"Equable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... share the Progressist idea, that much can be done by legislation to ameliorate the condition of the masses of the population, nor do they see that in a country like New Zealand, where labour is dear, food cheap, and the climate mild and equable, their condition need necessarily be so deplorable. They still cherish the old theories of individualism. The humanitarian ideals of Mr. Reeves, not being idealists, they regard with little interest. What they see is the Government of their Colony, which they ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... conventional types of the mosaics and the Byzantine painters,—idealizing them when the personages represented were of higher mark and dignity, but in none ever outstepping truth. Advancing in his career, we find year by year the fruits of continuous unwearied study in a consistent and equable contemporary improvement in all the various minuter though most important departments of his art, in his design, his drapery, his coloring, in the dignity and expression of his men and in the grace ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and the squire had thought much but had come to no conclusion. On the morning when Walter Goddard crept into the disused vault at the back of the church, the squire awoke from his sleep at his usual early hour. He was not in a very good humour, if so equable a man could be said to be subject to such weaknesses as humours. The weather was very depressing—day after day brought only more rain, more wind, more mud, more of everything disagreeable. The previous evening had been unusually dull. He was never weary of being with Mary Goddard, ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... TIME. That shown by a clock or watch when compensated for the unequal progress of the sun in the ecliptic, and which thence forms an equable measure of time.—To take time is for an assistant to note the time by a chronometer at each instant that the observer calls "stop," on effecting his astronomical observation for altitude of a heavenly body, or for contact ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... the war telegrams to Rachel, who had come down late, complaining of a headache; but when Janet—the reserved and equable Janet—after going through the news of the recapture of Ostend, Zeebrugge, and Bruges, broke into the passionate, low-spoken comment: "The Lord is King—be the people never so unquiet!" or could not, for tears, finish the account ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... scanty locks of iron-gray were thick and dark, my now pale and furrowed cheeks were fresh and ruddy, like his own. Time, circumstance, and natural bent of mind, have done their work on both of us; and if his course of life has been less equable than mine, it has been chiefly so because the original impulse, the first start on the great journey, upon which so much depends, was directed by wiser heads in my case than in his. We were school-fellows for a considerable time; and if I acquired—as I certainly ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... been in such a situation that they could form perfect crystals they are called spars, some of which possess a double refraction, as observed by Sir Isaac Newton. When these crystals are jumbled together or mixed with some colouring impurities it is termed marble, if its texture be equable and firm; if its texture be coarse and porous yet hard, it is called lime-stone; if its texture be very loose and porous it is termed chalk. In some rocks the shells remain almost unchanged and only covered, or bedded with lime-stone, which seems to have been ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... and disappeared. There could be no mistake about it, it was the man himself who had fallen: that single and minute expression of the popular will had passed for ever from view; and the smooth and equable hum of the unseen ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... "The present equable diffusion of moderate wealth cannot be better illustrated, than by remarking that in this age many palaces and superb mansions have been pulled down, or converted to other purposes, while none have been erected ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... demanding infinite patience, forbearance, nay, affectionate blindness, in those who would minister to its happiness, and mitigate the worst results of those foibles themselves. Certainly George Sand, for a genius, was a wonderfully equable character; her "satanic" moods showed themselves chiefly in pen and ink; her nerves were very strong, the balance of her physical and mental organization was splendidly even, as one imagines Shakespeare's to have been. But the very vigor of her ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... other. A moral basis of sterling qualities is of capital importance. A true, honest, and trustworthy nature, capable of self-sacrifice and self-restraint, should rank in the first line, and after that a kindly, equable, and contented temper, a power of sympathy, a habit of looking at the better and brighter side of men and things. Of intellectual qualities, judgment, tact, and order are perhaps the most valuable. Above almost all things, men should seek in marriage perfect ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... would render the dealings of individuals mutual and just,—if they would preserve the property and labor of their subjects from the merciless caprices of the powerful, and keep society from reverting to a more or less barbarous state,—to supply a fixed and equable money-measure; and the majority of the governments have selected gold and silver as the best. As seemingly less changeable in quantity and value than anything else, as imperishable, as portable, as divisible, as both convenient and safe, the precious metals challenge superiority over every ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... peculiar gift with children which is not easy to define. Some people possess it, and some do not; it cannot be learned, it comes by nature. She was bright and firm and equable all at once. She both amused and influenced them. There was something about her which excited the childish imagination, and always they felt her sympathy. Amy was a tractable child, and intelligent beyond her age, but she was never ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... tierra templada the mean is from 62 degrees to 70 degrees F., and this is the climatic region which the Mexicans love to term "perpetual spring." In point of fact, it is a zone not unworthy of the designation, being equable, healthy, and with a beautiful and varied flora. It is to be recollected that the greater part of the area of the country lies in this temperate zone, although there is included in it a part of the great plateau, with