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More "Vital" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the second charge—that of hostility to the new administration on personal grounds—the Duke referred to the known opinions of Mr. Canning on the Catholic question. How could he be in office under a minister whom he must oppose on, at least, one vital question of domestic policy? How could he give the right honourable gentleman that fair support which one member of a cabinet had a right to expect from another? The principles of the new government could not be those of that of the Earl of Liverpool. The principle of the latter was to maintain the ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... thing, for the Divel, to impregnate the Air about us, with such Malignant Salts, as meeting with the Salt of our Microcosm, shall immediately cast us into that Fermentation and Putrefaction, which will utterly dissolve All the Vital Tyes within us; Ev'n as an Aqua Fortis, made with a conjunction of Nitre and Vitriol, Corrodes what it Siezes upon. And when the Divel has raised those Arsenical Fumes, which become Venomous. Quivers full of Terrible Arrows, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... were at work as well as the rest, the fight was recommenced with retrebled spirit; but when the mutilated body of the man who had been flung from the window, was observed lying in the pool of his own proper brains and blood, such a cry arose among his friends, as would cake (* harden) the vital fluid in the veins of any one not a party in the quarrel. Now was the work—the moment of interest—men and women groaning, staggering, and lying insensible; others shouting, leaping, and huzzaing; some singing, ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... equilibrium in which a rough word is like blow to her, and the touch of unmagnetized fingers reverses all her nervous currents. It is not everybody that enters into the soul of Mozart's or Beethoven's harmonies; and there are vital symphonies in B flat, and other low, sad keys, which a doctor may know as little of as a hurdy-gurdy player of the essence of those divine musical mysteries. The Doctor knew the difference between what men say and what ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... little or no use to us. And, to crown all, it was now so pitch-dark that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain the full extent of our disaster until daylight. Our situation, however, was too critical to admit of our waiting until then; it was of vital importance that immediate steps should be taken to secure what had been left to us; and, with this object, the carpenter and boatswain procured lanterns with which they proceeded aloft to make a critical examination into the condition of the spars and rigging. They were thus engaged when ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... and agonising suspense wore away, and no one, not even Margaret, suspected Esther's condition. Encouraged by her success, and seeing still very little sign of change in her person, and as every penny she could earn was of vital consequence in the coming time, Esther determined to risk another month; then she would give notice and leave. Another month passed, and Esther was preparing for departure when a whisper went round, and before ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... heaven to counterfeit with the face things that do not belong to one's affection; consequently their faces are types of their minds. When, therefore, they have marriage love, and love of wisdom, these loves in them give form to their faces, and show themselves like vital fires in their eyes; to which innocence and peace add themselves, which complete their beauty. Such are the forms of the inmost angelic heaven; and they are truly ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg
... prospect to the best swimmer. Meantime, the whale rose to the surface to spout. The change in his course enabled another boat to come up, and we lay on our oars, in order that Mr. D——, (the other mate) might lance him.—He struck him in a vital part the first dart, as was evident from the whale's furious dying struggles; but in order to make sure, we hauled up and lanced the back of his head. Foaming and breaching, he plunged from wave to wave, flinging high in the air torrents of blood and spray. The sea around ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... unbroken chain which links us to Catholic antiquity and guarantees the validity of our sacraments, combined with that freedom of religious speculation and that elasticity of devotional forms which were to him as necessary as vital air. Various elements of his teaching, various aspects of his practice will occur to different minds; but (just because it is sometimes overlooked) I feel bound to remind you of his testimony to the blessings which ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... delicious food; every dawn and sunset stored her heart with dreams; each fresh intimacy with Michael placed a new jewel in the casket of her soul; every hour with Freddy was a privilege and a reward. In her veins the dance of youth tripped a lightsome measure. Happiness made every moment vital. ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... Americas worth laying hands on. This highly favoured maritime position depends, however, upon an unnamed factor, the unchallenged possession and use of which by England has been the true foundation of her imperial greatness. Without Ireland there would be to-day no British Empire. The vital importance of Ireland to England is understood, but never proclaimed by every British statesman. To subdue that western and ocean-closing island and to exploit its resources, its people and, above all its position, to the sole advantage ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... pretty well depended on. But it would not be enough for Government that the English Radicals should abstain from going against them in a body, because so slender is the majority on which they can count, that if any considerable number were to oppose Government on some vital question, it would be sufficient to overthrow them. Of this they are aware, as well as of the probability of such defection, and the consequent precariousness of their situation, and many among them are beginning to be very tired and disgusted ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... first greeting. But Jeff didn't waste much thought on Weedie. He believed, at the crisis, Weedie could be managed. Miss Amabel had startled his mind broad awake to what she called the great issues and what he felt were vital ones. He went on over the bridge, and up the stairs of the old Choate Building to Alston's office, and, from some sudden ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... endure a sectional President? No, sir, it would mean secession—the death-knell of the Union. Sir, we may be driven to more practical arguments by the scurrilous speeches of the abolitionists. It is an attack on property, on the ownership of the inferior race by the supremely superior. That is the vital question." ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... spiritual travail of years, what a life it always has for the heart that forms it! It tells not of a persuasion, but of a conviction; a disproof of skepticism through the gathered forces of the soul; a struggle, through epochs of doubt and dismay, into an attitude of positive vital faith. Its process is the only one that gives real right to ultimate peace. In comparison with the method and measure of such a conviction, what matters its specific form? Self-truth is the point,—the fact for starting, the line for guiding; and as for result, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... people, two-thirds of whom have never written nor received a letter, could not read one if printed and sent them. They take no newspapers, and the great events of nations or discoveries of science have been nothing to them. Questions of vital importance to our country have never troubled them. They knew there was a war, for contending armies met on their grounds. With few exceptions their sympathies were with the Union. Too poor to own slaves to any extent, they had no motive ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various
... in recent years been taking on a new and more vital meaning. In earlier times the value of education was assumed, or vaguely taken on faith. Education was supposed to consist of so much "learning," or a given amount of "discipline," or a certain quantity of "culture." Under the newer definition, education ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated. Now, in this case there was not the slightest doubt in my mind from the first that the key of the whole matter must be looked for in the scrap of paper ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... Middle Ages with amazing skill and dialectical acuteness by the Scholastic doctors, with the aid of the method which Aristotle, the greatest logician of antiquity, bequeathed to philosophy. Neither Luther nor Calvin departed essentially from these great deductions on such vital subjects as the existence and attributes of God, the Trinity, sin and its penalty, redemption, grace, and predestination. The creeds of modern Protestant churches are in harmony with the writings of both the Fathers and the Scholastic ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... cruising force. The American forty-four was unknown to British experience, and could be met only by ships of the line. Add to this consideration the remoteness of the American shore, and its dangerous proximity to very vital British interests, and there are found the elements of the difficult problem presented to the Admiralty by the combination of American force—such as it was—with American advantage of position for dealing ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... Chinese philosopher, the reason for thus renewing fire periodically is that the vital principle grows weaker and weaker in old fire, whereas in new fire it is young and vigorous. This annual renewal of fire was a ceremony of very great antiquity in China, since it is known to have been observed in the time of the first dynasty, about two thousand ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... the great services of Oakes Ames, representative from the Massachusetts Second Congressional District, for ten years ending March 4, 1873, in achieving the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, the most vital contribution to the integrity and growth of the ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... poetry or his humour or his philosophy or his theology but not at all in his sociological and political outlook, I fear that these three chapters may loom a little uninvitingly. If they are tempted to skip them altogether, I shall not blame them; yet they will miss a great deal that is vital to the understanding of his whole mind and the course his life was to take. These are not the most entertaining chapters in the book, but if we are really to know Chesterton the events they cover must ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... off its robe of flesh, opens out a subject of paramount interest. Thus it is that on every plane Christ is the Fulfilling of the Law, and that "Salvation" is not a silly shiboleth but the logical and vital process of our advance into the unfoldment of the next stage of the limitless capacities of our being. Of these things I hope to write in another volume, should it be permitted to me, and in the meanwhile I would commend the present abstract statement of principles to the reader's attention in ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... relation and by implication casting reflection upon her delicacy and even purity of life as a woman separated from her lawful husband, Helen could have met with dispassionate reasoning whatever assault Edith made upon her. This point was too vital, it touched too closely the core of her woman's nature, and although she retained perfectly her self-control, there was a pulse of passion in her voice ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... guinea—a pocket piece I've carried for years. You've heard, no doubt, of vital things turning upon the tossing of a coin. Well, if you see me toss this coin to-morrow, something of that sort will occur. It will be tossed up in the midst of a riddle, Major; when it comes down it will be a ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Air about us, with such Malignant Salts, as meeting with the Salt of our Microcosm, shall immediately cast us into that Fermentation and Putrefaction, which will utterly dissolve all the Vital Tyes within us; Ev'n as an Aqua-Fortis, made with a conjunction of Nitre and Vitriol, Corrodes what it Seizes upon. And when the Devil has raised those Arsenical Fumes, which become Venemous ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... and sweet" is said to be excellent for weak people; it gives them vital force. When little Georgette Beck was recovering from her illness, I used to take her in my arms and walk with her in the garden by the hour together, beneath a certain wall hung with grapes, which the Southern sun was ripening: that sun cherished her little ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the phrase, the strangest of paradoxes, the existence in fact of a logical contradiction. For religion is in its essential nature a living thing, for the very reason that it is part of the experience of a living person. As experience is not merely alive, but the sum of all our vital powers, it is ever growing, both in breadth and in intensity. So far then as we are in any true sense religious men, our religion, as part and parcel of our experience, must be alive with an intense and vigorous activity, growing in the direction ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... last to open. Pyotr Ilyitch was admitted into Fenya's kitchen, but the girl begged him to allow the house-porter to be present, "because of her misgivings." He began questioning her and at once learnt the most vital fact, that is, that when Dmitri Fyodorovitch had run out to look for Grushenka, he had snatched up a pestle from the mortar, and that when he returned, the pestle was not with him and his hands were ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... moreover, that the thread from the mule is softer and "loftier", and that cloth woven from it has a more "clothy" feel. But others say they can produce soft yarn with the ring. In the United States, where the labor cost is a vital item, the ring-spindle has an ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous
... shotgun, and fire the culverin, and to knock monogamy into a cocked hat. Money first and massacre second. They can draw on their revelation supply house at three days, any time, for authority to fill the irrigation ditches of Zion with the blood of the Gentile and feed his vital ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... to every sentimental impulse—that is why they weep so easily. Watch them at a murder trial—they weep for the victim, then they weep for the murderer. Half their tears are useless. If women would put into constructive thinking some of the vital power they waste in weeping and talking they ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... for his delicacy would not allow him even in so vital a cause to call bodies bodies. The woman here edged so close that he bolted across her in affright, and began to slant back towards the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... less than his that writ 9 Attempt translation; for transplanted wit All the defects of air and soil doth share, And colder brains like colder climates are: In vain they toil, since nothing can beget A vital spirit but a vital heat. That servile path thou nobly dost decline Of tracing word by word, and line by line. Those are the labour'd births of slavish brains, Not the effect of poetry, but pains; Cheap vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords No flight ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... thus established, are destined to be accepted by the general mind of the age, without actual harm to the real interests of civilization and religion. No fact, which is a fact and not an illusion, can do harm to any of the vital interests of mankind. No truth can stand in hopeless antagonism to any other truth. To suppose otherwise would be to resolve the moral government of God into a hopeless enigma, or enthrone a perpetual and hostile dualism, resigning the universe to the rival and contending ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... "Hush, Julius!" I continued, for the boy also had turned angrily upon me. "Pray stop your outcry, for Heaven's sake! Silence is of vital importance to us all at this moment, for we may be on the very verge of a crisis. Mr Monroe and I are both of opinion that we very recently ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... desert was a place prepared For weary hearts to rest; The hillside was a temple blest; The grassy vale a banquet-room Where he could feed and comfort many a guest. With him the lily shared The vital joy that breathes itself in bloom; And every bird that sang beside the nest Told of the love that broods o'er every living thing. He watched the shepherd bring His flock at sundown to the welcome fold, The fisherman ...
— Music and Other Poems • Henry van Dyke
... torrents. The solace of hot coffee was denied, for there was no fuel. Food was gone. The minutes were hours. While hunger gnawed at the vitals, a clammy chilliness seized upon one, making him feel as if every vital organ was in a state of congestion. How daylight was longed for, and soon after the first streaks of dawn began to appear, I deserted my watery couch and made straight across the country toward some infantry camps, and actually hugged every fragment ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... atonement had become impossible. That must be put off for another day—perhaps for ever. He wasn't sure. He couldn't tell. For the minute his head was in a whirl. He hardly knew what he was saying, except that his rejoinders to Lois's remarks were more or less at random. Vital questions were pounding through his brain and demanding an answer. Who knew but that with regard to Rosie she was right—and yet wrong? Women, with their remarkable powers of divination, didn't always hit the nail directly on the head. It might be the ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... the worst. This is in marked contrast with the smooth-faced doctor, who, as a rule, asks you to show your tongue, and when you obey he does not look at it, but begins to go through his mail, whistling cheerfully. He puts such vital questions as, how far up is your bedroom window at night, and do you ever have a sense of eye-strain after reading too long, and when you reply, he pays no attention. His entire attitude expresses the conviction that either you are not ill at all, or that if you are, you are not in ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... repeat at intervals, sometimes brushing instead my arm and shoulder. I have had people try to mesmerise me a dozen times, and never with the least result. But at the first tap—on a quarter no more vital than my hat-brim, and from nothing more virtuous than a switch of palm wielded by a man I could not even see—sleep rushed upon me like an armed man. My sinews fainted, my eyes closed, my brain hummed, with drowsiness. I resisted, at first instinctively, ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the Sabbath will not hold ye guiltless for this profanation of his holy day." But, at that period, vital religion was but little felt or understood upon the Borders, and they regarded not ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... since—put him in Keredec's charge, and he was taken up into the Tyrol and virtually hidden for two years, the idea being literally to give him something like an education—Keredec's phrase is 'restore mind to his soul'! What must have been quite as vital was to get him out of his horrible wife's clutches. And they did it, for she could not find him. But she picked up that rat in the garden out yonder—he'd been some sort of stable-manager for Harman once—and set him on the track. He ran the poor boy down, and yesterday she followed ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... baffling adventures in trying to attain it—including the machinations of a gang of professional gamblers, and the mysterious kidnapping of the football team's star fullback. It is a quick-moving, vital story that will ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... is about noon, and the vital spectacle is now near the village of Tilnitz. The fog has dispersed, and the sun shines clearly, though without warmth, the ice on the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... years which have been more fruitful in works of mechanical genius or dynamic energy, novels have been more widely distributed and more eagerly read than at any previous period. The poetry of the time, in the degree in which it has been fresh and vital, has been treated by newspapers as matter ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... education have carried Germany far; they are essential things, but an equally essential need for the coming time is a free play for men of initiative and imagination. Is Germany to her utmost possibility making capable men? That, after all, is the vital question, and not whether her policy is wise or foolish, or her commercial development inflated or sound. Or is Germany doing no more than cash the promises of those ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... can do will stop it. We cannot in our souls really want to stop it: the vital force that has produced this change would paralyse our opposition to it, if we were mad enough to oppose. But we will not oppose. You and I may be of the ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... recently passed through a Presidential contest in which the passions of our fellow-citizens were excited to the highest degree by questions of deep and vital importance; but when the people proclaimed their will the tempest at once subsided and all ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... at length reduced to extreme distress for food. They ate the roots and stems of the herbage, and finally stripped the very bark from the trees and devoured it, in the vain hope that it might afford some nutriment to re-enforce the vital principle, for a little time at least, in the dreadful struggle which it was waging within them. There are certain forms of pestilential disease which, in cases like this, always set in to hasten the work which famine alone would be too slow in performing. Accordingly, ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... last, and I never could persuade them. One man, as if wishing to crush all his inward vacillations at one fell stroke, told me stoutly that he never used tobacco, though I found next day that he loved it as much as any one of them. It seemed wrong thus to tamper with their fidelity; yet it was a vital matter to me to know how far it could be trusted, out of my sight. It was so intensely dark that not more than one or two knew me, even after I had talked with the very next sentinel, especially as they had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... at work! As I sat in the bathtub (when a man is fifty he may be pardoned for taking a warm bath on winter mornings) my mind fell upon the desire of wandering: it occurred to me that a spread of legs in the vital air would be richly repaid. The windows called me: as soon as shirt and trousers were on, I was at the sill peering out over Gissing Street. Later, even through closed panes, the chink of milk bottles on the pavement below seemed ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... followed by those of European traders, beginning in the late 15th century. By the 19th century, Britain had assumed political control of virtually all Indian lands. Indian armed forces in the British army played a vital role in both World Wars. Nonviolent resistance to British colonialism led by Mohandas GANDHI and Jawaharlal NEHRU brought independence in 1947. The subcontinent was divided into the secular state of India and the smaller Muslim state of Pakistan. A third war between the two countries in ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... New York. Had the Barnburners supported Cass, he would have secured the electoral vote of the State. They were accused of wrecking the party out of revenge. Certain it is that the outcome was indecisive, so far as the really vital questions of the hour were concerned. A Whig general had been sent to the White House, but no one knew what policies he would advocate. The Democrats were still in control of the Senate; but thirteen Free-Soilers held the balance ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... their lives are usually written in one of two ways, both equally unsuited to popular appreciation. Either they are presented in a dry, bare, matter-of-fact manner, which requires all the knowledge and sympathy of the initiated to give it vital meaning; or else they are surrounded with an appanage of portents, visions, miracles, legends—spread before the reader without discrimination or explanation—which confuse the mind and soul, and absolutely repel all who do ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... have been ascribed by various authors, not to one species, race, or individual being prepotent over the other in impressing it character on its crossed offspring, but to such rules as that the father influences the external characters and the mother the internal or vital organs. But the great diversity of the rules given by various authors almost proves their falseness. Dr. Prosper Lucas has fully discussed this point, and has shown[153] that none of the rules (and I could add others ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... losing our influence in those distant regions, the Government of India, however, considered that a road from our frontier to Chitral should be made, and certain positions retained in order to guard it. This vital question having been carefully considered at home, the Secretary of State for India, on June 13, 1895, telegraphed to the Viceroy that her Majesty's Government regretted they were unable to concur in the proposal. He went on to say that no 'military force ...
