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More "Tentative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... already made him a tentative offer to that effect, my boy, and, now that the first flush of his rage is over, he is a coyote lacking the courage to kill. He will agree to your proposal, and I shall take occasion to warn him that ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... a sergeant's mount, and I had to take on an Argentine re-mount, a rough, stupid little mare, with kicking and biting propensities which quite threw the roan's into the shade. She also had a peg of ignominy, and three times a day I had to dance perilously round my precious pair with a tentative body-brush and hoof-pick. The scene generally ended in the pegs coming away from the loose sand, and a perspiring chase through the lines. I had some practice, too, in driving in a team, for one of our drivers "went sick," and I took his place in the ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... governing the daily life of the Peruvian Indian—where he should live, what should be the character of his work, what should be the distinctive character of his clothing, when and whom he should marry, how much land he should hold and cultivate, and so on, were the result of ages of tentative experiment, and were so numerous and intricate that probably none but the amautas themselves thoroughly understood them. The committee, however, which had for nearly a month been preparing itself for the task of initiating the ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... cable to-night," he urged, "that you have signed. They are holding back the public announcement of the Secretary's route until hearing from Your Excellency. This is only tentative," he pointed out; "the Senate must ratify. But our Senate will ratify it, and when you sign now, it is ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... sensible and intellectual, and the priority of mind, which run through all of them; but he has no definite forms of words in which he consistently expresses himself. While the determinations of human thought are in process of creation he is necessarily tentative and uncertain. And there is least of definiteness, whenever either in describing the beginning or the end of the world, he has recourse to myths. These are not the fixed modes in which spiritual truths are revealed ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... United States called for bids for an aerial mail service between New York and Washington—an act urged upon the Government in this volume. That service contemplates a swift carriage of first-class mail at an enhanced price—the tentative schedule being three hours, and a postage fee of twenty-five cents an ounce. There can be no doubt of the success of the service, its value to the public, and its possibilities of revenue to the post-office. Once its usefulness ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... through these orders that the careful student can pass that veil of formal propriety, reticence, and dignity which so often obscured the inner, the tentative, elements of Washington's ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... out of a mere negation, the abolition, viz., of the old political freedom, we may easily conceive that there would be an interval of fluctuating, and tentative efforts to supply its place, before a new comic form could be developed and fully established. Hence there may have been many kinds of the Middle Comedy, many intermediate gradations, between the Old and the New; and ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... She ended with a gently fervent appeal that—if her prayer were granted—something "might happen" which would result in her becoming a Countess of Lawdor. One could not have put the request with greater tentative delicacy. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... you send in your entry? I believe we've got it here, somewhere." He began to fumble industriously through a pile of papers and Denver caught his breath. For a moment he had seen his dreams brought to nothing, his last chance at the prize-money gone; but at this tentative suggestion on the part of the chairman he suddenly took heart of grace. They wanted him to compete, it had been advertised in all the papers, and they were willing to meet him half-way. But Denver was no liar, he ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... opportunities for closer observation than was ever evoked by observation lessons, and for experiments full of meaning and full of zest. Naturally we do not despise correct information, but these children are very young and all this work is tentative. We are never dogmatic, it is all "Do you think they might have ..." or "Well, I know what I should have done; I should have ..." and the teacher's reply is usually ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... such peril of powerful foreign coalition. Immediately after receiving from Selwyn the information concerning the British-German alliance, he had begun to build, as it were, a fire behind the British Ministry, and the result was its overthrow. When the English nation began to realize that a tentative agreement was being arrived at between their country on the one hand, and Germany and Japan on the other, with America as its object of attack, there was a storm of indignation; and when the new Ministry was installed the diplomatic ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... Clifford knocked her tentative little knock at the door. "Come in, mother," Elma cried, starting up in her surprise; and her mother, much wondering, turned the handle ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... federated states would be immediately raised to the limit. The various questions of social and educational reform can only be advanced towards a better understanding and perhaps a partial solution by a continual process of experimentation—undertaken with the full appreciation that they were tentative and would be pushed further or withdrawn according to the nature of their results. Obviously a state government is a much better political agency for the making of such experiments than is a government whose errors would affect ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... design, and style to that which was known here as "stump" work. Until the eighteenth century English work was more or less archaic in every branch. Personally, I see no more absurdity in the queer doll-like figures than in contemporary wood-carving. It was a period of tentative effort, and was, of course, beneath criticism. English Art has ever been an effort until its one bright burst of genius in the eighteenth century, while the continental nations appear to have breathed ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... we come to individual names of artists and to the beginnings of landscape. Ku K'ai-chih (4th century) ranks as one of the greatest names of Chinese art. A painting by him now in the British Museum (Plate I. fig. 1) shows a maturity which has nothing tentative about it. The dignified and elegant types are rendered with a mastery of sensitive brush-line which is not surpassed in later art. Ku K'ai-chih painted all kinds of subjects, but excelled in portraiture. During the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... other day. In a parish which I often visit, the organ in the church is what is called presided over by the most infamous executant I have ever heard—an elderly man, who seldom plays a single chord correctly, and whose attempts to use the pedals are of the nature of tentative and unsuccessful experiments. His performance has lately caused a considerable amount of indignation in the parish, for a new organ has been placed in the church, of far louder tone than the old instrument, and my friend the organist is hopelessly adrift upon it. The residents in the place have almost ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lives. And so you will find that this, which is a figure, represents that which is true of most of us. We have only begun to live; and we live in the lower ranges of our nature, or perhaps we have touched life on a higher level in some tentative sort of way. But the most of us are only partly alive, have only developed a little of what is possible in us, have only come in contact with some fragments of this wonderful universe that is all around ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... decay—inevitable because it was prescribed by the nature of the universe. We have only an imperfect knowledge of the influential speculations of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Empedocles, but we may take Plato's tentative philosophy of history to illustrate the trend and the prejudices of Greek thought on this subject. The world was created and set going by the Deity, and, as his work, it was perfect; but it was not immortal and had in it the seeds of decay. The period of its duration is 72,000 solar years. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... essayed a roughness, but only achieved a tentative friendliness. Stebbins hesitated for a second; a suspicious look came into the farmer's misty blue eyes. Then Stebbins, mindful of his prison record and fiercely covetous of his new home, gave another name. The name of his maternal ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... been sufficient to enable me to engage on any very careful tests as to the sensitiveness of Lola's skin. Yet I have made certain preliminary notes as to what I hope to do in this connexion, and have also begun with a few tentative attempts. I first tried her sensibility to various degrees of warmth by teaching her the use of the thermometer. I made a drawing of a thermometer—according to its actual size—and added principal numbers and figures ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... nothing final about a logical rendering of experience. Its value is not contained in itself; its significance is that of standpoint, outlook, method. It intervenes between the more casual, tentative, and roundabout experiences of the past, and more controlled and orderly experiences of the future. It gives past experience in that net form which renders it most available and most significant, most fecund for future experience. The abstractions, generalizations, and classifications ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... was accomplished at first in a humdrum and tentative way. About seventy years ago children's books were very uninteresting. In the little stories manufactured for children, the good boy ended in a Coach-and-four, and the bad boy in a ride to Tyburn. The good boys must have been a set of little snobs and prigs, and I could scarcely ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... down his first tentative offer I had quite made up my mind that he wanted to engage me as a sort of super-butler with sudden death included amongst the risks of service, and I had no intention of mixing up in other people's quarrels on such terms. ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... mistaken—Macartney, and myself to run it; with not enough men even to get out the ore, without working the mill and the amalgam plates. It had been no particular matter while the whole mine was only a tentative business, and I had been having half a fit at Dudley's mad extravagance in putting up a ten-stamp mill when we had nothing particular to crush in it. But now, with ore that ran over a hundred to the ton being fed into the mill, and Macartney and I doing the work of ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... character of a 'know nothing;' but the boys have already learned the lesson which he is unable to teach them, and they are free from the conceit of knowledge. (Compare Chrm.) The dialogue is what would be called in the language of Thrasyllus tentative or inquisitive. The subject is continued in the Phaedrus and Symposium, and treated, with a manifest reference to the Lysis, in the eighth and ninth books of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. As in other writings ...
— Lysis • Plato
... without the knowledge of many mountains and many rivers; so in the productions of genius, nothing can be stiled excellent till it has been compared with other works of the same kind. Demonstration immediately displays its power, and has nothing to hope or fear from the flux of years; but works tentative and experimental must be estimated by their proportion to the general and collective ability of man, as it is discovered in a long succession of endeavours. Of the first building that was raised, it might ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... unanticipated bodies of wealth that appeared. But both men are equally set towards the Normal Social Life, and equally enemies of the New. The so-called "socialist" land legislation of New Zealand again is a tentative towards the realisation of the same school of ideas: great estates are to be automatically broken up, property is to be kept disseminated; a vast amount of political speaking and writing in America and throughout the world enforces ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... was particularly gracious to Violet. She talked about dogs and horses even, in her desire to let herself down to Miss Tempest's level; praised the Forest; made a tentative remark about point lace; and asked Violet if she was fond ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... Bartlett house it was apparent that preparations were in progress for an event of importance. Paperhangers and cleaners came and went, consultations were held daily concerning new rugs and curtains. Miss Enid and Miss Isobel gave tentative orders and Madam promptly countermanded them. Workmen were engaged and dismissed and reengaged. The door to the room at the head of the stairs, which he knew to be Eleanor's, now stood open, revealing ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... life Simon Harley, the town back on the defensive by a combination of circumstances engineered by a master brain, knew what it was to be checkmated. He had hot the least doubt of ultimate victory, but the tentative success of the brazen young adventurer, were gall and wormwood to his soul. He had made money his god, had always believed it would buy anything worth while except life, but this Western buccaneer had taught him it could not purchase the love of ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... establishment of direct lines of steamers between North and South America has been brought to the attention of Congress by my predecessor and by Mr. Root before and after his noteworthy visit to that continent, and I sincerely hope that Congress may be induced to see the wisdom of a tentative effort to establish such lines by the ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... general dilatoriness in heeding the summons was accountable for the tardiness of others. Until a majority of States were represented, the delegates could only adjourn from day to day. That the gentlemen from Virginia put this time to good use appears from the plan which they drew up as a tentative program and which Randolph presented to the convention. Indeed, there is little doubt that much unrecorded progress was made throughout the convention by informal conferences among ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... understands him all over, so to speak; and I am sure that he would himself be the first to see that this must be, and to confess that things which he himself has not yet thought out clearly, had yet to be mentioned and have a tentative place assigned them in his philosophy. Many of us are profusely original, in that no man can understand us—violently peculiar ways of looking at things are no great rarity. The rarity is when great peculiarity of vision is allied with ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... five months of tentative measures or of incidents which taught both parties that they could not, either of them, hope to completely destroy their opponents, the two allied brothers received at Verdun, whither they had repaired to concert their next movement, a messenger ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... to The Alexander, but she had never in her life known such an aching loneliness as had been Miss Toland's fate for many years. To such a nature the solitary years in Paris, the solitary return to California, the tentative and unencouraged approaches to her nieces, all made a dark memory. Rich as she was, independent and popular as she was, Miss Toland's life had brought her nothing so sweet as this young thing, to teach, to dominate, ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... quickness of city men, they soon arrived at Mrs. Grail's. The good lady was sitting at one of her front windows, sewing. As she looked into the street, her face was seen to have a sad and thoughtful expression. She came to the door in response to a sharp ring by Wesley Tiffles, who was tentative of bellpulls. Mrs. Crull kept two servants, but she could never get over the impulse to answer the door, when she ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... truth, mon ami. It is inevitable that Turkey fights if Germany goes to war. England, France, Russia know it. Ask yourself, then, how enormous to us the value of those plans—tentative, sketchy, perhaps, yet the inception and foundation of those German-made and German-armed fortifications which today line the Dardanelles and the adjacent waters within the sphere of ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... that there could be only one final and satisfactory solution: that was the abolition of dual ownership—in other words, the buying out of the landlord and the establishment of the tenant in the single and undisputed ownership of the soil on fair and equitable terms. A tentative start had been made in land purchase by the Land Purchase Act of 1885—called, after its author, the Ashbourne Act. This experiment had proved an immense success, for in six years the ten millions sterling assigned for its operations were exhausted ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... from New Jersey. You know how tentative any reconstruction of events must be under the circumstances, but we're pretty sure of this, especially since there was no fire. Preston apparently broke a fingernail trying to fasten his seat belt and one of the stewardesses had brought him a little first-aid kit. He had torn open ...
