|
|
|
More "Discursive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... chairs a little farther out into the darkness, smoking cigars and drinking some rather wonderful coffee. The doctor had gone off to see a patient, and Von Ragastein was thoughtful. Their guest, on the other hand, continued to be reminiscently discursive. ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... effect produced;—for no one, I suppose, will set Johnson before Burke,—and Burke was a great and universal talker;—yet now we hear nothing of this except by some chance remarks in Boswell. The fact is, Burke, like all men of genius who love to talk at all, was very discursive and continuous; hence he is not reported; he seldom said the sharp short things that Johnson almost always did, which produce a more decided effect at the moment, and which are so much more easy to carry off.[1] Besides, as to Burke's testimony ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... side, speak a language stamped with schematism, while to be correct, even in making love, your language should be discursive. Allow me to ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... cordially coincide, and at the same time bring these somewhat rambling and discursive reminiscences to ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... Empathy is perpetually being checked by the need for practical thinking. We are made to think in the most summary fashion from one to another of those grouped possibilities, past, present and future, which we call a Thing; and in such discursive thinking we not only leave far behind the aspect, the shape, which has started a given scheme of Empathy, a given movement of lines, but we are often faced by facts which utterly contradict it. When, instead of looking at a particular aspect of that mountain, ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... inwardly inspired, Shelley could picture the ideal goals of life, the ultimate joys of experience, better than a discursive critic or observer could have done. The circumstances of life are only the bases or instruments of life: the fruition of life is not in retrospect, not in description of the instruments, but in expression of the spirit itself, to which those instruments may prove useful; ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... noticed it too, but it only made her discursive brain think of cuckoos. She would no doubt immediately have begun to talk of cuckoos, incoherently, unrestrainably and deplorably, if she had been in the condition of nerves and shyness she was in last time she ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... the distance, and then settle his business in two or three dozen sentences; an American is much more likely to devour the ground in five minutes, and then spend an hour or more in lively conversation not wholly pertinent to the matter in hand. The American mind is discursive, open, wide in its interests, alive to suggestion, pliant, emotional, imaginative; the English mind is concentrated, substantial, indifferent to the merely relative, ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... he gave out the hymn he seemed to have quietly overlooked the new harmonium. She sang her best, however, and more than one of the audience thought that "little Sister Appleby" had greatly improved. Indeed, it would not have seemed strange to some—remembering Brother Seabright's discursive oratory—if he had made some allusion to it. But he did not. His heavy eyes moved slowly over the congregation, and ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... as looking larger, but then whenever she saw him he struck her as looking larger. He enveloped her hand in a large amiable paw for a minute and asked after the children with gusto. The large teeth beneath his discursive moustache gave him the effect of a perennial smile to which his asymmetrical ears added a touch of waggery. He always betrayed a fatherly feeling towards her as became a man who was married to a handsome wife old enough ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... disciple up and down the land, pointing out to him the "bold, upholsterrific blunders" to be found in the architecture of the day, and commenting on them in a caustic, colloquial style—large, loose, discursive—a blend of Ruskin, Carlyle and Whitman, yet all Mr. Sullivan's own. He descends, at times, almost to ribaldry, at others he rises to poetic and prophetic heights. This is all a part of his method alternately to shame and inspire his pupil to some sort of creative ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... wild—the happy—the almost delirious idea of a Regatta; and taking their courage in their hands had sought an interview with Sir Felix, to entreat his patronage for the scheme. They had found him in his most amiable mood, and within an hour—the old gentleman is discursive—he had consented to become Patron and President and to honour the gathering with his presence. But observe; the idea cannot have originated before August the 12th, on which day the trio arrived from London; yet a whisper of it had reached ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... say that this is a fault in Irving: if it is a fault at all it belongs to his time; then, too, these tales were supposed to be written by the garrulous antiquarian, Diedrich Knickerbocker; but their discursive style is not in vogue to-day, and ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... on this notion of religious truth as purely moral and practical is that it is itself abstract and one-sided. The universe as it appears to discursive thought, with its vast system of seemingly uniform laws, which operate without much consideration for our wishes or feelings, must be at least an image of the real universe. We cannot accept the irreconcilable ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... tension of the heart. On the one side we have all passages of life-weariness, whether as the issue of long meditation, or as the outcome of familiar talk; and on the other we have the brilliant and discursive criticism of man and Nature continued throughout the play. All this is so closely connected with the treason of his mother, that we see the very attachment of the feeling to ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... a just verdict of unsuitableness and of incompetency by bringing many and grievous charges against their flocks. "A mania for church-extending"; "a hankering for architectural splendor"; "or for discursive and satirical preaching"; "or for something florid or profound": these and the like imputations have been put forward, as a screen, by many an unsuccessful preacher, who failed,—simply failed,—not in selling horns or hides, shirtings or sugars,—but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... read it again, but with difficulty and uncertainty still, for I had lost some little rest and my mental vision seemed clouded. The note was more connected, now, but did not meet the emergency it was expected to meet. It was too discursive. It appeared to read as follows, though I was not certain of some ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... His essays are disjointed—discursive and eloquent in parts, and bare and meagre in others. Connections are omitted, passages of real and rare beauty jostling with long passages of the most common-place rhetoric. His platitudes, however, to myself ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... learned professor as in duty bound, reported the conversation to his pupil's father; with the additional observation that he feared, he very humbly and respectfully feared, that the developing mind of the prince appeared undesirably disposed towards discursive philosophies, which were wholly unnecessary for the position he was destined to occupy. Whereupon the King took his son to task on the subject with a ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... States as a paroled prisoner of war. Captain Porter took him at once to Chester and put him again to school, this time to an old gentleman named Neif, who had served in the guards of Napoleon. The method of instruction practiced by him seems to have been unsystematic and discursive; but Farragut, who was ever attentive to make the most of such opportunities as offered for self-improvement, derived profit here also, and said afterward that the time thus passed had been of service to him throughout his life. Until very lately there were residents of ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... of essay writing, surely, have seemed in our own generation less distinctive of our peculiar quality. While admirable biographical and critical studies appear from time to time, and here and there a whimsical or trenchant discursive essay like those of Miss Repplier or Dr. Crothers, no one would claim that we approach France or even England in the field of criticism, literary history, memoirs, the bookish essay, and biography. We may have race-memories of a pine-tree which help us to write vigorously and ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the pillow. All the wretchedness of her life seems to have culminated, the little doubts she has thrust out or tried to overlive. Somehow she appears to have worked a great and unwitting change in the Grandon family. Once, when Denise was in a discursive mood, she told Violet of Mr. Wilmarth's proposal of marriage. What if she had married him? Violet thinks now. Marcia talks about her "Vulcan" with a curious pride, and he certainly is indulgent. In that case Violet ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... fact concerning Mr. Philip Spruce, that his method of telling a story ("Which reminds me," always meant a story with him) is very discursive. He may be said to resemble Jeremy Bentham, who, according to Hazlitt's criticism, fills his sentence with a row of pegs, and hangs a garment upon each of them. Let us omit some portion of his tediousness, and allow him to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... dies of a broken heart, with the following somewhat discursive farewell to her child: 'There are two ways in which a mother can be of use to her daughter; the one is by instilling into her mind virtuous principles, and by setting her a virtuous example, the other is by being to her, in her own person, ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... it all was unpremeditated, incoherent, and discursive, and yet strangely effective. She described the contortions of her kaleidoscope as they came to mind haphazard, with an indifference, a precise objectivity that made the picture all the more real and universal, not the special ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... impossible longings and regrets, for he knew full well that neither was his body strong enough nor his soul staunch enough for him to bury himself as a Trappist. Still, once started from that spring-board, his imagination flew off at a tangent, overleaped every obstacle, floated in discursive reveries where he saw himself as a Friar in some easy-going convent under the rule of a merciful Order, devoted to ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... while counselor Kiesewetter and J.F. Costelli were authors of libretti and songs. The others were prominent in court circles, and their devotion to music was such as to give weight to the communication. The memorial itself is discursive to a point which taxes one's patience, but the expressions of appreciation and friendship are genuine, and must have gratified Beethoven extremely. Naturally but one outcome was probable as a result of this memorial. ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... end, the monologue was an incoherent discursive medley, now plaintive, now passionate, at times prayerful, then exultant. As he proceeded, he seemed to lose sight of his present aim at doing good in the hope of release from termless life, and become the Jew ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... Dr. Harding has not something to say that is worth listening to."—-London Daily Mail, "The publishers of 'The Corner of Harley Street' are really justified in comparing these critical papers with Dr. Holmes' 'The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table'.... They are charmingly discursive, often witty, and always full of a genial sympathy with humanity and the ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... genuine, biography of Burns is furnished by his own writings. His letters will, if carefully studied, disprove many of the positions taken up so confidently by would-be interpreters of his history. It is not the purpose of this discursive paper to take up the details of the Clarinda episode; but philandering is scarcely the word by which to describe the mutual relations of the lovers. As for Mrs. M'Lehose, the severest thing that can with justice ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Life," which you have no doubt got. It is hard reading, but intensely interesting. I am a thorough convert to his main results, and it seems to me that nothing more important has appeared since your "Origin." It is a pity he is so awfully voluminous and discursive. When you have thoroughly digested it I shall be glad to know what you are disposed to think. My first notice of it will I think appear in Nature next week, but I have been hurried for it, and it is not so well written an article ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... discussion opening out deceptively from the sparkling stream of the story, or stranded on some lofty sentiment never dreamt of in their philosophy. For the author's mind is, in the best sense of the word, a discursive one. It is full of positive thought, and strikes out right and left like a school-boy who must needs relieve his superabundant spirits by pinching his sister's ear, thrusting his fists in his brother's face, kicking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... arrow in the air had the effect of sending the old fellow off at a tangent. His bent was evidently discursive, and all thoughts of his late religious controversy seemed ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... which tied me to the north. Now that those bonds have fallen entirely from me, and I am back in my southern home—whether for good or for evil rests upon the lap of the high gods—I have been able unexpectedly to resume contact with Dawson and to bring this, discursive book to some kind of a conclusion. It cannot really end so long as Dawson and Froissart and Madame Gilbert live and remain in friendly association with me. They have become parts of my life, and if I have not ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... if it does not excuse, the unequal space devoted to districts with equal claims to attention. But it would take years, if not a lifetime, to render the manuscript of so discursive a ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... from his discursive answer that she had not much of a name one way or another. She was not very fast. It took no fool, though, to steer her straight, he believed. Some years ago he had seen her in Calcutta, and he remembered being told by somebody then, that on her passage ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... very beginning, those plants which scattered their seeds widest throve the best; while those which merely dropped them on the ground under their own shadow, and on soil exhausted by their own previous demands upon it, fared ill in the struggle for life against their more discursive competitors. The result has been that in the long run few species have survived, except those which in one way or another arranged beforehand for the dispersal of their seeds and fruits over fresh and unoccupied ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... The discursive story began to narrow and concentrate itself when at last it reached Mexico. The sister changed her position in her chair, and crossed her knees when Tehuantepec was mentioned. It was from that place that Joel had sent her the amazing ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... and discursive subaltern, relieved on account of rheumatic troubles from more strenuous duties with an Infantry regiment, joined our mess and proved a valuable addition. He was a talented mathematician whose researches had carried him to where mathematics soar ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... only these differences, that the Nature-worship which seems coming will be all the more crushing and slavish, because we know so much better how vast and glorious Nature is; and that the superstitions will be more clumsy and foolish in proportion as our Saxon brain is less acute and discursive, and our education less severely scientific, than those ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... him distinction, and having gained two steps without purchase, removed, too, by his present rank, and the pension for his wound, from being likely to become chargeable to him; so he had written such brotherly congratulations, that good honest Fred was quite affected. He was even discursive enough to mention some connexions of the young man who had been with Fred in the Crimea, a Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy, a very good sort of fellow, who gave excellent dinners, and was a pleasant yachting companion. His ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 'Monseigneur, the most, at present, depends on yourself.