perfection was our naval reputation arrived in the twelfth century, that the code of maritime laws, which are called the laws of Oleron, and are received by all nations in Europe as the ground and substruction of all their marine ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... over six feet in height; and, though then little more than nineteen years old, was well developed in proportion to his stature. His boxing, rowing, and other athletic exercises had done wonders towards bringing his naturally vigorous, upright frame to the perfection of healthy muscular condition. Tall and strong as he was, there was nothing stiff or ungainly in his movements, He trod easily and lightly, with a certain youthful suppleness and hardy grace in all his actions, which set off his fine bodily formation to the best advantage. He had keen, quick, ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... in silver-point, of an orange-tree in mingled fruit and bloom—an exquisite piece of work, of a Japanese truth, intricacy, and perfection. Fenwick looked at it in silence. These silver-point drawings of Welby's were already famous. In the preceding May there had been an exhibition of them at an artistic club. At the top of the drawing ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... perfection, the Highlands must be passed immediately after the fall of the leaf. The scene is then the finest, for neither the scanty foliage which the summer lends the trees, nor the snows of winter, are present ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... William Cowper. He had the wit," he added, "with the underlying moral seriousness." As for the wit, I doubt it. Cowper had not the wit that inevitably hardens into "jewels five words long." Laboriously as he sought after perfection in his verse, he was never a master of the Horatian phrase. Such phrases of his—and there are not many of them—as have passed into the common speech flash neither with wit nor with wisdom. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... bankruptcy; for four years his mind had been giving way, very slowly and softly, and now he was living, without knowing it, on what Laura wrote. Nobody but Laura knew what heavy odds she fought against, struggling to bring her diminutive talent to perfection. Poverty was always putting temptation in her way. She knew that she had chosen the most expensive and the least remunerative form of her delightful art. She knew that there were things she could do, concessions she could make, sacrifices, a thousand facile extensions ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... by the enterprise of Boydell, and wood-engraving was brought to perfection by the brothers Bewick. In sculpture, Flaxman, Nollekens, and Bacon did first-rate work. Music alone of the arts really interested the king. The public taste was stimulated by the establishment of Handel commemoration concerts; the opera was well attended, and church ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... temper. And yet he strongly felt her charm; the eddies had a strange fascination! Roderick, in the glow of that renewed admiration provoked by the fixed attention of portrayal, was never weary of descanting on the extraordinary perfection of her beauty. ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... intrude into the firing line of an artillery duel. And such an occasion was the present. For the first time in the history of the Grand Sybaris Hotel, he was presenting to its guests the dish which he had brought to that pitch of perfection which almost amounts to scandal. Canetons a la mode d'Ambleve. In thin gilt lettering on the creamy white of the menu how little those words conveyed to the bulk of the imperfectly educated diners. And yet how much specialized effort had been lavished, how much carefully ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... Rafael had learned to value the companionship of his relations; now he had it in perfection. For every word that he said appreciative laughter was ready—it really sparkled round him. When he disagreed with prevailing tastes, prejudices, and morals, they disagreed too. When his precocious intelligence burst upon them, they were always ready ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... addition of considerable manure, and poor ones will need a good deal. To secure a strong, luxuriant stand of grass it is very essential that it should be fed well. While grass will grow almost anywhere, it is only on rich soils that you see it in perfection, and the ideal lawn demands a sward as ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... in doing it to perfection; and an admirable piece of horsemanship it was. The horse, suddenly checked in his impetuous gallop, upon the very brink of the zequia, and drawn back on his haunches, with head erect, starting eyeballs, and open smoking nostrils, formed a noble picture to look upon. Several, ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... opposite side of the brook, stood two young ladies! They were evidently city girls. Their morning toilets were the perfection of simple elegance—hats, parasols, gloves, dresses, the very cream ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... was there—not a difficult matter, when he had in its perfection the secretarial manner of complete self-effacement. Said she reflectively, like one puzzling out ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... might be the fifty-first—the words never more sincerely accepted, even when chanted to all the perfection of choral music, in the Sistine Chapel or in St. Peter's, than when, in the ears of constant sufferers for their Christian faith, ribald voices contemptuously sang ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... and hence his long series of efforts relating to the flame-engine, the caloric engine, the gas-engine, and finally the solar engine,—with either steam or heated air as the medium for carrying the heat. During the last years of his life some of his most patient and careful study was given to the perfection of a solar engine, or engine for utilizing directly the heat of the sun instead of that of coal or other carbon compounds. Besides this direct line of study and experimentation, he gave during these years much thought to various scientific problems connected with solar energy, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... at Verdayne Place, and May at Verdayne Place was altogether different from May in any other part of the world. The skies were of a far deeper and richer blue; the flowers reached a higher state of fragrant and rainbow-hued perfection; the sun shining through the green of the trees was tempered to just the right degree of shine and shadow. To an Englishman, home is the beginning and the end of the world, and Paul ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... since the King's visit in 1822, when I met you in Edinburgh street, and inhaled, by juxtaposition, your sweet fraternal breath. How the Fates have since sundered us! How have you been going on, fattening and beautifying from one degree to another of poetical perfection, while I have, under the chilling shade of the Ochil Hills, been dwindling down from one degree of poetical extenuation to another, till at length I am become the very shadow and ghost of literary leanness! I should now wish to see you, and compare you as you are now ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... snorted, and squealed, too, with fierce pleasure. He jerked and curveted him with a brutal playfulness, and after a few minutes' turning and wheeling, during which everybody had leisure to admire the perfection of his equitation, he cantered round to a point exactly opposite his enemy, and pulled up his ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in the dim eyes of age; certainly, the last persons who bear any likeness to the lasagnone are the Germans, with their honest, heavy faces comically anglicized by leg-of- mutton whiskers. The truth is, the lasagnone does not flourish in the best caffe; he comes to perfection in cheaper resorts, for he is commonly not rich. It often happens that a glass of water, flavored with a little anisette, is the order over which he sits a whole evening. He knows the waiter intimately, and does not call him "Shop!" (Bottega,) as less ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... pumiceous, especially near their surfaces; and, in course of time, the steam cavities become filled with secondary minerals such as calcite, chlorite and zeolites. Another characteristic of this group of rocks is the perfection with which many of them show prismatic or columnar jointing, a structure often ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... of the St Andrew Mountains, in the island of Jamaica, where we resided for a short time, we beheld in perfection this lovely night, and experienced in an equally great degree its inconveniences. It was indeed a favoured spot, for which nature had done her utmost. Sublime and beautiful were there so exquisitely blended, that to determine the leading characteristic of the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... the instruments of pleasure. To be a painter, does it suffice to arm one's self with a brush, or does the purchase at great cost of a Stradivarius make one a musician? No more, if you had the whole paraphernalia of amusement in the perfection of its ingenuity, would it advance you upon your road. But with a bit of crayon a great artist makes an immortal sketch. It needs talent or genius to paint; and to amuse one's self, the faculty of being ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... antithesis. What was paraded, as a kind of transcendental analogy between things not before suspected of resemblance, discovered by the "spiritual insight" of the moral seer, is in fact no more than a grave clench,—a solemn quibble,—a conceit; arising not from the perfection of mind, but the imperfection of language. Those conceptions, fabricated by Fancy out of the materials that Fancy deals in, and colored by the rays of a poetic sentiment, wear the same relation to truths, that the prismatic hues of the spray of a fountain in the sunshine bear to the gems which ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... take you into my confidence," I said, as we passed several naked cedar-trees, and halted in the shelter of some fine peppers that grew to perfection in this valley, where I related the trouble I had had to bring the old lady round to the idea of Dawn's singing lessons, and mentioned the girl's ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... as a spoken tongue. Whatever difficulty there might be in this was only so much the more evidence of the need of putting an end to the undue neglect that had made Celtic Scholarship so scarce. Nothing would ever be done by man or nation if we stayed beginning till our first act should achieve perfection. He could only say that it was full time to begin, and that the need of a right study of Celtic must be fully recognised if the study of English literature itself was to make proper advance in usefulness, and serve England in days to ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... an even race. Reff Ritter knew how to handle an iceboat to perfection and brought his craft up in the breeze in a ...
— The Mystery at Putnam Hall - The School Chums' Strange Discovery • Arthur M. Winfield
... The carpet-bedding gardening is the making of figure-beds in house-leeks and achyranthes and coleus and sanitalia, and other things that can be grown in compact masses and possibly sheared to keep them within place and bounds; the reader sees these beds in perfection in some of the parks and about florists' establishments; he will understand at once that they are not meant in any way to express the season, for the difference between them in September and June is only that they may be more perfect in September. The subtropical gardening ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... complaisant—but with all this we are perhaps not very "tasteful." Let us finally confess it, that what is most difficult for us men of the "historical sense" to grasp, feel, taste, and love, what finds us fundamentally prejudiced and almost hostile, is precisely the perfection and ultimate maturity in every culture and art, the essentially noble in works and men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the goldenness and coldness which all things show that have perfected themselves. Perhaps our ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... weighing his sense; or if it is a friend, the highest compliment he conceives it possible to pay him is, that his thoughts and expressions are moulded on some hackneyed model. His standard of ideal perfection is what he himself now is, a person of mediocre literary attainments: his utmost contempt is shewn by reducing any one to what he himself once was, a person without the ordinary advantages of education and learning. It is accordingly assumed, with much complacency in his critical pages, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... the ease it gives me; yet why should I bless that which has cursed me?" And again his heart returned to its bitterness; the hand that so often had attuned it to gentleness, was cold—cold in death. Alas! resignation is the most difficult lesson in the Christian code; few there are who learn it to perfection—it requires a ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... of it was ironical. It has been remarked as a very extraordinary circumstance that an author who had the greatest fame of any man of his day as the master of a superb style, for this was indeed Bolingbroke's position, should have been imitated to such perfection by a mere novice, that accomplished critics like Chesterfield and Warburton should have mistaken the copy for a firstrate original. It is, however, to be remembered that the very boldness and sweeping rapidity of Bolingbroke's prose rendered it more fit for imitation than if its merits had ...
— Burke • John Morley
... of singularly prepossessing appearance, with a countenance full of fire and spirit, and blooming with health, and it was easy to see that his life had been passed in the country, and in constant manly exercise; for though he managed his horse—a powerful bay charger—to perfection, there was nothing of the town gallant, or of the soldier, about him. His doublet and cloak were of a plain dark material, and had seen service; but they well became his fine symmetrical figure, as did the buff boots defending his well-made, vigorous limbs. Better ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... find this human chameleon at Venice, wearing a beard down to his waist, sleeping on the ground, eating rice and drinking water, and recounting his adventures to all who cared to hear them. He was an Armenian, and played the part to perfection—until he wearied of it, and found another to play. At this time ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... downright severe training the hapless mites find it. But, as Jerry tersely put it to his hearers, one of whom winced secretly, what is training but 'keeping the body under subjection'—a period of toilsome effort that any degree of perfection necessitates? ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... saint. To Latimer, also, technical theology was indifferent—indifferent in proportion to his piety. But he hated lies—legalised or unlegalised—he could not tolerate them, and he died sooner than seem to tolerate them. The counsels of perfection, however, lead to conduct neither possible, nor, perhaps, ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... replied the Martian, "that our planet is much older than the earth, and if we are right in that it is but natural that our civilization should be older also. If the tendency of mind is toward perfection, if in your experience you have found that, in the main, men look upward more than downward, what would you expect to find in a world so beautiful as this and where life has existed so long? From what we know of our ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... ambition. The new code was engraved upon ten tables, and subsequently two more tables were added, and these twelve tables are the foundation of the Roman jurisprudence, that branch of science which the Romans carried to considerable perfection, and for which they are most celebrated. The jurisprudence of Rome has survived all her conquests, and is the most valuable contribution to civilization which ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... a new departure has been made, until now reproductive processes have been brought to such perfection that there is hardly any texture or color scheme that can not be matched. Note, if you will, Howard Pyle in color—rich in yellows and reds, with black and white spaces as an enrichment. Note also A. I. Keller's transparent work in charcoal gray. ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... unusually delightful voyage. The weather was perfection and their fellow-voyagers included many persons interesting to talk with and many others interesting to observe ...
