|
|
|
More "Focus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be alone, to consider, to focus his thought; he went off for a walk by himself among the hills, past the spring, up the valley, till he came to a place where the down ran out into the plain, the bluff crowned with a great earthwork. An enormous view lay spread out before him. To left and right the smooth elbows of ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... enough to bring this recital well within the focus of truth, and as the wagons wound slowly forward he further saw to what depth of hatred and cold malice the mind of that "High Command" descended. Burned villages and hamlets might have been expected, as conflagrations spring from bursting shells, yet even ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... fashion, and Wainwright substituted for Cameron was somehow like taking a bite of some pleasant fruit and having it turn out plain potato in one's mouth. It was so sudden, like that. She could not seem to get her equilibrium. Her mind was in a whirl of question and she could not focus it on her present caller nor think of anything suitable to say to him. She was not even sure but that he was noticing that she ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... position could not be stormed, is proved by the result of the actual attempt. It is doubtful if, in any battle ever fought by any troops, men displayed greater gallantry. They rushed headlong, not only once, but thrice, into the focus of a frightful front and cross fire of artillery and small-arms, losing nearly half their numbers in a few minutes; the ground was littered with their dead, and yet the foremost had only been able to approach within ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... come to a focus. It was fight, or yield and be treated as a traitor. Bacon resolved to fight, and he found many to back him in it, for he soon had a force collected. How many there were we do not know. Some say only ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... disgusted and astonished Kaiser Karl as this treatment,—not of Marlborough, whom he regarded only as he would have done a pair of military boots or a holster-pistol of superior excellence, for the uses that were in him,—but of the Kaiser Karl his own sublime self, the heart and focus of Political Nature; left in this manner, now when the sordid English and Dutch declined spending blood and money for him farther. "Ungrateful, sordid, inconceivable souls," answered Karl, "was there ever, since the early Christian times, such a martyr as you have now made ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Feeling is diffused over the whole surface of the body; but light is focalized in the eye; sound in the ear. The organization of a sense or a pleasure seems diluted and imperfect, unless it is gathered by some machinery into one focus, or local centre. And thus it is that a general state of pleasurable feeling sometimes seems too superficially diffused, and one has a craving to intensify or brighten it by concentration through some sufficient stimulant. I, for my part, have tried every thing in this world except 'bang,' ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... lower extremity a second glass called ocular, to which the eye of the observer is applied. The rays from the luminous object traverse the first glass, and by refraction form an image upside down at its focus. This image is looked at with the ocular, which magnifies it. The tube of the field-glass is, therefore, closed at each extremity by the object ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... earnestly in the direction indicated, and was almost immediately rewarded by the glimpse of some indistinct, dark figures dimly showing against the lighter background of sky. He brought his field-glasses to a focus. ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... door, showing a easy and well-lighted lobby within, the fear aura no longer touched Paul Harley. Out from the doorway came hominess and that air of security and peace which had seemed to characterize the house when viewed from outside. The focus of menace, therefore, lay not inside the house of Sir Charles but without. It was very curious. In the next instant ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... the mountaineer, jubilantly, winking significantly at Clayton and his attendants, who stood about him at the fireplace. Clayton shook his head firmly, but the rest followed Hicks, who turned at the door and repeated the invitation with a frowning face. Clayton was left the focus of feminine eyes, whose unwavering directness kept his own gaze on the floor. People began to come in rapidly, most of whom he had never seen before. The room was filled, save for a space about him. Every ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... restrained, would result in confounding the lower with the higher. The expression "Good Nigger" means everywhere in the South a real Negro, from the Southern standpoint, one who in no respect gets out of focus with that standpoint; the expression "Bad Nigger" means universally one who in some respect, not necessarily criminal, does get out of focus with it. So, stated differently, the race problem is the problem how to keep the Negro in focus with ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... that he was. We must also take it for granted that the murderer knew of these little dinners for two which took place in the private room above the Cafe Dame every Wednesday—and sometimes on Friday. Around the figure of the methodical major—with his conspicuous white hat as a sort of focus—was built up one of the most ingenious schemes of murder with which I have ever come in contact. ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... your first and second volume," said a tall, long-chinned, short-sighted blue, dressed in yellow, peering into my face, as if her eyes were magnifying glasses, and she was obtaining the true focus of vision, "but you fall off in your last, which is all about that ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... the whole tale of their situation. On that little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow which had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents, mistakes, fears, errors of the last. He was their nodal point, their focus, their expression in a single term. For the rashness of those parents he had groaned, for their ill assortment he had quaked, and for the misfortunes of these ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... not by them; invisible hands touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of cold soft fingers at my throat. I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear I should be in bodily peril; and I concentrated all my faculties in the single focus of resisting, stubborn will. And I turned my sight from the Shadow—above all, from those strange serpent eyes—eyes that had now become distinctly visible. For there, though in nought else round me, I was aware that there was a WILL, and a will of intense, ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... his tale and avoid mentioning himself; he was the centre of it all, the focus of the darts of Fate, and there was no getting away ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... wondrous centre of fertile and generous thoughts! What precious and life-giving rays would stream incessantly from this focus of charity, emancipation, and love! What great things might be attempted what magnificent examples given to the world! What a divine mission! What an irresistible tendency towards good might be impressed on the whole human race by a ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... during times when judicial murders were common, would have excited nothing more than passing interest had not the national sentiment been so aroused by the chaotic conditions. As it was it served to focus attention on the general maladministration over which Yuan Shih-kai ruled as provisional President. "What is my crime?" had shrieked the unhappy revolutionist as he had been shot and then bayonetted to death. That query was most easily answered. His crime was that he was not strong enough or big ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... another not less formidable. The war seemed at length compressed to the point of a single battle, which was to decide its fearful issue. With divided sympathies, Europe looked with anxiety to this scene, where the whole strength of the two contending parties was fearfully drawn, as it were, to a focus. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Hall invitation and make the visit was as sudden as it was belated. The postcard came in August, but it was not until October that Galusha made up his mind. His decision was brought to a focus by the help of Mrs. Worth Buckley. Mrs. Buckley's help had not been solicited, but was volunteered, and, as a matter of fact, its effect was the reverse of that which the lady intended. Nevertheless, had it not been for Mrs. Buckley ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Mahmoud's country was extremely hot. It stood right up above one's head and looked like the little thing that you get in the focus of a burning glass. The sun made it almost impossible to move, except in the early morning or at evening, and even during the night it was not particularly cool. It never rained in ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... adjustments, as occasion arises. We are never interested in changing the whole environment; there is much that we take for granted and accept just as it already is. Upon this background our activities focus at certain points in an endeavor to introduce needed changes. Habituation is thus our adjustment to an environment which at the time we are not concerned with modifying, and which supplies a leverage to our active habits. Adaptation, in fine, is quite as much adaptation ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... perfectly, but of a lower scale of perfection than the true "adamantine" standard, which is absolutely flawless. When still lower, and the reflection, though maybe fairly good, is somewhat "fuzzy," or is confused or out of focus, it is then merely shining; when still less distinct, and no trace of actual reflection is possible (by which is meant that no object can be reproduced in any way to define it, as it could be defined in the reflection from ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... when he pleases to bring it to bear on a particular focus. Had seen the implement in LORD MAYOR'S hand; insisted upon knowing all about it before proceedings went further. Turned out to be nothing more dangerous than petition from Corporation of Dublin in favour of Home-Rule Bill. SPEAKER, instantly mollified, allowed it to be read; after which LORD ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... mine, but attended with more serious results. He had knocked his wildebeeste over in much the same way, and thought it was dead; and as he was very keen on obtaining photographs of game, he took his stand-camera from the Indian who carried it and proceeded to focus it on the animal's head. When he was just about to take the picture, he was thunderstruck to see the wildebeeste jump up and come charging down upon him. He sprang quickly aside, and in an instant up went the camera into the air, followed the next moment by the unfortunate Indian, the ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... friend, 'the fact is I am an engineer (section D of the Public Works Department) and I have to make an important measurement in connexion with the Apothegm of the Bilateral which runs to-night precisely through this spot. My fingers now mark exactly the concentric of the secondary focus whence the Radius Vector should be drawn, but I find that (like a fool) I have left my Double Refractor in the cafe hard by. I dare not go for fear of losing the place I have marked; yet I can get no ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the focus of the eyes often causes a strain on the brain in the effort to adjust them. This sometimes causes epilepsy, and we have known many cases cured by the use of spectacles made to correct this inequality. In all cases of this ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... accept the fabulist's aera as contemporary with Croesus and Solon (B.C. 570,) about a century after Psammeticus (Psamethik 1st) threw Egypt open to the restless Greek.[FN233] From Africa too the Fable would in early ages migrate eastwards and make for itself a new home in the second great focus of civilisation formed by the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. The late Mr. George Smith found amongst the cuneiforms fragmentary Beast-fables, such as dialogues between the Ox and the Horse, the Eagle and the Sun. In after centuries, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... by some intelligent friend at Mrs. Clanfrizzle's establishment, with the express direction to mark and thoroughly digest as much as he could of the habits and customs of the circle about him, which he was rightly informed was the very focus of good breeding and haut ton; but on no account, unless driven thereto by the pressure of sickness, or the wants of nature, to trust himself with speech, which, in his then uninformed state, he was assured would inevitably ruin him ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... stir of the wind in the far reaches of the valley. The dense white veil that swung from the zenith became suddenly pervaded with vague shivers; then tenuous, gauzy pennants were detached, floating away in great lengths; the sun struck through from a dazzling focus in a broad, rayonnant, fibrous emblazonment of valley and range, and as she rose and went to the window to note the weather signs she could not resist the lure of escape. She had struggled all day with an eager desire to be out of the house, removed from ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... birthday, and you the only friend who remembered it; if confession were not good for the soul, though harder than sin to some people, of whom I am one—well, if all reasons were not at this instant converged into a focus, and burning me rather violently, in that region where the seat of emotion is supposed to lie, I should keep my trouble to myself. Yes, I have fifty times had it on my mind to tell you the whole story. But who can be certain that his best friend will not smile—or, ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... nothing for it but to fall back again till we have a force sufficient to capture the whole city, and utterly defeat its defenders. With us away, this place will become the focus of the mutiny. Half the fugitives from Delhi will find their way here, and at least we shall be able to crush them at one blow, instead of having to scour the country for them for months. The more of them gather here the better; ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... the hand. When I visited the Filipino priest, I was received in a friendly manner by a young girl who, when I offered my hand, thanked me with a bow, saying, "Tengo las sarnas" ("I have the itch"). The malady, which is very common in the Philippines, appears to have its focus ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... sufficiently superstitious, but those of Tette are in this particular pre-eminent above their fellows. Coming from many different tribes, all the rays of the separate superstitions converge into a focus at Tette, and burn out common sense from the minds of the mixed breed. They believe that many evil spirits live in the air, the earth, and the water. These invisible malicious beings are thought to inflict much suffering on the human race; but, as they have ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... found himself taking a throbbing interest in the visitors at the loge opposite. He was as interested in Dorothy Marteen's admirers as any fond father could be; and yet his eyes turned with strange, fascinated jealousy to the older woman's loveliness. Suddenly he drew in the focus of his glasses. A face had come within the rim of his observation—the face of a man sitting in the row in front of him. That man, too, had his glasses turned toward the group on the other side of the diamond horseshoe, and the look on his face was not pleasant ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... at the same time stuffing tobacco into the bowl of the corn-cob, "it is for this very reason that chapter forty-two of my book must prove to be the hub of the whole, and the whole, Mr. Knox, I am egotist enough to believe, shall establish a new focus for thought, an intellectual Rome bestriding and uniting ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... a purely physiological explanation; indeed, in view of our having two eyes, it is in less need of explanation than the single visual sense-datum which we normally obtain from the things on which we focus. ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... adventure, in the stories of hunter and trapper, the journals of Lewis and Clarke, the narratives of Boone and Crockett. In writing his superb romances of the Northern Lakes, the prairie and the sea, Fenimore Cooper had merely to bring to an artistic focus sentiments that lay deep in the souls of the great mass of his American readers. Students of our social life have pointed out again and again how deeply our national temperament has been affected by the existence, during nearly three ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... censure. At one time he wearies, and at another tantalises the reader, with the prolixity or ambiguity of his preambles. His prelusive sentiments are sometimes far-fetched, and converge not with a natural declination into the focus of epigram. In dispensing praise and censure, he often seems to be governed more by prejudice or policy, than by justice and truth; and he is more constantly attentive to the production of wit, than to the ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... and without, his violin. Partly from age, and partly from a too convivial life, the old, heavily veined hands trembled so that he could scarcely unbutton his overcoat, or handle his cup of hot coffee. His head shook too, and his kind, rheumy eyes, in their endeavor to focus themselves, seemed to flicker back and forth in their sockets. The child used to watch him, fascinated, as he fumbled endlessly at the fastenings of his violin-case, and put back the top with uncertain fingers. She was waiting for the thrilling moment when he should tuck the instrument away under ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... prosecution of this scheme many advantages are offered, which to the trader and mere man of the world are of considerable importance, by bringing all our charities to a focus. Setting aside the great saving that could and would be effected in the management by united efforts, a much larger sum might be given to the legitimate object of each charity, and a systematic and efficient check upon each ...
— Suggestions to the Jews - for improvement in reference to their charities, education, - and general government • Unknown
... country. In 1839, when Don Carlos was driven out of the country by the patriot soldier Espartero, she endeavored to gain him over to her side, but failed. Espartero became Regent, and Maria Christina repaired to Paris, where she was received with great distinction by Louis Philippe, and Paris became the focus of all sorts of machinations against the constitutional government of Spain, and of plots for its overthrow. One of these had just been defeated at the time of Irving's arrival. It was a desperate attempt of a band of soldiers of the rebel army to carry off the little Queen and her sister, ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... by this time entirely anglified, and this was the greatest step in the making of Scotland. The Celtic dynasty now held the most fertile district between Forth and Tweed, a district already English in blood and speech, the centre and focus of the English civilisation accepted by the Celtic kings. Under this Malcolm, too, his grandson, Duncan, became ruler of Strathclyde—that is, ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... Rome was the shrine of law; and from thence has emanated that unrivalled system of jurisprudence which has formed the model of every nation since. Being thus the centre of the political power of the empire, the Roman Forum became also the focus of its architectural and civic splendour. It was crowded with marble temples, state buildings, and courts of law to such an extent that we wonder how there was room for them all within such a narrow area. Monuments of great men, statues ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... with, as far as the modern scientific approach is concerned, first made clearly apparent in Hypnotism. Hypnotism seems to be such a modification of normal mental conditions under the power of commanding suggestion as really for the time being to focus consciousness and mental action generally in one suggested line. A new set of inhibitions and permissions are thus imposed upon normal consciousness. Attention is withdrawn from the usual frontiers (if one may use the word) to which, consciously or subconsciously, ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... well known that power lies in a saltatorial ensemble of white lace skirts, pale blue hose, lustrous naked arms, undulating bodice, magnetic eyes, flying hair, and an unchanging smile, to focus the perceptions of a man, to absorb his consciousness, aided by a tune which seems to close out from him all ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... with renewed affright the remembrance of the apparition that had so appalled him, the recollection only served to kindle and concentrate his curiosity into a burning focus. He had said aright,—love had vanished from his heart; there was no longer a serene space amidst its disordered elements for human affection to move and breathe. The enthusiast was rapt from this earth; and he would have ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... meantime had set to work putting into position the huge reflector. At first I thought it might be some method of throwing a powerful light on the house. But on closer examination I saw that it could not be a light. The reflector seemed to have been constructed so that in the focus was a peculiar coil of something, and to the ends of this coil, Garrick attached two wires which he fastened to an instrument, cylindrical, with a broadened end, ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... store. The door was open, and so was the window. In the gloom of the interior I made out Henriques' legs. He was standing by the counter, and apparently talking to Japp. He moved to shut the door, and came back inside my focus opposite the window. There he stayed for maybe ten minutes, while I hugged my impatience. I would have given a hundred pounds to be snug in my old room with japp thinking me out ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... place save that it was away up in the north- west, on one of the higher reaches of the Enyong Creek, and a two days' journey for her by water. The lads lived at a town called Ikpe, an old slave centre, that had been in league with Aro, and the focus of the trade of a wide and populous area. It was a "closed" market, no Calabar trader being allowed ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... all the points of this wave, travelling as far as the surface KD along lines parallel to DB, will advance subsequently towards the point B, and will arrive there at the same time. As for the Ellipse which served for reflexion, it is evident that it will here become a parabola, since its focus A may be regarded as infinitely distant from the other, B, which is here the focus of the parabola, towards which all the reflexions of rays parallel to AB tend. And the demonstration of these effects is just the same ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... never meant to accept him—all she had wanted had been the mere proclaimable fact of his surrender; but during the last weeks the focus of her plans had shifted—they had come to mean more than the gratification of her vanity. The denial of what she sought, the dragging of her schemes, the growing sense of hopelessness, had made her see just exactly how much she wanted. She would really like to marry ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... had said so much less, really thought what Rosamond said in mere play. Those extorted thanks seemed to her a victory of her sex in a field she had never thought of; and though she had no desire to emulate the lady, and felt that a daughter of Dunstone must remember noblesse oblige, the focus of her enthusiasm was in an odd ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... please Pythagoras, I did not say a word to him and I passed to Zarathustra, who was occupied in concentrating the celestial fire in the focus of a concave mirror, in the middle of a hall with a hundred doors which all led to wisdom. (Zarathustra's precepts are called doors, and are a hundred in number.) Over the principal door I read these words which are the precis ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... To focus this thought on the immediate subject of our present study, this I think is the only and true solution of the tedious question, so much discussed by the two opposing schools of thought: whether the government of the Italian communes ...