its great range of heat and cold from ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... our anchorage, in latitude 32 degrees 27 minutes 21 seconds South and longitude 2 degrees 1 minute 10 seconds West of Swan River, variation 4 degrees 10 minutes westerly. The temperature of Houtman's Abrolhos is rendered equable by the fact that they lie at the limit of the land breezes; during the month we were there ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... itself. Her days passed in noiseless, equable procession. Many hours had been given back to her empty after Edith's death. She had filled them with interests outside her home, with visiting the poor in the district round All Souls, with evening classes for shop-girls, with "Rescue" ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... of speech, in his rank, unweeded eloquence, which seemed naturally to discourage any effort at selection, any sense of fine difference, of nuances or proportion, in things. The loose sympathies of his genius were allied to nature, nursing, with equable maternity of soul, good, bad, and indifferent, rather than to art, distinguishing, rejecting, refining. Commission and omission; sins of the former surely had the preference. And how would Paolo and Francesca have read the lesson? How would this Henry the Third, and Margaret of the "Memoirs," ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... than was his wont to-day, but he seemed in equable spirits, and made many exclamations of delight. He said suddenly, "Do you know one of the advantages of growing old? It is that if you have an unpleasant thing ahead of you, instead of shadowing the mind, as it does when you are young, ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to the same genus branched off from a common progenitor, whilst generic characters are those which have remained unaltered from a much more remote epoch, and accordingly are now less variable. This statement makes a near approach to Mr. Walsh's law of Equable Variability. Secondary sexual characters, it may be added, rarely serve to characterise distinct genera, for they usually differ much in the species of the same genus, and are highly variable in the individuals of the same species; ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... windings at the base, coiled a snake. The pipe was not over large, for all its wealth of ornamentation. Barndale had hung over it when he smoked it first with the care of an affectionate nurse over a baby. It had rewarded his cares by colouring magnificently until it had grown a deep equable ebony everywhere. Not a trace of burn or scratch defaced its surface, and no touch of its first beauty was destroyed by use. Apart from its memories, Barndale would not have sold that pipe except at some astounding figure, which nobody would ever have been likely ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... through his diplomatic skill being required in Downing Street. This was what he said, pleading his having to adjust some nice and knotty point of difference between the valiant King of Congo and the neighbouring and pugnacious Ja Ja, or else to remonstrate, in firm and equable language, as Officialdom knows so well how to do, against the repeated unjustifiable homicides of the despot of Dahomey, in sacrifice to his gods, beneath the sheltering shade ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... stacks, that may be reckoned by their hundreds of thousands. At Messrs. Giesler's the disgorging of the wine is accomplished in a small cellier partially underground, and the temperature of which is very cool and equable. The dgorgeurs, isolated from the rest of the workpeople, are carrying on their operations here by candlelight. So soon as the sediment is removed the bottles are raised in baskets to the cellier above, where the liqueuring, ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... feminine devotee of beauty and personal adornment, who, in the course of time, was to succeed the other as the mistress of the moat-house. The difference went far beyond externals; there was a wide psychological gulf between them—the difference between a woman of healthy mind and calm, equable temperament, who had probably never bothered her head about the opposite sex, and a woman who was the neurotic product of a modern, nerve-ridden city; sexual in type, a prey to morbid introspection ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... had a little more of Rowdy's equable disposition. It was typical of Pete, however, that he absolutely hated to leave an unpleasant task to an indefinite future. Moreover, he rather liked the Concho boys and the foreman. He wanted to ride ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... charges being high, however, to all who could afford to pay, and Mrs Pipchin very seldom sweetening the equable acidity of her nature in favour of anybody, she was held to be an old 'lady of remarkable firmness, who was quite scientific in her knowledge of the childish character.' On this reputation, and on the broken heart of Mr Pipchin, she had contrived, taking one year with another, to eke out ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... unlikely that "she may live to be plain Miss Guelph." Even Sir Robert Peel wrote: "If I am to be believed, I foresee revolution as the consequence of this Bill;" and he "felt that it had ceased to be an object of ambition to any man of equable and consistent mind to enter into the service of the Crown." And as late as 1839, so robust a character as Sir James Graham thought the world was coming to an end because the young Queen gave her confidence to a Whig Minister. "I begin to share all your apprehensions and forebodings," he writes ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... itself for a year—the happiest of my life, as I often, while it lasted, thought it would prove; and now that my years are over I know to have been so. To the anxious, nervous, exciting, irritating tenor of my London life succeeded the calm, equable, and all but imperceptible control of my dear friend, whose influence over her children, the result of her wisdom in dealing with them, no less than of their own amiable dispositions, was absolute. In considering Mrs. Henry Siddons's character, when years had modified ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... interrupted the journey. Under a pretext that was little remarked, M. de Wardes went forward in advance of the others. He took Manicamp with him, for his equable and dreamy disposition acted as a counterpoise to his own. It is a subject of remark, that quarrelsome and restless characters invariably seek the companionship of gentle, timorous dispositions, as if the former sought, in the contrast, a repose for their own ill-humor, ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... convert effects no small