— Everybody's Lonesome - A True Fairy Story • Clara E. Laughlin
... not know that thee was possessed of the art of mimicry, my cousin," she remarked. "Harriet hath it to perfection, but thee has never shown sign ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... Printing, Faustus thought he had at length opened the door to riches, honour, and enjoyment. He exerted himself to the utmost, in order to bring the art to perfection, and he now laid his discovery before mankind; but their lukewarmness quickly convinced him that, although the greatest inventor of his age, he and his family would soon perish with hunger unless his genius continually displayed ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... the wilderness than among the bonds of civilisation; yet always retaining, as English adventurers will, certain dainty personal particulars—such, for instance, as that prejudice in favour of clean linen, which only the highest civilisation can cultivate into perfection. He went off down Grange Lane with the swing and poise of a Hercules when the admiring waiters directed him to the Cottage. Miss Wodehouse, who was standing at the door with Lucy, in the long grey cloak and ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... Saturday, Isleworth.—I hope that this letter will reach you before you set out for Cumberland, because I am impatient to tell you that the Perfection of Nature is at this instant the Perfection of Health. I came over here in my boat to write my letter from a place where I am sure that your thoughts carry you very often, and to make my letter from that local ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... Similarly it was said that the rope which turned the roller should be new; if possible it should be woven of strands taken from a gallows rope with which people had been hanged, but this was a counsel of perfection rather than a ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Apollo and the muse Calliope. He was presented by his father with a lyre and taught to play upon it, and he played to such perfection that nothing could withstand the charm of his music. Not only his fellow mortals, but wild beasts were softened by his strains, and gathering round him laid by their fierceness, and stood entranced with his lay. Nay, the very trees and rocks were sensible to ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... flush of undisguised annoyance made him, if anything, better-looking than ever. It brought out a certain strength of mouth and jaw which I had not observed there hitherto. It gave him an ugliness of expression which only emphasized his perfection ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... the drowned continents fled to the high places of America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Isles. And some degenerated naturally into cave men, neolithic and paleolithic creatures, and some retained their marvelous innate beauty and life-perfection, as the South Sea Islanders, and some wandered savage in Africa, and some, like Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or Chinese, refused to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in its half-forgotten, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... offices remained unchanged: the division of the Church into bishoprics and the grouping together of bishoprics into metropolitan dioceses. Finally, the property and the whole social status of the Church and of the hierarchy remained unchanged, as did also the conviction that the perfection of the Christian life was to be sought and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... discipline at the Bartletts' it was like slipping out of the harness to be back at the Martels'. They held him up to no standard, and offered no counsel of perfection. He could tell his best stories without fear of reproof, laugh as loud as he liked, and whistle and sing without disturbing anybody. Rose mended his clothes, doctored him when he was sick, petted him in public as well ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... fellow-traveller, a man named Arcangeli, and had shown him the gold medals received at Vienna. Arcangeli's avarice was aroused. One morning he entered Winckelmann's room, under pretence of taking leave. Winckelmann was then writing "memoranda for the future editor of the History of Art," still seeking the perfection of his great work. Arcangeli begged to see the medals once more. As Winckelmann stooped down to take them from the chest, a cord was thrown round his neck. Some time afterwards, a child with whose companionship Winckelmann had beguiled his delay, knocked at the door, and receiving no answer, ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... it to live," said the hunter gravely, "but with Tayoga it is an art carried to the highest degree of perfection. He was born with a gift for it, a very great gift. He inherited all the learning accumulated by a thousand years of ancestors, and then he added to it by ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to keep these two people apart," she struck in. She had recovered. I admired the quickness of women's wit. Mental agility is a rare perfection. And aren't they agile! Aren't they— just! And tenacious! When they once get hold you may uproot the tree but you won't shake them off the branch. In fact the more you shake ... But only look at the charm of contradictory perfections! No wonder men give in—generally. I won't say I was ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... grounded on the existing fund of thought, and their creations do not deviate widely from existing types. This is the sort of inferiority which their works manifest: for in point of execution, in the detailed application of thought, and the perfection of style, there is no inferiority. Our best novelists in point of composition, and of the management of detail, have mostly been women; and there is not in all modern literature a more eloquent vehicle of thought ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... led him up a staircase. In the carpet and the gilt banisters, in the porter who opened the door, and in the panels that decorated the hall, the same S. Street style was apparent, but carried to a greater perfection, ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... creatures have their instinct to live together, so men have their inborn mutual love. 'God divided man into men that they might help each other.' Their strength lies in their mutual help, their pleasure is in their mutual love, and their perfection is in their giving and receiving of alternate good. Therefore Shakya Muni says: "Be merciful to all living beings." To take up arms against any other person is unlawful for any individual. It is the violation of the ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... girls less ready to praise their lovers, but that they do not dwell so much on physical perfection. Here is a ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is made great, and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep. It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis of foppery and folly. It is the perfection of the mock-heroic! I will give only the two following passages in illustration of these remarks. Can anything be more elegant and graceful than the description of Belinda, in the beginning of the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... he is praying for me in heaven, that I am indebted for the fortitude I retain. It is not merely the affection of a daughter, but the most intimate knowledge of his character which makes me affirm that I have never seen human nature carried nearer to perfection than it was in his soul; if I was not convinced of the truth of a future state, I should become mad with the idea that such a being could have ceased to exist. There was so much of immortality in his thoughts and feelings, that it happens to me ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... prize was safe. Without risk of loss it could be watched in its unceasing revolutions. It seemed as if the animal, with automatic perseverance, attempted to eject the incubus, the weight of which kept it about an inch below the aperture of the valves. Such motion would naturally tend to perfection. Whatsoever its lustre, it would certainly be a sphere. Besides, it was a pearl in the making. As long as it remained within the pinna and it could not be voluntarily rejected, its size would inevitably increase. It was the rolling stone to which time and the secretions of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... buy, just love! But, do you know? they don't realize that, in order to get, they must give. In order to be loved, they must themselves love. Now you start right in and love the whole world, love everybody, big and little. And, as you love people, try to see only their perfection. Never look at a bad trait, nor a blemish of any sort. Try it. In a week's time you will be a ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... whereupon I entered my city and repossessed myself of my place by the might of Almighty Allah, and now I fight not but trusting in His aid. When Bakhtzaman heard these words he awoke from his heedlessness and cried, "Extolled be the perfection of God the Great! O king, this is my case and my story, nothing added and naught subtracted, for I am King Bakhtzaman and all this happened to me: wherefore I will seek the gate of Allah's mercy and repent unto Him." So he went forth to one of the mountains and worshipped Allah ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... adds, "There was nothing affected or singular in his habit, or person, or gesture; he understood the forms of good breeding enough to practise them without burdening himself or others." This indeed is the perfection of good breeding ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... force. The manipulation of a motive power capable of invigorating both body and mind, is an occupation worthy to employ intelligence and skill. In countries where the people depend upon meagre supplies this art is brought to perfection. The pot-au-feu of France and Switzerland, the olla podrida of Spain, the borsch of Poland, the tschi of Russia, the macaroni of Italy, the crowdie of Scotland, all are practical examples ...
— The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economical Every-Day Cookery • Juliet Corson
... these soils from two causes, viz.; want of moisture and want of food. Cultivated plants demand as an indispensable condition of their growth and perfection, to be supplied with water in certain quantities, which differ with different crops. Buckwheat will flourish best on dry soils, while cranberries and rice ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... aristocrat, striving for self-perfection and cast down by compromise made necessary by love for others, drew to a close as he neared his eightieth year. He would have given everything, and he had kept something. Worldly possessions had been stripped from his dwelling, with its air of honest kindly comfort. More ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... clear of high buildings or trees. Human aeronautics, Graham perceived, were evidently still a long way behind the instinctive gift of the albatross or the fly-catcher. One great influence that might have brought the aeropile to a more rapid perfection had been withheld; these inventions had never been used in warfare. The last great international struggle had occurred before ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... highly prize it, Compar'd with marriage, had you tried them both, Differs as much as wine and water doth. Base bullion for the stamp's sake we allow: Even so for men's impression do we you; By which alone, our reverend fathers say, Women receive perfection every way. This idol, which you term virginity, Is neither essence subject to the eye, 270 No, nor to any one exterior sense, Nor hath it any place of residence, Nor is't of earth or mould celestial, Or capable of any form at all. Of that which hath no being, do not boast; Things ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... of the river Swan, in an extremely well-chosen locality. The streets are broad; and those houses which are placed nearest to the river, possess, perhaps, the most luxuriant gardens in the world. Every kind of fruit known in the finest climates is here produced in perfection. Grapes and figs are in profuse abundance; melons and peaches are no less plentiful, and bananas and plantains seem to rejoice in ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... of this physical perfection being humble with me, looking up to me, seemed to mean a great deal. I think Maurice feels about intellect rather as I do about beauty. He made me understand that he must. And that seemed to open my heart to him in an extraordinary way. ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... in a very confused and indefinite manner, for I was young at that time, and not much given to deep reflections. Neither did I consider that the peace whereof I write is not to be found in this world—at least in its perfection, although I have since learned that by religion a man may attain to a very great degree ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... world, far or near. So shalt thou enjoy her beauty in the way of right and the Lord of Glory be content with thee; for it is reported of the Prophet (whom God bless and preserve) that he said, "There is no monkery in Islam." At this the King was transported to the perfection of delight; his heart was lightened and his breast dilated and care and anxiety ceased from him; and he said to the Vizier, 'None shall go about this business but thou, by reason of thy consummate wit and good breeding; wherefore do thou make ready by the morrow and depart and demand me this ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... anyone who pretended to be a soldier, either to look well after his horse, or to keep his armor bright and in good order, who thought it much to let his hands be serviceable to what was nearest to him, his own body. "Are you still to learn," said he, "that the end and perfection of our victories is to avoid the vices and infirmities of those whom we subdue?" And to strengthen his precepts by example, he applied himself now more vigorously than ever to hunting and warlike ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the sea the producer and creator of all the monstrous shapes which are found therein; but any development of this idea in other directions was probably cut short by the priests, who must have realised, under the influence of the doctrine of the divine rise to perfection, that animism in general was altogether incompatible with the creed which ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... Virginia. The very remoteness of the planters from the King increased their reverence and love. They could not be present at court to see the monarch in all his human weakness, so there was nothing to check their loyal imaginations from depicting him as the embodiment of princely perfection. Nor had the wealthy families of the colony aught to anticipate of economic or political gain in the triumph of Parliament. Possessed of large estates, monopolizing the chief governmental offices, wielding a great influence over ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... a delightful atmosphere in the shade even in midsummer, while cool nights are everywhere the rule. The greatest surprise of the traveller is that a region which is in perpetual bloom and fruitage, where semi-tropical fruits mature in perfection, and the most delicate flowers dazzle the eye with color the winter through, should have on the whole a low temperature, a climate never enervating, and one requiring a dress ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... these volatile people would sooner resign every thing most valuable than any portion of their amusements. Besides, without such an establishment, the talents of singers and dancers could not be maintained in their present perfection. It holds out to them constant encouragement and remuneration; while, compared to any other theatre, it excites in the spectators a greater number of pleasing sensations. How then could ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... proved the prophets false, I pricked The bubble of perfection, And clapped upon their inner light The snuffers ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... three reasons: (1) he spoke too quickly for the leisurely and composed conversation of the Gael; (2) his pronunciation was bad, and people did not like to tell him so or correct him—(no one ever pronounced Gaelic to perfection who did not get the language with his mother's milk); (3) he was fond of using literary words, taken from the older bards, in his ordinary conversation; now, such words are obsolete in every-day talk and quite unfamiliar to crofters and cottars. In the Highlands, Blackie's English was ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... healthy well-brought-up womanhood he had ever met, and he thought also that the beneficent influence of the Church, exercised through the unworthy medium of himself, would mold her into a creature as near perfection ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... collar and bow tie Mr. Batch's face was taking on a dull ox-blood tinge that spread back, even reddening his ears. Mr. Batch had the frontal bone of a clerk, the horn-rimmed glasses of the literarily astigmatic, and the sartorial perfection that only the rich can afford ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... by the handle this time, and I recognised Emily's special cake-knife, an instrument wrought to perfection by long years of service, sharp as a razor down both sides, with a flexible tip that slithered round a basin and scooped up the last ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, July 25, 1917 • Various