— The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century • William Klapp Williams
... The proof of justice lies not in the voice Of numbers; England's not the world, nor is Thy parliament the focus, which collects The vast opinion of the human race. This present England is no more the future Than 'tis the past; as inclination changes, Thus ever ebbs and flows the unstable tide Of public judgment. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... what kisses be! In what veil'd hymn Or mystic dance Would he that were thy Priest advance Thine earthly praise, thy glory limn? Say, should the feet that feel thy thought In double-center'd circuit run, In that compulsive focus, Nought, In this a furnace like the sun; And might some note of thy renown And high behest Thus in enigma be expressed: 'There lies the crown Which all thy longing cures. Refuse it, Mortal, that it may be yours! It is a Spirit, though ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... V. Forrestal Papers, Princeton University Library, while helpful in tracing the Urban League's contribution to the Navy's integration policy, lack the focus and comprehensiveness of the Forrestal Papers in the National Archives' Office of the Secretary of the Navy file. Another collection of particular interest for the naval aspects of the story is the Dennis D. Nelson Papers, in the custody of the Nelson family in San Diego, California, with ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... that time the English ambassador in Russia, was ordered to quit the capital without delay, and to retire to Riga, which then became the focus of the intrigues of the north which ended in the death of Paul. The English ships were seized in all the ports, and, at the pressing instance of the Czar, a Prussian army menaced Hanover. Bonaparte lost no time, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... she says the conditions are not right. Is that so surprising? Take a telephone—you can't talk over it unless the connections are right, can you? Take a telescope or a microscope—you can see nothing through them unless the instruments are in focus, can you? Take an automobile—it will not move an inch unless all the parts are properly adjusted, will it? You may have the finest photographic camera in the world, yet you will get no picture unless you expose the sensitive plate in just the right way—isn't that true? ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... absolutely now, while she stuck a long pin, a trifle fallaciously, into her hat—she had, with an approach to irritation, told her maid, a new woman, whom she had lately found herself thinking of as abysmal, that she didn't want her—she tried to focus the possibility of some understanding between them in consequence of ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... great blaze of light in the distance, against which figures were dimly moving, and from the heart of which the strange voice came. He heard a woman's voice, then several voices together; then suddenly the whole scene shifted into focus, his eyes were tied to the light; the oranges and the gas and the smell of clothes and heated bodies slipped back into distance—he was caught into the world where he had longed ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... you want to try a lens, first be sure that the slides of your camera are correctly constructed, which is easily done. Place at any distance you please a sheet of paper printed in small type; focus this on your ground glass with the assistance of a magnifying-glass; now take the slide which carries your plate of glass, and if you have not a piece of ground glass at hand, insert a plate which you would otherwise excite in the bath after the application of collodion, but now dull it by touching ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... developing the plate to see how it happened, for I pressed the button at the right time. The picture, such as it is, I give as Plate XL, c. I was so calm and cool and collected that I quite forgot to focus ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... without distinction, this king has made the Hawaiian nobility, the present alii say, bastard and dishonored. The chiefs descended from Keawe conceal their origin, and are by no means flattered when reminded of it. From Keawe down, the genealogies become a focus of disputes, and it would be really dangerous for the rash historian who did not spare the susceptibilities ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... pregnant words ever ready,—or if soft methods would not serve, then by hard and even hardest he put down a great deal of miscellaneous anarchy in Norway; was especially busy against heathenism (devil-worship and its rites): this, indeed, may be called the focus and heart of all his royal endeavor in Norway, and of all the troubles he now had with his people there. For this was a serious, vital, all-comprehending matter; devil-worship, a thing not to be tolerated one moment ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... suggesting questions which help to detect the passion, and strangeness and dramatic contrasts of life." And not only to bring suggestions, but repose, by granting to eyes wearied with minute concerns the contrasts of vast times and spaces, the majestic idea of the Whole; to change the focus and variously dispose the ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... a lot of Bud, but when a woman has fourteen it sort of unsettles her mind so that she can't focus her affections or play any favorites. And so when Bud's clothes were found at the swimming hole one day, and no Bud inside them, she didn't take on up to the expectations of the neighbors who had brought the news, and who were standing around waiting for her to go ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... him astray in his judgment of the individual; it was merely that he was too much occupied with what he counted his work—with his theories first, then his writing of them, then the endless defending of them, to care to see beyond the focus of his short-sighted eyes. Vavasor was a gentlemanly fellow, and that went a long way with him. He did not oppose him, and that went another long way: of all things he could not bear to be opposed in what he so plainly saw ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... by the Persians, and the constant reports and tributes sent from every province to the central court of the king, were well calculated to bring to it, as to a focus, the curious lore of the various nations who came in contact with or ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... other things, that in oblique refraction light is separated into colors. Therefore, any small portion of the convex lens of the telescope, being a prism, the rays proceed to the focus, separated into prismatic colors, which make the image thus formed edged with a fringe of color and indistinct. But, fortunately for the early telescope makers, the degree of this aberration is independent of the focal length of the lens; so that, by increasing ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... upon the subject are: "I figure that the earthquake which caused so much damage in San Francisco came from what we call the focus of disturbance. This focus at San Francisco is seven miles below the surface of the earth. As the Sierra Madre mountains grow, a phenomenon which is constantly going on, the blocks of earth below change positions; ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... beginning with effects, from induction to induction, often arrives at causes and states some principles. Delsarte, perhaps, proceeded thus while seeking to combine his discoveries, but this accomplished, he placed in the first line, synthesis, whence all emanates, and this focus of light radiating in all directions, illumines even to its farthest limit, the vast field of aesthetics. Cousin, after all, claims neither for the Greeks nor for himself the discovery ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... landscape dimly lighted up, the wonder is whether it is all artificial, or whether one is not oneself the victim of some morbid illusion; and if it is not indeed a real country view seen through a distorted vision out of focus, or through the ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... the huge station clock, and began walking quickly back, down the now peopled platform to the ticket barrier. As he did so his eyes and mind, trained to note all that was happening round him, together with an unconscious longing to escape from the one absorbing thought, made him focus those of his fellow-travellers who stood about him. They consisted for the most part of provincial men of business, and of young officers in uniform, each and all eager to prolong to the uttermost their golden moments in Paris; more than one was ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... sudden, however, a horrific blaze, emitted from a huge focus of intolerable light, set the whole heavens aflame. As from a fresh-created baleful sun, blue and livid and golden-colored lightnings were shivered from it on all sides; dull, however, in comparison to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... enormous wealth—we convulse the excellent Dame by terming it a chained hurricane, to launch in foul blasts or beneficent showers, according to the moods during youth—and the composite Lord Fleetwood comes nearer into our focus. Dame Gossip, with her jigging to be at the butterwoman's trot, when she is not violently interrupting, would suffer just punishment were we to digress upon the morality of a young man's legal possession of enormous ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the decelerating spaceship. They had been slowing down for several days, since their speed with the added hyperdrive had been increased greatly. The young cadet adjusted the last dial and the blue-green planet sprang into clear sharp focus on the screen. ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... perfect faith, it is something between prayer and wish,—an act of natural piety sublimed by Christian hope, that shares in the light, and meets the diverging rays, of faith, though it be not contained in the focus. ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... and Wagner, who seek to compress all the arts into their own particular art. The mind that finds many outlets generally overflows in dissipation of energy instead of digging a deep single channel of its own. And yet to focus our feelings to one point may be a dangerous accomplishment. For instance, the fulminating fire of Swinburne's radium rhymes, while harmless to himself, may become dangerous through me or some other 'conductor.' Unfortunately, the inability to foretell ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... (the reader should not forget that all the characters are Indians), only the upper half of her body being visible, the lower being covered up by the low backs of the cane chairs. She was distinctly behind the chairs, and consequently slightly out of focus. Still everything was quite clear. Even her long necklace was visible through the little opening in the dhoti near the right shoulder. She was resting her hands on the backs of the chairs and the fingers were nearly totally out of focus, but a ring on the right ring-finger ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... seemed to Hugh an almost grotesque thought. He could conceive of a species of Pantheism, in which the object of one's awe and worship was the vast force underlying all existing things; but even so it seemed necessary to Hugh to focus it all into one personal force. The essence of worship seemed to Hugh to be that the thing worshipped should have unity and individuality. It seemed to him as impossible to worship a thing of which he himself was a part, as to demand ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Monaco and Mantone smiled at so arrogant a pretension. Rocco-Bruno was not the strongest, and was reduced to silence: from that moment, however, Rocco-Bruno was marked out to the two national conventions as a focus of sedition. The republic was finally proclaimed under the title of the Republic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... he had already suggested as the focus of attention, and they both saw, with the quick-sightedness of men accustomed to live by the chase, the cause ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... ushered by the landlord into a room which had been turned into a salon, felt himself instantly under the focus of an eyeglass held in the most ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... time trying to determine whether possession of the suit or previous experiences leading to his insistence on its development brought into focus the third ethic of his philosophy: "Rules One and Two are valuable and have their use. But when the chips are really down, do it yourself!" Instead, he toddled about personally acquiring the trappings of omnipotent royalty with ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... many a lonely woman is not life made endurable, even pleasant, by the possession and the love of a devoted dog! The man who would focus the burning glass of science upon the animal, may well mock at such a mission, and speak words contemptuous of the yellow old maid with her yellow ribbons and her yellow dog. Nor would it change his countenance or soften ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... pulses only is given to us of a variegated dramatic life. How may we see in them all that there is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.... While all melts under our ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... be persuaded. He was already beginning to see about how the cat jumped and to understand how much depended upon the gentle patronage of the luminaries of society. There was one little star, surely, whose light he should be glad to focus on himself once more—nor be indebted to another's kindness for the privilege. He had indeed ventured to call on Preciosa once or twice at her own home—in particular there was the evening on which, defying niggardly Fortune, he had invited her to the theatre, her ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... with them, then? Seven million church member voters in this country! Why do not they focus their religion and do something? I divine a reason. While they live all the rest of the year with prayers and resolutions, they go out on a moral debauch on election day with a disreputable individual ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... noise from the walled end of the passage. A moment later a blinding ray of light swung in, to focus upon them. ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... that the Polish National Government had no object in view but to excite and await the intervention of France; that Galicia was the principal focus of the rebellion, and that the unknown Government had no actual existence, is, on the one hand, an unskilful attempt to justify the Governments of Russia and Austria, and, on the other, by the ignoring of all the reports ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... four naturally brings everything to a practical focus and seems to me admirable. Chapter five, too, impressed me as very useful. The topical questions and their answers in the appendix was a very happy thought and adds materially to the value of the book."—Dr. G. Stanley Hall, ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... centre of gravity before their constituent masses have coalesced with one another. In a larger nebula, these local aggregations may have concentrated into rotating spheroids of vapour, while yet they have made but little approach towards the general focus of the system. In a still larger nebula, where the local aggregations are both greater and more remote from the common centre of gravity, they may have condensed into masses of molten matter before the general distribution of them has greatly altered. In short, as ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... field-glasses with rusty round barrels and lenses that refracted the colors of the rainbow; but exquisitely small ones, with square shoulders on the sides and quality showing in every line. She caught them up ecstatically and looked out across the Sink; and Wunpost let her gaze, though her focus was all wrong, while he made ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... streets. As we went eastward the lighting seemed to grow more generous. After the murk of London it was queer to slip through garish stations with a hundred arc lights glowing, and to see long lines of lamps running to the horizon. Peter dropped off early, but I kept awake till midnight, trying to focus thoughts that persistently strayed. Then I, too, dozed and did not awake till about five in the morning, when we ran into a great busy terminus as bright as midday. It was the easiest and most unsuspicious ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... as he finished reading the list. "I'll have the things here just as early in the morning as I can get them. I'm going to put out the lantern, but I will then hand it over to you with some matches. It has got a shade, and you can focus the rays so they will not show outside. Here are a couple of magazines—I brought ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... his meals on the wing, as it were, to run for trains, to snatch two hours' sleep anywhere between midnight and morning, and to be jostled by rude crowds that failed to recognize his superiority. The full-backed light overcoat, during its brief existence the focus of so much attention, was lost in a dinner rush and never reappeared. But, above all, Mr. Heathcote had upon his hands the care of the helpless, miserable lackey, and never did a sick baby require more attention. John was lost amid his strange ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... amongst the thin sparse scrub. . . . The younger ones resemble nothing so much as large funeral plumes. Their outlines seen under a blazing sun are indistinct, and they give to the whole scene a curious effect of being 'out of focus.'" ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... from eccentricity or helps to correct it. Eccentricity may appear harmless and even interesting, but in practice it is found to be a drawback, enfeebling some sides of a character, throwing the judgment at least on some points out of focus. In children it ought to be recognized as a defect to be counteracted. When people have an overmastering genius which of itself marks out for them a special way of excellence, some degree of eccentricity is easily pardoned, and almost allowable. But eccentricity ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... looked at the boiler quite twenty minutes, he got his ideas into a focus, and brought them to bear upon Solomon Daisy's story. The more he thought of it, the more impressed he became with a sense of his own wisdom, and a desire that Mr Haredale should be impressed with it likewise. At length, to the end that he might sustain a principal ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... and if curved, curving continuously or brokenly, etc. That this quality of line is distinct from form may be shown by the simple experiment of turning a spiral—a logarithmic spiral, let us say—in different ways about its focus. The aesthetic effect of the figure is absolutely different in the different positions, and yet the feeling about the character of the line itself seems to remain the same. In what sense, and for what reasons, ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... in the Memoir the focus of the Egyptian question changes; attention is centred on the diplomatic questions arising ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... began to shake in an alarming way. Only it must not be forgotten that the significance of Jerusalem to Isaiah did not arise from the temple of Solomon, but from the fact that it was the city of David and the focus of his kingdom, the central point, not of the cultus, but of the sovereignty of Jehovah over His people. The holy mount was to him the entire city as a political unity, with its citizens, councillors, and judges (xi.9); his faith in the sure foundation on which Zion rested was nothing ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... a change, unable to name it, but impossible to escape it. He was different. His eyes were bright, and they looked at her with a focus directed from a ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... furnish will point out a way whereby the modicum of assistance which the United States may properly lend the Ecuadorian Government may be made effective in ridding the west coast of South America of a focus of contagion to the future commercial current passing ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... him prompted Nelson to painfully raise his head and look about. He blinked dazedly, meanwhile trying to focus his eyes, then he heaved a faint sigh of relief as his gaze encountered the muscular, well-proportioned figure of Richard Alden, who half sat, half reclined, against one of the grey stone walls, burying a ghastly ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... various Indian tribes of the region, and wherever these emblems of butchery had been accepted the savage hordes were gathering, and around their bale-fires in the midnight pantomimes of murder were concentrating their excitable natures into a burning focus which would light their path ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... in Julius Caesar does not focus on any one person as completely as in the other great tragedies. Like the chronicle plays which had preceded it, it gives rather a grand panorama of history than the fate of any particular hero. This {178} explains its title. It is not the story of Julius Caesar the man, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... our race from day to day it is necessary to stop the headlong progress of experience, and, for an hour, to look back upon the past. Often, before we remember to direct our mind to it, that past is already blurred, and dim. The picture is out of focus, and turning from it in sorrow instantly the flight of our time begins again. This should not be. "There is," says Emerson, "a relationship between the hours of our life and the centuries of time." Let us give history and archaeology its due attention; for ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... crossed the ocean once before, and had done the continent. This time she intended to spend all of her time in Germany. Grace decided her new acquaintance to be a remarkably bright girl. At any other time she would have listened to her with absorbed interest, but try as she might, Grace could not focus her attention on what was being said. One thought was uppermost in her mind, that Miriam was the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... my dear Watson, I will. At present I am, as you know, fairly busy, but I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a textbook, which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume. Our present research appears to be a ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in the male, or the clitoris, in the female, is the exciting cause of masturbation. In a very large number of cases of masturbation, it is not the glans, but some other portion of the penis, which is the focus of stimulation. In girls, also, in numerous instances, masturbation is effected by stimulation of the labia minora, and I am inclined to believe that the importance of the labia minora is in this respect not inferior to that of the clitoris. In solitude, ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... sang some French chansons. Both playing and singing were perfect of their kind. Rorie did not understand Chopin, and thought there was a good deal of unnecessary hopping about the piano in that sort of thing—nothing concrete, or that came to a focus; a succession of airy meanderings, a fairy dance in the treble, a goblin hunt in the bass. But the French chansons, the dainty little melodies with words of infantile innocence, all about leaves and buds, and birds'-nests and butterflies, pleased him infinitely. He hung over the ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... city-state, but pretended above all to assure his welfare in this world and especially in the world to come. The Oriental mysteries offered their votaries radiant perspectives of eternal happiness. Thus the focus of morality was changed. The aim became to realize the sovereign good in the life hereafter instead of in this world, as the Greek philosophy had done. No longer did man act in view of tangible {xxiii} realities, but to attain ideal hopes. Existence in this life was regarded as a preparation for ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... examination of the Illustrated London News. The pictures, strictly speaking, are not so good, either artistically or morally, but there is a tang about them, an I-do-not-know-what. And it is always wisest to focus attention on some such extraneous interest. Otherwise you may get to looking in ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... Some traces of the former platform system, however, still remained. In front of the curtain, the stage projected into a wide "apron," as it was called, lined on either side by boxes filled with spectators; and the house was so inadequately lighted that almost all the acting had to be done within the focus of the footlights. After the curtain rose, the actors advanced into this projecting "apron" and performed the main business of the act beyond the range ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... drinking-water conducted in pipes, laid for the purpose from a spring about a mile and a quarter distant, whilst other piping carries water to the end of the pier for the requirements of shipping. This improvement, the present salubrity of the town (once a fever focus), and its latest Spanish embellishments, are mainly due to the intelligent activity of its late Governors, Colonel (now General) Gonzalez Parrado, and the late General ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... designed to be adapted to the focus of the citizen- student who brings to his task not merely the intellectual interest of the collector of knowledge, but the moral interest which belongs to one who is a part of all he sees, and a sharer in ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... world-conception which had hitherto obtained in the Chinese mind. He did not ask his fellow-countrymen to discard any part of what they had long held in high esteem: he raised the old theories from the sphere of science to that of philosophy by unifying them and bringing them to a focus. And he made this unification intelligible to the Chinese mind by his famous T'ai chi t'u, or Diagram of the Great Origin (or Grand Terminus), showing that the Grand Original Cause, itself uncaused, produces the yang and the yin, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... new American citizenship, none the less look to some centre in the Old World as the source and inspiration of their national culture and traditions. The most typical instance is the feeling of the American Jew for Palestine, which may well become a focus for his declasse kinsmen in other parts of the world. The Jews quite realise that they can have no exclusive claim to the possession of such a religious centre as Jerusalem, and it is clear that whatever happens to the Holy Land as a whole, the city itself must be subject to an ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... back. He thought of notifying the police, but, after all, he was none the worse off—except for his promise to Poritol and Alcatrante, now involuntarily broken. He must explain to them as best he could. The marked bill had been of no consequence to him except as a focus of adventure. And he had had about as much adventure as he ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... going to make you doff your hat to a hero before he is done; so he speaks eloquently not only of Milton but of the classics on which Milton fed, of the ideals and struggles of his age, of the Commonwealth and the Restoration,—of everything which may catch your attention and then focus it on one Titanic figure battling like Samson among the Philistines. It may be that your sympathies are with the Philistines rather than with Samson; but presently you stop objecting and are carried along by the author's eloquence as by a torrent. His style ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Ferdinand Pizarro, feeling convinced that his name constituted a focus of permanent agitation, resolved to get rid of him. He caused him therefore to be put upon his trial, which ended, as it was easy to foresee, in a sentence of death. When Almagro received this news, after giving way for a few moments to a very natural grief, pleading ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... could focus his sight upon them, these "shadows," without any light to cast them, moved in distorted guise there on the deck with a motion that was somehow rhythmical—a great movement as ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... at Court with all the forms it had acquired under Louis XIV.; dignity alone was wanting. As to gaiety, there was none. Versailles was not the place at which to seek for assemblies where French spirit and grace were displayed. The focus of wit ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... contest a generation later, when its great captain passed away. But these Sonnets to Liberty are worthy of comparison with the noblest passages of patriotic verse or prose which all our history has inspired—the passages where Shakespeare brings his rays to focus on "this earth, this realm, this England,"—or where the dread of national dishonour has kindled Chatham to an iron glow,—or where Milton rises from the polemic into the prophet, and Burke from the partisan into the philosopher. ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... got to canalise their emotion and concentrate their energies on some more definite and more maniable problem than that of making something that shall be aesthetically "right." They need a problem that will become the focus of their vast emotions and vague energies, and when that problem is solved their work will ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... day,—one of those crystalline days of our snowless Southern winter, when the air is clear and cool, and outlines sharpen in the light as if viewed through the focus of a diamond glass;—and in that brightness Julien La Brierre perused his own brief epitaph, and gazed upon the sculptured name of drowned Adele. Only half a year had passed since she was laid away in the high wall of tombs,—in that strange colonial columbarium ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... connection with this proposed Bureau. I urge you, indeed, to employ it in all conceivable ways. Be the mothers of men and women as well as of little children—the mothers of communities—the mothers of the state. And as a focus to these energies and disinterested activities, let us pray Washington to give ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... not been in my unnatural position for many minutes before I began to suffer agonies, agonies not only physical but mental; for standing there like some prisoner of the Inquisition, it came to me how this dismantled apartment must be the focus of the dreadful forces of Hassan ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... burst asunder and scatter as wide as the lagoon: so that I was irresistibly reminded of what I had read of nebular convulsions. A thin cloud overspread the area of the reef and the adjacent sea—the dust, as I could not but fancy, of earlier explosions. And, a little apart, there was yet another focus of centrifugal and centripetal flight, where, hard by the deafening line of breakers, her sails (all but the tattered topsail) snugly furled down, and the red rag that marks Old England on the seas beating, union down, at the main—the Flying Scud, the fruit of so many toilers, a recollection ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sainte-Beuve, thinks he can trace a marked rise even in Bossuet's style from the moment he became a courtier of Louis XIV. The King brought men together, placed them in a position where they were induced and urged to bring their talents to a focus. His court was alternately a high-bred gala and a stately university. If we contrast his life with those of his predecessor and successor, with the dreary existence of Louis XIII and the crapulous lifelong debauch of Louis XV, we become sensible that Louis XIV was distinguished ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... old story, with certain types of character, and he was not forgetful of theatrical necessities or dramatic construction. But as he went on he brought all his astounding interest in human nature to focus on the old plot and the stock type. Hamlet, the hesitating avenger, becomes the sentimentalist, the idealist, the thinker at war with himself, the embodiment of that conflict between circumstance and a nature unfitted to its task, which ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... St. Lawrence, but chiefly on the northern shore, with the houses grouped into cotes or little villages which almost touched elbows along the banks of the stream. In each of these hamlets the manor-house or home of the seigneur, although not a mansion by any means, was the focus of social life. Sometimes built of timber but more often of stone, with dimensions rarely exceeding twenty feet by forty, it was not much more pretentious than the homes of the more prosperous and thrifty among the seigneur's dependents. Its three or four spacious rooms were, however, more ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... the big tree across the street. I'm sure he's watching the Foger house, and when Andy came to the door that time, I happened to look around and saw that man focus a pair of opera glasses on him and ...