— Indian Frontier Policy • General Sir John Ayde
... rings, the Government supporters troop back, and pass all the clauses unamended. As an instance of this contemptible way of conducting the debate, it is sufficient to point to the fact already mentioned, that so vital a matter as the power of the English Parliament to tax Ireland was not even hinted at until nearly the ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... of mind and body became absorbed in these new duties. The patient who fell into Cecil's hands had little to complain of. She struggled for his life when even the shadow of death had fallen on him, and sometimes, by arduous exertions and devoted nursing, saved one in whom the vital flame had wasted almost to the socket. And then a nearly divine content came to her as she imagined she might have spared some distant heart the pangs that had ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... liberty, the only liberty I mean, is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle. ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... Scotland. Even the unfavourable description so often quoted of Eneas Silvius, reports the common people as having "abundance of flesh and fish," no small ingredient of wellbeing, and records rather a complete absence of luxuries than that want which reduces the vital strength of a nation. The same authority tells of exportations of "hides, wool, salt fish, and pearls," the latter a curious item, although there were as yet no manufactures, and even such necessaries as horse-shoes and every kind of harness had to be ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... the word Rudra is meant Prana and the other breaths. The commentator explains that the etymology is utkramana kale dehinam rodayanti iti Rudrah Pranah. By regulating the vital breaths and the senses, Yogins attain to Yoga puissance and succeed in roving wherever they please in their ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... This is the vital law; lying at the root of all that I have ever tried to teach respecting architecture or any other art. It is also the law ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... gasp as if an earthquake had opened at her feet, and turned deathly white. She did not venture to say a word. All in the room waited in mute suspense, realizing that the matter must be of vital importance. With a sad face Miss Roscoe drew out the nineteen envelopes and compared them with those which ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... either the biggest or the most picturesque tree to illustrate it. Here is one of my favorites now before me, a fine yellow poplar, quite straight, perhaps 90 feet high, and four thick at the butt. How strong, vital, enduring! how dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It is, yet says nothing. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... joke; that Christianity was not a solemn plaything for one day in the week, but a real, practical, working proposition for every day in the year; that the main support of the structure is industry; that its most vital commandment is this, 'six days shalt thou labor'; that no amount of wealth can excuse a man from this duty. Every one worked. There was no idleness and therefore little poverty. The days were all for labor and the nights for rest. The wheels of progress ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... those who habitually attend seances during life are almost certain to develop a tendency to haunt them after death, and so themselves in turn run the risks into which they have so often brought their predecessors. Besides, it is well known that the vital energy necessary to produce physical manifestations is frequently drawn from the sitters as well as from the medium, and the eventual effect on the latter is invariably evil, as is evinced by the large number of such sensitives who ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... of 15, or between that and 17, having much vital strength, is capable of begetting children; and also that the force of the procreating matter increases till 45, 50, and 55, and then begins to flag; the seed, by degrees, becoming unfruitful, the natural spirits being extinguished, and the humours dried up. Thus, in general, ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... Paine. The "outlaw's" imprisonment in Paris caused jubilations among the English gentry, and went on simultaneously with Jay's negotiations in London, when any expression by Washington of sympathy with Paine (certain of publication) might have imperilled the Treaty, regarded by the President as vital. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Cincinnati. The details are often invented, and the characters are all invented as to their psychological evolution, though some are based upon those of real persons easily identifiable in that narrative. The drama is that of the actual events in its main development; but the vital incidents, or the vital uses of them, are the author's. At times he has enlarged them; at times he has paraphrased the accounts of the witnesses; in one instance he has frankly reproduced the words of the imposter as reported by one who heard Dylks's last address in the Temple at Leatherwood ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... give him air—land and living, life and honour, would I give for the power of undoing these cruel iron platings that suffocate him!" He that would soothe sorrow must not argue on the vanity of the most deceitful hopes. The body lay as that of one whose last draught of vital air had been drawn, and who must never more have concern with the nether sky. But Halbert Glendinning failed not to raise the visor and cast loose the gorget, when, to his great surprise, he recognized ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... know this man Brutus?" asked Tullis, arising to stand beside her. A sub-conscious, triumphant thrill shot through him as an instantaneous flash of his own physical superiority over this girl's husband came over him. He was young and strong and vital. He could feel the sensation of being strong; he tingled with the glory of it. He was thirty-five, Marlanx seventy. He wondered if Marlanx had ever ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... of beauty! 'neath thy sun-ting'd shades, Beside thy lake, crystal in roseate light, Enam'ring music breathes: there, raptur'd maids In dances, with adoring youths unite; There, magic voices sigh in song; and glades With birds and blossoms, all but vital, seem Entranc'd, like ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various
... Heliobas, "how do you define the vital principle? What mysterious agency sets the heart beating and the blood flowing? By the small porter's lantern of to-day's so-called Science, will you fling a light on the dark riddle of an apparently purposeless Universe, and explain to me why ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... system was not in force in the time of Darius and Artaxerxes (when the dead were buried or, as in the case of Croesus, burned) though the ideas were appearing at that period on which it is founded; and it is plain that it has no necessary or vital connection with the religion of Zarathustra. But in later Mazdeism there are many such importations. This religion, in its course from east to west, came in contact with beliefs and usages with which, though ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... nor disagreeable to the mind, but so soon as it takes a distinctive form it becomes either pleasing or displeasing, and is either cast away and forgotten, or retained arid expanded by the Affections, whose office it is to cause Thought to become a vital reality, ready to show itself in the external life so soon as a fitting occasion calls ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... he kept his vow, may partly be seen in his subsequent efforts in recruiting the colored troops at a vital moment in the terrible war of the Rebellion which so swiftly followed the sublime apotheosis of ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... of the Asiatic cholera striding from shore to shore of the Atlantic and marching like Destiny upon cities far remote which flight had already half depopulated. There is no other fear so horrible and unhumanizing as that which makes man dread to breathe heaven's vital air lest it be poison, or to grasp the hand of a brother or friend lest the grip of the pestilence should clutch him. Such was the dismay that now followed in the track of the disease or ran before it throughout the town. Graves were hastily dug and the pestilential relics as hastily covered, because ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... boarded the sealer, the women watching from the shore observed strange contortions seize many of the men; some fell on the deck; some crouched, shaking as with palsy; some writhed for a moment, then fell limp and seemingly boneless; only the two Frenchmen stood erect and strong and vital—the Squamish talisman had already overcome their foes. As the little sealer set sail up the gulf she was commanded by a crew of two Frenchmen—men who had entered these waters as captives, who were leaving them as conquerors. The palsied Russians ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... Dr. Peabody explains—the Jeans board, much of the southern work of the Rockefeller or general educational board and other well-known agencies to this end. And to accomplish the reconciliation of the races and the regions he gave the vital force which finally cost him his life. The future will render this service its due meed of praise, as the writer so well sets forth, a service carried on in the midst ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... must, however, be conceded to the opponents of the physiognomy of handwriting. General rules only can be laid down. Yet the vital principle must be true that the handwriting bears an analogy to the character of the writer, as all voluntary actions ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... caring over much for mixed biscuits, in his sixteenth year, with Dawson's over and done with—"No, Mrs. Trussit, not in the least like," and grimly said in addition, the changes, alterations and general growing-up Development may be said to be inside him rather than out, and there they are vital enough. ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... willing to lower for a fish that moment, as on the day his craft first struck the cruising ground; and Radney the mate was quite as ready to change his berth for a boat, and with his bandaged mouth seek to gag in death the vital jaw ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... formed the vital flaw in the general defence; and it was upon these that Dick turned, charging at the head of his men. So vigorous was the attack that the Lancastrian archers gave ground and staggered, and, at last, breaking their ranks, began to crowd back into the houses from which they had ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... heart is pure and innocent; and the collision between the two separate parts imposed by duty on the one hand, by extreme youth on the other, the one telling her that she is a responsible head of a family and the depository of her husband's honour in its tenderest and most vital interests, the other telling her, through the liveliest language of animal sensibility, and through the very pulses of her blood, that she is herself a child; this collision gives an inexpressible charm to the whole demeanour of many a ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... keep an eye on her, Harry," returned the old detective, after a careful survey. "It looks to me as if she were up to some trick. She wouldn't be watching those inspectors' departure that way unless it was of vital importance to her." ...
— The Bradys and the Girl Smuggler - or, Working for the Custom House • Francis W. Doughty
... reality pursuing this branch are increasing. Fortunately, the "psychology for teachers" and "applied psychology" of a score of years ago are giving way to a kind of educational psychology that is much more vital. Men like Judd and Thorndike are formulating a psychology of the different branches of study and of the teaching processes involved that will enable the teacher to see the connection between the psychological ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... You see, the Jivros are our doctors. Much of the wisdom of our race is in their hands. They are our priests and our administrators. They leave to us only useless occupations which will not allow us to be dangerous. For centuries they have been taking over every vital function of our life. I am allowed to live only so long as I am a willing tool, and foolish enough to wreak their evil will upon my people. It is a part I cannot continue to play. Every instinct of my being shrinks from ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... painting his portrait, designed that which appeared in the woodcut of the author's own third edition of his poem, which has been copied into Mr. Panizzi's. It has all the look of truth of that great artist's vital hand; but, though there is an expression of the, genial character of the mouth, notwithstanding the exuberance of beard, it does not suggest the sweetness observable in one of the medals of Ariosto, a wax impression of which is now before me; nor ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... our life in that winter camp, it remains for me to record the most important occurrence of all. About this time there came into the life of the men of the Battery an experience more deeply impressive, and of more vital consequence to them than anything that had ever happened, or ever could happen in their whole life, as soldiers, and as men. The outward beginning of it was very quiet, and simple. We had built a little log church, ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... consultations with Captain Charlie and his father that Mary was always present. In fact, Mary herself was in a position materially to help John Ward in his study of the industrial problems that were of such vital interest to him. No one knew better than did Pete Martin's daughter the actual living conditions of the class of laboring people who dwelt in the Flats. Certainly, as he watched the progress of ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... persisted. 'Will ye risk your crowns in defence of King James's one, or will ye strike in, hit or miss, with these rogues of Devon and Somerset? Stop my vital breath, if I would not as soon side with the clown as with the crown, with all due respect ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a fleet for every harbor, it would be impossible to depend upon this kind of defense, as the enemy would select whichever harbor he found least prepared to receive him. It would be of vital importance that we defend every harbor of importance, as a neglect to do so would be like locking some of our doors and leaving the others open ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... same. Therefore we, as Jews, must always insist upon the maintenance of the pure monotheistic idea for which we suffered and struggled, and for which our fathers died. We must maintain this as the mainstay and vital principle of Judaism. For this very reason, and for no other, we insist, especially from the point of view of a Jewish theological college, that this idea of a pure Jewish religion, the pure monotheistic idea, must be held unshakenly and without any change or any ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... Balzac. The hero becomes possessed of a magical wild ass's skin, which yields him the means of gratifying every wish; but for every wish thus gratified, the skin shrank somewhat, and at last vanished, having been wished entirely away. Life is a peau d'ane,[TN-74] for every vital act diminishes its force, and when all its force is ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... outlook crude and raw. They abandon vital matters to be tickled with a straw, But the straw that they were tickled with—the chaff that they were fed with— They convert into a weaver's beam to ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... sure great ally on the Continent;[12114] that to obtain this he must conciliate Austria; that he must not drive her to despair, but rather win her over and compensate her on the side of the Orient; place her in permanent conflict with Russia, and attach her to the new French Empire by a community of vital interests. In vain does he, after Tilsit, make a bargain of this kind with Russia. This bargain cannot hold, because in this arrangement Napoleon, as usual with him, always encroaching, threatening, and attacking, wants to reduce Alexander to the role of a subordinate and a dupe.[12115] No clear-sighted ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... as the hurricane of shot and shell struck her, but she received no injury to her vital parts, and was checked not a moment in her headlong course. Frobisher had given orders that his fire was to be reserved until he himself gave the word, and he now watched for that moment as a ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... shuddered at this foreign marking out of hours. A melancholy, intense as had been his former ecstacy, began to enfold his spirit. Perhaps he had waited too long for the simple breakfast; perhaps the recent glory had drained him of vital force. A hopelessness, alike of life and death, rose ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... with spirited scenes and stirring adventures, and the boy who reads it attentively will acquire a sound knowledge on subjects that are of vital importance ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... of vital interest to the actors, and it is to be noted that the theatrical hairdressers have of late years devoted much study to this branch of their industry. The light comedian still indulges sometimes in curls of an unnatural flaxen, and the comic countryman is too often allowed ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... place associated with his person in order to remember him; she always felt near him, and memories were the vital air which nourished her soul. Music remained the best ornament of her solitary existence, and never did the forms of the son and the father come nearer to her than when she sang the songs—or in after years ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and the events were marshalled in orderly and logical sequence. But I thought I detected a lack of living substance—it was much as if I gazed at a symmetrical array of presentable clamshells from which the succulent and vital inhabitants had been removed. I intimated that the author might do well to get ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... state in those (11) places (8) natural inattention and ignorance which have borrowed no light of the masses, but also the from (5) it; particularly (19) the doubtful language held even by a doubtfulness of some of the (12) Socrates on even so vital a greatest men concerning things of subject as[36] the immortality of the utmost (11) importance, as the soul; and then can he in well as the (15 a) natural seriousness and sincerity maintain inattention and ignorance ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... a lying owd devil, and so he is; but I didn't knaw onybody could yeer me." In this way the enemy assailed him on his way home from his pious work, grudging him the peace of mind which a good man has in the service of his Master. Satan would not raise any vital point of faith or duty with Abe, because he knew he would be beaten, and Abe would be blest, and would rise high on the wings of his faith out of the devil's reach; but he could spring a snare upon the good man about his pocket-handkerchief, and gradually ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... tormented him. Miasmatic moments that come to firm men also, and make them dizzy with the thought of the mere waywardness of life. Had he been any better or wiser than Roper Ellwell? When the test of a vital passion had come he had acted like any other inconsiderate, purposeless young man, like any one with a chaotic ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting slavery throughout the United States had passed the Senate on April 8, 1864, but had failed of the necessary two-thirds vote in the House. The two most vital thoughts which animated the Baltimore convention when it met in June had been the renomination of Mr. Lincoln and the success of this constitutional amendment. The first was recognized as a popular decision needing only the formality of an announcement ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... is gone An angel passeth hence! See, how she lies, Easy and tranquil, like a sleeping child! The peace of heaven around her features plays, The breath of life no longer heaves her breast, But vital warmth still ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... growth. It is a most meritorious organization. Language will not express the extent of its benefits to humanity and to civilization. It adds to the comfort of untold thousands of happy homes. It furnishes employment for thousands of people. It furnishes food of vital importance to many families. It is the main stay in the manufacture of all kinds and grades of furniture. It furnishes food for thought. It keeps the scientific and investigating minds busy in the constant development ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... has been remarked that States' Rights, as a political principle, cannot be placed on the same plane as those with which it is here grouped. History, however, proves conclusively that, although it may be less vital to the common weal, the right of self-government is just as deeply cherished. A people that has once enjoyed independence can seldom be brought to admit that a Union with others deprives it of the prerogatives of sovereignty, and it ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... and even in those sections of the more recent which embrace acknowledged rarities, is instantaneously felt. In some branches of collecting, and where the prices of commodities are such as to exclude all but a knot of wealthy amateurs, the entrance of a new-comer on the ground makes a vital difference, especially if the market is in need of support from existing wants having been supplied; and if one goes about a little, one hears men whispering in corners and questioning who the stranger is, and for what he ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... trembling with eagerness. I wondered if my shot would tell. I tried to visualize its consequences. It might strike some vital spot. It might kill some man whose life was of the utmost value to the enemy. It might—it might do anything! And I knew that my shot would be watched; Normabell, sitting up there on the Pimple in his little observatory, ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... it seems to me a question of immediate, vital, decisive interest. It certainly determined the national action of France, Great Britain, and Italy. They did not believe that Germany and Austria were acting in self-defense. If that had been the case, Italy at ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... presented new obstacles in its doubtful rainfall and its experimental farmers. It contained as well the conditions that had always prevailed along the edge of settlement. Transportation was vital to its life,—as vital as it had been in the Granger States,—yet was nearly as unregulated. The Interstate Commerce Law of 1887 had little noticeable immediate effect. Discrimination, unreasonable rates, ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... "I can well understand your feeling in the matter, Miss Sinclair, and I have nothing of reproach. I do think you are making a mistake. With Vil Holland knowing what he does of your father's operations, time may be a vital factor in the success of your undertaking. Let me caution you again against carrying the ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... very differently worked. They were in general shaped somewhat like a breast plate; and, being suspended from the necks of the possessors, led him, previous to his first interview with them, to suppose they were some kind of defence for the more vital parts. There was no doubt but that they were provided with nets for catching very large fish, or animals, as the fragments of a rotten one lying on the shore were picked up, the meshes of which were wide enough to admit the escape of a moderate sized porpoise; and the ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... the navy, here as in the upper Mississippi, was in the maintenance of the communications, which were wholly by the river, as well as in assuring the safety of New Orleans, then stripped of all the troops that could be spared. The danger of two points like Vicksburg and Port Hudson, both of such vital importance, and both being besieged at the same time, aroused every latent energy of the Confederacy, and set in motion every armed man of whom it could dispose. To divert and distract the attention of the Union generals, to induce them to abandon ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... and picked up the little boy, who, although fearfully bitten about the leg, was still alive. It had not before uttered a sound, but now it began to cry as it saw the blood streaming from the wounded limb. As far as I could judge, no vital part had been touched, and I told Aboh to say to the mother, that if she would let us doctor it we would do so, as I had hopes of its recovery. Having washed it then and there in cold water, we stopped the blood, bound up the wounds, and gave it ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... But, vital as they are to its success, the, telephone art requires more than engineers and scientists. So we find that in the building and operation and maintenance of that vast continental telephone system which bears ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... the Square, which was also explained to you; on entering it now, you are received on the two extreme points of the Compass pressing your naked right and left breasts, which are thus explained: As the most vital points of man are contained between the two breasts, so are the most valuable tenets of Masonry contained between the two extreme points of the Compass, which are 'Virtue, Morality, and Brotherly Love.'" The Senior Deacon ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... principle of death; The young disease that must subdue at length, Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength: So, cast and mingled with his very frame, The mind's disease, its ruling passion came; Each vital humour which should feed the whole, Soon flows to this, in body and in soul: Whatever warms the heart, or fills the head, As the mind opens, and its functions spread, Imagination plies her dangerous art, And pours it all upon the peccant part. Nature ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... scarcely a scratch upon it. Therefore, if you are playing in an important match with a ball that has already been used at a large number of holes, it may be advisable to put down a new one when long work with the driver and brassy is a vital necessity. A close watch for loss of shape should also be kept on these rubber-cored balls. They vary very much in this respect, and not only is it impossible to putt well with a ball that is not perfectly round, but it never flies so well as one ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... wherewith I may purchase the chemical elements necessary to build up my ever-wasting tissues, and keep a roof over me to shelter me from the inclemency of the weather. I thus have no thought to expend upon the vital questions which surround me on every side. Yet, miserable entity as I am, I can still at times feel some degree of happiness, and am even—save the mark!