... follows: "To the end that the kirk of God may have a tryall of men's knowledge, judgements, graces, and utterances; as also, such that have somewhat profited in God's Word may from time to time grow in more full perfection to serve the kirk as necessity shall require; it is most expedient that in every towne where schooles and repaire of learned men are, there be a time in one certain day every week appointed to that exercise which S. Paul calls prophecying; the order whereof is expressed by him ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... at the 'Eclipse Livery and Bait Stables,' in Pegasus Street, or Peg Street, as it is generally called, where he enacted the character of stud-groom to perfection, doing nothing himself, but seeing that others did his work, and strutting consequentially with the ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... time arrived to his full perfection; he stood nearly three feet higher than any other; and, when the caravan was preparing, I led him to the sheiks, and offered him as a candidate for the honour. They would have accepted him immediately, had it not been ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... worship mostly is, a cold and lifeless abstraction; a merging of human nature into one far nobler and higher the spiritual existence of the supernal world. For perfect love is perfect happiness, and the only perfection of man; and what is a demon but a being without love? And what makes man's love truly divine, is the fact that it is bestowed upon ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... was ingenuous enough to have suggested the fact that had Lieutenant Gregoriev and not Colonel Brodsky been the original holder of her debt, the damsel's attitude might have been less unyielding. But Ivan had still his boyish belief in the perfection of all woman nature. And certainly that part of Mademoiselle Petrovna's career which he knew best, was of a nature to increase the strength ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... there we bought our lumber. The labor we supplied ourselves, and though we put our hearts into it and the results at the time seemed beautiful to our partial eyes, I am forced to admit, in looking back upon them, that they halted this side of perfection. We began by making three windows and two doors; then, inspired by these achievements, we ambitiously constructed an attic and divided the ground floor with partitions, which ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... they are very sensitive; and hence a loud noise, strong smell, violent or even slight shaking of the vessel, will sometimes destroy them. Small worms, which are common to the water, suffice for their food in general, but the Chinese, who bring gold fish to great perfection, throw small balls of paste into the water, of which they are very fond. They give them also lean pork, dried in the sun, and reduced to a very fine and delicate powder. Fresh river-water should be given them frequently, if possible. Gold-fish seldom deposit spawn when kept in glass-vessels. ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... country and in our new cities we still lack the luxurious perfection of fastidious civilisation. But, sir, regard our level. That is what I say to every unprejudiced Britisher that comes among us; look at our level. And when you have looked at our level, I think ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... truth shall be made known to you from his written Word. But take heed what you receive for truth, and examine, compare, and weigh it well with the Scriptures. It is not possible that the Christian world should come so lately out of such thick anti-Christian darkness, and that full perfection of knowledge should break forth at once. Shake off, too, the name of Brownists, for it is but a nickname, and a brand to make religion odious, and the professors of it, to the Christian world. And be ready to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... employer. The Good Lord knows I have reason enough for it. But you needn't feel uneasy because I say it in your hearing, for I'm going to his office this very day to say the same things, and worse, to his face. When I think of the way he's used his influence over Mark—and I believed him the pink of perfection and was as pleased as an old fool over his friendship ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... masterly. The baby has an a priori intuition that the note of the domestic cat is repulsive to the ear of the human adult. Consequently, what does your baby do but betake itself to a practical study of the caterwaul! After a few conscientious rehearsals a creditable degree of perfection is usually reached, and a series of excruciating performances are forthwith commenced, which last with unbroken success until the stage arrives when correction becomes possible. This process may check the child's taste for imitating the lower animals in some of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... with good health, good spirits, good friends, a competent and increasing fortune? And had he not also a perpetual feast of fame? But, as a learned friend has observed to me, 'What trials did he undergo, to prove the perfection of his virtue? Did he ever experience any great instance of adversity?' When I read this sentence, delivered by my old Professor of Moral Philosophy, I could not help exclaiming with the Psalmist, 'Surely I have now more ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... they were undone. Her coiffure gave you the impression that she never thought of fashion, nor changed its form of dressing, from year to year. And the exquisite planting of the hair on her forehead, as it waved back in broad waves, added to the perfection of the Greek simplicity of the whole thing. Nothing about her had been aided by conscious art. Her dress, of some black clinging stuff, was rather poor, though she wore it with the air of a traditional empress. Indeed, she looked an empress, from the tips of her perfect ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... that no limit can be set to the perfection of human faculties, that the progress and perfectibility of man are independent of any power which can arrest them, and have no term unless it be the duration of the globe itself. The progress might be swift or slow, but the ultimate ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... her little friend's reproach, and saw that she had done her injustice in thinking her youth rendered her incapable of that perfection of friendship, which might justify the accepting of her offer; she acknowledged her error, and assured her she would comply if she had no other means of obtaining the instruction she proposed to purchase for her; but that was not the case, for ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... the income-tax comes mainly from those who are unscathed by it; those who suffer most severely from it, suffer in silence. The inferior machinery of the income-tax is unquestionably very far from attaining that degree of perfection, which we had a right to look for from the able and practised hands which framed it. The outcry raised, however, against the income-tax on this score, particularly on the ground of the heedlessness of subordinate functionaries, is subsiding. There is evident, as far as the Government itself ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... industry in this city has been so intimately connected with the growth and prosperity of the city itself, that the steps by which the art of milling has reached its present high state of perfection are worthy of note, especially as Minneapolis may rightly claim the honor of having brought the improvements, which have within the last decade so thoroughly revolutionized the art of making flour, first into public notice, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... is instinctive behaviour, which reaches such remarkable perfection in ants, bees, and wasps. In its typical expression instinctive behaviour depends on inborn capacities; it does not require to be learned; it is independent of practice or experience, though it may be improved ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... to three months old, from fifty to seventy-five dollars. When six months old, from seventy-five to a hundred: From six months to maturity, from one hundred to two hundred. These prices are, of course, for the ordinary all-around good dogs. With dogs that approximate perfection, and which only come in the same proportion as giants and dwarfs do in the human race (I believe the proportion is one in five thousand), and the advent of which would surprise the average kennel man as much as if the President had sent him a special invitation ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... always carried the kettle to the well; and when she came back Daisy could hear the iron clink of the stove as the kettle was put on. Presently Juanita came in then from her kitchen, and began the work of putting the house in order. How nicely she did it! like the perfection of a nurse, which she was. No dust, no noise, no bustle; still as a mouse, but watchful as a cat, the alert old woman went round the room and made all tidy and all clean and fresh. Very likely Juanita would change the flowers in a little vase which stood on the mantelpiece ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... give up the first rank, to which his natural talents invited him, and consequently his attention to military matters and political affairs by which he got the supreme power, did not allow him to attain perfection in oratory. Accordingly at a later period, in his reply to Cicero about Cato,[445] he deprecates all comparison between the composition of a soldier and the eloquence of an accomplished orator who had plenty of leisure ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... topics, till the indiscretion of my friends was brought upon the carpet, when I said: "What fault did the lord of past munificence remark, that his servant should seem so contemptible in his sight? Individually with God is the perfection of majesty and goodness, who can discern our failings and continue to us his support." When the prince heard this sentiment he subscribed to its omnipotence; and, with regard to the stipendiary allowance of my friends, ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... a weekly Philadelphia newspaper and a semi-weekly St. Louis journal—almost the only papers that came to the village, though Godey's Lady's Book found a good market there and was regarded as the perfection of polite literature by some of the ablest critics in the place. Perhaps it is only fair to explain that we are writing of a by gone age—some twenty or thirty years ago. In the two newspapers referred to lay the secret of ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... give a detailed account of all that Pericles did to make his native city the most glorious in the ancient world. Greek architecture and sculpture under his patronage reached perfection. To him Athens owed the Parthenon, the Erechtheum, left unfinished at his death, the Propylaea, the Odeum, and numberless other public and sacred edifices; he also liberally encouraged music and the drama; and during his life, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... poised. The controlling power of personal responsibility, valuable and essential as it is, cannot permanently and unremittingly restrain the volcanic forces of the passion of love even in high civilizations. "No perfection of moral constitution in a woman," Hinlon has well said, "no power of will, no wish and resolution to be 'good,' no force of religion or control of custom, can secure what is called the virtue of woman. The emotion of absolute devotion with which some man may inspire her ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... enjoyment of drinking. This caused his guests to banter him about his moderation, and allude to the historic drinking-horn of gigantic size, which, as the chronicles of the House attested, his ancestors used to drain at their banquets, though in those days the Burgundy was far from its present perfection, and Canary had not yet been invented. His companions' enthusiasm for drinking at last disgusted him with entertaining, and he gradually lost his taste ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... carried on freely along a vast extent of coast, it was different in the city of Hamburg, where English goods were introduced only by fraud; and I verily believe that the art of smuggling and the schemes of smugglers were never before carried to such perfection. Above 6000 persons of the lower orders went backwards and forwards, about twenty times a day, from Altona to Hamburg, and they carried on their contraband, trade by many ingenious stratagems, two of which were so curious that they are worth ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... described, Hycy, I see you have not forgotten your Homer yet; but really Kathleen Cavanagh is a perfect Juno, and has the large, liquid, soft ox-eye in perfection." ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... something he can make. In creative moments men always draw upon "some secret spring of certainty, some fundamental well into which no disturbing glimmers penetrate." But this is no slack philosophy, for the chance is denied by which we can lie back upon the perfection of some mechanical contrivance. Yet in the light of it government becomes alert to a process of continual creation, an unceasing invention of forms to meet ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... come by such noble manners, and the perfect bel air? That countrified Walcote widow could never have taught him." Esmond had his own opinion about the countrified Walcote widow, who had a quiet grace and serene kindness, that had always seemed to him the perfection of good breeding, though he did not try to argue this point with his aunt. But he could agree in most of the praises which the enraptured old dowager bestowed on my Lord Viscount, than whom he never beheld a more fascinating and charming gentleman. Castlewood ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... the apothecary; "the poor fellow must have his flageloet with him even upon an affair of this kind. It beats all! My dear man of moods! my good vagabond! my windlestraw of circumstance! constant only to one ideal—the unattainable perfection in a kind of roguish art. To play a perfect tune in the right spirit he would sacrifice everything, and yet drift carelessly into innumerable disgraces for mere lack of will to lift a hand. I daresay sometimes ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... velvet, while underfoot there was no lack of life either. Strange insects, shaped like sticks or leaves or even bits of moss, attracted the attention of the alert boys although they passed over hundreds of such nature mimics unnoticed, owing to the perfection of their mimicry. ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the stage for serious healing of body tissues and organs. Normalization may take one or two more weeks depending on how badly the body was out of balance. As the blood chemistry steadily approaches perfection, the faster usually feels an increasing sense of well-being, broken by short spells of discomfort that are usually ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... way—about an' make it still clearer. Most married folks, as I notice, start t'other way about. For argyment's sake we'll call 'em Jack an' Joan. Jack starts by thinkin' Joan pretty near perfection; but he wants her quite perfect and all to his mind—his mind, d'ye see? Now if you follow that up, as you followed it ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... conclude, that the tactics of the Roman armies underwent important changes when the revolutions mentioned in the preceding chapters were effected, though we cannot trace the alterations with precision, because no historians appeared until the military system of the Romans had been brought to perfection. ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... black flowing mustaches, and he wore his campaign hat pinned up at the side with the brass military pin and swayed with some show of swagger as he walked. His gift of oratory he did not bring to the flower of its perfection except at lodge. He was always sent as a delegate to Grand Lodge, and when he came home men came from all over the county to see the colonel exemplify the work. But as he marched to funerals under his large white plume and with his sword dangling at his side, Colonel ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... "I expect perfection in no human being," said the professor, taking up a Bible from the table and turning over the pages with the air of a man who knew its contents well; "when I see Christians in some sort obeying this, I will believe that their system is the true system; but ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... Edition at Sevenpence. The success of Nelson's Library has been due to the careful selection of books, regular publication throughout the whole year, and excellence of manufacture at a low cost, due to perfection of machinery. ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... level of the dam crest was reached, and there was no longer any evidence of what had happened except the lowness of the water. Then, all at once, the toilers disappeared, except for one big beaver, who kept nosing over every square inch of the work for perhaps two minutes, to assure himself of its perfection. When he, at last, had slipped back into the water, both Jabe and the Boy got up, as if moved by one thought, and stretched ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Pyramids of Aboukir and Sakkara. There are many of these, and of various shapes and sizes, and it struck me that, taken together, they might be considered as showing the progress and perfection (such as it is) of pyramidical architecture. One of the Pyramids at Sakkara is almost a rival for the full-grown monster at Ghizeh; others are scarcely more than vast heaps of brick and stone: these last suggested to ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... men. Among the Tamils of Ceylon masturbation is said to be common. In Cochin China, Lorion remarks, it is practiced by both sexes, but especially by the married women.[188] Japanese women have probably carried the mechanical arts of auto-erotism to the highest degree of perfection. They use two hollow balls about the size of a pigeon's egg (sometimes one alone is used), which, as described by Joest, Christian, and others,[189] are made of very thin leaf of brass; one is empty, the other (called the little man) contains a small ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... ago, That here his conquering ancestors were nursed; And Ireland but translated England first: By this reprisal we regain our right, Else must the two contending nations fight; 50 A nobler quarrel for his native earth, Than what divided Greece for Homer's birth. To what perfection will our tongue arrive, How will invention and translation thrive, When authors nobly born will bear their part, And not disdain the inglorious praise of art! Great generals thus, descending from command, With their own toil provoke the soldier's ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... order in which they were arranged at their spinning-wheels and looms in an extensive airy apartment, was admirable. A governess inspected and regulated all their works, which were the manufacturing of ribbons of all colours, coarse linens, and tapes; all which were managed and brought to perfection by themselves from the silk and flax in their first state; even the dying of the colours is performed by them. These girls are received for five years, at the end of which they are at liberty to marry, and have for their portions their wheel ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... constant she remained in her chosen life, and what advance she had made in the way of perfection, the Hermit now felt that it behoved him to exhort her again to return to the convent; and more than once he resolved to speak with her, but his heart hung back. At length he bethought him that by failing in this duty he imperilled ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... night-cap almost imperceptibly trembled over his knees. They gazed astonished at his long, curved back, while the white corner of one eye gleamed blindly at them. He was afraid to turn his head, he shrank within himself; and there was an aspect astounding and animal-like in the perfection of his expectant immobility. A thing of instinct—the unthinking stillness of a scared brute. "What are you doing here?" asked Mr. Baker, sharply.—"My duty," said the cook, with ardour.—"Your... what?" began the mate. Captain Allistoun touched his arm lightly.—"I know his caper," he said, in ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... more likely that you will become Emperor of all the Russias!" But God never daunts a soul with such discouragement. He first sets before it a great ideal—the faith of Abraham, the meekness of Moses, the prayer of an Elijah, the love of a John—and then, as the source of all perfection, enters the soul, to be in it all that He has taught it ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... was so striking, that it was impossible for him to remain confounded with the crowd. The least attentive eye must have singled him out from among a thousand. It was a tall light figure, so graceful in every movement; then his dancing was quite perfection. ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... later the Simonidean played his part to perfection. He took a drink, then another, and almost before he had set his cup down, gave a groan, and clutched at ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... it that our desires so infinitely transcend our capacities? We grasp at everything—do so by the very constitution of our natures; and seize—less than nothing. We can not rest without perfection in everything, yet the labor of a life devoted to one thing, only shows us how unattainable it is. I am oppressed with gloom—oh, for light, light, light! Feb. 20th.—Alas! my feelings of discouragement and despondency, instead of diminishing, ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... a prude, and I admired you as a "pensive nun, devout and pure." I now think you are more than half a coquet, and I like you for your roguery. The truth is, I am in love with you, my angel; and whatever you are, is to me the perfection of thy sex. I care not what thou art, while thou art still thyself. Smile but so, and turn my heart to ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... or, The way to Eminencie and Perfection. A piece of serious Spanish wit Originally in that language written, and in English. By Sir John Skeffington, Kt. and Barronet. London, printed for John Martin and James Allestrye at the Bell in St ...