— Tom Swift and his Great Searchlight • Victor Appleton
... power lies in a saltatorial ensemble of white lace skirts, pale blue hose, lustrous naked arms, undulating bodice, magnetic eyes, flying hair, and an unchanging smile, to focus the perceptions of a man, to absorb his consciousness, aided by a tune which seems to close out from him all the rest ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Then the focus changed to cover the other machine. It was of the same type; and Smith saw that it was swooping in a steep spiral, its driver leaning over in his seat, ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... is this. It is a magnetic, electric conductor for the magician's will. It directs the flow of his thought and concentrates it upon a given point in space or an object. It is, magically, what the sights of a rifle are to a sportsman. It enables him to focus his powers with exact precision upon the mark against which, or upon which, his will is directed. Apart from this there is no power, per se, in the Wand itself, any more than there is in a lightning conductor without the electric storm. Ergo, the Wand is the conductor, in the magician's ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... and I were in a constant state of ecstasy and of clutching each other's gowns, trying to see every one who passed. But it was of no use. Although they drove slowly on purpose to be seen, if you tried to focus your glance on each one it seemed as if they drove like lightning, and you got only astigmatism for your pains. I always came home from the Bois with a headache and ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... ills are principally caused by bad physical habits, so are mental ills and inefficiency chiefly due to various bad mental habits, which are allowed to fasten themselves upon us. These will be briefly discussed so as to focus attention upon them, for the first thing necessary for the correction of a bad habit is to recognize its presence. It is as important to think right as it is to give the body proper care. A good body with a mind working in the wrong direction is of no use. If we allow our minds to ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... there found Turenne; on the other hand, the queen had just been through Normandy; all the towns had opened their gates to her; it was just the same in Burgundy; the Princess of Conde's able agent, Lenet, could not obtain a declaration from the Parliament of Dijon in her favor. Bordeaux was the focus of the insurrection; the people, passionately devoted to "the dukes," as the saying was, were forcing the hand of the Parliament; riots were frequent in the town; the little king, with the queen ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... journal than in the examination of the Illustrated London News. The pictures, strictly speaking, are not so good, either artistically or morally, but there is a tang about them, an I-do-not-know-what. And it is always wisest to focus attention on some such extraneous interest. Otherwise you may get to looking in ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... some maritime disputes (see littoral states); Svalbard is the focus of a maritime boundary dispute between Norway and ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... shout, and run up and down the deck, with no other object in view than that of giving vent to my excited feelings. Then I went below for the telescope, and spent nearly ten minutes of the utmost impatience in vainly trying to get a focus, and in rubbing the skin nearly off my eyes, before I discovered that having taken off the large glass to examine the phosphoric water with, I had omitted ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... Peru till its independence. The power of Spain in South America was destroyed at the battle of Ayacucho, Dec. 9, 1824. In 1830 Venezuela separated from Colombia, and Ecuador followed the same year. The first Congress was held in Riobamba; but Quito has ever since been the political focus. The ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... loudly and loftily, "listen. Now, Ariel, bring your brains to a focus. I improvise poetry; I improvise fiction. We will begin with the good old formula of the fairy stories. ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... great city, the capital of the Bohemian Crownland, the centre of a not unimportant nation, the focus in which are concentrated the hottest, if not the brightest, rays from the fire of regeneration kindled within the last half century by the Slavonic race. There is an ardent furnace of life hidden beneath the crust of ashes: there is a ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... Felt his brow begin to wrinkle, And his pose assume a sad and solemn style; But the Periwinkle trusted, As the focus he adjusted, That his customer would ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... terminated by a pair of broken shoes, and sustained by what he called a single gallows; his broad-brimmed straw hat scooped down upon his shoulders behind, and in front added to his congenital difficulty of getting people in focus. "How do you do, this morning, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... pencils. Now in fig. 2 the concave eye-glass is so placed as to receive only a part of the convergent pencil A p B, and this is the arrangement usually adopted. By using a concave glass of shorter focus, which would therefore be placed nearer to m p, the whole of the convergent pencil might be received in this as in the former case. But then the axis of the emergent pencil, instead of returning (as we see it in fig. 1) towards the axis of the telescope, ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... be seen a wonderful volcanic tract. So vast, in fact, that Professor Johnstrup has termed it the Fire Focus of the North. To the north-east, again, is found a large lake, called 'Myvata,' or 'Midge Lake,' with a volcanic range of mountains which stretch from north to south; the most famous of these are 'Leivhnukr,' and 'Krafla,' which, after years of quiescence, ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... straight into the lens," he said. "If they do, it won't make a good picture. They ought to come at an angle. So," he explained, placing his hand obliquely to the line of focus. Then he bent over, laid his eye to the gun-sight of the machine, and likewise ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... to home affairs, for his hands were full of arrears of business, and the excitement respecting Mr. Smith necessarily occupied him. Pending the arrival of letters from the Rector, every tongue was in commotion, and the reading-room was a focus of debate and centre of intelligence. So many letters, either in assault or defence, were addressed to the editor of the Pursuivant, that only a supplement as big as the Times could have contained them. Every poor person ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a kind of democracy of crime, contended for by Mr. Freeman, that has its charms to the ears of the groundlings. He is opposed to a law that punishes one class of gamblers only, instead of bringing all, within the focus of its penalties! There is much truth in this. Laws ought to be equal in their operation—but if they cannot be equal, this is no reason why there ought to be no laws at all. This conclusion is not warranted by any rule in ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... of the otherwise immaculate sky. The castle undoubtedly commanded that highway on the far side of the wood along which they must pass. Carter had descended into the road and was eagerly adjusting the focus for a better view. ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... says he, "in my travels I was obliged to avoid Fyzabad, upon account of the suspected rebellion there." Another chief-justice would have gone fifty miles about to avoid Lucknow, for everybody knows that Lucknow was the focus and centre of extortion, corruption, and peculation, and that a worse air for the lungs of a chief-justice could not be found in the world. If his lungs wanted the benefit of pure air, he would even have put himself in the focus of a rebellion, to have ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... severe head injuries and secondary to acute traumatic osteo-myelitis, was the form most commonly seen. Pyaemia with secondary deposits was uncommon, and often of a somewhat subacute form; thus I saw several patients recover after secondary abscesses had been opened, or the primary focus of infection removed. The only really acute case of joint pyaemia I heard of, developed in connection with a blistered toe followed by ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... the military capital. Kamakura was then only a fishing hamlet, but at the zenith of its prosperity it had grown to be a city of at least a quarter of a million of inhabitants. During a period of one hundred and fifty years it remained the centre of military society and the focus of a civilization radically different from that of Kyoto. The Taira had invited their own ruin by assimilating the ways of the Fujiwara and of the courtiers; the Minamoto aimed at preserving and developing at Kamakura the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... and the face slid out of focus; the vision faded like a darkened magic-lantern, and ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak
... stage-lighting. In old pictures you will observe the actors constantly standing in a line, because the oil-lamps of those days gave such an indifferent illumination that everybody tried to get into what was called the focus—the "blaze of publicity" furnished by the "float" or footlights. The importance of this is illustrated by an amusing story of Edmund Kean, who one night played Othello with more than his usual intensity. An admirer who met him in the street next day was loud in his congratulations: ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... Her life was faithful to its first impulse. Devoted to the improvement of the condition of the people, she was the moving spring of the charitable development of this great city. Her house, without any pedantic effort, had become the focus of a refined society, who, though obliged to show themselves for the moment in the great carnival, wear their masks, blow their trumpets, and pelt the multitude with sugarplums, were glad to find a place where they could at all times divest themselves of ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... which the seed is to be sown; it looks primarily to the growth of the seed and not to the elimination of the weeds. Our nature is a field in which the Word of God is sown; its preparation and care is what we need to focus ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... of the table were six or seven thick pasteboard cards, each about the size of a large portfolio, and on these the author's notes and extracts were collected from all his repertories into something like a focus for a present purpose. He was writing a novel based on facts; facts, incidents, living dialogue, pictures, reflections, situations, were all on these cards to choose from, and arranged in headed columns; and some portions of the work he was writing ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... the administration. Mr. Lincoln seems to be a rather slow intellect, with slow powers of perception. However, patience; perhaps the shock of events will arouse and bring in action now latent, but good and energetic qualities. As it stands now, the administration, being the focus of activity, is tepid, if not cold and slow; the circumference, that is, the people, the States, are full of fire and of activity. This condition is altogether the reverse of the physiological and all other natural laws, and this may turn out badly, as nature's laws never can ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... differentiation enormous wealth—we convulse the excellent Dame by terming it a chained hurricane, to launch in foul blasts or beneficent showers, according to the moods during youth—and the composite Lord Fleetwood comes nearer into our focus. Dame Gossip, with her jigging to be at the butterwoman's trot, when she is not violently interrupting, would suffer just punishment were we to digress upon the morality of a young man's legal possession of enormous wealth ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Harold realized that here was his opportunity: in one stroke, one easy shot, he could turn the day's ignominy into triumph. He could focus Virginia's admiration upon himself. But the impulse had even deeper significances. It was not the way of sportsmen, wandering in file on mountain trails, to clamor for the first shot at game. Whatever ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... Arabella he found Peter Blood alone and very far gone in drink—a condition in which no man ever before remembered to have seen him. As Wolverstone came in, the Captain raised bloodshot eyes to consider him. A moment they sharpened in their gaze as he brought his visitor into focus. Then he laughed, a loose, idiot laugh, that yet somehow was half ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... surface KD along lines parallel to DB, will advance subsequently towards the point B, and will arrive there at the same time. As for the Ellipse which served for reflexion, it is evident that it will here become a parabola, since its focus A may be regarded as infinitely distant from the other, B, which is here the focus of the parabola, towards which all the reflexions of rays parallel to AB tend. And the demonstration of these effects is just the ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... many languages. He was one of the most precocious of the long list of precocious versifiers; his own words are: 'I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.' The influences which would no doubt have determined his style in any case were early brought to a focus in the advice given him by an amateur poet and critic, William Walsh. Walsh declared that England had had great poets, 'but never one great poet that was correct' (that is of thoroughly regular style). Pope accepted this hint as his guiding principle and proceeded to seek correctness ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... your left!" Belle's thought drove in as he had never before felt it driven. Being a Prime, she did not need a focus spot and appeared the veriest instant later than ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... women's clothes, was noting the long, firm folds of her skirt. Vernon had turned from the window to approve the loving closeness of those violets against her hair. Lady St. Craye in her graceful attitude of conscious unconsciousness was the focus of their eyes. ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... enough of his former gentility about Barnet's appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too, had other things to think of that night, and he was permitted to reach the galleries about Leicester Square—that great focus of London ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... science tells us, the magnet controls, But she is a magnet to emigrant Poles, And folks with a mission that nobody knows Throng thickly about her as bees round a rose. She can fill up the carets in such, make their scope Converge to some focus of rational hope, And, with sympathies fresh as the morning, their gall Can transmute into honey,—but this is not all; Not only for those she has solace; O, say, Vice's desperate nursling adrift in Broadway, Who clingest, with all that is left of thee human, To the last slender ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... deceptive, but surely it was some animal approaching in his direction. He had up till then forgotten his binoculars, but he was now wide awake and, looking first to his rifle, he got out his glasses and twisted them into focus upon the moving object in the distance. A startled exclamation rose to his lips as the field-glasses covered the moving spot; it was a man. Yes running, stumbling, crouching and at times almost crawling the object which he saw was a white man, naked except for a few rags. His ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... them! No longer will you see the antichthon of Plato, the focus of Philolaues, the spheres of Aristotle, or the seven heavens of the Jews with the great waters above ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... it to her, she put her hand on his shoulder, got slowly up, and stood on the creepie and adjusted the focus of her glass; after a short view, she said ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... back. He was confused, and there was blankness around him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more complete integration than he ...
— The Very Secret Agent • Mari Wolf
... of the concern. When a man goes sticking his nose into the running of the house, he's apt to get it tweaked, and while he's busy drawing it back out of danger he's going to get his leg pulled, too. You let your wife tend to the housekeeping and you focus on earning money with which she can keep house. Of course, in one way, it's mighty nice of a man to help around the place, but it's been my experience that the fellows who tend to all the small jobs at home never get anything else to tend to at the office. In the ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... were playing checkers instead of the game of life. He made no reply, but the spell was broken. I believe that both sides had been bluffing. In attempting to use my kodak while continuing the bluff, I brought matters to a focus. "What a picture you fellows will make," I said aloud, as my right hand slowly worked the kodak out of the case which hung under my left arm. Still keeping up a steady fire of looks, I brought the kodak in front of me ready to focus, and then touched the spring that ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... necessarily diffuse in the strict sense of the term; the omentum often protects the upper abdominal cavity from infection, as was proven in this case at the autopsy. It is possible that this diffuse peritonitis, which did not in the early period of the affection extend beyond the limited local focus, was not due to the intestinal contents and to bacteria, but chiefly to bacterial toxins which arose from the circumscribed original focus. This fact is pointed out by the prompt retrogression of the diffuse peritoneal ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... focus of a million pairs of convergent eyes, the Ambitious Person sat him down between the sun and moon and murmured sadly to ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... Scripture, and therefore not combinable with a perfect faith, it is something between prayer and wish,—an act of natural piety sublimed by Christian hope, that shares in the light, and meets the diverging rays, of faith, though it be not contained in the focus. ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... symptom of serious retinal disease. All night-prowling animals have widely dilatable pupils, and in addition to this they have in the retina a special organ called the tapetum lucidum, the function of which is to reflect to a focus in front of them the relatively few rays of light that enter the widely-dilated pupil and thus enable them the better to see their way. Hence the luminous appearance of the eyes of such animals in ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... his proof, the claims of the poet must fascinate one with their implications. The two aspects of human life, the physical and the ideal, focus in the poet, and the result is the harmony which is art. The fact is of profound philosophical significance, surely, for union of the apparent contradictions of the sensual and the spiritual can only mean that idealism is of the essence of the universe. What is the poetic ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... pull of his mindless enemy in the distant sky. Floating and kicking his way over to the Tele-screen, he quickly switched the instrument on. Rotating the control dials, he brought the blinding white image of the onrushing solar disk into perfect focus. Automatically he adjusted the two superimposed polaroid filters until the proper amount of light was transmitted to his viewing screen. They really built ships and filters these days, he reflected wryly. Now if they could only form a rescue ...