—puffed up occasionally with a sense of my ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to correct the excitation caused by the active principles of coffee, and therefore it suits sanguineo-bilious subjects who suffer from habitual tonic constipation. But it is ill adapted for persons whose vital energy soon flags; and for lymphatic, or bloodless people its use should ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... plenty of time on his hands and an abundant inclination to talk. Yes, there was something. Mr. Sefton, so he heard, meant to make the matter one of vital importance, and the higher officers of the Government were content to leave it to him, confident of his ability and pertinacity and glad enough to be ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... at the eager, flushed face. He knew and I did, too, that there was something back of this request. But it couldn't be anything of vital importance to ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... I waited an hour in the Vital Statistics Bureau while the chief smoked cigars with Alf Symmes, that ward heeler. I had sent in our firm card, and the chief held it in his hand and flipped it and smoked and sat where he could look ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... experience at times, and so draws no demagnetising nervous uncertain currents. If it were not for an insatiable extravagance, and a capricious fancy for different jewels, she would be impossible to deal with. She has information, obtained from what source I do not as yet know, which is of vital importance to me. Were it not for that, one could simply enjoy her as a mistress and take ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... retreat? And hither haste, a surer death to meet? Why didst thou leave thy damp, infected cell? If that was purgatory, this is hell. We too, grown weary of that horrid shade, Petitioned early for the Doctor's aid; His aid denied, more deadly symptoms came, Weak and yet weaker, glowed the vital flame; And when disease had worn us down so low That few could tell if we were ghosts or no, And all asserted death would be our fate, Then to the Doctor we were ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... twenty-four hours, however, the amount of comfort was small, as in the way of protection and covering we only had what blankets, rain-coats, and hammocks we took from the dead Spaniards. Ammunition, which was, of course, the most vital need, was brought up in abundance; but very little food reached us. That afternoon we had just enough to allow each man for his supper two hardtacks, and one hardtack ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... old and rickety trade-musket, and, when lead is wanting, he loads it with a bit of tile: as many gorillas are killed with tools which would hardly bring down a wild cat, it is evident that their vital power cannot be great. He owned to preferring a charge of twenty buckshot to a single ball, and he received with joy a little fine gunpowder, which he compared complimentarily with the blasting article, half charcoal withal, ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... now got rid of Mr. Huntingdon for a season, my spirits begin to revive. He left me early in February; and the moment he was gone, I breathed again, and felt my vital energy return; not with the hope of escape—he has taken care to leave me no visible chance of that—but with a determination to make the best of existing circumstances. Here was Arthur left to me at last; and rousing ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... few sentences of a pious book deepened the impression. He became a converted man, and joined himself to a handful of earnest Christians in Bedford, who becoming, in the language of the day, "a church," he was appointed its first minister. Gifford exercised a deep and vital though narrow influence, leaving behind him at his death, in 1655, the character of a "wise, tolerant, and truly Christian man." The conversation of the poor women who were destined to exercise so momentous an influence on Bunyan's ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... lower; would that we could speak with authority on this as on many another point! But many instruments have had wood taken from them by vampires and faddists, and we can not speak with authority as to the vital points of scores of these noble efforts of art, therefore better not lay down laws or adduce supposed facts regarding them, but do our utmost to build up something as noble, and each one of us leave art no worse than he found it, casting reproach and scorn on the utterly indifferent, ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... had no intention of entering into debate or controversy with anyone. Now, as he viewed the matter, he was surprised to find the role that he was playing. On the first night, he had only intended to stand up for and express his convictions toward a very vital subject—that of living above sin. He had been a sinner, he had now become soundly converted, had received light on sanctification (though he was not yet sanctified) and holy living, and his only object had been to be loyal to the truth he had found. As it looked to him now, he ...
— Around Old Bethany • Robert Lee Berry
... vivid and notable work. "The poetry of Robert Browning," says Pater, "is pre-eminently the poetry of situations." He selects a character, no matter how uninteresting in itself, and places it in some situation where its vital essence may become apparent, in some crisis of conflict or opportunity. The choice of good or evil is open to it, and in perhaps a single moment its fate will be decided. When a soul plays dice with the devil there is only a second in which to win or lose; but the ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... of popular opinion and of government opposition that Ferdinand Foch took up his work in the Superior School of War—that work which was to make possible the first victory of the Marne, to save England from invasion by holding Calais, and to do various other things vital to civilization, including the prodigious achievements of the days that have ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... to deal with the more vital questions," Cornish continued, looking straight at Von Holzen. "I want details of the new process—the prescription, ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... beautiful experiments have conclusively demonstrated that fowls do not catch the charbon; now the vital warmth of birds is from seven to nine degrees higher than in the case of mammiferous animals; he imagined that if the fowl was cooled down by baths to the lower temperature, it would be liable equally to become affected; he tried, and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... made an advance in the definition of Force, and have come to consider Force as a kind of energy; the application of Force being the application of energy. Such terms as Mechanical Force, Chemical Force, Vital Force, are therefore out of date, and in their place the more definite ideas of energy are substituted. Instead, therefore, of getting such terms as Transformation of Forces, we now get Transformations of Energy. In the chapter ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... to within about thirty yards of the two animals, who were moving about now on one side and now on the other with the greatest rapidity, so that it would not be very easy, I knew, to hit a vital part. ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... be pedantic indeed to have devoted so many words to a mere matter of name. If a drama is good it signifies but little what we call it, or whether its title be exactly appropriate. In this case, however, we have to do with a vital defect and not merely with a misnomer. A play may be good in different ways; and what the preceding criticism is intended to bring out is the fact that the strength of 'Fiesco', such as it has, does not lie in the intellectual organization of the whole. The mind ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... European enemies some places in the Mediterranean and in the Gulf of Mexico. But the terms which she obtained were quite as advantageous and honourable as the events of the war entitled her to expect, or as she was likely to obtain by persevering in a contest against immense odds. All her vital parts, all the real sources of her power, remained uninjured. She preserved even her dignity: for she ceded to the House of Bourbon only part of what she had won from that House in previous wars. She retained her Indian ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... negro's progress, an obscure fear of the very equality so contemptuously denied, furnished a rich soil for successful agitation. Statistics of crime, ingeniously manipulated, were made to present a fearful showing against the negro. Vital statistics were made to prove that he had degenerated from an imaginary standard of physical excellence which had existed under the benign influence of slavery. Constant lynchings emphasized his impotence, and bred everywhere a growing contempt ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... day. The scene with Beauclerk was a great strain. I feel a kind of apprehensiveness and terror—yes, terror, which I cannot describe. It may be my nerves, it may be fancy. But I am too conscious of being alive. Every minute seems vital. Every sound is acute. This day has been one long over-emphasis. Look at my hand: how it trembles! Beauclerk called me a witch. Certainly, I am more sensitive to ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... began to be sensibly awakened, followed by self-pity, and some further form of what we understand as consciousness. If partially a degradation of her nature, this saved her mind from true despair when it began to stir after the vital shock that had brought her to earth. "To what purpose should I be fair?" was a question that did not yet come to her; but it was sweet to see Merthyr's eyes gather pleasure from the light of her own. Sweet, though nothing more than coldly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... provision in its effect upon social equality, he would fail to find it. But he would find it in the unwritten law of the natural aversion of the races. He would find it in public opinion, which is the vital force in every law in a free government. This is a subject that our Constitution failed to regulate, because it was not contemplated by its authors. It is a question that will settle itself, without serious difficulty. ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... the sense here indicated, is the mainspring and vital principle of Tragedy. The efforts of Aeschylus and Sophocles were sustained by it, and its inevitable decay through the scepticism which preceded Socrates was the chief hindrance to the tragic genius of Euripides. Yet the inequality of which we have ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... repress a smile at this torrent of eloquence gushing from such a bit of a fellow, which sounded specially out of place here, where the ryots are given to stating their profoundly vital wants in plain and direct vernacular, of which even the more unusual words get sadly twisted out of shape. The clerks and ryots, however, seemed duly impressed, and likewise envious, as though deploring their parents' omission to endow them with ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and Kurtz's life was running swiftly too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time. The manager was very placid, he had no vital anxieties now, he took us both in with a comprehensive and satisfied glance: the 'affair' had come off as well as could be wished. I saw the time approaching when I would be left alone of the party of 'unsound method.' The pilgrims ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... intolerant critics than the little ones, and if they inherit the tendency to insincerity the only way in which you can avert the much-to-be dreaded sin is by being absolutely truthful yourself. Cultivate veracity as a virtue, as a grace, as a vital necessity for the integrity of the soul. Prune excrescences in the shape of loose statements; if you err in telling a wonderful story, let it be in cutting down rather than in magnifying. A couple of ciphers less are better than one too many. It is to be feared that for many ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... colonization is, indeed, one of vital importance, and demands much consideration, for it is the wholesome channel through which the superfluous population of England and Ireland passes, from a state of poverty to one of comfort. It is true that the independence of the Canadian settler must be the fruit of his own labour, for ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... takes a distinctive form it becomes either pleasing or displeasing, and is either cast away and forgotten, or retained arid expanded by the Affections, whose office it is to cause Thought to become a vital reality, ready to show itself in the external life so soon as a fitting occasion ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... but to wait. As for Clara's secret, the more he thought about it, the more persuaded he was that it was not connected with Rieseneck, but with some other person. He grew anxious, however, as he watched her, for it was now clear that unless something occurred to revive her vital energy and her spirits, she must soon become an invalid altogether, even if she did not die of her sufferings. More than once, Greifenstein proposed to go away, to travel, to spend the winter in a southern climate, but she refused to leave her home, with a firmness ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... executed in the most simple and least cruel way, they seldom occur. Slaves who have murdered their masters, were executed with the most horrible barbarity by being impaled. An iron was passed down their backs, so as not to touch any vital part, and by it they were suspended, one end of the iron rod being fixed in a post ten feet from the ground. If the weather is dry, they may live on many days in that horrid position; but if water enters the wound, mortification ensues, and they ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the Liberal Party, the Times says:—"Sir WILLIAM is the strongest stimulant known to the Gladstonian wire-pullers, and his appearance is always an indication that the vital energies of the patient are low. It is well understood that his proper place is by his own fireside, and that his true function is to evolve epigrams and construct original systems of finance in that calm retreat.... But whenever they feel particularly downcast ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... compelled by the new philosophy to use new methods in presenting to the world the results of their midnight research. Such work as Cardan undertook in the composition of his moral essays, and in the Commentary on Hippocrates put no heavy tax on the brain or the vital energies; the Commentary was of portentous length, but it was not much more than a paraphrase with his own experiences added thereto. Mathematics were his pastime, to judge by the ease and rapidity with which he ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... and cement buildings opposite each other. Old and new cars on grease-blackened concrete floors. Tire advertisements. The roaring of a tested motor; a racket which beat at the nerves. Surly young men in khaki union-overalls. The most energetic and vital places in town. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... iron, but much of stone, like to yellow soft flint spa, shaped like a barbed arrowhead, but flung like a dart, with great force. These arms (cut by art and tools, it seems, beyond human) have somewhat of the nature of thunderbolt subtlety, and mortally wounding the vital parts without breaking the skin; of which wounds I have observed in beasts, and felt them with my hands. They are not as infallible Benjamites, hitting at a hair's-breadth; nor are they wholly unvanquishable, ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... indisposed—so much so, that his physician had to be called in during the day. He found him with a good deal of fever, and deemed it necessary to resort to depletion, as well as to the application of other remedies to allay the over-action of his vital system. These prostrated him at once—so much so, that he was unable to sit up. Before night he was so seriously ill that the physician had to be sent for again. The fever had returned with great violence, and the pressure on his brain ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... conduct of the Chinese war, his vigorous protest against the Conspiracy Bill, and his frank sympathy with Mazzini's dream of a United Italy, helped to bring the old leader, in the long fight for civil and religious liberty, into vital touch with younger men of the stamp of Cobden, Bright, and Gladstone, of whom the people justly expected great things in the not distant future. Lord John knew, however, that the Liberal camp was full of politicians who ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... back, feebly, to the heart; the lungs drew in the vital air, and the circle of life was restored. When the physician arrived, nature had done all for her that could be done. The sickness of her spirit was beyond the reach of ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... with a thrill of energy which penetrated Craven in a peculiar and fascinating way. He felt almost as if she sent a vital fluid through his veins. ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... curious method practised for the cure of certain diseases. The cure may be effected by impregnating a proper medium or vehicle with some of the mumia or vital spirit of the patient, and giving it to an inferior animal to swallow. It is pretended that the animal unites and assimilates the mumia with itself, and imbibes its vicious qualities, and by that means restores health to the person to ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... employment of excessive, or irrelevant, or trivial or grotesque detail, the besetting sin of the Classics is so complete an omission of realistic detail that the description becomes inflated, windy and empty, and the strongest words in the language lose their vital force because they are set fluttering hither and thither in multitudes, with no substantial hold upon reality. There is nothing that dies sooner than an emotion when it is cut off from the stock on which it grows. The descriptive epithet ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... kings reign only for their subjects' weal; May the divine Saraswati[131], the source Of speech, and goddess of dramatic art, Be ever honoured by the great and wise; And may the purple self-existent god[132], Whose vital Energy[133] pervades all space, From future ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... that word his speech faille began. For from his feet up to his brest was come The cold of death, which had him overnome. And yet moreover in his armes two, The vital strength is lost, and all ago. Only the intellect, withouten more, That dwelled in his herte sike and sore, Gan faillen, whan the herte felte deth; Dusked his eyen two, and failled his breth. But on his ladie yet cast ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... leave the faint, vital spark to smoulder down or leap out. The moor was very unfrequented at this hour; at certain periods of the day, portions of it, intersected by meandering tracks, were crossed by men labouring in the adjacent ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... known when to stop. The worst part of the enterprise was before him: the business—clearly of such vital importance to him, for whatever reason—of shutting himself in Manderson's room and preparing a body of convincing evidence of its having been occupied by Manderson; and this with the risk—very slight, as no doubt he understood, but how unnerving!