—'How so?' asked he. I answered, 'It is only by showing good conduct, and proofs of real wisdom and worth, that the King's entire favor can be gained First of all, to fear God'"—And, in fact, I launched now into a moral preachment, or discursive Dialogue, of great length; much needing to have the skirts of it tucked up, in a way of faithful abridgment, for behoof of poor English readers. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... (1) current, currency, incur, concur, occurrence, cursory, excursion, course, discourse, intercourse, recourse; (2) curriculum, precursor, discursive, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... anyone has a right to indulge in the convenience of indented headings when writing a discursive article, I may claim a share in the privilege. When I retired from the editorship of a morning newspaper, a not obtrusively friendly commentator wrote that my chief claim to be remembered in that connection was that I had invented ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... each, which there is no mistaking. The former, for instance, contains but few metrical passages, whereas the latter is composed of poetry and prose in almost equal proportions. The ethical part continually addresses the reader himself in the second person singular, while the discursive section never does. In a word, internal evidence leaves no doubt that, whether the dislocation of the chapters was the result of accident or design, this was the ground plan of ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... composition as a whole, but in the choice of a single word, while it by no means interferes with, but may even prescribe, much variety, in the building of the sentence for instance, or in the manner, argumentative, descriptive, discursive, of this or that [23] part or member of the entire design. The blithe, crisp sentence, decisive as a child's expression of its needs, may alternate with the long-contending, victoriously intricate sentence; ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... of North America, yet, did space admit, a discussion might profitably be entered upon regarding the details of it among the ancients and the origin of the ceremony. As it is, simple narrations of cremation in this country, with discursive notes and an account of its origin among the Nishinams of California, by Stephen Powers, [Footnote: Cont. to N. A. Ethnol., 1877, vol. iii, p. 341] seem to be all that ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... passage that he wanted to have explained. His sister looked uneasy all the time, and hurried to put on her hat, and stand demonstratively waiting, telling Gillian that they must go, the moment the lesson began to tend to discursive talk, and making a most decided sign of prohibition to her brother when he showed a ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a white hand with blue veins—a strong hand, though so delicately fashioned. The touch of the wedding-ring again gave a new direction to his discursive thoughts. ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... deck, clasping the precious volume to his heart. Allusive or discursive speech scared him like indecency; and I had used his gem but as a peg whereon flauntingly to hang it. It took me three days to tame him and to induce him to show me another of his treasures, recently acquired ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... little or no share in public life, and not cared much for society. Yet they have been folk of more than average ability, with intellectual and aesthetic interests. We are prone to enthusiasms, but lack perseverance. We are discursive and superficial, perhaps, but none would call us stupid. We are perhaps abnormally self-centered and self-conscious—never cruel or vicious. Our powers of self-control are considerable; we are conventional people only because we are lazy and intensely ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... however devoted himself with characteristic energy to the presentation of his case, and prepared a memoir wherein all the most serious grievances of the Upper Canadian people were set forth in detail. In this document the writer adopted a discursive and rhetorical style which, as the Colonial Secretary justly remarked, were "singularly ill adapted to bring questions of so much intricacy and importance to a definite issue." The facts were nevertheless pretty comprehensively embodied, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... captain's order had been obeyed, he commenced the narrative of his love adventure, and for a time spoke with his accustomed calmness: but toward the close he became so exceeding discursive and excited, and it was with so much difficulty we drew from him many little particulars it was essential to hear, that I have been compelled, from regard to brevity as well as strict decorum, to soften down and render in my own words some of the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... things, which, having no corporeal evidence, can be perceived and comprehended only by the discursive energies of reason. Hence the ambiguous nature of matter can be comprehended only by adulterated opinion. Matter is the principle of all bodies, and is stamped with the impression of forms. Fire, air, and water derive their origin ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... farmer's calendar of the seasons as interpreted by the guileless amateur. Joan has what is known as a nice mind. But to tell truth she has chosen a difficult and dangerous if alluring art form. Of course letters enable you to evade some of the difficulties of the novelist's task, to be discursive, allusive and incomplete. But you can't be let off anything of the precision and subtlety of your characterisation. On the contrary. And Joan makes everyone in Pelton (except the rustics, whose authenticity I gravely suspect) talk as Joan writes. They have nearly all seen her commonplace ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... nearly as possible in the very words of my sitters. In the case of this third story, it is impossible for me to proceed upon the same plan. The circumstances of "Sister Rose's" eventful history were narrated to me at different times, and in the most fragmentary and discursive manner. Mademoiselle Clairfait characteristically mixed up with the direct interest of her story, not only references to places and people which had no recognizable connection with it, but outbursts of passionate political declamation, on the extreme liberal side—to say nothing of little ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... been planned to make this an old-fashioned discursive novel, say of the Victor Hugo variety, the second chapter would expend itself upon a philosophical discussion of Fat and a sensational showing of how and why the presence or absence of adipose tissue, at certain important crises, had altered the destinies ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... hearing she was in the grounds, joined her there. She looked ill and anxious, and she received me with rigid politeness. Fortunately, Mrs. Eyrecourt (now convalescent) was staying at Ten Acres, and was then taking the air in her chair on wheels. The good lady's nimble and discursive tongue offered me an opportunity of referring, in the most innocent manner possible, to Winterfield's favorable opinion of Romayne's pictures. I need hardly say that I looked at Romayne's wife when I mentioned the name. She turned pale—probably fearing that I had some knowledge of her letter ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... a style more than usually refined, it was in those works of fiction, those short but agreeable narratives, in which he desired to win the fond attention of the reader, but in which he never endeavoured to call up violent emotions, to engage in the wild speculations of a discursive fancy, or to treat topics requiring logical or historical correctness. For such works as the Sketch Book, we believe the style adopted by Mr. Irving to be eminently well fitted, and we do not hesitate ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... and so does her brother. He is very nice, only his self-consciousness spoils him," returned Nan, in a calm, discursive tone, as though they ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... declared Brick, "and them as has heard it once can take it or leave it." He was discursive, circumstantial, and it was a long time before he led them in fancy to the door of the boat-house and showed them Red Feather and Gledware disappearing forever beneath ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... conflict, science was in the wrong. He seems to have been, from first to last, an unquestioning believer in the doctrines of the Christian religion, and he viewed with great disfavour any one who ventured to question any part of its creed. As a lecturer he was eloquent and though discursive, always interesting. None of his lectures were written, so that to-day they are only a fading memory to those who heard them delivered. Though found acceptable at the time, it is hardly likely that, if delivered at the ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... everybody's imagination took a discursive leap among possibilities, and then everybody, of ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... in the book happily comes first, the essay on Stendhal. Closely and yet lightly written, full of facts yet as amusing as a bit of discursive talk, penetrating, candid and very shrewd, this study would be hard to beat in English, or, for that matter, in French. It is, too, the best of the essays as regards discrimination. There are no shades of Stendhal's genius, whether making ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... be mainly discursive and anecdotal, for no one really knows much more than externals concerning the Chinese. Some men there are, generally reporters on the big dailies, who have been admitted to the tongs; who can take you into the exclusive Chinese clubs; who are everywhere ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... likeness to tree and herb as with the likeness of tree and herb to us; and furthermore, it will go into the whole subject, systematically and at length. Meanwhile, it is open even to an amateur to offer something, in a general and discursive way, upon so inviting a theme, and especially to call attention ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... is not the word for it) is totally unlike that of anybody else I ever heard. It comes forth without the slightest effort, provided he is in spirits and disposed to talk at all. It is the spontaneous outpouring of one of the most fertile and restless of minds, easy, familiar, abundant, and discursive. The qualities and peculiarities of mind which mar his oratorical, give zest and effect to his conversational, powers; for the perpetual bubbling up of fresh ideas, by incapacitating him from condensing his speeches, often makes them tediously digressive and long; but in society he ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands that protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the cartoon of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive talk with him. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... discursive. Lady Engleton enjoyed the pastime of lightly touching the edges of what she called "advanced" thought. She sought the society of people like the two Professors and Miss Du Prel in order to hear what dreadful and ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... frocks they soiled per diem were minutely chronicled. Then her house came under consideration: she depicted the bright glory of the new ponceau furniture, as contrasted with shocking old faded things—and she glanced significantly toward Mrs. Lawson's sofas and chairs. Next she made a discursive detour to the culinary department, and gave a statement of the number of stones of lump sugar she was getting boiled in preserves, and of the days of the week in which they had puddings, and the days they had ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... of the subject has been somewhat discursive, it may be admitted that a great population following callings related to the sea is, now as formerly, a great element of sea power; that the United States is deficient in that element; and that its foundations can be laid only in a large commerce ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... conceived in the moral law, and therefore, only so far as a pure practical use is made of them. As to all the rest that belongs to these conceptions psychologically, that is, so far as we observe these faculties of ours empirically in their exercise (e.g., that the understanding of man is discursive, and its notions therefore not intuitions but thoughts, that these follow one another in time, that his will has its satisfaction always dependent on the existence of its object, etc., which cannot be the case in the Supreme Being), from all this we abstract in that case, and then there remains ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... trees shading Fernando's adobe sat Winthrop and the constable. The brandy-bottle was half empty and a box of cigars was open beside it on the bench. The afternoon shadows were lengthening. The constable had been discursive, voluminous, in his entertaining. Time was as nothing. He borrowed generously of to-morrow and even the next day. He became suddenly quite fond of this quiet, gentlemanly chap opposite him, who said little, but seemed to be a ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly by little and little into a full and clear light." These are different, but certainly very wonderful, instances of what can be done by attention. But now suppose that your mind is in its nature discursive, erratic, subject to electric attractions and repulsions, volage; it may be impossible for you to compel your attention except by taking away all external disturbances. I think the poets have an advantage and a disadvantage ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of his freckled ears. On these occasions Mr. Shrimplin inclined to a certain sad conservatism as he discussed with his son those events of the week last passed which had left their impress on his mind. But what pleased Custer best was when his father, ceasing to be gently discursive and becoming vigorously personal, added yet another canto to the stirring epic of ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... how such a huge mass ever manages to melt," said Elspie—for the human mind, even in pretty girls, is discursive. ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... of head and heart. He has drawn it, indeed, in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude,—shown in all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty, sees all things in and by the light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone. In all the Shakespearian women there is essentially the same foundation and principle; the distinct individuality and variety ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... at His will, Maker of all things. So, He rules the world, With wrath commingling mercy. Who may hope With finite mind to understand His ways, So excellent in power, in wisdom deep, In justice terrible, respecting none Who pride themselves in fancied wisdom." Hark! On the discursive speech a whirlwind breaks, Tornadoes shake the desert, thunders roll And from the lightning's startled shrine, a voice! The voice of the Eternal. "Who is this That darkeneth knowledge by unmeaning words? Gird up thy loins and answer. Where wert thou When the foundations of the earth were laid? ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... an affectionate song of praise of the Mediterranean and the dwellers on its littoral, especially the fiery and hardy sailors of Spain, and of Spaniards, in particular the Valencians and Catalonians. Signor IBANEZ' method is distinctly discursive; he gives, for instance, six-and-twenty consecutive pages to the description of the inmates of the Naples Aquarium and is always ready to suspend his story for a lengthy disquisition on any subject, person or place that interests him. This puts ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... the first meditation (pathamam jhanam) the mind is concentrated on the object in the way of understanding it with its form and name and of comprehending it with its diverse relations. This state of concentration is called vitakka (discursive meditation). The next stage of the first meditation is that in which the mind does not move in the object in relational terms but becomes fixed and settled in it and penetrates into it without any quivering. This state is called vicara (steadily moving). The first ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... its whole energy directed to getting the meaning, the greatest care should be given to making a plan. No person who has attained distinction in prose has worked without a plan. Any piece of literature, even the most discursive, has in it something of plan; but in literature of the first rank the plan is easily discovered. How clear it is in Macaulay's essay has been seen. In Burke it is yet more logical and exact. However beautiful a piece may be, however ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... Bill's discursive remarks upon other subjects, and put into rather more choice English than that in which the latter delivered it, ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... really chosen the Best Swell Place by the fact of a vacant table at a window looking out over a box hedge. Jack told the waiter that the assemblage was not an autocracy, but a parliament which, with a full quorum present, would enjoy in discursive appreciation selections from the broad range of ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Daddy John rolled off to meet him there. The novelty of the moment over, the children returned sedately to their play, and the women sat together under the canopy of the tree. Bella's adventures had been few and tame, Susan's was the great story. She was not discursive about her marriage. She was still shy on the subject and sensitively aware of the disappointment that Bella was too artlessly amazed to conceal. She passed over it quickly, pretending that she ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... of the history of cacao owes much to "Cocoa—all about it," by Historicus (the pseudonym of the late Richard Cadbury). This work is out of print, but those who are fortunate enough to be able to consult it will find therein much that is curious and discursive. ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... commas, who corrupted words and sentences. Whatever could be done by adjusting points is therefore silently performed, in some plays with much diligence, in others with less; it is hard to keep a busy eye steadily fixed upon evanescent atoms, or a discursive mind upon ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... to Scripture, "No man shall see God and live" (Exod. xxxiii. 20). Now all discursive exercises of prayer, or even of active contemplation, regarded as an end, and not as a preparation for the passive, are exercises of life by which we cannot see God, that is, become united to Him. All that is of man, and of his own industry, however noble and ...
— A Short Method Of Prayer And Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... there was no response. Yet it was part of the Doctor's system of aggravation to become discursive at these moments, in the hope of interruption, and he continued for some moments to dwell on the terrible possibility of a state of affairs in which a gentleman could no longer settle a dispute with an enemy without being subjected to succeeding spiritual embarrassment. But all this digression ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... be puzzled by the title of this discursive volume, the following verses may provide him with an explanation. They were written some time ago for a lady who had requested, required, requisitioned (I forget the precise shade of the imperative) ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "Saklatun", whence Mr. Skeat would derive "scarlet." This note is from the voyage of F. Pyrard, etc. London. Hakluyts, M.dccc.lxxxvii.; and the editor quotes Colonel Yule's M. Polo (ii. chapt. 58) and his "Discursive Glossary s. v. Suclat." ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... "The Mill on the Floss" seems to me to have most dramatic continuity, in distinction from that descriptive, discursive method of narration which I have attempted to indicate. After Hetty Sorrel, I think Maggie Tulliver the most successful of the author's young women, and after Tito Melema, Tom Tulliver the best of her young men. English novels abound ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... find themselves at home. Nor is it a lack of dignity and composure in the parlor or at the table. Nor is it a lack of sense of propriety in meetings of worship. But it is in matters ethical, civic and deliberate, and in the free and discursive meetings of men, in which new and intricate questions are to arise; in positions of trust, in which the highest considerations of social responsibility constitute the trust; in these, the men and women trained in Quakerism are lacking throughout ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... published posthumously, became a text-book for students, and reached a nineteenth edition in 1851. Their faults, considered as philosophical treatises, are palpable. They have the wordiness of hasty composition, and the discursive rhetoric intended to catch the attention of an indolent audience. Brown does not see that he is insulting his hearers when he apologises for introducing logic into lectures upon metaphysics, and indemnifies them by quotations ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... plow one's way; slide, glide, coast, skim, skate; march in procession, file on, defile. go to, repair to, resort to, hie to, betake oneself to. Adj. traveling &c. v.; ambulatory, itinerant, peripatetic, roving, rambling, gadding, discursive, vagrant, migratory, monadic; circumforanean[obs3], circumforaneous[obs3]; noctivagrant[obs3], mundivagrant; locomotive. wayfaring, wayworn; travel-stained. Adv. on foot, on horseback, on Shanks's mare; by the Marrowbone stage: in transitu &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Eastern adventurer. The art of quiet and entertaining conversation, which is always easy as well as entertaining, is chiefly known in England. In Scotland we are pedantic and wrangle, or we run away with the harrows on some topic we chance to be discursive upon. In Ireland they have too much vivacity, and are too desirous to make a show, to preserve the golden mean. They are the Gascons of Britain. George Ellis was the best converser I ever knew; his patience and good breeding made me often ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... descendeth unto the third and fourth generation, he was early taught to love De Quincey, and although, being a truthful man, he cannot swear he has read every page in all the fifteen volumes—roxburghe calf—yet he knows his way about in that whimsical, discursive, but ever satisfying writer, who will write on anything, or any person, always with freshness and in good English, from the character of Judas Iscariot and "Murder as a Fine Art" to the Lake Poets—there never was a Lake school—and ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... Lever's books have the quality rather of speech than of writing; wherever you open the pages there is always a witty, well-informed Irishman discoursing to you, who tells his story admirably, when he has one to tell, and, failing that, never fails to be pleasant. Irish talk is apt to be discursive; to rely upon a general charm diffused through the whole, rather than upon any quotable brilliancy; its very essence is spontaneity, high spirits, fertility of resource. That is a fair description of Lever. He ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... Holy Russia. In The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary (Macmillan) he returns with even more than his customary zeal to his good work, wishing herein specifically to interpret Russian Christianity to the West. A passionate earnestness informs his discursive eloquence. I cannot resist the conviction that he has the type of mind that sees most easily what it wishes to see. He moves cheerily along, incidentally raising difficulties which he does not solve, ignoring conclusions ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various
... signs of recovery in Ovid's face, Carmina detected a faint return of colour. She was so relieved that she was able to listen to the doctor's oddly discursive talk, and even to join in it. "Some of our friends used to think I was like ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... had left his wife alone for six months at an hotel, whilst he went and amused himself. He scarcely glanced at the small daughter, now presented to him for the first time; and he bade Madame Lavaux, the mistress of the hotel, "make haste and finish with all that," when, with tearful voice, and discursive minuteness, she related to him the history of his wife's last days. He made all necessary arrangements; took possession of Madame Linders' watch and few trinkets; himself superintended the packing of her clothes and other trifling properties into a large trunk, which he left in Madame ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... his affections is present. He is the very picture of confusion and distress, looking like a man who has lost something, and knows not where to seek for it. His eyes wander from the carpet to the ceiling; at one moment he is engaged in counting the panes in the window, and the next in watching the discursive flights of a blue-bottle round the apartment. But while he appears anxiously seeking for some object on which to fix his attention, he carefully avoids looking towards his innamorata; and should their eyes meet by chance, his cheeks assume the tint of the beet-root ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... done them, they had only to ask and have. But midst this he read, and he lacked not mental food to feed on, as his father possessed a large and well-stocked library. Henry's reading, however, was necessarily desultory and discursive, but such the retention of his memory, that he forgot nothing he had once conned; as an instance of this I must relate an anecdote, often told of him by Mr. Jay, an attorney at Norwich, still living, and who was an excellent client, and a great admirer of my brother, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... of a polar expedition which brought back more results than any of its forerunners: Scott's Discovery voyage. We had the largest and most efficient scientific staff that ever left England. We were discursive. We were full of intellectual interests and curiosities of all kinds. We took on the work of two ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... brought this discursive lady back to the point: "Would she be so kind as go with this good youth to the ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... end to these discursive sentences, let me add this poetic morsel in my own vein. Mr. Butler of Philadelphia was quite right in his judgment of my indoles: I "write by impulse on occasion." Here is a very recent instance in point. I had lately visited Mr. Barraud's painted-window works near Seven Dials, and ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Bantling felt himself quite equal), but the cause of Miss Stackpole's need of demonstrative affection. Each of these groping celibates supplied at any rate a want of which the other was impatiently conscious. Mr. Bantling, who was of rather a slow and a discursive habit, relished a prompt, keen, positive woman, who charmed him by the influence of a shining, challenging eye and a kind of bandbox freshness, and who kindled a perception of raciness in a mind to which the usual fare of life seemed unsalted. Henrietta, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... in plants as nature or growth, and in inorganic substances as 'holding' or cohesion. To this lowest stage add change, and you have growth or plant nature; super-add to this phantasy and impulse and you rise to the soul of irrational animals; at a yet higher stage you reach the rational and discursive intellect, which is peculiar ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... neither talked much, but having obtained the necessary stock of perch, they landed at the favourite spring, and prepared a fry. While seated on the grass, alternating be tween the potations of punch, and the mastication of fish, these worthies again renewed the dialogue in their usual discursive, philosophical, and ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... is a very complimentary thing to say about any novel. Written in diary form, on the whole successfully, it tells little of doing and much of being, and a great deal more of feeling than of either. It is scarcely necessary after that to add that it is discursive. As a matter of fact I found that for me that half of its charm which did not lie in being whisked off, as it were by magic, to sit in the sunshine of Switzerland lay in its author's reflections upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... the consideration of balance until a complication of many units forces the necessity upon it. The painter who esteems lightly the subject of composition is usually found to be the painter of simple subjects—portraits and non-discursive themes, but though these may survive in antagonism to such principles their authors are demanding more from the technical quality of their work than ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... clearness, the reader has a right to demand, in the first place, discursive or logical clearness, that is, on the basis of conceptions, and, secondly, intuitive or aesthetic clearness, by means of intuitions, that is, by examples or other modes of illustration in concreto. I have done what I could for the first ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... little prepared by her discursive reading and discussion under the Widgett influence for ideas and "movements," though temperamentally perhaps she was rather disposed to resist and criticise than embrace them. But the people among whom ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... a position which it had not attained, even in Spain earlier, even in France at more or less the same time: and had entirely antiquated, on the one hand, the mere fabliau or novella—the story of a single limited situation—on the other, the discursive romance with little plot and next to no character. One great further development, impossible at this time, of the larger novel, the historical, waited for Scott: but even this was soon, though very awkwardly, tried. It could not yet ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... in the latter year was appointed rector of the college at Gratz. During this time the Archduke Ferdinand chose him as his confessor. Not long afterwards he was accused to the General of being a courtier, an imputation so vague as to need a discursive reply. But his long letter of self justification addressed to Father Aquaviva is interesting on account of the vivid scenes it lays before us. ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... to sketch, while I walked on. This often happened. Indeed, his rambles were often discursive, so that I lost sight of him for hours together; once in Sardinia, when there was reason to fear his having been carried off to the mountains by banditti. Thus, each had his separate adventures; on the present occasion I had opened out a new and splendid view, and, having retraced my steps ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... writings, however, Johnson manages, almost entirely, to throw off these impediments. In his deep capacity for sympathy and reverence, we recognise some of the elements that go to the making of a poet. He is always a man of intuitions rather than of discursive intellect; often keen of vision, though wanting in analytical power. For poetry, indeed, as it is often understood now, or even as it was understood by Pope, he had little enough qualification. He had not the intellectual vivacity implied in the marvellously neat ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... incursions of the sea like that which broke in over Holland and formed the Zuyder Zee, may have often occurred, can be made to look like evidence that something that, by courtesy, might be called a general Deluge has really taken place. Their discursive energy drags misunderstood truth into their service; and "the glacial epoch" is as sure to crop up among them as King Charles's head in a famous memorial—with about as much appropriateness. The old story of the raised beach on ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... their Greek, Gibbon was beginning to learn it. Was this early deficiency ever repaired in Greek as it was in Latin? I think not. He never was at home in old Hellas as he was in old Rome. This may be inferred from the discursive notes of his great work, in which he has with admirable skill incorporated so much of his vast and miscellaneous reading. But his references to classic Greek authors are relatively few and timid compared with his grasp and mastery ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... the actual results of these imaginary phenomena, and the crimes and cruelties they have caused us to commit, is one of the most instructive studies in which we can possibly be engaged. It is here that man is most astonishing, and that we contemplate with most admiration the discursive and unbounded nature of ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... to-day would print the disquisitions which Hamilton wrote in 1788 in support of the Constitution, or that, if it did, any one would read them, least of all the lawyers; and yet Mr. Roosevelt's audience was emotional and discursive even for a modern American audience. Hence, if he attempted to lead at all, he had little choice but to adopt, or at least discuss, every nostrum for reaching an immediate millennium which happened to be uppermost; although, at the same time, he had ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... substance is so elusive and requires such alert attention on the part of the listener, cannot continually present new material[17] without becoming diffuse; but instead, must make its impression by varied emphasis upon the main thought. Otherwise it would become so discursive that one could not possibly follow it. From these historical facts as to the structure of music certain inferences may be drawn; the vital importance of which to the listener can hardly be exaggerated. As polyphonic treatment (the imitation and interweaving of independent melodic lines) ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... to be conversational I have only managed to be unduly discursive. I have never been very well acquainted with the art of conversation—that art which, I understand, is supposed to be lost now. My young days, the days when one's habits and character are formed, have been rather familiar with long silences. Such voices as broke into ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... the soft, sweet sense of ease, like the breath of violets in the air, that surrounded him. They talked of all sorts of things, or rather, as he said to himself, they babbled, for real talk could hardly be so discursive, so aimless, so merely merry. She made him think of a child playing with a lapful of flowers; that was what her talk was like. She would spread them out in formal rows, arrange them in pretty, intricate posies, or, suddenly, gather them into generous handfuls which she gave you with a pleased ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... upon some pleasant view, or unexpectedly entering an apparently previously unexplored nook, more than atoned for such trifling annoyances. Without digression in some degree, neither spoken nor written language can be made entertaining to the person addressed. Who is more discursive than the Autocrat, the Czar of table-talkers; and whose productions are more charming or wiser? We do not do our everyday thinking in strictly logical or consistent forms. It is sufficient to introduce hypotheses, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... historical person emerge as it were out of the clay, like a second Eve; but he makes a mental reservation that it would be better if English and American sculptors would make a freer use of their chisels—of which more hereafter. Story was a light-hearted, discursive person, with a large amount of bric-a-brac information, who could appreciate Hawthorne either as a genius or as a celebrity. He soon became Hawthorne's chief companion and social mainstay in Rome, literally a vade mecum, and we may believe that he exercised more or less influence ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... that result when art comes in—not so much to transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself." In other words, it is not until the true story has been converted into fiction by the suppression of whatever is discursive or ungainly, and the addition of a stroke of fantasy, that it becomes integral, balanced in all its parts, ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... speak of language, we mean chiefly phonetic articulate language, we do not exclude the less perfect symbols of thought, such as gestures, signs, or pictures. They, too, are language in a certain sense, and they must be included in language before we are justified in saying that discursive thought can be realized in language only. One instance will make this clear. We hold that we cannot think without language. But can we not count without language? We certainly can. We can form the conception of three without any spoken word, by simply holding up three fingers. In the same manner, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... first, the belief in insight as against discursive analytic knowledge: the belief in a way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating, coercive, which is contrasted with the slow and fallible study of outward appearance by a science relying wholly upon the senses. ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... Merriam worked down the coast by schooner and sloop to Colon, thence across the isthmus to Panama, where he caught a tramp bound for Callao and such intermediate ports as might tempt the discursive skipper from ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... because the most genuine, biography of Burns is furnished by his own writings. His letters will, if carefully studied, disprove many of the positions taken up so confidently by would-be interpreters of his history. It is not the purpose of this discursive paper to take up the details of the Clarinda episode; but philandering is scarcely the word by which to describe the mutual relations of the lovers. As for Mrs. M'Lehose, the severest thing that can with ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... 1595, and in the latter year was appointed rector of the college at Gratz. During this time the Archduke Ferdinand chose him as his confessor. Not long afterwards he was accused to the General of being a courtier, an imputation so vague as to need a discursive reply. But his long letter of self justification addressed to Father Aquaviva is interesting on account of the vivid scenes it lays before us. Its main ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... lounge, pressing her throbbing temple upon the pillow. All the wretchedness of her life seems to have culminated, the little doubts she has thrust out or tried to overlive. Somehow she appears to have worked a great and unwitting change in the Grandon family. Once, when Denise was in a discursive mood, she told Violet of Mr. Wilmarth's proposal of marriage. What if she had married him? Violet thinks now. Marcia talks about her "Vulcan" with a curious pride, and he certainly is indulgent. In that case Violet would have marred ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Molly lightly, "I suppose Sidney told you a little of our news. Men's letters are not discursive as a rule I know, but ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... pick one's way, thread one's way, plow one's way; slide, glide, coast, skim, skate; march in procession, file on, defile. go to, repair to, resort to, hie to, betake oneself to. Adj. traveling &c. v.; ambulatory, itinerant, peripatetic, roving, rambling, gadding, discursive, vagrant, migratory, monadic; circumforanean[obs3], circumforaneous[obs3]; noctivagrant[obs3], mundivagrant; locomotive. wayfaring, wayworn; travel-stained. Adv. on foot, on horseback, on Shanks's mare; by the Marrowbone stage: ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... glanced down his beard, and Razumov, whose tension was relaxed by that unexpected and discursive turn, ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... many things, which, having no corporeal evidence, can be perceived and comprehended only by the discursive energies of reason. Hence the ambiguous nature of matter can be comprehended only by adulterated opinion. Matter is the principle of all bodies, and is stamped with the impression of forms. Fire, air, and water derive their origin and principle from the scalene triangle. ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... beginning, those plants which scattered their seeds widest throve the best; while those which merely dropped them on the ground under their own shadow, and on soil exhausted by their own previous demands upon it, fared ill in the struggle for life against their more discursive competitors. The result has been that in the long run few species have survived, except those which in one way or another arranged beforehand for the dispersal of their seeds and fruits over fresh and unoccupied areas ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... an eminent English divine and philosopher, born in Somerset; his chief work, a vast and discursive one, and to which he owes his fame, "The True Intellectual System of the Universe," in which he teaches a philosophy of the Platonic type, which ascribes more to the abiding inner than the fugitive ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... sermon by observing, that it was not a little remarkable that there were so few good reasoners in the world, considering that the discursive faculty was one of the characteristics of man's nature, as contrasted with brute animals. It had indeed been said that brutes reasoned; but this was an analogical sense of the word "reason," and an instance of that very ambiguity ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... rather impatiently, for Aunt Agatha, with all her perfections, was too much given to proverbial and discursive philosophy; "but to reduce this to practice, what work can I do in this ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... say, 'you will never trust your discursive faculty so long as you live, if you are mistaken here' ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... trade, chief among which are M.B. Hammond's The Cotton Industry (1897) and C.W. Burkett and C.H. Poe's Cotton, its Cultivation, Marketing, Manufacture, and the Problems of the Cotton World (1906). D.A. Tompkins, in Cotton and Cotton Oil (1901), gives valuable material but is rather discursive. J.A.B. Scherer, in Cotton as a World Power (1916), attempts to show the influence of cotton upon history. Holland Thompson in From the Cotton Field to the Cotton Mill (1906) deals with the economic and social changes arising from the development of manufacturing in an ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... Our discursive notice would, probably, contribute but little to this joint-stock production; but as even comparing notes is not always unprofitable, we venture ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... English. His walk in life gives him a singularly catholic outlook. His learning is profound, but he is not overburdened by it, and he preserves his native gaiety of style even when solving crabbed problems of bibliography. He is at times discursive, but he is never tedious; and he shows no trace of that philological pedantry and narrowness or obliquity of critical vision which the detailed study of literary history has been known to breed in English and German investigators. While M. Jusserand ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... cohesion. To