— Rescue Squad • Thomas J. O'Hara
... honor—right-hand column; but more conspicuous than the headlines of his own story was one of Redding's, photographs. It was the one he had taken of Sister Anne when first she had approached them, in her uniform of mercy, advancing across the lawn, walking straight into the focus of the camera. There was no mistaking her for any other living woman; but beneath the picture, in bold, staring, uncompromising type, was a strange and ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... now glance at the times as they are, and see how the business of life is transacted. Manhattan Island has something over 2,500,000 inhabitants, and is surrounded by a belt of population, several miles wide, of 12,000,000 more, of which it is the focus, so that the entire city contains more than 14,500,000 souls. The several hundred square miles of land and water forming greater New York are perfectly united by numerous bridges, tunnels, and electric ferries, while the city's ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... reflectors are fixed in the same holder; one a concave mirror, the other a plane one. The former brings the rays of light to a point or focus while the latter simply passes the beam of light along just as it received it, viz., as ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson
... the larger, the latter having a deeper swish, deeper and longer drawn-out. Their voices were so high and shrill that the singing of the jungle crickets seemed almost contralto in comparison. Finally, I began to feel myself the focus of one or more of these winged weasels. The swishes became more frequent, the returnings almost doubling on their track. Now and then a small body touched the sheet for an instant, and then, with a soft ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... bite or to tear him. Instinctively the fallen man covers his face with his arms, and with the lion, tiger and leopard the arms come in for fearful punishment. It is the way of carnivorous beasts to attack each other head to head and mouth to mouth, and this same instinct leads these animals to focus their initial attacks upon the heads and faces of ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... continuous growth. From month to month, and from year to year, as aeroplane constructors and pilots have continued at their tasks, overcoming technical difficulties and personal risks, the interest of ordinary people has grown perceptibly. Even before the war—which has done so much to focus attention on flying—the attitude of scepticism and apathy had been greatly changed. When the London Aerodrome at Hendon was established, there were shrewd men in the city, men who are ordinarily very sound in their conclusions, who declared the public would ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... and a princely fortune, Count d'Orsay spared neither trouble nor expense to render his house the focus of all that was rich and rare; and, with a spirit that does not always animate the possessor of rare works of art, he opened it to the young artists of the day, who were permitted to study in its ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... opposite. He was as interested in Dorothy Marteen's admirers as any fond father could be; and yet his eyes turned with strange, fascinated jealousy to the older woman's loveliness. Suddenly he drew in the focus of his glasses. A face had come within the rim of his observation—the face of a man sitting in the row in front of him. That man, too, had his glasses turned toward the group on the other side of the ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... hold the object where I told you," Quest replied, "I can see it. I promise you that. There, that's right. Hold it steady. I've got the focus of it now. Say, French, where did you say ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... apart from the polar compression, the shape seemed as if the spheroid were irregularly squeezed; so that though not broken by projection or indentation, the limb did not present the regular quasi-circular curvature exhibited in the focus of our telescopes. Also, between the inner ring and the planet, with a power of 500, I discerned what appeared to be a dark purplish ring, semi-transparent, so that through it the bright surface of Saturn might be discerned as through a veil. Mercury shone brightly several degrees outside the ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... first was general and desultory; but after a little time Ernest brought conversation round to its proper focus, and placed his case of conscience fairly before his father confessor. Was it allowable for a consistent socialist to accept the place of tutor to the son of a ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Georgia thus the geographical focus of our Negro population, but in many other respects, both now and yesterday, the Negro problems have seemed to be centered in this State. No other State in the Union can count a million Negroes among its citizens,—a population ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... and the president said a few words that were more or less significant; but the abbe, looking at them slyly, brought their thoughts to a focus by taking a pinch of snuff and saying as he handed round his snuff-box: "Who can do the honors of Saumur for monsieur ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... right so far, that it is possible by just a touch to convert the noblest sentiment into commonplace. No more than a touch is necessary. The parabolic mirror will reflect the star to a perfect focus. The elliptical mirror, varying from the parabola by less than the breadth of a hair, throws an image which is useless. But Mr. Cardew was far more wrong than he was right. He did not take into account that what his wife said and what she felt might not be the same; ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... the spot he had already suggested as the focus of attention, and they both saw, with the quick-sightedness of men accustomed to live by the chase, the cause ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... craving, but by his own will he followed my suggestions and never took more than I permitted. It meant a terrible struggle. The tortures which he had to pass through were perhaps worse than those which he had experienced at the time of his lowest downfall. They came to a focus when he tried to go from five grains to three grains a day and then again when he approached half a grain. From there he had to move to a fourth of a grain, then to an eighth, and even that had still to be divided into four different doses ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... next minute with his hands trembling so that he could hardly focus and steady the "optic tube." Then he shouted in his excitement, and handed ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... and home was the living Hut and its focus was the stove. Kitchen and stove were indissolubly linked, and beyond their pale was a wilderness of hanging clothes, boots, finnesko, mitts and what not, bounded by tiers of bunks and blankets, more hanging clothes and dim photographs between the frost-rimed ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... mother's lap Stephen shuddered with the sharpest pain he had ever known. An ocean-wide tempest arose in his breast, Samson's strength to break the pillars of the temple to slay these men with his bare hands. Seven generations of stern life and thought had their focus here in him,—from ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... judgement by those same standards, after detaching them for the purpose from the environment in which they had their being? How false must be the conception of them thus obtained! We view the individuals so selected through a microscope of modern focus. They appear monstrous and abnormal, and we straight-way assume them to be monsters and abnormalities, never considering that the fault is in the adjustment of the instrument through which we inspect them, and that until that ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... perfection and complication.—To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... is I am an engineer (section D of the Public Works Department) and I have to make an important measurement in connexion with the Apothegm of the Bilateral which runs to-night precisely through this spot. My fingers now mark exactly the concentric of the secondary focus whence the Radius Vector should be drawn, but I find that (like a fool) I have left my Double Refractor in the cafe hard by. I dare not go for fear of losing the place I have marked; yet I can get no further without ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... place, where he thought the light would be most serviceable, and then started to focus his camera on a spot which he selected; when the drifting piece of wreckage reached that position it would be at the proper distance for effective work, and he could press the button with the belief that he had ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... view the possibility of its being connected with some more central body of water. Having however gained a position so much higher to the north, and almost on the same meridian, and having crossed so remarkable a feature as the Stony Desert (which, as I suppose, was once the focus of a mighty current, to judge from its direction passing to the westward), I no longer encouraged hopes which, if realized, would have been of great advantage to me, or regretted the circumstances by which I was prevented from more fully examining the north-east and ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... get his train of thought to focus once more on the submarine problem. But for some reason the business with the microphone and the speaker in the next room kept lingering ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... of the capital cities of the provinces; the kernel is that vast sleepy interior of China. Few people, even in Shanghai, know what it means; so that to the stay-at-home European pardon for ignorance of existing conditions so much out of his focus should readily be granted. ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... "that must be why they always have a pair of them,—so as to get a proper focus. Nicht ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... hurl itself down the precipice to an islet immediately above the fall, and from one point of which he could look over its edge into the foaming caldron below, mark the mad whirl of its waters, and stand in the very focus of its vapoury columns and its deafening roar. But unique and magnificent as was the cataract when Dr. Livingston beheld it, the reports of others, and the inference drawn by himself, satisfied him that the spectacle was tame compared with what occurs during the rainy season, when the river ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... result of thought. Picture to yourself a beautiful tone; sing it on the vowel Ah. If you stood in rapture before an entrancing scene you would exclaim, Ah, how beautiful. Producing a beautiful tone rests on certain conditions. First, breath control; Second, Freedom of throat; Third, Correct focus of tone. ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... conspire to ignore. She thinks that these barriers to progress ought to be swept away, because they have a vicious effect on the institution and degrade men and women. She's always got her eye on the future, and the result is sometimes that she doesn't focus the present too exactly. ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... materials, they are "Human Nature, in its various Forms and Affections." Each character should focus on a single vice or virtue, yet since "the Heart of Man is frequently actuated by more Passions than one," subsidiary traits ought to be included to round out the portrait (e.g., the covetous man may also be ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... presented the little disk to the face of the glowing luminary. Quivering with excitement lest a sudden cloud should interpose, a moment passed before I could hold the lens steadily enough to concentrate a burning focus. At length it came. The little thread of smoke curled gracefully upwards from the Heaven-lighted spark, which, a few moments afterwards, diffused with warmth and ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... proof and illustration of a previous position;—gratifying no passion, indulging no caprice, but, with a calm mastery over your soul, leading you onward and onward for ever through a thousand windings, yet with no pause, to some magnificent point in which, as in a focus, all the party-coloured rays of his discourse should converge in light. In all this he was, in truth, your teacher and guide; but in a little while you might forget that he was other than a fellow student ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... stepped to one side, so that the light from the lamp shone from behind him, and he wondered if the picture had been condemned to hang with its face to the wall because it typified the existent rather than the past. He looked more closely, and drew back step by step, until he was in the proper focus to bring out every expression in the lovely face. In the picture he saw each moment a greater resemblance to Jeanne. The eyes, the hair, the sweetness of the mouth, the smile, brought to him a vision of Jeanne herself. The woman in the picture was older than Jeanne, and his ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... dress he moved through the gardens and pavilions of the casino on the rock, where with the coming of darkness the gayety of the town began to focus ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... treatment,—not of Marlborough, whom he regarded only as he would have done a pair of military boots or a holster-pistol of superior excellence, for the uses that were in him,—but of the Kaiser Karl his own sublime self, the heart and focus of Political Nature; left in this manner, now when the sordid English and Dutch declined spending blood and money for him farther. "Ungrateful, sordid, inconceivable souls," answered Karl, "was there ever, since the early Christian ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... (I quote from rough notes only), "A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." Here we have the truer philosophy, here we have the secret of Lewis Carroll's life. He never wasted time on social formalities; he ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... things but the course of things, that they are moving past me, over me, and round and round me their fixed center—for the horizon to bend about, for the sky to arch over, for the highways to start from, for every influence and interest between Hingham and Heaven to focus on. ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... paper and read while waiting.... It was queer how he could hardly focus his attention on it, impatient for her as a schoolboy for his first love.... Always when she entered a room came beauty.... Well, she would come.... The type took form beneath his eyes.... The races at ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... too is their dwelling, the Atrium Vestae, and also that of the Pontifex Maximus (Regia), in whose potestas they were; these three buildings, then insignificant to look at, constituted the religious focus of the oldest Rome.[31] A little farther again to the left is the temple of Castor and the spring of Juturna, lately excavated, where the Twins watered their steeds after the battle of the lake Regillus. In front of us we ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... not as affording a case that can be argued with ingenuity, but as enshrining one great principle that shines through and informs the rest, that illumines the mind of the individual, that warms, clarifies and invigorates—that, so to speak, puts the mind in focus, gets the facts of existence into perspective, and gives the individual everything in its right place and true proportion. It brings a man to the point where he does not dispute but believes. He has been wandering about cold and irresolute, tasting all philosophies, or none, and drinking ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... with a head much too small for his height; a narrow forehead, above which the brown hair looked like a wig; pale-blue, ill-set eyes, that seemed too large for their sockets, consequently tumbled about a little, and were never at once brought to focus; a large, but soft-looking nose; a loose-lipped mouth, and very little chin. He always looked as if consciously trying to keep himself together. He wore his shirt-collar unusually high, yet out of it far shot his long neck, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... which, while accepting with enthusiasm their new American citizenship, none the less look to some centre in the Old World as the source and inspiration of their national culture and traditions. The most typical instance is the feeling of the American Jew for Palestine, which may well become a focus for his declasse kinsmen in other parts of the world. The Jews quite realise that they can have no exclusive claim to the possession of such a religious centre as Jerusalem, and it is clear that whatever happens to the Holy Land ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... into one focus all that they found of beauty in art from many distant sources—Egyptian, Indian, Assyrian—and thus fired their inborn genius, which thenceforth radiated its splendour ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... "If the universe is pure mind and there is no matter, then this dirt is not a real thing, after all. It seems, of course, as if it were thicker under the beds and bureaus than elsewhere, but I suppose our evil thoughts focus themselves there rather than in the centre of the room. Similarly, if the broom handle is broken, deny the dirt away—denial is much less laborious than sweeping; bring 'the science' down to these simple details of everyday life, and you will make converts by dozens, only ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Adjoining this temple, Opimius, the consul, erected the Basilica Opimia, which was used by the silversmiths, who were the bankers and pawnbrokers of Rome. The whole quarter on the north side of the Forum, where this basilica stood, was the Roman exchange— the focus for all ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... tobacco perhaps isn't quits the thing for a man of education. But to be a chandler is something worthy of any man's ambition. You supply at once the solids and the luxuries of life; you range from boiled ham and pickles to mixed biscuits and preserves. You are the focus of a whole street. The father comes to you for his mid-day bread and cheese, the mother for her half-ounce of tea, the child for its farthing's-worth of sweets. For years I've been leading a useless life; once let me get into my shop, and I become a column of the social system. Faith, ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... the stream at a slow pace to the north, sweltering in the heat which seemed to come to a focus here at the confluence of great waters, until at last they reached a wide extent of low country overgrown with bushes and cut with a broad yellow band coming ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... assembly but by its title and function, no colours could paint to the imagination anything more venerable. In that light the mind of an inquirer, subdued by such an awful image as that of the virtue and wisdom of a whole people collected into one focus, would pause and hesitate in condemning things even of the very worst aspect. Instead of blameable, they would appear only mysterious. But no name, no power, no function, no artificial institution whatsoever, can make the ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... the first epochs of the formation of the globe. The basalt pillars, fitted one into the other, measured from forty to fifty feet in height, and the water, calm in spite of the tumult outside, washing their base. The brilliant focus of light, pointed out by the engineer, touched every point of rock, and flooded the walls with light. By reflection the water reproduced the brilliant sparkles, so that the boat appeared to be floating between ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... writer suggests the theory that a stream or group of innumerable bodies, comparatively small, but of various dimensions, is sweeping around the solar focus in an orbit, which periodically cuts the orbit of the earth, thus explaining the actual cause of shooting ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... pondered in her heart persistently whatever she had actually seen and heard, and in the end was almost the only non-Indian actor on the stage of Sialpore to reap advantage. If that does not prove unfitness for one of the leading parts, what does? A star should scintillate—should focus all eyes on herself and interrupt the progress of the play to let us know how wise and beautiful and wonderful she is. But Tess apparently agreed with Hamlet that "the play's the thing," and was much too interested in the plot to interfere ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... compassionate woman, fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular, compact and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downward and inward, to one common focus. ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... account; if this were not the evening of my birthday, and you the only friend who remembered it; if confession were not good for the soul, though harder than sin to some people, of whom I am one—well, if all reasons were not at this instant converged into a focus, and burning me rather violently, in that region where the seat of emotion is supposed to lie, I should keep my trouble to myself. Yes, I have fifty times had it on my mind to tell you the whole story. But who can be certain ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... long thin lips an instant but, eager to be on, raised an outspanned hand to his spectacles and, with trembling thumb and ringfinger touching lightly the black rims, steadied them to a new focus. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... importance and the mind as everything. Now I am firmly convinced that the mind of man, so far from being a thing apart from the objects that form its environment, is, in fact, nothing else but a mirror or focus upon which objects register their impressions and that all the thinking in the world is done not really by the mind but by the objects that form our thoughts and the reasons, utterly divorced from what we call human reason, that connect ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... issues between Houses, and I come to that between Parties. Great changes in a community are very often unperceived; the focus of reality moves from one institution in the State to another, and almost imperceptibly. Sometimes the forms of institutions remain almost the same in all ceremonial aspects, and yet there will be one institution which under pretentious forms is only the husk ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... detectascope enables you to see what is going on in another room. The focus may be altered in range so that the faces of those in the room may be recognized and the act of passing money or signing cheques, for instance, may be detected. The instrument is fashioned somewhat after the cytoscope of the doctors, with which the ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... the facts which we actually know directly in the ordinary course are discriminated out of a very much wider field which we must also be said in a sense to know directly though most of it lies outside the clear focus of attention. This whole field of virtual knowledge is regarded as standing to the actual facts to which we usually devote our attention, much as, for instance, the whole situation of stumbling upon something in a dark ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... Tommy was playing in the yard. Sally's eyes came to a focus upon him, crouching by a hole in the fence which kindly old Mrs. Wallingford had erected as a protection against the prying inquisitiveness of an eight-year-old determined to ...
— The Calm Man • Frank Belknap Long
... escaped from Janet, and had been seeking him some time, opening doors and stumbling into endless passages, but always making her way back somehow to the focus of light—the big hall; and feeling drearily as though she were some forlorn princess shut up in an enchanted castle, who could not find ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Court of the Universe.—Passing through the Tower of Jewels into the great court where themes become universal under the circle of stars above the surrounding colonnade, we come to the Fountains of the Rising and the Setting Sun, by A. A. Weinmann, one at either focus of the elliptical sunken garden. In the East, the Sun, in the strength of the morning, his wings spread for flight, is springing upward from the top of the tall column rising out of the fountain. Walk toward him ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... desk. "That proves it! Governor Hardy has to be told what's going on!" He flipped on the teleceiver near by and asked the central communications operator to connect him with the governor's office. In a moment the face of Christopher Hardy sharpened into focus on ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... his sallow cheek flushed. "Here at last I may serve you somewhat, Martin," said he and, turning his back to the sun, he set the instrument to his eye and began moving the three vanes to and fro until he had the proper focus and might obtain the sun's altitude; whereby he had presently found our present position, the which he duly pricked upon the chart. He now showed me how, by standing out on direct course instead of following the tortuous windings of the coast, we could shorten our passage by very many ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... and Germany received a check. A blood-stained revolution at Belgrade ousted the pro-Austrian Obrenovitch, and put in its place the rival family of the Karageorgevitch. Under the new dynasty Servia escaped from Austrian tutelage, and became an independent focus of Slav life in close touch with Russia. The change was illustrated in 1908, when Austria took advantage of the revolution in Turkey, led by the Young Turks, to annex formally the occupied territories of Bosnia and the Herzegovina. Servia, which had hoped to gain these ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... address. We heard the United States Marine Band playing "Hail to the Chief." For a few seconds I looked toward the reviewing stand. The new President, Warren G. Harding, was taking his place on the stand amid the din and roar of applause. He was the focus of all eyes, the pivot around which all interest turned. Not one of the thousands turned to look at the lonely figure laboriously climbing into the automobile. The words of Ibsen flashed into ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... penetrating, and even microscopic vision; but he sees everything in his favourite black and white or gray, and loses all the delights of gorgeous, though it may be deceptive, colouring. One man sees everything in the forcible light and shade of Rembrandt: a few heroes stand out conspicuously in a focus of brilliancy from a background of imperfectly defined shadows, clustering round the centre in strange but picturesque confusion. To another, every figure is full of interest, with singular contrasts and sharply-defined features; the whole effect is somewhat spoilt by ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Always the child of impulse, and careless of appearance and opinion, she felt her thoughts, none too cheerful or optimistic that morning during her long walk down the avenue, drawn by the expression upon the legless man's face to a sudden focus of triumph and solution. She struck the palm of one small workman-like hand with the back of the other, ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... its club, and, what is odd, the navy furnishes many crack players. It is the favorite par excellence at all schools, colleges and universities; every county, every town and every village has its local club; while the I Zingari and its host of rivals serve to focus the ubiquitous talent of All England. The public enjoy it, merely as spectators, to such a degree that a grand match-day at Lord's is only second in point of enthusiasm to the Derby Day. Special trains carry thousands, and the field presents a gay picture ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... the dead," said the Eastern pundit, reproachfully, out of his yellow turban, to the American who had just ordered a ham-sandwich. "And you eat the living," replied the American, as he handed a little hand-microscope to the pundit and asked him to focus it upon his dinner of dried figs. The pundit looked at the figs through the glass, and behold, they were covered with crawling, wiggling, wriggling, living life! And then did the man from the East throw the microscope out of the window, and say, "Now there are no ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... things. They think with a simple flat certitude that if, for example, a doctor says quinine is good for a case it means that he wishes to put every ounce of quinine that can be procured into his patient, to focus all the quinine in the world upon him; or that if a woman says she likes dancing, that thereby she declares her intention to dance until she drops. They are dear lumpish souls who like things "straightforward" as they say—all or nothing. They think qualifications or any quantitative ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... not escaped the notice of the British military authorities, who welcomed any movement which might bring to a focus that resistance which had been so nebulous and elusive. Lord Kitchener having once seen the enemy fairly gathered into this huge cover, undertook the difficult task of driving it from end to end. For this enterprise General French was given the chief command, and had ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... (Italian), not merely in a few subjective lines, but with genuine modern enjoyment. He was one of those figures in the world's history in whom all the intellectual life and feeling of a time come to a focus. ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... thing you always incidentally collect others. The fisherman who casts his net for shad usually secures a few other fish, and once in a while a turtle, which enlarges the mesh to suit, and gives sweet liberty to the shad. To focus exclusively on dollars is to secure jealousy, fear, vanity, and a vaulting ambition that may claw its way through the mesh and let your dollars slip into ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... despite of all our precautions, be introduced amongst us, measures better calculated for the destruction of a community, could scarcely be devised, than the ancient quarantine regulations; for they certainly would convert every house proscribed by their mark, into a den and focus of the most concentrated pestilential contagion, ensuring fearful retribution upon those who had thus so blindly shut them up. The mark alone, besides being equivalent to a sentence of death upon all the inmates, would effect all this—the sick would ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... purpose the centralizing point of his thoughts. It may take the form of a spiritual ideal, or it may be a worldly object, according to his nature at the time being; but whichever it is, he should steadily focus his thought-forces upon the object, which he has set before him. He should make this purpose his supreme duty, and should devote himself to its attainment, not allowing his thoughts to wander away into ephemeral fancies, longings, and imaginings. This is ...