—of the woman on the ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... true with other programs that are making and breaking new ground. Some do not yet have the capacity to absorb well or wisely all the money that could be put into them. Administrative skills and trained manpower are just as vital to their success as dollars. And I believe those skills will come. But it will take time and patience and hard work. Success cannot be forced at a single stroke. So we must continue to strengthen the administration ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... with little hair on his face, and fat in person, who had in his breasts milk enough to suckle a child. He was a soldier, and this strange property caused him no slight inconvenience. Sages, he affirms, on account of their studious lives, are little prone to sexual passion. With them the vital power is carried from the heart to a region remote from the genitals, i.e. to the brain, and for this reason such men as a rule beget children weak and unlike themselves. Diet has a valid effect on character, as the Germans, who subsist chiefly on the milk of ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... protract the hopeless struggle, and these sturdy troops also fell back, retiring slowly and firmly, while the rebels, flushed with victory, were pouring into front and flank the most deadly fire. It was a moment of vital importance to our army and our cause. A rout of these two corps, while the remaining two-thirds of the army was separated in columns far distant from each other, must insure the destruction of each column in ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... train, so that they could not batter down the chateau over his head. What his ultimate fate would be he could not tell. Could he hold that castle indefinitely? If not, what? How he was to get away and reach Napoleon with his vital news he could not see. There must be some way, however. Well, whatever was to be would be, and meanwhile he could only wait developments ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... numb from the needle puncture. In all except the most vital areas, those slim missiles would not usually cause death, or even serious injury; but soon the wound would ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... man to have made a few inquiries as to whether Spatola used a violin case or no. If he had done so, I am inclined to think that the answers would have been in the affirmative. But there is another and more vital point upon which I would base an objection to the reporter's theory. He says that, goaded into a rage, Spatola struck his tormentor down. But he forgets that If the murderer did not visit Hume's with the intention of doing murder, it was rather a freakish thing for him to ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... facts. Let it suffice to say that the same causes made the Arabs victorious over the Byzantine emperor and the Persian Shah-in-Shah, and that these causes were the weakness and exhaustion of the national dynasties in the presence of the vital elements of the conquerors. The people suffered from the carelessness of their kings; individual energy was powerless against the invasion of disciplined and fanatical tribes, commanded by generals like Omar ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... been exhausted by powerful emotions often have a vast amount of the vital fluid at their service. This phenomenon of the extreme clearness of the eye in moments of anger was the more marked in Mademoiselle Rogron because she had often exercised the power of her eyes in her shop by opening them to ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... cells and tissues, which only divine, harmonious, and wholesome thought can build up. Is it surprising that no one is perfectly healthy? If man were not linked to God, and unconsciously receiving an inflow of recuperative vital force, the multitudinous destroyers would soon disintegrate his physical organism. Can the building forces be strengthened, stimulated, and made more harmonious and divine? Yes, through mind. The mind surely but ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... the fact of each individual being so frequently under the influence of medicine. Poor Charley was victimized almost every week; and, instead of being a fresh, hearty boy, began to show a pale, thin face, and every indication of a weakened vital action. This appearance only increased the evil, for both parents, growing more anxious in consequence, were more urgent to have him placed under treatment. Dr. Elton sometimes remonstrated with them, but to no purpose; and yielding to their ignorance and their anxiety, became a ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... doubtless equally hard in a more vulgar sphere, but his defences were shattered: in that night of visitation his heart was rent as well as his prison, and over the openings, while they were fresh, the skilful sower promptly dropped the vital seed, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." The word entered, and ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... on "stolen time," to use the phrase of Macaulay, and therefore vital, for things done because you have to do them—done to get rid of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... we were all doing, lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes. It seemed to me too preposterous that in my first view of the horror of East London I should have recalled De Quincey's literary description of the literary suggestion which ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... when he had seen that Morgan really intended to kill him, he had been convinced that the man was in deadly earnest. It had been then that he had desperately twisted himself so that Morgan's bullet had not touched a vital spot. ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... open earth Her mouth, and hide me in her deepest gulfs! But him, the hero of the golden locks 215 Thus cheer'd. My brother, fear not, nor infect With fear the Grecians; the sharp-pointed reed Hath touch'd no vital part. The broider'd zone, The hauberk, and the tough interior quilt, Work of the armorer, its force repress'd. 220 Him answer'd Agamemnon, King of men. So be it brother! but the hand of one Skilful to heal shall visit and shall dress The wound with drugs of pain-assuaging power. He ended, and ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... do you define the vital principle? What mysterious agency sets the heart beating and the blood flowing? By the small porter's lantern of to-day's so-called Science, will you fling a light on the dark riddle of an apparently purposeless Universe, and explain ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... contrary, the normal, decorous, and amiable are the realm of our longing, and these are life in its seductive banality. That man is far from being an artist, my dear, whose ultimate and deepest passion is the exquisite, eccentric, and satanic, who knows no yearning for the innocent, simple, and vital, for a little friendship, devotion, familiarity, and human happiness—the furtive and consuming yearning, Lisaveta, for the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... opportunities, and freedom from the preoccupations of bread-winning, what are we to expect from the parliament man to whom political science is as remote and distasteful as the differential calculus, and to whom such an elementary but vital point as the law of economic rent is a pons asinorum never to be approached, much less crossed? Or from the common voter who is mostly so hard at work all day earning a living that he cannot keep awake for five minutes over ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... the extreme variability of secondary sexual characters—such as the horns, crests, plumes, etc., which are found in males only,—the reason being, that, although of some use, they are not of such direct and vital importance as those adaptive characters on which the wellbeing and very existence of the animals depend. But in the case of wholly useless structures, which are not rudiments of once useful organs, we cannot see what there is to ensure any amount of constancy or stability. ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... government was despised, in Denmark people did not, and would not, know it. In the Danish paper with the widest circulation, the Daily Paper, foreign affairs were dealt with by a man of the name of Prahl, a wildly enthusiastic admirer of the Empire, a pleasant man and a brainy, but who, on this vital point, seemed to have blinkers on. From all his numerous foreign papers, he deduced only the opinions that he held before, and his opinions were solely influenced by his wishes. He had never had any opportunity of procuring information at first hand. He said ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... melody, its passages of rare beauty,—all these speak of a true poet who has not yet quite found himself or his subject. A third volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems (1820), is in every sense a fulfillment, for it contains a large proportion of excellent poetry, fresh, vital, melodious, which improves with years, and which carries on its face the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... sacred duty to the children whom God has given you, to keep aloof as much as possible from all those points on which Christians differ, and make your children feel from their earliest years that there are points, and those the great, vital root points, on which all more or less agree, which many members of the Romish Church have held, and, I doubt not, now hold, as firmly as Protestants,—adoption by one common Father, justification by the blood of one common Saviour, sanctification ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... which I have been gathering material—in nearly all the countries mentioned—have assisted me in my work. But I must make special mention of the very careful reading of the whole manuscript by Mr. J. G. Phelps Stokes, and of the numerous and vital changes made at ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... in the very beginning of their friendship, however, and so vital a subject could not remain, outside the relations which established themselves more and more intimately between them as the days went on. Janet began to find herself constantly in the presence of a temptation to bring the matter home to Elfrida ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... ago he would have considered the situation in which he now found himself a future development out of the question. Mojave had brimmed with optimism and pride and accomplishment and eagerness. Base Mojave loomed vital in national defense, constituted a main element ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... Two Cities." It may be a picture of vivid local colouring, like "Ivanhoe," or "Lorna Doone," or "Dr Antonio." It may be full of social hints and glimpses, with many a covert wise suggestion, like Miss Austin's "Emma." It may shew up a vital truth or a life-long mistake, like Miss Edgeworth's "Helen," or open out new natural scenes like the "Adventures of a Phaeton"; or life scenes, like "Oliver Twist"; or be so full of frolic and fun and sharp common sense, that the mere laughter of ...
— Tired Church Members • Anne Warner
... politics and morals, where the need for common action makes necessary some sort of consensus among the members of a group, very little can be said for it in aesthetics, where no practical issues are directly involved. There, herd instinct simply substitutes sham appreciation for a vital and healthy reaction. Of course, imitative judgments must be distinguished from those that agree because they are based on a genuine contagion or community of feeling. This distinction may be a difficult one for the outsider to make; ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... his maxims theoretically. We must study everything that surrounds, alters, and determines him, for it is at this point that a man's environments and relationships most influence him. As Grohmann said, half a century ago, "If you could find an elixir, which could cause the vital organs to work otherwise, if you could alter the somatic functions of the body, you would be the master of the will.'' Therefore it is never superfluous to study the individual's environmental conditions, surroundings, all his outer influences. That the effort required in such a study is great, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... honored its history. To him the party of Jefferson and Jackson was inseparably linked with all that made the American Commonwealth the greatest of democracies. Yet where men are acutely conscious of vital differences of opinion, only the hourly practice of self-control can prevent clashing. Neither Douglas nor his opponents were prepared to undergo ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... five boy babies born to every one hundred girls. The law holds in every land where vital statistics have been kept; and Sairey Gamp knew just as much about the cause why as Brown-Sequard, Pasteur, Agnew ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... these obey; and let the learn'd prescribe; That men may die, without a double bribe: Let them, but under their superiors, kill; When doctors first have sign'd the bloody bill; He 'scapes the best, who, nature to repair, Draws physic from the fields, in draughts of vital air. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... aesthetics, and afterwards of ethics at Geneva, who is known to the outside world solely by the publication of selections from his Journal in 1882-84, which teems with suggestive thoughts bearing on the great vital issues of the day, and which has been translated into English by ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... afford to carry passengers and have them live under our government with no real vital interest in its perpetuity. Every man ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... numberless great sea-fights which you have fought how few you have lost, how many you have won. It is only rational, then, that your allies should much prefer to share this particular risk with you. Indeed, to show you how natural and vital to you is this maritime study, the following reflection may serve. For several years the Lacedaemonians, when at war with you in old days, dominated your territory, but they made no progress towards destroying you. At last God granted them ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... God, that were hungering and thirsting for the truth. He firmly declared that Christians should receive no other doctrines than those which rest on the authority of the Sacred Scriptures. These words struck at the very foundation of papal supremacy. They contained the vital principle ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... literally flew into mist as a half-kilogram shell tore through his armor and exploded. Costigan shut off his beam, and, with not the slightest softening of one hard lineament, stared around the air-room; making sure that no serious damage had been done to the vital machinery of the air-purifier—the very lungs of the ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... was the living reality and Michael, her lover, and her own love were the things that mattered, the woman in the hut the one brilliant vision. Life was vital, urgent. A gnat's life would be long enough if it was to be passed with the woman whom she knew, in the coming struggle, would fight with tools which she, Meg, would not dare or deign to touch. As vivid as her vision of the tomb ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... his address by declaring the need of college spirit in college life. He defined it as the vital thing, the heart of a great educational institution, and he went on to speak of its dangers, its fluctuations. Then he made direct reference to athletics in its relation to both college spirit ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... demands the supplies, is agreeable to the people. But yet an unlimited and continued expense will in the end be destructive. What matters it whether a State is mortally wounded by the hand of a foreign enemy, or dies by a consumption of its own vital strength? Such a consumption will come upon Holland sooner than upon England, because the latter has a greater radical force; but, great as it is, that force at last will be so diminished and exhausted by perpetual drains, that it may fail all at once, ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... Catholic orthodoxy and Arianism was, at that time, a vital question for Christianity in its entirety, and St. Athanasius was not wrong in attributing to it supreme importance. It may be presumed that the Catholic clergy, the bishop of Rheims, or the bishop of Langres, were no strangers to the repeated praises which turned the thoughts of the Frankish ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the place they whispered and schemed and plotted. Pardeau prowled the aisles, his eyes piercing the darkness—spotting them, cataloguing them. And thus he came upon Emil Hillerman, his Deputy of Vital Intelligence sitting dutifully in the end seat of a middle aisle. Hillerman's thick lips hung lax, his eyes squinted laboriously as he sought to follow the thread ...
— The Clean and Wholesome Land • Ralph Sholto
... that sheet go by itself. Alas! the question with me is not which of them is right, but whether I am right,—and that in something far more vital than opinion. It does seem as if one who has lived as long as I have, ought to have overcome all his spiritual foes; but I do not find it so. I feel sometimes as if I were only struggling harder and harder with all the trying questions, both speculative ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... know the sort of entertainments you mean. But please do not beg a vital question by calling them plays. I dont pretend to be an authority; but I have at least established the fact that these productions, whatever else they may be, are ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... however, be conceded to the opponents of the physiognomy of handwriting. General rules only can be laid down. Yet the vital principle must be true that the handwriting bears an analogy to the character of the writer, as all voluntary actions are characteristic of ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... assigned for the phenomenal ill-luck of the theater, but undoubtedly the vital objection to it as a Temple of Drama lay in the fact that nobody could ever find the place where it was hidden. Cabmen shook their heads on the rare occasions when they were asked to take a fare there. Explorers to whom a stroll through the Australian bush was child's-play, ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... those physical states that have practically nothing to do directly with the nervous system at all. Take a broken leg. Of course the cure of a broken leg is affected by the state of the nervous system, since it depends upon the amount of vital energy, the state of the blood, and so on. But there are distinct processes of change of tissue that are bound to take a certain fixed period. You may—as has been proved over and over again in the mental laboratories—hasten and direct the action of the nervous energy, ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... did you ever read some stately bit of prose, which caught in its glamour of splendid words the vital, throbbing world of affairs and passions, some crystallization of a rich experience, and then by chance turn to the "newsy" column of an American newspaper? (Forsooth, these must be literary letters!) Well, that tells the sensations of going from Europe to Wabash. ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... but I think I can pull them both round. Nothing vital, you see, touched, and these Mauser bullets ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... concomitantly with the increase of national prosperity. Temporary poverty is the real explanation of the apparent temporary decline of Buddhism. But an era of great wealth is beginning. Some outward forms of Buddhism must perish; some superstitions of Shinto must die. The vital truths and recognitions will expand, strengthen, take only deeper root in the heart of the race, and potently prepare it for the trials of that larger and harsher life upon which ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... show that oyster-shells are formed by the agency of oysters, and in no other way. And if there were no better reasons, we should be justified, on like grounds, in believing that Globigerina is not the product of anything but vital activity. ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... say, the influence is from the very start of that high sort in which he that takes becomes co-thinker with him that gives, Shakspere's absorption of Montaigne being as vital as Montaigne's own assimilation of the thought of his classics. The process is one not of surface reflection, but of kindling by contact; and we seem to see even the vibration of the style passing from one intelligence to the other; the nervous and copious speech of Montaigne awakening Shakspere ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... however, in your case, a wilful sin; you still mourn bitterly over the shame to yourself and the annoyance to others caused by the indulgence of your ill-temper. You are also painfully alive to the doubts which your conduct excites in the mind of your more worldly associates as to the reality of a vital and transforming efficacy in religion. You feel that you are not only disobeying God yourself, but that you are providing others with excuses for disobeying him, and with examples of disobedience. You mourn over these considerations in bitterness of heart; ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... "citadel," inside which her ten 18-ton and 12-ton guns were well protected. In this way her guns, waterline, and engines—or "vitals," as these are known for short—were fully protected at the expense of less vital parts of the ship. Though smaller and less expensive than the Minotaur she was a far more efficient ship. Her broadside was 1818 pounds. The Sultan, another ship of much the same type, had a broadside of 1964 pounds. During the early sixties another type of vessel ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... of undergoing a change of essential nature; and had in connexion therewith clearly set forth wherein the essential nature of the soul consists. They now proceed to elucidate the question as to the origination of the instruments of the individual soul, viz. the organs and the vital breath. ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... no petty curiosity, but a grand indifference, a statuesque calm, a goddess-like withdrawal from the affairs and atmosphere of common mortals. Indeed it is not she who will ask for details that any other woman would burn to know: a single question as to the vital point, and then "what else have you to tell me?" The rest might keep a day, a week, a month. Her taste was always for large outlines, her mind has breadth and grasp and comprehension; when she seemed to care for little things, she was at play. In a matter like this, ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... the language of poetry is in no way different, except in respect to metre, from that of good prose. Poetry can boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose: the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both. In works of imagination and sentiment, in proportion as ideas and feelings are valuable, whether the composition be in prose ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... military office. The Dissenters might now serve their God as they pleased, without fear of persecution. Unitarians and Roman Catholics, as well as Jews, were expressly excluded from the benefits of the act. The passage of this measure did much to remove religion from English politics as a vital issue. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... against believing 'que la colonne est replacee, parcequ'elle est relevee.' The solution which he so elaborately recommended to Europe has shown itself desperate and impossible. Catholicism may long remain a vital creed to millions of men, a deep source of spiritual consolation and refreshment, and a bright lamp in perplexities of conduct and morals; but resting on dogmas which cannot by any amount of compromise be incorporated with the daily increasing mass of knowledge, assuming ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... nothing more wonderful than to feel the machinery of the world—the political world—roar or die away, according to the touch of one's fingers. Oh, yes, we're alike so far as that is concerned! But there is a very vital difference. You are only an American by accident. I am one by descent. For me there doesn't exist any other country. ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... proper, in like manner, the pigmy feuds which were customary there continued to smoulder; and even Macedonia, formerly so tranquil, consumed its strength in the intestine strife that arose out of its new democratic constitutions. It was the fault of the rulers as well as the ruled, that the last vital energies and the last prosperity of the nations were expended in these aimless feuds. The client states ought to have perceived that a state which cannot wage war against every one cannot wage war at all, and that, as the possessions and power enjoyed by ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... once broken, his return to strength was rapid. Although accompanied by delirium, and though running its full course of weeks, the "mountain fever" is not as intense as typhoid. The exhaustion of the vital forces is not as great, and recuperation is easier. In two days Bennington was sitting up in bed, possessed of an appetite that threatened to depopulate entirely the little log chicken coop. He found that the tenancy of the camp had materially changed. Mrs. ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... according to law.[71] This grand conception, which is sketched in the "Discours," and more fully developed in the "Principes" and in the "Traite de l'Homme," he worked out with extraordinary power and knowledge; and with the effect of arriving, in the last-named essay, at that purely mechanical view of vital phaenomena towards which modern physiology ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... will give a wide difference in ending.... Change the country and the atmosphere is changed, the elements are subjected to new influences which develop new incidents and so a new plot.... Change any vital part in any character and the plot must be different. One might almost say two plots thus developed from the same plot-germ can have no greater resemblance than two shells cast up by the ocean."