— The Last Straw • William J. Smith
... to the theory that comparatively few (of those who die) make good communicators, I may be permitted to suggest, perhaps, a tentative explanation of the rarity of good communicators (and communications), based upon this principle. Certain it is that special adaptability and idiosyncrasy are necessary to the one on this side—this constituting, in fact, a "medium," as we understand it. It seems highly probable ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... crows came. They came in their own way; but so they had always come. Came in the guise of an elderly tramp, vacant-eyed and straggly-bearded, soiled, tentative, and reluctant. But what mattered things like this: since in his wings, which were only hairy arms that needed soap, he brought the raiment? Such a pile of them, too, such royal abundance. A fine black cutaway coat, a handsome pair of "extra" trousers, shirts, and ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... university as distinguished from a college. He had to correlate and concentrate the various departments, and make them complete by making a place for effective graduate work. Certain revolutionary measures, such as the admission of women, the first tentative steps toward free election of studies, the introduction of a scientific course, had been instituted by his immediate predecessors; it became his duty to make them ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... managers and foremen. But not for a quarter of an hour after that did he get rid of his show manager, Mr. Pitts, with the tentative make-up of the catalogue for the first annual stock-sale on the ranch. By that time Mr. Bonbright was on hand with his sheaf of telegrams, and the lunch-hour was at hand ere they were ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... the red squirrel does not lay by a store of food for winter use, like the chipmunk and the wood-mice; yet in the fall he sometimes hoards in a tentative, temporary kind of way. I have seen his savings—butternuts and black walnuts—stuck here and there in saplings and trees near his nest; sometimes carefully inserted in the upright fork of a limb or twig. ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... having the tentative introduction of Lydia at once cut off, and yet the proposition seemed to him natural. Indeed, as they turned into Mill Street it occurred to him that Jeff might be providing solitude and a fitting place to talk. ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... which implies constraint. Here, even more than elsewhere, the art that conceals art is an absolute requisite, and to have a witticism presented to us in limping or cumbrous rhythm is as counteractive to any electrifying effect as to see the tentative grimaces by which a comedian prepares a grotesque countenance. We discern the process, instead of being startled ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... hears in certain quarters about the human stud farm. [Footnote: See Mankind in the Making, Ch. II.] State breeding of the population was a reasonable proposal for Plato to make, in view of the biological knowledge of his time and the purely tentative nature of his metaphysics; but from anyone in the days after Darwin, it is preposterous. Yet we have it given to us as the most brilliant of modern discoveries by a certain school of sociological writers, who seem totally unable to grasp the modification of meaning "species" and "individual" ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... brain-fever or enthusiastic infatuation, is to be found in the vicious process of reasoning applied to such estimates; the doctor, having taken up one novel idea of the national character, proceeded afterwards by no tentative inquiries, or comparison with actual facts and phenomena of daily experience, but resolutely developed out of his one idea all that it appeared analytically to involve; and postulated audaciously ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... This second tentative effort at conversation having flickered and gone out she bent again to her work, while Blair remained, looking down at her, in his eyes mingled amusement and resentment. What had he done, he wondered, to account for such a change? ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr
... from the high seas, living together in the evening of their days in a narrow court in a London slum, the one paralysed and the other blind; the one a most brilliant and imaginative story-teller, the other a most cautious, modest, tentative, and genial critic. And let us sit between their two chairs for a moment and listen to the moving story of Old Joe, believing it with all the simplicity, if not with all the stupefied, admiration of the little slum children who gaze at the pirate when his chair is moved out into the court that ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... not the proceedings at Rome had anything to do with it, but he thought that they had a great influence on the mind of the President; that, doubtless, his action was not determined solely by that, and, therefore, that the Secretary of State first made a tentative application to see whether a proposition for another Conference was acceptable, and that he found all countries here represented answering the circular in the affirmative; that they agreed with him that a conference for this purpose ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... became softly, mistily blue. All that forenoon Hazel prowled restlessly out of doors without cap or coat. There was a new feel in the air. The deep winter snow had suddenly lost its harshness. A tentative stillness wrapped the North as if the land rested a moment, gathering its force for some ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the same time set forth certain general propositions as a tentative system of law to be operative in practice, a disregard of which in the opinion of the German Government would constitute a breach of international ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell
... went back to his tentative romance. She had passed his window and disappeared into the fog, and there was a reasonable doubt of her ever returning from it. The Singer in the Fog; thus he would write it down in his book of memories and sensibly turn the page. Once down-town ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... cementing it, was a most serious danger, to which an opposite alliance would alone be an adequate counterpoise; and the experiment might at least be tried whether such an alliance was possible. At the beginning of August, therefore, Stephen Vaughan was sent on a tentative mission to the Elector of Saxe, John Frederick, at Weimar.[617] He was the bearer of letters containing a proposal for a resident English ambassador; and if the elector gave his consent, he was to proceed with similar offers to the ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... frequently libelled in this manner by the "Yellow Press," and represented both by pen and pencil as the ringleader and instigator of the so-called "conspiracies"; this accusation, at first tentative, later grew increasingly clear and unmistakable. The campaign of calumny in which even the more respectable Press took its share, was, however, directed more particularly against the Military Attache, Captain von Papen, and ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... that this attitude was tentative. Everything depended on how well Thorpe lived up to his reputation at the outset,—how good a first impression of force and virility he would manage to convey,—for the first impression possessed the power of transmuting ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... Dick who was suddenly awakened at what he judged to be the middle of the night. And the manner of his awakening was this. He seemed to be dreaming that he was buying a new pair of shoes and, after having tried on several tentative pairs in a shop, the salesman, who was attired in the full regalia of a cowboy, gave Dick's left foot a sharp kick as if to indicate that he should ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... road to Oregon was even now not a trail but a road, deep cut into the soil, though no wheeled traffic had marked it until within the past five years. A score of paralled paths it might be at times, of tentative location along a hillside or a marshy level; but it was for the most part a deep-cut, unmistakable road from which it had been impossible to wander. At times it lay worn into the sod a half foot, a foot in depth. Sometimes it followed the ancient ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... the peace and pleasure of which were held as sacred duties on the part of the descendants, sacrifices and offerings being made toward this end. Nevertheless, here and there, among the Romans, were eminent thinkers who seemingly held a vague, tentative belief in some form of Reincarnation, as, for instance, Ovid, who says: "Nothing perishes, although everything changes here on earth; the souls come and go unendingly in visible forms; the animals which have acquired goodness will take upon them human form"; and ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... statute when enacted was in the nature of the case more or less tentative and experimental, it was hardly expected to supply a complete and adequate system. While its wholesome effects are manifest and have amply justified its enactment, it is evident that all desired reforms in transportation methods have not been fully accomplished. In ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... asked me if I would fight. There was, of course, no question of drawing back, but I remember very plainly that I was a little aghast, for he was much taller and broader than I, and I had, into the bargain, a very bad cause to defend. But we had hardly exchanged the first tentative blows before I felt overwhelmingly superior. The poor cub! He had not the slightest notion how to fight. From my everyday school life in Copenhagen, I knew hundreds of tricks and feints that he had never learnt, and as soon as I perceived ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... Its practical value was illustrated by the brilliant researches of Halley on cometary orbits. It necessitated, however, a long train of tedious calculations, and, in consequence, was not much used, astronomers generally preferring to attain the same end by a tentative process. In the year 1780, Laplace communicated to the Academy of Sciences an analytical method for determining the elements of a comet's orbit. This method has been extensively employed in France. Indeed, previously to the appearance of Olber's method, about the close of the last century, it ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... remembered how timid, tentative, and dear the postal and telephone services of even the most civilized countries still are, and how inexorably the needs of revenue, public profit, and convenience fight in these departments against the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... for his card-houses, in drawing ornamental diagrams for colouring, and in those various instructive occupations which an inventive teacher will lead him into, he may for a length of time be advantageously left, like the primitive builder, to tentative processes; and so will learn through experience the difficulty of achieving his aims by the unaided senses. When, having meanwhile undergone a valuable discipline of the perceptions, he has reached a fit age for using a pair of compasses, he will, while duly appreciating ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... abandoned homestead. He saw with instant vividness the wrecked framework of his own plans. He heard the echo of Fadeaway's sneering laugh in the fury of the wind. He told himself that he had been duped and that he deserved it. Lacking physical strength to carry him through to a place of tentative safety, he gave up, and credited his sudden regret to true repentance rather than to weakness. He would return to the Concho, knowing that his brother would forgive him. He wept as he thought of his attitude of the repentant ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... to set up standards of quality for butternuts, the following tentative schedule for judging has been worked out along the same lines as the schedule for judging black walnuts. Twenty-five nuts are used in a sample and the score is made up of the weight in grams of the kernels recovered on the first crack, plus total weight ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... to pucker her mouth into a funny little grimace that denoted amusement, surprise and sympathy, all together. "Then I'll ask Barbara Gordon to give you a separate trial later," she said kindly. "Nothing will be really decided to-morrow. We only make tentative selections to submit to Mr. Masters when he comes up next week. He's the professional ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... ventures favorably yonder. If it goes through, I'd have to take most of the vendor's payment in shares, which I'm quite ready to do. That's a rough sketch of the scheme, sir, but in the meanwhile it's only tentative." ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... The word Transubstantiation (an ambiguous term to the disputants who do not define substance) had been invented by Peter of Blois, but not yet enjoined upon the Church by the Lateran Council of 1215. The language of the earlier fathers, of St. Bernard, did not suffice. Peter Lombard's tentative terms had given way to less reserved speech. Thomas Aquinas, not yet born, was to unite the rival factions which forked now into Berengarius, who objected to the very terms Body of Christ, &c., always used for the Sacrament; and now into some ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... was nettled. He had never found the paper lost out of the closet in his own room, though he had never given up a tentative search for it. ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... divided into three parts. (1) Tentative classification of the languages of Mexico; (2) notes on the immigration of the tribes of Mexico; (3) geography ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... that all would come right in the end, and vaguely she determined that in some undefined way she would help Ethel, would yet demonstrate to this child of hers that she understood and sympathised. The interview which had just terminated, futile, conflicting, desultory, muddled, tentative, and abrupt as life itself, appeared to her in the light of a positive achievement. She was not unhappy about it, nor about anything. Even the scathing speech of Florence Gardner had ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... good. If the tares may have been sometimes more conspicuous than the wheat, we should ask ourselves whether our own lack of vigilance and forethought did not contribute to the luxuriant growth of tares in a soil naturally congenial to them. After many hesitations, and some tentative and half-hearted steps, we at length recognised that intellectual partnership however imperfect must lead towards a closer political partnership. It became, indeed, impossible for us to refuse to do so without being untrue to the ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... you, Mr. Rankin. (Rankin goes out. She comes to the other end of the table, looking at Sir Howard with a troubled, sorrowfully sympathetic air, but unconsciously making her right hand stalk about the table on the tips of its fingers in a tentative stealthy way which would put Sir Howard on his guard if he were in a suspicious frame of mind, which, as it happens, he is not.) I'm so sorry for you, Howard, about ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... His tentative politeness charmed one who was accustomed to assurance in the youthful manner; he was disturbed because she was to drive him home, instead of his driving her. Shouldn't he have a shot? They hadn't a car at Robin Hill since the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... bits and I think I will finish by finally building myself a scant but solid creed for I have cast all preconceived notions from me, rooted out all expressions of habit and influence, and cleared, though perhaps still warped dwelling of my former tentative suppositions will contain henceforth but the jewels of certain convictions, or remain ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... very badly managed institution. The excellence of this article was at once acknowledged on all sides, even by the press; and I appear to have made some impression in the highest administrative circles, for I shortly afterwards heard from my friend Rudolf Liechtenstein, that tentative advances had been made to him with a view to his accepting the position of manager, associated with which there was certainly an idea of asking me to become conductor of the Grand Opera. Among the reasons which caused this proposal to fall through was the fear, Liechtenstein ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... call them either animals or plants? Was Nature then so poor that forsooth only two lines of differentiation were at the beginning open for her effort? May we not rather believe that life's tree may have risen at first in hundreds of tentative trunks of which two have become in the progress of the ages so far dominant as to entirely obscure less progressive types? The Myxomycetes are independent; all that we may attempt is to assert their near kinship with one or other ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... the university was at that time divided between sundry general courses and various technical departments, the whole being somewhat tentative. These general courses were mainly three: the arts course, which embraced both Latin and Greek; the course in literature, which embraced Latin and modern languages; and the course in science, which embraced more especially modern languages in connection with a somewhat extended range of scientific ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... these lines. {18} Moreover, as the Master observed, the work would have been premature in Tennyson's youth, and, indeed, it would still be premature. The comparative science of religious evolution is even now very tentative, and does not yield materials of sufficient stability for an epic, even if such an epic could be forced into the mould of the Arthur legends, a feat perhaps impossible, and certainly undesirable. A truly ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... classics and mathematics of medieval culture are history, economics, ethics, and sociology. Although these subjects are as yet merely in the making, thousands of students are flocking to their investigation, and are going out to try their tentative knowledge in College Settlements and City Missions and Children's Aid Societies. The best instincts of generous youth are becoming enlisted in these living themes. And why should our daughters remain aloof from the most absorbing work of modern city life, work quite as fascinating to young women ...