— As a Man Thinketh • James Allen
... bow loomed almost over the floating logs, Barra abruptly transferred his focus of attention to his right rear, pulling with all the power of the boat's drive crystals. The craft swung violently, throwing a solid sheet of water over pier and shore, drenching the logs and the ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... ray of light, h, from the mirror or condenser above the stage will enter the slide and thence be refracted to the silvered surface of the illuminator, r, whence it is reflected at a corresponding angle to the object in the focus of the objective. A shield to prevent unnecessary light from entering the objective can be made of any material at hand, by taking a strip one inch long and three-fourths of an inch wide and turning up one end. A hole not more than three-sixteenths of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... Blood alone and very far gone in drink—a condition in which no man ever before remembered to have seen him. As Wolverstone came in, the Captain raised bloodshot eyes to consider him. A moment they sharpened in their gaze as he brought his visitor into focus. Then he laughed, a loose, idiot laugh, that yet somehow was ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... and offer a major opportunity for real revolution and change if we are able and daring enough to exploit them. This, in turn, has led us to develop the concept of Rapid Dominance and its attendant focus on Shock and Awe. Rapid Dominance seeks to integrate these multifaceted realities and facts and apply them to the common defense at a time when uncertainty about the future is perhaps one of the few givens. ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... that the base should be heavy, the upright about three and a half feet high, and the top or desk about fourteen by twenty inches. This top should tilt only slightly, so that the conductor may glance from it to his performers without too much change of focus. Our reason for mentioning apparently trivial matters of this kind is to guard against any possible distraction of the conductor's mind by unimportant things. If these details are well provided for in advance, he will be able while conducting ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... her, she stood there in the red glow, straining eyes and memory to focus both on a past that receded and seemed to dwindle to ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... guilty of a species of maternal idolatry; centered in her child Louis Marie as rays gathered up into a focus, were all her hopes, her aspirations, her ideas of the future. If she could be assured she would live to see her son leading the armies of the empire, ruling in the cabinets of state or worshipped in the circles of the great and learned, ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... increasing degree of correspondence (relevancy) between the stimulus-idea and the images, as they appear.[33] Precisely so, the images of microscope, slide, reflex and scratchy handwriting, as they successively come into focus, conform more and more to the nature of the stimulus, until the approximation ends in the idea of an all-absorbing interest in "scratchy" marks. This visual image hardly reaches precision before it becomes translated ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... how to poise your body, how to breathe, how to hold your head, how to focus your mind on things of universal importance. Believe your tender, loving thoughts and wishes for good to all humanity have power to help the struggling souls of earth to rise to higher and better conditions. ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Thee Let Bride and Bridegroom learn what kisses be! In what veil'd hymn Or mystic dance Would he that were thy Priest advance Thine earthly praise, thy glory limn? Say, should the feet that feel thy thought In double-center'd circuit run, In that compulsive focus, Nought, In this a furnace like the sun; And might some note of thy renown And high behest Thus in enigma be expressed: 'There lies the crown Which all thy longing cures. Refuse it, Mortal, that it may be yours! It is a Spirit, though ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... passed off gaily, for Bernard Clowes was no dog in the manger, and listened with sparkling eyes to adventures that ranged from Atlantic sailing in a thirty-ton yacht to a Nigerian rhinoceros shoot. Nor was Lawrence the focus of the lime-light-he was unaffectedly modest; but when, in expatiating on a favourite rifle, he confessed to having held fire till a charging rhinoceros bull was within eight and twenty yards of him, Bernard could supply the footnotes for himself. "I knew she wouldn't ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... lifeboat tore upward through the air at the highest permissible atmospheric velocity Bradley and Clio peered over Costigan's shoulders into the plate, watching in absorbed interest the scene which was being kept in focus upon it. The Nevian ship of space was plunging downward in a long, slanting dive, her terrific beams of force screaming out ahead of her. The rays of the little lifeboat had boiled the waters of the ocean; those of the parent craft ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular, compact and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downward and inward, to one common focus. ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... oscillation in the emotional interest, and the hot places may shift before one almost as rapidly as the sparks that run through burnt-up paper. Then we have the wavering and divided self we heard so much of in the previous lecture. Or the focus of excitement and heat, the point of view from which the aim is taken, may come to lie permanently within a certain system; and then, if the change be a religious one, we call it a CONVERSION, especially if it be by crisis, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... on the thirteenth of December to find everywhere the peculiar flatness that always follows a day which for weeks has been the focus of one's aims ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... ready to fight China yet," said the Japanese Foreign Minister to the impetuous young Korean. It was ten years later before Japan was ready, ten years of steady preparation, and during that time the real focus of the Far Eastern drama was not Tokyo nor Peking, but Seoul. Here the Chinese and Japanese outposts were in contact. Here Japan when she was ready created ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... remarks to them: "I see you are painting my sweet little home. May I look? Oh, what a lovely little sketch!" Once, on a never-to-be-forgotten day, she observed one of them take a camera from his pocket and rapidly focus her as she stood on the top step. She turned full-faced and smiling to the camera just in time to catch the click of the shutter, but then it was too late to hide her face, and perhaps the picture might appear in the Graphic ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... single differentiation enormous wealth—we convulse the excellent Dame by terming it a chained hurricane, to launch in foul blasts or beneficent showers, according to the moods during youth—and the composite Lord Fleetwood comes nearer into our focus. Dame Gossip, with her jigging to be at the butterwoman's trot, when she is not violently interrupting, would suffer just punishment were we to digress upon the morality of a young man's legal possession ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in every phase of graceful discomfort. The athletes and members of the School Eleven, dressed in appropriate flannel, were depicted as a rale with their arms crossed over the backs of chairs, and brought very much into focus so as to display the muscular development in high relief. The more studious portion of the community, "with leaden eye that loved the ground," scanned small photograph-books with absorbing interest; ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... ever attain to understand and find his proper place in this Universe, this great sweeping harmonious circle of which nevertheless he feels himself to be the diminutive focus? His senses are absurdly imperfect. His ear cannot catch any music the spheres make; and moreover there are probably neither spheres nor music. His eye is so dull an instrument that (as Blanco White's famous sonnet reminds ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... any one of them, he is sure to disgust the rest; if he select particular men from among them all, it is a hazard that he disgusts them all. Those who are left out, however divided before, will soon run into a body of opposition; which, being a collection of many discontents into one focus, will without doubt be hot and violent enough. Faction will make its cries resound through the nation, as if the whole were in an uproar, when by far the majority, and much the better part, will ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... together, lump together; collect, collocate, colligate[obs3]; get , whip in; gather; hold a meeting; convene, convoke, convocate[obs3]; rake up, dredge; heap, mass, pile; pack, put up, truss, cram; acervate[obs3]; agglomerate, aggregate; compile; group, aggroup[obs3], concentrate, unite; collect into a focus, bring into a focus; amass, accumulate &c. (store) 636; collect in a dragnet; heap Ossa upon Pelion. Adj. assembled &c. v.; closely packed, dense, serried, crowded to suffocation, teeming, swarming, populous; as thick as hops; all of a heap, fasciculated cumulative. Phr. the plot ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... was in apogee. His bank, as I have said, was coming to be more than a mere bank; it was now the focus of many miscellaneous enterprises. Several of these were industrial companies; prospectuses bearing his name and that of his institution constantly came my way. Some of these undertakings were novel and daring, but most of them went through; and he was more likely to use his associates ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... heart of the Elector of Saxony—a reign of unclouded splendour and happiness for the woman in whom pity for her lover was soon replaced by a passion as ardent as his own. Fetes and banquets and balls succeeded each other in swift sequence, at all of which Aurora was Queen, the focus of all eyes, and receiving universal homage, won no more by her beauty and her position as the Elector's favourite than by her sweetness and graciousness to the humblest. No mistress of a King was ever more beloved than this daughter of Sweden. Even the Elector's mother, a pattern of ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... child from its mother's lap Stephen shuddered with the sharpest pain he had ever known. An ocean-wide tempest arose in his breast, Samson's strength to break the pillars of the temple to slay these men with his bare hands. Seven generations of stern life and thought had their focus here in him,—from Oliver ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... comparing, analyzing, building toward conclusions. These processes go on inevitably—go on with little concern about attention. But when we narrow the field—when we bring our mental energy to a focus on something specific and particular we ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... must also take it for granted that the murderer knew of these little dinners for two which took place in the private room above the Cafe Dame every Wednesday—and sometimes on Friday. Around the figure of the methodical major—with his conspicuous white hat as a sort of focus—was built up one of the most ingenious schemes of murder with which I have ever come in contact. The victim literally ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the consummation could be effected. It is in this unity of plot that the Amadis series differs from its predecessors—the Arthurian romances, and those of the paladins of Charlemagne, which are detached adventures, each complete in itself, and not bearing to any common focus.—Amadis de Gaul (fourteenth century). ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... mirrors—a sort of copper basins, polished inside. Stand them face to face, some yards apart. Put a hot iron ball—not red hot—in the focus of one mirror. Put a bit of phosphorus in the focus of the other. The phosphorus will take fire; though without the mirrors you might place it much nearer the hot iron, and yet it would not burn. So we know that there are rays of heat, because we can reflect them as we ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... old town, half buried in foliage, and with many orchards and gardens about it. A pity that two great armies should focus on ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... he muttered. "Utgard...." Then his eyes did focus and he sat up, gazing around him with ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... voice recalled her to the game, and she made an effort to focus her attention on the cards. But it was quite useless. Her play grew wilder and more erratic with each hand that was dealt, until at last a good no-trump call, completely thrown away by her disastrous tactics, brought the ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... call attention to the attempts made to receive the luminous impression upon a band prepared with gelatino-bromide of silver. In practice this band would unwind uniformly at the focus of the receiving telescope, which would be placed in a box, forming a camera obscura. The velocity of this band prepared for photographing the signals would be regulated by clockwork. The experiments that have been made have not given results that are absolutely satisfactory, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... told Charlie, therefore, to try and occupy his attention by showing him some of the other articles which we had brought. What interested him most was a telescope, through which, having adjusted the focus, we made him look at his friends. He almost let it drop in his astonishment at seeing them so near, and had not Charlie held it, it would have fallen overboard. He looked through it again and again, each time expressing ...
— The Cruise of the Dainty - Rovings in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... English ideas of "music." She had caught the word "Vorspielen" being bandied about the long tea-table, and had gathered that there was to be an informal playing of "pieces" before Fraulein Pfaff. She welcomed the event. It relieved her from the burden of being in high focus—the relief had come as soon as she took her place at the gaslit table. No eye seemed to notice her. The English girls having sat out two meal-times with her, had ceased the hard-eyed observation which had made the long silence of the earlier repasts only less embarrassing ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... the direction indicated, and was almost immediately rewarded by the glimpse of some indistinct, dark figures dimly showing against the lighter background of sky. He brought his field-glasses to a focus. ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... saw things instantly and in a flash—that they stood out for him in outline and colour and movement there and then. That is plain in the parables from nature, and here it is confirmed. Is there in all his parables a blurred picture, the edges dim or the focus wrong? The tone of the parables is due largely to this gift of visualizing, to use an ugly modern word, and of doing ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... had long since ceased to be so: the emperor's designations were basileus and autocrat[o]r). From this time there were two Bulgarias—eastern and western. The eastern half was now little more than a Byzantine province, and the western became the centre of national life and the focus of national aspirations. ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... which minister vitality to the whole system, and is only fit to be hung up in a museum to show what a rigid, lifeless thing the strongest vertebral column becomes when separated from the organisation by which alone it can receive nourishment. We must realise the one focus of our individuality as clearly as the other, and bring both into equal balance, if we would develop all our powers and rise to that perfection of Life which has no ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... in the adjacent figures NP represent an eye duly framed and retaining its natural figure. In Fig. 1 the rays falling nearly parallel on the eye, are by the crystalline AB refracted, so as their focus or point of union F falls exactly on the retina: but if the rays fall sensibly diverging on the eye, as in Fig. 2, then their focus falls beyond the retina: or if the rays are made to converge by the lens QS before they come at ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley
... bit of Sphagnam, a curious moss, with curious incomplete spiral cells in the leaves. I dare say it will bear preservation in Canada balsam. I have received a new microscope, a queer-looking thing, very portable; one object glass of a quarter inch focus, by Ross; two eye- pieces magnifying linearly 200 to 300 times. I have put it up, but I am not well enough to decide on its merits. Now that I have arranged all my things, I am literally frightened at the work I ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... Ideal Beauty from its mother's breast. Now in strong lines, with bolder tints design'd, You sketch ideas, and portray the mind; Teach how fine atoms of impinging light To ceaseless change the visual sense excite; 40 While the bright lens collects the rays, that swerve, And bends their focus on the moving nerve. How thoughts to thoughts are link'd with viewless chains, Tribes leading tribes, and trains pursuing trains; With shadowy trident how Volition guides, 45 Surge after surge, his intellectual tides; ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... a suitable place, where he thought the light would be most serviceable, and then started to focus his camera on a spot which he selected; when the drifting piece of wreckage reached that position it would be at the proper distance for effective work, and he could press the button with the belief that he ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... and Quito were placed by the high roads of the Incas in immediate correspondence. Intelligence from the numerous provinces was transmitted on the wings of the wind to the Peruvian metropolis, the great focus to which all the lines of communication converged. Not an insurrectionary movement could occur, not an invasion, on the remotest frontier, before the tidings were conveyed to the capital, and the imperial ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... half a dozen or more, by turns, subordinate sinners, under-graduates, younger than some of the chosen phalanx, but not less obscene in their appearance, though indeed not so much beholden to the plastering focus; yet unpropt by stays, squalid, loose in attire, sluggish-haired, uner-petticoated only as the former, eyes half-opened, winking and pinking, mispatched, yawning, stretching, as if from the unworn-off effects ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... Cremona, does not invalidate the importance of this fact about its origin. The name of Roman School, again, has been given to Raphael and Michael Angelo together with their pupils. The truth is that Rome, for one brief period, during the pontificates of Julius and Leo, was the focus of Italian intellect. Allured by the patronage of the Papal Curia, not only artists, but scholars and men of letters, flocked from all the cities of Italy to Rome, where they found a nobler sphere for the exercise ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... types: refractors and reflectors. A refracting telescope consists of an object-glass composed of two or more lenses, mounted at the upper end of a tube, which is pointed at the celestial object. The light, after passing through the lenses, is brought to a focus at the lower end of the tube, where the image is examined visually with an eyepiece, or photographed upon a sensitive plate. The largest instruments of this type are the 36-inch Lick telescope and the 40-inch refractor of ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... the insect nearer by degrees, and found that only when within a foot of her eyes could she see it, and I fancy then only indistinctly as she would peer about excitedly, as if uncertain what it was, until near enough to be in the focus of clear vision, and then, by a sudden dart, she would seize and flit away ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... Luke enumerate so carefully the civil and ecclesiastical authorities in verses 1 and 2? Not only to fix the date, but, in accordance with the world-wide aspect of his Gospel, to set his narrative in relation with secular history; and, further, to focus into one vivid beam of light the various facts which witnessed to the sunken civil and darkened moral and religious condition of the Jews. What more needed to be said to prove how the ancient glory had ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... out of innumerable threads of filmy texture, and there are many indications of spiral tendencies. Each of the bright stars of the group — Alcyone, Merope, Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Atlas — is the focus of a dense fog (totally invisible, remember, alike to the naked eye and to the telescope), and these particular stars are veiled from sight behind the strange mists. Running in all directions across the relatively open spaces are nebulous wisps and streaks ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... philosophy from its practical or humorous side. "If the universe is pure mind and there is no matter, then this dirt is not a real thing, after all. It seems, of course, as if it were thicker under the beds and bureaus than elsewhere, but I suppose our evil thoughts focus themselves there rather than in the centre of the room. Similarly, if the broom handle is broken, deny the dirt away—denial is much less laborious than sweeping; bring 'the science' down to these simple details of everyday life, and you will make converts by dozens, only pray don't ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... he spoke. At the same instant the stunned eyes found their focus—and found her beside his stirrup, leaning wide from her seat in sweet concern, one gloved hand resting on the pommel ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... infinite credit upon himself. After a few other remarks the ladies and gentlemen were invited to inspect the library, which for the rest of the evening was the centre of attraction. The coup d'oeil, when once one had fairly entered into this beautifully designed, permanent focus of intellectual wealth, around whose walls were ranged the imperishable memorials of nearly all of man's genius that has been thought worthy of preservation, was striking and memorable. As in the lecture room, those emblems, which are our symbolical as ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... Watson, I will. At present I am, as you know, fairly busy, but I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a textbook, which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume. Our present research appears to ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... blood-letting and drawing teeth, while the surgeons were prohibited from "barbery or shaving." In 1745 barbers and surgeons were separated into distinct corporations by 18 George II. c. 15. The barber's shop was a favourite resort of idle persons; and in addition to its attraction as a focus of news, a lute, viol, or some such musical instrument, was always kept for the entertainment of waiting customers. The barber's sign consisted of a striped pole, from which was suspended a basin, symbols the use of which is still preserved. The fillet round ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... missionaries, when they reached Alexandria, found a people ready to appreciate the profoundest mysteries. But with these advantages came great evils. The Trinitarian disputes, which subsequently deluged the world with blood, had their starting-point and focus in Alexandria. In that city Arius and Athanasius dwelt. There originated that desperate conflict which compelled Constantine the Great to summon the Council of Nicea, to settle, by a formulary or creed, the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... sudden fluctuations of feeling in order to understand why it was that in 1835 the word "Pole" conveyed a derisive meaning to a people who consider themselves the wittiest and most courteous nation on earth, and their city of Paris the focus of enlightenment, with the sceptre of arts ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... middle-aged, the other much younger. To her vexation she could not, from this distance, clearly discern their faces; but on glancing rapidly round the room, she saw Horace's little binocular. An instant brought it into focus upon the carriage, and what she then saw gave Mrs. Damerel such a shock, that an exclamation escaped her. Still she gazed through the glasses, and only turned away when ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... your finger-tips, from your ears, your eyes, and every portion of your body come to a focus in your brain and carry information to it about the things you taste, see, hear, feel, and smell, so the wires of a telephone system come together at the central station. And as it is necessary for your right hand to communicate with your left through your brain, so it is necessary ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... of societies by the action of great men may be comfortably believed so long as, resting in general {233} notions, you do not ask for particulars. But now, if, dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we discover the hypothesis to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping at the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back a step, and ask, Whence comes the great man? we find that the ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... decades for the abatement of the liquor nuisance, but it remained for an American woman, under the spur of bitter memories, and a sort heart, to originate a method, at once so bold and radical as to sharply focus public attention upon the utter villainy and ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular, compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... had the glass in focus more scales had fallen from my eyes; and now I knew why I had seen so much of Raffles these last few weeks, and why he had always come between seven and eight o'clock in the evening, and waited at this very window, with these very glasses at his eyes. I saw ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... Heathcote. He learned how to take his meals on the wing, as it were, to run for trains, to snatch two hours' sleep anywhere between midnight and morning, and to be jostled by rude crowds that failed to recognize his superiority. The full-backed light overcoat, during its brief existence the focus of so much attention, was lost in a dinner rush and never reappeared. But, above all, Mr. Heathcote had upon his hands the care of the helpless, miserable lackey, and never did a sick baby require more attention. John was lost amid ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... officer commanding, so that practically nobody was hurt on either side. One force or the other would surrender after being caught in an impossible situation. Not any more. These days, they want blood. Plenty of blood. And they want the Telly cameras to focus right into the ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... in the distant sky. Floating and kicking his way over to the Tele-screen, he quickly switched the instrument on. Rotating the control dials, he brought the blinding white image of the onrushing solar disk into perfect focus. Automatically he adjusted the two superimposed polaroid filters until the proper amount of light was transmitted to his viewing screen. They really built ships and filters these days, he reflected wryly. Now if they could only form a ...