this lowest stage add change, and you have growth or plant nature; super-add to this phantasy and impulse and you rise to the soul of irrational animals; at a yet higher stage you reach the rational and discursive intellect, which is peculiar ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... the reader has a right to demand, in the first place, discursive or logical clearness, that is, on the basis of conceptions, and, secondly, intuitive or aesthetic clearness, by means of intuitions, that is, by examples or other modes of illustration in concreto. I have done what I could for the first kind of intelligibility. This was essential ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... sense, Browning's longest work is akin to that of his wife. Both "The Ring and the Book" and "Aurora Leigh" are metrical novels. The one is discursive in episodes and spiritual experiences: the other in intricacies of evidence. But there the parallel ends. If "The Ring and the Book" were deflowered of its blooms of poetry and rendered into a prose narrative, it might interest a barrister ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... And such light and discursive thoughts as visit the brain only when it is weary and resting began straying through Yevgeny Petrovitch's head; there is no telling whence and why they come, they do not remain long in the mind, but seem to glide ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... surely, have seemed in our own generation less distinctive of our peculiar quality. While admirable biographical and critical studies appear from time to time, and here and there a whimsical or trenchant discursive essay like those of Miss Repplier or Dr. Crothers, no one would claim that we approach France or even England in the field of criticism, literary history, memoirs, the bookish essay, and biography. We may have race-memories ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... assistance, they are not able to do it any harm—none whatever; they do enough when they trouble its rest. When I say they do no harm, my meaning is, that they cannot really hurt it, because they have not strength enough, and because they are too discursive. As the understanding gives no help, neither much nor little, in the matters put before the soul, they never rest anywhere, but hurry to and fro, like nothing else but gnats at night, troublesome and unquiet: and so they go about from one subject ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... the moving sea, an almost unbearable loneliness would fall upon soul and body; she needed Warren, she said to herself, often with bitter tears. Warren, splashing in his bath, scattering wet towels and discarded garments so royally about the place; Warren, in a discursive mood, regarding some operation as he stropped his razor; Warren's old, half-unthinking "you look sweet, dear," when, fresh and dainty, his wife was ready to go downstairs—for these and a thousand other memories of ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... out his hand; but Mr. Edmonstone withheld it, trying his patience by an endless quantity of discursive half-sentences, apparently without connection with each other, about disappointment, and hopes, and being sorry, and prospects, and its 'being an unpleasant thing,' and 'best not raise his expectations:' during all which time Philip, expecting to hear of Laura, and his heart beating so fast as ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... measure, the intellect of the metaphysician with the temperament of the great psychic, so that he was able to analyse with the most precise dialectic, experiences which in most cases paralyse the tongue and blind the discursive reason. His sixth Ennead, "On the Good or the One," is one of the great philosophic treatises of the world, and it sums up in matchless words the whole mystic position and experience. There are two statements in it which contain ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... a critical edition of the text nor an emended edition of Casaubon's translation, it has not been thought necessary to add full notes. Casaubon's own notes have been omitted, because for the most part they are discursive, and not necessary to an understanding of what is written. In those which here follow, certain emendations of his are mentioned, which he proposes in his notes, and follows in the translation. In addition, one or two corrections are made where ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... "the winter of the deep snow," Lincoln became acquainted with one Denton Offutt, an adventurous and discursive sort of merchant, with more irons in the fire than he could well manage. He wanted to take a flat-boat and cargo to New Orleans, and having heard that Hanks and Lincoln had some experience of the river, he insisted on their ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... utility, that it is strange that in sea-girt England we should possess no treatise on the subject at all commensurate with its importance. There is a large work on the subject by Bernardi, a Neapolitan, too voluminous and discursive for general use; and by being in the Italian language, a sealed book to the English reader. A translation of this work into German was reviewed in the 67th number of the Quarterly Review; and after the observations made by the reviewer, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 528, Saturday, January 7, 1832 • Various
... these discursive sentences, let me add this poetic morsel in my own vein. Mr. Butler of Philadelphia was quite right in his judgment of my indoles: I "write by impulse on occasion." Here is a very recent instance in point. I had lately visited Mr. Barraud's painted-window works near Seven ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... most cordially coincide, and at the same time bring these somewhat rambling and discursive reminiscences to ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... which is quite too unflinching for contemporary nerves. Our bonne foi is still sophisticated in comparison with that of the great Gascon. Of all essayists who have yet written, he is the most transparent, the most sincere even in his stratagems, the most discursive, the most free-tongued, and therefore the most alive. A classic commonplace becomes in his hands a new intimacy of feeling: where verbal commonplaces have, as it were, glazed over the surface of our sense, he goes behind them to rouse anew the living nerve. And there is no theme on which he ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... steals anything, I will be responsible for it): a form of introduction, by the way, too sweeping in its suretyship for prudent men to use in Riverina—I shall describe the group, severally, with such succinctness as may be compatible with my somewhat discursive style. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... in forcing their thoughts to concentrate themselves on any given subject, or in afterwards compelling them to take a comprehensive glance of every feature of that subject. Both these processes require much the same habits of mind: the latter, perhaps, though apparently the more discursive in its nature, demands a still greater degree of ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... suggestions escape?—where do you meet with the details that fix your attention at the time and cling to your memory for ever?—where do both writer and reader luxuriate so much at their case, and feel that they are wisely discursive?—But if we pursue this idea, it will be scarcely possible to avoid something which might look like self-praise; and we content ourselves for the present with expressing our humble conviction that we are doing a service to writers and readers, by calling forth materials ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... the least attractive of the papers in the London University Magazine, we ought also to run over the lighter portions of its pages. These are "A young head, and, what is still better, a young heart,"—discursive enough—"A Tale of the Irish Rebellion—the Guerilla ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... entertaining conversation, which is always easy as well as entertaining, is chiefly known in England. In Scotland we are pedantic and wrangle, or we run away with the harrows on some topic we chance to be discursive upon. In Ireland they have too much vivacity, and are too desirous to make a show, to preserve the golden mean. They are the Gascons of Britain. George Ellis was the best converser I ever knew; his patience and good ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... under the conditions of experience—the exterior conditions of physical nature and human society. Such are the ideas of cause and substance; of unity and infinity, which govern all the processes of discursive thought, and lead us to the recognition of Being in se;—such the ideas of right, of duty, of accountability, and of retribution, which regulate all the conceptions we form of our relations to all other moral beings, and constitute morality;—such the ideas of order, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... was a moment to live over; and to myself now I was more discursive. I vanquished the giant trout again and again, altering details of the contest at will—as when I waded into icy water to the waist in a last moment of panic. My calm review disclosed that this had been fanciful overcaution; but at the great crisis and ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... before August, 1914, the POSTMASTER-GENERAL was wont to give on the Vote for his department a long and discursive account of its multifarious activities, and to enliven the figures with anecdotes and even with jokes. Mr. ILLINGWORTH knows a better way. With deliberate monotony he reeled off his statistics to a steadily diminishing audience. Only once did he evoke a sign of animation. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various
... delicious passage at the end, like a draught of fragrant wine, about the gowned figures evaporating into the twilight, and the nightingale heard among the flowering chestnuts of Jesus. But the talk itself is discursive and somewhat pompous. However, it is not of that that I wish to speak, it is rather of the passage from Digby's Godefridus which is read aloud by the narrator, which sets out to analyse the joyful and generous temperament of Youth. "They [the young] are easily put to Shame" ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... world, would not know how to find, nor intend to find, a way of communication with his creation, would certainly be an idea theologically inconceivable. We should, therefore, still have to adhere to the idea of a special providence of God, even if in our discursive reasoning and exact investigation of the processes in the world we should not find a single guide referring us to the scientific possibility of such a direct and uninterrupted dependence of the world on its author. ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... much to ponder in his old friend's counsels. They were discursive and many-fronted, and whenever he seemed to be penetrating or defeating the particular considerations under examination the others in the background had a way of appearing invincible. He had a strong persuasion that Likeman was wrong—and unanswerable. And the true God now was no ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... to make this an old-fashioned discursive novel, say of the Victor Hugo variety, the second chapter would expend itself upon a philosophical discussion of Fat and a sensational showing of how and why the presence or absence of adipose tissue, at certain important crises, had altered the ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... now the tension of the mind relieves the tension of the heart. On the one side we have all passages of life-weariness, whether as the issue of long meditation, or as the outcome of familiar talk; and on the other we have the brilliant and discursive criticism of man and Nature continued throughout the play. All this is so closely connected with the treason of his mother, that we see the very attachment of ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... to ward off a just verdict of unsuitableness and of incompetency by bringing many and grievous charges against their flocks. "A mania for church-extending"; "a hankering for architectural splendor"; "or for discursive and satirical preaching"; "or for something florid or profound": these and the like imputations have been put forward, as a screen, by many an unsuccessful preacher, who failed,—simply failed,—not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... SADLY discursive as I have already been, I must still further entreat the reader's patience, as I am about to string together, without any attempt at order, a few odds and ends of things not hitherto mentioned, but which are either curious in themselves ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... tedious. No one could imagine that the New York press of to-day would print the disquisitions which Hamilton wrote in 1788 in support of the Constitution, or that, if it did, any one would read them, least of all the lawyers; and yet Mr. Roosevelt's audience was emotional and discursive even for a modern American audience. Hence, if he attempted to lead at all, he had little choice but to adopt, or at least discuss, every nostrum for reaching an immediate millennium which happened to be uppermost; although, at the ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... He at once resolved to abandon his own impossible country and settle in Spain. Accompanied by his wife and his two young daughters, he set out from Calais with his carriage, his horse, his man-servant, and his monkey. A discursive, disorderly, delightful book is the record of his journey through France into Catalonia, of his visit to Montserrat, which takes up the larger part of it, of the abandonment of his proposed settlement ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... too conscious of his sad shortcoming, or, rather, of his failing powers. Only eight papers had come from his hand when it closed in death. In September the first of his papers was published—"Personal Recollections;" the last in November—"A Visit to the British Museum;" they are garrulous and discursive, and a good deal of the humour they contain was repeated from earlier works. That they should have contained any at all, under the circumstances, is the wonder; indeed, one is irresistibly reminded by them of his own humorous ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... unintentionally comic, the former of which Sterne read with an only too retentive a memory for their jests, and the latter with an acutely humorous appreciation of their solemn trifling. Later on it will be time to note the extent to which he utilized these results of his widely discursive reading, and to examine the legitimacy of the mode in which he used them: here it is enough to say generally that the materials for many a burlesque chapter of Tristram Shandy must have been unconsciously storing themselves in his ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... that enables the least educated native of eastern Europe to talk and write in at least half a dozen tongues. A more congenial companion cannot be desired for the hours when one "pours out heart affluence in discursive talk," and when the conversation, dealing at first with things near at hand and next to us, reaches out and rises to the greater questions ...
— Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High - Frequency • Nikola Tesla
... stages of the first meditation (pathamam jhanam) the mind is concentrated on the object in the way of understanding it with its form and name and of comprehending it with its diverse relations. This state of concentration is called vitakka (discursive meditation). The next stage of the first meditation is that in which the mind does not move in the object in relational terms but becomes fixed and settled in it and penetrates into it without any quivering. This state is called ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... actual results of these imaginary phenomena, and the crimes and cruelties they have caused us to commit, is one of the most instructive studies in which we can possibly be engaged. It is here that man is most astonishing, and that we contemplate with most admiration the discursive and unbounded nature ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... the same. Lever's books have the quality rather of speech than of writing; wherever you open the pages there is always a witty, well-informed Irishman discoursing to you, who tells his story admirably, when he has one to tell, and, failing that, never fails to be pleasant. Irish talk is apt to be discursive; to rely upon a general charm diffused through the whole, rather than upon any quotable brilliancy; its very essence is spontaneity, high spirits, fertility of resource. That is a fair description of Lever. He is never at ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... no hindrance to my volubility, I am glad to say; a back is not very inspiring or expressive, but Ruth can tell me when you look bored if I wax too discursive." ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... already a little prepared by her discursive reading and discussion under the Widgett influence for ideas and "movements," though temperamentally perhaps she was rather disposed to resist and criticise than embrace them. But the people among whom she was now thrown through the social exertions of Miss Miniver and the Widgetts—for Teddy ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... find the will to realise even the most timid of its dreams. And I wondered if always it would be so, if man was a doomed animal who would never to the last days of his time take hold of fate and change it to his will. Always, it may be, he will remain kindly but jealous, desirous but discursive, able and unwisely impulsive, until Saturn who begot him shall devour him ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... all. In each species he excels the specialists. He surpasses the school of Antiphon in perspicuity, the school of Lysias in verve, the school of Isocrates in variety, in felicity, in symmetry, in pathos, in power. Demosthenes has at command all the discursive brilliancy which fascinates a festal audience. He has that power of concise and lucid narration, of terse reasoning, of persuasive appeal, which is required by the forensic speaker. His political eloquence can worthily image the majesty of the state, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... made by ill-natured tale-bearers who met with more encouragement than they deserved, created some consternation in the family circle; while the reading set at Cambridge was duly scandalised at the influence which one, whose classical attainments were rather discursive than exact, had gained over a Craven scholar. To this hour men may be found in remote parsonages who mildly resent the fascination which Austin of Jesus exercised over Macaulay of Trinity. [It was at this period ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... July and August last, under the title, The Revised American Prayer Book. Here we come upon a writer who, if not always edifying, has the undoubted merit of being never dull. In fact, so deliciously are logical inconsequence and accidental humor mingled throughout his fifteen columns of discursive criticism that a suspicion arises as to the writer's nationality. It is doubtful whether anyone born on the English side of the Irish Sea could possibly have suggested the establishment of a Saint's Day in honor of the late respected Warden of Racine College, or seriously have proposed that ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... year 1281, the Kadi lived with much honour, famed as the most learned and widely-read personage in Damascus, filling his house with scholars and discursive amateurs of verse, and engaging in conversations that are described by a friend as "most instructive, being entirely devoted to learned investigations and ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... of the chateaux of that part of France; his system being to talk only of the large towns, where he may be supposed to find a market for his goods. It was his ambition to pass for an ironmonger. But in the large towns he is usually excellent company, though as discursive as Sterne and strangely indifferent, for a man of imagination, to those superficial aspects of things which the poor pages now before the reader are mainly an attempt to render. It is his conviction that Alfieri, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... the office, but hung around awhile as though there were something further he wished to speak about. Finally, after some discursive remarks about the crops and politics, he asked, in an offhand, disinterested manner, as though the thought had just occurred ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... is worth listening to."—-London Daily Mail, "The publishers of 'The Corner of Harley Street' are really justified in comparing these critical papers with Dr. Holmes' 'The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table'.... They are charmingly discursive, often witty, and always full of a genial sympathy with humanity and the significant ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... the leaves of a book, joining in with a word now and then, it was, in the main, the soft, sweet sense of ease, like the breath of violets in the air, that surrounded him. They talked of all sorts of things, or rather, as he said to himself, they babbled, for real talk could hardly be so discursive, so aimless, so merely merry. She made him think of a child playing with a lapful of flowers; that was what her talk was like. She would spread them out in formal rows, arrange them in pretty, intricate posies, or, suddenly, gather them into generous ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... purchase, removed, too, by his present rank, and the pension for his wound, from being likely to become chargeable to him; so he had written such brotherly congratulations, that good honest Fred was quite affected. He was even discursive enough to mention some connexions of the young man who had been with Fred in the Crimea, a Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy, a very good sort of fellow, who gave excellent dinners, and was a pleasant yachting companion. His wife was said to be very pretty and pleasing, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Logic at Queen's Coll., Belfast, and thereafter Pres. of Princeton Coll., New Jersey. He wrote several works on philosophy, including Method of the Divine Government (1850), Intuitions of the Mind inductively investigated (1860), Laws of Discursive Thought (1870), Scottish Philosophy ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... of a Regatta; and taking their courage in their hands had sought an interview with Sir Felix, to entreat his patronage for the scheme. They had found him in his most amiable mood, and within an hour—the old gentleman is discursive—he had consented to become Patron and President and to honour the gathering with his presence. But observe; the idea cannot have originated before August the 12th, on which day the trio arrived from London; yet a whisper of it had reached me on the 2nd or 3rd. ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... it seemed to Bernard that he had grown to be less of a talker than of yore. Doubtless, when a man finds himself united to a garrulous wife, he naturally learns to hold his tongue; but sometimes, at the close of one of Blanche's discursive monologues, on glancing at her husband just to see how he took it, and seeing him sit perfectly silent, with a fixed, inexpressive smile, Bernard said to himself that Gordon found the lesson of listening attended with some embarrassments. Gordon, as the years went by, ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... topic of their discussion, and enough has been said to reveal the lines along which it developed. There was much of a discursive nature, naturally, introduced by Bessie, who sought thereby to fog the issue and effect a compromise. She had found that was a good way to deal with a husband. But to-night Falkner kept steadily ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... novel, Strange Roads (CONSTABLE); but it is only fair to say that Derek Blunt (ne Blount), second son of the Earl of Avonleigh, is no prig, but, on the contrary, a very pleasant fellow. For a protagonist he obtrudes himself only moderately in a rather discursive story which involves a number of other people who do nothing in particular over a good many chapters. We are halfway through before Derek takes the plunge, and then we find, him, not in the slums of some industrial quarter, but in Western ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... meal the Frenchman was in great feather: he was discursive and pompous to every one. In Moscow too, I remembered, he had blown a great many bubbles. Interminably he discoursed on finance and Russian politics, and though, at times, the General made feints to contradict him, he did so humbly, and as though wishing ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... too, but it only made her discursive brain think of cuckoos. She would no doubt immediately have begun to talk of cuckoos, incoherently, unrestrainably and deplorably, if she had been in the condition of nerves and shyness she was in last time she saw Mrs. Fisher. But happiness had done away ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... realm of the possible is an actual infinity of ideas. Out of the consideration of an infinity of ideas, how can God arrive at a choice? Why not? His mind is not, of course, discursive; he does not successively turn over the leaves of an infinite book of sample worlds, for then he would never come to the end of it. Embracing infinite possibility in [32] the single act of his mind, he settles his will with intuitive immediacy upon the best. The inferior, the monstrous, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... manuscript for you (I think I have that of the American Notes complete), and will try to make the parcel better worth its long conveyance. With regard to Maclise's pictures, you certainly are quite right in your impression of them; but he is "such a discursive devil" (as he says about himself) and flies off at such odd tangents, that I feel it difficult to convey to you any general notion of his purpose. I will try to do so when I write again. I want very much to know about —— and that ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... his discursive answer that she had not much of a name one way or another. She was not very fast. It took no fool, though, to steer her straight, he believed. Some years ago he had seen her in Calcutta, and he remembered being told by somebody then, that on her passage up ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... is edifying; and concerning the eighteenth-century physician, with his tye-wig and gilt-head cane, sprightly and not unmalicious. But we must now confine ourselves to quoting a few detached passages from this discursive chronicle. The description of Ranelagh (in the chapter on Music) is too lengthy to reproduce. Here is that of the older Vauxhall:—"The Vauxhall concert takes place in a garden singularly decorated. The Director of Amusements in this garden ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... inspired, Shelley could picture the ideal goals of life, the ultimate joys of experience, better than a discursive critic or observer could have done. The circumstances of life are only the bases or instruments of life: the fruition of life is not in retrospect, not in description of the instruments, but in expression of the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... the blessing descendeth unto the third and fourth generation, he was early taught to love De Quincey, and although, being a truthful man, he cannot swear he has read every page in all the fifteen volumes—roxburghe calf—yet he knows his way about in that whimsical, discursive, but ever satisfying writer, who will write on anything, or any person, always with freshness and in good English, from the character of Judas Iscariot and "Murder as a Fine Art" to the Lake Poets—there never was a Lake school—and ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... two possible forms of reason, the intellectus archetypus and the intellectus ectypus. By the first he means a reason 'which being, not like ours, discursive, but intuitive, proceeds from the synthetic universal (the intuition of the whole as such) to the particular, that is, from the whole to the parts'. According to Kant, such a reason lies outside human possibilities. In contrast to it, the intellectus ectypus peculiar ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... in as much of the story as he could follow—Emmy was somewhat discursive—and as his interjectory remarks were unprovocative of argument, he constituted himself a good listener. Besides, romance had never come his way. It was new to him, even Emmy's commonplace little romance, like a field ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... great talker—but his talk was more properly a monologue. It was a discursive essay, with perhaps a few marginal notes from his subdued audience. How could one talk on equal terms with a man who could not brook contradiction or even argument upon the most vital questions in life? Would ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fruit, Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed, To vital spirits aspire, to animal, To intellectual; give both life and sense, Fancy and understanding; whence the soul Reason receives, and reason is her being, Discursive, or intuitive; discourse Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours, Differing but in degree, of kind the same. Wonder not then, what God for you saw good If I refuse not, but convert, as you To proper substance. Time may come, when Men With Angels may participate, and find No inconvenient ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... keeping—money. They have mostly taken little or no share in public life, and not cared much for society. Yet they have been folk of more than average ability, with intellectual and aesthetic interests. We are prone to enthusiasms, but lack perseverance. We are discursive and superficial, perhaps, but none would call us stupid. We are perhaps abnormally self-centered and self-conscious—never cruel or vicious. Our powers of self-control are considerable; we are conventional people only because we are ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... confined periphery, abounding in individuals who are led to observation of his person through interest in the kindred nature of his occupation with their own. But the walks of Marie may, in general, be supposed discursive. In this particular instance, it will be understood as most probable, that she proceeded upon a route of more than average diversity from her accustomed ones. The parallel which we imagine to have existed in the mind of Le Commerciel would only be sustained in the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... you me: as having clasped a rose Within my palm, the rose being ta'en away, My hand retains a little breath of sweet, So may man's trunk, his spirit slipped away, Hold still a faint perfume of his sweet guest. 