[13] "In the evolution of ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... purported to come to you from our house. Be pleased to look and see whether it is a receipt entirely in manuscript, or whether it is a numbered and printed form which merely requires the filling in of the amount. The settlement of this apparently trivial question is, we assure you, a matter of vital importance. Anxiously awaiting your reply, we remain, with high ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... refreshes me," said the pope, breathing more freely; "it seems as if it communicated to my lungs a renewed vital power and caused the blood to flow more rapidly in my veins. Lorenzo, this is a singularly fortunate day for me, and I will make the most of it. Come, we will ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... day in accordance with the law of continuity. I remember the time, above fifty years ago, when it was said that no substance found in a living plant or animal could be produced without the aid of vital forces. As far as external form is concerned, Eozoon shows how difficult it is to distinguish between organised and inorganised bodies. If it is ever found that life can originate on this world, the vital phenomena will come ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... between the two—a silence of which neither was conscious. Both were thinking, Myrtle disjointedly, purposelessly, all unconscious that her slow, untrained mind had groped for a great and vital truth and found it; Ray quickly, eagerly, connectedly, a new and daring resolve ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... greater wrong than I dreamed of," thought she, with unutterable compassion. "Alas! it was a sad mistake! He might have had a kind of bliss in the consequences of this deed, had he been impelled to it by a love vital enough to survive the frenzy of that terrible moment, mighty enough to make its own law, and justify itself against the natural remorse. But to have perpetrated a dreadful murder (and such was his crime, unless love, annihilating moral distinctions, made it otherwise) on no better ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was as if she must sleep during her son's address. He had hardly mounted the stairs before the ark of the laws—hardly uttered his first words—when a remarkable change crossed her face. Her cheeks burned. She arose. All her vital energy seemed aroused. Her son meanwhile was speaking down below. She could not have told what he was saying. She did not hear him—she only heard the murmur of approbation, sometimes low, sometimes loud, which came to her ears from the quarters of the men. The ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... was made up on one point. Whatever he did, and wherever he went, he felt the doctrine he had just heard as needful to him as vital air, and he must be within reach of it. This, and not the hermit's cell, was what his instinct craved. He had always been a studious, scholarly boy, supposed to be marked out for a clerical life, because a book was more to him than a bow, and he had been easily trained in good habits and ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... them back just as they went away; A little wiser, maybe, but unchanged In all the vital things—let them today Take up the lives that war has disarranged. Let them renew the youth they laid aside To fight their battles in the world of men, God, bring to life their little dreams that died, And build their altars new ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... was that she had never heard his music, knew nothing at first hand of his talent, yet believed in it with such vital force, such completeness. There was something almost great in that. She was a woman who absolutely trusted her instinct. And her instinct must have told her that in him, Claude Heath, there was some particle ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... plaster and one of the castors. That moment when self-control was altogether torn aside, the shocked discovery of his father's perfect humanity, had left a singular impression on Mr. Polly's queer mind. It was as if something extravagantly vital had come out of his father and laid a warmly passionate hand upon his heart. He remembered that now very vividly, and it became a clue to endless other memories that had else been ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... stabbed the poor gentleman, and leaving him weltering in his blood, made a precipitate retreat. The astonished parishioners did all they could to recover him, but in vain; for the weapon had touched the vital parts, and he expired as ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... was discarded as a feature of the main plot. Only in a very few instances could a play be constructed in such a manner as to allow the Chorus any real influence on the story. Aeschylus' skill in this branch of his art is really extraordinary; the Chorus does take a part, and a vital part too, in the play. Again, the number of Greek actors was limited, whereas in a modern play their number is just as great as suits playwright's convenience or his capacity. The impression then of a Greek play is that it is a somewhat thin ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... him from his second brooding session till the sweet spring sunset had begun to gather and he had more or less cleared up, in the deepening dusk, the effective relation between the various parts of his ridiculously agitating experience. There were vital facts he seemed thus to catch, to seize, with a nervous hand, and the twilight helping, by their vaguely whisked tails; unquiet truths that swarmed out after the fashion of creatures bold only at eventide, creatures that hovered and circled, ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... supplement the action of my predecessor by proposing to Her Majesty's Government the modification of that instrument and the abrogation of such clauses thereof as do not comport with the obligations of the United States toward Colombia or with the vital needs of the two ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... striking terror into their husbands by rolling on the floor, gnashing their teeth, throwing about the furniture or poisoning the coffee; all this upon some strange fixed theory that women are what they call emotional. But in truth the old and frigid form is much nearer to the vital fact. Most men if they spoke with any sincerity would agree that the most terrible quality in women, whether in friendship, courtship or marriage, was not so much ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... very much less direct and fundamental than is that of the governmental system of England, Russia, Austria-Hungary, or the Scandinavian states. At certain points, however, as will appear, this connection is vital. And the relation of the constitution of 1871-1875 to the several instruments by which it was more immediately preceded is essential to be observed, because this body of fundamental law comprises but ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Beautiful and lonely hills they were, eloquent of toil, expressive with the brown squares in the green, the lowly homes of men, the long lines of roads running everywhither, overwhelmingly pregnant with meaning—wheat—wheat—wheat—nothing but wheat, a staggering visual manifestation of vital need, of ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... caught it up, and fired into the water. I fired three times, and two of the shots went into the brute's head. One missed him, and the first seemed not to harm him much, but the third hit him in some vital place, I hope,—some sensitive place, at any rate, for the hideous jaws started wide. Then, with my gun in my hand still, I began with all my might to shout out, 'Rolf!" I couldn't leave my post, for the brute, though he had let ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... well constructed and the events were marshalled in orderly and logical sequence. But I thought I detected a lack of living substance—it was much as if I gazed at a symmetrical array of presentable clamshells from which the succulent and vital inhabitants had been removed. I intimated that the author might do well to get better acquainted with ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... sure that we all, indeed I think it likely that we do not all, take it home to our thoughts with sufficient seriousness that this mysterious growth in the thing sown implies a mysterious vital power or force which is ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... what results. He has earned a manly living from the first, and therewithal has steadily contributed a vital portion to the current, and to the enduring, literature of his land and language. There was one thing that characterized the somewhat isolated New York group of young writers in his early prime—especially himself and his nearest associates, such as Taylor and Boker, and, later, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... a discovery dawns upon the world to bless and improve it, and while all are engaged in extolling it some persons feel that they have had its germs floating in their minds, though from the lack of favorable conditions, or some other cause, they never took root or became vital. An act of heroism is performed, and a bystander is conscious that he has that within him by which he could have taken the same step, although he did not. Some one steps forward and practically opposes a social custom that is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... of central economic controls has been delayed by political factionalism, marked by bitter armed struggles. In early 1993 the Georgian economy was operating at well less than half capacity due to disruptions in fuel supplies and vital transportation links as a result of conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, antigovernment activity in Western Georgia, and Azerbaijani pressure against Georgian assistance for Armenia. To restore economic viability, Georgia must establish domestic peace and must maintain economic ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... great charm of voices is their individuality, which is the result not alone of training, but of ages of varied experience, for man is the sum of all that has preceded him. It is, to say the least, an extraordinary mentality that would destroy this most vital element in singing for the sake of ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... as have been hinted at. People who have been living for a long time in dreary country-places, without any emotion beyond such as are occasioned by a trivial pleasure or annoyance, often get crazy at last for a vital paroxysm of some kind or other. In this state they rush to the great cities for a plunge into their turbid life-baths, with a frantic thirst for every exciting pleasure, which makes them the willing and easy victims of all those who sell the Devil's wares on commission. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... if I have not done so already, that she had graciously informed me that notwithstanding my refusal in past years of such a priceless opportunity, I also was to be allowed to bathe my superannuated self in the vital fires, though in what guise I should emerge from them, like Herodotus when he treats of the mysteries of old Egypt, if she knew, she did not think it lawful ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... packed by Nature, the novelist asks: "Is it a small thing for the creature (who uses a corset) to say to her Creator, 'I can pack all this egg-china better than you can,' and thereupon to jam all those vital organs close by a powerful, a very ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... but a sharp pain came in his side, and for the first time he thought of his wound. Passing his hand to it, he found it was clotted with blood. The cold air had stopped the bleeding, and thus saved his life. Though the bayonet had gone clear through him, his hurt was not mortal, for no vital ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... procured were very differently worked. They were in general shaped somewhat like a breast plate; and, being suspended from the necks of the possessors, led him, previous to his first interview with them, to suppose they were some kind of defence for the more vital parts. There was no doubt but that they were provided with nets for catching very large fish, or animals, as the fragments of a rotten one lying on the shore were picked up, the meshes of which were wide enough to admit the escape of a moderate sized porpoise; and the line of which it was ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... achieve her freedom reaches. It is therefore far more important for her to begin with her inner regeneration, to cut loose from the weight of prejudices, traditions, and customs. The demand for various equal rights in every vocation in life is just and fair, but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved. Indeed if the partial emancipation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... would ask her lover and not him all these things. Restlessness, then, was the trouble, simple restlessness: home bored her. He could quite understand the daughter of Mr. Stanley being bored and feeling limited. But was that enough? Dim, formless suspicions of something more vital wandered about his mind. Was the young lady impatient for experience? Was she adventurous? As a man of the world he did not think it becoming to accept maidenly calm as anything more than a mask. Warm ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... in high dudgeon to digest her affront, and did not reappear in Susan's kitchen for many weeks. Perhaps it was just as well, for they were hard weeks, when the Germans continued to strike, now here, now there, and seemingly vital points fell to them at every blow. And one day in early May, when wind and sunshine frolicked in Rainbow Valley and the maple grove was golden-green and the harbour all blue and dimpled and white-capped, the news ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... examination of probationers comes up immediately after the reading of the minutes in well-regulated church courts, being most important and vital. ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... as down, yet irresistible, suppressed the great art of healing, vital chronometry, the wrongs of inventors, the collusions of medicine, the Mad Ox, and all but drawing-room topics, at the very first symptom, and only just allowed the doctor to be the life ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... the will. ... It is strange that every vital lesson that experience teaches can never be expressed in words. The past few days have taught me more than the rest of the summer. There will always be a secrecy of the soul, and what this contains constitutes God's image and likeness. Life sings tonight in ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... part of his speech with intense energy, winding it up with the usual slap on the thigh, delivered with unusual fervour, and then, becoming aware that the vital spark of the cutty had all but fled, he applied himself to its resuscitation, in which occupation he found relief to his feelings, and himself formed a brilliant illustration of his remarks ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... object and influence are nefarious. Every family is a secret society; every business firm, and every banking and insurance institution. Those men who have no capacity to keep a secret are unfit for positions of trust anywhere. There are thousands of men whose vital need is culturing in capacity to keep a secret. Men talk too much—and women too. There is a time to keep silence, as well as a time to speak. Although not belonging to any of the great secret societies ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... in a sprightly letter to a friend), when the fatal signal was given, and a few hours after, on the 18th of April, 1802, and in his sixty-ninth year, he sunk into his chair and expired. "Thus in one hour (says his affectionate biographer) was extinguished that vital light, which the preceding hour had shone in flattering brightness, promising duration; (such is often the cunning flattery of nature), that light, which through half a century, had diffused its radiance and its warmth so widely; that light in which ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... reflected, how the mere sight of her revitalized him. Life took on a sudden interest, a zest that it never had elsewhere. He supposed it was because she was herself so vital. A feeling of exultation now swept over him—he forgot his fatigue, that he was hungry, and was conscious only of the fact that he was going to be near her, to talk to her uninterruptedly—for hours, maybe. After that he would go back content, ask Beth to marry him, ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... will be ruined. Such persons do not so much care what is the rate of interest at which they employ their money: they can reduce the interest they pay in proportion to that which they can make. The vital points to them is to employ it at some rate. If you hold (as in Lombard Street some persons do) millions of other people's money at interest, arithmetic teaches that you will soon be ruined if you make nothing of it even if the interest you ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... tremendous influence in Belgium, and is sincerely respected. They will be a vital force in holding the people together in their patriotic devotion, and ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... doctrine of Transience, but it has come to a view diametrically opposite to that of the Hindus. Transience for Zen simply means change. It is a form in which life manifests itself. Where there is life there is change or Transience. Where there is more change there is more vital activity. Suppose an absolutely changeless body: it must be absolutely lifeless. An eternally changeless life is equivalent to an eternally changeless death. Why do we value the morning glory, which fades ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... this work offer no apology for presenting it to the reading public, since the wide prevalence of the evils which it exposes is sufficient warrant for its publication. The subjects with which it deals are of vital consequence to the human race; and it is of the utmost importance that every effort should be made to dispel the gross ignorance which almost universally prevails, by the wide diffusion, in a proper manner, of information of the character contained ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... cry: "Repent, believe; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." The doctrine that was set forth had not only the vital growth of ages in it, but it had accreted the misunderstanding of the ages also; yet this doctrine did not hide, it only limited, the saving power of God. "Believe," cried the preacher, "in a just God and a Saviour." So he preached Christ unto ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... him when he tried to escape a thrashing by telling a white lie. And to-day's misfortune had been the fault of his face; if you felt happy, you mustn't show it. He had discovered the danger of letting his mind lie open, and his small organism set to work diligently to grow hard skin to draw over its vital parts. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... believed in the mysterious influence of the Queen of Night on human destinies; they think that every Selenite is connected by some sympathetic tie with each inhabitant of the earth; they pretend, with Dr. Mead, that she entirely governs the vital system—that boys are born during the new moon and girls during her last quarter, &c., &c. But at last it became necessary to give up these vulgar errors, to come back to truth; and if the moon, stripped of ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... of a great shock Billie had made a vital discovery. The most important thing that would ever come to him in life was to find Lee Snaith alive. How blind he had been! He could see her now in imagination, as in reality he had seen her a hundred times, moving in the sun-pour with elastic tread, full-throated and deep-chested, ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... great for her impaired nervous energy, and she sought some stimulant which would enable her to appear bright on the stage when actually she should have been recuperating, in sleep, that loss of vital force which can be recuperated ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... of Church polity are often exceedingly distasteful to persons of contracted views but of genuine piety, for they cannot understand how the progress of vital godliness can be influenced by forms of ecclesiastical government. [603:1] About this period such sentiments were probably not uncommon, and much of the apathy with which innovations were contemplated may thus be easily ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... of science indorses the assertion that "electricity is life." nor can we even venture to speak of life as one of the varieties or manifestations of energy. Nevertheless, electricity has an important influence upon vital phenomena, and is in turn set in action by the living being—animal or vegetable. We have electric fishes—one of them the prototype of the torpedo of modern warfare. There is the electric slug which used to be ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... which is also inevitable. To him, the book was vital, reaching down into the very heart of the world. Fancy took his work, and, to the eyes of its creator, made it passing fair. At times he would sit for an hour or more, nibbling at the end of his pencil, only negatively conscious, ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... perhaps furrow out a new path. This conception is based on this same law of the conservation of energy to which reference has been made. If, however, I am right in my contention that the "Libido" is only one manifestation of an energy,— greater than simply "vital,"—which can be studied to the best purpose only among men whose powers have been cultivated to the best advantage, then it will be seen that this conception of "Libido" as a force of definite amount is not ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... 