— Waltoniana - Inedited Remains in Verse and Prose of Izaak Walton • Isaak Walton
... emphasis. It is not an easy thing in the stress of the visible to remember the greater power of the Invisible. The most earnest Christian worker is sometimes overwhelmed by discouragement or, again, unduly confident because of the perfection of system and method, forgetting that God knows no obstacle, and that He alone can put life into ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... would ill accord with the idyllic peace of our Eden Vale. The young men are so familiar with this kind of toy, and many of them have, after profound ballistic studies, brought their skill to such perfection, that in my opinion they would show themselves as superior to their European antagonists in artillery as they would in rifle-practice. The same holds good of our horsemen. In brief, we have no army; but our men and youths handle all the ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... only the production of the most complete Printing Press then known, together with a variety of collateral improvements, but the increasing, if not originating, that impulse which has since carried this important branch of art so near to perfection. ...
— The Author's Printing and Publishing Assistant • Frederick Saunders
... is inseparable from the experiment; but ordinary work isn't risky in itself. Why," he added, "I was reading a book the other day, the life of Fitzherbert, you know, who was a man of prodigious laboriousness, who died early, worn out. He had an impossible standard of perfection. If he had to write an article, he read all the literature on the subject over and over; he wrote and re-wrote his stuff. There was a case quoted in the book, as if it were to Fitzherbert's credit, when he had to send in an article ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... time to Hanover, where his father sent him to take a view of that court in his tour of travelling. He was in his first bloom of youth and vigour, and had so strong an appearance of that perfection, that it was called beauty by the generality of women: though in my opinion there was a coarseness in his face and shape that had more the air of a porter than a gentleman; and, if fortune had not interposed her almighty power, he might ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... I have already said was attired in a white satin trained dress made to fit her slender figure to perfection and covered with thin tule. She wore orange blossom in her hair and on her dress and a magnificent diamond crescent ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... enemy. Had not a woman ruled England we should have had a harder task than we did by far. Christianity has lifted woman to a level with man. It has given her liberty of movement, of faith, of life. It also demands her political deliberation. May this beginning of our second Centennial see the perfection of our political system, in this admission of woman to all the rights and duties of citizenship. It has worked well in Wyoming. It will everywhere. Let ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of the scenery was through which we passed, I must own that want of foliage struck me as a terrible drawback to the perfection of the landscape, which, in other respects, was very wild ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... master. "Sit down." So she sat down and he signed to the brunette. Now she was endowed with grace and beauty and symmetry and perfection, delicate of body, with coal-back hair, slender shape, rosy, oval cheeks, liquid black eyes, fair face, eloquent tongue, slim waist and heavy buttocks. So she rose and said, "Praised be God who hath created me neither blameably fat nor ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... intellectual luminosity; but he is a great man, strong in the cold, steadfast nerve that he inherits from his ancestor, and respectable in the symmetry of an intellect which, like a marble masterpiece, leaves nothing to regret except the thought that its perfection excludes the blemish of a soul. John Sherman will figure creditably in history. Mankind soon forgets the sentimental acrimony of the moment, provoked by the suffering of harsh processes, and remembers only the grand results. Thus John Sherman will figure in history as the man ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... also, although their manoeuvres had been more methodical, were in some confusion. It is not given to a body of thirty ships, of varying qualities, to attain perfection of movement in a fortnight of sea practice. The change of wind had precipitated an action, which one admiral had been seeking, and the other shunning; but each had to meet it with such shift as he could. The British (CC) being close-hauled, ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... gave him a strength in defence, and an impetuosity in attack, which made it a simple matter to break up the undisciplined squadrons opposed to him. Bannockburn rang the death-knell of the tactics which since Hastings had been regarded as the perfection of military art. The political lessons of the victory were of not less importance. It is almost too much to say that Bannockburn won for Scotland its independence, for Scottish independence had already been vindicated. But the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... have given Hester my address in London, and told her to let me know before she decides on another place. A woman who can't talk, and a woman who can cook, is simply a woman who has arrived at absolute perfection. Such a treasure shall not go out of the family, if I can help it. Did you notice the Bechamel sauce at lunch? Pooh! a young man who smokes cigars doesn't know the difference between Bechamel sauce and melted butter. Good ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... it. And it does not matter what kind of greenhouse it is, whether a fruit house, a flower house, or a vegetable house, it is available for mushrooms. One of the advantages of raising mushrooms in a greenhouse is that they grow to perfection in parts of the greenhouse that are nearly worthless for other purposes; for instance, under the stages, where nothing else grows well, although rhubarb and asparagus might be forced there, and a little chicory and ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... great cause, a mighty project, commanding the noblest enthusiasms and the highest efficiency of effort, the project of bringing this whole world to salvation. And that not the salvation of a mental condition but of the perfection of its whole being, the realization of its highest possibilities, the full noontide of ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... a dark face and glossy black hair; and he entertained a notion that there were one or two points in his costume which required to be carefully rectified, ere he could consider that he had attained to perfection: so he brushed the long hair off his forehead, crossed his arms, ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... the full expression of a healthy love of nature, possible only to a moral sanity in the man—a cheery Wordsworthian enjoyment of her, which as a rule I have never found in perfection out of the English school and its derivatives; the outpouring of a robust nature which prefers to see the outer world with the spectacles of no school, and through the memory of no other man; not self-taught ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... who looked really well, and completely a man, was the empress herself. As she was very tall and somewhat powerful, male attire suited her wonderfully well. She had the handsomest leg I have ever seen with any man, and her foot was admirably proportioned. She danced to perfection, and every thing she did had a special grace, equally so whether she dressed as a man ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... began its testimony by placing Scott Jackson on the stand. All the man's natural shrewdness came to his aid while on the stand. His words were clear, frankly spoken and there was no hesitation in his manner. He acted the innocent man to perfection. ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... send it to. Such things as she bought on the spot were placed in her carriage. And happiest of all omissions, she met no one she knew. The praise that Madame Barriere lavished on Honora's figure was not flattery, because the Paris models fitted her to perfection. A little after five she returned to her hotel, to a Mathilde in a high state of suppressed excitement. And at six, the appointed fateful hour, arrayed in a new street gown of dark green cloth, she ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... would not mislead a young man by describing a model of perfection which could never exist; but I would so choose the faults of his mistress that they will suit him, that he will be pleased by them, and they may serve to correct his own. Neither would I lie to him and affirm that there really ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... fell, the distant glitter as of tiny sparks amidst the trees took the attention of all. They were too distant to see the phenomenon to perfection; but the faint sparkle was very beautiful as the myriads of fire-flies, by which it was caused, flitted and changed from place to place, which was now dark, now scintillating in a ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... me from active employments; and I have since endeavoured to improve myself in the practice of those passive virtues which are never enough prized by the world, and which are often painful rather than pleasant. I have endeavoured after the perfection of patience, humility, and submission; but, my Constantia, I have only endeavoured, and have discovered so many unsubdued weaknesses, such a lingering fondness for what I must renounce, that I fear nothing but the cold chill of death will benumb those ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... our arrival by the poet. Tennyson was a magnificent creature to look at. He had everything: height, figure, carriage, features and expression. Added to this he had what George Meredith said of him to me, "the feminine hint to perfection." ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... being so much among flowers, she has become one herself. Violets, roses, and heliotrope have all had a share in her creation! What eyes, what a mouth! what teeth! what hands! Surely I have found here, not only the perfection of all things beautiful, but the perfection of all things natural, the perfection of natural grace in contradistinction from artificial grace. Moreover, she is a romanticist. There is an expression of romance, of unworldliness, in those deep-set eyes of hers, that sinks into my heart of ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... invented by the genius and skill of man, not only lightens the labor of the farmer, but it performs the work which formerly required the united effort of many men. Many foreign countries send to the United States for mowers and reapers, because it is here these machines have reached their highest perfection. ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... left, block after block, came upon the line with unerring order and precision, as though it were a long curling whiplash straightening itself out to the tension of a giant hand. And so with each of the other two lines. All were formed simultaneously. Here was not only perfection of military evolution, but the poetry of rhythmic movement. The three lines were all formed within twenty minutes, ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... that he was flushed with the weather, but that availed nothing. Louise thought privately to herself that Jacobi had decidedly gained in manly bearing; that he had a simpler and more vigorous demeanour; he was become, she thought, a little more like her father. Her father was Louise's ideal of manly perfection. ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... the latter had the tie of a common fatherland, and spoke the same French that Sebastian spoke. D'Arragon's French had the roundness always imparted to that language by an English voice. It was perfect enough, but of an educated perfection. ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... of mind, certain instincts and peculiarities remaining entire. Here, in Angus, for instance, there is that instinctive cunning which some of the lower animals, such as the fox, possess, existing in a wonderful degree of perfection. Pope himself, who "could not drink tea without a stratagem," could scarce have possessed a larger share of it. And yet how distinct must not this sort of ingenuity be from the mechanical ingenuity! Angus cannot fix a button in its ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... of this Episode was to give Adam an Idea of the Holy Person, who was to reinstate human Nature in that Happiness and Perfection from which it had fallen, the Poet confines himself to the Line of Abraham, from whence the Messiah was to Descend. The Angel is described as seeing the Patriarch actually travelling towards the Land of Promise, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... kneading. She could get more from Luclarion then than at any other opportunity. Perhaps that was because Miss Grapp could not walk off from the bread-trough; or it might be that there was some sympathy between the mixing of her flour and yeast into a sweet and lively perfection, and the bringing of her mental leaven wholesomely ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... got his papers he took his leave. I could not help admiring the whale-boat in which he was rowed back to his own vessel. It was a beautiful little thing, though dirty; but, it had doubtless seen much service. It was exquisitely modelled, and the two seamen in the little craft handled it to perfection. How they contrived to stand up in it quite steady, while the boat, sometimes apparently half out of the water, kept rising and falling on the long ocean-swell, seemed to me little short ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... fruit trees, whose penitence and devotion were so severely austere, and whose very singular history is given us in the interesting "Lettres de Madame la Comtesse de la Riviere;" Linant, to whom Voltaire was a warm protector and friend, and who, in 1745, wrote his poem Sur la Perfection des Jardins, sous la regne de Louis XIV.; and of whom it was said that "les qualites du coeur ne le caracterisoient pas moins que celles de l'esprit;" Le Pere