"Elaborate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with the idea that anything more elaborate was the sign manifest of too recent fortune, that she had indulged in caustic criticism of the modern palaces of certain New York friends. But although the immediate impression of the Montgomery house was of soft ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... forgery of bank-notes, a great deal of ingenuity and art has been expended on their production. The principal features of the manufacture are described as a peculiar kind of paper and water mark; an elaborate design, printed with a peculiar kind of ink, and certain private marks, known only ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... was no silence about the wedding, only about the possibility that it might be an ordeal, or that the ordeal might be avoided. It could not be avoided. There was nothing to be said on that point. But there was much talk, during the few days of their stay in New York, about the elaborate preparations for the ceremony. Morrison, who came to see them in their temporary quarters, kept up a somewhat satirical report as to the magnificence of the performance, and on the one occasion when they went to see Molly they found her flushed, ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... inhabitants), especially so in the life on the Maidan, the centre of attraction and fashion. Eden Park is also greatly frequented, and the race-course is the finest in India; but, notwithstanding, Calcutta has not the charm of Bombay. The Strand Hotel gave us an elaborate menu for our New Year's dinner, which was supplemented by flowers and bonbons, and we all voted the occasion, even if in a foreign land, a success. And so I link Lucknow and Calcutta together in the ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... appear, at first sight, that when writing the fourth chapter, "On Pulpit Oratory," the author had before his mind an elaborate discourse, such as is expected only on great occasions. ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... issues the Parents' Review). In America, where specially valuable work has been done, several universities have encouraged the study (notably Chicago, while under the auspices of Professor John Dewey); and Professor G. Stanley Hall's initiative has led to elaborate inquiries, the principal periodical for the movement being the Pedagogical Seminary. The impetus to this study of the child's mind and capacities was given by the classic work of educationists like J.A. Comenius, J.H. Pestalozzi, and F.W.A. Froebel, but ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... sewer-pipe cost $112; and the three catch-basins, bricked up and covered with two-inch plank, cost $63. The filling in of all these trenches was done by my own men with teams and scrapers, and should not be figured into this expense account. It must be borne in mind that while this elaborate water system was being installed, no buildings were completed and but few were even begun; the big house was not finished for more than a year. The sites of all the buildings had been decided on, and the farm-house and the cottage ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... it lay, what had once in the days gone by, been elaborate gardens, but were now a mere tangle of brushwood, waving ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... gardens are in no way elaborate: a number of avenues have been cut out of an ancient wood; and that is all. There are no shrubs; just a patch of dahlias, with a ridiculous little iron railing round them. But its whole charm lies in its picturesque situation up above the town. In between the tall ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... at least a foot and handed it to the chief. The dignity of the savage at once gave way before the beloved weed. He smiled—that is, he grinned in a ghastly way, for his face, besides being black, was streaked with lines of red ochre—and graciously accepted the gift. Then George made an elaborate speech in dumb-show with hands, fingers, arms, and eyes, to the effect that he desired the Kafir to accompany him to his location, but the chief gravely shook his head, pointed in another direction and to the sun, as though to say that time was on the wing; then, ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... towers and buildings added to the ancient keep under the direction of Norman of Torn and the grim, old man whom he called father, were of the Norman type of architecture, the windows were larger, the carving more elaborate, the rooms lighter ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... tried to speak warmly of the friend he was really fond of, and again he felt that he had failed. Why? He would not ask himself—but he knew. This shamed him, and he began an elaborate eulogy on poor Georges, conscientious, self-effacing, ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... of priests, endowed with lands, who kept up the elaborate liturgy and ritual of the temples, and also preserved whatever knowledge of astronomy, history, medicine, etc., had been handed down ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs
... "but I don't spend much of my time in planning out some elaborate revenge. Now those marble steps—do you know what Mr. Stoddard said when he came out to inspect ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... he leaned against it, felt for the knob, turned it, carefully backed away from the door and opened it. Holding the edge, he eased himself around it and, balancing on the outer side, closed it again with elaborate care. Then he took a tentative step and lifted his ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... which studies comparative mythology, and spares no pains to get at the meaning underlying the barbarous worship of the rudest nations, ought to be interested in the question of the ideas that formed and were expressed by that elaborate Jewish ritual. In the present case, the signification is plain enough. That which, in one aspect, is a peace-offering reconciling to God, in another aspect is the nourishment and the joy of the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... blackness overhung the white expanse of snow. No sound came from the village, buried among the drifts; all that was to be heard in the kitchen was the scraping of Prosper's knife as he fashioned elaborate rosettes and lozenges on the dogwood stock. Now and then he stopped and cast a glance at Charlot, whose flaxen head was nodding drowsily. When the child fell asleep at last the silence seemed more profound ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... good part of the day, for we were fond of being philosophical, and scorned long journeys and early starts on principle. The place, moreover, invited to repose. People in elaborate shooting costumes sallied from the chateau with guns and game-bags; and this was a pleasure in itself, to remain behind while these elegant pleasure-seekers took the first of the morning. In this way, all the world may be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... other, the closest possible interbreeding would be perpetual. Therefore we should bear in mind that with all hermaphrodite animals, as far as I can learn, their structure permits and frequently necessitates a cross with a distinct individual. With hermaphrodite plants we incessantly meet with elaborate and perfect contrivances for this same end. It is no exaggeration to assert that, if the use of the talons and tusks of a carnivorous animal, or the use of the viscid threads of a spider's web, or of the plumes and hooks on a seed may be safely inferred ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... him to give on his arrival—Excellency or Prince, according to his fancy. He could also find numerous servants carefully drilled to play the part of old family retainers, and carriages upon which the most elaborate coat-of-arms could be painted at an hour's notice. Nor was there any difficulty whatever in immediately procuring all the accessories of a life of grandeur—all that is needful to dazzle the unsuspecting, to throw dust in