part of its own great purposes. No sooner does any one interest grow painful by excess than a new claim arises to divert the thoughts, a new demand is made on the sensibilities; and by lowering our affections from the intensity of selfishness to the more bland and equable feeling of impartiality, forms that just and generous condition of the mind at which the political economists aim when they dilate on the glories and advantages of their favorite theory of the ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... been referring to the decline, as I before spoke of the progress, of the Romans: the career of that people through twelve centuries is a drama of sustained interest and equable and majestic evolution; it has given scope for the most ingenious researches into its internal history. There one age is the parent of another; the elements and principles of its political system are brought out into a variety of powers with mutual ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... knows how good you are, how tender, how equable in anger, how loving, you are tenfold greater still. But," she added, "a man of genius is always more or less a child; and you are a child, a dearly beloved child," she said, caressing him. Then she drew that invitation ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... company of infantry, composed of black men, officered by whites. It must be admitted that they present a fine military appearance when on parade. Nassau has long been a popular resort for invalids who seek a soft, equable climate, and as it lies between the warm South Atlantic and the Gulf Stream it is characterized by the usual temperature of the tropics. There seemed to be a certain enervating influence in the atmosphere, under the effects of which the habitues of the place were plainly ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... nothing of the physiology of ferns and mosses, but as a matter of fact I think they will be found to increase and diminish together all over the world. Both like moist, equable climates and shade, and are therefore both so abundant in oceanic islands, and in the high ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... capable of performing in the fullest degree the highest functions of life. Therefore give the children plenty of plain, wholesome food; their active systems will appropriate it. If they continue serene in temper, equable in disposition, and generally healthy,—if the eyes are bright, the skin clear, the sleep serene,—the diet is ...
— The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economical Every-Day Cookery • Juliet Corson
... fall of fresh fragments from above, or diminished by their removal from below, yet not in such mass or with such momentum as entirely to disturb those already accumulated, the materials on the surface arrange themselves in an equable slope, producing a straight line of profile in the bank ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... were, a complete account of the sugar crop, of the local business houses, of the state of the freight market. All that talk was interspersed with hints as to personalities, amounting to veiled warnings, but his pale, fleshy face remained equable, without a gleam, as if ignorant of his voice. As you may imagine I opened my ears very wide. Every word was precious. My ideas as to the value of business friendship were being favourably modified. He gave me the names of all the disponible ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... innumerable. Many, many writers whom I have not quoted in these letters have adorned everything they touched, but do not seem to me to reach the snow-line or rise into great and moving eloquence. Charles Lamb, for example, never descends from his equable and altogether pleasing level, far above the plain of the commonplace, but neither does he reach up to the lofty altitudes of the lonely peaks; and if I began to quote from him, I see no obstacle to my quoting his entire works! And of Addison, Johnson wrote, ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... faculty, and had thus armed their intellectual sight by the keenest abstraction and by the submersion of the other powers of their nature. Extraordinary men are formed then by energetic and over-excited spasms as it were in the individual faculties; though it is true that the equable exercise of all the faculties in harmony with each other can alone make happy and perfect men.' After this statement, from which it should seem that in the progress of society nature has made it necessary ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... The equable tenor of his mind in these respects is illustrated by his letters from several of these places; and though I have but comparatively a small number of them now in my hands, yet they will afford some valuable extracts; which I shall therefore here lay before my reader, that he ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... that he had an independent way of looking at things. He would constantly bring before us some latent fact, some unsuspected relation, some resemblance between dissimilar things. We should feel that his utterances were not echoes. If therefore, in these moments of equable serenity, his mind glancing over trivial things saw them with great clearness, we might infer that in moments of intense activity his mind gazing steadfastly on important things, would see wonderful visions, where to us all was vague and shifting. During our quiet walk with him ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... Verity left it. There was no break, even in details of furnishing or arrangement, with the past. This, to Sir Charles, added to the natural restfulness of the place. Now after the great achievements and responsibilities of his Eastern career he found retirement congenial. The soft equable climate benefited his health. Rough shooting and good fishing could be had in plenty—stag-hunting, too, in Arnewood Forest, when he inclined to such sport. The Hard was sufficiently easy of access ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... north, and Norsemen from the west, all met and mingled with the native Gauls and eventually became Parisians. Environment acted its part, and so did the forces of Nature. The soil of the basin of Paris is fruitful, the climate equable, but neither encourage idlers; both demand a toll of strenuous labour, yet not so trying to man's strength as to leave him exhausted at the end of the day's work; he may recreate himself and bring his mind to bear on the ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... of the original population, as well as the numerical proportions of its members, indicates a warmer and, on the whole, somewhat tropical climate, which remained tolerably equable throughout the year. The subsequent distribution of living beings in zones is the result of a gradual lowering of the general temperature, which first began to ...
— Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... height, while toward the north they rise into fine peaks, glorious with eternal snow. Although the city is in the latitude of Albemarle Sound, North Carolina, its elevation and its neighborhood to Alpine ranges give it a climate which is in the main cool, equable, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... in a more equable distribution of the manurial constituents in the dung, by gradually and thoroughly incorporating the liquid portion of the manure with ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... all that he grew calmer and more equable. The biting, sarcastic tone he had adopted gradually disappeared; and it almost seemed as if the mood had been merely a survival of his ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... granted absolute freedom to the absent husband or wife, who was thereby authorized to remarry without further notice,—or words to that effect. It was, declared Randolph Fitts, a perfectly just and equable law, and would no doubt ease the minds of quite a number of people in far-off lands,—if ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... extraordinary effort of the muscles; by these means, instead of fortifying the whole body equally and generally, they often contribute to the development of the most dangerous diseases, since they do not teach the evil which the injudicious use of movements may produce." It was the harmonious and equable increase of all the voluntary and some of the involuntary muscles which the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... fluttering voice to tragic earnestness. "This was the—the—open cesspit that dared to call us 'stinkers.' And now—and now, it tries to shelter itself behind a dead rat. You annoy me, Rattray. You disgust me! You irritate me unspeakably! Thank Heaven, I am a man of equable temper—" ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... made her a more logical, reasoning, reasonable being than he believed it possible for a woman to be. Poor papa! All that he really knew of his most interesting daughter was that she was growing up a good child, physically strong and active, morally well educated, with a fortunately equable temper; and that she owed a great deal to him. What, precisely, was never defined. But when the thought of his kindness recurred to him it always suffused ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... us, "there can always be seen the same expression of modesty or confusion; and even in the dark, a rise of temperature of the skin of the face can be felt, exactly as occurs in the European." With the Indians who inhabit the hot, equable, and damp parts of South America, the skin apparently does not answer to mental excitement so readily as with the natives of the northern and southern parts of the continent, who have long been exposed to great vicissitudes of climate; ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... colour of the wood, together with the fact, that all the former occupants had fallen victims to the climate, gave the house an air of extraordinary gloom; still, this was in some measure dissipated by the multitude of flowers in the garden, of the kinds familiar to us in England, and which, from the equable temperature of the mountain climate, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... master and pupil had been added to those of playfellows, and their intercourse had run on so smoothly that until to-night Maurice had never known his charge's full power to irritate him. Like most persons of steady and equable temperament, he felt deeply annoyed, even humiliated, by having been surprised into impatience and anger; he was doubly displeased with himself and with Lucia. Yet, as he thought of her his mood softened; she was only a child, and would be good to-morrow. ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... descriptions of wheat. But considering that the sudden drop in the prices from 5s. to 6d., on account of the difference of Is. in the price, is at variance with the principle of the law, which seeks to establish as equable and uniform a reduction of duty as possible, we propose to make this arrangement respecting colonial wheat—that when the price of British wheat is under 55s., the duty upon every quarter of British colonial wheat ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... $250,000,000 to the product of the country would be a gain to every branch of industry; and if the equable system of taxation by a stamp-tax on all sales were adopted, the burden would not be felt. The additional product being mostly from an improved system of agriculture at the South, a much larger demand ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the 65th—twenty men led by Sergeant Mathew Coffin. They were chiefly Company A men, and they were going to relieve the pickets along the South Fork. Thanks to Mr. Commissary Banks, they had breakfasted well. The men were happy, not hilariously so, but in a placid, equable fashion. As they came down, over the wet grass, from the bluff, they talked. "Mist over the Shenandoah's just like mist over the James"—"No, 'tisn't! Nothing's like mist over the James."—"Well, the ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... and hot, the glorious, equable equatorial heat, and when we got out of the mangrove swamps through which the road is causewayed, there was fine tropical foliage, and the trees were festooned with a large, blue Thunbergia of great beauty. It is eight miles from the landing at Teluk Kartang to ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... and beauty the Filbertines are far above the average. The men are six feet in height and upwards, and proportionately wide. By a combination of equable climatic and economic conditions this altitude has become standardized and there is little variation from it. A sort of rough control is exercised in this regard. When a young male Filbertine has got his growth he is measured with a bamboo yardstick ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... given by wine is always mounting and tending to a crisis, after which it declines; that from opium, when once generated, is stationary for eight or ten hours; the one is a flame, the other a steady and equable glow. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... having, in one of his excursions, incautiously laid down on the frozen side of a hill when heated with walking, had caught a severe inflammatory sore throat, which became daily worse whilst we remained in the tents, but began to mend soon after he was enabled to confine himself to the more equable warmth of the house. We took up our abode at first on the floor, but our working party, who had shown such skill as house carpenters, soon proved themselves to be, with the same tools, (the hatchet and crooked knife,) excellent cabinet makers, and daily added a ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... easily silenced. Poor Bessy's uncertain fits of tenderness had produced more bewilderment than pleasure in her sober-minded child; but the little girl's feelings and perceptions had developed rapidly in the equable atmosphere of her step-mother's affection. Cicely had reached the age when children put their questions with as much ingenuity as persistence, and both Mr. Langhope and Amherst longed for Mrs. Ansell's aid in parrying her incessant interrogations as to the cause and length of Justine's absence, what ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... in truth, and in reality, his motive; but there was, at the same time, in his mind, a temporary inclination to deep and intense thought, which he could by no means shake off, and which naturally disposed him to a slow and equable pace. ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... treatment? Or could the technical and perhaps unconscious violator of an obscure and whimsical law be reformed by putting him on an equality with a cold-blooded murderer, or with a man who had grown rich by selling the shame of women? Was the punishment equable which handled with equal severity a brutish negro from the cotton fields, and a man brought up in refinement ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... snuff very solemnly, and looked round him with a calm circumspection, fixing his dull eye upon me, and wagging his head, with an equable motion, slowly up and down, spoke ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... of the whole island is warm and moist and very equable. The rainfall is copious at all times of the year, but is rather heavier during the prevalence of the north-east monsoon in the months from October to February, and least during the months of April and May. At Kuching, during the last thirty years, the average yearly ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... with a difference; and that deviation forms the school. Taking Gogol as the norm of modern Russian fiction—Leo Wiener's admirable anthology surprises with its specimens of earlier men—we see the novel strained through the rich, mystic imagination of Dostoievsky; viewed through the more equable, artistic, and pessimistic temperament of Turgenieff, until it is seized by Leo Tolstoy and passionately transformed to serve his own didactic purposes. Realism? Yes, such as the world has never before seen, and yet ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Representatives yesterday passed a singular compensation bill, benefiting two disbursing clerks and others already rich enough. I have written a note to Senator Johnson, of Missouri, hoping to head it off there, or to so amend it as to make it equable and just. All the paths of error lead to destruction; and every one seems inclined to be ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... some excitement in the bosoms of them all, as they met and shook hands; but far too much to enable either of them to begin his story and tell it in a proper equable style of narrative. Mr Harding was some minutes quite dumbfounded, and Mr Arabin could only talk in short, spasmodic sentences about his love and good fortune. He slipped in, as best he could, some sort of congratulation about the deanship, and then went ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... of Irkutsk is fairly good; not nearly so cold in winter as many places on the same latitude; the summers are pleasant and equable; but the fall of the year is generally unhealthy, dense fogs occasioning a good deal of pulmonary disease and rheumatism. The city, too, is so execrably drained that severe epidemics occasionally occur during the summer months, but in winter the dry cold ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... nothing we admit; but that it is an adequate substitute for play we deny. The defects are both positive and negative. In the first place, these formal, muscular motions, necessarily less varied than those accompanying juvenile sports, do not secure so equable a distribution of action to all parts of the body; whence it results that the exertion, falling on special parts, produces fatigue sooner than it would else have done: to which, in passing, let us add, that, if constantly repeated, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... begin with—that we ought to make it a part of our Christian discipline of ourselves to seek to cultivate a continuous and equable temperament of calm, courageous good cheer; and that Jesus Christ never commands such a temper without showing cause for our obedience—let us turn for a few moments to the various instances in which this expression falls from ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... worth more than a bird on the telegraph wire." He chuckled deeply. "And, of course, no owner ever thinks of paying the full value of salvaged property. Nor does the court expect him to. Something like an equable division is ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... and XXXII. These lessons serve the purpose of making the transition from the mild, equable climate which characterized the early part of the mid-Pleistocene period to the colder climate of the later part of the period. The early part is the age which is characterized in this book. The later part will be treated in the next book. (For ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... cold and reserved towards those of whom he knew little; but gentle, simple, equable, and familiar in the intercourse of friendship. It is there that, throwing off the grave exterior which he wore in public, he gave himself up to ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... Cromwell that the Rump in its despair was answering in a very singular way; that in their splenetic, envious despair, to keep-out the Army at least, these men were hurrying through the House a kind of Reform Bill—Parliament to be chosen by the whole of England; equable electoral division into districts; free suffrage, and the rest of it! A very questionable, or indeed for them an unquestionable, thing. Reform Bill, free suffrage of Englishmen? Why, the Royalists, themselves, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... hardly pick up the apples in the fields. But England undulates with grass that seems to fix the fluent color of the greenest waves on either hand. And our eagle-eyed blue sky droops its lid over the island, as the moisture gathers, with a more equable compassion than we know for all shrubs ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... peculiar and terrible hardship and privation for a gently-nurtured woman, that, conjoined with her exceptional beauty of face and form, exercised a fascination upon me so potent that I frequently found it exceedingly difficult to maintain that equable coolness and strict friendliness of behaviour demanded by the exigencies of our peculiar situation. All of which, ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... said than the intensely red speck of fire was glowing within the pipe-bowl and the scarecrow, without waiting for the witch's bidding, applied the tube to his lips and drew in a few short, convulsive whiffs, which soon however became regular and equable. ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... this opinion are briefly, that it has communication with the Atlantic on each border of the state—by the Mississippi on the west, and Lake Michigan on the east; that the soil is very fertile, and the climate remarkably healthy, being more equable than the same latitude on sea-board, and quite free from fever or ague. With great glee, the captain details a sporting excursion in this romantic district, in the course of which he fell in with an old acquaintance ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... woman, but over which, in her, the clear and brilliant eyes and the sweet, proud mouth presided in unbroken calm. These superb tints implied resources only, not a struggle. With this torrent from the tropics in her veins, she was the most equable person I ever saw, and had a supreme and delicate good-sense, which, if not supplying the place of genius, at least comprehended its work. Not intellectually gifted herself, perhaps, she seemed the cause of gifts in others, ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... contemporary says: "His words seem to flow as from a person repeating with grace and energy some delightful poem." And of his conversation it is recorded: "Throughout a long-drawn summer's day would this man talk to you in low, equable but clear and musical tones, concerning things human and divine; marshalling all history, harmonizing all experiment, probing the depths of your consciousness, and revealing visions of glory ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... way, not as a series of glowing points and pictures, which outline themselves radiantly upon a duller background, but as a rich full thing, like a great tapestry, all of which is important, if it is not all beautiful. It is not that the marvel and wonder of life is less; but it is more equable, more intricate, more mysterious. It does not rise at times, like a sea, into great crested breakers, but it comes marching in evenly, roller after roller, as far as ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... protect this mass of loose or incoherent materials from the ravages of floods, so long as rivers flowed, nor from being swallowed by the ocean, so long as there were winds and tides. From the border of the land upon the shore, to the middle of the ocean, there is either at present an equable declivity at the bottom of the sea, or every thing tends to form this declivity, in gradually moving bodies along this bottom. But, however gradual the declivity of the bottom, or however slow the progress of loose materials from the shore towards the deepest bottom of ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton
... say exactly how you are? and will you write? And I want to explain to you that although I don't make a profession of equable spirits, (as a matter of temperament, my spirits were always given to rock a little, up and down) yet that I did not mean to be so ungrateful and wicked as to complain of low spirits now and to you. It would not be true either: ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... features was not reassuring to him. But he had a side-thought, prompted by admiration of her perfect build of figure, her succinct expression of countenance, and her equable manner of speech: to the effect, that the true English yeomanry can breed consummate women. Perhaps—who knows? even resolute human nature is the stronger for an added knot—it approved the resolution he had formed, or stamped with a justification the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fluids in the animal economy, analogous to our own circulation—it being far too irregular and inconstant to depend on any such regulated movement. On removing the head of a Lucciola, this intermitting light immediately ceased; but the other—the permanent, steady, and equable light—remained unchanged, and was not extinguished for from sixty to seventy hours after the death of the insect, unless the body was immersed in oil or alcohol, which extinguished it presently. We found, that though oil and alcohol quickly extinguished ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... of children cannot, perhaps, properly be said to be exercised upon animals; they are frequently extremely fond of animals, but they are not always equable in their fondness; they sometimes treat their favourites with that caprice which favourites are doomed to experience; this caprice degenerates into cruelty, if it is resented by the sufferer. We must not depend merely upon the natural feelings ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... reputation for courage, he was no favourite even with the cadets. He was hardly in sympathy with them. His temper was always equable. Whatever he may have felt he never betrayed irritation, and in the lecture-room or elsewhere he was kindness itself; but his own life had been filled from boyhood with earnest purpose and high ambition. Hard work was more to his taste than amusement. Time, to his mind, was far too valuable ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... poet is the equable man, Not in him but off him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of their full returns. [Footnote: By Blue ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... very well satisfied with the fact of his engagement, believing that he had taken the best possible means for securing his future happiness; an equable, quiet sort of happiness, of course—he was nearly thirty, and had outlived the possibility of anything more than that. It would have bored him to suppose that Geraldine expected more from him than this tranquil kind of worship. Perhaps the lady understood this, and schooled ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... think so," Frank Merrill answered. "I think we'll have an equable, semi-tropical climate all the year round—about ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... run, you have a severe competition against the attraction of external pursuits, whether those pursuits take the form of business or pleasure. It is given to you to teach lessons of the utmost importance to mankind, in maintaining the principle that no progress can be real which is not equable, which is not proportionate, which does not develop all the faculties belonging to our nature. [Cheers.] If a great increase of