Rapin;[4] D'Argenville; Le Maistre, curate of Joinville, who in 1719 added to his ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... (to the Crown-Prince).... I am well persuaded your Royal Highness will regulate all that to perfection, and so manage that your fair sex will be charmed to find themselves with you at Reinsberg, and you charmed to have them there. But permit me, your Royal Highness, to repeat in this place, what I one day took the liberty of saying here at Berlin: Nothing in the world would better suit the present ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... No, no—let me proceed. I can command myself—Florian! I wooed and won an angel for my bride—my expression is not a lover's rhapsody—at this distant period, seriously I pronounce it—Eugenia approached as closely to perfection as the Creator has permitted to his creature! Such as she was, to say I loved her were imperfect phrase! my passion was enthusiasm—was idolatry! Our marriage-bed was early blessed with increase—and as my lip greeted with a father's kiss the infant, my heart bounded with a new transport towards ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... observation, his insight, all made him inherently satirical, though not cruelly so; but satire had become pure whimsicality at last; and he came to see that, on the whole, the world was imperfect, but also, on the whole, was moving towards perfection rather than imperfection. He grew to realise that what seemed so often weakness in men was tendency and idiosyncrasy rather than evil. And in the end he thought better of himself as he came to think better of all others. For he had thought less of all ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the misfortunes of our fallen condition that rectitude in any course, however good, cannot long be maintained—at least in reasonable perfection. The army which had enabled Radama to pursue on the whole a beneficent course, ere long began to make its creator know its power. Feeling his dependence on it, Radama adopted the unwise policy of increasing the military ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... time I conceiv'd the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wish'd to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening thought and action; Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... for a week," retorted Mr. King, "and I go when that time is up. We've had a visit—I can't express it to you, what a fine time—as near to perfection as it is possible for a visit to be; but day after to-morrow ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... makes me nervous. I am continually led up to false expectations. Always, she seems just on the verge of achieving the big thing, the super-big thing, and always she just misses it by a shade. Just as I am prepared for the culminating flash and illumination, I receive more perfection of technique. She is cold. She must be cold . . . Or else, and the theory is worth considering, ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... of the great Emperor Piyadasi, Beloved of the Gods, also known by the name of Asoka. So far from being memorials of a time when 'the mechanical arts were in a rude state', the Asoka columns exhibit the arts of the stone-cutter and sculptor in perfection. They were erected about 242 to 230 B.C., and the inscriptions on them contain a code of moral and religions precepts. They do not commemorate conquests, although the Asoka pillar at Allahabad has been utilized by later sovereigns for the recording of magniloquent ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... the raven blackness of her hair, her marked yet delicate features, and the general impression produced by her dark coloring, were reasons why she seemed older than the rest. It was Jacqueline's privilege to exhibit that style of beauty which comes earliest to perfection, and retains it longest; and, what was an equal privilege, she resembled ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... of patience, as a woman understands and feels. The curious depth of calm in Lily which irritated Maurice was created by a faith, half religious, half unreasoning, wholly strong and determined, such as no man ever knows in quite the same fullness as a woman. It is such a perfection of faith which gilds the silences in which the souls of many women wait, surrounded by the clouds of apparently shattered lives, but conscious that there is a great outcome, obscure and remote, but certain as the purpose which ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... you raise your gun to needlessly take a feathered life, think of the marvellous little engine which your lead will stifle forever; lower your weapon and look into the clear bright eyes of the bird whose body equals yours in physical perfection, and whose tiny brain can generate a sympathy, a love for its mate, which in sincerity and unselfishness suffers little when compared ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... this time sailed a saucy-looking craft called the 'Virtue of Cape Cod.' This Hornblower was one of the independent school, cared not seven coppers for anybody, nor had the most virtuous respect for the nets of his neighbours; he looked the pink-perfection of a Cape Cod fisherman. The skipper rose before his accusers; his hard, weather-bleached face looking as if his intention to throw a harpoon into somebody was the very best in the world. Then his dark eyes flashed lightning at the Squire, who commanded the little Scotchman ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... a man of much observation. He would not, therefore, be able to introduce many of the arts and customs of England among his countrymen, or greatly to improve those to which they have long been habituated. Captain Cook, however, was confident, that he would endeavour to bring to perfection the fruits and vegetables which had been planted in his garden. This of itself would be no small acquisition to the natives. But the greatest benefit which these islands are likely to receive from Omai's travels, will be in the animals that ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... Shepherdess" (Pl. 9), that is, or used to be, in the Chauchard collection. In this nobly tranquil work, in which there is no hint of sadness or revolt, are to be found all his usual inevitableness of composition and perfection of draughtsmanship—note the effect of repetition in the sheep, "forty feeding like one"—but the glory of the picture is in the infinite recession of the plain that lies flat, the exact notation of the successive positions upon it of the things that stand ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... riding through the wood, haunted, as usual, by visions of her loveliness which, in his opinion, reached the very pinnacle of perfection. He was sick with longing to meet her alone, freed from all fear of incurring some watcher's displeasure. In his heated imagination the desire of being near her had assumed such enormous proportions, that he felt that life without her ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... slow takes shape, Despite a thousand counter forces, till At last the final end is reached: a look Is thus enough to bind two hearts for life, And this is but the true fulfilment of A preordained law that in the life Before had all but reached perfection full, Or their appointed shape had all but tak'n, And in the new life easily attains The end: such, then, the truth of all such things. Call it what you will, simple tendency Inherited, the least sign gives it life, Which ...
— Tales of Ind - And Other Poems • T. Ramakrishna
... realism is quite different in sort from the realisms of immature art, which, aiming at nothing beyond a faithful copy, is content with producing an ugly picture of an ugly thing. Now this latter kind of realism endured in painting some time after decorative realism such as I have described had reached perfection in sculpture. Nor was it till later, and when the crude scholastic realism had completely come to an end, that there became even partially possible in painting decorative realism analogous to what ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... same self-love which, moderate and prudent, was a principle of happiness and perfection, becoming blind and disordered, was transformed into a corrupting poison; and cupidity, offspring and companion of ignorance, became the cause of all the evils ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... it for granted he knew all about the old favourites, he mentioned par excellence Lionel's air in Martha, M'appari, which, curiously enough, he had heard or overheard, to be more accurate, on yesterday, a privilege he keenly appreciated, from the lips of Stephen's respected father, sung to perfection, a study of the number, in fact, which made all the others take a back seat. Stephen, in reply to a politely put query, said he didn't sing it but launched out into praises of Shakespeare's songs, at least of in or about that period, the lutenist Dowland who lived in Fetter ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... order; the range black and speckless, the closets sweet with their fresh white paper. And Cousin Jane's bread and biscuit were as good as anybody's, her ham tender and a luscious pink, her two kinds of cake perfection. ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... belongs to them, and assembling in a riotous manner, have actually taken it all away. One man, who keeps a team, has carried home for his share forty stacks of wood. Forty-five of these people his lordship has served with actions. These trees, which were very sound and in high perfection, were winter-cut, viz., in February and March, before the bark would run. In old times the Holt was estimated to be eighteen miles, computed measure from water-carriage, viz., from the town of Chertsey, on the Thames; but now it is not ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... black and glossy, but coarse; and there was the admired crop—a long crop, much like the tail of a horse—a switch tail. The fine figure was meagre, prim, and constrained. The beauty, the grace, and the elegance existed, no doubt, in their utmost perfection, but only in the imagination of her partial young sister. Her father, as Harriet told me, was familiarly called 'Jew Westbrook,' and Eliza greatly resembled one of the dark-eyed daughters ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... Serendib must die, nor will the relentless scythe of Time spare our Etherians, with all their exalted attributes. They will die repeatedly; and after having through sundry periods of probation attained spiritual perfection, they will all pour into the sun. Since it is the sun which originates life and feeling and thought upon the surface of our earth, "why may we not declare that the rays transmitted by the sun to the earth and the other planets ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... two masters. The mind of man is so constituted, and the influences bearing upon it are so peculiar in their orderly arrangements, that the more it is concentered upon one object and pursuit, the more perfection and certainty attend its action. But if it be divided between two objects and pursuits, and especially if both of these require much thought, its action will be imperfect to a certain degree in both, or one will suffer while the other ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... of life was just what suited St. Martin, and he was very happy. He lived apart with God, and yet had work to do in training his monks in the way of perfection and teaching the Faith to the ignorant pagans. But he had not yet arrived at the end of God's great plan for him. And if God now called him away from the life he loved to a life he did not want at all, ...
— Stories of the Saints by Candle-Light • Vera C. Barclay
... thought of this and have made some good resolutions; perhaps, on the other hand, you cannot think of anything amiss that needs correcting. In this case will you let me help you? In every other respect you may be perfection, but as an exchange operator, which is the only capacity in which (alas!) I know you, you are often lacking. I have no doubt that you are charming in private life and that we should get on famously if we met at dinner; but you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... troublous times of Dante there had been prophetic souls who caught the vision of a new Italy, healed of her countless schisms, purified from her social degradations, and uniting the prowess of her ancient life with the gentler arts of the present for the perfection of her own powers and for the welfare of mankind. The gleam of this vision had shone forth even amidst the thunder claps of the French Revolution; and now that the storm had burst over the plains of Lombardy, ecstatic youths seemed to see the vision embodied in the person of Bonaparte ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... keep an interpreter on the premises," said the doctor, blowing his nose. Coleman struggled with himself. He knew the jargon to perfection, for his parents spoke it still, but he had always posed as ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and the manipulation of machinery calls for a knowledge of natural philosophy and higher mathematics. The masterly tilling of the soil demands one learned in chemistry and botany—botany, which we know is not even a stranger to Latin. So we might go through every industry and point out that its perfection is conditioned on the highest mental training. Let the Negro teacher, while loving industrial training for his race, not learn to despise that which appears on the surface to be merely a mental gymnastic, but which, when examined more carefully, proves to be that only which furnishes ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... the French have called a cruiser after him. Their opinion at the time, according to their historians,[38] was that the British were superior in officers and men and ships—constant cruising on the Adriatic had brought them near perfection. Among the incidents recorded is that of one of the Amphion's cadets who was doing police work at the fort; in despair at being out of the battle he swam to his ship. A fusillade from the Favorite put some shot ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... upon the sofa, and disposing her train effectively on the carpet around her: "She's before time. The dinner is in the last moment of ripe perfection now, when we must still give people fifteen minutes' grace." She studies the ...