1792 the popular agitation grew. France was now throwing all the enthusiasm, the vital emotion of patriotism into her internal upheaval. Rouget de Lisle invented his great patriotic hymn, christened in the following August the Marseillaise. Men who could get no guns, armed themselves ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... still the best study of Rodin as man and thinker is to be found in a book by Judith Cladel, the daughter of the novelist (author of Mes Paysans). She named it Auguste Rodin, pris sur la vie, and her pages are filled with surprisingly vital sketches of the workaday Rodin. His conversations are recorded; altogether this little picture has much charm and proves what Rodin asserts—that women understand him better than men. There is a fluid, feminine, disturbing side to his art and nature very appealing to emotional women. Mlle. Cladel's ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... all assent not to the same creed; but the intention of each may be pure: at least, common charity teaches us thus to think, till some open act betray a malignity of principle. Toleration is the vital spark of religion: arm the latter with the whips of persecution, and you convert her into a fiend scattering terror and dismay! In your own country you enjoy a liberty of sentiment beyond every other on the face ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... narrowness of it all, I see that I was giving up many things which are interesting and beautiful, many friendships that might have been delightful, but on the other hand there was always the pressing on, the big, vital side, the great throb of life. I miss it. I feel to myself as a great factory sounds on Sundays and holidays, when the engine that drives all the machinery of the place is silent. I wander among the empty, quiet places, and ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... love of self, his thirst for praise, had in no wise diminished. Had she been asked for a direct answer she could have told that his enthusiasm for target practice in the woods, where for hours he pretended to be shooting Germans, was vital to his abnormally active imagination; for Jeb, although a giant in strength and a god in grace, possessed the brow and ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... music: one false note makes a discord that spoils the effect of the whole. But it is useless to give rules for writing an harmonious style. When one sits down to write he should give his whole thought and energy to expressing himself forcibly and with the vital glow of an overpowering interest. An interesting thought expressed with force and suggestiveness is worth volumes of commonplaces couched in the most faultless language. The writer should never hesitate in choosing between perfectness of language and vigor. On the first ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... found. It is true that our troops have had battles to fight during this interval for the protection and extension of our Indian possessions and our colonies; but these have been with distant and unimportant enemies. The danger has never been brought near our own shores, and no matter of vital importance to our empire has ever been at stake. We have not had hostilities with either France, America, or Russia; and when not at war with any of our peers, we feel ourselves to be substantially at peace. There has, indeed, throughout this long period, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... glad to receive an English Traveller who, when his Vanity was concerned, would spend his cash without stint. We drank a great deal of the Water of the Spaw, and uncommonly nasty it was, making it a Thing of vital necessity to take the Taste of it out of our Mouths as soon as might be with Wine and ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... And the new and vital sense of Hermione's strangeness which was alive in Artois was met by a feeling in her that was akin to it, only ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Lewis's schemes. And yet, what other explanation could there be? Ed's behavior had been extraordinary; his evident terror at news of Dave Law's expedition, his conversation with Tad Lewis over the telephone, his subsequent actions at the river, all seemed to indicate that he had some vital interest in maintaining the mystery of Guzman's ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... the secret work-room of Nature, and drag out into the light the evidences of her clumsiness, and proofs of her lapses of skill,—evidences and proofs, moreover, that tell us much of the methods and means used by the vital artisan of Life,—the loom, and even the silent weaver at work upon the mysterious garment ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... hour been truly happy. At the height of their passion had there been any of that exquisite give and take between them which may mark the simplest love of the rudest lovers, but which is in its essence moral, a thing not of the senses but of the soul? There is nothing else which is vital to love. Without it passion dies into space like the flaming corona of the sun. With it, the humblest hearts may 'bear it out even ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mail," said Alicia, smiling brightly at Lindsay, "brought you a letter, I know." It was extraordinary how detached she could be from her vital personal concern in him. It seemed relegated to some background of her nature while she occupied herself with the immediate play of circumstance or was lost in her ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... with whom he continued closeted for near an hour. I ascertained, afterwards, that he questioned the dear girl closely on the subject of my sister's malady; even desiring to know if her affections were any way connected with this extraordinary sinking of the vital powers; but not in the slightest degree inclining to the distrust of Rupert's being in any manner implicated in the affair. Lucy, truthful and frank as she was, felt the uselessness, nay, the danger, of enlightening ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... men, Hal Sinclair was the vital spirit. In the actual labor of mining, the mighty arms and tireless back Of Quade had been a treasure. For knowledge of camping, hunting, cooking, and all the lore of the trail, Lowrie stood as a valuable resource; and Sandersen was the dreamy, resolute spirit, who had hoped for gold in ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... anxious for the railroad, and surely no one would accuse him of understanding speculation. (A little laugh ensued.) Canute had had no objection to the removal of bodies of common people for the sake of the railroad, but when it came to that of his own grandfather, the question became suddenly of vital importance to the whole parish. He said no more, but looked smilingly at Canute, as did also several others. Meanwhile, Canute Aakre surprised both him and them ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... and the grave dug out of sight of Gosshawk. But of course it could not long escape observation; that is to say, it was seen by the clerks; but the directors and manager were all seated round a great table upstairs absorbed in a vital question, viz., whether or not the Gosshawk should imitate some other companies, and insure against fire as well as death. It was the third and last discussion; the minority against this new operation was small, but obstinate and warm, and the majority so absorbed in bringing ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... abroad, soon occupied a commanding place. Few agreed with Martin that "the lad in George Street painted better before he went to Italy," for if the majority were unaware of his high artistic gifts, none could be unconscious of the vital and convincing quality of his portraitures. His earlier sitters included some of the most distinguished people in Scotland. Lord President Dundas must have been amongst the very first for he died before the end of the year. Ere long his position was unassailable, ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... studies, a considerable field has been opened up for biological research, but in this, which is not our subject, I shall notice one point only. It has been proved that vital germs—bacteria, for example—may be kept for seven days at -190 deg.C. without their vitality being modified. Phosphorescent organisms cease, it is true, to shine at the temperature of liquid air, but this fact is simply due to the oxidations and other chemical ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... South. The only thing to break this tie is unfair and cruel treatment of the negro on the part of the white man. In this connection our white friends should know that not only in the lynchings, and in the courts and in the unwholesome conditions on the southern railway common carriers (as vital as these are), but that in the general attitude of many of our southern white people, there is exhibited a contempt for the negro which makes the best of the negroes feel that they are only tolerated in the South. And yet in their individual relations ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... exposed to the danger of perishing and impaired by much actual loss, exerted no influence on the minds of those who still used the tongues to which they belong. Greek letters, as we have seen, decayed with the Byzantine power, and the vital principle in both became extinct long before the sword of the Turkish conqueror inflicted the final blow. The fate of Latin literature was not less deplorable. When province after province of the Roman ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... experience would be able to obliterate. She looked ten years older. Her wonderful dark eyes, glowing with a soft tender fire alone remained untouched by the withering hand of anxious love. They were as vital as ever they had been, and when Cornelia said so, she answered, "That is because my soul dwells in them, and my soul is always young. I have had a year, Cornelia, to crumble the body to dust; but my soul made light of it for love's sake. Did ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... was that Mrs. Muir's eyes followed Robin more than they followed Donal. Their clear deeps yearned over her. Such a glowing vital little thing! No wonder! No wonder! And as she grew older she would be more vivid and compelling with every year. And Donal was of her kind. His strength, his beauty, his fearless happiness-claiming temperament. How could one—with dignity and delicacy—find out why she had this obvious air of ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... most vital reports was that of the treasurer, Mrs. Henry Wade Rogers. It was a remarkable story especially to those who remembered the time when the receipts of the association for the whole year did not exceed $2,000, laboriously collected by Miss Anthony, with possibly ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... been placed in my hands. What it is, I know not. But if I ever learn, it will be from just such a man as Jim Airth. I have never really talked with him, yet I am so conscious of his strength and virility, that he stands to me, in the abstract, for all that is strongest in manhood, and most vital in life. ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... and I accept your belief, but He did not send me to you merely to relieve physical pain and mental disquiet. If a man is stumbling toward an abyss of darkness, is it any great kindness to hold a lamp so that his last steps may be easier? There is for each one of us a vital truth and a sacred duty, and in shutting your eyes to these and living in the present hour, you show—pardon an honest friend for saying it—you show a more fatal weakness than you ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... It is clear indeed that, for any great nation that strives to maintain its place, a powerful air fleet has become a necessity; while for Britain, an island no longer from the military point of view, seeing that we must face seriously the question of invasions by air, there is a vital need to strive for command of the air, as we now hold ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... the breast; which opinion is embraced by Epicurus. The Stoics are generally of this opinion, that the seat of the soul is throughout the heart, or in the spirit about it. Diogenes, in the arterial ventricle of the heart, which is also full of vital spirit. Empedocles, in the mass of the blood. There are that say it is in the neck of the heart, others in the pericardium, others in the midriff. Certain of the Neoterics, that the seat of the soul is extended from the head to the diaphragm. Pythagoras, that the animal part of the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... our vital organs, and of the cessation to be, so that we move no longer upon the face of the earth, and that our places know us no more, or the idea of being swept away suddenly into eternal oblivion, and of being as though we had never been, cannot fail of itself of producing awful ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... the walk Dick never asked when Miss Asher was coming back to the tollhouse, nor did Captain Asher make any remarks upon the subject. It was not really of vital importance to Dick, as Broadstone was so near, and it was of such vital importance to the captain that it was impossible for him to ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... religion. These are sufficiently axiomatic. The appeal to the history of the nineteenth century is sufficient to establish the first, and the appeal to the heart of humanity will establish the second. Democracy is the dominant spirit in the world's life to-day. It is the vital air of America. Whatever is in its nature inimical to democracy cannot permanently endure on this continent, and certainly cannot control, whether it be in the sphere of ecclesiasticism or commercialism. This, then, is the sure ground for optimism. ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... strange, appreciative powers, he ministered to an appetite which seemed unquenchable. It was dusk when he came out, his cheeks burning, his eyes bright. He carried a new music, a whole world of new joys with him, but his most vital sensation was one of glowing and passionate sympathy. They were splendid, these heroes who had seen the truth and had struggled to give life to it with pencil or brush or chisel, that others, too, might see and understand. If only one could do one's ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... other hand, in a Witwatersrand gold mine, in gold and tin gravels, or in massive copper mines such as Bingham and Lake Superior, where at least some sort of life can be approximated, it becomes a most vital element in valuation. ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... enough in a civilization in chronic and violent flux like modern civilization, even when applied to ordinary municipal law which may be changed at will by legislation, but it brings society almost to a stand when applied to the most vital functions of government, with no means at hand to obtain a corrective. For the court of last resort having once declared the meaning of a clause of the Constitution, that meaning remains fixed forever, unless the court ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... days to live, perhaps not so long, and every moment was precious; but Mrs. Grower's words, spoken with calm deliberation, "Dear friend, you must see me in another room for a few minutes about a matter of vital importance," had their effect. And she rose, and after leaving a few orders with the nurse, and telling her husband she would return immediately, she quietly followed Mrs. ...
— Little Frida - A Tale of the Black Forest • Anonymous
... fancy's flight. For what can be more natural than the conviction that the secret of the name, age, and features of the captive, which was so perseveringly kept through long years at the cost of so much care, was of vital importance to the Government? No ordinary human passion, such as anger, hate, or vengeance, has so dogged and enduring a character; we feel that the measures taken were not the expression of a love of cruelty, for even supposing that Louis XIV were the most cruel of princes, would he not have ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... forget that this is, to me at least, a very serious, indeed a vital matter. Is what you have just said the solemn conviction of your own heart? or have you suffered yourself to be misled by the tendency to self-esteem and perverseness I have sometimes had occasion to reprove in you? Have you thoroughly searched ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... the conception of "vital force" which comes straight from the philosophy of Aristotle. It is a fundamental proposition of that philosophy that a natural object is composed of two constituents—the one its matter, conceived as inert or even, to a certain extent, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... events of that evening until they became a blur in her memory. Her principal recollection was that she had been quite swept off her feet. Transley had interpreted her submission as assent, and she had not corrected him in the vital moment when they stood before her father that night in the ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... Cappy interrupted tartly. "I wouldn't give two hoots in hell for a satisfied man, unless he's his own man—understand. You should have a more vital interest in the Ricks Lumber and Logging Company and the Blue Star Navigation Company. We always make our skippers own a piece of the vessels they command, so they will not be tempted to rob us, for in robbing us ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... matters, undertook to direct everything, and, instead of having recourse to warmth and gentle treatment, he ordered the bodies to be rolled on a cask, suspended them by the heels, and resorted to a sort of practice that might have destroyed well men, instead of resuscitating those in whom the vital spark was dormant, if not ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... the right-hand one, and I will make sure of the one to the left. Aim low and steadily at the head, for that is the only vital part a ball will reach. Remember, if you only wound him, he'll slip into the water and ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... not eternal. Something will shine out to take the load off that flags me, which is at present intolerable. I have killed an hour or two in this poor scrawl. I am a sanguinary murderer of time, and would kill him inch-meal just now. But the snake is vital. Well, I shall write merrier anon. 'T is the present copy of my countenance I send, and to complain is a little to alleviate. May you enjoy yourself as far as the wicked world will let you, and think that you ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... the dead ashes of the fire which a little while ago had played on Howells, vital and antagonistic, by the door of the private staircase. The man had challenged him to do just the thing from which he shrank. But Howells was no longer vital or antagonistic, and it occurred to him that a little of his shrinking arose from the thought of approaching and robbing ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... action makes necessary some sort of consensus among the members of a group, very little can be said for it in aesthetics, where no practical issues are directly involved. There, herd instinct simply substitutes sham appreciation for a vital and healthy reaction. Of course, imitative judgments must be distinguished from those that agree because they are based on a genuine contagion or community of feeling. This distinction may be a difficult ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... the broken humerus, or wing-bone, and other means had to be adopted to put it out of pain. This was as if a man on the gallows were to continue to breathe by a broken armbone, and afforded us an illustration of the fact, that in birds, the vital air penetrates every part of the interior of their bodies. The breath passes through and round about the lungs—bathes the surfaces of the viscera, and enters the cavities of the bones; it even penetrates into some spaces between the muscles ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... classical models, the men of that time were too much of children, too much beneath the spell of their own genius, to be critics. Compare them with the great writers of other ages; and we feel instinctively that, in spite of their surroundings, they have far more of vital kindred with Homer or the creators of the mediaval epic, than with the Greek dramatists—Aschylus excepted—or with Dante or with Goethe. The "freshness of the early world" is still upon them; neither they nor their contemporaries were born to ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... that in all probability, the vital energy of the protoplasm of the endothia is diminishing. Quality, flavor, or anything you please, is bound up with certain vitality, and that diminishes and finally will cease. That is the reason for the endothia ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... pumped two more bullets after his first one. Both had found their billet in the body of the bear; but neither had struck a vital spot. The scattering fire, as the beast plowed through the embers, drove the rest of the party out of range in a hurry. Jack dragged Wash to one side; but ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... from that time forth he has entirely withdrawn from the intimacy with me which was only of a few days standing. Pray forgive me, and believe that I was prevented by nothing but natural kindness from assailing the reputation of a friend in so vital a point at a time of such very great distress, considering that he had shewn me every sort of kindness and attention, But if you incline to the harsher view of my conduct, take it that the interests of my canvass prevented me. Yet, even granting that to be so, I think you should pardon me, "since ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... so signally refuted during the trial that it is hardly possible that any great number of the judges were influenced by them. It was quite different and far weightier matters which brought about the conviction of Socrates, questions on which there was really a deep and vital difference of opinion between him and his contemporaries. That Socrates's attitude towards popular belief was at any rate fully understood elsewhere is testified by the answer of the Delphic Oracle, that declared Socrates to be the wisest of all men. However remarkable such a pronouncement ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... of this vital question would necessarily involve the treatment of a great variety of subjects. The heart of the British Empire is to be found in Great Britain. It is not proposed in this place to deal either with the working of British political institutions, or with the various ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... with precautions. "What has he done—what has he done?" quavered Mr. Carteret to his sister. She, however, after a glance at the patient, motioned their young friend away and, bending over the bed, replied, in a voice expressive at that moment of an ample provision of vital comfort: ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... surgeon at the Cuartel de Meysic, was too ill to be sent thither, unless on a matter of vital importance, and Sandy Ray, hastening from Maidie's bedside in response to a summons, was met by the tidings that a recess had been ordered, and that he would be sent ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... present she did not know whether she had inherited a large fortune, or was practically a penniless orphan living on the charity of her friend Mrs. Rushmore; and several months might pass before this vital question was solved. Mrs. Rushmore believed that Margaret would get the money, or a large part of it; Margaret did not, and in the meantime she was doing her best to cultivate her voice in order to ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... she flew out of my view, Her home or name I ne'er could gather, But aye sin' syne I sigh and pine For that sweet lass amang the heather. O'er the muir amang the heather, O'er the muir amang the heather, While vital heat glows in my heart, I 'll love the lass amang ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... mixture of Sumerian and Semitic elements. The primitive Sumerian had believed in a sort of animism. Each object had its zi or "spirit," like men and beasts; the zi gave it its personality, and endowed it, as it were, with vital force. The zi corresponded with the ka or "double" of the Egyptians, which accompanied like a shadow all things in heaven and earth. The gods themselves had each his zi; it was this alone that made them permanent and personal. With such a form of religion there could be neither deities ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... different armies and corps being dictated and governed by the same general laws that have so long obtained, simplicity of combination and manoeuvre, and the concentration of a numerically superior force at the vital point. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... become mighty for good and evil, and men, lost elsewhere in the crowd, stand forth as agents of Destiny. In their toils, their sufferings, their conflicts, momentous questions were at stake, and issues vital to the future world,—the prevalence of races, the triumph of principles, health or disease, a blessing or a curse. On the obscure strife where men died by tens or by scores hung questions of as deep import for posterity as on those mighty contests of national adolescence ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... do more till this had been settled, so I besought the official in charge to let me take all the books home with me, if only for a day, explaining to him the vital importance of my request. He readily consented and I hastened home with the whole lot. You may imagine with what interest I put the page I wished to examine under my microscope and laid beside it the piece of glass which, you will perhaps remember, I cut from a window of the room in which the ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... large sums of money to assist them to go. And now a glance at the morning papers confirmed his midnight bulletins. Indiana, where he had made the strongest efforts because the control of its statute book was vital to him, had gone his way barely but, apparently, securely; Scarborough was beaten for governor by twenty-five hundred. Presently he had Culver in to begin the day's business. The first paper Culver handed him was a cipher ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... air no more was vital now, But did a mortal poison grow. The lungs, which used to fan the heart, Served only now to fire each part; What should refresh, increased the smart. And now their very breath, The chiefest sign of life, became the cause of death! SPRAT, BISHOP ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the eighties presented new obstacles in its doubtful rainfall and its experimental farmers. It contained as well the conditions that had always prevailed along the edge of settlement. Transportation was vital to its life,—as vital as it had been in the Granger States,—yet was nearly as unregulated. The Interstate Commerce Law of 1887 had little noticeable immediate effect. Discrimination, unreasonable rates, and overcapitalization were still grievances ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... mess as naturally as a duck to water. He showed neither awkwardness nor shyness, but this was consonant with his habit of thought. Once attune your mind to the reception of the unexpected, so that even the great and vital facts of life and death leave you unshaken and unamazed, and the lesser quantities are adjusted ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... of her son's counsels; but it appeared to him that she intended to signify to him that she did so, and he answered her in words that were sore and almost bitter. "I am sorry," he said, "that you and I cannot agree about a matter that is of such vital concern to both of us; but as it is so, we can only act as each thinks best, you for yourself and I for myself. I am sure, however, that you will believe that my only object is your happiness and your fair name, which is dearer ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... not a matter of such vital importance that you need look so worried, Nellie. I'll go to the police head-quarters, explain the matter, and leave the watch. That will be the end of it," said Fred, trying to assume ...