— Rescue Squad • Thomas J. O'Hara
... view'd through crystal spheres in drops saline, Quick-shooting salts in chemic forms combine; Or Mucor-stems, a vegetative tribe, Spread their fine roots, the tremulous wave imbibe. Next to our wondering eyes the focus brings Self-moving lines, and animated rings; First Monas moves, an unconnected point, Plays round the drop without a limb or joint; Then Vibrio waves, with capillary eels, And Vorticella whirls her living wheels; 290 While insect Proteus sports with ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... osteo-myelitis, was the form most commonly seen. Pyaemia with secondary deposits was uncommon, and often of a somewhat subacute form; thus I saw several patients recover after secondary abscesses had been opened, or the primary focus of infection removed. The only really acute case of joint pyaemia I heard of, developed in connection with a blistered toe followed by cellulitis of ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... stopped, gazed hard, rubbed his eyes, gazed again, and then said to Jose, "Jose, your eyes are better than mine: what is that in the village?" Jose's eyes were already starting from his head, as if to get a better focus on what he saw. "Padre," he said, almost in a whisper, "I think it is the yellow thing that Pio stole. The sergeant made it open when we went for the package, and it was like that." "Holy Saints!" cried the Father; "it looks ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... will be seen a wonderful volcanic tract. So vast, in fact, that Professor Johnstrup has termed it the Fire Focus of the North. To the north-east, again, is found a large lake, called 'Myvata,' or 'Midge Lake,' with a volcanic range of mountains which stretch from north to south; the most famous of these are 'Leivhnukr,' and 'Krafla,' which, after years of quiescence, poured forth ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... graduates still in business—write solely from their own viewpoint. Their letters are focused on "our goods," "our interests" and "our profits." But the new school of letter writers keep their own interests in the background. Their sole aim is to focus on the viewpoint of the reader; find the subjects in which he is interested, learn the arguments that will appeal to him, bear down on the persuasion that will induce ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... destined to become a seat of learning; or rather, a seminary as well as a focus and mart ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... progress among the lower classes is astonishing, considering the short period these emissaries have laboured. To any one looking on the map of the Continent, and acquainted with the spirit of our times, this impious focus of illumination ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... felt myself touched, but not by them; invisible hands touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of cold, soft fingers at my throat. I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear I should be in bodily peril; and I concentered all my faculties in the single focus of resisting stubborn will. And I turned my sight from the Shadow; above all, from those strange serpent eyes,—eyes that had now become distinctly visible. For there, though in naught else around me, I was aware that there was a WILL, and will of ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the Bacteriologist; "perhaps the microscope is out of focus for you. Eyes vary so much. Just the fraction of a turn this ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... especially in the north. China continues to lose arable land because of erosion and economic development. As part of its effort to gradually slow the rapid economic growth seen in 2004, Beijing says it will reduce somewhat its spending on infrastructure in 2005, while continuing to focus on poverty relief and through rural tax reform. Accession to the World Trade Organization helps strengthen its ability to maintain strong growth rates but at the same time puts additional pressure on the hybrid ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... and mention several far-reaching discoveries made by their use; beginning with mechanism for the manipulation of light. Optics is based on the accidental discovery that a piece of glass of certain shape will draw light to a focus, forming an image of any object at that point. The next step was in learning that this image can be viewed with a microscope, and magnified; thus came the telescope revealing unheard of suns and galaxies. The first telescopes colored everything looked ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... for that one face whose light was hope until it became the only reality in a universe of silence and darkness. His whole life seemed to focus now on the little face with its dimpled chin and shy, tremulous lips smiling ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... Bridgewater Canal by Brindley, some fifty years before, the increase in the business transacted between the two towns had become quite marvellous. The steam-engine, the spinning-jenny, and the canal, working together, had accumulated in one focus a vast aggregate of population, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... his high-hoisted boat, was about taking his wonted daily obervation of the sun to determine his latitude. Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean's immeasureable burning-glass. The sky looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God's throne. Well that Ahab's quadrant was furnished with colored ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... indicative mood, still not for a moment the conditional! Rachel did not fail to make another note; but now there was nothing bitter even in her thoughts. She believed in this man, and in his promises; moreover, she began to focus the one thing about him in which she disbelieved. It was his feeling towards her—nothing more and nothing else. There he was insincere; but it was a pardonable insincerity, ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... you look at your face in the glass, you cannot at once (say at three feet distance) see the outlines of the eye and cheek. They disappear every where, except in the focus common to both eyes. Then nothing is seen absolutely at rest. The act of breathing imparts perpetual motion to the artist and the model. The aspen leaf is trembling in the stillest air. Whatever difference of opinion may exist as to Turner's ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 20, March 16, 1850 • Various
... range of that point, with the result that a hail of shells instantly began to fall upon that particular battery with the most deadly precision. Thus, after a little while, every battery on the heights became in turn the focus of a terrific crossfire from the ships and the field batteries, the effect of which soon became manifest in the silencing of several of the Russian guns, either by dismounting, or, as we afterwards discovered, by the complete destruction of ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... however, wondered. "But doesn't the man of courage know what he's afraid of—or not afraid of? I don't know that, you see. I don't focus it. I can't name it. I ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... therefore be regarded as War concentrated, as the centre of effort of the whole War or campaign. As the sun's rays unite in the focus of the concave mirror in a perfect image, and in the fulness of their heat; to the forces and circumstances of War, unite in a focus in the great battle for one ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... precisely in Europe that I find my best American types. Our citizens show up better against a European background,—it excites and stimulates their nationality, so to speak. And again, with a big subject like mine, you want to step back to get the proper focus. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 7, 1891 • Various
... degree south of the equator. These facts, says Mr. Darwin, seem to show that an island or archipelago is in process of formation in the middle of the Atlantic. A line joining St. Helena and Ascension would, if prolonged, intersect this slowly nascent focus of volcanic action. Should land be eventually formed here, it will not be the first that has been produced by igneous action in this ocean since it was inhabited by the existing species of testacea. At Porto Praya, in St. Jago, one of the Azores, ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... meaning is brought out by taking a little thought, as the leaves and sticks and stones and pigmy men and women in the shady corners of the stereograph are developed into the seeming proportions of real life, when the images in the focus of the lenses of the stereoscope. We know of no modern book of travels which gives one so vivid and fresh a picture, in many various aspects, of the external nature, the people, the customs, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... primary decision must have been lost and won and the fighting would have been most intense; while the action on all the other parts of the line must have been contingent upon the results at this "tactical center." This "focus" could not have been to the north or west of Paris, because the great bodies of French troops are to the east; nor was it on the battle line nearest Paris, for everything we saw today in and behind the zone of operations testified to the contrary. In ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... state of semi-consciousness in which she realized nothing but the strong holding of his arms. She even vaguely wondered after a time whether this also were not a dream, for other fantasies began to crowd about her. She rocked on a sea of strange happenings on which she found it impossible to focus her mind. It seemed to have broken adrift as it were—a rudderless boat in a gale. But still that sense of security never wholly left her. Dreaming or waking, the force of his personality ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... thought that you would like to see the singers, and observe their costumes and expressions. Some birds have a good deal of expression and a very charming manner while singing—a manner much more to my taste than that of many a prima donna whom I have heard, although my taste may be uncultivated. Focus your glass on that indigo-bird in yonder tree-top. Don't you see him?—the one that is favoring us with such a lively strain, beginning with a repetition of short, sprightly notes. The glass may enable you to ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... that Peter sought to bring matters to a focus was not long in coming, for when he reached the sawmills, which had resumed desultory operations, he found Flynn and Jacobi, the "Reds," calmly seated in the office, smoking and talking with Shad Wells. Peter had left his ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... twelfth chapter he calls it a "great and beneficial plan." Subsequently he calls it a disgraceful and fatal expedient. He recurs frequently to the subject in isolated passages, but never collects the facts, into a focus, with a view of deducing their real meaning. Yet the point is second to none in importance. Its elucidation throws more light on the fall of Rome than any other considerations whatever. The question is, Whether Rome was conquered by the ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... eccentricity or helps to correct it. Eccentricity may appear harmless and even interesting, but in practice it is found to be a drawback, enfeebling some sides of a character, throwing the judgment at least on some points out of focus. In children it ought to be recognized as a defect to be counteracted. When people have an overmastering genius which of itself marks out for them a special way of excellence, some degree of eccentricity is easily pardoned, and almost allowable. But eccentricity unaccompanied ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... Indian painting continued to focus on Jain themes, adulterated to only a very slight extent by subjects drawn from poetry. It is possible that the Krishna story was also illustrated, but no examples have survived; and it is not until the very end of the sixteenth century that the ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... themselves. The outward vision is transient, the inner vision can build eternal realities. "Are we to beg and cringe and hang on the outer edge of life,—we who should walk grandly? Is it for man to tremble and quake—man who in his spiritual capacity becomes the interpreter of God's message,—the focus ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... way, he's going to shape the policy of the concern. When a man goes sticking his nose into the running of the house, he's apt to get it tweaked, and while he's busy drawing it back out of danger he's going to get his leg pulled, too. You let your wife tend to the housekeeping and you focus on earning money with which she can keep house. Of course, in one way, it's mighty nice of a man to help around the place, but it's been my experience that the fellows who tend to all the small jobs at home never get anything else to tend to at the office. In the end, it's usually cheaper ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... surroundings, and decimals weren't invented then, so that of course it's impossible for me to grasp them; and the same with geography—the map of Africa then had about three names on it, so it's quite superfluous to try to remember any more. I'm going to cultivate the mental atmosphere of the place and focus my mind accordingly. I'll concentrate on the Elizabethan period of history, and the rest ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... will not long suffer any prince of the House of Bourbon to keep by force the French emissaries out of their dominions; nor whilst France has a commerce with them, especially through Marseilles, (the hottest focus of sedition in France,) will it be long possible to prevent the intercourse or ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Universe.—Passing through the Tower of Jewels into the great court where themes become universal under the circle of stars above the surrounding colonnade, we come to the Fountains of the Rising and the Setting Sun, by A. A. Weinmann, one at either focus of the elliptical sunken garden. In the East, the Sun, in the strength of the morning, his wings spread for flight, is springing upward from the top of the tall column rising out of the fountain. Walk toward ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... Court with all the forms it had acquired under Louis XIV.; dignity alone was wanting. As to gaiety, there was none. Versailles was not the place at which to seek for assemblies where French spirit and grace were displayed. The focus of wit and intelligence ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... to assemble the energies and join them you will, all together, deny the existence of the sum total of reality as you know it. Distance does not exist—every point in the reachable universe coincides with every other point and that common point is the focus of your attention. You can be and actually are anywhere you please or everywhere at once. Time does not exist. Space does not exist. There is no such thing as opacity; everything is perfectly transparent, yet every molecule of substance is perceptible in its relationship ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... literally a "splitting headache"; for there was a schism in the sympathies. When these men looked at some historic object, like the Catholic Church or the French Revolution, they did not know whether they loved or hated it most. Carlyle's two eyes were out of focus, as one may say, when he looked at democracy: he had one eye on Valmy and the other on Sedan. In the same way, Ruskin had a strong right hand that wrote of the great mediaeval minsters in tall harmonies and traceries as splendid as their own; and also, so to speak, a weak and feverish left ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... not ordinarily in themselves interesting and admirable. But when the exercises had been duly gone through, then arose the original and powerful minds, to take full advantage of what had been gained by all the practising, and to concentrate and bring to a focus all the hints and lessons of art which had been gradually accumulating. Then the sustained strength and richness of the Faery Queen became possible; contemporary with it, the grandeur and force of English ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... good look at his old possessions, Mark made a sweep of the horizon with the glass, in order to ascertain if any other land were visible, from the great elevation on which he now stood. While arranging the focus of the instrument, an object first met his eye that caused his heart almost to leap into his mouth. Land was looming up, in the western board, so distinctly as to admit of no cavil about its presence. It was ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... ought to begin. [Footnote: One may note here, perhaps, the desirability too often disregarded by over-solicitous parents, and particularly by the parents of the solitary children who are now so common, of keeping the child a little out of focus, letting it play by itself whenever it will, never calling attention to it in a manner that awakens it to the fact of an audience, never talking about it in its presence. Solitary children commonly get too much control, they are forced and beguiled upward rather than allowed to grow, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... reason I have found it impossible to use up, in what I have written upon places and their genius, these notes about Rome. I cannot focus Rome into any definite perspective, or see it in the colour of one mood. And whatever may have happened there to my small person has left no trace in what I have written. What I meet in Rome is Rome itself. Rome is alive (only the more so for its occasional ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... a long pin, a trifle fallaciously, into her hat—she had, with an approach to irritation, told her maid, a new woman, whom she had lately found herself thinking of as abysmal, that she didn't want her—she tried to focus the possibility of some understanding between them in consequence of which he should ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... my hands, shout, and run up and down the deck, with no other object in view than that of giving vent to my excited feelings. Then I went below for the telescope, and spent nearly ten minutes of the utmost impatience in vainly trying to get a focus, and in rubbing the skin nearly off my eyes, before I discovered that having taken off the large glass to examine the phosphoric water with, I had omitted to put it ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... dominance of a single nation and the destruction or subjugation of all others. This is as inevitable as is death. If we would preserve and foster racial and national diversity of traits, promote social individuality as we so eagerly foster the diversity of selves, we must speedily focus attention upon human nature and seek that knowledge of it which shall enable us to control it wisely rather than to destroy ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... this action of light. The plates or films are coated with a silver salt,—usually a more sensitive salt than silver chlorid. This is exposed to the light that shines through the lens of the camera. As you have learned, the lens brings the light from the object to a focus and makes an image on the film or plate. The light parts of this image will change the silver salt to silver; the dark parts will not change it. So wherever there is a white place on the object you are photographing, there will be a dark patch of silver on the film or plate, and wherever ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... the issues between Houses, and I come to that between Parties. Great changes in a community are very often unperceived; the focus of reality moves from one institution in the State to another, and almost imperceptibly. Sometimes the forms of institutions remain almost the same in all ceremonial aspects, and yet there will be one institution which under pretentious forms is only the husk of reality, and another which under ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... finer and grosser parts of the air in motion; from the earth to the sun, the air is finer and finer, till it becomes pure light near the confines of the sun, and fire in the orb of the sun, or solar focus. From the earth towards the circumference of this system, in which he includes the fixed stars, the air becomes grosser and grosser, till it becomes stagnant, in which condition it is at the utmost verge of this system, from whence, in ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... and rear around and call attention to itself—couldn't if it should try. But it's here and there and everywhere in America, just the same. A railroad car with one drunken fool in it gives you the idea. You focus on him and say, 'What a beastly shame!' and you entirely overlook the other fifty-odd people in the car who are quietly ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... optical as well as the actinic image is chromatically inferior, but both lie in the same place; and consequently the best correction lies in F (this is known as the "actinic correction'' or "freedom from chemical focus''). ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... his brother Indians who was blind in one eye, imagining with untutored wisdom that if it gave light to a white man, it should also to a red, and they worked at it for a time, but they could not get the focus, finally they threw it away, saying it was no good, he could ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... two hours of it, and the less subtle beaux had better learned to focus their pseudo-passionate glances elsewhere, for eleven o'clock found Isabelle and Amory sitting on the couch in the little den off the reading-room up-stairs. She was conscious that they were a handsome pair, and seemed to belong distinctively in this seclusion, ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... began, loudly and loftily, "listen. Now, Ariel, bring your brains to a focus. I improvise poetry; I improvise fiction. We will begin with the good old formula of the fairy stories. ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... survive the white heat of this furnace—the focus of the modern world's fiercest desire to live and to will—the money centre of the earth? Was not the whole structure of Society at last thoroughly materialistic? Was not religion merely a tradition, honour and virtue merely ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... traits, you understand. I spent some miserable, undecided days. It was not the threat of disinheritance that worried me, although when you have been brought up to regard yourself as a prospective millionaire it is rather difficult to adjust your vision to a pauper focus. But it was the thought of alienating Uncle Dick. I love the dear, determined old chap like a father. But last night my guardian angel was with me and I decided to remain my own man. So I wrote to Uncle ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the Christian graces into its focus. It draws Charity, followed by her lovely train, her forbearance with faults, her forgiveness of injuries, her pity for errors, her compassion for want. It draws Repentance, with her holy sorrows, her pious resolutions, her self-distrust. It ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... of children will not be able to play at the school recital. Such children should be gathered together at the end of the term, and should play to the mistress who organizes the work. In this way they too will gain experience, and a little focus will have been made ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... "utterly inexplicable;" and Sir David Brewster, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in December last, assured me it was not less a puzzle to him than to Sir John. An eastern traveller, who attributes its production to "a reduplication of impulse setting air in vibration in a focus of echo," means, I suppose, saying nearly the same thing as the two philosophers, and merely conveys his meaning in ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... different calibre. With the exception of "To a Water-lily," whose quality is uncomplex and unconcealed, these tone-poems in little are a curious blend of what, lacking an apter name, one must call nature-poetry, and psychological suggestion; and they are remarkable for the manner in which they focus great richness of emotion into limited space. "At an Old Trysting Place," "From an Indian Lodge," "A Deserted Farm," and "Told at Sunset," imply a consecutive dramatic purpose which is emphasised by their connection through a hint of thematic community. ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... In this view Balder or Don Quixote was no more insane than other people. Their eyes bore true witness to what was in their minds, and the sanest eyes can do no more. Their minds were, perhaps, out of focus; but who can cast ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... radiation were made by freely suspending thermometers with naked bulbs, or by laying them on white cotton, wool, or flannel; also by means of a thermometer placed in the focus of a silvered parabolic reflector. I did not find that the reflector possessed any decided advantage over the white cotton: the means of a number of observations taken by each approximated closely, but the difference between individual ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... these rocks, and on one occasion a sea-lion,—an estray from the familiar rocks on the other side of the Golden Gate. But he ceased work in his garden patch, and coming to his house, exchanged his hoe for a telescope. When he got the mystery in focus he suddenly stopped and rubbed the object-glass with his handkerchief. But even when he applied the glass to his eye for a second time, he could scarcely believe his eyesight. For the object seemed to be a WOMAN, the lower part of her figure submerged in ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... facing a tall elderly man, clean-shaven, clad in well-worn black—a clergyman evidently; and I noted at once a far-away look in his eyes, as if they were used to another plane of vision, and could not instantly focus things terrestrial, being suddenly recalled thereto. His figure was bent in apologetic protest: "I ask a thousand pardons, sir," he said; "I am really so very absent-minded. I ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... the best of spirits, for there was no uncertainty in the minds of the party prophets as to the result of the morrow's ballot—excepting with regard to Miss Bailey. The rest of the ticket would unquestionably be elected; accordingly all hands and voices were free to focus their energies in her behalf and thus make the victory a clean sweep. Nevertheless the earlier speakers felt obliged to let their eloquence flow over the whole range of political misgovernment from the White House and the national platform down, although the actual issue was the choice of a ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... my daughter, without the aid of whose younger eyes and livelier memory, and especially of her faithful diary, which no fatigue or indisposition was allowed to interrupt, the whole experience would have remained in my memory as a photograph out of focus. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... seen this star of my youth expire, this burning focus of my eyes and heart extinguished! I have seen the shutters of the window closed for many a long year on the funereal darkness of that little room. One year, one day, I saw them once more opened. I looked to see who dared to live where she had lived before; and then I saw, in summer time, ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... the place save that it was away up in the north- west, on one of the higher reaches of the Enyong Creek, and a two days' journey for her by water. The lads lived at a town called Ikpe, an old slave centre, that had been in league with Aro, and the focus of the trade of a wide and populous area. It was a "closed" market, no Calabar trader being allowed ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated in a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder. Captivity has brought my mental faculties to a focus; and you are well aware that from the collision of clouds electricity is produced—from electricity, lightning, from ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... asunder and scatter as wide as the lagoon: so that I was irresistibly reminded of what I had read of nebular convulsions. A thin cloud overspread the area of the reef and the adjacent sea—the dust, as I could not but fancy, of earlier explosions. And a little apart, there was yet another focus of centrifugal and centripetal flight, where, hard by the deafening line of breakers, her sails (all but the tattered topsail) snugly furled down, and the red rag that marks Old England on the seas beating, union down, at the main—the Flying Scud, the fruit of so many ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... dependants on my own family, suddenly enriched. I knew Mrs. Bradfort had a large six thousand a year, besides her own dwelling-house, which stood in Wall Street, a part of the commercial emporium that was just beginning to be the focus of banking, and all other monied operations, and which even then promised to become a fortune of itself. It is true, that old Daniel M'Cormick still held his levees on his venerable stoop, where all the heavy men in town used to congregate, and joke, and ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... once said of man: "Stands he not thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities?" One day I saw the American army standing "in the centre of immensities, in the conflux of eternities," at the focus of histories. One day I saw the American army in France march in answer to General Pershing's offer to the Allies at the beginning of the big drive, march to its place in history beside its Allies, the English ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... art and refinement, and, at the same time, of those democratical theories which formed the beau ideal of the Athenian notions of government." Athens became the center and capital of the most polished communities of Greece; she drew into a focus all the Grecian intellect, and she obtained from her dependents the wealth to administer the arts, which universal traffic and intercourse taught her to appreciate. The treasury of the state being placed in the hands ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... warmth, too scattered for any given purpose. But as the prism by dividing the rays of light reveals to us the brilliant coloring of the atmosphere, and as the burning-glass by concentrating them in a focus intensifies their heat, so does the right of suffrage reveal the beauty and power of individual sovereignty in the great drama of national life, while on a vital measure of public interest it combines the many voices of the people in a grand chorus ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the body is is 'here'; when the body acts is 'now'; what the body touches is 'this'; all other things are 'there' and 'then' and 'that.' These words of emphasized position imply a systematization of things with reference to a focus of action and interest which lies in the body; and the systematization is now so instinctive (was it ever not so?) that no developed or active experience exists for us at all except in that ordered form. So far as 'thoughts' and 'feelings' can be active, their activity ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... closed off by a road barrier quite some distance away and tightly parked cars testified to the attraction of the expanding grass. Scorning these idle sightseers, I pushed and shoved my way forward to what had now become the focus of all my interests. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... however, when the tension between them would relax, when some incident occurred to focus Ditmar's interest on the enterprise that had absorbed and unified his life, the Chippering Mill. One day in September, for instance, after an absence in New York, he returned to the office late in the afternoon, and she was quick to sense his elation, to recognize in him the restored ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... attain to understand and find his proper place in this Universe, this great sweeping harmonious circle of which nevertheless he feels himself to be the diminutive focus? His senses are absurdly imperfect. His ear cannot catch any music the spheres make; and moreover there are probably neither spheres nor music. His eye is so dull an instrument that (as Blanco White's famous sonnet reminds ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... culture "by suggesting questions which help to detect the passion, and strangeness and dramatic contrasts of life." And not only to bring suggestions, but repose, by granting to eyes wearied with minute concerns the contrasts of vast times and spaces, the majestic idea of the Whole; to change the focus and variously dispose the perspectives of ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... reflecting surface; 2d, that surface parabolic; 3d, those rays parallel to each other and to the axis of the surface. It is to be proved that the concourse of these three circumstances is a mark that the reflected rays will pass through the focus of the parabolic surface. Now, each of the three circumstances is singly a mark of something material to the case. Rays of light impinging on a reflecting surface are a mark that those rays will be reflected ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... photographic objectives; the optical as well as the actinic image is chromatically inferior, but both lie in the same place; and consequently the best correction lies in F (this is known as the "actinic correction'' or "freedom from chemical focus''). ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... starry heavens and the moral law as the two transcendently overwhelming phenomena of the universe is, perhaps, more frequently quoted than any other written by a German author. This is the treatise which forms the central focus of Kant's thinking. It stands midway between the "Critique of Pure Reason" and the "Critique of Judgment." Herein Kant takes up the position of a vindicator of the truth of Christianity, approaching his proof of its validity and authority by ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... himself the focus of non-Muscatelish eyes, And the pain of their convergence was a terror and surprise. As with pitiless impaction all their heat-waves on him broke He was seen to be evolving awful quantities ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... the Polish nation should retain an independent and separate existence. For this reason, therefore, I consider the existence of Cracow as a state, having been thus secured by general treaty—whatever the complaints the three Powers had made that Cracow was the focus of disturbances; that revolutionary intrigues there found a centre and a means of organization; that there arose from that small state insurrection against the three surrounding Powers; that it was impossible to preserve those Powers from this insurrection: ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... processes to hurried growth of the overstimulated brain. The result is a type of child with a puny body and an excitable brain,—the neurotic. The young eye, for example, is too flat (hypermetropic)—made to focus only on objects at a distance. Close application to print, or even to weaving mats or folding bits of paper accurately, causes an overstrain on the eye, which not only results in the chronic condition known as myopia,—short-sightedness,—so common to school children, but which acts unfavorably ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... ellipse there are two points situated upon the line representing the major axis, and which are termed the foci when both are spoken of, and a focus when one only is referred to, foci simply being the plural of focus. These foci are equidistant from the centre of the ellipse, which is formed as follows: Two pins are driven in on the major axis to represent the foci A and B, Figure 75, and around these pins a loop of fine twine is passed; a ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... in the stories of hunter and trapper, the journals of Lewis and Clarke, the narratives of Boone and Crockett. In writing his superb romances of the Northern Lakes, the prairie and the sea, Fenimore Cooper had merely to bring to an artistic focus sentiments that lay deep in the souls of the great mass of his American readers. Students of our social life have pointed out again and again how deeply our national temperament has been affected by the existence, ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... of two hundred miles on each side of them, evidences of subterranean action are to be found in recently elevated coral-rock, or in barrier coral-reefs, indicating recent submergence. In the very centre or focus of the great curve of volcanoes is placed the large island of Borneo, in which no sign of recent volcanic action has yet been observed, and where earthquakes, so characteristic of the surrounding regions, are entirely unknown. The equally large island of ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... imperative, flighty, irascible and rather foolish little Father, in an ever-increasing degree. "Very coldly received at Court," it is said: ill seen by Walpole and the Powers; being too likely to become a focus of Opposition there. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... relations to each other. As Lloyd Morgan puts it, "We are mainly at work upon the mental background. It is our object to make this background as rich and full and orderly as possible, so that whatever is brought to the focus of consciousness shall be set in a relational background, which shall give it meaning; and so that our pupils may be able to feel the truth which Browning puts into the mouth of ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... the romantic revival converge." [2] The popular ballad, the Gothic romance, the Ossianic poetry, the new German literature, the Scandinavian discoveries, these and other scattered rays of influence reach a focus in Scott. It is true that his delineation of feudal society is not final. There were sides of mediaeval life which he did not know, or understand, or sympathize with, and some of these have been painted ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... strange thing came about. Under the influence of the children's sympathetic expectancy, the Perdu began to find fuller expression. Every mysterious element in the neighborhood—whether emanating from the Perdu itself or from the spirits of the people about it—appeared to find a focus in the personalities of the two children. All the weird, formless stories,—rather suggestions or impressions than stories,—that in the course of time had gathered about the place, were revived with added vividness ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... now becoming visible to human ken though existent for ever and ever? So let us hope divine truths may be shining, and regions of light and love extant, which Geneva glasses cannot yet perceive, and are beyond the focus of Roman telescopes. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... stuck a long pin, a trifle fallaciously, into her hat—she had, with an approach to irritation, told her maid, a new woman, whom she had lately found herself thinking of as abysmal, that she didn't want her—she tried to focus the possibility of some understanding between them in consequence of which he should ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... pains and inconveniences, which increases in proportion as it makes itself looked for. Athos had no longer his son to induce him to walk firmly, with his head erect, as a good example; he had no longer, in those brilliant eyes of the young man, an ever-ardent focus at which to regenerate the fire of his looks. And then, must it be said, that nature, exquisite in its tenderness and its reserve, no longer finding anything that comprehended its feelings, gave ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... its practical activity to-morrow abundantly fulfil its high purpose; may its renown as a seat of true learning, a centre of free inquiry, a focus of intellectual light, increase year by year, until men wander hither from all parts of the earth, as of old they sought Bologna, or ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... still enough of his former gentility about Barnet's appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too, had other things to think of that night, and he was permitted to reach the galleries about Leicester Square—that great focus of London ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... a Republic. The motion for the abolition of Royalty was not even discussed. "What need is there for discussion," exclaimed a delegate, "where all are agreed? Courts are the hot-bed of crime, the focus of corruption; the history of kings ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Anne and Priscilla continued to feel as strangers in a strange land. Then, suddenly, everything seemed to fall into focus—Redmond, professors, classes, students, studies, social doings. Life became homogeneous again, instead of being made up of detached fragments. The Freshmen, instead of being a collection of unrelated individuals, found themselves a class, with a class spirit, a class yell, ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... more central body of water. Having however gained a position so much higher to the north, and almost on the same meridian, and having crossed so remarkable a feature as the Stony Desert (which, as I suppose, was once the focus of a mighty current, to judge from its direction passing to the westward), I no longer encouraged hopes which, if realized, would have been of great advantage to me, or regretted the circumstances by which I was prevented from more ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... appease, the most industrious attendance fails to gratify, the deepest humility displeases. During these terrible transitions, which induce fierce distraction, Job himself would become irritable, insanely furious, and choleric. A man in such a state regards himself as the focus of all miseries. When recovered, he feels chastened, becomes urbane and ludicrously amiable, he conjures up fictitious delights from all things which, but yesterday, possessed for him such awful portentous aspects. ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... snuffed, and the chairman's spectacles adjusted to the proper focus, he commenced ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... and tell the whole world of her gladness. Without knowing why or wherefore, she was vaguely conscious that in some way she was different from what she was before she came to Carver House, and she also knew that things would never be just as they were before. Somehow or other the focus had changed, a ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... handkerchief about his neck, carefully wiped the eye and object glasses of his binocular and his own tired old eyes and, once more prone on his stomach, gazed again; then twisted the screw a trifle as though to get a better focus; gazed still another time; lowered the glass; rose to his knees, his eyes gleaming brilliantly and his teeth setting hard; once more levelled the glass and looked with all his soul in his eyes and then slowly let ...
— Sunset Pass - or Running the Gauntlet Through Apache Land • Charles King
... means whereby she might be instrumental in helping out of their difficulties her several friends whom she so dearly loved. She believed that she had succeeded in hitting upon a scheme which would, at least, bring things to a focus. She was sure that, if she could bring all the parties together under one roof, matters would straighten themselves without much outside assistance. Jack and Sally owned a beautiful country place, within easy motoring ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... not, however, the mechanical selection of limbs and features, but the ebullition of an heated fancy that burst forth; and the fine senses and enlarged understanding of the artist selected the solid matter, which he drew into this glowing focus. ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... eminently fitted for this role by her pure character and fine intelligence; but she added to these the advantages of rank and fortune, which gave her ample facilities for creating a social center of sufficient attraction to focus the best intellectual life of the age, and sufficient power to radiate its light. Still it was the tact and discrimination to select from the wealth of material about her, and quietly to reconcile old traditions with ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... state like this may vary its form in, more or less richness and beauty of detail, but here is the focus of what makes life valuable. It is this spirit which makes poverty the best servant to the ideal of human nature. I am content with this type, and will only quote, in addition, a ballad I found ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... winter climate, and the ruby-crown's chief distinguishing characteristics are told. These rather confusing relatives would be less puzzling if it were the habit of either to keep quiet long enough to focus the opera-glasses on their crowns, which it only rarely is while some particularly promising haunt of insects that lurk beneath the rough bark of the evergreens has to be thoroughly explored. At all other times both kinglets keep up an incessant fluttering and twinkling among the twigs and ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... these novels is the women who appear in them. Decorative art in fiction has perhaps never gone farther than with Taou Yuen, the marvelous Manchu woman brought home from Shanghai to Salem as wife of a Yankee skipper in Java Head. She may be taken as focus and symbol of Mr. Hergesheimer's luxurious inclinations. By her bewildering complexity of costume, by her intricate ceremonial observances, by the impenetrability of her outward demeanor, she belongs rather to art than to life—an Oriental Galatea radiantly adorned but not wholly metamorphosed ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... known as poor almost as dependants on my own family, suddenly enriched. I knew Mrs. Bradfort had a large six thousand a year, besides her own dwelling-house, which stood in Wall Street, a part of the commercial emporium that was just beginning to be the focus of banking, and all other monied operations, and which even then promised to become a fortune of itself. It is true, that old Daniel M'Cormick still held his levees on his venerable stoop, where all the heavy men in town used to ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... if she happened to be on her tree-stem; and I have tried bringing the insect nearer by degrees, and found that only when within a foot of her eyes could she see it, and I fancy then only indistinctly as she would peer about excitedly, as if uncertain what it was, until near enough to be in the focus of clear vision, and then, by a sudden dart, she would seize and flit ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... what it was, Lanyard was well satisfied that he now held the true focus of this conspiracy, a secret of the first consequence, far too momentous to the designs of England to be entrusted, though couched in the most cryptic cipher ever mind of man devised, even to cables or mails which ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... is wrong to revere them to the exclusion of folk less showy but perhaps no less essential. It is almost as wrong as it would be for the judges at the horse-show to put the dog-cart before the horse and then focus their admiring glances so exclusively upon the vehicle that they forgot the very existence of its ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... childishly pleased when we see the further subdivision of labor going on, because the quantity of the output is increased thereby, and we apparently are unable to take our attention away from the product long enough to really focus it upon the producer. Theoretically, "the division of labor" makes men more interdependent and human by drawing them together into a unity of purpose. "If a number of people decide to build a road, and one digs, ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... party who had come to see the duel: and how strange is the fact, that as much as human nature is prone to shudder at death under the gentlest circumstances, yet men will congregate to be its witnesses when violence aggravates the calamity! A public execution or a duel is a focus where burning curiosity concentrates; in the latter case, Ireland bears the palm for a crowd; in the former, the annals of the Old Bailey can amply testify. Ireland has its own interest, too, ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... the evidence here brought to a focus ought to dissipate once for all the belief in a moral sense, as commonly entertained. A long experience of mankind, however, prevents him from indulging in such an expectation. Among men at large, lifelong ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... doesn't the man of courage know what he's afraid of—or not afraid of? I don't know that, you see. I don't focus it. I can't name it. I ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... the surplus skin or dermis, especially at the top, it may be more easily flattened. After the glass is properly mounted in front of the camera, the lights are placed behind it and light is directed through the skin. The ridge detail is brought into focus on the ground glass. Before the picture is actually taken it is suggested that the ground glass be checked by first using one light and then two lights to ...
— The Science of Fingerprints - Classification and Uses • Federal Bureau of Investigation
... followed her among the people going back to the village. Once she whirled with an inimitable movement, flinging her fingers toward Skag, in a gesture that seemed to focus the eyes of the whole world upon him. (And in that instant, the American men could not have spoken a word—for the richness of ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... willingness to listen to all they had to say about themselves. According to Clancy's opinion, conversation should be an equal interchange. He looked direct into Miss Ainsley's eyes. They bewildered and perplexed him, for they appeared to gather the rays of some light he did not understand and focus them upon himself. He wished he could see her in the society of other men and could learn more of her antecedents so that he might better account for her, but he went away feeling that she was more ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... inattention to man is part of its power over his imagination; for although it is so absorbed and busy, and has regard for sun and stars and a melancholy frowning concentration upon the foot of cliffs, it is never face to face with man: he can never come within the focus of its great glancing vision. It is somewhere beyond time and space that the mighty perspective of those focal rays comes to its point; and they are so wide and eternal in their sweep that we should find their end, could we but trace them, in a condition far different ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... Jiggle-joggle, jiggle-joggle...! For each pause she was grateful. Whenever Ah Cum (whose normal stride was sufficient to keep him at the side of her chair) pointed out something of interest, she had to strain the cords in her neck to focus her glance upon the object. Supposing the wire should break and her head tumble off her shoulders into the street? The whimsey caused another smile to ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... business cares, making life miserable instead of pleasant for the family he has toiled for. His wife meekly accepts his grumblings and his tyranny. His children frequently threaten rebellion, but their feelings smolder until the situation is brought into sharp focus by the arrival of son Jim from college with a bride. This overt act of Jim's gives courage to his brother George to bring home a radio, banned as a nuisance by the head of the family, and to sister Amy to blossom out in a low-backed evening gown and plan to step out dancing. Mr. Hunter is ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... shall be a burning-glass That diligence to worship may succeed, That I may catch God's glories as they pass, And focus to a deed. ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... to see what is going on in another room. The focus may be altered in range so that the faces of those in the room may be recognized and the act of passing money or signing cheques, for instance, may be detected. The instrument is fashioned somewhat after the cytoscope of the doctors, with which the ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... part, the "Royal Society for the improvement of Natural Knowledge" had already become famous, and had acquired a claim upon the veneration of Englishmen, which it has ever since retained, as the principal focus of scientific activity in our islands, and the chief champion of the cause ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... with excitement over Irish affairs and for a while I wondered how any one could think that Irish affairs mattered in the least. Fresh from my wanderings over a huge continent Ireland seemed to me a small place. It took me a week to get my mind into focus again. Then I began once more to see the Home Rule question as it should be seen. South America and Ascher's web of international credit sank into ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... in a south-east and north-west direction, and therefore corresponded to the lines of undulation or of principal flexure. Bearing in mind all these circumstances, which so clearly point to the south-west as the chief focus of disturbance, it is a very interesting fact that the island of S. Maria, situated in that quarter, was, during the general uplifting of the land, raised to nearly three times the height of any ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... her the right to the proceeds of her industry, or to give her the right to the proceeds of her industry without giving her the power to protect the property she may acquire; she must therefore have the legal and political rights, or she has nothing. The ballot-box is the focus of all other rights, it is the pivot upon which all others hang; the legal rights are embraced in it, for if once possessed of the right to the ballot-box, to self-representation, she will see to it that the laws shall be just, and protect her person ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... hitherto obtained in the Chinese mind. He did not ask his fellow-countrymen to discard any part of what they had long held in high esteem: he raised the old theories from the sphere of science to that of philosophy by unifying them and bringing them to a focus. And he made this unification intelligible to the Chinese mind by his famous T'ai chi t'u, or Diagram of the Great Origin (or Grand Terminus), showing that the Grand Original Cause, itself uncaused, produces the yang and the yin, these the Five Elements, and so on, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... in one of two ways—first, as a vivid picture affecting the focus and retina of the eye, perfect in its outline and colouring, and giving the impression of being either distant or near or at moderate range, Secondly, it may be conveyed as a vivid impression accompanied by a hazy and undefined formation in the crystal field. In this form it becomes ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... especially makes us unquiet; therefore we should attend to it that we get—as far as possible—what rest we need, and take all the rest we get in the best way. We cannot expect to fulfill these conditions all at once, but we can aim steadily to do so, and by getting every day a stronger focus and a steadier aim we can gain so greatly in fulfilling the standards of a healthy mind in a healthy body, and so much of our individual dust will be laid, that I may fairly promise a happy astonishment at the view of life which will open before us, and the ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... the wrong done her, and securing the "revenge" she craved, she would at the same time have conferred a benefit on society. She is shut out from any action against the one person who injured her; but as a sort of compensation she is allowed to become a radiating focus of disease, to shorten many lives, to cause many deaths, to pile up incalculable damages; and in so doing she is to-day perfectly within her legal rights. A community which encourages this state of things is not only immoral ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... note: includes eight small islands in the Saint Pierre and the Miquelon groups Land boundaries: 0 km Coastline: 120 km Maritime claims: exclusive economic zone: 200 nm territorial sea: 12 nm International disputes: focus of maritime boundary dispute between Canada and France Climate: cold and wet, with much mist and fog; spring and autumn are windy Terrain: mostly barren rock Natural resources: fish, deepwater ports ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... what may have been the subject that had originally vexed her, it was the invariable experience that those legs became the focus to which her excited wrath was drawn, and then, indeed, it must be owned, she was exceedingly hard to deal with. She would recall in bitter phrases the fact that he had married her with other and honester legs, and she would plainly intimate that in substituting ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... to be adapted to the focus of the citizen- student who brings to his task not merely the intellectual interest of the collector of knowledge, but the moral interest which belongs to one who is a part of all he sees, and a sharer in the social responsibility for the present ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... complete for this kind of work that there is very little for us to do beyond being sure that we have an unexposed section of film in place and that we have sufficient light to obtain a picture. Of course we must have the focus right and must be sure we are pointing at what ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... the old home—such a book would possess a deep human interest, and would make a high and wide appeal. Nevertheless, I feel that at the present time the most urgent need, from every point of view on which I have touched, is to focus the thought available for the Irish Question upon the definite work of a reconstruction ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... God and the king was the vice-king. Yet they had seen their beloved viceroy, Iturrigaray, deposed by a conspiracy of Spanish shop-keepers, which had organized itself in that focus of Mexican trade, the Parian. All this was bewildering to the nation. All New Spain was astonished to see a power sufficiently potent to arrest the vice-king emanate from such a quarter. And not only had ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... of my brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated in a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder. Captivity has brought my mental faculties to a focus; and you are well aware that from the collision of clouds electricity is produced—from electricity, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the background upon which are made specific adjustments, as occasion arises. We are never interested in changing the whole environment; there is much that we take for granted and accept just as it already is. Upon this background our activities focus at certain points in an endeavor to introduce needed changes. Habituation is thus our adjustment to an environment which at the time we are not concerned with modifying, and which supplies a leverage to our active habits. Adaptation, in fine, is quite as much adaptation of ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... abstraction and impartiality, is rooted like a vegetable to one point in space and time, and exists by limitation, piety belongs to the equilibrium of his being. It resides, so to speak, at his centre of gravity, at the heart and magnetic focus of his complex endowment. It exercises there the eminently sane function of calling thought home. It saves speculative and emotional life from hurtful extravagance by keeping it traditional and social. Conventional ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... he had been trying all the evening to look at Nona Vincent in Violet Grey's person, what subsisted in his vision was simply Violet Grey in Nona's. He didn't wish to see the actress so directly, or even so simply as that; and it had been very fatiguing, the effort to focus Nona both through the performer and through the "Legitimate." Before he went to bed that night he posted three words to Mrs. Alsager—"She's not a bit like it, but I dare say I can ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... the country by the patriot soldier Espartero, she endeavored to gain him over to her side, but failed. Espartero became Regent, and Maria Christina repaired to Paris, where she was received with great distinction by Louis Philippe, and Paris became the focus of all sorts of machinations against the constitutional government of Spain, and of plots for its overthrow. One of these had just been defeated at the time of Irving's arrival. It was a desperate ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... same time resented, the tribute he paid Braceway through his hesitancy. The man was a clever detective and, if left to dominate Greenleaf unopposed, might easily focus attention on a new theory of the crime. Not that this could result in the acquittal of the negro; but it might deprive him, Bristow, of the credit he was ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... early morning light crept over the plain little bunches of cattle followed by brown, lithe riders. Like spokes of a wheel each group moved to a hub. Old Black Ned, the cook, was the focus of their travel. For at Spring River he had waiting for them hot coffee, flaky biscuits, steaks hot from the coals. Each rider seized a tin cup, a tin plate, a knife and fork, and was ready for the best Uncle Ned ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... often said before, we think that a good lens requires no "actinic" focus to find. In a properly constructed lens the chemical and visual foci are identical; and we would ourselves not be troubled with the use of one in which they differed. Our advertising columns will point out to you where such a lens man be procured. We believe, where there is a difference ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... called the eye-piece, at the other. The function of the large lens is to act as a sort of gigantic eye. It collects a large amount of light, an amount proportional to its size, and brings this light to a focus within the tube of the telescope. It thus produces a small but bright image, and the eye-piece magnifies this image. In the reflector, instead of a large lens at the top of the tube, a large mirror is placed at the bottom. This ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... child of impulse, and careless of appearance and opinion, she felt her thoughts, none too cheerful or optimistic that morning during her long walk down the avenue, drawn by the expression upon the legless man's face to a sudden focus of triumph and solution. She struck the palm of one small workman-like hand with the back of the other, and exclaimed: ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... credulous, and inconsiderately generous to be a successful editor. If a paper could be conducted on purely altruistic principles, and without reference to profits, there would be no man fitter to occupy an editorial chair. For as an inspiring force, as a radiating focus of influence, his equal is not to be encountered "in seven kingdoms round." However, this inspiring force could reach a far larger public through published books than through the columns of a newspaper. It was therefore by no means ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... to flee for their lives, yet their authority was eventually superseded, and they were compelled to bow to the storm by retiring from their seats of government. One common spirit pervaded the United Provinces of America, though it was more rampant in some colonies than others. The grand focus of rebellion was still at Massachusets Bay, where, towards the close of the year, in the course of predatory hostility, the town of Falmouth was cannonaded and totally destroyed, in revenge for some offence relative to supplies, and on the refusal of its inhabitants to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... deal with the infinite are, besides, exposed to danger from small, unsuspected admixtures of human error, which become deadly when carried to such vast results. The smallest speck of earth's dust, in the focus of an infinite lens, appears magnified among the heavenly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... up or down, until my attention was arrested by a circular rift or opening in the foliage of a large tree that over-topped its fellows in the distance. In the centre of this rift I perceived a white spot, but could not, at first, distinguish what it was. Adjusting the focus of the telescope, I again looked, and now made it out to be a ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... the lion, tiger and leopard the arms come in for fearful punishment. It is the way of carnivorous beasts to attack each other head to head and mouth to mouth, and this same instinct leads these animals to focus their initial attacks upon the heads and faces of their ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... the Browning Palace was for so many years a focus for all who revered and loved the wedded poets, Robert ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... of her thoughts, shared her uncertainties, notwithstanding the struggle then going on in my own mind. But I remained quiet and so did she, and the sleigh ultimately flew past us up the road. The sigh which broke from her lips as this terror subsided, brought my disordered thoughts to a focus. I must not keep her longer. Something must be said at once. As soon as she looked my way ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... conspicuous that the spectator thinks he can grasp them with his hand. In the experiment, some of the rays passing through the smoke, the representation will be much less vivid than on the cloth; and if care be not taken to reduce the light to its smallest focus, it will ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... conception of unchanging spatial relations in the fundamental lines of perspective vision receives constant reinforcement from the facts of daily experience. The influence of the above-described changes in experimental conditions is mediated through their effect upon the location of the focus of the limiting and perspective lines of vision. As the plane of the upper boundaries of the enclosing walls was elevated and depressed the intersection of the two systems of lines was correspondingly ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... Alice has really done nothing but permit his absorbing worship of many demure little maids to focus and concentrate itself into an almost incredible transformation of what was the intrinsic nature of the writer into what was the intrinsic ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... home. Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, trade, navigation, and the arts, will receive a correspondent encouragement. That city will, in the course of time become the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations, and the concentrating point of vast, disposable, and accumulating capitals, which will stimulate, enliven, extend, and reward the exertions of human labor and ingenuity, in all their processes and exhibitions. ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... philosophy was bound to be somewhat rapid and summary; and now that this is completed it will doubtless not be superfluous to come back, on the same plan as before, to some more important or more difficult individual points, and to examine by themselves the most prominent centres on which we should focus the light of our attention. Not that I intend to probe in minute detail the folds and turns of a doctrine which admits of infinite development: how can I claim to exhaust a work of such profound thought that the least passing example employed takes ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... my unnatural position for many minutes before I began to suffer agonies, agonies not only physical but mental; for standing there like some prisoner of the Inquisition, it came to me how this dismantled apartment must be the focus of the dreadful ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... Now I'll look.—Thanks. Your eyes require a different focus from mine. Yes. What I expected," said the professor, handing back the glass. "Have another look at your sand heap; it will repay observation; it is one of the milestones of the caravan roads, only they are not placed at regular distances. Have you ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... with all the forms it had acquired under Louis XIV.; dignity alone was wanting. As to gaiety, there was none. Versailles was not the place at which to seek for assemblies where French spirit and grace were displayed. The focus of wit and ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... is simply that of a body turning entirely round upon its own centre. The only centre around which the moon performs a revolution is very far from its own proper axis, being situated at the centre of the earth, the focus of its orbit, and as it has no other rotating motion around the earth, it cannot revolve on its own ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... clearing; all is more or less confused at present. She grasps nothing distinctly; and yet she is often very near a clear perception. But it is with her mind as with a telescope: it is near the right focus for seeing things clearly, but simply it wants the adjustment which would bring it to the point of unclouded vision, and then, when that adjustment has been reached, it wants to be kept fixed at the right focus. I cannot but hope that ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... in little less danger in the opposite direction. Attempting to intercept with dismounted fire parties of the enemy, who were retiring towards Halifax, the little force became the focus of every wandering party of the enemy, not only of those evacuating the positions of Talana and Lennox Hill, but also of many riding in from the Buffalo. For the hills and plain were full of Boers ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... thin glass cover. It will be easily seen that the ray of light, h, from the mirror or condenser above the stage will enter the slide and thence be refracted to the silvered surface of the illuminator, r, whence it is reflected at a corresponding angle to the object in the focus of the objective. A shield to prevent unnecessary light from entering the objective can be made of any material at hand, by taking a strip one inch long and three-fourths of an inch wide and turning up one end. A hole not more than three-sixteenths ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... by officers elected by the locality, and paid from local funds. None of these can be said to be matters of local, as distinguished from national importance. It would not be a matter personally indifferent to the rest of the country if any part of it became a nest of robbers or a focus of demoralization, owing to the maladministration of its police; or if, through the bad regulations of its jail, the punishment which the courts of justice intended to inflict on the criminals confined therein (who might have come from, or committed ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... them—with the fierce wind howling around them, sweeping across a broad expanse of hidden country, blowing as if it had arisen simultaneously from every point of the compass, and making those wanderers the focus of its ferocity—the two women walked through the darkness down the hill upon which Mount Stanning stood, along a mile and a half of flat road, and then up another hill, on the western side of which Audley Court lay in that sheltered valley, which seemed to shut ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... month or two, but to a Londoner it is a sort of stagnation. Men like myself prefer to be at the heart of things—to live close to the centre of activity. London is the nucleus of England; not only the seat of government, but the focus of intellect, of art, of culture, of all that makes life worth living; and please do not put me down as a cockney, Miss Lambert, if I confess that I love these crowded streets. I am a lawyer, you know, and ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... diminutive landscape dimly lighted, the wonder is whether it is all artificial, or whether one is not one's self the victim of some morbid illusion; and whether it is not indeed a real country view seen through a distorted vision out of focus, or through the wrong ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... Kegworthy the clotted nonsense was a revelation from on high. He was that outcast boy. The memorable pronouncement of the goddess received confirmation in some kind of holy writ. The Vision Splendid, hitherto confused, crystallized into focus. He realized vividly how he differed in feature and form and intellect and character from the low crowd with whom he was associated. His unpopularity was derived from envy. His manifest superiority was gall to their base natures. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... and religious problems of the family find a focus in the purpose of preparing persons for social living. The family justifies its cost to society in the contribution which it makes in trained and motived lives. As a religious family its first duty is to prepare the coming generation to live in a religious society, in one which will ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... returned, but he had not dared a visit to the Three Star. Who the rider with her was he did not care. That it was a tenderfoot was plain by his clothes and by his seat. As he adjusted the powerful glasses to a better focus Plimsoll's face twisted to an ugly smile. He had a flask in his hip pocket and he swigged at it before he rode to catch ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... soundless tread, through the opalescent light, they appeared like specters flying from hateful shadows. Suddenly, in the air before them, not farther up than a low hill-top flared a lambent flame; as they looked at it, the apparition contracted into a focus of dazzling lustre. Their hearts beat fast; their souls thrilled; and they shouted as with one voice, "The Star! the Star! God is ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... reference to communication with other quarters than the United States—with Halifax, with Bermuda, with Europe. Its distance from these points, and from Santa Lucia, where the resources of Europe may be said to focus for it, makes its situation one of extreme isolation; a condition emphasized by the fact that both Bermuda and Santa Lucia are themselves dependent upon outside sources for anything they may send to Jamaica. At all these points, coal, the great factor of modern ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... the rays of glory or support the cloudy thrones of the saints and prophets, there are between seventy and eighty figures in the picture; yet the hosts of heaven and the church on earth seem gathered about the altar with its sacred wafer—the tiny circle which is the focus of the great composition and the inevitable goal of all regards, as it is the central mystery ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... fine ringing laugh in him, and clear pregnant words ever ready,—or if soft methods would not serve, then by hard, and even hardest, he put down a great deal of miscellaneous anarchy in Norway; was especially busy against heathenism (devil-worship and its rites): this, indeed, may be called the focus and heart of all his royal endeavor in Norway, and of all the troubles he now had with his people there. For this was a serious, vital, all-comprehending matter: devil-worship, a thing not to be tolerated one moment longer than you could by ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... to wish that I could find the shorter path—fix forms and characters in my mind—and instead of copying the lines, try to read the language, and, if possible, find the grammar of the art by bringing into one focus the various observations I have made, and then trying by my power on the canvas how far my plan enabled me to combine and apply them to practice. For this purpose I considered what various ways, and to what different purposes, the memory might be applied, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... betakes it to embodying in verse its imaginations and conceptions, the result is poetry. Poetry is thought so inly warmed by creative sensibility as to overflow in musical cadence. And when we consider that thought is the gathering of loose intellectual activity into a fast focus; that creative sensibility is human feeling refined of its dross, stilled of its tumultuousness in the glow of the beautiful; that musical cadence is heard by him who can hearken with such rapt reverence as to catch some sound of the tread in divine ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... Garden was not exactly a Paradise yet, though it is in a fair way of becoming one. It is a spot of some fifty acres reclaimed from the scrubbiest part of Wormwood Scrubbs, and made the focus of a club of working men, of whom I am very proud indeed to be one. Indeed, I do not see why throughout the remainder of this article I should not use the first person plural. I will. Well, then, we secured this spot, and we have got in the first place one of ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... his cigar into the surf that curled at their very feet, leaving a rim of foam and scum. The red end died with a fizz. Then he turned his dark eyes full upon her with a steady focus. ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... than that of friendship existed between them; that no word had ever passed between them which might not have passed in the daily intercourse between brother and sister. But this did not cause her to shrink from the admission. Jeff was her whole horizon in life. There was no detail of her focus which was not occupied by the image of the man whom she regarded as the genius ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... indignant voices. The inhabitants of each poor squalid dwelling were gathered round the doors and windows, if indeed they were not actually standing in the middle of the narrow ways—all with looks intent towards one point. Marlborough Street itself was the focus of all those human eyes, that betrayed intensest interest of various kinds; some fierce with anger, some lowering with relentless threats, some dilated with fear, or imploring entreaty; and, as Margaret reached ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... indicate the elaborate and intricate character of the organ of research which we have to use. All subsequent discoveries are rendered misleading if the total activity, at least in its general movement, of our instrument of research is not brought into focus. This instrument of research which I have named "man's complex vision" implies his possession, at the moment when he begins to philosophize, of certain ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... participation and consensus in the formation of public opinion. The public has not only a circumference, but it has a center. Within the area within which there is participation and consensus there is always a focus of attention around which the opinions of the individuals which compose the public seem to revolve. This focus of attention, under ordinary circumstances, is constantly shifting. The shifts of attention ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... tore upward through the air at the highest permissible atmospheric velocity Bradley and Clio peered over Costigan's shoulders into the plate, watching in absorbed interest the scene which was being kept in focus upon it. The Nevian ship of space was plunging downward in a long, slanting dive, her terrific beams of force screaming out ahead of her. The rays of the little lifeboat had boiled the waters of the ocean; those of the parent craft seemed literally to blast them ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... who had slipped off to one side, out of the focus of the glaring light, just in time to prevent Jean Forette from using the weapon he had quickly taken from a side pocket. "Go on, close in. I've drawn ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... Mackinaw. It will hold the key of all the northern lakes; and should its growth be marked by energy and enterprise, will command the trade of the greatest mining region in the world; be the chief depot of the northern fisheries; the outlet of an immense lumber trade; and the focus of a great network of railways, communicating with tropics on the south, and stretching out its iron arms, at no distant day, to the Atlantic on the east, and Pacific ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... government employed by the Persians, and the constant reports and tributes sent from every province to the central court of the king, were well calculated to bring to it, as to a focus, the curious lore of the various nations who came in contact with ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... hypothesis evidently upset Mesmerism from its very foundations; yet the illuminati did not judge thus. All bodies became a focus of special emanations, more or less subtle, more or less abundant, and more or less dissimilar. So far the hypothesis found very few contradictors, even among rigorous minds; but soon these individual corporeal emanations were endowed, relatively towards those, (without ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... for both O'Connell is clearly responsible—whether we regard them as amongst his merits or the reverse. He first, and as it has been proved permanently, brought the priest into politics, with the unavoidable result of accentuating the religious side of the contest and bringing it into a focus. The bitterness which three generations of the penal code had engendered only, in fact, broke out then. The hour of comparative freedom is often—certainly not alone in Ireland—the hour when the sense of past oppression first reveals itself in all its intensity, and that biting ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... multitudinous knowledges, its aroused conscience, its spurred and yet thwarted sympathies, its new incitements to egotism also, and new tools and appliances for egotism to use,—placed, as it were, in the focus of a vast whispering-gallery, where all the sounds of heaven and earth came crowding, contending, incessant upon his ear? One sees at a glance how the serious thought and poetry of Greece cling to a few master facts, not being compelled to fight always with the many-headed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... in the ability to concentrate your rays and focus them on one point. Isaac Newton could do it. "On a Winter day I took a small glass and so centered the sun's rays that I burned a hole in my coat," he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... less look to some centre in the Old World as the source and inspiration of their national culture and traditions. The most typical instance is the feeling of the American Jew for Palestine, which may well become a focus for his declasse kinsmen in other parts of the world. The Jews quite realise that they can have no exclusive claim to the possession of such a religious centre as Jerusalem, and it is clear that whatever happens to the Holy Land as a whole, the city itself must be subject ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... absolute by law and custom, and so moderate from his own disposition. The empress Elizabeth, to whom I was at first presented, appeared to me the tutelary angel of Russia. Her manners are extremely reserved, but what she says is full of life, and it is from the focus of all generous ideas that her sentiments and opinions have derived strength and warmth. While I listened to her, I was affected by something inexpressible, which did not proceed from her grandeur, ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... Person which is the clou of the devotional life, we get as it were the link between the extreme apprehensions of transcendence and of immanence, and their expression in the lives of contemplation and of action; and also a focus for that religious-emotion which is the most powerful stimulus to spiritual growth. It is needless to emphasize the splendid use which Christianity has made of this type of experience; nor unfortunately, ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... marshmallows; we add mustard, chill, curry, tabasco and sundry bottled red devils from the grocery store, to add pep and piquance to the traditional cayenne and black pepper. This results in Rabbits that are out of focus, out of order and out ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... thinks he can trace a marked rise even in Bossuet's style from the moment he became a courtier of Louis XIV. The King brought men together, placed them in a position where they were induced and urged to bring their talents to a focus. His court was alternately a high-bred gala and a stately university. If we contrast his life with those of his predecessor and successor, with the dreary existence of Louis XIII and the crapulous lifelong ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... or Imperial Diet of the German Empire, was, during our stay in Berlin, a focus for the eyes of all Europe and America. The Government, professedly actuated by a fear of war, asked for an appropriation, largely to increase the army annually for a term of seven years. This House of Deputies, elected by the people and numbering ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... might determine. He was a statesman as well as a soldier. It did not take him long to fathom the peculiarities of the organization and composition of the Aztec Empire. He knew that discord existed and he had only to introduce himself to become a focus for the discontent and rebellion. By giving a secret impression that he was for either side, he could play one party against the other, as best suited his purposes. He came to bring freedom to the one, to promote ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... To this irruption succeeded an interval of peace—the calm before the storm. From every part of Spain, the most chivalric and resolute of the Moors, taking advantage of the pause in the contest, flocked to Granada; and that city became the focus of all that paganism in Europe possessed ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book IV. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... this unity of plot that the Amadis series differs from its predecessors—the Arthurian romances, and those of the paladins of Charlemagne, which are detached adventures, each complete in itself, and not bearing to any common focus.—Amadis de Gaul (fourteenth century). ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... put on a bold face and broke the news to us on our arrival; but, contrary to his fears, Mrs. Moulton and I were enchanted. Mademoiselle Wissembourg was not so enthusiastic. A live Communard at such near focus had no attraction ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... in one of the two enormous rooms that were allotted to me, I threw myself into an arm-chair and tried to focus the extraordinary imaginative impression which this house had ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... perfectly to focus this attention that I have come to Murglebed-on-Sea. Here I am alone with the murk and the mud and my own indrawn breath of life. There are no flowers, blue sky, smiling eyes, and dainty faces—none of the adventitious distractions of the earth. There are no Blue-books. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... as it shone white and splendid in the snowy night. And now it had lost its mystic glamour,—disintegrated by gradual approach he could see the long handles of the pine-knots; the red verges of the flame; the blue and yellow tones of the focus; the trailing wreaths of dun-tinted smoke that rose from them. Then became visible the faces of the men who held them, all crowding eagerly to the verge. But it was in a solemn silence that he was received; a ...
— The Christmas Miracle - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... courts and camps, born and bred in the focus of a most gorgeous civilization, he was banished to the ends of the earth, among savage hordes and half-reclaimed forests, to exchange the splendour of St. Germain and the dawning glories of Versailles for a stern, grey rock, haunted by sombre priests, rugged ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... of course, the focus of the Romances. Dumas frequently admitted that D'Artagnan was the man he could never be. In The Vicomte de Bragelonne, the character expands even further. Although his primary symbolic representation is that of the virtue of ...
— Dumas Commentary • John Bursey
... me much, at first, did you? When you thought of me I seemed a little—not much, of course, but quite an important little—out of focus on the only horizon that your own world sees. Well, I knew that was bound to happen, and that if you really cared for me as much as you thought you did at the farm, it was just as well that it should—for you'd soon find ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... seen on the evening of our arrival, after a fifteen miles' walk, and, seen, too, in the glow of a singularly angry-looking evening sky, Livorno Bay, with its derelict barque to focus one's gaze, presented a spectacle almost terrifying in its desolation. Years must have passed since anything edible could have been found on board the Livorno. Yet I hardly think I should exaggerate if I said that ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... the Western front once more ablaze, with bitter fighting at Loos and a great French offensive in Champagne. With October the focus of interest and anxiety shifts to the Balkans. Austrian armies, stiffened with Germans, have again invaded Serbia and again occupied Belgrade. The Allies have landed at Salonika, and Ferdinand of Bulgaria has declared war on Serbia. Thus a new theatre of war has been opened, and though ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... was a prolonged silence. The atmosphere of the room seemed to be whirling round with frightful rapidity to one terrific focus. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... Mr. Lane." Foster leaned back in his swivel-chair and looked out of the window. His eyes did not focus on any detail of the office building opposite. They had the far-away look which denotes a preoccupied mind. "Ever been to Golden?" he asked at last abruptly, swinging back in his seat and looking ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
Copyright © 2025 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