people's eyes, and ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... river with an occasional glance back to the group on the hill. When a few rods from shore, Job, who had the faculty of making his English irresistibly funny whenever he chose, stood up in the stern of the canoe, and taking off his hat to them with a very elaborate bow ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... shop in the Market-place, Mr Leach described his visit to London to a few "favoured" customers, and provoked unlimited laughter. It was Jonas Moore and Joe Town who induced him to give a public lecture on his travels. An elaborate bill was prepared, "almost as big as a house side," informing the burgesses of Keighley that Mr James Leach would give "three nights' lectures in the Temperance Hall, on his life and travels in London during his six weeks' commission from the Local Board of Health." A few frequenters of the ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... completed food was brought in, and there was a good deal of eating and sleeping and smoking done. Being informed that nothing more would be done until after nightfall, I went to my own shelter, to elaborate some of my more hasty sketches while matters were still fresh in my mind. At 7 o'clock a messenger came to tell me that ceremonies were about to be resumed. During my absence the principal character in the night's performance—a man arrayed in ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... and his bed was surrounded by a crowd of persons who awaited his orders. The Marchioness had long wished that he would be baptized. After repeated refusals, one day, during his convalescence, he himself asked for baptism. His mistress, very much delighted, ordered the most elaborate preparations. In a parlor there was erected over a stately bed a canopy richly embroidered. The entire family and all the friends of the house were present. Mmadi-Make, lying on this bed, was asked concerning the name he desired to have. Because ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... of the supply of water to the metropolis, in conjunction with Dr. Roget and Professor Brande, and the result was the very able report published in that year. Only a few months before his death, in 1834, he prepared and sent in an elaborate separate report, containing many excellent practical suggestions, which had the effect of stimulating the efforts of the water companies, and eventually ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... impressive phraseology, yet without the overstrained brevity and involutions of that great historian,—and contriving to blend with it a perspicuity and grace not inferior to Lysias,—may be seen illustrated in the elaborate criticism of the ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... Michelangelo wrought the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel with the ochres which he digged with his own hands in the garden of the Vatican; forgetting also that the greatest work in the world has been accomplished by men like Gideon, who delayed not for elaborate preparation, but just took firebrands and torches—indeed, anything they could lay their hands upon—and cried out, "The sword of the Lord and of Gideon," and won the victory. The text is most striking, and presents an outline which any one ought to ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... so elaborate that they cannot be washed and changed with sufficient frequency; and not so long that the baby's feet will be hampered in their movements by them. All of baby's clothes but the dress should be fastened ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... and admitted that it was, beginning an elaborate explanation and apologies. But Mrs. Peach was thoroughly roused, and then overcome. 'He's married, he's married!' she said, and swooned, or feigned to swoon, so that Jim was ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... anticipated in a donation of twenty shillings to every poor mother at the birth of a child. Casual labour is to be cared for in some sort of workhouse-factories in London. These reforms are to be financed partly by economies and partly by a graduated income-tax, for which Paine presents an elaborate schedule. When the poor are happy and the jails empty, then at last may a nation boast of its constitution. In this pregnant chapter Paine not only sketched the work of the future; he ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... peer of the realm in his robes!" whispered Eve, who was much amused with the elaborate toilet of the subject of their remarks, who descended the ladder supported by a sailor, and, after speaking to the master, was formally presented to his late boat-companion, as Sir George Templemore. The two bustled together about the quarter-deck ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... Spike Brennon chewed it, and had his hair clipped in Brennon manner. He lived his days and his nights in dreams of delivering or evading blows. Often while dressing of a morning he would stop to punish an invisible opponent, doing an elaborate dance the while. It was better than ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... a moue, but did not answer. She was wondering if Don Carlos's invitation had been by way of an elaborate practical joke, wondering if he intended to subject her to intense discomfort under the guise of hospitality, or if he had ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... last year elaborate tables to prove that machinery does not supersede adult male operatives. According to these tables, rather more than half of all the factory-workers employed, viz., 52 per cent., were females and 48 per cent. males, and of those operatives more ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... They crowned a king this day, and there has been great rejoicing and elaborate tomfoolery, and I am perplexed and saddened. I never saw anything to compare with the pageant, except Yankee circuses and Alhambra ballets; nor did I ever see anything so ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... in this western front so many unfinished and supervening designs occur that I find myself unable to imagine the meaning of its builders. Considering, first of all, the arrangement of its detail, I find elaborate flower-mouldings and renaissance-work placed so high up that they can barely be distinguished as anything save light and shade, whereas upon the Portail des Libraires all such delicate work ceases at about 9 feet high, and the upper carving is done boldly in broad, simple masses ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... gradually promoted and finally, in 1911, became Colonel in command of the Dantzig Black Hussars. This regiment owes its black uniform and white death's heads to the thrift of Friedrich II who utilised the black funeral hangings at the elaborate funeral of his father to make uniforms for this regiment. It has been in existence about 175 years. The white death's heads and bones which appeared in the funeral trappings were used to make ornaments for the ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... Europe were comparatively poor and mean, while the palaces of the oriental monarchs powerfully affected the imagination of the traveller. At a time too when the manners of the European nobility exhibited little refinement, the dignified courtesy and elaborate ceremonies of Bagdad and Ispahan were not less imposing than the pomp and splendour of their garb and its decorations. The Eastern chivalry also was to the full as efficient as that of the West; for what it lacked in weight of metal, ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... governor, was so often absent on mysterious errands that the authorities at last fixed on her as the one most likely to betray her countrymen. She was won to their purpose through her vanity. Her mistress had a comb of elaborate and curious workmanship, and to have one like it was the principal object in her existence. The governor told her that she should have this priceless treasure itself if she would tell him where the chiefs were meeting. To this act of