— Why go to College? an Address • Alice Freeman Palmer
... something,—but they had lost something too. They seemed unabashed, almost declamatory, in their sentiment. They had acquired a new and positive importance; it was as if the assertions they made had all at once become truths, had ceased to be tentative. She read them over again. No, they did not tell it all, all that she meant to say; but they brought back the day, and she was glad she had written them,—glad with an agitated, inexpressible gladness. She would like to know ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... the work of preparation. Then I had to deal with you. For you were the spring that had kept the works moving, and you had to be taken apart—and what a buzzing followed!—When I came in here, I didn't know exactly what to say. Like a chess-player, I had laid a number of tentative plans, of course, but my play had to depend on your moves. One thing led to the other, chance lent me a hand, and finally I had you where I ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... for open-mindedness, indeed, in some degree accounts for the tentative quality in so much of the theory of translation. Translation fills too large a place, is too closely connected with the whole course of literary development, to be disposed of easily. As each succeeding period has revealed new ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... would appear, did not immediately respond to the lady's advances. They were probably too shy, too tentative, to attract Rochester's attention. It is probable, also, that there were plenty of beautiful women about the Court, more mature, more practised in the arts of coquetry than Frances, and very likely not at all 'blate'—as Carr and his master would put it—in showing themselves ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... no sooner knocked than the door was opened by Maisie. He was slightly embarrassed at being brought face to face with her thus suddenly after the last scene that they had shared. He entered in a tentative manner, only just crossing the threshold, as though he had not much time ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... Montmorency at once resigned. No notice was taken of Villele's request except by England. The King himself went over to the war party and appointed Chateaubriand his Minister of Foreign Affairs. Great Britain's tentative offer of mediation was summarily rejected by France. To Villele, King Louis XVIII. thus explained his attitude: "Louis XIV. destroyed the Pyrenees; I shall not allow them to be raised again. He placed my house on the throne of Spain; I shall ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... little doubt that the two tentative voyages were highly profitable, for Drake was able to fit out his third expedition with a care and completeness almost unknown at that time. The ships were "richly furnished, with victuals and apparel for a whole year: ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... legislation on social questions which was initiated or endured by the senate, shows the tentative attitude adopted by the nobility in their dealings with the people, and proves either a statesmanlike view of the needs of the situation or the entire lack of a proud consciousness of their own immunity from attack. Even had they possessed the power to dictate ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... program—professional preparation for all teachers in the high school and that along the four lines suggested. But the movement has gone much farther than suggested by my statement. The results are found in something more authoritative and more permanent than tentative agreement among educational leaders, or even among educational institutions. The law-making bodies of the land have taken a part, and by legal enactment have required about what I have suggested. The State of North Dakota, for example, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... compatriots who had acquired the language under the same conditions as to pronunciation, etc., as themselves. Experts and beginners, those who from practical experience knew the great possibilities of the new tongue as a written medium, no less than the neophytes and tentative experimenters who had come to see whether the thing was worth taking seriously, they were now to make the decisive trial—in the one case to test the faith that was in them, in the other to set all doubt at rest in one sense or the other ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... the tentative efforts of the robins in the early spring, at the beginning of the song season, before they get their harps in full tune? It is interesting and amusing to listen to their rehearsals, of which they need quite a number before they acquire full ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... which the insurrectionary States should be dealt with at the close of hostilities had been the object of solicitous inquiry throughout the war. It was indeed often a question of angry disputation in Congress, in the press, and among the people. The tentative and somewhat speculative efforts in this field, which had been made or at least encouraged by Mr. Lincoln, had confused rather than solved the problem, and yet his action could not fail to exert ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... personal interview that ever occurred between us. I called upon Senator Morrill of Vermont, and together we made a visit to the President. I spoke of the features of the proclamation that seemed to be objectionable. He said that "the measure was tentative" only, and that until the experiment had been tried no other proclamation would be issued. Upon that I said in substance that the Republican Party might accept the proclamation as an experiment, but that it was contrary to the ideas of the party, and that a continuance of the policy would work a ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... the moment, the subject dropped, but the imp of mischief still flickered defiantly in the golden-brown eyes, and when, after dinner was over, Maria brought in the coffee, Ann threw out a tentative remark which instantly achieved its nefarious purpose of loosening the ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... the simple fact that they are far apart and they cannot write to each other. When, at last, they are brought together, there will be no fight at all, because they will overwhelm their enemies. That time, madame, has not come yet. We are only at the stage of tentative underground rumblings. But a little eruption is enough to wipe out one man if he be standing ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... hearing the girl's words. At her announcement of going to the island he began to make tentative plans to accompany her. There might be a lot he could do. And she sure needed help. He wondered if he could offer his assistance without again ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... I read, is the judgment of Plato; though, ever disposed to explore the remote possibilities of education, he discusses the subject in a tentative spirit, as if vaguely hoping that more might, through some discovery in method, be accomplished by means of doctrine. But in the "Republic" his permanent persuasion is shown. He there bases his whole scheme ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... constitution and all that, don't you think?" Pink asked. "We can draw up a tentative one, and then fix it up at the first meeting. This is going to be a big thing. It'll go ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... opposite direction, which further puzzled Shannon. But he was a stock horse first and a hurdle racer as an afterthought; and a good stock horse knows his rider's mind, if that rider is a good man. He made one tentative movement towards his paddock mates, now moving away towards the gate; then, feeling the touch of Wally's hand on the bit, and the light pressure of his knee, he decided that some new game was on foot, and cantered ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... the heart would come with the lifting leaves, no pang of mysterious pain with bird-song, star-set, dewfall. Even her love of Foxy would become a groping thing, and not any longer would she know, when her blind bird made its tentative music, all it meant and all it dreamed. This very night she had forgotten to lean out and listen as of old to the soft voices of the trees. She had said her prayer, and then she had been so tired, and pains ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... year to be distracted with the tentative scepticism of essayists and reviewers. In a healthy condition of public opinion such a book as Bishop Colenso's would have passed unnoticed, or rather would never have been written, for the difficulties with which it deals would have been long ago met and disposed of. When questions rose ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... opinion. Many will doubtless find stories missing that seem necessary even to so small a list, while others will find tales included that may seem questionable. Such a selection can be, and is intended to be, only tentative, a starting point from which there are many ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... discovered and colonized by the Portuguese in the 15th century; Cape Verde subsequently became a trading center for African slaves and later an important coaling and resupply stop for whaling and transatlantic shipping. Following independence in 1975, and a tentative interest in unification with Guinea-Bissau, a one-party system was established and maintained until multi-party elections were held in 1990. Cape Verde continues to exhibit one of Africa's most stable democratic governments. Repeated ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... and of voices becomes distinct and draws nearer. From the mass of the four men who tightly hung up the burrow, tentative hands are put out at a venture. All at once Pepin murmurs in a ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... Now for some tentative explanation of these rather unusual proceedings. It is generally known that a hypnotized person will imagine things and do things willed by the hypnotizer, that the sensibility of persons to hypnotism varies, and that persons frequently hypnotized ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... their assistance. Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom and effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tentative, continually "in further search and progress;" while written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber[3] of the truth. ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... each other she promised to continue to be his guide; and during the fortnight which followed they roamed the hills in happy comradeship. In most of the village friendships between youths and maidens lack of conversation was made up for by tentative fondling; but Harney, except when he had tried to comfort her in her trouble on their way back from the Hyatts', had never put his arm about her, or sought to betray her into any sudden caress. It seemed to be enough for him to breathe her nearness like a flower's; and ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... wrangle humorously over their agricultural deficiencies, and drifted off into open-eyed dreaming. Into his picture he began to fit these two speculatively, with a purely tentative adjustment of their personalities to his requirements. They were arguing about which of the two was the worst farmer; but Luck, riding alongside them, was seeing them slouched in their saddles and riding, bone-tired, with a shuffling trail-herd hurrying ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... transact with Lord Grenville, (p. 022) and in endeavoring to conduct it found himself rather awkwardly placed. He was not minister to the Court of St. James, having been only vaguely authorized to discuss certain arrangements in a tentative way, without the power to enter into any definitive agreement. But the English Cabinet strongly disliking Mr. Deas, who in the absence of Mr. Pinckney represented for the time the United States, and much preferring to negotiate with Mr. Adams, ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... meant himself, but she was thrown out by the cognomen's correspondence with that of the laird, which suggested that the boy had been merely attempting the name of the great man of the district. With this in her mind, and doubtfully feeling her way, she essayed the tentative of setting him right in the Christian name, and said: "Thomas—Thomas Galbraith." Gibbie shook his head as before, and again resumed his seat. Presently he brought her the slate, with all the rest rubbed out, and these words standing alone—sir giby galbreath. Janet read them ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... know as I ever saw a fellow quite so much concerned and anxious," Henley's strangely tentative voice produced. "I saw him over there the other day, and he had lots to say. He means to—to get you if he possibly can. He's planning a fine house, and said he was going to tell you about it when he come over. He says women know better about such things than men, and is going to offer ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... of weed attacked a city you utter an absurdity. I think everyone was aware of the fantastic discrepancy between statement of the event and the event itself. So innocent and ridiculous the grass looked as it made its first tentative thrust at the urban nerves; the green blades sloped forward like some prettily arranged but unimaginative corsage upon the concrete bosom of the street. You could not believe those fragile seeming strands would resist the impress of a careless boot, much less the entire arsenal of military ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... weapons and of all the appliances of war, as well as for adding to the comfort and securing the health of the soldier. Every imaginable instrument of usefulness in any of the operations of the camp, or the march, or the field of battle, has been the subject of tentative ingenuity, such as none but Yankees could display. The musket, the carbine, the pistol, have been constructed upon numberless plans, apparently with every possible modification. The cartridge has been covered with ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Duplication of the Hexahedron, demonstrated geometrically to all the Universities and all the Academies of Europe.[2] There are innumerable verses, French and Italian, in all stages, occasionally attaining the finality of these lines, which appear in half a dozen tentative forms: ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... men in khaki were no exception to the rule; they were cowed, with all their munitions of war. They had decided on no definite course of action; or said they had not—to save their face. Their plans were essentially tentative; and, besides, the railway train—an important factor—was not just yet able to carry far ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... in the morning, there was a tentative tap on my door. While I was growling about why they should bother tapping, the door opened and a woman came in with my breakfast tray. She was not my nurse; she was ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... a relentless war, which never ceased until Mr. Wilson disbanded his company. Carl Rankin, who was a Columbus boy and an old friend of Alfred's called on Alfred. He advised that he was dissatisfied with his surroundings and a tentative partnership agreement was entered into for the next season. However, the arrangements went no further as Mr. Rankin's health failed him rapidly and it was not long until minstrelsy lost one of the most versatile performers ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... and as his witnesses probably furnished but few hints for a continuous narrative, this perspective, especially in things chronological, may sometimes be faulty. Yet when one remembers that by 70-80 A.D. it must have been a matter of small interest by what tentative stages the Messianic salvation first extended to the Gentiles, it is surely surprising that Acts enters into such detail on the subject, and is not content with a summary account of the matter such as the mere logic of the subject would naturally suggest. In any case, the very difference ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... a gong from the car barn beyond came like a reminder of his purpose, a summons to make a tentative effort, at least, to achieve it. So he turned resolutely away, leaving academic dreams ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... may think of the means by which the New Model sought its aims, we must in justice remember that, so far as those aims went, the New Model was in the right. For the last two hundred years England has been doing little more than carrying out in a slow and tentative way the scheme of political and religious reform which the army propounded at the close of the ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... moment are great theories elaborated: the facts which demand them become first prominent; then, to the period of observation succeeds a period of pondering and of tentative explanation. By such efforts the human mind is gradually prepared for the final theoretic illumination. The colours of thin plates, for example, occupied the attention of Robert Boyle. In his 'Experimental History of Colours' he contends against the schools which affirmed that colour was 'a ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... Presently Jack took a tentative step forward, and Patsie followed in his wake. Half a yard from Pixie's chair they stopped short with eager, craning faces, with bodies braced in readiness for a ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... intensified by that strong "partisan" feeling of one man for another—fruit of the ineradicable sex antagonism which so often colours the judgments men pass on women and women on men. Then had come love, against which he had striven in vain, and gradually, out of love, had grown a new tentative belief which the pitiful culmination of the Raynham episode had ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... lips. Twice, during the remainder of the day, she faced him and opened her mouth as if to speak, and then turned away again. Calhoun shrugged. He had fairly definite ideas about her, by now. He carefully kept them tentative, but no girl born and raised on Weald would willingly go to Orede, with all of Weald believing that a shipload of miners preferred death to remaining there. It tied in, like everything else that was unpleasant, to blueskins. Nobody from Weald would dream of landing ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... must be appended; and our old friend Byles the butcher was plainly audible tapping at the back door. So it had to go into the world, one part (as it does seem to me) alive, one part merely galvanised: no work, only an essay. For a man of tentative method, and weak health, and a scarcity of private means, and not too much of that frugality which is the artist's proper virtue, the days of sinecures and patrons look very golden: the days of professional literature very ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... long before he had done talking; tentative cries of "Agnes!" passed unheeded, and she was only recalled to the present by the appearance of Colonel Waring in overcoat and soft hat half-way through the ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... may be considered as having "moderate muscular exercise," and it may easily be understood that the 14-year-old boy eats as much as his father who is engaged in business or professional occupation, both requiring, according to the tentative standard, 0.8 of the food needed by a man with moderate muscular work. (3) It is not assumed that any housewife will find it convenient to follow exactly the proportions suggested in the menus. The purpose is to show her about what amounts and proportions of food materials ...
— Public School Domestic Science • Mrs. J. Hoodless
... matter of fact Amber was hoping the Rolands, with Sophia Farrell, might linger somewhere en route, remembering that the girl had discussed a tentative project to stop ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... from the cause, a conscript in which, she had so ill-understood. The falling back into luxury, the acceptance of those things which in her tentative, unrevolutionary way she had always imagined to come into her right of possession, had been very easy—very gentle—the drifting of a feather on an idle summer wind. She had let herself be borne on it, using it, not as an advantage, ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... must add, that his account of the manner in which a conception is selected, suitable to express the facts, appears to me perfectly just. The experience of all thinkers will, I believe, testify that the process is tentative; that it consists of a succession of guesses; many being rejected, until one at last occurs fit to be chosen. We know from Kepler himself that before hitting upon the "conception" of an ellipse, he tried nineteen other imaginary paths, which, finding them inconsistent ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... applied to mobs, was then in every body's mouth; and, accordingly, after my brother had recovered from his first astonishment at this insurrection, he made us several sweeping bows that looked very much like tentative rehearsals of a sweeping fusillade, and then addressed us in a very brief speech, of which we could distinguish the words pearls and swinish multitude, but uttered in a very low key, perhaps out of regard to the two young strangers. We all laughed in chorus ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... satisfaction ran through the expectant people. They pressed near to receive her, looking with zest at the stooping blond head with its flower buds, and at the delicate, white, tentative foot that was reaching down to the step of the carriage. There was a sudden foaming rush, and the bride like a sudden surf-rush, floating all white beside her father in the morning shadow of trees, her veil ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... and studying her from different points. She wished to stand before her easel, in her Synthesis working-dress, with her palette on her thumb, and a brush in her other hand. He said finally, "Why not?" and Cornelia made a tentative sketch ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... the base; oblique lines (as in certain imitation Gothic) which lose their balance for lack of a countervailing thrust against them, all these, and alas many hundreds of other possible combinations, are detestable to our feelings. And similarly we are fussed and bored by the tentative lines, the uncoordinated directions and impacts, of inferior, even if technically expert and realistically learned draughtsmen, of artists whose work may charm at first glance by some vivid likeness or poetic suggestion, ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... (xl.-xlviii.). Now if P had been in existence, such a programme would have been unnecessary, and, in any case, Ezekiel would hardly have ventured to contradict a code which enjoyed so venerable a sanction and bore the honoured name of Moses. It is easier to suppose that Ezekiel's programme is a tentative sketch, which was modified and improved upon by the authors of P. Again there was every inducement during and immediately after the exile to formulate definitely the ritual practice of pre-exilic times, and to modify it in ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... perfectly sure that it is wiser to use plain short words than obscure long ones; but not in the least sure that I am doing the best that can be done for my pupils, in classing swallows with owls, or milkworts with violets. The classification is always given as tentative; and, at its utmost, elementary: but the nomenclature, as in all ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... the Boer leaders had made a succession of tentative suggestions, each of which had been put aside by the British Government. Their first had been that they should merely concede those points which had been at issue at the beginning of the war. This was set aside. The second ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for reprisals against the franctireurs of the country side. Its duty was to go forward and make connection with the Scotch and Gurkha troops with which it was brigaded. The Afghans knew this, and knew too, after their first tentative shots, that they were dealing with a raw regiment. Thereafter they devoted themselves to the task of keeping the Fore and Aft on the strain. Not for anything would they have taken equal liberties with a seasoned corps—with ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... quality he found most maddeningly irritating in Rosalie was her obviously absolute unconsciousness of the fact that it was entirely natural and proper that her resources should be in her husband's hands. He had, indeed, even in these early days, made a tentative effort or so in the form of a suggestive speech; he had given her openings to give him an opening to put things on a practical basis, but she had never had the intelligence to see what he was aiming at, and he had found himself almost floundering ungracefully in his ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Jefferson began a tentative showing of his colours while the bill was fighting its stormy way through Congress, and Hamilton was a brief while perceiving his drift and appreciating his implacable enmity. The first time that Jefferson encountered the lightning in Hamilton's ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... very successful play which MM. Meilhac and Halevy wrote together was a book for M. Offenbach; and it was possibly the good fortune of this operetta which finally affirmed the partnership. Before the triumph of the Belle Helene in 1864 the collaboration had been tentative, as it were: after that it was as though the articles had been definitely ratified—not that either of the parties has not now and then indulged in outside speculations, trying a play alone or with an outsider, but this was without ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... Jeremy. "All right; same here. I stake a gold-mine and Rammy raises me. Fetch your crown and sceptre and I'll play king to Jim's ace in a royal straight flush. Mabel's queen. Hadad's a knave. He looks it! Keep smiling, Hadad, old top, and I'll let you forgive me. Rammy's the ten-spot—tentative—tenacious—ten aces up his sleeve—and packs a ten-ton wallop when you get him going. What's Narayan ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... ancestry is the true or speaking man (Homo), who was gradually evolved from the preceding stage by the advance of animal language into articulate human speech. As to the time and place of this real "creation of man" we can only express tentative opinions. It was probably during the Diluvial period in the hotter zone of the Old World, either on the mainland in tropical Africa or Asia or on an earlier continent (Lemuria—now sunk below the waves of the Indian Ocean), which stretched from East ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... mining career was not sudden and spectacular; it was a lingering close, a reluctant and gradual surrender. The "Josh" letters to the Enterprise had awakened at least a measure of interest, and Orion had not failed to identify their author when any promising occasion offered; as a result certain tentative overtures had been made for similar material. Orion eagerly communicated such chances, for the money situation was becoming a desperate one. A letter from the Aurora miner written near the end of July presents the situation very fully. An extract or ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... acknowledged on all sides, even by the press; and I appear to have made some impression in the highest administrative circles, for I shortly afterwards heard from my friend Rudolf Liechtenstein, that tentative advances had been made to him with a view to his accepting the position of manager, associated with which there was certainly an idea of asking me to become conductor of the Grand Opera. Among the reasons which caused this proposal ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... his character of a 'know nothing;' but the boys have already learned the lesson which he is unable to teach them, and they are free from the conceit of knowledge. (Compare Chrm.) The dialogue is what would be called in the language of Thrasyllus tentative or inquisitive. The subject is continued in the Phaedrus and Symposium, and treated, with a manifest reference to the Lysis, in the eighth and ninth books of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. As in other writings of Plato (for example, the Republic), there is a progress from unconscious ...