— The Elevator • William D. Howells
... heat was just right for her purposes, Ellen was sent out of the way, and when she got back there was nothing to be seen but the fast-shut oven door. It was just the same when the dishes, in all their perfection, were to come out of the oven again. The utmost Ellen was permitted to see was the napkin covering some stray cake or pie that by chance had to pass through ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... requires is that the moisture supply should be adequate and timely. There are undoubtedly many apple orchards grown without irrigation where a little water during the latter part of the summer would be a great advantage for the perfection of winter varieties. ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... equity."(67) We know, indeed, that all his ways are guided by the most absolute and perfect justice; and this is the very circumstance which creates the difficulty. The more clearly we perceive, and the more vividly we realize, the perfection of the divine equity, the more heavily does the difficulty press upon our minds. This assurance brings us no relief; we still demand, if God be just, as in truth he is, how can he deal with us after such a manner? The answer we obtain is, that God is just. And if this does not satisfy us, ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... his instrument is out of order, the music will be discordant. It is not necessary for me to argue that a man must be in perfect health to exhibit perfect mentality. But as perfect health is the exception and not the rule, we rarely find mentality even approximating perfection. We are obliged, in our estimate of the character of men, to allow for various bodily infirmities, in a word, for the eccentricities of disease. These diseases may be inherited or acquired since birth; they may be acute or chronic ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... "Counsel of perfection," laughed Monty. "Government's responsible to the Common—Commons to the people—people want peace and plenty. No. Your guess was good. We are in here while the government at ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... justified, in very truth, Robert," said Willet. "I've known none other who can prepare a fish with as much tenderness and perfection as you. I suppose 'tis born in you, but you have a way of preserving the juices and savors which defies description and which is beyond praise. 'Tis worth going hungry a long while to put one's tooth into so delicate a morsel as this salmon trout, and 'tis a great pity, too, that our guest, ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... he eased the Royal James over till she was running nearly parallel with the fleeing ship. His orders came quick and fast, while the men trimmed the main and fore sheets to the last hair's breadth of perfection. It was to be a race, and a ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... he played the two in question, to such perfection, that the Major was astonished, and asked him, at ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... adventure to affirm this of the Sentiments of our author, that they are generally the most familiar which I have ever met with, and at the same time delivered with the highest dignity of phrase; which brings me to speak of his diction. Here I shall only beg one postulatum, viz., That the greatest perfection of the language of a tragedy is, that it is not to be understood; which granted (as I think it must be), it will necessarily follow that the only way to avoid this is by being too high or too low for the understanding, which will comprehend everything within its reach. Those two extremities ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... that is beautiful!" exclaimed the Commodore. "That is a perfect picture!—the very perfection of steadiness and breaking." ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... the Bible had been advocated in the first Sermon; but it was urged from a hundred quarters that a considerable amount of unbelief prevailed respecting that very Book for which it was evident that the preacher claimed entire perfection and absolute supremacy. The singular fallacy of these last days, that Natural Science, in some unexplained manner, has already demolished,—or is inevitably destined to demolish[1],—the Book of Divine Revelation, appeared to be ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... that, It is impossible for one man's will to be directed at the same time to diverse things, as last ends. Three reasons may be assigned for this. First, because, since everything desires its own perfection, a man desires for his ultimate end, that which he desires as his perfect and crowning good. Hence Augustine (De Civ. Dei xix, 1): "In speaking of the end of good we mean now, not that it passes away so as to be no more, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... utmost Power to the Satisfaction and Happiness of all about us." And in these pages we have Fielding's philosophy of goodness and greatness, delivered in words that already display an unrivalled perfection of style. Speaking of his third volume, that poignant indictment of devilry the Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great, it is thus that Fielding exposes the iniquity of villains in "great" places:—"But without considering Newgate as no ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... bough, the mellow sunshine streaming through the lattice of green leaves, the tinkle of the woodland stream, spoke in every tone; and more than this, the hearth-glow in whose light the patient hands had worked, the breath of the soul bending itself in passionate prayer for perfection, these, too, seemed to have wrought their blessed influence on the willing strings until the tone was laden with spiritual harmony. One might indeed have sung of this little red violin—that looked to Lyddy, in the sunset glow, as if it were ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and the hot predatory carnivor who were our begetters, may haunt us to the end of time. The bee and the ant, too, have woven inextricably into the woof of their cells the instincts that sooner or later would send their brain ganglia, even when evolved to the pitch of perfection, to elaborating the self-and-species murdering inventions and discoveries that are apparently destined to slay us. The powers of unconscious memory and unlearnable technique of reaction to experience, once grooved, thus prove the great gift and the eternal curse of protoplasm. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... that they might be improved by changing some of the numbers, and yet retaining the hypotheses. To this task he applied himself with much earnestness and assiduity, and after close application and laborious study he accomplished the arduous undertaking of bringing those tables to a high state of perfection. ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... affairs of the world each thing strives for its perfection and the preservation of its being, so on the other hand does man interest himself in the different concerns of others on some account, either for the public good, or to acquire, apart from the common interest, praise and reputation with some profit. ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain
... But instead, as one by one the formations he used to know are culled from the manual, he watches the new formations with a passive eye and reserves his choleric criticisms for the old reliables' "Echelon to the right" and that maximum of military perfection the ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... coolness of her caress. Tall, swaying trees spoke to him of her height, her majesty and her grace. He perceived the softness and lightness of her footfalls in the passage of evening shadows across a lake or meadow, the perfection of her features in the form and finish of flower petals and the delicate tints of her beauty in the coloring of flowers; the raven hue and sweeping length of of her tresses in the drowning shades of midnight and the entrancing veil of her lashes in deep mysterious woods; ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... of the projector. Lucretia, whom he first dismissed, was apprenticed to a milliner; and she afterwards became the wife of a linendraper in London. Sabrina, after Day had relinquished his attempts to make her such a model of perfection as he required, and which included indomitable courage, as well as the difficult art of retaining secrets, was placed at a boarding-school at Sutton Coldfield, in Warwickshire, where she was much esteemed; and, strange to say, was at length married ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... may be called surgical nursing, i.e., practical manual nursing, than, perhaps, any one in Europe, honestly believes that it is impossible to learn it from any book, and that it can only be thoroughly learnt in the wards of a hospital; and she also honestly believes that the perfection of surgical nursing may be seen practised by the old-fashioned "Sister" of a London hospital, as it can be seen nowhere else in Europe. 3. While thousands die of foul air, &c., who have this surgical nursing to perfection, the ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... not to be pure, for which in excuse he has pleaded his country, the Scotch dialect then being in a very imperfect state. Having mentioned the Scotch dialect, it will not be improper to observe, that it is at this time much in the same degree of perfection, that the English language was, in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth; there are idioms peculiar to the Scotch, which some of their best writers have not been able entirely to forget, and unless they reside in ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... Key: It lay on the table; and may again, in the course of Providence, come to lie!—The Prussian Lieutenant lays it down accordingly, and hurries out, with a grin on his face. There was much small laughter over this transaction; Majesty himself laughing well at it. Higher perfection of passivity no Burgermeister ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... running parallel to the length of the jaw, the edges of which in corresponding upper and lower teeth fit and work together like the blades of a pair of scissors. The cats (including the lions, tigers and leopards) have this arrangement in perfection (see Figs. 21 and 22). They cut the bones and muscles of their prey into great lumps with the scissor-like cheek-teeth, and swallow great pieces whole without mastication. Insect-eating mammals have cheek-teeth with three or four sharp-pointed tubercles standing ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... importance of qualities is best estimated by that of their respective subjects. But the mind, both in itself and in reference to man, is far better than the body, or than property. The excellencies of the mind, therefore, are in the same proportion to be preferred to the highest perfection of the body, and the best disposition of external circumstances. The two last are of a far inferior, and merely subservient nature; since no man of sense covets or pursues them, but for the sake of the mind, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... the works of human ingenuity it cannot be said that there is any locomotive so perfectly adapted to its purposes, doing so much work with so small a quantity of fuel, as this machine of nature's manufacture—the horse. And, as a necessary consequence of any sort of perfection, of mechanical perfection as of others, you find that the horse is a beautiful creature, one of the most beautiful of all land-animals. Look at the perfect balance of its form, and the rhythm and force of its action. ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... the beautiful boy one of those pure and yet passionate friendships—call them rather, with St. Augustine, by the sacred name of love—which, fair and holy as they are when they link youth to youth, or girl to girl, reach their full perfection only between man and woman. The unselfish adoration with which a maiden may bow down before some strong and holy priest, or with which an enthusiastic boy may cling to the wise and tender matron, ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... that he was first known as the author of "Sights from a Steeple," though accident may have had its share in the matter; and he long continued to use this signature. This little essay is very carefully written, and displays in remarkable perfection one quality that became so characteristic of his work that he has no rival in it except Poe; it has that harmony of tone which is known as keeping a unity of design and development so pervasive that the heavens above and the earth below are seen from the little steeple ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... rise, and the whole tide flow shorewards. The man must awake through all his soul, all his strength, all his mind, that he may worship God in unity, in the one harmonious utterance of his being: his heart must be united to fear his name. And for this final perfection of the individual the race must awake. At this season and that season, this power or that power must be chiefly developed in her elect; and for its sake the growth of others must for a season be delayed. But the next generation will inherit all that has ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... have deemed it a precious boon to have been granted the privilege of making Bellchambers' clothes without a cent of pay. As he wore them, they would have been a priceless advertisement. Trousers were his especial passion. Here nothing but perfection would he notice. He would have worn a patch as quickly as he would have overlooked a wrinkle. He kept a man in his apartments always busy pressing his ample supply. His friends said that three hours was the limit of time that he would ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... hiding place the necklace, weighed it in his hand, examined it minutely. Granting its marvellous perfection, he recognized no more its beauty, dispassionately reviewed in turn each stone of matchless loveliness, no more susceptible to their seductive purity, perceiving in them nothing but hard, bright, translucent pebbles, cold, ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... sending in to the Salon. Clutton, characteristically, had nothing ready, and he was very scornful of the two heads that Lawson sent; they were obviously the work of a student, straight-forward portraits of models, but they had a certain force; Clutton, aiming at perfection, had no patience with efforts which betrayed hesitancy, and with a shrug of the shoulders told Lawson it was an impertinence to exhibit stuff which should never have been allowed out of his studio; he was not ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... "ways," and insisted calmly and immovably upon wholehearted compliance with them. She had a small, well-cultivated farm and a comfortable house, and her hired men lived in clover. Caleb Cramp had been perfection after his kind, and Miss Calista did not expect to find his equal. Nevertheless, she set up a certain standard of requirements; and although three weeks, during which Miss Calista had been obliged to put up with the immature ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... driven back by the redoubled experience of my bad hearing! Yet it was not possible for me to say to men: Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf. Alas! how could I declare the weakness of a sense which in me ought to be more acute than in others—a sense which formerly I possessed in highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or ever have enjoyed; no, I cannot do it. Forgive, therefore, if you see me withdraw, when I would willingly mix with you. My misfortune pains me doubly ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... prettiest; and in a family of pretty sisters (Sophy always excepted) Flora was the acknowledged beauty. She was the kind of girl whose nose never turns red on a frosty morning. A little, white, exquisite nose, purest example of the degree of perfection which may be attained by that vulgarest of features. Under her great gray eyes were faint violet shadows which gave her a look of almost poignant wistfulness. If there is a less hackneyed way to describe her head on ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... if we had, as sometimes happens, deficient blossom showers; as in that case, and with many rootlets near the surface, a stimulus would be given to the plant which would induce it to throw out the blossom when there was not enough rain to bring it to perfection; whereas, if, by putting down the manure more deeply we attracted the roots downwards, the blossom buds could only be started after such an amount of rain as would give the soil such a soaking that a successful blossom would be insured. There certainly ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... set myself above all this, oh how cruelly was I driven back by the doubly painful experience of my defective hearing! and yet it was not possible for me to say to people, 'Speak louder—bawl—for I am deaf!' Ah! how could I proclaim the defect of a sense that I once possessed in the highest perfection—in a perfection in which few of my colleagues possess or ever did possess it? Indeed, I cannot! Forgive me, then, if ye see me draw back when I would gladly mingle among you. Doubly mortifying is my misfortune to me, as it must tend to cause me to be misconceived. From ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... look of comprehension. There was an unconsciously wistful tone in the girl's voice. Her face, though pallid, was lovely to view; her dress was dainty and arranged with care; she earnestly sought to be as beautiful "without and within" as was possible, yet the twisted limbs forbade her attaining the perfection she craved. ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... taught to think that the demonstrative force of the same lies no less in invective than in praise, we certainly do at the desk hack to pieces bravely the traditional tyrants of antiquity. Mezentius, if such is the chance, we slay over again with unsavoury antitheta; or we roast to perfection Phalaris of Agrigentum, as in his own bull, with lamentable bellowing of enthymemes. In the debating room or lecture-room, I mean; for in the State for the most part we rather adore and worship such, and call them most powerful, most great, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... our food, and we had the privilege of assisting at the ceremony. We were initiated into the mystery of frying an omelette-au-naturel, the safest thing to order, no matter where you may be in France, for the humblest cottage knows how to send up its omelette to perfection. The handmaiden waited upon us, but she was heavy and not intelligent, and she walked about in wooden shoes that clattered and echoed and shocked one's nerves. But this did not affect the omelette, or the modest ragout that concluded ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... Spirit is such as will require us to attentively listen, diligently study, and patiently learn the lessons He would teach us. And so we see that the Holy Spirit does not set aside our powers and faculties, but seeks to awaken and stir them into full activity, and develop them into well- rounded perfection, and thus make them channels through which He can intelligently influence and ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... not reply. The engineer had seemed to her to be a singularly attractive young man, yet she was equally impressed with Cissy's superior condition, which could find flaws in such perfection. Following her friend down the steps of the veranda, they passed into the staring graveled walk of the new garden, only recently recovered from the wild wood, its accurate diamond and heart shaped beds of vivid green set in white quartz borders giving it ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... diving, swimming, games, and rarest food—all these had stirred the depressed Europe of the last days of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth centuries beyond the understanding by us cynical and more material people. The world still had its vision of perfection. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... men groaned. "I cannot call that black bread and water breakfast. When I think of the breakfasts I have eaten, when I think of the dishes I have refused to eat, because they were not cooked to perfection, I groan over my folly in those days, and my enormous stupidity in ever ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... said Vaughan. 'I wish I was in there. In the first place you've got Merevale. He gets as near perfection as a beak ever does. Coaches the House footer and cricket, and takes an intelligent interest in things generally. Then there are some decent fellows in Merevale's. Charteris, Welch, Graham, Thomson, ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... Procope was well aware to what marvelous perfection the Americans had brought their sail-sledges, and had heard how in the vast prairies of the United States they had been known to outvie the speed of an express train, occasionally attaining a rate of more than a hundred miles an hour. The wind was still blowing hard from the south, and assuming ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... early wishes, we will follow him through his successful career. He is still living, and industrious, careful, and pious. He has never relaxed that watchfulness enjoined by the blessed Saviour, and alike so necessary to the consistent walk of a professor of religion and the perfection of the Christian character. Finding it harder to endure the glare of great prosperity than to dwell within the shadow of the cloud of poverty and sore affliction, he has ever cherished the same talisman ...