treachery she finally ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... other cattle, and in the fourth, of bees. It gives us the most finished specimen of the Latin hexameter which we have. It is acknowledged by scholars to stand at the head of all Virgil's works, and is certainly the most elaborate and extraordinary instance of power in embellishing a most barren subject which human genius has ever afforded. The commonest precepts of farming are delivered with an elegance which could scarcely be attained ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Deal"—that is, a condition of equal rights and non-existing privileges. More radical reformers find the same principle equally useful for their own purposes. Mr. Frederic C. Howe, in his "Hope of Democracy," bases an elaborate scheme of municipal socialism exclusively upon it. Mr. William Smythe, in his "Constructive Democracy," finds warrant in the same principle for the immediate purchase by the central government of the railway and "trust" franchises. Mr. Henry George, Jr., in his ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... and similar topics, and of such miscellaneous matter as the "General Instructions of a Mother to a Daughter for her Conduct in Life," showed that the influence of the salon was not yet exhausted. In the continuation called "L'Entretien des Beaux Esprits" (translated in 1734), however, the elaborate framework was so far reduced that fourteen short tales were crowded into two volumes as compared with eighteen in the four volumes of the previous work. Writers of fiction were evidently finding brief, unadorned narrative most acceptable ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... tall, Always dressed from crown to toe In the quaint elaborate fashion Of a hundred ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... counterbalances it. If they are both bad, she comforts herself that she has graces; a certain manner; a 'je ne sais quoi,' still more engaging than beauty. This truth is evident, from the studied and elaborate dress of the ugliest women in the world. An undoubted, uncontested, conscious beauty, is of all women, the least sensible of flattery upon that head; she knows that it is her due, and is therefore obliged to nobody for giving ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... superadded and supplementary to the heart, assisting it to execute a more powerful and perfect contraction, and so proving subservient to the complete expulsion of the blood. They are, in some sort, like the elaborate and artful arrangement of ropes in a ship, bracing the heart on every side as it contracts, and so enabling it more effectually and forcibly to expel the charge of blood from its ventricles. This much is plain, at all events, that in some animals they are less strongly ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... each we shall find the true flowers, minute affairs, some staminate; others, on distinct plants, pistillate, the berry bearers; or rarely both male and female florets seated on the same club, as if Jack's elaborate plan to prevent self-fertilization were not yet complete. Plants may be detected in process of evolution toward their ideals just as nations and men are. Doubtless when Jack's mechanism is perfected, his guilt will disappear. A little way ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... an iron door of elaborate openwork, leading, Moorish fashion, through a shallow vestibule into a patio—the first we had seen on our way south; and if it had not been slammed shut with a loud click, by some person inside, half Manzanares would have poured ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Lodge. On the east of the High Street stand All Saints' National Schools. In the continuation of the High Street is an old house on the left-hand side called Fulham House. It stands back on the east side of the road behind a wall. Some of the carving on the fireplaces and doors is very elaborate. In a large room upstairs a sumptuously carved wooden mantel encloses a coloured marble block with a white marble centre. The door of this room is also very fine. The cellars are extraordinarily large and massively ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... very fine white-and-gold throne-room in Dublin, decorated in the heavy but effective style of George IV., and it certainly compares very favourably with the one at Buckingham Palace. St. Patrick's Hall, too, with its elaborate painted ceiling, is an exceedingly handsome room, as is the Long Gallery. At my father's first Drawing-Room, when I officiated as page, the perpetual kissing tickled my fancy so, that, forgetting that to live up to my new white-satin breeches and lace ruffles I ought to wear an impassive countenance, ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... said the Count quietly, and giving an order to the French sailor who acted as his mate, the latter mounted into the brig, disappeared down the cabin hatchway, and returned in a few minutes with half-a-dozen canisters, with which the man smilingly departed, after distributing a few elaborate Spanish bows. ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... cigars are not natural and necessary adjuncts to a Chinese dinner. They are in fact only to be found at the houses of natives who have mixed with foreigners and are in the habit of inviting them to their houses. The topic is an interesting one, and deserves a somewhat elaborate treatment, both for its own sake as a study of native customs, and also to aid in dispelling a host of absurd ideas which have gathered round these everyday events of Chinese life. For it is an almost universal belief that Chinamen dine ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... is richly ornamented with carvings and fine woodwork, the Bishop's Throne having originally been a pedestal for the shrine of St. Werburgh. The cathedral contains several ancient tombs of much interest, and the elaborate Chapter Room, with its Early English windows and pillars, is much admired. In this gorgeous structure the word of God is preached from a Bible whose magnificently-bound cover is inlaid with precious stones and its markers adorned with pearls. The book ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... ancient languages, as the Hebrew, which have been employed chiefly for expressing plain sentiments in the plainest manner, without aiming at any elaborate length or harmony of periods, this pronoun [the relative] occurs not so often."—L. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... high authority cannot be questioned, by an elaborate discussion ("Vues des Cordilleras," p. 148 et. seq., ed. 1870), has shown the relative likeness of the Nahua calendar to that of Asia. He cites the fact that the Chinese, Japanese, Calmucks, Mongols, Mantchou, and other hordes of Tartars have cycles of sixty years' duration, divided into five ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... that a doubt has arisen in my mind whether some particulars do not need explanation. Doubtless the nimble wits of the sagacious have fathomed to their satisfaction all that seemed mysterious; but there may be others who, either less imaginative or more indolent, would like an elaborate elucidation. These latter I invite to accompany me across the blue Atlantic to the pleasant town of Exeter, in the lovely county of ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... elaborate device adopted by Campos, and by Weyler after him, to check the Cuban movements. We need only say here that, despite its cost and the number of men it tied up on guard duty, the trocha failed to restrain ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... system. The psychical element in the matter of food-habit is important in all higher animals, but most of all in man. The digestive organs are controlled by the nervous system, and the brain acts upon the latter in such a way as to favour or to restrain the "appetite" and the secretion of the elaborate digestive juices, so that fear, surprise, disgust, and "nausea" (that strange product of mental and physical reactions) may destroy appetite and