— Lysis • Plato
... and possibly other States. The effect of this discussion is apparent in all of the ten constitutions afterward drawn, with the exception of Pennsylvania's, which was a failure; but none of them passed beyond the tentative or embryonic stage. It therefore remained for Massachusetts to present the model, which in its main features has not yet ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... which English weather would not have been capable. There was no abrupt drop of the mercury, as if a trap were sprung under it, after the fashion with us. It softly gave way in a gradual, delicious coolness, which again mellowed at the edges, as it were, and dissolved in a gentle, tentative rain. But how far the rain might finally go, we did not stay to see: we had fled from the "anguish of the solstice," as we had felt it in London, and by the time the first shower insinuated itself we were in the heart of the ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... prophecies, and yet managed to live on it. He responded readily, I imagine, to any request for "something prophetic, you know," from acquaintances or even strangers. Above all, he kept to one style, and did not worry the public, when once it had got used to him, by tentative gropings after a new method. And Isaiah, we may be sure, ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... the sick man's strength might not fail him utterly. He had remembered—had Ches Mason; and, being one of those tenacious souls who cling to friendship and to a resilient faith in the good that is in the worst of us, he had thrown out a tentative life-line, as it were, and hoped that Ford might clutch it before he became quite submerged in the sodden morass ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... the crater and will find appropriate place in any comprehensive discussion of its origin; but the fact which is peculiarly worthy of note at the present time is their ability to unsettle a conclusion that was beginning to feel itself secure. This illustrates the tentative nature not only of the hypotheses of science, but of what science ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... power of sound, with the first rudiments of modulation! That all languages designate the melody of birds as singing (though according to Blumenbach man only sings, while birds do but whistle), demonstrates that it has been felt as, what indeed it is, a tentative and prophetic prelude of something yet to come. With this conjoin the power and the tendency to acquire articulation, and to imitate speech; conjoin the building instinct and the migratory, the monogamy of several species, and the ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... for the time it was written, an original, comprehensive, and bold attempt at explaining in a tentative way, or at least suggesting, the probable origin of man from some arboreal creature allied to the apes. It is as regards the actual evolutional steps supposed to have been taken by the simian ancestors of man, a more detailed and comprehensive hypothesis than that offered by Darwin ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... like those of Egyptology and Assyriology, a good many theories and conclusions must be tentative and provisional only. Discovery crowds so quickly on discovery, that the truth of to-day is often apt to be modified or amplified by the truth of to-morrow. A single fresh fact may throw a wholly new and unexpected light upon the results we have already gained, and cause ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Since 1975 civil war has seriously damaged Lebanon's economic infrastructure, disrupted economic activity, and all but ended Lebanon's position as a Middle Eastern entrepot and banking hub. Following October 1990, however, a tentative peace has enabled the central government to begin restoring control in Beirut, collect taxes, and regain access to key port and government facilities. The battered economy has also been propped ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... assuredly not "cold in blood"—a physical condition as difficult to conceive of Shakespeare at any age as of Cleopatra. It is in the scenes of vehement passion, of ardour and of agony, that we feel the comparative weakness of a yet ungrown hand, the tentative uncertain grasp of a stripling giant. The two utterly beautiful scenes are not of this kind; they deal with simple joy and with simple sorrow, with the gladness of meeting and the sadness of parting love; but between and behind them come scenes ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of THE LEVELLERS. All the while, however, there was also a quiet formation, in some of the superior and more educated minds of the Army, of sentiments essentially Republican, but more reserved and tentative in the style of their Republicanism. Among these minds too it had become a question whether a mere settlement with the King even on the basis of the Nineteen Propositions would suffice, and whether the hour had not come for organic ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... roof, screens of wonderfully carved wood brought from Upper Egypt, Persian hangings and embroideries, divans and prayer rugs, on which nobody ever prayed. Lord Reggie and Mr. Amarinth both played the piano in an easy, tentative sort of way, making excess of expression do duty for deficiencies of execution, and covering occasional mistakes with the soft rather than with the loud pedal. Lord Reggie played a hymn of his own, which he frankly acknowledged was very beautiful. He described it as a hymn without ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... that comparatively few (of those who die) make good communicators, I may be permitted to suggest, perhaps, a tentative explanation of the rarity of good communicators (and communications), based upon this principle. Certain it is that special adaptability and idiosyncrasy are necessary to the one on this side—this constituting, in fact, a "medium," as we understand it. It seems ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... deepened. He avoided Saunders's tentative gaze. "I reckon I won't, to-day, anyway," he faltered. "I never was much of a hand to hang about big ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... one end than the other, endeavouring to satisfy some ideas about epicyclic motion, but could not find a satisfactory curve. He then had the fortunate idea of trying an ellipse with the same axis as his tentative oval. Mars now appeared too slow at the apses instead of too quick, so obviously some intermediate ellipse must be sought between the trial ellipse and the circle on the same axis. At this point the "long arm ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... A few tentative ventures resulted in profits so large that the company grew mightily enthusiastic over the novel manner of working. In each instance, Harris was consulted, and made his confidential statement as to the legality of the thing proposed. Mary gratified her eager mind by careful studies ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... nearest them was running a slow bass scale on a sort of two-stringed horse-fiddle of a strange shape. Average Jones' still untouched glass, almost full of the precious port, trembled and sang a little tentative response. Up-up-up mounted the thrilling notes, ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... apart and they cannot write to each other. When, at last, they are brought together, there will be no fight at all, because they will overwhelm their enemies. That time, madame, has not come yet. We are only at the stage of tentative underground rumblings. But a little eruption is enough to wipe out one man if he be standing on ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... done much for man, we cannot be persuaded that it has ever been the chief source of his worth or happiness. . . . We have machines for education. Instruction, that mysterious communing of Wisdom and Ignorance, is no longer an indefinable, tentative process, requiring a study of individual aptitude, and a perpetual variation of means and methods to attain the same end; but a secure, universal, straightforward business to be conducted in the gross, by proper mechanism, with such intellect ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Damozels’ and ‘Roman Widows’ and the like, talked now of the wanderings of Ulysses, of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ of ‘Sir Patrick Spens,’ and even of ‘Arthur Gordon Pym’ and ‘Allan Gordon.’ And on hearing a friend recite some tentative verses on a great naval battle, he looked about for sea subjects too; and it was now, and not later, as is generally supposed, that he really thought of the subject of ‘The White Ship,’ a subject apparently so alien from his genius. Every evening he used to take walks on ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Previously printed (under the tentative title Death, and with some small textual variations) in The Monthly Magazine, October, 1823, ...
— A Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... compressed into a few days in the former, in the latter into forty days of time. The tragedy of Arthur's reign could not so be condensed; and Tennyson chose the only feasible plan. He has left a work, not absolutely perfect, indeed, but such as he conceived, after many tentative essays, and such as he desired to achieve. His fame may not rest chiefly on the Idylls, but they form one of the fairest jewels in the crown that shines with unnumbered gems, each ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... his apprehensions. In an hour they were justified. The raw, damp wind brought with it something that touched his face like the brush of a feather. It was the year's first flake of snow, premature and tentative, but it was followed soon by others, until they became a thin white veil, driven by the wind. The brown leaves rustled and fell before them, and the appearance of the forest, that had been glowing in color an hour or two before, suddenly became wintry and chill. The advance of twilight made the ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... THE WORK.—Under Traditional Management the tentative calendar might cause speed, but could not direct speed. Under Transitory Management elimination of waste by prescribed methods and routing increases output. This increase becomes greater under Scientific ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... literature which, though delightfully redolent of the land whence it sprang, nevertheless possesses the universal note which makes it a truly human product. Many years ago one of the most gifted of Irish-Australian singers, "Eva"' of the Nation, voiced a tentative plaint: ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... of the Romanesque manner, advanced with certitude on any line of progress in this art. Their work, beautiful as it often is, ingenious as it almost always is, marked invariably by the individuality of the district and the builder, seems to be tentative, experimental. The principles of the Pointed Gothic style were never seized or understood by Italian architects. Even such cathedrals as those of Orvieto and Siena are splendid monuments of incapacity, when compared with the Romanesque churches of Pisa, S. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... folly in a man otherwise of good sense and judgment, not depraved by any brain-fever or enthusiastic infatuation, is to be found in the vicious process of reasoning applied to such estimates; the doctor, having taken up one novel idea of the national character, proceeded afterwards by no tentative inquiries, or comparison with actual facts and phenomena of daily experience, but resolutely developed out of his one idea all that it appeared analytically to involve; and postulated audaciously as a solemn fact whatsoever could be exhibited in any possible ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... finality or absoluteness would be an act of extreme presumption. The opinions which one holds depend so obviously on a number of contingent and accidental circumstances, and must so inevitably be tinged by one's personal experiences, that their validity can at best have but an approximate and tentative character. In making this comparison, too, it is only right to disregard the phenomena of mining camps and other phases of life on the fringes of American civilisation, which can be fairly compared only with pioneer life on the extreme frontiers of the British Empire. From a similar ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... renovating those noisome places of the city where human nature, undiluted by space, stews corrosion and corruption for its souls and bodies. Every day he would give her a glimpse of one or another of a multitude of half formed ideas, perhaps but just conceived, perhaps taking tentative form, which he was eager to work out and put to practical test. For the most part they seemed to her to be an unusual combination of business shrewdness, just feeling, and altruistic intent. Apparently his aim in them was to attain the end of social betterment ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... words! What signifies the conversation, when you listen for the heart to answer? What sweetness in the glance of a woman who begins to attract you! At first it seems as though everything that passes between you is timid and tentative, but soon there is born a strange joy, an echo answers you; you know a dual life. What a touch! What a strange attraction! And when love is sure of itself and knows response in the object beloved, what ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... in this tentative document, as we may call it, was subsequently incorporated in the Office of the Holy Communion as we are ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... rewrite the two Odes already translated, merely for the sake of uniformity, as the principle of correspondence to the Latin, the alternation of longer and shorter lines, is really the same in all three cases. Nay, so tentative has been my treatment of the whole matter, that I have even translated one Ode, the third of Book I, into successive rather than into alternate rhymes, so that readers may judge of the comparative effect of the two varieties. After this confession of irregularity, I need scarcely mention ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... resumed, gathering her draperies about her with a tentative hint of leave-taking: "I may go home and tell him that you will not ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... my tentative look of inquiry, "that Ellenora is going down-hill with her artistic theories of literature, and I mean that she has made our house a devilish unpleasant place to ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... began once more. The first movement expressed a sombre and virile struggle, the Romance a memory full of passionate but sad desire, followed by a slow uplifting, faltering and tentative, towards the distant dawn. Out of this a clear and melodious phrase developed itself with splendid modulations. The sentiment was very different from that which animated Bach's Adagio; it was more human, more earthly, more elegiacal. A breath of Beethoven ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... "Ghosts and their Meaning," deals with apparitions of the living, of the dying, and of the dead—according to the tentative arrangement of these cases made by the English S. P. R. Most of these are quoted from the Society's Proceedings, and the usual theories are offered to account for them; in the case of apparitions of the dead, e. g., "ghosts," the theory of deferred telepathic suggestion being held. This brings ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... fool, methinks!" quoth the archer. "But for our tall brother now, he is changed these latter days: he groweth harsh, methinks, and something ungentle at times." And Giles thoughtfully touched his arm with tentative fingers. ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... active, they are by no means unprecedented. In cases where the cause of lameness is not definitely located, and when by the process of exclusion one is enabled to decide that the seat of trouble is in the hip, a tentative diagnosis of hip ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... persistent emergence of a human type so fully aware of this Reality as to subdue to its interests all the activities of life; ever seeking to incarnate its abiding values in the world of time. And further, psychology suggested to us, even in its tentative new findings, its exploration of our strange mental deeps, reason for holding such surrender to the purposes of the Spirit to represent the condition of man's fullest psychic health, and access to his real sources of power. We found in the universal existence of religious institutions further evidence ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... Interviewer. "I wonder if he would examine some old coins of mine?" said he, in a modestly tentative manner. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... or even their form of government, which may be better adapted to their needs than a broader democracy. But of the German modern war-philosophy the world outside can hold but one opinion. It might have been supported as a purely tentative or speculative philosophy, but it could have been promoted in practice only by a crazy ruler. I was not therefore surprised to find circulated in Paris an article by an American physician which I had permitted to be published in America at the outbreak ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... life."[32] If this be really the case we can understand the connection of the symbol first with Orpheus, later with Christ, as Eisler remarks: "Orpheus is connected with nearly all the mystery, and a great many of the ordinary chthonic, cults in Greece and Italy. Christianity took its first tentative steps into the reluctant world of Graeco-Roman Paganism under the benevolent ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... fellow, opening a drowsy eye, must needs give vent to a croak, very hoarse and feeble; then, (apparently having yawned prodigiously and stretched himself, wing, and leg), he tried a couple of notes,—in a hesitating, tentative sort of fashion, shook himself,—repeated the two notes,—tried three, found them mellower, and more what the waiting world very justly expected of him; grew more confident; tried four; tried five,—grew perfectly assured, and so burst ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... Whewell, I must add, that his account of the manner in which a conception is selected, suitable to express the facts, appears to me perfectly just. The experience of all thinkers will, I believe, testify that the process is tentative; that it consists of a succession of guesses; many being rejected, until one at last occurs fit to be chosen. We know from Kepler himself that before hitting upon the "conception" of an ellipse, he ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... these laws of inanition, the craving of the human heart for some kind of excitement could be supplied from one source only. It might have been thought by any other than a sternly tentative philosopher, that the denial of their natural food to human feelings would have provoked a reactionary desire for it; and that the dreariness of the street would have been gilded by dreams of pastoral felicity. Experience has shown the fact to be otherwise; the thoroughly trained ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... good lady was sitting at one of her front windows, sewing. As she looked into the street, her face was seen to have a sad and thoughtful expression. She came to the door in response to a sharp ring by Wesley Tiffles, who was tentative of bellpulls. Mrs. Crull kept two servants, but she could never get over the impulse to answer the door, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... school as yet; its methods are tentative, and its few masters have been pretty much self-taught. But I think that a method and a school will evolve themselves by degrees—are perhaps evolving ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... Her delicate head Would quicken and quicken Each tentative tread If drops chanced to pelt her That summertime spills In dust-paven rills When thunder-clouds thicken And birds close ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... essay &c (attempt) 675; analysis &c (investigation) 461; screen; trial, tentative method, tatonnement. verification, probation, experimentum crucis [Lat.], proof, (demonstration) 478; criterion, diagnostic, test, probe, crucial test, acid test, litmus test. crucible, reagent, check, touchstone, pix^; assay, ordeal; ring; litmus ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... incarceration. He also told a different story from one he had told before to a certain official who now was present. He seemed rather mixed on a number of points, and this is all the more significant because he had been heartily afraid of being adjudged insane. Our diagnosis at this time was purely tentative as far as exact diagnosis was concerned. We stated that in our opinion he was an aberrational type and the practical point was that he should neither be allowed to go out in the community, nor be sent to a penitentiary, but rather to ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... Byzantine times, and the marble coverings then placed upon the walls have effectually covered up any traces which might have given a clue to the original form of the building. In consequence any attempt at restoration must be of a very tentative character. ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... The bathers occasionally look a great deal better out of their integuments than in them. Not from this class, however, do your all-the-year-round bathers come. The Arab is an exotic—a child of the Sun, loving not to disport himself in water the temperature of which shocks his tentative knuckles, as he dips them in the unaccustomed element. His wardrobe, again, is too much after the fashion of that pertaining to Canning's needy knife-grinder to make an al fresco toilette other than embarrassing. From the all-the-year-round ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... wall; girls shy and not shy filled the window-bench; four men, including Charley Jake, the hedge-carpenter, Elijah New, the parish clerk, and John Pitcher, a neighbouring dairyman, the shepherd's father-in-law, lolled in the settle; a young man and maid, who were blushing over tentative pourparlers on a life-companionship, sat beneath the corner cupboard; and an elderly engaged man of fifty or upward moved restlessly about from spots where his betrothed was not to the spot where she was. Enjoyment was ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... deprive the colonies of their western lands. The very language of the document contradicts this. For example, the expression "for the present, and until our further pleasure be known" clearly indicates the tentative nature of the proclamation, which was "to prevent [the repetition of] such irregularities for the future" with the Indians, irregularities which had prompted Pontiac's Rebellion.[5] The orderly advancement of this colonial frontier was ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... for instance, the insatiable curiosity with which the chestnut studied his wilderness and its inhabitants. He had seen the trail looping around the spot where the rattler's length had been coiled in the sand, or where a tentative hoof had opened the squirrel's hole. On a night of brilliant moonshine, he had watched through his glass while Alcatraz galloped madly, tossing head and tail, and neighing ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... the Ledge will drop in occasionally; not too much of THEM, you know; and of course, absolute immobility of the injured parts." The lady nodded; the patient lifted his blue eyes for an instant to hers with a look of tentative appeal, but it slipped off Miss Trotter's dark pupils—which were as abstractedly critical as the doctor's—without being absorbed by them. When the door closed behind her, the doctor exclaimed: "By Jove! you're in luck, ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... "the swinish multitude," applied to mobs, was then in every body's mouth; and, accordingly, after my brother had recovered from his first astonishment at this audacious mutiny, he made us several sweeping bows that looked very much like tentative rehearsals of a sweeping fusillade, and then addressed us in a very brief speech, of which we could distinguish the words pearls and swinish multitude, but uttered in a very low key, perhaps out of some lurking consideration for the two young strangers. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... recommend me to the Times Square subway station. You get into any train with that delicious sensation of breathless uncertainty as to where exactly you are going to be conveyed. To approach an official is sheer folly, as any tentative question is quickly calculated to work him up into a frenzy of rage and violence, while to ask your fellow passengers is equally useless as they are generally as dazed as you are. The great thing is to keep calm and at ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... weight of facts and documents. Mr. Ricardo had deduced a priori from the understanding itself laws which first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had constructed what had been but a collection of tentative discussions into a science of regular proportions, now first standing on ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... the phrase in answer to the chairman's tentative suggestion that the tracing of the line could, perhaps, be altered in deference to the prejudices of the Sulaco landowners. The chief engineer believed that the obstinacy of men was the lesser obstacle. Moreover, to ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... right, Mr. Pearson—Colonel Pearson, I mean. Have your space-buggy sent around to the shipyard. My boys'll fix it up." He made a note on another piece of paper. "If we live through this, I'm going to have a couple of supra-atmosphere ships in service on this planet.... Now, general, I have a tentative setup. We're going to need the Elmoran for patrol work south and east of Konkrook, and the Gaucho and Bushranger to the north and northeast, based on Kankad's. We'll keep the Aldebaran at Kankad's, and use her for emergencies. And we'll have patrols of light contragravity ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... not nourished, drank long, but was never drunken, revelled without mirth, hunted, fought, but got no joy. He utterly refused to see the Queen, who was at Cahors in the south. 'She is no wife of mine,' he said; 'let her go home.' Tentative messages were brought by very tentative messengers from his brother John. Good service, such and such, had been done in Languedoc; so and so had been hanged, or gibbeted, so and so rewarded: what had our dear and royal brother to ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... cattle outfit on foot and apply for work, it is—as a certain Ulysses of the outlands once said—not considered good form in the best families in Arizona. Pete was only too keenly conscious of this. There is a prestige recognized by both employer and tentative employee in riding in, swinging to the ground in that deliberate and easy fashion of the Western rider, and sauntering up as though on a friendly visit wherein the weather and grazing furnish themes for introduction, discussion, and the eventual wedge that may open ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... I made a tentative reach for it, and the Robot pushed it toward me. I connected it and made sure I could fire it: its operation was obvious. Then I stuffed the whole thing in my jacket pocket; and always afterward my hand at intervals went to that cool, sweating little cylinder. ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... attitude was tentative. Everything depended on how well Thorpe lived up to his reputation at the outset,—how good a first impression of force and virility he would manage to convey,—for the first impression possessed the power of transmuting the present rather ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... whole adventure, Watson carried away no bitterness. It was a social experience of a new order, and it led to the writing of another book, which he entitled, "POLICE COURT PROCEDURE: A Tentative Analysis." ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... Saunders's fervent protestations, he took a tentative step forward, as though inviting Miss Hartley to join ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... say a clump of weed attacked a city you utter an absurdity. I think everyone was aware of the fantastic discrepancy between statement of the event and the event itself. So innocent and ridiculous the grass looked as it made its first tentative thrust at the urban nerves; the green blades sloped forward like some prettily arranged but unimaginative corsage upon the concrete bosom of the street. You could not believe those fragile seeming strands would resist the impress of a careless boot, much less the entire ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... girl's words. At her announcement of going to the island he began to make tentative plans to accompany her. There might be a lot he could do. And she sure needed help. He wondered if he could offer his assistance without ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... been a happy one I cannot conceive it possible for a European, who knows the meaning of love or home, to contend. The single item of one divorce for every three marriages tells a tale of sorrow and heartache that is sad to contemplate. Nor does this include those separations where tentative marriage takes place with a view to learning whether the parties can endure living together. I have known several such cases. Neither does this take account of the great number of concubines that may be found in the homes of the ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... has for long occupied my attention," he wrote, "and, in a tentative way, a good deal has been done. But we have reached a point where little more progress can be made without a decision on the main issues. The question is, whether British colonisation is to be undertaken on a large and effective scale, under Government ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... organized in Paris, March 15 to 17, 1919, by a thousand officers and men, delegates from all the units of the American Expeditionary Force to an organization caucus meeting, which adopted a tentative constitution and selected ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... did not immediately respond to the lady's advances. They were probably too shy, too tentative, to attract Rochester's attention. It is probable, also, that there were plenty of beautiful women about the Court, more mature, more practised in the arts of coquetry than Frances, and very likely not at all 'blate'—as Carr and his master would put it—in showing themselves ready for conquest ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... ceased to tell his beads. Feeling in his kindly heart the echo of the appalling tragedy which was being enacted before him, he had put out a fatherly, tentative hand towards Marguerite, and given her icy fingers ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... tidings, reassure us. "Strange," said a gifted metaphysician once, "that the barrel organ, man, should terminate every tune with the strain of immortality!" Not strange, but divinely natural. It is the tentative prelude to the thrilling music of our eternal bliss written in the score of destiny. When at night we gaze far out into immensity, along the shining vistas of God's abode, and are almost crushed by the overwhelming ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... gave a slightly better complexion to an attack which the Russian Government was justified in calling "extraordinarily gratuitous." Cavour had one person of great importance on his side, the king. In January 1854 he broached the subject with the tentative inquiry, "Does it not seem to your Majesty that we might find some way of taking part in the war of the Western Powers with Russia?" To which Victor Emmanuel answered simply, "If I cannot go myself I will send my brother." But it is not too much to say that the whole country ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... dancing—except Fred. While the others whirled away he sank into a seat, staring vacantly ahead. He had reached the extreme point of his drunkenness and he was pulling toward sobriety again... He came out of his tentative stupor with the realization that a woman was seating herself ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the tempest passed, Sofia sat up and dabbled her eyes with a web of lace and linen. Then she looked round with a tentative smile that was wholly captivating. She was one of those rare women who can ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... liberty and order, so conceived, imply one another, the difference between the two positions ceases to be one of ends and becomes one of means. But every problem of means is one of extreme complexity which can only be solved, in the most tentative way, by observation and experiment. And opinions based upon such a process, though they may be strongly held, cannot be held with the simplicity and force of a religious or ethical intuition. We might, conceivably, on this basis adopt the position either ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... understand why ideas concerning the supernatural exert such an enormous influence in early society. In a world where everything was yet to be learned, man's first attempts at understanding himself and his fellows were necessarily blundering and tentative. His first attempts at explanation are expressed in terms of his own nature. He sees himself, his own passions, strengths, and weaknesses reflected in the nature around him. This is the outstanding, dominating fact in primitive life. Leave out this consideration and primitive ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... attitude before the door when Jabe, a little later, came back also. The long white slash down his favourite's side caught the woodsman's eye at once. He looked at it critically, touched the flour with tentative finger-tips, then turned on his wife a look of poignant interrogation. But Mrs. Jabe was ready for him. Her nerve had recovered. The fact that her victim showed no fear of her had gradually reassured her. What Jabe didn't know would never hurt ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... piece of the first decade we have an ode akin to this, relating a tentative progress of king Wu, to test the acceptance of his sovereignty. This is of a later date, and should be referred, probably, to the reign of king Khang, when the dynasty was fully acknowledged. Some critics, however, make it, like the three preceding, a portion ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... spring from the relation of one woman who was slowly but surely being forced to lay down what she had prized most in her womanhood and another who, slowly but surely, also became aware that hers was the prize in her turn, and thrust forward a tentative hand to grasp it. If I am at all right in this notion, then it is plain that feelings slight and faint, although not non-existent in ordinary homes, might be intensified in such a family as ours, and that a new and great impulse would have been imparted to them by such an artificial accentuation ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... after year to be distracted with the tentative scepticism of essayists and reviewers. In a healthy condition of public opinion such a book as Bishop Colenso's would have passed unnoticed, or rather would never have been written, for the difficulties with which it deals would have been long ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... then, has Great Britain marched since the Spring of last year—how much nearer is she to the end? One can but answer such questions in the most fragmentary and tentative way, relying for the most part on the opinions and information of those who know, those who are in the van of action, at home and abroad, but also on one's own personal impressions of an incomparable scene. And every day, ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... up a tentative list. He named four: first, Farrell Kennedy, who was in town, and said nobody should go if he didn't; Frank Elpaso, the Texan; the Englishman, Tommie Meggeson; and Wickwire, if he could be located—any one of them, Lefever knew, could give an account ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... been swept across the Aisne and was stretching north-eastward tentacles to clutch as much of the coast as was consonant with an unbroken line, the aerial spying out of the succeeding phases of retirement was of great service. Indeed, tentative though it was, the work of the British, French, and German machines before the advent of trench warfare proved how greatly air reconnaissance would alter the whole perspective ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... given to destroy the monster,—and to make it the very business and object of the war to sweep it out of existence. But that will be the end; and for the way, things will work out their own issues. And in the mean time I do not see that anything could be better than the cautious and tentative manner in which the President ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... here given. (2) Children as a rule may be considered as having "moderate muscular exercise," and it may easily be understood that the 14-year-old boy eats as much as his father who is engaged in business or professional occupation, both requiring, according to the tentative standard, 0.8 of the food needed by a man with moderate muscular work. (3) It is not assumed that any housewife will find it convenient to follow exactly the proportions suggested in the menus. The purpose is to show her about ...
— Public School Domestic Science • Mrs. J. Hoodless
... tentative synopsis, the playwright consulted his watch. Already the incident of the condemnable bandbox had eaten up much invaluable time. He would see himself doomed to unending perdition if he would submit to further ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... inscription might offer in the solution of Egyptian problems. Having an amazing faculty for the acquisition of languages, he, in one short year, had mastered Coptic, after having assured himself that it was the nearest existing approach to the ancient Egyptian language, and had even made a tentative attempt at the translation of the Egyptian scroll. This was the very beginning of our knowledge of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... heart would come with the lifting leaves, no pang of mysterious pain with bird-song, star-set, dewfall. Even her love of Foxy would become a groping thing, and not any longer would she know, when her blind bird made its tentative music, all it meant and all it dreamed. This very night she had forgotten to lean out and listen as of old to the soft voices of the trees. She had said her prayer, and then she had been so tired, and pains had shot through her, ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... in art, and forced to follow in a degree the dictation of necessity in the choice of subject, as his brush was his only resource and his family constantly increasing, his work of this period is always tentative. In painting it is luscious in color and firmly drawn and modelled, but it lacks the perception of truth which, when once released from the bondage of the city, began to manifest itself in his work. The first indication ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... a fairly friendly one—at least not unfriendly. Telzey framed a tentative mental question. "Who ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... from what has been said, that we stand upon the eve of a great movement in history and literature. Up to this time everything had been more or less tentative, experimental, and disconnected, all tending indeed, but with little unity of action, toward an established order. It began to be acknowledged that though the clergy might write in Latin, and Frenchmen in French, the English should "show their fantasyes in such words as we learneden ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... one or two tentative remarks to the nearest miner, and receiving only short, gruff replies, the traveller resigned himself to uncongenial silence, staring moodily out of the window at the ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for the good of the poor; thinking too, not unwisely, that the best heal-all for his sorrow was to be found in change of scene and more arduous work together. Also, he thought that if his vague tentative advertisements in the papers, which he dared not make too evident, had as yet brought nothing, some more satisfactory way of discovering Leam's hiding-place might shape itself when he was alone, freer ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... to decide upon a plan for the release of Weaver. He was confined in an old log cabin and watched continually by some one of the riders; but a tentative plan was accepted, subject to revision if a better chance of escape should occur. The success of this depended upon the possibility of Keller drawing off the guard by a diversion, while Phyllis slipped in and freed ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... so unnecessary, Rynason thought. The ancient Outsiders brain, computing from insufficient evidence probably gathered during a brief touchdown on Earth, had undoubtedly been able to give only a tentative appraisal of the situation. But the proto-Hirlaji language was not constructed to accommodate if's and maybe's, and the judgments of the brain were taken as law by ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... accomplished at first in a humdrum and tentative way. About seventy years ago children's books were very uninteresting. In the little stories manufactured for children, the good boy ended in a Coach-and-four, and the bad boy in a ride to Tyburn. The good boys must have been a set of little snobs and prigs, and I could ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... was only Dudley—who did nothing, and was celebrating himself stupid with drugs, or I was much mistaken—Macartney, and myself to run it; with not enough men even to get out the ore, without working the mill and the amalgam plates. It had been no particular matter while the whole mine was only a tentative business, and I had been having half a fit at Dudley's mad extravagance in putting up a ten-stamp mill when we had nothing particular to crush in it. But now, with ore that ran over a hundred to the ton being fed into the mill, and Macartney and I doing the work of six men instead ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... a notorious liaison with a dancer at the Opera; she has married lovelessly. They have met again, and, in sentimental mood, he has recalled that sojourn, has begun to make a kind of tentative love to her, probably unimpaired in beauty, certainly more intellectually interesting, for the whole monologue proves that she can no longer be patronisingly summed up in "poor pretty thoughtful thing." And she has cried, in the words which ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... give of its essential aim, so far as I have seen the processes (which were tentative and initial), is this. The masses represented by filled bookcases are set one in front of another; and, in order that access may be had as it is required, they are set upon trams inserted in the floor (which must be a strong one), and wheeled ...