'Tis so: for when discursive powers fly out, And roam in progress through the bounds of heaven, The soul itself gallops along with them As chieftain of this winged troop of thought, Whilst the dull lodge of spirit standeth waste Until the ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Miss Goldthwaite was singularly discursive and fragmentary in her conversation this morning, somehow. She dropped the map-traveling suddenly, and asked a new question. "And how comes ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... you know," she continued, in her blithe, discursive, happy-go-lucky fashion; "all quite ready; but she doesn't want it to go before the public until there has been a little talk about it, don't you understand? She wants some of the society papers to mention it; but she isn't quite sure how to get that done, and nobody seems able ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... work is both complete and exhaustive without being discursive. We shall look far before finding anything of its kind ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... the finest young men. Janey loved to watch the soldiers; she loved all manner of shows, and also to tell of them. She asked Bessie if she would like to hear about the emperor's fete last month; and when Bessie acquiesced, she began in a discursive narrative style by which a story can be stretched ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... Chaucer use "cillatun, which suggests Pers. "Sakalat, or "Saklatun", whence Mr. Skeat would derive "scarlet." This note is from the voyage of F. Pyrard, etc. London. Hakluyts, M.dccc.lxxxvii.; and the editor quotes Colonel Yule's M. Polo (ii. chapt. 58) and his "Discursive Glossary s. v. Suclat." ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... knowledge, and it embraces in its scope the loftiest subjects of human thought, and the richest fields of human inquiry. Nothing is too vast, nothing too subtle, nothing too distant, nothing too minute, nothing too discursive, nothing too exact, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... measure her modes of thought, to those of the people around her; but when this readjustment went beyond mere externals and concerned the vital issues of life, the secret that oppressed her took on a more serious aspect, with tragic possibilities. A discursive imagination was not one of her characteristics, or the danger of a marriage of which perfect frankness was not a condition might well have presented itself before her heart had become involved. Under the influence of doubt and fear acting upon love, ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... under consideration: she depicted the bright glory of the new ponceau furniture, as contrasted with shocking old faded things—and she glanced significantly toward Mrs. Lawson's sofas and chairs. Next she made a discursive detour to the culinary department, and gave a statement of the number of stones of lump sugar she was getting boiled in preserves, and of the days of the week in which they had puddings, and the days they ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... to discursive observations upon the inequality in the relations of the sexes. A suspicion of a drift to a closer meaning had been lulled, and the colour flooded her swiftly when Clara said: "Here is the difference I see; I see it; I am certain of it: women who are called ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... life; but, knowing that Miss Mellins had been invited for the sole purpose of keeping her company she continued to cling to the dress-maker's side, letting Mr. Ramy lead the way with Evelina. Miss Mellins, stimulated by the excitement of the occasion, grew more and more discursive, and her ceaseless talk, and the kaleidoscopic whirl of the crowd, were unspeakably bewildering to Ann Eliza. Her feet, accustomed to the slippered ease of the shop, ached with the unfamiliar effort of walking, and her ears with the din of the dress-maker's anecdotes; but every ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... almost entirely, to throw off these impediments. In his deep capacity for sympathy and reverence, we recognise some of the elements that go to the making of a poet. He is always a man of intuitions rather than of discursive intellect; often keen of vision, though wanting in analytical power. For poetry, indeed, as it is often understood now, or even as it was understood by Pope, he had little enough qualification. He had not the intellectual ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... volumes of bons mots, if anything is brought to him as mine, which is not so, habitually rejects it. This he now does all the more, because his intimates are in my company almost every day. Now in the course of our discursive talk many remarks are let fall, which perhaps at the time of my making them seem to them wanting neither in literary flavour nor in piquancy. These are conveyed to him along with the other news of the day: for so he himself directed. Thus it comes about that if he is told of anything besides about ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... unknown. They also record the patron day of a St. Mocholmoc, na hainse, "of the island," at the 30th October. Could we find what was the patron day of the saint of Inche Colm it might help to settle the matter. One of the above saints is called Colman Ailither, or the pilgrim. Chattering in my discursive way, let me add that a Saint Mocholmoc appears to have been a favourite with the Danes of Dublin in the twelfth century, for we find in the lists of the Danish Kings of Dublin that of Donald MacGilloholmoch as reigning from 1125 to 1134; and another of the name is noticed by ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... blotting-paper interposed between their writing and their desks! Pads are taken into confidence on the tenderest occasions, and oftentimes when I have made a business visit, and have sent in my name from the outer office, have I had it forced on my discursive notice that the officiating young gentleman has over and over again inscribed AMELIA, in ink of various dates, on corners of his pad. Indeed, the pad may be regarded as the legitimate modern successor of the old forest-tree: whereon these young ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... Aristotle, by the active intellect, the [Greek: nous] that has been called [Greek: poietikos]—that is, by what is essential and yet unconscious in human intelligence. The [Greek: nous poietikos] is Science entire, posited all at once, which the conscious, discursive intellect is condemned to reconstruct with difficulty, bit by bit. There is then within us, or rather behind us, a possible vision of God, as the Alexandrians said, a vision always virtual, never actually realized by the conscious ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... as well as of the knowing faculty." Never did natural historian so jauntily provide for every fact contravening his theories. Professor Blackie will never understand Atheism, or write profitably upon it, while he pursues this course. Let him restrain his discursive propensities, and deal scientifically with this one fact, which explodes his whole theory of Atheism. The supreme glory of our modern poetry is Shelley, and if ever a man combined splendor of imagination with keen intelligence and saintly character it was he. Raphael ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... senkuragxeco. Discourse parolado. Discourteous malgxentila. Discover eltrovi. Discovery eltrovo. Discredit senkreditigi. Discreet diskreta. Discretion singardemo, diskreto. Discriminate distingi. Discursive tro skribema. Discuss diskuti. Discussion diskutado. Disdain malsxati. Disease malsano—ego. Disembark elsxipigxi. Disengage liberigi. Disentangle liberigi. Disfavour malfavoro. Disgrace malhonori. Disguise alivesti. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... your side, speak a language stamped with schematism, while to be correct, even in making love, your language should be discursive. Allow me to tell you ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... to chance for having directed me to the interest of book-burning as an episode in the history of the world's manners, the discursive allusions to it in the old numbers of "Notes and Queries" hinting to me the desirability of a more systematic mode of treatment. To bibliographers and literary historians I conceived that such a work might prove of utility and interest, ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... their right to discuss these great topics on the first night of the session; awaiting the discussion in the commons. The Duke of Richmond endeavoured to bring on a debate; but ministers were taciturn; and after a long and discursive speech delivered by Lord Brougham, which touched upon the subjects of the Oregon dispute, the corn-laws, and Irish affairs, the address was carried. In the course of the evening, the Duke of Richmond wished the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... also, he arranged his figures and the matter of his speech so well that the final solution became inevitable, and the final solution, of course, was the addition of a penny to the income-tax. The debate which followed the Budget speech was quiet, discursive, friendly to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. Picton is a formidable man to Chancellors of the Exchequer—for he has very strong ideas of reform—especially on the breakfast-table; but Mr. Picton is rational as well as Radical; and he cordially acknowledged the duty ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... BAYLE, in which, amid an enormous mass of learning poured out over a multitude of heterogeneous subjects, the most absolute religious scepticism is expressed with unmistakable emphasis and unceasing reiteration. The book is an extremely unwieldy one—very large and very discursive, and quite devoid of style; but its influence was immense; and during the long combat of the eighteenth century it was used as a kind of armoury, supplying many of their sharpest weapons to the writers of ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the adventures of the pioneers of British North America, I think—even if it seems wearisome and discursive—my readers would better understand this story if I placed before them a general description of what is now the Dominion of Canada, more particularly as it was seen and discovered by the earliest ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... Alfieri's sake, her hopes that Charles Edward may die; disconnected phrases, run into each other without so much as a comma or a full stop (since I have had to punctuate my translation, at least partially, to make it intelligible); the excited, unconsecutive, unceasing, discursive, reiterating gabble of hysteria, eager, vague, impotent, thoughts suddenly vanishing and as suddenly coming to a dead stop; everything rattled off as if between two sobs or two convulsions. Did Alfieri ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... he had not been there, and after some consideration he agreed to accompany me. We went by rail to the little station on the seashore, and then attacked the arduous ascent. The day was perfect, though rather too warm for climbing, and we had frequent rests among the olive-trees, with delightfully discursive talks on all things under the sun. My companion's charm grew upon me moment by moment. There was in his manner a sort of refined coquetry of amiability which I found irresistible. It was combined with a frankness of sympathy ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... have something to say, who think more than they speak. The spinster aunts had been voluble persons, full of small chatter, women of no mental reservations whatever. The young men of his group had not been much different. The reflective attitude as opposed to the discursive was new to him. New and embarrassing. He felt impelled to talk, and while he groped uncertainly for some congenial subject he grew more and more acutely self-conscious. He felt that these men were calmly taking his measure. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... by illiterate persons dictionary words. And these dictionary words are indispensable to a writer, not only in the proportion by which he transcends other writers as to extent and as to subtility of thinking, but also as to elevation and sublimity. Milton was not an extensive or discursive thinker, as Shakspeare was; for the motions of his mind were slow, solemn, sequacious, like those of the planets; not agile and assimilative; not attracting all things within its own sphere; not multiform: repulsion was the ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the minutes of ecclesiastical councils. He searched diligently the records of Plymouth, Taunton, Boston, Essex, Providence, Newport, Hartford and New Haven. The book has a chronological record of the Connecticut churches. It is very discursive. ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... Love him with all your heart. Retire often within the closet of your heart to commune with God. Do not pray to him in a constrained and formal manner, but all simple and natural. God loves better the affectionate language of the heart, than, the cold and discursive thoughts of the intellect. The prayer of love softens ...