inhibit the digestive process. There are vast populations of men who live on rice, or beans, or ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... His dominion; practically, Christian affairs were administered by local authorities. It was impossible for a hundred reasons for Him to do what He wished with regard to the exchange of communications. An elaborate cypher had been designed, and a private telegraphic station organised on His roof communicating with another in Damascus where Cardinal Corkran had fixed his residence; and from that centre messages ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... playing mechanically with the flowers and sweet-scented herbs spread scantily before her. The trial was very brief: the evidence, emphatically conclusive, was confidently given, and vainly cross-examined. Nothing remained but an elaborate ad misericordiam excusative defence, which had been prepared by me, and which the prisoner begged her counsel might be allowed to read. This was of course refused; the recorder remarking, they might as well allow counsel ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... where the merits of tea were first largely agitated, and fill the scene with the traditional Dutch figures such as I sketch. I find in Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature" which I consulted before coming away that a French writer wrote an elaborate treatise to prove that tea merchants were always immoral members of society. It would be rather curious to apply the theory to the present ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... a jolly family dinner, with Mr. Hartwig carving and emitting little jokes, with Harry whining about his homework and Lulu telling the maid what an asphyxiated fool she was to have roasted the lamb too long— Father was highly elaborate in his descriptions of how he had tried on the tail-coat and found it to be a superb fit. As the coat was the personal theatricals-equipment of Mr. Harris Hartwig, who was shaped like the dome of the county court-house, Lulu looked suspicious, but Harry was discovered making ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... the family in collecting their friends and acquaintances on this important evening, they were completely successful in one point at least; for, before nine, half the dilettanti of the city were assembled in Greenwich-street, in a most elaborate state of musical excitement. Charlotte Henly, of course, was of the party, although she was absolutely ignorant of a single note, nor knew how to praise a scientific execution, or to manifest disgust at simple melody. But, her importance in the world of fashion, and her friend Maria, ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... unpack and make your toilet for dinner," she said, adding, as an after-thought: "You need not trouble to make an elaborate toilet, as there will be no one but ourselves, but to-morrow we will have some guests, among them several young men ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... an elaborate speech in favor of the war. From his standpoint, his speech was masterly and unanswerable. It was a grand consecutive argument, solid logic without sentimentalism. While he admitted that, according to the principles laid down by the great writers on international war, intervention ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... slowly. "I think a serious message." He sat down on a pile of sacks, and spread the paper on his knee. "But the characters are so elaborate—I can't make ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... assertion of any one theory of reconciliation. It was as certainly held by Chalmers and Dr. Pye Smith, as by Dr. Kurtz and the author of this treatise; nay, it has been recognized by not a few of their opponents also. Granville Penn, for instance, does not scruple to avow his belief, in his elaborate "Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaic Geologies," that both sun and moon were created on the first day of creation, though they did not become "optically visible" until the fourth. "In truth, that the fourth day only rendered visible the sidereal creation of the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... were laid upon the ground and upon these the body was placed, the figure in a recumbent position with the arms over the head. The invalid for whom this ceremony was held spared no expense in having the theurgist make the most elaborate explanation to his near relatives of the ...
— Ceremonial of Hasjelti Dailjis and Mythical Sand Painting of the - Navajo Indians • James Stevenson
... unaccountable reason false to her appeared to be beyond all question. Her trusting and innocent heart could not dream of the subtle network which was being wound round her. Her secluded life had left her very ignorant of the ways of the world, and the possibility of an elaborate deceit being practised upon her had never occurred to her. From the day that she heard the extract of the letter read by her guardian she never doubted but that such letters were received at the office by the man who professed ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... elaborate and learned commentary, with an interlinear version of "the Song of the Sun," the reader may consult "Les Chants de Sol," by Professor Bergmann, ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... porch of the inn was covered by little knots of women, all trying to talk at once; their faces told an ominous tale. Not a man was to be seen. The Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Chicago papers, all of which had previously contained elaborate illustrated accounts of Mr. Cooke's palatial park and residence, came out that morning bristling with headlines about the ball, incidentally holding up the residents of a quiet and retiring little community in a light that scandalized ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... years' reading. It is important to observe however, that every one of these references, except those which I have included in brackets, is given in the appendix to Cureton's Vindiciae Ignatianae, where the passages are quoted in full. Thus two-thirds of this elaborate note might have been compiled in ten minutes. Our author has here and there transposed the order of the quotations, and confused it by so doing, for it is chronological in Cureton. But what purpose was served by ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... novels merely to amuse,—we have always had it in our view to instruct, and it must not be supposed that we have no other end in view than to make the reader laugh. If we were to write an elaborate work, telling truths, and plain truths, confining ourselves only to point out errors and to demand reform, it would not be read; we have therefore selected this light and trifling species of writing, as it is by many denominated, ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... total annihilation, at least to such a crushing punishment that for many long years the defeated power will be little more than a geographical expression on modern maps." His letter concluded with an elaborate statement of the military resources and condition of the two nations, which approximate ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... hid away in the crypts of some remote mad-house—reduced to submission by privation and misery—a case as desperate as that of a prisoner in the Inquisition. What could be the motive for this elaborate and hideous fraud? Would it not be a more convenient course, as well as more merciful to put him to death? The crime would hardly be greater. Why should he be retained ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Mrs Rothwell and her daughters are assembled in the drawing-room making elaborate preparations for the evening with holly, and artificial flowers and mottoes, and various cunning and beautiful devices. On a little table by the grand piano stands a tray with a decanter of sherry, a glass jug filled (and likely to remain so) with water, and a few biscuits. ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... went out and sent the message, and it may be as well that we should follow it to its destination. Within thirty minutes of its leaving Barchester it reached the Earl of - in his inner library. What elaborate letters, what eloquent appeals, what indignant remonstrances, he might there have to frame, at such a moment, may be conceived, but not described! How he was preparing his thunder for successful rivals, standing like a British peer with his back to the sea-coal fire, and his hands in his ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... floor, into her rocking-chair again, and was swaying back and forth with her head comfortably leaning back, when the door at last yielded and Henry Glynn entered. He cast a covertly sharp, comprehensive glance at Mrs. Brigham with her elaborate calm; at Rebecca quietly huddled in the corner of the sofa with her handkerchief to her face and only one small uncovered reddened ear as attentive as a dog's, and at Caroline sitting with a strained composure in ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... the Trocadero at Cadiz by the duc d'Angouleme, and the better to mark the occasion the height on which the new barrack was to stand was solemnly rebaptized by the name of the fort in question. The programme of the fete was long and elaborate. It consisted of a representation of the taking of the Trocadero, a sham battle in which twenty battalions of the royal guard took part. Then came the laying of the cornerstone, which duty was performed by the dauphin ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... never dared as did Liszt. One was an aeolian-harp, the other a hurricane. I never attempted to play these studies in their revised form; I content myself with the first sketches published as an opus 1. There the nucleus of each etude may be seen. Later Liszt expanded the croquis into elaborate frescoes. And yet they say that he had ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... proverbs may be more instructive and comprehensive than the most elaborate scheme ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... to a free use of money, and of her own money, too, (for this is a country in which very many persons cast the substance of OTHERS right and left,) and when her eldest daughter expressed a wish to possess an elaborate specimen of our race, she had consented from a pure disinclination to deny her child any gratification that might be deemed innocent. Still, she knew that prudence was a virtue, and that Julia had thrown away money that might have ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... unsentimental tone, this brief speech had probably a much more powerful effect on the men than a more elaborate exhortation would have had. The impression was deepened by the remarks of an old officer, who made a very brief, soldierly speech after the General, winding up with the information that he had himself been in Egypt, and assuring them that if they did not take ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... strong gelatinous mixture of glue and treacle. This strap is then pressed on the ware, and gives the impression in glue, the colouring powder is then dusted over it, and a sufficient portion adheres to the damp parts to give the pattern, after having been again in the furnace. The more elaborate patterns on earthenware, and all those on porcelain, are ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... eloquence in Philip Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie (1581); but his ideas about poetry were floating, loose, and ill defined, and he had not much to point to as of first-rate excellence in recent writers. Webbe's Discourse of English Poetrie (1586), and the more elaborate work ascribed to George Puttenham (1589), works of tame and artificial learning without Sidney's fire, reveal equally the poverty, as a whole, of what had been as yet produced in England as poetry, in spite of the widespread ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... the three friends were busy with their favourite pursuits. Grant soon bagged several brace of grouse. Fred caught a basket of splendid sea-trout, some of which were over three pounds' weight, and a small salmon of about ten pounds; while Sam Sorrel sat down on a rock and painted an elaborate picture of the scenery. Of course their different occupations separated them from each other, but Hans kept close to Fred's elbow—for he had not only conceived a strong friendship for the young Englishman, but he was immensely ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... buttoned close at the throat, and came down well over the hips, fitting after the manner of a shirt. My trousers, issued by the Confederate Quartermaster Department, were fashioned in North Carolina, of a reddish-brown or brick-dust color, part wool and part cotton, elaborate in dimensions about the hips and seat, but tapering and small at the feet, in imitation, as to shape and color, of those worn by Billy Wilson's Zouaves at first Manassas. This is an accurate description of our apparel. Among our fellow-soldiers it attracted no especial attention, as there were ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... accord with the popular character of this work, to go minutely into all the variation of dentition which distinguish the different species. To those who wish to continue to the minutest details the study of the Indian Voles, I recommend a most careful and elaborate paper on them by Mr. W. T. Blanford, F.R.S., in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. L., pt. ii.; but without entering into the microscopic particulars of each species, I may here give a general idea of the formation of the teeth of the Arvicolae differing ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... air and to catch them in succession, than to sport in that manner with one only, then may blank verse be more easily fabricated than rhyme. And if to these labors we add others equally requisite, a style in general more elaborate than rhyme requires, farther removed from the vernacular idiom both in the language itself and in the arrangement of it, we shall not long doubt which of these two very different species of verse threatens ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... of the ways of folk in mediaeval castles and cottages. But the process savoured too much of the workshop. A novel or poem that required an appendix of notes and glossaries must be of high excellence to avoid suspicious resemblance to an elaborate literary counterfeit, since open and avowed borrowing from dictionaries of antiquities or volumes of travel must damage the illusion which is the indispensable element of romance. In Moore's fantastic metrical ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... an elaborate analysis, of either the structure or radical derivation of the various dialects we are acquainted with, I shall adduce a few instances in each, of words taken from the vocabularies I have mentioned ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... following essays as a (very big) set of program notes to accompany his second piano sonata. Here, he puts forth his elaborate theory of music and what it represents, and discusses Transcendental philosophy and its relation to music. The essays explain Ives' own philosophy of and understanding of music and art. They also serve as an analysis of music itself as an artform, and provide a critical explanation of the "Concord" ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... then it was done in a very crude way. There was none of the modern elaborate work of field telegraph systems. Nowadays, you see, an army builds its telegraph lines as it goes along. Then they were dependent upon the lines already built, mostly along the railroad tracks. The first really great war ...
— The Boy Scout Automobilists - or, Jack Danby in the Woods • Robert Maitland
... is the most elaborate form into which the praise of the Greek Church is cast. A canon consists, nominally, of nine odes or hymns, but the second ode is always omitted on account of the denunciations of God against Israel which it contains. The canons of the Great Fast are made up ...