— On Books and the Housing of Them • William Ewart Gladstone
... divers promises because nothing is so easy as to promise things. She ended with a gently fervent appeal that—if her prayer were granted—something "might happen" which would result in her becoming a Countess of Lawdor. One could not have put the request with greater tentative delicacy. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... approximately the above program—professional preparation for all teachers in the high school and that along the four lines suggested. But the movement has gone much farther than suggested by my statement. The results are found in something more authoritative and more permanent than tentative agreement among educational leaders, or even among educational institutions. The law-making bodies of the land have taken a part, and by legal enactment have required about what I have suggested. The State of North Dakota, for example, requires professional equipment of every teacher within ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... Pearson—Colonel Pearson, I mean. Have your space-buggy sent around to the shipyard. My boys'll fix it up." He made a note on another piece of paper. "If we live through this, I'm going to have a couple of supra-atmosphere ships in service on this planet.... Now, general; I have a tentative set-up. We're going to need the Elmoran for patrol work south and east of Konkrook, and the Gaucho and Bushranger to the north and north-east, based on Kankad's. We'll keep the Aldebaran at Kankad's, and use her ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... present at once, the simpler appears but 27 seconds per minute as against 34 seconds for the more complex. No attempt was made to arrange the figures on any regularly increasing scale of complexity so as to reach quantitative results. The experiment was tentative merely. ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... cause of it," I answered. "The Archduchess is a woman who perseveres. She declined to consider that my reply to her first tentative offer was in any way final. She passed the matter on to the Baron, and certainly until he lost his temper towards the end of our interview, he was a very efficient ambassador. He proved to us quite clearly that it was our duty to give Isobel ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is said to be vitiated by ambiguity.[1689] By ascertainment (of faults and merits), called Sankhya, is meant the establishment, by elimination, of faults or merits (in premises and conclusions), adopting tentative meanings.[1690] Krama or weighing the relative strength or weakness of the faults or merits (ascertained by the above process), consists in settling the propriety of the priority or subsequence of the words employed in a ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... and tentative trials of this plan have been encouragingly successful. But there are obvious defects in it, which we ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... a tentative list of some Celtic words found in dialects. Their etymologies are discussed in my Etymological Dictionary (1910), as they are also found in literary use; and the words are fully explained in the English Dialect Dictionary, which gives all their senses, and enumerates the ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... consisted of four quarto sheets, containing slightly caricature sketches of oddities of London life, such as cabmen, policemen, street musicians, and the like. He next tried his hand at lithography, and produced some political satires not without ability; but these at best were merely the tentative efforts of an artist who had not yet discovered the bent of his genius, in consequence of being compelled to accommodate himself to the standard of his early patrons—the printsellers. Having drawn his design, Leech has been known in those early times to spend ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... movements and the downfall of the dynasty. On the other hand, the documentary material for this period is extremely extensive, and many years of work are necessary to reach any general conclusions even in one single field. The following remarks should, therefore, be taken as very tentative and preliminary, ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... square of Puerto del Norte, waiting out his first day of pain. A kiskadee bird, the only other creature foolish enough to risk the hot bleakness of the plaza at that hour, flitted into a dust-coated palm, inspected him, put a tentative query or two, decided that he was of no possible interest, and left the Unspeakable Perk ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... philosophers was that they were living in a period of inevitable degeneration and decay—inevitable because it was prescribed by the nature of the universe. We have only an imperfect knowledge of the influential speculations of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Empedocles, but we may take Plato's tentative philosophy of history to illustrate the trend and the prejudices of Greek thought on this subject. The world was created and set going by the Deity, and, as his work, it was perfect; but it was not immortal and had in it the seeds of decay. The period of its duration is 72,000 solar ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... same features are reproduced in the prophetic books. The process is always extremely different from what it would be if the prophet arrived at his insight into spiritual things by the tentative efforts of his own genius. There is something sharp and sudden about it. He can lay his finger, so to speak, on the moment when it came. And it always comes in the form of an overpowering force from without, against which he struggles, but in vain. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... was an evening call on the part of the Semples, Mr. Semple being desirous of talking with Henry Cowperwood concerning a new transportation feature which was then entering the world—namely, street-cars. A tentative line, incorporated by the North Pennsylvania Railway Company, had been put into operation on a mile and a half of tracks extending from Willow Street along Front to Germantown Road, and thence by various ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... 1975 civil war has seriously damaged Lebanon's economic infrastructure, cut national output by half, and all but ended Lebanon's position as a Middle Eastern entrepot and banking hub. Following October 1990, however, a tentative peace has enabled the central government to begin restoring control in Beirut, collect taxes, and regain access to key port and government facilities. The battered economy has also been propped up by a financially sound banking system and resilient small- and ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... like an orange squeezed dry? He surely meant him no harm, however, for flashes of kindliness had lighted the shrivelled face as he talked. His look was bent in piercing comment upon Philip, who, trying hard to solve the mystery, now made a tentative rejoinder to his strange statement. Rising from his chair and bowing, he said, with shrewd foreknowledge of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... ruddy old man with iron-gray hair and a very red and bulby nose, was a garrulous servant, and after a tentative cough made an ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... like a dozen other small towns in the Harpeth Valley; they are all drowsy princesses who have just waked up enough to be wondering what did it. The tentative kiss has not yet disclosed the presence of the Prince of Revolution, and they are likely to doze for another century or two. I think I had better go back into the wide world and let them sleep on. One live member is likely to irritate the repose of ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... M. Offenbach's genius, and the now somewhat faded spectacular muse, flourished at the time of which I write in three of our seven theatres for months,—five, from the highest to the lowest being in turn open to it,—and had begun, in a tentative way, to invade the deserted stage even so long ago as the previous summer; and I have sometimes flattered myself that it was my fortune to witness the first exhibition of its most characteristic feature in a theatre into ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... then turned shortly in at the sidewalk. "It will hurt no one if I do that." Above Flavilla's flushed face, a tentative finger on her wrist, Frazee's expression grew serious. "I'll tell you this," he asserted; "she's sick. You had better call Markley to-day. And until he comes don't give her any solids. You can see she's ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... except that out of the Eater there comes Strength; out of the Unwise there comes not Wisdom! Shams are burnt up; nay, what as yet is the peculiarity of France, the very Cant of them is burnt up. The new Realities are not yet come: ah no, only Phantasms, Paper models, tentative Prefigurements of such! In France there are now Four Million Landed Properties; that black portent of an Agrarian Law is as it were realised! What is still stranger, we understand all Frenchmen have 'the right of duel;' the Hackney-coachman ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... has led painting into an aimless path. It has been wrong to see in Impressionism too exclusive a pretext for technical researches, and a happy reaction has set in, which leads us back to-day, after diverse tentative efforts (amongst others some unfortunate attempts at symbolist painting), to the fine, recent school of the "Intimists" and to the novel conception which a great and glorious painter, Besnard, imposes upon the Salons, where the elect draw ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... came of the first tentative organization in 1875. The first incorporated Church of Christ Scientist was chartered in 1879 with twenty-six charter members and Boston as its seat. Meetings of this church were held, to begin with, in Lynn and Boston, but Lynn was not friendly to the new enterprise ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... slightest words! What signifies the conversation, when you listen for the heart to answer? What sweetness in the glance of a woman who begins to attract you! At first it seems as though everything that passes between you is timid and tentative, but soon there is born a strange joy, an echo answers you; you know a dual life. What a touch! What a strange attraction! And when love is sure of itself and knows response in the object beloved, what ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... often possess too wide a diversity of viewpoints. The reader comes away with no underlying thought and no controlling principles. To overcome this defect, so common in books of this type, a tentative outline was formulated, setting forth a desirable mode of treating, in the confines of one chapter, the teaching of any subject in the college curriculum. This outline was submitted to all contributors for critical analysis and constructive criticism. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... but are no less conscious of his malevolent presence. Peyotists often see visions or dream of Coyote (d'Azevedo and Merriam 1957), and quick asides about Coyote's influence are apt to come up in conversation either as tentative jokes or in seriousness. One tale of a modern occurrence involving Coyote did come my way through the kindness of Warren d'Azevedo. His informant was the brother-in-law of my own informant and, like his kinsman, a semimystic, very conscious of his Indianness ...
— Washo Religion • James F. Downs
... in connection with dry feed, we judge them to be a safe ration in butter-making. Cabbage also is available, and in districts remote from large markets, might be grown for this purpose. Near cities it is probably worth more for human food than for fodder. The whole subject is yet in the tentative state, and all ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... he replied good-heartedly to this tentative question of mine; "glad to hev ye along o' me, seeing as how we both hev ben a-prospectin' ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... factors of sex differentiation, hitherto more or less latent, begin conspicuously to assert themselves. Here, plainly, is the dawn of womanhood, and here, in our consideration of woman the individual, we must make a start. If we recall the tentative Mendelian analysis already referred to, we may suppose that the "factor" for womanhood begins to assert itself, at any rate in effective degree, at this period of puberty, when a girl becomes a woman; and that its most effective reign ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... Comedy arose out of a mere negation, the abolition, viz., of the old political freedom, we may easily conceive that there would be an interval of fluctuating, and tentative efforts to supply its place, before a new comic form could be developed and fully established. Hence there may have been many kinds of the Middle Comedy, many intermediate gradations, between the Old and the New; and this is the opinion of some men of learning. And, indeed, historically ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... decided to induce Colonel Roosevelt to embark upon an entirely new activity, and negotiations were begun (alas, too late! for it was in the autumn of 1918), which, owing to their tentative character, were never made public. Bok told Colonel Roosevelt that he wanted to invest twenty-five thousand dollars a year in American boyhood—the boyhood that he felt twenty years hence would be the manhood of America, and that ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... States delegates to the Conferences of 1907 and 1908 were instructed to bring forward "with the suggested changes, and such further changes as may be made necessary by other agreements reached at the Conference, as a tentative formulation of the rules which should be considered." (My quotation is from the instructions as originally issued in English.) Such changes as have been made in the Code are due to discussions which have taken place between high naval and legal authorities at the Naval War ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... the woman beside him, and the pair of them, wrapped up in cloak and ulster, went out into the night. At the door, Vance turned and threw a quick, investigating glance in his direction. There seemed a hint of questioning in that glance; it might almost have been a tentative invitation. But, also, he wanted to see if their exit had been particularly ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... would. What concerns you concerns me. But I'd no business to assume it's the other way about. That is, when it's Dick. You're bound, you know," he said, in a tentative way he thought he ought to venture and yet not quite sure of ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... turned him, not towards the gate, but in the opposite direction, which further puzzled Shannon. But he was a stock horse first and a hurdle racer as an afterthought; and a good stock horse knows his rider's mind, if that rider is a good man. He made one tentative movement towards his paddock mates, now moving away towards the gate; then, feeling the touch of Wally's hand on the bit, and the light pressure of his knee, he decided that some new game was on foot, ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... to such equations between different times or different places by Sir George Shuckborough's tables, and other similar investigations, it is still a very difficult problem, complex, and, after all, merely tentative in the results, to assign the true value in such cases; not only for the obvious reason, that the powers of money have varied in different directions with regard to different objects, and in different ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... seemed as if the heart in her breast would burst with its anxiety. A woman was at all times a thing of overwhelming interest in the wilderness, and such a woman as this drew every eye in the brigade to feast upon her beauty, each according to the nature of the man, either furtively, with tentative admiration, or ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... Brissac passed violently? And his oaths of vengeance were breaths on a mirror. Ah well, I had ceased to hate him these twenty years. Did he love yonder woman, or was his fancy like mine, ephemeral? And he married Mademoiselle de Montbazon? That is droll, a kind of tentative vengeance." ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... she could not for some time determine on the precise course of procedure that should promise success to her aspirations. Primarily, her desire was to work out some alteration in the status of all concerned by which the domestic ideal might be maintained in all its splendid integrity. But her tentative efforts in this direction, made lightly in order that their purport might not be guessed by the husband, were destined to ignominious failure. Mrs. Delancy, a week after the melancholy anniversary occasion, made mention of the fact that she had cautiously spoken to Charles in ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... in the series. On the hypothesis of a plan which prearranged the organic world, nothing could be more unworthy of a supreme intelligence than this inability to construct an organism at once, without making several previous tentative efforts, undoing to-day what was so carefully done yesterday, and repeating for centuries the same tentatives in the same succession. Do not let us blink this consideration. There is a traditional phrase much in vogue among the anthropomorphists, which arose naturally enough from a ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... unfortunately not been sufficient to enable me to engage on any very careful tests as to the sensitiveness of Lola's skin. Yet I have made certain preliminary notes as to what I hope to do in this connexion, and have also begun with a few tentative attempts. I first tried her sensibility to various degrees of warmth by teaching her the use of the thermometer. I made a drawing of a thermometer—according to its actual size—and added principal numbers and figures ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... and this powerful logic, if even too strong for some of the readers of this book, were not so for the brave hearts of the leaders of Brook Farm, and for Mr. Ripley in particular. The tentative feeling, the search for science to back up the social impulses, seemed at last to have found something solid in a society conceived by the Creator; the man created by him, fitted to it by him; the society fitted to the man; the one the counterpart of the other. Albert Brisbane, Parke ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... Dick received his managers and foremen. But not for a quarter of an hour after that did he get rid of his show manager, Mr. Pitts, with the tentative make-up of the catalogue for the first annual stock-sale on the ranch. By that time Mr. Bonbright was on hand with his sheaf of telegrams, and the lunch-hour was at hand ere they ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... chickens she has hatched. The cowbird hatched and reared by the sparrow, or the warbler, or the vireo does not sing the song of the foster-parent. Why? Did its parent not try to teach it? I have no evidence that young birds sing, except occasionally in a low, tentative kind of way, till they return the following season, and then birds of a feather flock together, robins staying with robins, and cowbirds with cowbirds, each singing the song of its species. The songs of bobolinks differ in ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... was two other female forms, visitors apparently just admitted, and now ushered into the room. They were not announced—the servant turned her back on them and rambled off to our hostess. They advanced in a wavering tentative unintroduced way—partly, I could see, because the place was dark and partly because their visit was in its nature experimental, a flight of imagination or a stretch of confidence. One of the ladies was stout ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... 