— Letters of Madam Guyon • P. L. Upham
... subject has been somewhat discursive, it may be admitted that a great population following callings related to the sea is, now as formerly, a great element of sea power; that the United States is deficient in that element; and that its foundations can be laid only in a large commerce ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... talk and laughter go by him without any attempt to take part in it. After dinner he went to his own room; while Valentine and the ladies sat round the fire in the orthodox Christmas manner, and after a good deal of discursive conversation, subsided into the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... was no response. Yet it was part of the Doctor's system of aggravation to become discursive at these moments, in the hope of interruption, and he continued for some moments to dwell on the terrible possibility of a state of affairs in which a gentleman could no longer settle a dispute with an enemy without being subjected to succeeding spiritual ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... as well as to the subsequent action, of British officials. The sea coast from Maine to Georgia, according to the season of the year, was made to feel the increasing activity and closeness of the British attacks; and these, though discursive and without apparent correlation of action, were evidently animated throughout by a common intention of bringing the war home to the experience ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... It was his own phrase, for as a snare he regarded the holy estate; but the younger of the officers were pleased to find it funny, and ventured to laugh; whereat she grew red and silent, and they perforce became grave again that they might hear of the French. Here she was vague and discursive, and prone to detail at great length the feud between the Blue Lick Stationers and the "cow-drivers" on the Keowee, evidently hoping that it might lie within the latitude of the commandant's military authority ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... lines of composition as a whole, but in the choice of a single word, while it by no means interferes with, but may even prescribe, much variety, in the building of the sentence for instance, or in the manner, argumentative, descriptive, discursive, of this or that [23] part or member of the entire design. The blithe, crisp sentence, decisive as a child's expression of its needs, may alternate with the long-contending, victoriously intricate sentence; the sentence, born ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... to last, an unquestioning believer in the doctrines of the Christian religion, and he viewed with great disfavour any one who ventured to question any part of its creed. As a lecturer he was eloquent and though discursive, always interesting. None of his lectures were written, so that to-day they are only a fading memory to those who heard them delivered. Though found acceptable at the time, it is hardly likely that, if delivered at the ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... contemptuous of the Protestant concessions of Bishop Hurd's "Letters on Chivalry and Romance";[15] and, in short, fights a brave battle against the artillery of "the moderns" with weapons borrowed from "the armoury of the invincible knights of old." The book is learned, though unsystematic and discursive, but its most interesting feature is its curiously personal note, its pure spirit of honour and Catholic piety. The enthusiasm of the author extends itself from the institutes of chivalry and the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... reason is quite sufficient to prevent its confusion with the faculty whose discursive form it is. But this is not enough. We must, by still more delicate distinctions, make any confusion between these ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... portable timber as can be come at,—not without shouting: and, after the manner of ancient Greek Heroes, they lifted their hands to the daintily readied repast; such as it might be. (Weber, Deux Amis, &c.) Other Rascality prowls discursive; seeking what it may devour. Flandre will retire to its barracks; Lecointre also with his Versaillese,—all but the vigilant Patrols, charged ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... enough, this abtruse Inquiry might, in spite of the results it leads to, have continued dormant for indefinite periods. The Editor of these sheets, though otherwise boasting himself a man of confirmed speculative habits, and perhaps discursive enough, is free to confess, that never, till these last months, did the above very plain considerations, on our total want of a Philosophy of Clothes, occur to him; and then, by quite foreign suggestion. By the arrival, namely, of a new Book from ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... outset, the writer acknowledges a thousand imperfections in this discursive story. In all truth, it is a most garrulous and incoherent narrative. Like the automobile, part of the time the narrative moves, part of the time it does not; now it is in the road pursuing a straight course; then again it is in the ditch, ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... had adopted views in religion which went even beyond toleration and which might be regarded as entering the verge of scepticism. For a patrician he was very liberal in his political views. His imagination was poetical and discursive, his taste good and his tact extremely fine, so exquisite, indeed, that it sometimes approached to morbid sensibility, and disgusted him with slight defects and made him keenly sensible of small perfections to which common minds would ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... larger, but then whenever she saw him he struck her as looking larger. He enveloped her hand in a large amiable paw for a minute and asked after the children with gusto. The large teeth beneath his discursive moustache gave him the effect of a perennial smile to which his asymmetrical ears added a touch of waggery. He always betrayed a fatherly feeling towards her as became a man who was married to a handsome wife old enough to be her mother. Even ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... them, and in general smiled at the introduction of motives on a grand scale, or of reasons that lay very far off. This was the point of strongest difference between him and Deronda, who rarely ate at breakfast without some silent discursive flight after grounds for filling up his day according to the practice ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... mind. It has to speak with the language of logic, whereas its use and function in the world is to speak with a language not of logic, but of a process of mind which is at least as sovereign in its own right as the discursive reason. ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... in the Encyclopaedia, here too Diderot is always ready to turn from his subject for a moral aside. Even the modern reader will forgive the discursive apostrophe addressed to the judges of the unfortunate Calas, the almost lyric denunciation of an atrocity that struck such deep dismay into the hearts of all the brethren of the Encyclopaedia.[44] But Diderot's asides are usually in less tragic matter. A picture ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... bare plains and the deep arroyos and the dust-colored towns full of palaces and belfries, and the beggars in snuff-colored cloaks and the mule-drivers with blankets over their shoulders, and the discursive lean-faced gentlemen grouped about tables at cafes and casinos, and the stout dowagers with mantillas over their gleaming black hair walking to church in the morning with missals clasped in fat hands, all that is acutely indigenous, Iberian, in the ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... never written to Francis about Bradley Logan it would have been all right, quite a rescue, in fact. But in those too fatally discursive letters; the letters which had come finally to feel like a sympathetic diary with no destination, she had rather enlarged on him. He had been admiring her at disconnected intervals ever since she first met him. He had not ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... praise this book were superfluous. Sir Walter was ideally suited for the task which he set himself. He was an antiquarian, but not a Dryasdust; he had the topographical sense, but he spared us measurements; he was pleasantly discursive; if he moralized he was never tedious; he had the novelist's eye for the romantic. Above all, he loved and reverenced London. Though only a Londoner by adoption, he bestowed upon the capital a more than filial regard. Besant is the nineteenth-century ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... all was unpremeditated, incoherent, and discursive, and yet strangely effective. She described the contortions of her kaleidoscope as they came to mind haphazard, with an indifference, a precise objectivity that made the picture all the more real and universal, not the special ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Ruskin was only twenty-four; and at intervals during the next seventeen years he issued four additional volumes, the result of prolonged study both of Nature and of almost all the great paintings in Europe. The completed book is a discursive treatise, the various volumes necessarily written from more or less different view-points, on many of the main aspects, general and technical, of all art, literary as well as pictorial. For Ruskin held, and brilliantly demonstrated, that the underlying ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Tetrad indeed in the intellectual and intuitive contemplation, but a Triad in discursive arrangement, and a Tri-unity ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... ashamed of it, but have rather reason to rejoice therefore, even that we are sensible of this power that hath oftentimes laid hold of our adversaries, and made them yield to us, and join with us, and confess to the Truth, before they had any distinct and discursive knowledge of our doctrines."—The Quakers, then, according to this eminent Apologist for them, had, from the first, definite doctrines, which might be distinctly and discursively known. What were they? They hardly amounted to any express revolution of existing ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... grave discussion opening out deceptively from the sparkling stream of the story, or stranded on some lofty sentiment never dreamt of in their philosophy. For the author's mind is, in the best sense of the word, a discursive one. It is full of positive thought, and strikes out right and left like a school-boy who must needs relieve his superabundant spirits by pinching his sister's ear, thrusting his fists in his brother's face, kicking aside the foot-cushion, and making ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... a wise Lord Chancellor, who in a dialogue upon weighty matters thought it not unbecoming to amuse himself with discursive merriment concerning St. Appollonia ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