— Hymns of the Greek Church - Translated with Introduction and Notes • John Brownlie
... had been arranged for the night. The maid had laid aside the elaborate lace coverlet and pillow covers, had deftly turned back the bed clothing in correct fashion, and had put Grandma's night ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... and the archivolts filled in with little figures, sacred, fantastic, and grotesque, are there, as in connection with the central arch; but all this has only an ornamental purpose. The spectator who is at all interested in ecclesiastical architecture will examine with much delight the elaborate mouldings and the strangely-suggestive forms of men, beasts, birds, shapes fantastic and chimerical, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... souls. Men seek, feeling their way, a road that seems to elude them. A crowd of spirits, by the very fact of their contemporaneity, feel themselves distracted and agitated all in the same way. Confusedly and provoked by the same sufferings they elaborate the same ideal and formulate the same desires. But they all wander along twilit paths on the side of the night where the light seems to be breaking through, without, however, being able to pierce the darkness. These are the preliminary agonies of the ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... 'Time.' The 'times' used in modern music can practically be reduced to two—viz., Duple (two beats to the bar) and Triple (three beats to the bar). But in Elizabeth's day the table of various Proportions was a terribly elaborate thing. Of course many of these 'Proportions' never really came into practical use—but there was plenty of mystery left even after ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... have within your hand, the most pretious Treasure in the World. For this is the true Stone of Philosophers, than which, no Man ever had a better, nor shall have any other. And I my self did elaborate the Composition, from beginning to end. If you have another convenient Chamber, I will Shew you Metal transmuted into Gold, by such a Stone as this (When I had brought him into another Chamber.) Behold (said he) ...
— The Golden Calf, Which the World Adores, and Desires • John Frederick Helvetius
... hands of the British government, but his colleagues suppressed the clause. In 1778 Virginia forbade the importation of slaves into her ports. The next year Jefferson proposed to the Legislature an elaborate plan for gradual emancipation, but it failed of consideration. Maryland followed Virginia in forbidding the importation of slaves from Africa. Virginia in 1782 passed a law by which manumission of slaves, which before had required special legislative permission, might be given ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... not indulge in fashions. Strictly conservative in their manners and customs, they never imitate, but they simply vie with each other in the superlativeness of their own style; thus the dressing of the hair is a most elaborate affair, which occupies a considerable portion of their time. It is quite impossible for an Arab woman to arrange her own hair; she therefore employs an assistant, who, if clever in the art, will generally occupy about three days before the operation is ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... was an elaborate hiding of his tell-tale face; but the colonel's was the slightest of nods, and I could feel the sloe-black eyes of him boring into my ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... court, the king established elaborate forms of etiquette, and made himself almost an object of worship. The nobility swarmed about him, and sought advancement from his favor. Festivals and shows of all sorts—plays, ballets, banquets, dazzling fireworks—were ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Elaborate arrangements had been made for transmitting the news of the celebration to the world. All the important telegraph offices of the country were connected with Promontory, Utah, that day, so that the blow of the hammer driving ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... and yet how far superior to Grey's elaborate phraseology! Huxley has here seized the central point of the poet's thought, and expressed it with the dignity ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... diverting England from Bond aims by that and similar controversies. To make a show of sincerity about it all, the opinions (foregathered, of course) of certain eminent jurists in England and Holland were obtained, who refuted the claim in elaborate disquisitions and with that readiness of apparent conviction so peculiar to some advocates' affected faith in their clients' cause. Thus England was decoyed into a protracted tournament of words and phrases without any practical result, but gratifying ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... and invoking blessings of an elaborate nature on Gashford's head, the Irishman hastened away, and went straight to the prison, which stood considerably apart from the huts and ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... 16.; Voltaire, Siecle de Louis XIV.; Burnet, ii. 97; Memoires de Berwick; Dykvelt's Letter to the States General dated August 4. 1692. See also the very interesting debate which took place in the House of Commons on Nov. 21. 1692. An English translation of Luxemburg's very elaborate and artful despatch will be found in the Monthly Mercury for September 1692. The original has recently been printed in the new edition of Dangeau. Lewis pronounced it the best despatch that he had ever seen. The editor of the Monthly Mercury maintains that it was manufactured at Paris. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... made two or three summers before in the course of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the centre of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told. One evening in June, a single passenger landed upon the steamboat wharf. The ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... position. The style of this gentleman, in the office he designed for the payment of dividend warrants, now employed as the private drawing-office, is very different to the erections of his predecessor. The taste which produced the elaborate and exquisite ornaments in this room is in strong contrast to the severe simplicity of the works of ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... a great relief to the push. They ran against each other and the door-post in their eagerness to be at work. The furniture—what Mrs A. called her "few bits of things"—was carried out with elaborate care. The ironing table was the main item. It was placed top down in the cart, and the rest of the things went between the legs without bulging sufficiently to cause ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... in the cultural scale—among savage groups—the differentiation of employments is still less elaborate and the invidious distinction between classes and employments is less consistent and less rigorous. Unequivocal instances of a primitive savage culture are hard to find. Few of these groups or communities that are classed as "savage" show no traces of regression ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... and laughter gradually subsided. He sat down again on the bench and taking up his banjo prepared, with somewhat elaborate effort, to put it into ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... whitewashed in modern times, and does not look so venerable as it ought, with its arches and pillared aisles. In the chancel stands a marble tomb, heavy, rich, and elaborate, on the top of which lie the broken-nosed statues of Sir Anthony Browne and his lady, who were the Lord and Lady of Battle Abbey in Henry VIII.'s time. The knight is in armor, and the lady in stately garb, and (save for their broken ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... an interesting thought, that will occur to a contemplative mind, that the world contained, from the time when it was a nebulous mass, all the materials of the future individuals of the animate and inanimate creation,—that the elaborate creatures of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, as well as every mineral, were floating in amorphous masses through space. Human beings, like genius that was condensed from vapor at the rubbing of Aladdin's lamp, were diffused in gases, waiting the touch of the Great Magician's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... reached