4. After tentative plans have been adopted representatives of both denominations visit the local field together, confer with the churches concerned, and arrive at some agreement as to adjustments to ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... seemed at first rather uncertain how to take Durant, and looked him up and down as if in search of a convenient button-hole; he smiled innocently on the young man (Durant soon learned to know and dread that smile); nothing could have been more delicate and tentative than his approach. He had been silent for the last few minutes, lying low behind a number of the Nineteenth Century, for if he were a bore he had the dangerous power of masking his deadly qualities in an unreal absorption. ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... frontiers, and the confusion that ensued, one cannot wonder that, whilst the two bladders collapsed into one idea, they actually expanded into four names, two Latin and two Greek, gustus and gustatio, [Greek: geusis], and [Greek: geusma], which all alike express the merely tentative or exploratory act of a praegustator or professional "taster" in a king's household: what, if applied to a fluid, we ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... inquiry, the conversion of experimental into deductive truths could still less have been effected without large temporary assistance from hypotheses. The process of tracing regularity in any complicated, and at first sight confused, set of appearances, is necessarily tentative; we begin by making any supposition, even a false one, to see what consequences will follow from it; and by observing how these differ from the real phenomena, we learn what corrections to make in ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... cross-examination, accordingly, with a few tentative questions, testing whether the ice would bear before I took the other foot off dry land. It did not seem to be very strong, I thought. Some of them were a little bewildering, perhaps, but that, doubtless, was their only fault, which the Prince was desirous of amending, ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... by the increasing number of them, they have given proof of an unrest on this subject which at last is beginning to embody itself in organization and concerted study and enterprise. A fifty years of mere tentative groping is likely to be followed by another fifty years of ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... in your entry? I believe we've got it here, somewhere." He began to fumble industriously through a pile of papers and Denver caught his breath. For a moment he had seen his dreams brought to nothing, his last chance at the prize-money gone; but at this tentative suggestion on the part of the chairman he suddenly took heart of grace. They wanted him to compete, it had been advertised in all the papers, and they were willing to meet him half-way. But Denver was no liar, he shook his head and sighed, ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... shelter Her delicate head Would quicken and quicken Each tentative tread If drops chanced to pelt her That summertime spills In dust-paven rills When thunder-clouds thicken And birds ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... analyst omniscient. But it needs not omniscience roughly to body-forth the contours of coming events. It is done daily, on a smaller or larger scale, with more or less plausibility. All theories are grounded in this principle. And it is noticeable that, at this moment, such tentative prophesies are more than frequent, and more comprehensive ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... clump of weed attacked a city you utter an absurdity. I think everyone was aware of the fantastic discrepancy between statement of the event and the event itself. So innocent and ridiculous the grass looked as it made its first tentative thrust at the urban nerves; the green blades sloped forward like some prettily arranged but unimaginative corsage upon the concrete bosom of the street. You could not believe those fragile seeming strands would resist the impress of a careless ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... travel had followed for the family, a year of spending the new money lavishly for strange, long-dreamed-of luxuries—a year in which the money was joyously proved to be real. Then came a year of tentative residence in the East. That year was less satisfactory. The novelty of being sufficiently fed, clad, and sheltered was losing its ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... a good instance of it in German literature, always in its developments so much later than the English; and as the best instance of it in French literature, in the century preceding Browne, is Montaigne, from whom indeed, in a great measure, all those tentative ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... likely to be received from any hand clasp, no matter where given or with whom exchanged, and a princess or a countess was as likely to bestow it upon you as any ordinary person whom you might chance to meet. The pressure itself was merely a tentative question which might be translated by the words: "Are you a nihilist?" and you might understand it and reply to it by a returning pressure of acquiescence, or ignore it utterly, as you pleased. The pressure itself was so slight, was carelessly ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... entirely of this strange half-caste, whose beauty was provoking, although he resolutely repelled her tentative advances, that Grantham was thinking. In that last gesture when she had scornfully tossed her head in turning aside, had lain a bitter memory. Grantham stood for a moment watching the swaying draperies. Then, ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... has no artistic memory. He is as young as he was the day that he flung out his first tentative lunette after chaos. He is the patron saint of all pilgrims from the city's struggle, where they found no oases of rest. He melts "pasts" and family skeletons and hidden stories of any kind whatsoever into the blue as a background with the abandoned preoccupation of his ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... sighed, drew a wisp of what had been a cornet of snuff from her pocket, opened it, dipped in a tentative finger and thumb and, finding it empty, gazed at it with disappointment, sighed again and, with the methodical hopelessness of age, folded it up into the neatest of little squares and thrust it back in her pocket. Then she went on ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... minute as against 34 seconds for the more complex. No attempt was made to arrange the figures on any regularly increasing scale of complexity so as to reach quantitative results. The experiment was tentative merely. ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... taken by philanthropy in the poor man as borrower is still in the tentative and experimental stage, but there is an encouraging analogy between its beginnings and the early history of the savings banks. "It is seldom remembered," says Mrs. Lowell, "that the great scheme of savings banks was originally conceived and put into operation as a means of helping the poor. ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... substitutes, and soap, to name only a few of the uses to which it is put. The cake, or meal from which the oil has been pressed, is rich in nitrogen and is therefore valuable as fertilizer; it is also a standard food for cattle, and tentative experiments with it have even been made as a food for human beings. The hulls have also considerable value as cattle food, and from them are obtained annually nearly a million bales of "linters," that is, short fibers of cotton which escaped the gin. Since the seed is bulky and the cost of transportation ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... in outline and very quiet in presence, but though she scarcely speaks twenty lines, her face remains with us like a beautiful face seen once and never to be forgotten. There is something already, in her tentative delineation, of that "piercing and overpowering tenderness which glorifies the poet of Pompilia." Festus, Michal's husband, the friend and adviser of Paracelsus, is a man of simple nature and thoughtful ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... think, before the third expedition. Yes, it must have been the third, for I remember that it was boldly planned and that it was carried out without a hitch. The tentative period was over; all our arrangements had been perfected. There was, so to speak, always an unfailing smoke on the hill and an unfailing lantern on the shore. Our friends, mostly bought for hard cash and therefore valuable, had acquired confidence in us. This, they seemed to say, ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... of steps and of voices becomes distinct and draws nearer. From the mass of the four men who tightly hung up the burrow, tentative hands are put out at a venture. All at once Pepin murmurs in a stifled voice, ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... managed institution. The excellence of this article was at once acknowledged on all sides, even by the press; and I appear to have made some impression in the highest administrative circles, for I shortly afterwards heard from my friend Rudolf Liechtenstein, that tentative advances had been made to him with a view to his accepting the position of manager, associated with which there was certainly an idea of asking me to become conductor of the Grand Opera. Among the reasons which caused this proposal to fall through was the fear, ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... a certain common polity, or germ of polity, which we find in all the rude nations that have attained civilisation. These nations seem to begin in what I may call a consultative and tentative absolutism. The king of early days, in vigorous nations, was not absolute as despots now are; there was then no standing army to repress rebellion, no organised ESPIONAGE to spy out discontent, no skilled bureaucracy to smooth ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... "If we knew, you'd still be in L.A. Roughly six months and four days, plus or minus a month for the time differential. That's strictly tentative, according to the math boys. It's a parallel universe, one of several thousand already explored, according to the Grdznth scientists working with Charlie Karns. Most of the parallels are analogous, and we happen to be analogous ...
— PRoblem • Alan Edward Nourse
... than obscure long ones; but not in the least sure that I am doing the best that can be done for my pupils, in classing swallows with owls, or milkworts with violets. The classification is always given as tentative; and, at its utmost, elementary: but the nomenclature, as in all ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... re-mount, a rough, stupid little mare, with kicking and biting propensities which quite threw the roan's into the shade. She also had a peg of ignominy, and three times a day I had to dance perilously round my precious pair with a tentative body-brush and hoof-pick. The scene generally ended in the pegs coming away from the loose sand, and a perspiring chase through the lines. I had some practice, too, in driving in a team, for one of our drivers "went sick," and I took his ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... the means of treating American music in the broad and comprehensive way possible to epochs in art the works of which are fully finished and catalogued. In the nature of the case the treatment of American writers herein is tentative and incomplete. Later on, additions will be made, as ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... rifle and slipped cautiously through the bushes, stopping to make what assurance he could that he was not being seen, crawling for the most part across the open places, keeping as much as possible where boulders or trees hid him. He had already made his tentative plans; he made his way down into the bed of the ravine and thence upstream. Swiftly the light increased over the still solitudes. The sun was up on the highlands, the ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... receive much wider use. Following along somewhat the same pattern, suggested schedules have been proposed for the hickories and butternuts. These should receive further consideration and adoption, if approved at least on a tentative basis. A schedule for Persian walnuts is very much needed as indicated by the recent contest in which confusion occurred related to there being no recognized standards of evaluation. With the Persian ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... Morris had gone though his rites, the ritual that he had invented or discovered—in its essence, simple and pathetic enough—whereby he strove to bring himself to the notice of the dead, and to fit himself to see or hear the dead. Such tentative mysticism as served his turn need not be written down, but its substance can be imagined by many. Then, through an exercise of his will, he had invoked the strange, trance-like state which has been described. The soft waves flowing from an unknown ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... invitation. All members of the Foundation will be entitled to receive the published lectures without charge and they will also have the privilege of subscribing for certain first and limited editions of notable American books. At the present writing, even so much as I have suggested is largely tentative, and I offer it for its essential idea; an executive committee of The Bookman Foundation, in co-operation with an advisory committee, the members of which committees have yet to be finally determined, will settle all details. By the time of this book's publication or even sooner, I expect ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... her. Then, trusting his happy instinct, he sought for her hand. But she held that back. "I want to SEE it," she declared, and he was obliged to let her take the ring in her own way and examine it, and place it in every light, and compare it with others worn by her friends, and make little tentative charges of extravagance in his purchase of it, while he sat elated ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... up from the Legislative Assembly, three of which were rejected, and the two last were passed by the Legislative Council, but on both these occasions the principal supporters of the Bills distinctly stated that their votes were given on the understanding that the measures were to be tentative only, ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... for her in a tentative form; that is to say, they placed suppositious propositions before her and cunningly tried to commit her to one end of the propositions without committing themselves to the other. But she always saw the game and spoiled it. The trap was in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... an irascible family from the mother down," he observed, "and I'm sorry you've got into trouble with them so soon for the miller is probably the most popular man in the county." He paused, cleared his throat, and after a tentative glance at Kesiah, which fell short of her bosom, decided to leave the sentence in his mind unspoken while they remained in ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... during this lapse that Mallare smiled with interest at the spectacle of his disintegration. There follows, then, a sudden excited outburst, undated. In it the beginnings of his madness pirouette like tentative dancers. ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... hawthorn hedges we were in the midst of young forest trees. Why is it that a forest is always a surprise in France? Is it that we have such a respect for French thrift, that a real forest seems a waste of timber? There are forests and forests; this one seemed almost a stripling in its tentative delicacy, compared to the mature splendor of Fontainebleau, for example. This forest had the virility of a young savage; it was neither dense nor vast; yet, in contrast to the ribbony grain fields, and to the finish of the villa parks, was as refreshing to the eye as the right chord that strikes ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the acquisition of languages, he, in one short year, had mastered Coptic, after having assured himself that it was the nearest existing approach to the ancient Egyptian language, and had even made a tentative attempt at the translation of the Egyptian scroll. This was the very beginning of our knowledge of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... But before the test I shall send my blueprints to Washington. Our patent attorney there has already filed tentative plans and applied for certain patents that I consider completed. Don't fret. I'll make it impossible for anybody to steal ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... our friend was well advanced in life, there was still no better mode of travel between distant points than the slow, rumbling stage-coach; many who are here remember well its delays and discomforts. He saw the first tentative efforts of that mighty factor steam to transport more swiftly. He saw the first railroad built in the country; he lived to see the land ...
