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Multiform

adjective
1.
Occurring in or having many forms or shapes or appearances.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Multiform" Quotes from Famous Books



... a strain as was placed upon his abilities and character. Rare have been the periods that have witnessed such confusion of principles, social, political and religious. Those were the days when liberty was at work, "but in a hundred fantastical and repulsive shapes, confused and convulsive, multiform, deformed." Blind violence and half-way reforms characterized the age because the principles that were to govern modern times were not ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart

... paragraph becomes dominant here. One notes the accumulation of expressions for suffering, crowded into these verses—griefs, sorrows, wounded, bruised, smitten, chastisement, stripes. One notes that the cause of all this multiform infliction is given with like emphasis of reiteration—our griefs, our sorrows, and that these afflictions are invested with a still more tragic and mysterious aspect, by being traced to our transgressions, our iniquities. Finally, the deepest word of all is spoken when the whole mystery ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... plain-clothes policemen made themselves thoroughly at home in Mr. Michaelis's quarters till the following Monday. And when in the fore-noon of that day, Mr. Michaelis entered his rooms, puzzled and perturbed at finding the outer door ajar, he was promptly arrested on a multiform charge of arson ... and on being conveyed to a police station and searched he was found to ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... and Captain Jenkins, as would seem! Robinson, who did the thing,—an expert man, bred to business as old Horace Walpole's Secretary, at Soissons and elsewhere, and now come to act on his own score,—regards this Treaty of Vienna (which indeed had its multiform difficulties) as a thing to ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... mysterious abyss. That perpetual state of unconscious action and reaction was shown especially in those giddy moments when sleep came over his daily life, and from the depths of sleep and the night rose the multiform face of Being with its sphinx-like gaze. For a year Christophe had been obsessed with dreams in which in a second of time he felt clearly with perfect illusion that he was at one and the same time several different creatures, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

... it is understood by us, and as It will be developed and explained in this work, cannot be defined in summary terms, since its multiform and comprehensive nature embraces and includes all primitive action, as well as much which is consecutive and historical in the intelligence and feelings of man, with respect to the immediate and the reflex interpretation of the world, ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... Narayana, in the next world. Many a time in days of yore hast thou beheld the Supreme Creator of the universe with eyes of spiritual abstraction and renunciation, having first opened thy pure and lotus-like heart—the only place where the multiform Vishnu of universal knowledge may be seen! It is for this, O learned Rishi, by the grace of God neither all-destroying Death, nor dotage that causeth the decay of the body, hath any power over thee! When neither the sun, nor ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... chapter we have seen that as man at the present day is liable, like every other animal, to multiform individual differences or slight variations, so no doubt were the early progenitors of man; the variations being formerly induced by the same general causes, and governed by the same general and complex laws as at present. As all animals tend ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... Light-armed squadrons and fleet foragers Scouring thy plains, Arezzo! have I seen, And clashing tournaments, and tilting jousts, Now with the sound of trumpets, now of bells, Tabors, or signals made from castled heights, And with inventions multiform, our own, Or introduc'd from foreign land; but ne'er To such a strange recorder I beheld, In evolution moving, horse nor foot, Nor ship, that tack'd by sign ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... consider what truth as well as Hippocrates says about this or about any other nature. Ought we not to consider first whether that which we wish to learn and to teach is a simple or multiform thing, and if simple, then to enquire what power it has of acting or being acted upon in relation to other things, and if multiform, then to number the forms; and see first in the case of one of them, and then in the case of all of them, what is that power of acting or being ...
— Phaedrus • Plato

... mirth Shakes joyously, and each round drop Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top. How can I bear it; buried here, While overhead the sky grows clear And blue again after the storm? O, multi-colored, multiform, Beloved beauty over me, That I shall never, never see Again! Spring-silver, autumn-gold, That I shall never more behold! Sleeping your myriad magics through, Close-sepulchred away from you! O God, I cried, give ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse

... beloved again Were heavenly!—so I thought till this Unlooked for answer to the prayer My heart was making with its might, Thus challenged, caught in sudden snare, Like two clouds meeting on a height, And, pausing first in short strange lull, Then bursting into awful storm, Opposing feelings multiform, Struggled in silence: and then full Of our blind woman-wrath, broke forth In stinging hail of sharp-edged ice, As freezing as the polar north, Yet maddening. O, the poor mean vice We women have been ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor

... he writes that his marriage "was not, perhaps, in consequence of the attachment of romance, but I have no cause to repent it. If I have not got polite tattle, modish manners, and fashionable dress, I am not sickened and disgusted with the multiform curse of boarding-school affectation; and I have got the handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the kindest heart in the country." It was during the honeymoon, as he calls it, that he wrote the beautiful ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... overtake the mass of business which comes before it. Each year contributes its quota of inevitable arrears to the accumulated mass of previous Sessions, and the process will go on multiplying in increasing ratio as the complex and multiform needs of modern life increase. The large addition recently made to the electorate of the United Kingdom is already forcing a crop of fresh subjects on the attention of Parliament, as well as presenting old ones from new points of view. Plans of devolution and Grand Committees ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.

... please her proud lord and master. Even Amasis, who so revered the Samian philosopher, who had so often yielded to Hellenic influence, and who with good reason might be called a free-thinking Egyptian, would sooner have exchanged life for death, than his multiform gods for the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... far to explain some peculiar features of Hinduism. Compared with Islam or Christianity its doctrines are extraordinarily fluid, multiform and even inconsistent: its practice, though rarely lax, is also very various in different castes and districts. The strangeness of the phenomenon is diminished if one considers that the uniformity and rigidity of western creeds are due to their political more ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... embracing the whole universe in an endless series of total growths, decays, and exact restorations. In the beginning the Supreme Being is one and alone. He thinks to himself, "I will become many." Straightway the multiform creation germinates forth, and all beings live. Then for an inconceivable period a length of time commensurate with the existence of Brahma, the Demiurgus the successive generations flourish and sink. At ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... less connection can still be traced. And in each civilized nation there has now grown up, for the representation of one set of sounds, several sets of written signs used for distinct purposes. Finally, from writing diverged printing; which, uniform in kind as it was at first, has since become multiform. ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... multiform openings for sublime effects, for interesting personal communications, for revelations of impressive faces that could not have offered themselves amongst the hurried and fluctuating groups of a railway station. The gatherings of gazers about ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... crushing, that I was almost ready to falter. My greatest anxiety was to guide my dear children aright. The four older ones had resolved to follow the dear Redeemer, but the slippery paths of youth were theirs to walk in. The consideration of these multiform cares at one time seemed of crushing weight. I questioned whether the burden I had so often left at the foot of the cross I had not taken up again, and whether I had as fully consecrated self, with my dear children, to the Lord ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland

... its multiform manifestations, which came into the world nearly nineteen hundred years ago, is sometimes called the spirit of Christmas. And good reasons can be given for supposing that it is. At any rate, those nations that have the most of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... herself had wondered—wondered at the multiform changes of each swell as it came in—transformations of tint, of shape, of motion, that seemed to betoken a life infinitely more subtle than the strange cold life of lizards and of fishes,—and sinister, and spectral. Then they ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn

... British ferns, notably in Scolopendrium vulgare, of which Mr. Moore enumerates no fewer than 155 varieties,[366] many of the forms occurring on the same plant at the same time. Cultivators have availed themselves of this tendency to produce multiform foliage, not only for the purposes of decoration or curiosity, as in the many cut-leaved or crisped-leaved varieties, but also for more material uses, as, for instance, the many varieties of cabbages, of lettuces, &c. Most of these variations are mentioned ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters

... retrospect, were good in their way; they meant something. And you look forward to happier things in the future; it will be a long and on the whole a successful future perhaps. Think of the variety and the opportunity which this great, multiform, breathing world holds forth to a man; the friends, the activities, the changes of scene, the surprises, the conflicts, success and failure, hope and fear, triumph, defeat—life, in a word. It is ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... (made for him by the artificer, Tvashtar), of brass or of gold, with many edges and points. Upon a golden chariot he rides to battle, driving two or many red or yellow steeds; he is like the sun in brilliancy, and like the dawn in beauty; he is multiform, and cannot really be described; his divine name is secret; in appearance he is vigorous, huge; he is wise and true and kind; all treasures are his, and he is a wealth-holder, vast as four seas; neither his greatness nor his generosity can be comprehended; mightiest of gods is he, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... with the Carlyles in all their multiform relations to the Carlyle Country, and casts much valuable light upon the complex problems raised by ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... untruth to the nature of comedy, although the circumstances border on the tragic. When he wants to give the deeper affairs of the heart, he throws the whole at once out of the social circle with its multiform restraints. As in "Hamlet" the stage on which the whole is acted is really the heart of Hamlet, so he makes his visible stage as it were, slope off into the misty infinite, with a grey, starless heaven overhead, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald

... country is French. Everybody speaks it—has to. You have to know French particularly mongrel French, the patois spoken by Tom, Dick, and Harry of the multiform complexions—or ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... now on all hands due recognition, as being one of the most rich, fertile, and interesting in the history of man. The all-embracing despotism of Rome was replaced by the endless local divisions and subdivisions of feudal tenure. The multiform rites and beliefs of polytheism were replaced by the single faith and paramount authority of the Catholic Church. The philosophies of Greece were dethroned, and the scholastic theology reigned in their stead. The classic tongues ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison

... letter of hers, what did it signify but the revolt of a spirit of independence, irritated by all manner of sufferings, great and small? Ought he not to have replied in other terms? Was it worthy of him—man of the world, with passions, combats, experience multiform, assimilated in his long, slow growth—to set his sarcasm against ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... — N. diversity, irregularity, unevenness; multiformity &c. 81; unconformity &c. 83; roughness &c. 256; dissimilarity, dissimilitude, divarication, divergence. Adj. diversified varied, irregular, uneven, rough &c. 256; multifarious; multiform &c. 81; of various kinds; all manner of, all sorts of, all kinds of. Adv. variously, in all manner of ways, here ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... are dead groups of matter when we hate; But when we love we are as gods!—Unto The gentle fetters yearning, through each state And shade of being multiform, and through All countless spirits (save of all the sire)— Moves, breathes, and blends, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... What market has Industry in this France? For two things there may be market and demand: for the coarser kind of field-fruits, since the Millions will live: for the fine kinds of luxury and spicery,—of multiform taste, from opera-melodies down to racers and courtesans; since the Units will be amused. It is at bottom but ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... class has already exceeded all expectations. The foundation of nine bursaries, each worth L50 per annum, is certainly an inducement to perseverance which is not every day placed within the reach of poor students; and considering the multiform phases of chemical science, and the comparatively limited extent to which they have hitherto been developed, there is no saying to what results Mr. Young's ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans

... But if he were crossed in the least, if reinforcements did not arrive, or if there were any sign of independence in Paris, they became petulant, talking of ill-health, threatening resignation, and requesting that numbers of men be sent out to replace him in the multiform functions which in his single person he was performing. Of course these tirades often failed of immediate effect, but at least no effort was made to put an effective check on the writer's career. Read a century later in a cold and critical light, Bonaparte's proclamations ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... of Spinozism: the rationalism of Descartes is heightened by Spinoza into the imposing confidence that absolutely everything is cognizable by the reason, that the intellect is able by its pure concepts and intuitions entirely to exhaust the multiform world of reality, to follow it with its light into its last refuge.[1] Spinoza is just as much in earnest in regard to the typical character of mathematics. Descartes (with the exception of an example asked for in ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... failed partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its multiform activities. The men have been carelessly indifferent to much of this civic housekeeping, as they have always been indifferent to the details of the household.... The very multifariousness and complexity ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... distinct and separate personality. He is for a little while detached in appearance from the soul of the universe (anima mundi), but in reality no more detached from it than is a boulder or a log of drift-wood from the surface on which it rests. He still remains a part of the universal soul, the multiform, all-embracing God, who is himself not a self-conscious, freely willing being, but impelled by necessity in all his parts and members, and, no less than in all else, in those human members through which alone he attains to ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody

... noontide heats all nature is as silent here as in the virgin forests of the New World; but when the cool breath of evening begins to be felt, and that luminous darkness which is the glory of a summer night in Central Africa folds softly over the picture, the multiform life of earth swiftly re-awakens; birds and butterflies hover in the air, the monkeys chatter merrily, and leap from bough to bough. The sounds which then arise—song and hum and murmur, the roll of the river, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... visionary character.' This is, on the whole, very promising. It shows that Socialism is not going to allow herself to be trammelled by any hard and fast creed or to be stereotyped into an iron formula. She welcomes many and multiform natures. She rejects none and has room for all. She has the attraction of a wonderful personality and touches the heart of one and the brain of another, and draws this man by his hatred of injustice, and his neighbour by his faith in the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... in which an Oriental romance of the Middle Ages could be arrayed. Payne was perfectly satisfactory to all cultivated tastes but he designedly converted a romantic into a classical work: none ignores its high merits regarded merely as strong and vital English, but it lacks one thing needful—the multiform variety of The Nights. The original Arabic text which in the first thirteen tales (Terminal Essay, p. 78) must date from before the xiiith century at the latest (since Galland's MS. in the Bibliotheque Nationale has been assigned ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... of all our seeing.' In the mysterious inwardness of mutual possession, the soul which has given itself to God and possesses Him, has not only communion, but may even venture to claim as its own the deeper and more mysterious union with God. Those multiform mercies, 'which endure for ever,' and speed on their manifold errands into every remotest region of His universe, gather themselves together, as the diffused lights of some nebulae concentrate themselves ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... stand as the definitive nineteenth-century guess at this "riddle of the ages." I mean, of course, the vortex theory of atoms—that profound and fascinating doctrine which suggests that matter, in all its multiform phases, is neither more nor less than ether ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking when heard screaming on the wind and proclaiming itself through the darkness to every village or solitary house on its route, has now given way for ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler. Thus have perished multiform openings for public expressions of interest, scenical yet natural, in great national tidings,—for revelations of faces and groups that could not offer themselves amongst the fluctuating mobs of a railway station. The gatherings ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... frame, the large and round vault, the glacial bareness, the majestic simplicity of the edifices which have the rounded arch for their progenitor. It is not, like the Cathedral of Bourges, the magnificent, light, multiform, tufted, bristling efflorescent product of the pointed arch. Impossible to class it in that ancient family of sombre, mysterious churches, low and crushed as it were by the round arch, almost Egyptian, with the exception of the ceiling; all hieroglyphics, all sacerdotal, all symbolical, more loaded ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... civilized nation occupies, the more numerous are its points of contact with other peoples, and the less likely is there to be a premature crystallization of its civilization from isolation. Extension of area on a large scale means eventually extension of the seaboard and access to those multiform international relations which the ocean highway confers. The world wide expansion of the British Empire has given it at every outward step wider oceanic contact and eventually a cosmopolitan civilization. The same thing is true of the other great colonial empires of history, whether Portuguese, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... conjecture may be hazarded, the decision will probably depend mainly on one consideration, viz., which of the two systems is consistent with the greatest amount of human liberty and spontaneity. It is yet to be ascertained whether the communistic scheme would be consistent with that multiform development of human nature, those manifold unlikenesses, that diversity of tastes and talents, and variety of intellectual points of view, which not only form a great part of the interest of human life, but, by bringing intellects ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... her recurrent heavy tasks the drear doom of poverty with its multiform menace had cast no shadow on her ethereal face, and her pensive dark gray eyes were full of serene light as she met the visitor at the bars. A glimmer of mirth began to scintillate beneath her long brown lashes, and she spoke first. "The folks ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... however, from the above remarks, about the multiform and self-contradictory character of the amorphous thing called Hinduism, that it is therefore impossible for us to understand and measure its nature and power. For Brahmanism, through all ages, has not been without a definite ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones

... N. diversity, irregularity, unevenness; multiformity &c 81; unconformity &c 83; roughness &c 256; dissimilarity, dissimilitude, divarication, divergence. Adj. diversified varied, irregular, uneven, rough &c 256; multifarious; multiform &c 81; of various kinds; all manner of, all sorts of, all kinds of. Adv. variously, in all manner of ways, here there ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... what, not on the may; there is no question whether dreams will come, but there is question of the character of the dreams. This consideration is what makes calamity so long-lived! 'For who would bear the multiform ills of life'—he alludes to his own wrongs, but mingles, in his generalizing way, others of those most common to humanity, and refers to the special cure for some of his own which was close to his hand—'who would bear these things if he could, as I can, make his quietus with a bare bodkin'—that ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald

... committees, especially the indefatigable Secretary, to the pastors of all the churches, to the choir and leaders of the services of song in the house of the Lord, to the local and metropolitan press for its generous reporting of these meetings to the large congregation outside by its multiform and winged processes, and to the lines of transportation which have made us the recipients of their courtesy, we express our great ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various

... is a fixed quantity; and its amount and the terms on which it was to be available for our use were fixed or finished "from the foundation of the world." While it is a very significant fact in this connection that with all the multiform speculations which have been made as to the physical source of the sun's heat, no explanation wholly satisfactory has yet been made as to how this energy coming to us from the sun ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price

... import? To which questions I might reply, as Democritus did to him that asked the definition of a man, "'Tis that which we all see and know." Any one better apprehends what it is by acquaintance, than I can inform him by description. It is, indeed, a thing so versatile and multiform, appearing in so many shapes, so many postures, so many garbs, so variously apprehended by several eyes and judgements, that it seemeth no less hard to settle a clear and certain notion thereof, than to make a portrait of Proteus, or to define the figure of the fleeting air. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... language of Germany embraces not only the few octaves of passion, but the whole keyboard of existence. It has preludes, symphonies and sonatas for every phase of life. Nothing smaller than this range would suffice to express the multiform ideas of a people so thoughtful and cosmopolitan. And though by this universal sympathy German music may have lost a purely national life, it is a most sufficing compensation to have gained the power of expressing the ideas ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... of space, he beheld the gossamer shapes, whose choral joys his spirit had so often shared. There, group upon group, they circled in the starry silence multiform in the unimaginable beauty of a being fed by ambrosial dews and serenest light. In his trance, all the universe stretched visible beyond; in the green valleys afar, he saw the dances of the fairies; in the bowels of the mountains, he beheld the race that breathe the lurid air of ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... stands between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, was, like the poets of the former age, a multiform letter-writer. He was often seized with letter-writing when unable to write poetry or execute those unpublished masterpieces in the composition of some of which ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... its wanderings, come back to the fledglings in its nest? Strike love, the conjoiner, from creation, and creation returns to a void. Destroy love the parental, and life is born but to perish. Where stop the influence of love or how limit its multiform degrees? Love guards the fatherland; crowns with turrets the walls of the freeman. What but love binds the citizens of States together, and frames and heeds the laws that submit individual liberty to the rule of the common good? Love creates, love cements, ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton

... this man has touched me with. Perhaps the journey's end, the weariness Had wrought upon me first. I met him thus: 290 I crossed a ridge of short sharp broken hills Like an old lion's cheek teeth. Out there came A moon made like a face with certain spots Multiform, manifold and menacing: Then a wind rose behind me. So we met In this old sleepy town at unaware, The man and I. I send thee what is writ. Regard it as a chance, a matter risked To this ambiguous Syrian—he may lose, Or steal, or give it thee with ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning

... glad to avail himself of their strength to moderate the intolerant demands of the Leaguers. Many of the Protestants complained bitterly that the king had abandoned them. On the other hand, the haughty leaders of the League clamored loudly that the king was not a true son of the Church, and, in multiform conspiracies, they ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... enabled to walk the quarter-deck without actual holes in our dress; but the dresses themselves were grotesque, for the imitation of our spruce uniform was villainous, and our hats were deplorable; they were greased with oil, and broken, and sewed, and formless, or rather multiform: bad as were our fittings-out, we had not enough ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... across the features; indeed these seemed to change so much from moment to moment that they might have belonged to several different individuals, though each was beautiful. The fact of these remarkable changes with the suggestion of multiform personalities which they conveyed impressed both Bickley and myself very much indeed. Then the breast heaved tumultuously; it even appeared to struggle. Next the eyes opened. They were full of wonder, even of fear, ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard

... palm and pomegranate are at home in the valleys, and the dwarf willow and birch are frozen out a long way below the summits of the mountains. The tiger and the ptarmigan are, measured vertically, close neighbors, a mile or two apart, within easy calling distance. Man is equally multiform. All his races are assembled save the African. His extremes in physiognomy, dress, government and religion are brought into close communion. Character, in this cosmopolitan district, gives place to eclecticism. Its features and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various

... the lamp less disagreeably than Spenser. Where Milton forges and smelts, his gold is native. The endless, various, brightly-coloured, softly and yet distinctly outlined pictures rise and pass before the eyes and vanish—the multiform, sweetly-linked, softly-sounding harmonies swell and die and swell again on the ear—without a break, without a jar, softer than sleep and as continuous, gayer than the rainbow and as undiscoverably connected with any obvious cause. And this is the more remarkable because the very last thing ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... city comes the clang of bells: Their hundred jarring diverse tones combine In one faint misty harmony, as fine As the soft note yon winter robin swells. What if to Thee in thine infinity These multiform and many-colored creeds Seem but the robe man wraps as masquers' weeds Round the one living truth them givest him—Thee? What if these varied forms that worship prove, Being heart-worship, reach thy perfect ear But as a monotone, complete and clear, Of which the music is, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... should be made masters of both the troops and the finances. Furthermore, it is well that all the business of the empire should be transacted through a number of agents, in order that many may receive the benefit of it and become experienced in affairs. In this way your subjects, reaping a multiform enjoyment from the public treasures, will be better disposed toward you, and you will have an abundant supply of the best men on each occasion for all necessary lines of work. One single knight with as many subordinates ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio

... and classify all the vagaries of the human imagination which may be comprehended under the denomination of humour, is no easy task, and as it is multiform we may stray into devious paths in pursuing it. But vast and various as the subject seems to be, there cannot be much doubt that there are some laws which govern it, and that it can be brought approximately under certain heads. It seems to ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... with the keenest interest to the impending season, when Lord Montfort would formally enter its spell-bound ranks, and multiform were the speculations on his destiny. He attended an early levee, in order that he might be presented—a needful ceremony which had not yet taken place—and then again quitted his country, and for years. He was heard of in every capital except his own. Wonderful exploits at St. ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli

... religions are in themselves a highly interesting part of the history of mankind. In the multiform character that belongs to them we find reflected the peculiar traits of the several peoples among whom they have arisen. The history of religion stands in a close connection with the development of the fine arts,—architecture ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... The latter part of the text expressly says that (not the Lord but) another one, i.e. the individual soul is bound up by my; and therewith agrees another text, viz. 'When the soul slumbering in beginningless My awakes' (Gaud. K.). Again, in the text 'Indra goes multiform through the Mys' (Ri. Samh. VI, 47, 18), the manifold powers of Indra are spoken of, and with this agrees what the next verse says, 'he shines greatly as Tvashtri': for an unreal being does not shine. And where the text says 'my My is ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut

... come in comparison with it. Polueides gar haite kai di' heterotetos chorizomene ton nooumenon, kai holos kinesis esti noera peri to noeton. Dei de ten theian pistin henoeide kai eremon huparchein en toi tes agathotetos hormoi teleios hidrutheisan. For the operation of the Intellect is multiform and by diversitie separate from her objects, and is in a word, intellectuall motion about the object intelligible. But the divine faith must be simple and uniform, quiet and steddily resting in the haven of Goodnesse. And at last he summarily concludes, Esti oun houtos hormos asphales ton onton ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More

... justifications of novels occur to me. Firstly, that if some dreadful crisis awaited a ship of passengers at the line—where equally the danger was mysterious and multiform, the safety mysterious and multiform—how monstrous if a man should say to a lady, 'What are you reading?' 'Oh, I'm reading about our dreadful crisis, now so near'; and he should answer, 'Oh, nonsense! read something to improve ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... sacred tradition on which he is borne, and with which he is encompassed, are the two grand sources of "the philosophy of life." Let us follow these principles, now, into a few of their wide-spread streams and multiform historical branchings. First, the Bible clearly indicates what the profoundest study of the earliest and most venerable literatures confirms, that man was not created at first in a brutish state, crawling with a slow and painful progress out of the dull slime of a half ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... no longer the intelligence that reigns alone, but another spiritual power, which pays no heed to the brain, which passes by other roads and which might rather be the psychic substance of the universe itself, no longer set in grooves, isolated and specialized by man, but diffused, multiform and perhaps, if we could trace it, equal ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck

... Gallicanism of Jeffrey's mind and character. As Horace Walpole has been pronounced the most French of Englishmen, so may Francis Jeffrey be pronounced the most French of Scotchmen. The reader of his letters, no less than the reader of his essays, constantly comes across the most curious and multiform instances of this Frenchness. The early priggishness is French; the effusive domestic affection is French; the antipathy to dogmatic theology, combined with general recognition of the Supreme Being, is French; the talk (I had almost said the chatter) about virtue and ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... Heptarchy patriotisms must follow. —National voices, distinct yet dependent, Ensphering each other, as swallow does swallow, With circles still widening and ever ascendant, In multiform life to ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... Five and twenty years later, while passing my second winter in Rome, I heard of M. Rio's arrival there, and of the unbounded satisfaction he expressed at finding himself in the one place where no restless wheels beat time to, and no panting chimneys breathed forth the smoke of the vast, multiform industry of the nineteenth century; where the sacred stillness of unprogressive conservatism yet prevailed undisturbed. Gas had, indeed, been introduced in the English quarter; but M. Rio could shut his eyes when he drove through that, and there still remained darkness enough elsewhere ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For through that better perception he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form; and following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which express that life, and so his speech flows with the ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... men in different ages—extending from Alfred to Albert—has in like manner contributed, by their life and example, to shape the multiform character of England. Of these, probably the most influential were the men of the Elizabethan and Cromwellian, and the intermediate periods—amongst which we find the great names of Shakspeare, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles

... plants and skins. Surely, has such an one thought, nature is a mighty and consistent whole, and the providential order established in the world of life must, if we could only see it rightly, be consistent with that dominant over the multiform shapes of brute matter. But what is the history of astronomy, of all the branches of physics, of chemistry, of medicine, but a narration of the steps by which the human mind has been compelled, often sorely against its will, to recognize the operation of secondary causes ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley

... should be fine, to admit of this luxurious idleness. Let the blue-bosomed clouds be sailing along, like Peter Bell's boat; let the sunbeams be gilding the face of nature, and tinging the landscape with multiform hues; let the breezes be gentle, the spot retired, and the heart at ease. Now, go and stretch yourself on the grassy couch, while the branches of an aged tree shadow forth the imaged leaves around you. What a congenial ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various

... will be serviceable for me to set forth as explicitly as possible the alternative courses that lie open to our choice. We can simply release the roads and go back to the old conditions of private management, unrestricted competition, and multiform regulation by both state and federal authorities; or we can go to the opposite extreme and establish complete government control, accompanied, if necessary, by actual government ownership; or we can adopt an intermediate course of modified private control, under a more unified ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... every walk of morals. Religion, science, ethics, and every department of social economy but this, have their 'reformers.' Before the great problem, How shall the evils which attend our domestic service be removed? the stoutest-hearted reformer stands appalled. These evils are so multiform and all-pervading, they strike their roots so strongly, and ramify so extensively, that they defy the attempt to eradicate them; and they are thus left to flourish and increase. We have plenty of groans over these evils, but scarcely ever a thoughtful consideration of their cause, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... all the manifold relations of life,—the home, the market, the city, the state; all the multiform activities of life,—labour and speech and art and literature and {114} law; all the sentiments of life,—friendship and love and reverence and courage and hope,—all these are parts of a knowable whole; they are expressions of law; they are Reason realising itself through individuals, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... and the multiform discontent with education in its present stage of development, which is characteristic of our own generation, and which is in some ways so confusing and disconcerting, and so unfavourable to the smooth working of our educational ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... superstition and hypocrisy, as the original sin of Catholicism; so now I will proceed, as before, identifying myself with the Church and vindicating it,—not of course denying the enormous mass of sin and error which exists of necessity in that world-wide multiform Communion,—but going to the proof of this one point, that its system is in no sense dishonest, and that therefore the upholders and teachers of that system, as such, have a claim to be acquitted in their own persons of that ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman



Words linked to "Multiform" :   uniform, polymorphous, polymorphic



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