a third edition. We shall be surprised if it do not go through many. It possesses almost every qualification of a good book—grace, variety, and vigour of style—a concentrated power of description, which has all the effect of elaborate painting—information carefully collected and judiciously communicated—sound and enlarged views of important questions—a hearty and generous love of country—and the whole pervaded by a refined but sometimes caustic humour, which imparts a constant ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... or three days was notified when I would be expected at the estate. At the designated time I was escorted to Pisa by an aide-de-camp, and from there we drove the few miles to the King's chateau, where we fortified ourselves for the work in hand by an elaborate and toothsome breakfast of about ten courses. Then in a carriage we set out for the King's stand in the hunting-grounds, accompanied by a crowd of mounted game-keepers, who with great difficulty controlled ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... small, neatly-furnished apartment, panelled with wood, and containing two windows, neither of which were made to open—a peculiarity not only to be found in Iceland but in some other places, especially in Tyrol. A wooden bedstead stood in one corner, covered with an elaborate patch-work quilt, whilst a table and two chairs constituted the remainder of the furniture. As our party numbered five, some pack boxes were added—not very soft seats after a long jolting ride. A looking-glass hung on the wall; ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... it was mainly due to the able and temperate pleading of Alesius that this great boon, or indeed I may say this indefeasible right of Christian laymen, was granted. The same subject had been reverted to by him in his more elaborate treatise, De authoritate Verbi Dei, which was published in 1542 in Latin, and some time after ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... range," remarked Grace, who was languidly eating chocolates. "That is, your poetry is getting more elaborate." ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... other feature of difference there is amongst this commercial class of readers: amongst the aristocracy all are thoroughly educated, excepting those who go at an early age into the army; of the commercial body, none receive an elaborate, and what is meant by a liberal education, except those standing by their connections in the richest classes. Thus it happens that, amongst those who have not inherited but achieved their stations, many men of fine and powerful ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Arthur, Knights of the Holy Grail, Modern Knights of St. Paul, and others of such ilk have in symbolism sought to teach and find expression for the religious impulse. The method has been more or less the religious type in disguise—ancient titles, elaborate ritual, initiations, and degrees, red fire, fuss and feathers, and something doing all the time to attract the boy. The result has been and is a play-idea of organization and a make-believe environment on the part ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... author of A Saint Blaise and L'Andalouse and the Chanson de Fortunio, a lively gratitude to the author of Il ne faut jurer de rien and Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermee, call Emmeline a very badly told and uninteresting story. The almost over-elaborate description of the heroine at the beginning does not fit in with her subsequent conduct; Gilbert is a nonentity; the husband, though noble in conduct, is pale in character, and the sister had much better have been left out.[236] So the rest may ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... individual, East or West, in intellectual prowess. But, more than this, socially and religiously he regards himself as the first son of heaven. Contact with an Englishman, even with the King-Emperor himself, is for him pollution, which must be removed by elaborate and exacting religious ceremonies. To eat with any such would be a sin of the deepest dye. How can one expect such a man to meet with a foreigner on even terms, or to treat him with equality and true friendship? Before India loves ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... according to the Bible, he delivered an elaborate code of laws to his people in the name of God. The portions referring to war are contained in the twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy. Here they stand in ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... high and squeaky, like a boy's voice when it is breaking. The extended hand was soft and greasy in spite of its attempt at a firm grip. With elaborate politeness he ushered Mrs. Harrington into her chair. He took his place close beside her, crossed his fat legs, and stuck his ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... less elaborate document she thoughtfully went on to provide for their hearing and deciding, at the same time, any disputes over civil matters which might possibly have arisen among the population of that remote locality since it ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... recent productions in print,—his Fourth of July Oration at New York, and his Letter to the Craytonville Committee. But he has seen too many aspirants for the Presidency contrive to drown themselves in their inkstands, and is far too shrewd a man, to elaborate any documentary evidence of his opinions. If we arrive at them, it must be by a process of induction, and by gathering what evidence we can from other sources. Mr. Cushing knows very well that the multitude have nothing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... record was to be kept of the business done. The board thus established never did more than make recommendations and offer advice, as it had no authority to execute any of the plans that it might make; and although the records of its meetings are lengthy and give evidence of elaborate discussion of important matters, the results of its deliberations cannot be said to ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... could at any moment do exactly as it pleased us to do. All other liberty is a compromise between our own freedom of will and the wills of those with whom we come in contact. In an organized state each one of us has a more or less elaborate code of what he may do to others and to himself, and what others may do to him. He limits others by his rights and is limited by the rights of others, and by considerations affecting the welfare of the community as ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... large scale have occupied themselves too much with subordinate details, and have been misled from a true appreciation of his main lines of thought and action by religious, political, and hero-worshipping bias. For the following sketch, taking Mr. Lee's elaborate work as my chronological guide, I have read such of Defoe's undoubted writings as are accessible in the Library of the British Museum—there is no complete collection, I believe, in existence—and endeavoured to ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... Bossuet, who requested him to endorse an unscrupulous attack upon Madame Guyon. This made it necessary for Fenelon to define his position, which he did in his famous Maxims of the Saints. The treatise is important for our purposes, since it is an elaborate attempt to determine the limits of true and false Mysticism concerning two great ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... Huguenot conscience, and this talent spoke of expatriating itself. "I will go to Clagny to-morrow," replied the prince to me; and he went there, in fact, accompanied by the Marquise de Montchevreuil and Madame la Dauphine, in an elaborate neglige. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... christian zeal that woman derived the power of defying the utmost rigors of persecution with invincible fortitude. Saint Ambrose, in his elaborate and pious treatise on this subject, records the resolution of a fair disciple of Pythagoras, who, being severely urged by a tyrant to reveal the secrets of her sex, to convince him that no torments should reduce her to so unworthy a breach of ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... last, it came that a tapestry was but a painting in wool, with as many thousand differently united threads as would reproduce the shading of brush-blended paint, the whole thing fell of its own weight, and we of to-day value less the unlimited pains of the elaborate dyer and weaver than we do the simpler work. The reason is plain. Time fades a little even the securest dyes, and that little is just enough to reduce to flat monotones a work in which perhaps sixty thousand tones are ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... a casual smile that was a poor reward for his elaborate apology. "So sorry," she said with the sweet distant manner in which she disposed of bores and climbers, "but Mr. Ruyler and I are both tired. We are going ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... their names, like their faces, like their clothes, and it was idle for him to tell himself that their humble and contrite hearts, it might be, paid a far richer tribute of devotion than his had ever been, a gift tenfold more acceptable than his elaborate adoration. It was idle for him to move himself to be generous towards them, to tell himself that if he ever came to their gates, stripped of his pride, beaten and in beggar's weeds, that they would be generous towards him, loving him as themselves. Idle and embittering, finally, ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... home. He prepared his causes with the most thorough premeditation of the line of his own evidence, and of all the opposing evidence that could possibly be anticipated. Hence he moved with rapidity and precision, and was never taken by surprise. His arguments were not elaborate, or studied in point of finish, but they were strong, downright practical, and to the point. In this sense he was a fine and effective speaker to courts ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... low whistle, like a man who felt he had escaped from a scene in which persecution had been a little lightened by the ridiculous, and uttered a few curses on the nations of the north, for being so inconsiderate as to have histories so much longer and more elaborate than he conceived to be at all necessary. All this passed as he hastened along the promenade, which he found deserted, every human being having apparently left it. At length he thought he perceived a female form some distance ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... given for Miss Anthony in Rochester the evening before she left home for Baltimore she took cold and immediately after reaching Miss Garrett's she became very ill and was under the care of physicians and trained nurses. On the second night, however, the College Evening for which elaborate preparations had been made, she summoned the will power for which she had always been noted, rose from her bed, put on a beautiful gown and went to the convention hall. Quoting again from the Biography: "When she appeared on the stage and the great ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... that, as regards his spiritual welfare, John Wesley appeared to his mother at all times to be in a satisfactory condition. At one time he presses her for an opinion on Thomas a Kempis, and receives an elaborate answer, at once philosophical and theological, in the course of which the remark is made—"I take a Kempis to have been an honest weak man, with more zeal than knowledge, by his condemning all mirth or pleasure as sinful or useless, in opposition to so many plain and direct texts ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... he extols in panegyric terms, and proves how much superior he was in learning to William II. of Sicily. He says that "Henry, as often as he could breathe from his care and solicitudes, he was occupied in secret reading; or at other times joined by a body of clergy, would try to solve some elaborate question quaestiones laborat evolvere."[348] Frequently we find him writing about books, begging transcripts, eagerly purchasing them; and in one of his letters to Alexander, Abbot of Jenniege, Gemiticensem, he writes, apologizing, and begging his forgiveness for not having fulfilled his ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... coveted position, the Marquise devoted her energies to two things, and these she kept ever before her,—the pleasing of her royal master, and the furthering of her party's interests. How well she succeeded, this book shows. She entertained and amused the King by elaborate pageants, in the various chateaux which she built, or remodelled. Bellevue, Choisy, the Hermitage at Versailles, Menars, La Celle, Montretout,—these are among the monuments of her lavish career, and in these palaces she accumulated costly art objects, such as the Saxe porcelains, ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... delicate, the partitions perfectly invisible.' The correspondents were already accustomed to this 'heavenly mingle.' Few of the letters, those works of nature, and almost more wonderful than works of art, are to be taken on oath. Those elaborate lies, which ramify through them into patterns of sober-seeming truth, are in anticipation, and were of the nature of a preliminary practice for the innocent and avowed fiction of the essays. What began in mischief ends ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... have already made mention, Gogol. There was general enthusiasm; Gogol absorbed almost the entire attention of the public and men of letters. The great critic and publicist Byelinsky, in particular, took it upon himself to elaborate in his works the theories of realism; he formulated the program about 1850 under the name of the "naturalistic school." Thus the germs of the past had expanded triumphantly in the work of Gogol, and the way was now clear for Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... we have the contrast, elaborate, strongly drawn and telling, between Madam Loisel after ten years and her friend, who represents in flesh and blood what she might have been. Then at the end comes the short, sharp contrast of paste ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... inmate of that very select boarding-house carried on by Mrs. Bognor at number 17 Russell Street, Bloomsbury. He arrived with a steamer trunk, an elaborate traveling-bag and a dressing-case; took the best vacant room in the house, and dressed for dinner. Mrs. Bognor looked upon him as a valuable addition to her clientele, and introduced him freely to her other guests. Among these was Major Edward Jones. Major Jones ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... gave a little cry of surprise. Then their eyes met. Immediately he made the most elaborate bow of all his life, and she swept a graceful courtesy. Her face was slightly flushed that this stranger should have seen, but he carried such an open, cordial look that she paused, instead of hurrying into the governor's room, as she had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... observe, that such attacks do their execution without inquiry. Who can refute a sneer? Who can compute the number, much less, one by one, scrutinize the justice of those disparaging insinuations which crowd the pages of this elaborate history? What reader suspends his curiosity, or calls off his attention from the principal narrative, to examine references, to search into the foundation, or to weigh the reason, propriety, and force of every transient ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... had fashioned an elaborate tea-cosy with a letter "M" in outline stitch, and a pretty frilled pincushion marked with a "J," for her two aunts, so that taken all together the day would have been an unequivocal success had nothing else happened; but something ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... elaborate critique he rent Pawkins to tatters—one can fancy the man's disordered black hair, and his queer dark eyes flashing as he went for his antagonist—and Pawkins made a reply, halting, ineffectual, with painful gaps of silence, and yet malignant. There was no mistaking his will to wound Hapley, ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... king for themselves they drew up as against themselves for their tenants. Based too as it professed to be on Henry's Charter it was far from being a mere copy of what had gone before. The vague expressions of the old Charter were now exchanged for precise and elaborate provisions. The bonds of unwritten custom which the older grant did little more than recognize had proved too weak to hold the Angevins; and the baronage set them aside for the restraints of written and defined law. It is in this way that the Great ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green |