— Watch—Work—Wait - Or, The Orphan's Victory • Sarah A. Myers
... caught sight of Orena, he was astounded by its gleaming perfection. Here were hills and valleys, lakes and streams, glowing with the light of the most precious of metals. And, more astonishing than that, it was a world of miniature perfection—an infinitely tiny ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... your own bed, just as you cleaned your own boots or washed your own face. The larder consisted of tins of coffee, tea, sugar, and cakes, with an intermittent supply of butter and lemons. The infusing of tea and coffee was practised in perfection. It mattered not in the least whether toilette or breakfast came first, but it was exceedingly important that the care of the stove should precede both. Between ten and eleven the concierge's wife arrived with tools and utensils; ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... "sweeties," were staples. Then, too, there were balls of gum, beautifully clear, which in its raw state Foxy gathered from the ends of the pine logs at the sawmill, and which, by a process of boiling and clarifying known only to himself, he brought to a marvelous perfection. ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... peculiar tact and delicacy which no woman possessed in greater perfection, she began to soothe by degrees the vexed spirit of her magnanimous attendant. The excellence of the fish which he had taken in his expedition, the high flavour and beautiful red colour of the trouts, which have long given distinction to the lake, led her first to ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... is but a reflection of a divine personality." All the religions this world has ever known, have been but the aftermath of the ethics of one or another holy person; "as soon as character appears be sure love will"; "the intuition of the moral sentiment is but the insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul"; but these laws cannot ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... the Creole. I noticed the perfection of his dress; evidently he had not as yet loosed as much as a shoestring. And then I observed also that the visitor so close before him was ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... noble lord who preferred Malmsey wine! He had repeatedly assured Regina Ward that the camelia was his flower, so proudly beautiful! His soul was 'permeated with loveliness,' and asked no fragrance. Regina is a great white creature, lovely to behold, and, perfectly conscious of her perfection, no more actively charming than the Ino of Foley. He won Milly White's favor by applauding her love for wild flowers, declaring that a field of buttercups reminded him of the 'spangled heavens,' and that on summer days he was ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... adopted were not only the best of their kind, but carried out to absolute perfection. Had the letter been deposited within the range of their search, these fellows would, beyond ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of full hearts, remains on our minds as the last perfection of a perfect day. For myself, I am not ashamed to own that it made me weep like a child. Indeed, I cannot write of it now as I would; it unmans ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... according to what period of its history we consider. England was a musical nation until the Revolution of 1688; France was the greatest musical nation in the sixteenth century; and the recent publications of M. Henry Expert have given us a glimpse of the originality and perfection of the Franco-Belgian art during the Renaissance. But without going back as far as that, we find that Paris was a very musical town at the time of the Restoration, at the time of the first performance of Beethoven's symphonies ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... twofold. Throughout the first volume, I carefully kept the study of expression distinct from that of abstract architectural perfection; telling the reader that in every building we should afterwards examine, he would have first to form a judgment of its construction and decorative merit, considering it merely as a work of art; and then to examine farther, in what degree it fulfilled its expressional ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... both are equally vicious as arguments. The circumstances which are supposed to require this Divine design, and the details of the scheme, are absolutely incredible and opposed to all the results of science. Nature does not countenance any theory of the original perfection and subsequent degradation of the human race, and the supposition of a frustrated original plan of creation, and of later impotent endeavours to correct it, is as inconsistent with Divine omnipotence and wisdom as the proposed punishment ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... automobile is getting complicated, but it is also becoming efficient, if not exactly approaching perfection as yet. The early days of automobiling were not fraught with so many technicalities as to-day, when the last new thing may be a benzine bus or a turbine trailer; formerly everything was simple and crude,—and more or less inefficient. To-day many cars ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... picture, in which the human figure is represented in all possible attitudes, where every sentiment, every passion, every reflection of thought, and every aspiration of the soul are rendered with inimitable perfection, has never been equalled and never will be equalled in the domain ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... earth, spiking rails to the prairie in distant territories, or sending into Polynesian archipelagoes the rivet on whose integrity depends the safety of the iron ship. How needful to human progress is the conscientious perfection of their work! What tact they must employ in dealing with phalanxes of laborers of different nations and imperfect intelligence! What a stimulus to genius they are, with their readiness to catch at any labor-saving machine! See that astute-looking dwarf of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... 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 press which bears his name received that mechanical perfection in its execution, which has deservedly brought it into such ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... there be many perils in this land o' the woods—so many that all its people must learn to think or perish by them. A pretty bit o' wisdom it is, sor. It keeps the great van moving—ever moving, in the long way to perfection. Now, among animals, a growing brain works the legs of its owner, sending them far on diverse errands until they are strong. Mind thee, boy, perfection o' brain and body is the aim o' Nature. The cat's paw ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... less tempting than the houses of this description in New England when we first saw them, each in its pretty clean lawn, and surrounded by a lovely foliage. To return to this town—and, as a climax to its perfection, it has, out and out, the most comfortable hotel we have seen in America. It is quite a bijou, with a very pretty facade, and, being new last year, everything is in the best style. The ground floor, as ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... the lady, as usual, beautiful and elegant, and dressed to perfection, and ready to receive him ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... own discipline, and consequently attached to their officers and devoted to their marshal, till the latter, adored by the army, is become completely dictator of Portugal, his word is law, and the regency is little better than the shadow of Government. Moreover, the marshal acts his part to perfection, riding about the town in semi-regal state, surrounded by a brilliant staff. The man who has accomplished all this may not be a genius, but he has a right to be considered an extraordinary man, a man of the ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... suffers everywhere from a lack of balance. It is an almost inevitable defect, arising from its very grandeur. A mediocre work may quite easily be perfect of its kind; but it is rarely that a work lofty aim attains perfection. A landscape of little dells and smiling meadows is brought more readily into pleasing harmony than a landscape of dazzling Alps, torrents, glaciers, and tempests; for the heights may sometimes overwhelm the picture and spoil the effect. And so ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... navy of the United Provinces, enough has been said, in earlier chapters of these volumes, to indicate the improvements introduced by Prince Maurice, and now carried to the highest point of perfection ever attained in that period. There is no doubt whatever, that for discipline, experience, equipment, effectiveness of movement, and general organization, the army of the republic was the model army of Europe. It amounted to but ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... him for her picture, and listening to his passionate love-making. And, with all her faculties, she studied him. What was the charm of his presence? He was himself, and himself only. He seemed perfect, but he seemed to have arrived at perfection like a statue, not like a picture—by what had been taken away, not by what had been laid on. He was as natural as a bird, and as graceful and unembarrassed. He neither forced conversation, nor pressed the little attentions of the drawing-room, and his ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... still on the same side of the water, and, being immediately under the hill, within a considerable bending of the shore, we were enclosed by hills all round, as if we had been upon a smaller lake of which the whole was visible. It was an entire solitude; and all that we beheld was the perfection of loveliness ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... gained ground that the destined chronicler was Kinglake, and all men hailed the selection; yet the sceptic who in looking back to-day decries the greatness of the campaign may perhaps no less hesitate to approve the fitness of its chosen annalist. His fame was due to the perfection of a single book; he ranked as a potentate in STYLE. But literary perfection, whether in prose or poetry, is a fragile quality, an afflatus irregular, independent, unamenable to orders; the official tributes of a Laureate we compliment at their best with the northern farmer's verdict ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... masterly and unrivalled, save by certain articles from the pens of Hoffmann and our own writer Dwight. With the later works of the composer Oulibichef had no sympathy. Haydn and Mozart had given him his standards of perfection. We can forgive Beethoven, when at times he rises above all forms and rules in seeking new means ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... an exceedingly fine and handsome vessel, of enormous beam, and sitting very low upon the water, but the pace at which she was travelling conclusively demonstrated that, beamy as she was, her lines must be the very perfection of draughting; indeed this was proved by the ease with which she appeared to glide along the surface of, rather than through, the water, her progress being marked by singularly little disturbance of the element, considering her very high rate of speed. Her sails were magnificently cut, ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... genuine French wit, no longer that of the boor, or of the student, or of the burgess, but of the court and good society. Good society, in poesy, was born with Marot, with Francis I., and his sister Marguerite, with the Renaissance: much will still have to be done to bring it to perfection, but it exists and will never cease again. . . . Marot, a poet of wits rather than of genius or of great talent, but full of grace and breeding, who has no passion, but is not devoid of sensibility, has a way of his own of telling and saying things; he has a turn of his own; he is, in a word, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... sudden transition of tone, a working of the features, that a painter might study forever, and a gesture, bearing, look and utterance which were the consummation of histrionic art; yet so exclusively was this the ease, that admiration never lost itself in sympathy; it was the perfection of acting, not of nature; it won and chained the scrutinizing mind, but failed to sway the heart; it lacked the magnetic element; and while the critic was baffled in the attempt to pick a flaw, and the elocutionist in raptures at the sublime possibilities of his art, it was Rachel, not Hermione, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... swiftly and more swiftly, as Ralph gave the locomotive full head. A rare enthusiasm and buoyancy came into the situation. There was something fascinating in the breathless rush, the superb power and steadiness of the crack machine, so easy of control that she was a marvel of mechanical genius and perfection. ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... to perfection—and did no more. She turned confidentially to Horace, and said to him, in her gracefully ironical way: "She is ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... kettledrums, not with the pride and circumstance of glorious war. The soldiers of its ranks had not even a uniform—they were clad in buckskin and linsey, leather and fur. They had no trained fashion of march, yet stood shoulder and shoulder together well enough. They were not drilled into the perfection of trained soldiers, perhaps, but each could use his rifle, and knew how far was ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... dress is strangely illustrated in the Western Indian. His ideal of perfection is the English costume of some forty years ago. The tall chimney-pot hat with round narrow brim, the coat with high collar going up over the neck, sleeves tight-fitting, waist narrow. All this is perfection, and the chief who can array himself ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... Japan as our privet or hawthorn. Japanese money is very thin. Some of the coins are oblong, some square, and others round. The chief circulating coins are of copper or iron. The workmen are very skilful: they manufacture cutlery and sword-blades to perfection. They show great skill also in gold and silver work. Their mirrors are of bronze, the reflecting surface being of silver, and polished, the back and handle ornamented with various devices. Everything, indeed, that a Japanese artisan produces, exhibits a neatness and elegance which speaks well for ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... the big gray boulder in the orchard looking at the poem of a bare, birchen bough hanging against the pale red sunset with the very perfection of grace. She was building a castle in air—a wondrous mansion whose sunlit courts and stately halls were steeped in Araby's perfume, and where she reigned queen and chatelaine. She frowned as she saw Gilbert coming through the orchard. ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Cholula, particularly, there are still caciques with long Indian names; also in Tlascala—and though barefoot and ragged, they are said to possess great hidden wealth. But it is neither in or near the capital that we can see the Indians to perfection in their original state. It is only by travelling through the provinces that we can accomplish this; and should the lateness of the season oblige us to remain here any time after another Minister arrives, we may probably take a longer journey in some different direction ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Morey was methodically checking every control as Arcot called out the readings on the control panel. Everything was working to perfection. Their every calculation had checked out in practice so far. But the real test was yet ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... only served to emphasise the unusual characteristics of the child Magda. Her skin was wonderful, of a smooth, creamy-white texture which gave to the sharply angled face something of the pale, exotic perfection of a stephanotis bloom. Her eyes were long, the colour of black pansies—black with a suggestion of purple in their depths. They slanted upwards a little at the outer corners, and this together with the high cheek-bones, alone would have betrayed her Russian ancestry. When Lady Arabella wanted ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... with food in order to begin digesting, and the new-born lungs need but the contact with air in order to begin to breathe. The capacity for performing these perpetually repeated visceral actions is transmitted in perfection. All the requisite nervous connections are fully established during the brief embryonic existence of each creature. In the case of lower animals it is almost as much so with the few simple actions which make up the creature's mental life. The bird known as the fly-catcher ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... was encroachment of the civil on the spiritual power. The special rules of a pious association in no way affected the safety of the state or public order. If a number of ladies wished to join its ranks and accept its discipline in order to follow the path of Christian perfection and lead a more exemplary life in the world, they should be free to do so, and their directors should be free to remonstrate with them if they were not faithful to their pledge. In this incident the intendant was ...