— The New Minister's Great Opportunity - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... fountain. At the back of his mind there was a flickering thought that he wanted to do something, a vague feeling that he had some sort of an appointment which he must keep; but he was unable to think what it was. Meanwhile, he conducted tentative experiments with his breath. It was so long since he had last breathed that he had lost the knack ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... their work, the mere suggestion of which would have been scouted by their fathers; but they are themselves as ready as their fathers were to scout any further new suggestion, and it is only by iteration and reiteration that the shorter steps of tentative experiment can ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... be done? The tentative suggestions of this chapter may appear to the reader inadequate. But the opportunity was missed at Paris during the six months which followed the Armistice, and nothing we can do now can repair the mischief wrought at that time. Great privation and great risks to society ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... is, that in all of them there is no attempt to carry on the development of epic, to take up its symbolic power where Milton left it. On the contrary, this seems to be deliberately avoided. For any tentative advance on Miltonic significance, even for any real acceptance of it, we must go to poetry which tries to put epic intention into a new form. Some obvious peculiarities of epic style are sufficiently definite to be detachable. Since Theocritus, a perverse kind ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... the high school and that along the four lines suggested. But the movement has gone much farther than suggested by my statement. The results are found in something more authoritative and more permanent than tentative agreement among educational leaders, or even among educational institutions. The law-making bodies of the land have taken a part, and by legal enactment have required about what I have suggested. The State of North Dakota, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... year after year to be distracted with the tentative scepticism of essayists and reviewers. In a healthy condition of public opinion such a book as Bishop Colenso's would have passed unnoticed, or rather would never have been written, for the difficulties with which it deals would have been long ago met and disposed of. When questions ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... complaint. His function is in fact indistinguishable from that of the best kind of statesman at the present day. His books upon ethics, therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life, must more and more ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentative and suggestive rather than dogmatic,—I mean with novels and dramas of the deeper sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft and philanthropy and social and economical reform. Treated in this way ethical treatises may be voluminous and luminous as well; but they never can be final, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... instant. Being of society she knew its needs, and although she was too young to look far ahead and foresee the structure which was to rise upon these tentative foundations, she shrewdly began by offering her services to certain friends often hopelessly bewildered with the mass of work they were obliged to leave to incompetent secretaries and housekeepers. One thing led to another, as it always does with ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... better not "know it all," or even a part of it. To be thoroughly happy in a case like this it is best to leave minute details and even a general knowledge of such things to the inquisitive. I had, however, sufficient curiosity to speculate on the dishes, and have made a tentative menu of them, assuming the courses, from their color, flavor and general ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... policy was a tentative one, and rightly so. He laid down no programme which must compel him to be either inconsistent or unwise, no cast-iron theorem to which circumstances must be fitted as they rose, or else be useless to his ends. He seemed to have chosen Mazarin's motto, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... glad she had a chance to ride," said Granville Joy, in a tentative voice. He looked uneasily ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the complete resemblance. It is 'a life-long task ere the lump be leavened.' This likeness does not reach its completeness by a leap. It is not struck, as the image of a king is, upon the blank metal disc, by one stroke, but it is wrought out by long, laborious, and, as I said, approximating and tentative touches. My text suggests that to us by its addition, 'So are we, in this world.' The 'world'—or, to use modern phraseology, 'the environment'—conditions the resemblance. As far as it is possible for a thing encompassed with dust and ashes to resemble the radiant sun in the heavens, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... which pervaded the court during this scene, in which the reader will have observed I played a bold, tentative, and happily-successful game, was broken as the witness was borne off by a loud murmur of indignation, followed by congratulatory exclamations on the fortunate termination of the suit. The defendant's counsel threw up their briefs, and a verdict was ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... his indomitable pride of will, we hear the sudden thunder of his verse. An acquaintance, M. de Chalon, who had been one of the household of Marie de Medicis, directed Corneille to the Spanish drama. The Illusion Comique, the latest of his tentative plays, is a step towards the Cid; its plot is fantastical, but in some of the fanfaronades of the braggart Matamore, imported from Spain, are pseudo-heroics which only needed a certain transposition to become the language of chivalric heroism. The piece closes ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... There was a tentative quality in the statement, an attempt to carry off easily a situation capable of unpleasant developments, a studied ignoring of his captor's possible right to detain him. But Corrie swung around with a face of open sunniness that shamed suspicion, his hands in the ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... out, glad to get into the free air again. He did not envy the responsibility of a president in war time, whether the president of a country already established or of one yet tentative. He hurried home, and it was his mother herself who responded to the sound of the knocker—his mother, quiet, smiling and undemonstrative as of old, but with an endless tenderness for him in the depths of ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... subject—a suggestion that what is so positively and repeatedly stated must of necessity be true, must of necessity have been proved by irrefutable evidence at some time or other. So much you take for granted—for matters which began their existence perhaps as tentative hypotheses have ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... indeed made new, restored to the lustre and fulness of her young womanhood. He remembered then that she had long been silent when he came near her, plainly conscious of his presence but with an apparent constraint, with something almost tentative in her manner. With her return to health and comeliness there had come back to her a thousand little graces of dress and manner and speech. She drew him, with his starved love of beauty and his need of ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... arrangement with Rogers was tentative, depending on whether he could get the charter and could ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... Amber was hoping the Rolands, with Sophia Farrell, might linger somewhere en route, remembering that the girl had discussed a tentative project to stop over between steamers ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... hitherto unpublished Polonaise in A flat, written at the age of eleven, is also included in this unique number. This tiny dance shows, it is said, the "characteristic physiognomy" of the composer. In reality this polacca is thin, a tentative groping after a form that later was mastered so magnificently by the composer. Here is the way it begins—the autograph ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... Pauses that catch your blood and freeze it suddenly still like the rustling of a branch in silent woods at night. A gipsy in a red sash is playing, slouched into a cheap cane chair, behind him a faded crimson curtain. Off stage heels beaten on the floor catch up the rhythm with tentative interest, drowsily; then suddenly added, sharp click of fingers snapped in time; the rhythm slows, hovers like a bee over a clover flower. A little taut sound of air sucked in suddenly goes down the rows of seats. With faintest tapping of heels, faintest snapping of the fingers of a brown hand ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... of the sort one hears in certain quarters about the human stud farm. [Footnote: See Mankind in the Making, Ch. II.] State breeding of the population was a reasonable proposal for Plato to make, in view of the biological knowledge of his time and the purely tentative nature of his metaphysics; but from anyone in the days after Darwin, it is preposterous. Yet we have it given to us as the most brilliant of modern discoveries by a certain school of sociological writers, who seem totally unable to grasp the modification of meaning "species" ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... turned out. Throughout the sultry hours he held his position, not daring to move his men save to drive back tentative advances on the part of the enemy, which he knew were designed to cover the movements of their artillery. He could not press his attack home, far less penetrate to the guns, and the range of his musketry would of course be hopelessly inadequate when Chand Singh chose to begin to pound ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... party which afterwards became formidable under the name of THE LEVELLERS. All the while, however, there was also a quiet formation, in some of the superior and more educated minds of the Army, of sentiments essentially Republican, but more reserved and tentative in the style of their Republicanism. Among these minds too it had become a question whether a mere settlement with the King even on the basis of the Nineteen Propositions would suffice, and whether the hour had not come ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... because his uncle had been a popular country squire, but she held her peace and amused herself by watching the play which went on between the two sisters during the next twenty-four hours. Esmeralda was plainly anxious and ill at ease, and made tentative allusions to the coming meet, which Bridgie received with bland obtuseness. She had not the courage to make her request in so many words, but instead brought forward a succession of gloomy prophecies calculated to dampen expectation ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... open to him in which he had made a few halting and tentative steps—that of journalism, with its broad entrance and narrowing perspective into the fair field of letters. While a sophomore at Knox he had exercised his irrepressible inclination "to shoot folly as it flies" by contributions to the local paper of Galesburg, which had the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... his napkin under his collar or spit on the carpet.... What laughable little folk we were! I, who had always seen man as the last and final expression of evolution, now saw him as the stumbling, crawling, incredibly stupid, result of a tentative experiment—a first step up a ladder ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... everybody in the party seemed moved with a desire for dancing—except Fred. While the others whirled away he sank into a seat, staring vacantly ahead. He had reached the extreme point of his drunkenness and he was pulling toward sobriety again... He came out of his tentative stupor with the realization that a woman was seating herself ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... fellows of the swamps followed at intervals to the water, grotesque hulking shapes, odorous and slimy with mud. All drank from the same spot; all ignored, save for a tentative rooting snuffle, the unconscious figures lying puny beneath them. But all noticed the twisted roots of the stump, sticking out in a score of directions, and ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... with grasses, from which meadow larks rose in all directions like grasshoppers. Soon after they passed the canvas "schooners" of some who had started the evening before. Down the next long slope the ponies dropped cautiously with bunched feet and tentative steps. Spring Creek was forded for the last time, another steep grassy hill was surmounted, and they looked abroad into Rapid Valley and over to ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... something now," said the little nobleman, sagacious so far; but he was too eager to read the verification of the tentative remark in her face, and she perceived that it was a guess founded ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... took a tentative step forward, and Patsie followed in his wake. Half a yard from Pixie's chair they stopped short with eager, craning faces, with bodies braced in readiness for ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... the pieces and brushed away as much of the dirt as he could. He handed one to Mikah and took a tentative bite out of the other one: it was gritty with sand and tasted like slightly rancid wax. It took a distinct effort to eat the repulsive thing but he did. Without a doubt it was food, no matter how unwholesome, and would do until something ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... no longer a mere tentative hypothesis. One by one, step by step, each division and subdivision of science has contributed its evidence, until now the case is complete and the verdict rendered. While there is still discussion as to the method of evolution, none the ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... times, succeed to the ancestral kangaroos and wombats of the secondary strata. Slowly the horses grow more horse-like, the shadowy camel begins to camelise himself, the buffaloes acquire the rudiments of horns, the deer branch out by tentative steps into still more complicated and more complicated antlers. Side by side with this wonderful outgrowth of the mammalian type, in the first plasticity of its vigorous youth, the older marsupials die away one by one in the geological record before the faces ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... valuable franchise to a rich corporation, by an alderman; absolution to an impenitent king, by a priest, and so forth. Refusals are graded in a descending scale of finality thus: the refusal absolute, the refusal condition, the refusal tentative and the refusal feminine. The last is called by some casuists ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... mechanical contrivance could be devised that could take his place on the wheel, and no combination of purely chemical and physical forces can alone do with matter what life does with it. The analogy here hinted at is only tentative. I would not imply that the relation of life to matter is merely mechanical and external, like that of the rider to his wheel. In life, the rider and his wheel are one, but when life vanishes, the wheel falls down. The chemical and physical activity of matter ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... kindred occurrences enable one better to appreciate the motives which prompted the delegates to shroud their conversations and tentative decisions in a decorous ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... truth. If you still retain your interest in his genius (as I see not how you can avoid, having understood it and cooperated with it so truly), you will be glad to know that he values his American readers very highly; that he does not defend this offensive style of his, but calls it questionable tentative; that he is trying other modes, and is about publishing a historical piece called "The Diamond Necklace," as a part of a great work which he meditates on the subject of the French Revolution. He says it is part of his creed that history is poetry, could we tell it right. He ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Howard' grated upon my nerves. Up to this moment, except through the translatophone, she had not addressed me by my name in any form; and every tentative lover knows that when his lady addresses him as though he had no name it means that she does not wish to use his formal title and that the time has not arrived for her to call him ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... upon that visit was the sole personal interview that ever occurred between us. I called upon Senator Morrill of Vermont, and together we made a visit to the President. I spoke of the features of the proclamation that seemed to be objectionable. He said that "the measure was tentative" only, and that until the experiment had been tried no other proclamation would be issued. Upon that I said in substance that the Republican Party might accept the proclamation as an experiment, but that it was contrary to the ideas of the party, and that a continuance of ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... slowly. "It makes my head ache, to stay in all day. May Gaston not ride with me?" she asked diffidently, her eyes anywhere but on his face. He had not allowed her to ride with any one except himself since her attempted escape, and to her tentative suggestions that the rides with the valet might be resumed he had given a prompt refusal. He hesitated now, and she was afraid he was going to refuse again, and she looked up wistfully. "Please, ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... Hazleton and Long Divide concern, he says they're disposed to regard British Columbian ventures favorably yonder. If it goes through, I'd have to take most of the vendor's payment in shares, which I'm quite ready to do. That's a rough sketch of the scheme, sir, but in the meanwhile it's only tentative." ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... not so much afraid of this difficulty, for the German people have learnt the value of the fleet. We have got beyond the tentative stage, and have paid enough for our experience. We must hold fast what we possess and recover what we have lost during the last decades through the unfortunately unbusiness-like spirit of our foreign policy. Then the German people will have renewed ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... composed by their assistance. Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom and effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tentative, continually "in further search and progress;" while written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber[3] of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... made up his mind to this, he was coming very near to the end of his walk, within the sound of the hammers at work on the refitting of the old house. The sound of tools to a clever workman who loves his work is like the tentative sounds of the orchestra to the violinist who has to bear his part in the overture: the strong fibres begin their accustomed thrill, and what was a moment before joy, vexation, or ambition, begins ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... was at that time divided between sundry general courses and various technical departments, the whole being somewhat tentative. These general courses were mainly three: the arts course, which embraced both Latin and Greek; the course in literature, which embraced Latin and modern languages; and the course in science, which embraced more especially modern languages ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... general eminence in the profession were slower to climb than on the Midland.' It was a small circuit, 'attended by some seventy or eighty barristers and divided into two or three independent and incompatible sets of Quarter Sessions, among which after a year or so of tentative experience it was necessary to choose one set and stand by it. Fitzjames and I both chose the round of the Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire sessions; which involved a good deal of travelling and knocking about in some out-of-the-way ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... into a blue flame, as Jimmie Dale lighted it. It disclosed, in shadow, the battered easel, the dirty canvases, some finished, some but tentative daubs, that banked the wall in disorder opposite the small French window, whose shade was closely drawn; it crept dimly into the far corner of the room and disclosed the cheap cot, unmade, the blanket upon it rumpled in negligent untidiness; it fell full, such as ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... of rebellion, half genuine, half facetious, he made several tentative scrapes with the razor. He winced violently, and ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... not display any aptitude for letters till late in life. His class—a fourth, which, at least as regards the greater names of literature, is perhaps the smallest of all—comprises those who may almost be said to drift into literary work and literary fame, whose first production is not merely tentative and unoriginal, but, so to speak, accidental, who do not discover their real faculty for literary work till after a pretty long ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... most effective adjunct of her conversation. Socially, she was absolutely devoid of weakness or of shame. She found society extremely interesting, and she always struck straight for the desirable things in it, making short work of all those delicate tentative processes of acquaintanceship by which men and women ordinarily sort themselves. Rose's brilliant vivacious beauty had caught her eye at dinner; she adored beauty as she adored anything effective, and she always took a queer pleasure in bullying her way into ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... could not have told exactly how it was done, but she knew that two minutes later young Gray and Mellicent were at the piano, he, shining-eyed and happy, drawing a tentative bow across the strings: she, no less shining-eyed and happy, giving him ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... into its gait. Everybody was back in town, at least Mrs. Wesson said so in her column, where she also prophesied a program of festivities for the coming six months. This was reassuring as Mrs. Wesson was supposed to know, and anyway there were signs of it already—a first tentative outbreak of parties, little dinners cropping up here and there. People who did things were trailing back from Europe, bringing new clothes and ideas with which to abash the stay-at-homes. Big houses were opening and little ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... America, vast and fruitful as it appears to-day, is even yet, for its most important results, entirely in the tentative state; its very formation-stir and whirling trials and essays more splendid and picturesque, to my thinking, than the accomplish'd growths and shows of other lands, through European history, or Greece, or ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... from the relation of one woman who was slowly but surely being forced to lay down what she had prized most in her womanhood and another who, slowly but surely, also became aware that hers was the prize in her turn, and thrust forward a tentative hand to grasp it. If I am at all right in this notion, then it is plain that feelings slight and faint, although not non-existent in ordinary homes, might be intensified in such a family as ours, and that a new and great impulse would have been imparted to them by such an artificial accentuation ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... is uniform, science is true,' the hypothetical character of science appears in the form of the statement. Nevertheless, it seems undesirable to call our confidence in Nature's uniformity an 'hypothesis': it is incongruous to use the same term for our tentative conjectures and for our most indispensable beliefs. 'The Universal Postulate' is a better term for the principle which, in some form or other, every ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... dustbin for the rubbish of all nations. Here the problem is worst—here the victims are weakest and most manageable. London will bear what would stir a riot in Birmingham or Leeds. Make the experiment as partial and as tentative as you please—give the Home Office power to extend or revoke it at will—but ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... full with the fat of him. One arm only he sported, from the shoulder of which was suspended a small and tattered bundle with the mud caked dry on the outer covering from the last place he had pitched his doss. He advanced with tentative caution, made sure of the harmlessness of the man beside the fire, ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... cargo under the main-hatch. Again Mr. Todd expressed the hope that Providence would see fit to let this treasure remain where the pirates had left it, no longer to tempt man to kill and steal. But Captain Bunce and his officers thought differently. Glances, then tentative comments, were exchanged, and in five minutes they were of one mind, even including Mr. Todd; for it may not be needless to state that the treasure and the passenger-ship ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
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