wealth in a country takes place, and with that increase of wealth a powerful stimulus to the invention of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... very sorry," he said at last without raising his eyes, and carefully preserving an equable and mild tone of voice, "I am sorry you are so harsh in your judgments, Mr. Leigh;—and still more sorry that you appear to be bent on opposing the Roman Catholic movement in England. I will do you the justice to believe that you are moved by a sincere ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... both presenting, in their structure and in their adaptations to the conditions of existence, as valid and clear evidence of design as any animal or plant ever presented: suppose we have now discovered two intermediate species, B and C, which make up a series with equable differences from A to D. Is the proof of design or final cause in A and D, whatever it amounted to, at all weakened by the discovered intermediate forms? Rather does not the proof extend to the intermediate species, and go to show ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... these stores; probably the jays and magpies, who yet retained an instinct which had become useless. With the equable climate and mild open winters of Central California, no bird need store up food; and this was shown by the great accumulations which had never been touched. Moreover, nuts were often put in holes that were inaccessible to so large a bird as a jay. So necessity ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... drew her firmly to and through the door, and once again Rose wondered at Lotty, at her balance, her sweet and equable temper—she who in England had been such a thing of gusts. From the moment they got into Italy it was Lotty who seemed the elder. She certainly was very happy; blissful, in fact. Did happiness so completely protect one? Did it make one so untouchable, so wise? Rose was happy herself, but not ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... is much visited because of its mild and equable climate, its scenery, and its quaint laws and customs. The island is 30 miles long, and is mountainous in the centre. From the highest point, Snaefell, one can see four countries. Picturesque wooded ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... actual specie basis in order to redeem the notes at the places of issue, produces no dangerous redundancy of circulation, affords no temptation to speculation, is attended by no inflation of prices, is equable in its operation, makes the Treasury notes (which it may use along with the certificates of deposit and the notes of specie-paying banks) convertible at the place where collected, receivable in payment of Government dues, and without violating any ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Tyler • John Tyler
... hot and cold, wet and dry, and the like, of which the sense of touch has the perception; thus it is in potentiality with regard to contraries, and is able to perceive them. Therefore the more the organ of touch is reduced to an equable complexion, the more sensitive will be the touch. But the intellectual soul has the power of sense in all its completeness; because what belongs to the inferior nature pre-exists more perfectly in the superior, as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. v). Therefore the body to which the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... any one who is well acquainted with Greek types and with the forms of modern athletes will observe that the Greek physical build is not identical with that of our days. The equable climate and the unstrained life of the young men produced something more rounded and fleshy than we see in the north. Our athletes are less harmoniously built, with more prominent sinews, more harsh and wiry in ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... and intimate friendship with a large proportion of the guiding spirits of his time, were the things he really valued, and all these he fully attained. He had great conversational powers, which never degenerated into monologue, a singularly equable, happy, and sanguine temperament, and a keen delight in cultivated society. He might be seen to special advantage in two small and very select dining clubs which have included most of the more distinguished ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... apparently equalizing influence of married life, it must be added that the records discussed in the text were obtained during residence in London, whereas, since my marriage, I have lived in South Cornwall, where the climate is both milder and more equable.] ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Portions of them, thoroughly irrigated, remain beautifully green throughout the year, and herbage over the whole region is abundant. Sheltered from the blasts to which the lower plains are exposed, these parks enjoy an equable climate; and old hunters, who have camped in them for many seasons, describe life there as an earthly paradise. They abound in animals of all sorts. Elk, deer, and antelope feed on their rich grasses. Hither also the puma follows its prey, and there ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... effort for Mr. Cleveland's acceptance. During this first visit of mine, the Secretary of State and the First Assistant Secretary were both absent, having been almost prostrated by the extreme heat. At a second visit in October, I again saw the President, found him in the same equable frame of mind, not allowing anything to trouble him, quietly discharging his duties in the calm faith that all would turn out well. Dining with Secretary Hay, I mentioned this equanimity of the ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... replied the equable voice, "but my dispatches are of the greatest importance. Kindly let ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... voices, for every one was anxious to propitiate the forewoman by bestowing upon her the flattery which was essential to keep her in an equable state ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... started out on her pilgrimage in a fairly equable frame of mind, but before she got well under way, the wind had made her furious. It was a frisky March breeze that had gotten left behind and now wandered ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... anxieties, as to feel always prepared for the summons that may come without warning. For the rest, quit this climate as soon as you can,—it is the climate in which the blood courses too quickly for one who should shun all excitement. Seek the most equable atmosphere, choose the most tranquil pursuits; and Fenwick himself, in his magnificent pride of stature and strength, may be nearer the grave than ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... candidate himself indeed seemed to take only perfunctory