— Edna's Sacrifice and Other Stories - Edna's Sacrifice; Who Was the Thief?; The Ghost; The Two Brothers; and What He Left • Frances Henshaw Baden
... so much vital force in the average human being. If all this force is put into one's daily toil, there is none left for helpful conversation, for sympathetic communion at home, for uplifting reading, or for worship. Persevere in that course, and you reach barbarism: ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... instructive to note that, upon the other side, the untrained instinct of President Lincoln was always turning in the same direction. In perusing the field of operations his finger would always stray to the eastern coast of North Carolina as the vital point, and no persuasions could induce him to give up the apparently useless foothold which we kept there for more than three years without material advantage. It was a matter of constant surprise to the Confederate military authorities that this course was not adopted, and the final result ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... harmless or wholesome prescription for the Americans, and as maddening poison to the French? The answer must be that the quality of the drug is relative to the condition of the patient, and that the vital question for the student of the old regime and the circumstances of its fall is what other drug, what better process, could have extricated France on more tranquil terms from her desperate case? The American colonists, in spite of the over-wide ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... man skilled in the sound medical practice that learns its lessons without books—bedside practice. His opinion declared that the child's vital power was seriously lowered. "Some cause is at work here," he said to the mother, "which I don't understand. Can you help me?" Mrs. Linley helped him without hesitation. "My little daughter dearly loved her governess; and her governess has been obliged ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... unrighteousness? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? As the most intimate friend and companion in life, you should seek one who truly can be one with you in all things, and most assuredly so in this vital respect." ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... vital importance in the history of Anglo-Saxon law is its tendency towards the preservation of peace. Society is constantly struggling to ensure the main condition of its existence—peace. Already in AEthelberht's legislation ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... and his brother Sleep! One pale as yonder wan and horned moon, With lips of lurid blue, The other glowing like the vital morn, 5 When throned on ocean's wave It breathes over the world: Yet both so passing ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... of nature to Matter. In the mind they are as 'anticipations of morality' springing up, not indeed 'from certain rules or propositions arbitrarily printed on the soul as on a book,' but from some more inward and vital Principle in intellectual beings, as such whereby these have within themselves a natural determination to do some things and to ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... pride of man, and speak to the sceptic through the crushed heart of a fatal experience. I have seen many instances of the fatal effects of grief as a direct mortal agent, killing, by its own unaided energies, as certainly, though not in so short a time, as a blow or a wound in the vital organs of the human body. The common nosologies contain no name for the disease, because, in truth, it cannot properly be called a disease, any more than a stab with a sword can deserve that name; and this, combined with the fact that it is only in a very few instances ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... poison, and the weaker the organic power, the less decidedly and the less successfully will the organism combat against the poison, and the more inroad will the latter make upon the system, affecting vital organs and paralyzing the efforts of the nervous system by attacking it in its centres. In such cases of torpid reaction, the patient frequently passes at once into a typhoid state. This is what we call scarlatina maligna, or ...
— Hydriatic treatment of Scarlet Fever in its Different Forms • Charles Munde
... to slip from the net, to dig him a vital thrust with the trident: "If you thought that, why ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... Apothecary, and they parted excellent friends. Lying down again with his eyes shut, he heard the Apothecary say, out of the room and quite a long way off—or he dreamed it—that there was a want of vital power (what was that, Paul wondered!) and great constitutional weakness. That as the little fellow had set his heart on parting with his school-mates on the seventeenth, it would be better to indulge the fancy if he grew no worse. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... through the window and sped above his head; but to these he paid no heed, nor did he fire until he drew a bead upon a vital spot of some German. Then there would be a sharp crack and the result would be one ...
— The Boy Allies in the Trenches - Midst Shot and Shell Along the Aisne • Clair Wallace Hayes
... ancients,—such as the creative power of matter, the horror of a vacuum, the esprit recteur, etc. (p. 22),—admits immediately, as necessary to the comprehension of chemical phenomena, a series of entities no less obscure,—vital force, chemical force, electric force, the force of attraction, etc. (pp. 146, 149). One might call it a realization of the properties of bodies, in imitation of the psychologists' realization of the faculties of the soul under the ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... more common among this type than any other. Apoplexy comes next, especially if the fat man is also a florid man with a fast heart or an inclination to high blood pressure. A sudden breaking down of any or several of the vital organs is also likely to occur to fat people earlier than to others. It is the price they pay for their ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... first horn of the last head, the hand that did so was shaking with excitement and suspense. It seemed, like the rest, to possess no attribute other than mere decoration. And yet, and yet—surely he had missed some vital point. He would go over them again. There remained, however, the last horn, and as he took hold of it with a premonitory dread of disappointment, he felt that it was loose in its socket, and that he could by an effort turn it completely over. With a triumphant ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... with the increase of national prosperity. Temporary poverty is the real explanation of the apparent temporary decline of Buddhism. But an era of great wealth is beginning. Some outward forms of Buddhism must perish; some superstitions of Shinto must die. The vital truths and recognitions will expand, strengthen, take only deeper root in the heart of the race, and potently prepare it for the trials of that larger and harsher life upon which it ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... for a bit, to talk the matter over quiet like? I ha' got ten pound—no matter how and no matter where—and it's yours just to let me go to sea this week instead of next. A handy, neat-looking sailor like you, Will, need never be long out of a berth, and it's vital for me to get away just now. Ten pound, just to oblige a mate! You won't get such an offer ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... and educational problem, and must rest upon the same principles that govern in any successful industry, or in education, and that we recognize in the conduct of life. That little progress has been made is due to public indifference to a vital question and to the action of sentimentalists, who, in their philanthropic zeal; fancy that a radical reform can come without radical discipline. We are largely wasting our energies in petty contrivances instead of striking at the ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... materially, there will be a larger supply than we have to-day, if not sufficient to meet the demands of the times. I have not dealt in statistics. This I leave for a future study. I have been as one crying in the wilderness, sounding the alarm, calling attention to our most vital need, to a problem which is worrying our best men. I plead with Christian parents to lay their promising sons on the Master's altar, and to the Church and college I cry awake! and behold ruin of home and country if you fail to lead many of the ablest and best ...
— The Demand and the Supply of Increased Efficiency in the Negro Ministry - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 13 • Jesse E. Moorland
... Trones the Germans had refuges for concentrating their reserves to feed in more troops, whose orders, as all the prisoners taken said, were to hold to the last man. Trones Wood was never to be yielded to the British. Its importance was too vital. Grim national and racial pride and battalion pride and soldierly pride grappled in unyielding effort and enmity. The middle of the woods became a neutral ground where the wounded of the different sallies lay groaning from pain and thirst. Small groups of British ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the last signs of life disappear. There is not a bird, not an insect; even the flies which exist in all the lands of the earth are not found. While the deserts of the sea contain vital wealth in profusion, here are sterility and death. Yet one is intoxicated with the stillness and lifelessness of it all, and the air is pure and virginal, blowing from the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... expression as a scientific man defends his, and demonstrate that they are true upon any assumptions whatsoever. Any loud fool may stand in front of a picture and call it inaccurate, untrustworthy, unbeautiful. That last, the most vital issue of all, is the one least assured. Loud fools always do do that sort of thing. Take quite ignorant people before almost any beautiful work of art and they will laugh at it as absurd. If one sits on a popular ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... course, inconceivable that the distinguished representatives of these great governments would have entertained for consideration any subject not of vital and international importance. ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... because the end they proposed still fled from them; for the men of pleasure every day surfeited of their vice, and heaped up work for sorrow and repentance, and the men of labour spent their strength in daily strugglings for bread to maintain the vital strength they laboured with; so living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of a wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... not built on diplomatic lines. What she wanted she wanted at once. When she had something vital to accomplish she went straight at it, and certainly nothing more vital than her present mission had come her way ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... aspiration to its culmination in the Gospel, is by far the most magnificent [presentation] in literature. And surely the fact of its having all been lived does not detract from its poetic value. Nor does the fact of its being capable of appropriation by the individual Christian of to-day as still a vital religion detract from its sublimity. Only to a man wholly destitute of spiritual perception can it be that Christianity should fail to appear the greatest exhibition of the beautiful, the sublime, and of all else that appeals to our spiritual nature, ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... mind was quite engrossed by his grief. He was wrought up to the point where his reserve and sense of proportion had quite left him, and his trouble was the one vital thing in the world. "That's the whole thing," he went on, flicking ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... a lesson of solemn appeal to us all. Our only opportunity of bearing any fruit worthy of our natures and of God's purpose concerning us is by vital union with Jesus Christ. If we have not that, there may be plenty of activity and mountains of work in our lives, but there will be no fruit. Only that is fruit which pleases God and is conformed to His purpose concerning us, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... sound, and free from adhesions. The liver was very small, in its colour natural, firm in its texture, and every way free from the smallest appearance of disorganization. The stomach, as well as the spleen and other abdominal contents, was alike free from the traces of disease. Indeed all the vital parts were so perfectly healthy in their appearance, and so small, that they resembled more those of a youth, than of a man who had attained his forty-seventh year; which state of the body, associated with habits of life favourable ...
— The Death of Lord Nelson • William Beatty
... Dangerous it may be—feeble it must be—yet live it shall, the proud determination to serve the Church of which I am a member, and to combat the heresies by which she is assailed." Thus spoke, at least thus thought, a man zealous according to his imperfect knowledge, confounding the vital interests of Christianity with the extravagant and usurped claims of the Church of Rome, and defending his cause with an ardour ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... self-control, to the point even of raising his cane to his insolent interlocutor. That blemish, hidden with the most jealous care, represented to the young man what it had represented to his father, the vital point of self-love, secret and constant humiliation. It was very faint, the trace of negro blood which flowed in their veins, so faint that it was necessary to be told of it, but it was sufficient to render a stay in America so much the more intolerable to both, as they ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... to see and to hear Helen; that is, indeed, one of his supreme experiences. But it is not here a matter of superficial staring at a beautiful woman; all that Helen is, the total cycle of her spirit's history, is to enter his heart and become a vital portion of his discipline. It is probable that the youth does not realize every thing that Helen means and is; still he beholds her, and that in itself is an education. Helen is not merely a figure of voluptuous beauty, which captivates the senses; ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... out much smoke, but no vital heat; here and there, the red glare of violence burst up through the dust of words and the insufferable cant of ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Rule Parliament. Nearly twenty years have passed since that same great man, indomitably defying age and infirmities in the pursuit of his great ideal, passed the second Home Rule Bill (1893) through the British House of Commons. That Bill stands to-day unshaken in regard to all its vital clauses. Some of us still hold the faith that that Bill would, if it had become law in 1893, have saved Ireland from many years of wastage, and would have built up, to face our enemies in the gate, a stronger ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... be kept happy," he added very quietly. "But the vital question is whether that is at all possible in Kohat, or in any other of our stations; for Kohat is by no means the worst. She hates the place, doesn't she? She's counting the days to get away to the Hills. You know you can't look me straight in ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... request Silent performance maketh best return." We from the bridge's head descended, where To the eighth mound it joins, and then the chasm Opening to view, I saw a crowd within Of serpents terrible, so strange of shape And hideous, that remembrance in my veins Yet shrinks the vital current. Of her sands Let Lybia vaunt no more: if Jaculus, Pareas and Chelyder be her brood, Cenchris and Amphisboena, plagues so dire Or in such numbers swarming ne'er she shew'd, Not with all Ethiopia, and whate'er Above the Erythraean sea is spawn'd. Amid ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... through a Presidential contest in which the passions of our fellow-citizens were excited to the highest degree by questions of deep and vital importance; but when the people proclaimed their will the tempest at once subsided ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... not so much in the knowledge of principles, as in the manner of applying them; to reveal them to ignorant people is to put a razor in the hand of a monkey. Moreover, the first and most vital of your duties consists in perpetual dissimulation, an accomplishment in which most husbands are sadly lacking. In detecting the symptoms of minotaurism a little too plainly marked in the conduct of their wives, most men at once indulge in the most insulting suspicions. ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... the actual battle began. More books have been written about that battle than any other that was ever fought. One is tempted to say, almost than all others that were ever fought. And the closest reasoners arrive at different conclusions and disagree as to many vital and important details. The Duke of Wellington himself left two accounts, one in his dispatches and one in notes written long afterward, which were irreconcilable, but some things are certain, upon some things all ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... And both, if thus established, are destined to be accepted by the general mind of the age, without actual harm to the real interests of civilization and religion. No fact, which is a fact and not an illusion, can do harm to any of the vital interests of mankind. No truth can stand in hopeless antagonism to any other truth. To suppose otherwise would be to resolve the moral government of God into a hopeless enigma, or enthrone a perpetual and hostile dualism, resigning the universe ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... now the vital question before General Stuart and his band. Every hour of delay added to the dangers surrounding them. Troops were hastily marching to cut off their retreat; cavalry was gathering to intercept them; scouts ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the subject as of great value, and I suppose that in them Roosevelt did more than any other writer to popularize the study of the historical origin and development of the vast region west of the Alleghanies which now forms a vital part of the American Republic. One attribute of a real historian is the power to discern the structural or pregnant quality of historic periods and episodes; and this power Roosevelt displayed in choosing both the War of 1812 and ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... must unite with the ovum or female element in order to produce the seed that will develop into the new plant. The same fact is true of the human race. Before pregnancy can take place there must be a meeting and fusion of the vital elements of the two sexes. This fertilization of the ovum or joining of the male and female elements is called conception. It is brought about by coitus, by means of which the semen of the male is deposited in the vagina ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... the war to a Committee of four, of whom the Ulster leader should be one; and, having failed in this attempt to infuse energy and decision into the counsels of his Chief, he turned him out and formed a Ministry with Carson in the office of First Lord of the Admiralty, at that time one of the most vital in the Government. Colonel James Craig also joined the Ministry as ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... told the history of his love; that history which to men of twenty-four and girls of twenty is of such vital importance. A young man when first he loves, and first knows that his love is frequent in the thoughts of the woman he has chosen, feels himself to be separated from all humanity by an amber-tinted cloud—to be enveloped in a mystery of which common mortals know nothing. He shakes his ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... glow'd; the subtle flame Ran quick thro' all my vital frame, O'er my dim eyes a darkness hung; My ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... differently worked. They were in general shaped somewhat like a breast plate; and, being suspended from the necks of the possessors, led him, previous to his first interview with them, to suppose they were some kind of defence for the more vital parts. There was no doubt but that they were provided with nets for catching very large fish, or animals, as the fragments of a rotten one lying on the shore were picked up, the meshes of which were wide enough to admit the ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... the force of steam!) And bring, obedient to some wizard power, Back to the Earth more spirits in an hour, Than Brooklyn's famous ferry could convey, Or thine, Hoboken, in the longest day! Time was when men bereaved of vital breath, Were calm and silent in the realms of Death; When mortals dead and decently inurned Were heard no more; no traveler returned, Who once had crossed the dark Plutonian strand, To whisper secrets of the spirit-land,— Save when perchance some sad, unquiet soul— Among ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... order. It is not its individual so much as its related life which is contemplated." The silent presence of children in the roles of the Greek drama is very impressive (350. 21). At Rome, though childhood is more of a "vital force" than in Greece, yet "it is not contemplated as a fine revelation of nature." Sometimes, in its brutal aspects, "children are reckoned as scarcely more than cubs," yet with refinement they "come to represent the more spiritual side of the family life." ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... had now to decide seemed big and vital to him. His pride was touched. A need was involved. Good sense might counsel acceptance of Aunt Clara's offer, but he thought it cowardly. Since they had failed in the issue of making a living, the brave course was to retrieve that failure by themselves. More—it did not seem to him the act ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... word on the last night of George's vacation—that vital evening which she had half consented to agree upon for "settling things" between them. "Almost engaged," she meant. And George, discontented with the "almost," but contented that she seemed glad to wear a sapphire locket with a tiny photograph of ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... of nervous energy is expended unnecessarily while waiting. If we are obliged to wait for any length of time, it does not hurry the minutes or bring that for which we wait to keep nervously strained with impatience; and it does use vital force, and so helps greatly toward "Americanitis." The strain which comes from an hour's nervous waiting, when simply to let yourself alone and keep still would answer much better, is often equal to a day's labor. It must be left to ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... inconceivably beautiful and varied, from the broad and brightly dark purple leaf of the maple, to the delicate and pale sere leaf of the poplar, all blending harmoniously with the deep green of their brethren in whom the vital sap still flows in full vigour. I have heard people compare the Hudson and the Rhine. I cannot conceive two streams more totally dissimilar—the distinctive features of one being wild forest scenery, glowing with ever-changing hues, and suggestive ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... shape her course in the direction indicated by her husband. The effect of his words, on me, was neither slight nor transitory. His iron sentences—cold and harsh—sunk deep into my heart, and stirred up not only my feelings into a sort of rebellion, but awakened within me a slumbering train of vital thought. It was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery, against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit: the white man's power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man. "Very well," thought I; "knowledge unfits ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... this conviction that he entered on the vital period of his dual career. The imminent crisis, and his own share in ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... I still had a hazy conception as to Nature in disease. That the vital forces needed the support of all the food the stomach of the sick could dispose of, was not a question of the remotest consideration. That medicine did in some way act to cure disease ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... coach for the drive to London, Fleetwood had the new name for the parasitic and sham vital troop at his ears. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... affection. I have honored you. I have placed you in the highest positions, intrusting you repeatedly with large shares of my own sovereign power. I have confided in you—committing my most essential and vital interests to your charge. And now this is the return. You employ the very position, and power, and means which your confiding husband has put into your hands, to betray him in the most cruel way, and to aid and encourage his worst and ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... "same cause, same effect," which philosophers imagine to be vital to science, is therefore utterly otiose. As soon as the antecedents have been given sufficiently fully to enable the consequent to be calculated with some exactitude, the antecedents have become so complicated that it is very unlikely they will ever recur. Hence, if this were the principle ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... a variety requires and presupposes Divine power. And so between the scientific hypothesis of the one and the philosophical conception of the other no contrariety remains. "A proper view of the nature of causation.... places the vital doctrine of the being and the providence of a God on ground that can never be shaken."[9] A true and worthy conclusion, and a sufficient answer to the denunciations and arguments of the rest of the article, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... humane man was up there, clinging to a cross piece. He had evidently gone up the ladder which led to the hay loft, a little ahead of the horse, and as he clung to the cross piece, his coat tail gone, and the vital part of his pantaloons and some skin gone to that bourne from whence no pantaloons seat returns, his bald head covered with dust and cobwebs, he was a ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... is surely conceivable that it may survive the fall of Anthropomorphism, and that the desperate struggle which is being waged about the formal belief in "Personality," may be merely the sloughing off of something that when it is gone, will be seen to have not been vital to religion. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... with that mingling of ingenuous respect and curiosity with which an ardent young man would regard the most distinguished leader of his age, and felt drawn to him by a certain atmosphere of vital cordiality such as one can feel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... say it is scientific to reason from your own conscious knowledge upon the line of physical elements, as well as space and duration, to the ideas of infinite matter, space, and duration. Do you not know that there is also a line of vital and mental forces? Why is it that you do not consider men equally scientific who reason upon that line from conscious knowledge to the idea of an ever-living, all-powerful intelligence? Power is a matter of conscious knowledge. ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... while he does not allow it to restrain him from doing what he pleases. The principle which he thus adopted was, that the seceded States had never been out of the Union as States. It would seem to be clear that, constitutionally speaking, a State in the American Union is a vital part of the government, to which, at the same time, it owes allegiance. The seceded States solemnly, by conventions of their people, broke away from this allegiance, and have not, up to the present moment, formed a part of the government. The condition in which they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... breast, a purple flood Gush'd o'er her shining limbs. She sighing cry'd,— "This fate, O Phoebus, I deserv'dly meet, "Were but thy infant born;—two now in one "Thy dart has slain!"—She spoke,—her vital blood Fast flow'd, and stay'd her voice. A deadly chill Seiz'd all her members, now of life bereft. Too late, alas! her sorrowing lover mourns His cruel vengeance; and himself he hates, Too credulous listening, and too soon enflam'd: The bird he hates, who first betray'd the deed And ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... this moment, When the pangs of death already touch me, Firmly my mind against injustice strives, And the last impulse to my vital powers Is given by anxious wishes to redeem My fellowmen from pain; surely my end, Howe'er accomplished, is not ...