— The Great Intendant - A Chronicle of Jean Talon in Canada 1665-1672 • Thomas Chapais
... after ten minutes' walk reached her destination in a quiet by-way called St Paul's Crescent, consisting of small, decent houses. That at which she paused had an exterior promising comfort within; the windows were clean and neatly curtained, and the polishable appurtenances of the door gleamed to perfection. She admitted herself with a latch-key, and went straight ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... always when her temper was roused, the reason being that thirty years ago the arts and accomplishments of dentistry had not reached so fine a perfection ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... of mine, who was a stranger to him, to keep an eye on him. Unnoticed by him, this friend followed him step by step, and in due time he spoke to him. The role, like that of Sbrigani in Pourceaugnac, required an intelligent actor, and it was played to perfection. Without making the child fearful and timid by inspiring excessive terror, he made him realise so thoroughly the folly of his exploit that in half an hour's time he brought him home to me, ashamed and humble, and afraid to look me ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... of time!" said Jimmy, as he watched her go off the stage. "Lily, perhaps ... in her new position ... will want a real maid, not a Glass-Eye! Lily ... why, she's perfection! To think of the abysses she has walked along without falling! There's more merit than one thinks in that kind of life. And how I should like to get hold of the people who talk ill of her. And that ... that ... oh, ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... glided along in such perfect rhythm that Cora Kimball, the fair driver of the Whirlwind, heard scarcely a sound of its mechanical workings. To her the car went noiselessly - the perfection of its motion was akin to the very ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... distinguished Athenian literature. The democracy demanded a literature of a popular kind, the vivacity of the people a literature that made a lively impression; and both these conditions were fulfilled by the drama. But though brought to perfection among the Athenians, tragedy and comedy, in their rude and early origin, were Dorian inventions. Both arose out of the worship of Dionysus. There was at first but little distinction between these two species of the drama, except that comedy belonged more to the rural celebration ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... mind, is nothing more than a very fine and splendid art, conveying things, to people who possess the liturgical faculty, in an extraordinarily dramatic and vivid way. I further believe that this is an art which has been gradually brought nearer and nearer perfection by being tested and developed through nineteen centuries, by every kind of mind and nationality. The way in which it does, indisputably, appeal to such very different kinds of people, and unite them, does, quite apart from other ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... not lavish, is kind Nature's hand; Nor was perfection made for man below. Yet all her schemes with nicest art are planned, Good counteracting ill, and gladness woe. With gold and gems if Chilian mountains glow, If bleak and barren Scotia's hills arise; There, plague and poison, lust and rapine grow; Here, peaceful are the vales, and pure the ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... still more attached to his metaphysical than his political creed, and carried his doctrines of the perfectibility of mankind as far as he did those respecting the conceivable perfection of a model of government; and as in the one case he declared against all power which did not emanate from the people themselves, so, in his moral speculations, he was unwilling to refer any of the ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... taught me that, and I may add, your father, for when I first saw him he had the perfection of manners." He might also have referred to Vinton Arnold, whom he had studied so carefully, but he could not bring himself to speak of one whom in his heart he knew to be the chief barrier between them, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... strangely with the frugal air and temper of the northern country, with the bare walled fields, the ruggedness of the crags above, and the melancholy of the treeless marsh below. And within this common lavishness, all possible delicacy, all possible perfection of the separate bloom and tuft—each foot of ground had its own glory. For below the daffodils there was a carpet of dark violets, so dim and close that it was their scent first bewrayed them; and ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... steel, which was of a distinct bluish tinge where it was not darkly stained. About an inch from the tip a tiny triangular nick had been made in one of the sharp edges, the only flaw in the weapon's perfection. Creighton looked up from it to meet the Sheriff's ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... classes: a master caste, very limited in numbers; a vast body of unproductive workers employed in ministering to the luxury and pomp of the master caste; and a small body of strictly productive workers, which, owing to the perfection of machinery, would be able to provide for the needs of all. It is needless to say that all save the masters would be at the minimum point as to means of subsistence. Decaying empires in ancient times have often presented such ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... the foot of Squaw Peak at last we look back over Squaw Valley. In the late summer tints it is beautiful, but what must it be in the full flush of its summer glory and perfection? Then it must be a delight to the eye and a refreshment to the soul. How interesting, too, it is to rehabilitate it as a great glacial lake. One can see its pellucid waters of clear amethystine blue and imagine the scenes that transpired ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... We arranged the thing to perfection. We had a constable in waiting in our rooms at the Metropole, and we settled that Dr. Polperro was to call at the hotel at a certain fixed hour to sign the warranty and receive his money. A regular agreement on sound stamped paper was drawn out between ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... thy bright perfection? 5 Or dim thy beauty with a tear? Had MYRA followed my direction, She long had wanted cause ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... neither is attended; and I think, The nightingale, if she should sing by day, When every goose is cackling, would be thought No better a musician than the wren. How many things by season season'd are To their right praise, and true perfection. ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... clapping his hands. "You have uttered my speech to perfection, and now you shall have the pleasure of the first paddle our new craft has made. Come, Andrew, come, Timbo, we will lose no time; we ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... search for the history of human perfection, shall I speak of Naples or Rome? Alas! At the contemplation of such misery, in vain you constrain your lips to smile; they pout, and the uncalled tears stream over your face. Pity, in these most unhappy countries, blinded with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... him. It was in his love-life, far more than in his poetry, that he attained completeness. When he died by drowning, in 1822, and his body was burned in the presence of Lord Byron, he was truly mourned by the one whom he had only lately made his wife. As a poet he never reached the same perfection; for his genius was fitful and uncertain, rare in its flights, and mingled always with ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... in a long-defunct publication, the Pall Mall Budget, and I recall a caricature of it in a pre-Martian periodical called Punch. He pointed out—writing in a foolish, facetious tone—that the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs; the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of the human being, and that the tendency of natural selection ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... during the last half-hour to ease his feelings on—though he was not the man to own up to such a weakness, even to himself—and the boat came neatly to supply his want. It was long enough since he had found occasion for such an outburst, but the perfection of his early training stood him in good stead then. Every biting insult in his vocabulary, every lashing word that is used upon the seas, every gibe, national, personal, or professional, that a lifetime of hard language could teach, he poured ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... made, and we lost the position without seriously attempting to defend it. Buller was now, therefore, in possession of the key to the Boer position in Natal, a position which we had occupied for two months—and could therefore, have fortified to perfection—and whose strategic importance should have been known in its smallest details. I think our generals, who had a sufficient force at their disposal, of which the mobility has become world-famed, should have been able to prevent such a fiasco as our occupation of the splendid line of defence ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... Blackie for three reasons: (1) he spoke too quickly for the leisurely and composed conversation of the Gael; (2) his pronunciation was bad, and people did not like to tell him so or correct him—(no one ever pronounced Gaelic to perfection who did not get the language with his mother's milk); (3) he was fond of using literary words, taken from the older bards, in his ordinary conversation; now, such words are obsolete in every-day talk and quite unfamiliar ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection joins us on the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have it not among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English, or Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other's errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us, something yearns for the old land, and ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... called mangga and mampalam (Mangifera indica, L.) is well known to be a rich, high-flavoured fruit of the plumb kind, and is found here in great perfection; but there are many inferior varieties beside the ambachang, or Mangifera foetida, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... far as to connect every thing feminine with these qualities, and to believe that nothing can be feminine without them. For our parts, we confess, that, although no enemies to a pretty foot, it is by no means a sine qua non in our estimate of female perfection; being in no way disposed, where the head and heart are gems, to undervalue these in consideration of any deficiency in the heels. Captain de Haldimar probably thought otherwise; for when he had passed his unwilling ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... contrast with their former destitute condition under the government of Old Mexico. Some of the inhabitants might be said to be rich, though but few of this class own ten thousand dollars' worth of property. It is with great labor that the people of Taos bring their crops to perfection, as it is necessary to irrigate the soil, unless the season, which is rarely the fact, is favorable in furnishing rains to them. There are no fences to divide one man's possessions from another's; but, by common law, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... the owner dined—traditionally called the great parlour—and within it sat about a dozen young men of the yeomanry cavalry, one of them being Festus. They were drinking, laughing, singing, thumping their fists on the tables, and enjoying themselves in the very perfection of confusion. The candles, blown by the breeze from the partly opened window, had guttered into coffin handles and shrouds, and, choked by their long black wicks for want of snuffing, gave out a smoky yellow light. One of the young ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... bloody-bones to a distrust of its own vision, and to repose implicitly on that of others; to go backwards instead of forwards to look for improvement; to believe that government, religion, morality, and every other science were in the highest perfection in ages of the darkest ignorance, and that nothing can ever be devised more perfect than what was established by our forefathers. To these I will add, that I was a sincere well-wisher to the success of the French revolution, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... while the author lay "in a weak and languishing condition, neither able to go on nor likely to recover, at least in any short time," gives a most artistic finishing stroke to it. Defoe never interfered with the perfection of it after his recovery, which took place very shortly. The Appeal was issued in the first week of January; before the end of the month the indomitable writer was ready with a Third Part of the Secret History, and ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... we had seen the acme of perfection in rice cultivation and irrigation in China and Japan. But here in Java, we have seen more to excite the admiration in this respect than in either of these countries. One can only marvel at the completeness of the system of irrigation. Rice is in all stages of ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... very slight, will not hinder the functioning of the organ; and hence this first accidental variation can, in a sense, wait for complementary variations to accumulate and raise vision to a higher degree of perfection. Granted; but while the insensible variation does not hinder the functioning of the eye, neither does it help it, so long as the variations that are complementary do not occur. How, in that case, can the variation be retained ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... pallateable dish. there is but little of the broad leafed cottonwood above the falls, much the greater portion being of the narrow leafed kind. there are a great abundance of red yellow perple & black currants, and service berries now ripe and in great perfection. I find these fruits very pleasent particularly the yellow currant which I think vastly preferable to those of our gardens. the shrub which produces this fruit rises to the hight of 6 or 8 feet; the ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... competition worked quite freely, this adjustment would be so nice that no military apportionment of forces among different brigades, regiments, etc., made consciously and by the most intelligent commanding officer, could surpass the perfection of it. There would be also an equally fine adjustment of the comparative amounts of capital devoted to different industries. In the actual productive organism each man goes where he will—capitalist, laborer, and employer of capital ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... church. How seldom is the man in the pulpit able to make people feel that the things he is talking about are things at all! Neither when the heavens are black with clouds and rain, nor when the sun rises glorious in a blue perfection, do many care to sit down and be taught astronomy! But Hester was a live gospel to them—and most when she sang. Even the name of the Saviour uttered in her singing tone and with the expression she then gave it, came nearer to them than when she spoke it. The very brooding ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... parents were often unreasonable, expecting impossibilities, in their wild desire for perfection in their offspring. An outsider, being unprejudiced by anxiety, could judge more fairly. John found that the telegram, which had almost broken her heart, was reasonable and justified; nay, even that it displayed a dutiful regard for her safety and comfort, of which ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... said Detricand. "There is the difference between us—between your cause and mine. You are all for logic and perfection in government, and to get it you go mad, and France is made ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Fezziwig in "The Christmas Carol," one vast substantial smile. He had beamed cheerfully on what to him was evidently the best of all possible worlds. Now, however, it would seem that doubts had occurred to him as to the universal perfection of things. His face was graver. His eyes and his mouth alike gave evidence of ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... marry him. But young Nicholas Stuyvesant came home from abroad to find his mother ill and Clarice nursing her. Every day he noticed the modest rosy maid moving noiselessly about like a sunbeam. Her physical perfection profoundly impressed him. In her presence he constantly talked to his mother about his admiration for healthy women. Each evening Clarice reported to him the condition of the mother, and on one occasion mentioned that she had never known ache, ...
— Different Girls • Various
... he had brought his body to a state of equal perfection, partly by nature, partly by practice, so that he could carry out easily everything that he took in hand. It was nimble and at the same time heavy to the utmost degree, and he could, therefore, run, fight, and ride safely at full speed. He never burdened himself with overmuch food, nor ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... taking his visible stand beside the pillow of departing life. No miracles are necessary to him who sees in the rising and setting of the sun, in the order and beauty of the universe, in the absolute perfection of its mechanical laws, in his own fearful and wonderful structure, the evidence of infinite wisdom in design, and infinite power in execution; and the examination of the structure and character ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... affliction, she could not be so selfish as not offer her friends the best position in Florence for seeing what to many of them was the most important event in their lives, as it was to her even in her grief. The true Italian taste appeared to perfection in every street through which the procession passed to the Duomo, and thence to the Palazzo Pitti. Those who saw it declare nothing could surpass the splendour of the cathedral when illuminated; but that we could not see, nor did ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
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