— Andre • William Dunlap
... of the Union. Sir, we may be driven to more practical arguments by the scurrilous speeches of the abolitionists. It is an attack on property, on the ownership of the inferior race by the supremely superior. That is the vital question." ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... minds unawakened and therefore empty. They face adolescence in almost complete freedom from control. They very often have far too little opportunity for invigorating games, and they do not know how to express themselves, though vital energies are vibrant within them. It is only natural that they should find orderly ways of life very dull, and that in pursuit of excitement they should take to hooliganism. Not having learnt to appreciate either literature or art, they either read nothing or read stories that ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... recognised meeting. Her whole person, which at first sight had impressed him with its emphatic individuality, now struck him as characterless and conventional. And yet—what was she like? She was like a chameleon. No, she wasn't; he recollected that the change of colour was a vital process in that animal. She was like an opal—all sparkle when you move it, and at rest dull, most undeniably dull. No, that wasn't it exactly. She was a looking-glass for other people's personalities (he hated the horrid word, and apologised ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... most foolish order—I never hear a man droning about the cruelty of field sports, but I set him down, on the spot, either as a hypocrite or a fool, and probably a glorious union of the two. When man can exist without killing myriads of animals with every breath of vital air he draws, with every draught of water he imbibes, with every footstep he prints upon the turf or gravel of his garden—when he abstains from every sort of animal food—and, above all, when he abstains from his great pursuit of torturing his fellow men—then let ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... something called fashion—that they should, I say, have been in the habit of deliberately crushing that part of the body which should be specially left free, contracting and displacing their lungs, their heart, and all the most vital and important organs, and entailing thereby disease, not only on themselves but on their children after them; that for forty years past physicians should have been telling them of the folly of what they have been ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... completed, until, in the language of the author above quoted, "it has been exposed to the action of the atmosphere, travelling, for this purpose, through the lungs, when it becomes completely assimilated with the vital fluids." Hence, although the meaning of dyspepsia must be restricted, as its derivations demand; the term, digestion, bears a much more extensive signification than it generally receives, and any error in its process may ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... calm and sweet" is said to be excellent for weak people; it gives them vital force. When little Georgette Beck was recovering from her illness, I used to take her in my arms and walk with her in the garden by the hour together, beneath a certain wall hung with grapes, which the Southern sun was ripening: that sun ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... consequence of some other action. Blind and capricious impulses hurry us on heedlessly from one thing to another. So far as this happens, everything is writ in water. There is none of that cumulative growth which makes an experience in any vital sense of that term. On the other hand, many things happen to us in the way of pleasure and pain which we do not connect with any prior activity of our own. They are mere accidents so far as we are concerned. There is no before or ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... Lemnius (1505-1568), music is a chief antidote against melancholy; it revives the languishing soul, affecting not only the ears, but the vital and animal spirits. It erects the mind, ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... coat of the ermine is produced by the whitening of the fur, and not, as was once supposed, by the substitution of white for dark hairs. Probably one cause of this change of hue may be that the energies of the creature concentrate themselves on the vital organs, to enable it to resist the extreme low temperature of the icy regions it inhabits, and cannot thus spare a sufficient amount of blood for the formation of the colouring matter which tinges the ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... Edinburgh. Mrs. Marcet's Conversations (1818) were spreading the doctrine among babes and sucklings. The Utilitarians were the sacred band who defended the strictest orthodoxy against all opponents. They spoke as recognised authorities upon some of the most vital questions of the day, of which I need here only notice Free Trade, the doctrine most closely associated with the teaching of their revered Adam Smith. In 1816 Ricardo remarks with satisfaction that the principle 'is daily ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... laughs, the groves are fresh and fair, The sun's mild lustre warms the vital air; If Sylvia smiles, new glories gild the shore, And vanquish'd Nature seems to charm ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... Impression; Art, of Nature; through the mediation of Science, meaning thereby the Laws of Knowing. These Laws of Knowing thus hold an exact relation to the Laws of Doing; or, in other words, Scientific Laws to Creative and Vital Laws, which last are the Laws of Administration, human and divine. As an epitome or miniature, then, the Laws of Language must be an exact reproduction of the Laws of the Universe. Language itself, in other words, must be an epitome or miniature ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... collision between the two Powers for the causes already stated. The Government of the Czar showed that it desired to keep on friendly terms with the Cabinet of St. James, for, in reply to a statement of Lord Derby that the security of Constantinople, Egypt, and the Suez Canal was a matter of vital concern for Great Britain, the Russian Chancellor, Prince Gortchakoff, on May 30 sent the satisfactory assurance that the two latter would remain outside the sphere of military operations; that the acquisition of the Turkish capital was "excluded ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... That vital hand dropped—fractured, done. But in the same second Drake gave a shriek of pain as a shot rang out and his own right arm ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... Mother," he explained, wearily, "I do wish you wouldn't speak of your vital organs in the plural. Anyone would imagine you were a sort of freak, like the two-headed boy at the ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... years; that man used more 'air-brushes than any duke in the land, and as for eau-de-Cologne, he must have bathed himself in it. He hordered me about like a lord. He never paid me one shilling—he stabbed me in my most vital part—but ah! ah! never mind THAT: and I said I would be ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... medicine—Epsom salts, is made from that useful article, sugar, by uniting with it a smaller portion, more than it has naturally, of oxygen gas. The air we breathe contains a most deadly poison, called by chemists azotic gas, which, by its being mixed with what is called vital air, (oxygen gas,) becomes necessary to our existence, as much as the one (vital air or oxygen gas) would be prejudicial without the other; and Prussic acid, the most violent of all poisons, is contained in the common bitter-almond. But these ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... Manila is the central point, will be ours without conflict. In our system there is healing for wounds, and attraction for the oppressed. The holding of the islands by Spain would signify the continued shedding of blood, and drainage of the vital resources of the peninsula. As against Spain the Philippines will be united and desperate unto death, while they would without coercion walk hand in hand with us, and become the greatest of our dependencies—not ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... nonconformist withal. He says: 'To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer is to have kept your soul alive.' Independence and optimism are vital parts of his unformulated creed. He hated cynicism and sourness. He believed in praise of one's own good estate. He thought it was an inspiriting thing to hear a man boast, 'so long as he boasts of what he really has.' If people but knew this they would boast 'more ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... decade of its feeble existence, the founding, within a day's journey, of this powerful colony, on ecclesiastical principles distinctly antagonistic to their own, was a momentous, even a formidable fact. Critical, nay, vital questions emerged at once, which the subtlest churchcraft might have despaired of answering. They were answered, solved, harmonized, by ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... twin-murder we can speak hopefully. It will doubtless take some time to develop in them the spirit of self- sacrifice to the extent of nursing the vital spark for the mere love of God and humanity among the body of the people. The ideals of those emerging from heathenism are almost necessarily low. What the foreigner does is all very well for the foreigner, but the force of habit or something more subtle evidently excuses the ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... and of the people resolving, which amounts to an act of Parliament. So the Parliament is the heart, which, consisting of two ventricles, the one greater and replenished with a grosser matter, the other less and full of a purer, sucks in and spouts forth the vital blood of Oceana by a perpetual circulation. Wherefore the life of this government is no more unnatural or obnoxious upon this score to dissolution than that of a man; nor to giddiness than the world; seeing the earth, whether it be itself or the heavens ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... as to convert covert hostility into open antagonism, and thus to reverse the political and military combinations of Europe. In the absence of regular accredited diplomatic representatives, Saumarez became at once the exponent and the minister of this vital policy. He had to avoid quarrels, and yet at the same time to restrain Sweden from acts of injury to which she was constantly impelled by the Emperor, whose purpose naturally was exactly the opposite of his; and who sought further to estrange all ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... consciousness of this truth is witnessed by a common phrase, which excludes from suggested schemes of arbitration all questions which involve "national honor or vital interests." No one thing struck me more forcibly during the Conference at The Hague than the exception taken and expressed, although in a very few quarters, to the word "honor," in this connection. There is for this good ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... because they acknowledge nothing superior to their own essential baseness. To Gibbie every man was better than himself. It was for him a sudden and strange descent—from the region of poetry and closest intercourse with the strong and gracious and vital simplicities of Nature, human and other, to the rich commonplaces, amongst them not a few fashionable vulgarities, of an ordinary well-appointed house, and ordinary well-appointed people; but, however bedizened, humanity was there; and he who does not love human more than any other nature ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... is not excited. Thus we have come to this conclusion, as the result of our inquiry, that the fermentation of sugar, the splitting of the sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid, glycerine, and succinic acid, is the result of nothing but the vital activity of this little fungus, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Cape of Good Hope from the point of view of Australian security; and a letter which he wrote to an official of the Admiralty while awaiting sailing orders for the Reliance (January 25, 1795), is perhaps the first instance of official recognition of Australia's vital interest in the ownership of that post. There was cause for concern. The raw and ill-disciplined levies of the French, having at the outbreak of the Revolutionary wars most unexpectedly turned back the invading ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... go," shouted Juan, and his cry was echoed by Harry; but she did not seem to hear them, and was the first to arrive at where a huge bear lay upon its flank, feebly clawing at the rock with fore and hind paw, it having received a couple of shots in vital parts. ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... perfect brain and body-resting sleep. Come to this wonderful, happy, helpful lodge and get a store of energy, and an abundance of vital ammunition with which to make the fight, when you go back to your ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... Cochrane for De Berenger; and after they had called witness after witness to give this confirmation upon this insignificant and trifling point, they leave him without confirmation upon that important, that vital part of this case to my Lord Cochrane, videlicet: the dress which Mr. De Berenger wore at the time he came to that house, and had with him that interview. Lord Cochrane puts him on a grey military great coat, a green uniform, and a ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... struggles with the so-called Montanism, but finally and above all, the existing situation of the Church in the third century with regard to the world within her pale, made the question of organisation the vital one for her. Tertullian and Origen already found themselves face to face with episcopal claims of which they highly disapproved and which, in their own way, they endeavoured to oppose. It was again the Roman bishop[169] who first converted the proposition that the bishops are ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... difference between not being able to remember and not being able to forget. In the former case the so-called knowledge is not a part of oneself; it is not vital. The roots do not penetrate beneath the surface of our minds; they are, as it were, merely stuck on; the mental sap does not circulate. In the latter case the knowledge is real; it is alive and growing; there is a vital connection between it and ourselves. ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... cracked, as did that of Alexis. Bullets flew about all three occupants of the machine, and then the craft, struck in a vital spot, staggered. The 'plane began to sink slowly. In vain did Hal try to check the descent. The machine, still heading slightly toward the north, glided ...
— The Boy Allies with the Cossacks - Or, A Wild Dash over the Carpathians • Clair W. Hayes
... descent there had been generally no transfer of clanship; both the woman and her partner or husband retained their own clans, and the children belonged to their mother's clan. In the totemic stage of society the totem-clan was the vital organism, and the individual scarcely realised his own separate existence, but regarded himself as a member of his totem-clan, being a piece or fraction of a common life which extended through all the members of the clan and all ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... first introduction of African slaves, be thoroughly put in practice, so completely had circumstances beyond man's devising or control compelled the altering of men's minds and methods with regard to the new interests which had irresistibly forced themselves into importance as vital items in political arrangements. Nowadays, therefore, that Mr. Froude should desire to create a state of feeling which had, and could have had, no existence with regard to the common interests of the inhabitants for upwards of two full centuries, is [178] evidently an excess of confidence ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... punishments for the cure of spiritual diseases or evils, are but palliative; for the reaction, if reaction ensue, is not in the right direction. It is true that a cure sometimes results in spite of the treatment, especially in transient cases, the vital forces restoring health during the temporary restraint of the diseased action; but in many cases the constipation is only aggravated by cathartics, and diarrhoeas are not benefited by astringents; and the evil man often becomes ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... once the typical mottled texture of the skin appeared, the flesh rapidly deteriorated and fell away in chunks. The victim remained unfevered and agonizingly conscious until the degeneration reached a vital spot. ...
— Wind • Charles Louis Fontenay
... of all sanitary investigation indicate clearly the vital necessity for the complete and speedy removal from human habitations of all matters which, by their decomposition, may tend to the production of disease, and early measures should be taken by the authorities of all towns, ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... more mysterious in nature than this fact of the existence of a living land: a land that repairs itself, when injured, by vital processes, and resists the eternal attack of the sea by vital force, especially when we think of the extent of some of these lagoon islands or atolls, whose existences are an eternal battle ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... beside me. It was loaded, too, and a revolver. I caught it up, and fired into the water. I fired three times, and two of the shots went into the brute's head. One missed him, and the first seemed not to harm him much, but the third hit him in some vital place, I hope,—some sensitive place, at any rate, for the hideous jaws started wide. Then, with my gun in my hand still, I began with all my might to shout out, 'Rolf!" I couldn't leave my post, for the ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... the atmosphere. Very likely the strength he now put forth was intensified by a convulsive reaction of all the powers of life, as is not infrequently the case in sudden awakenings from similar interruptions of vital activity. The coming to himself and the bursting of his case were simultaneous. He sat staring about him, with, of all his mental faculties, only his imagination awake, from which the thoughts that occupied it when he fell senseless ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... of the prodigal expenditure of the sun's heat, we are tempted to ask a question which has the most vital interest for the earth and its inhabitants. We live from hour to hour by the sun's splendid generosity; and, therefore, it is important for us to know what security we possess for the continuance of his favours. When we witness the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
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