interest in what was happening at Baltimore. He never allowed a single ballot or the changes those ballots reflected to ruffle or disturb him. Never before was the equable disposition of the man better manifested than during these trying days. Only once did he show evidences of irritation. It was upon the receipt of word from Baltimore, carried through the daily press, that his manager ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... rivals living or dead. Posterity has reversed this judgment. Yet Tillotson still keeps his place as a legitimate English classic. His highest flights were indeed far below those of Taylor, of Barrow, and of South; but his oratory was more correct and equable than theirs. No quaint conceits, no pedantic quotations from Talmudists and scholiasts, no mean images, buffoon stories, scurrilous invectives, ever marred the effect of his grave and temperate discourses. His reasoning was just sufficiently profound ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the man's first taste of bitter mental anguish. Hitherto his life had been equable and pleasant; his friends had adored him; the world had flattered him; he had been at peace with his own soul. He had known his failings, but laughed at them cavalierly; he stood on a different platform from the struggling, ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... Nebraska, is in many respects naturally fitted for those forms of social life in which woman's work may be performed under the most favorable circumstances; a country richly adapted to the various forms of agriculture and to pastoral occupations; a mild and generally equable climate are there well calculated to show the ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... man. The effect on my mind was, on the whole, saddening, but not in the least depressing. It was a kind of poetic sadness that had nothing to do with low spirits. I have never been either merry or melancholy, but have kept an equable cheerfulness that maintains itself serenely enough even in solitude and amidst the desolate aspects of stony and barren lands. As life advances, it is wise, however, to seek the more cheering influences ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... as he is himself of his Journal; and I have written in German text, and in round hand, on either side of it, on the waterproof canvas cover, "POSITTVELY NOT TO BE OPENED;" to which he has affixed his signature. I have stenographed every word he has said to me respecting the equable distribution of certain curiosities among his friends and children, and his last wish about "his" dear old friend, Sir Roderick Murchison, because he has been getting anxious about him ever since ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... During the more equable temperature of night the balloon's height is governed by the drag rope. Leaving a range of hills and floating out over a valley, the weight of the drag pulls the balloon down until the same length of ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... 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. How it rebukes by its tough and equable serenity all weathers, this gusty-temper'd little whiffet, man, that runs indoors at a mite of rain or snow. Science (or rather half-way science) scoffs at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad, and of trees speaking. But, if they don't, they do ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... are wild animals, rich in the treasures of sense, but the New England boy had a wider range of emotions than boys of more equable climates. He felt his nature crudely, as it was meant. To the boy Henry Adams, summer was drunken. Among senses, smell was the strongest — smell of hot pine-woods and sweet-fern in the scorching summer noon; of new-mown hay; of ploughed earth; of ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... marriage and paternity establish an identity of interest between husband and wife, or parent and child, so far the participation of the one in the Government is virtually the participation of both, the franchise of one the franchise of both. Such identity is not always true or equable, but it nevertheless approximates truth, and is therefore the more readily accepted as such in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... still there was a good deal of money in Boston. Pleasures took on a rather more economical aspect and grew simpler. But business was at a standstill. The Leveretts were among the first to suffer, but Mr. Leverett's equable temperament and serene philosophy kept ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... touched by no such pathos. He was extraordinarily prosperous and equable; he was undeniably self-sufficient. Even the sorrows and bereavements that he had to bear were borne gently and philosophically. He knew exactly what he wanted to do, and did it. Those sturdy, useful legs of his ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... could have conceived that he had been engaged the moment before in so fierce though short a struggle. There was none of the heat of the combatant or the triumph of the victor in his air or countenance, and his placid and equable expression of face contrasted strongly with the cloud which sat upon the brow ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... his swallowing opium-pills to keep him lively upon the first night of a certain tragedy we may presume to be a piece of retaliatory pleasantry on the part of the suffering author. But, indeed, John had the art of diffusing a complacent equable dulness (which you knew not where to quarrel with) over a piece which he did not like, beyond any of his contemporaries. John Kemble had made up his mind early that all the good tragedies which could be written had been written, and he resented any new attempt. His ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... even if she would, but must perforce drown. And so, her head wrapped in a mantle, she stretched herself weeping on the floor of the boat. But it fell out quite otherwise than she had conjectured: for, the wind being from the north, and very equable, with next to no sea, the boat kept an even keel, and next day about vespers bore her to land hard by a city called Susa, full a hundred miles beyond Tunis. To the damsel 'twas all one whether she were at sea or ashore, for, since ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... and University Streets, known as Burnside Hall. But that conditions there were not ideal is evident from an appeal made in December, 1854, to the firm that had previously repaired the antiquated furnaces. The Secretary wrote: "Instead of imparting to us an equable and cheering warmth such as might reasonably be expected from their matronly development ... to me they are painfully and consistently cold. Do, then, come to our relief and save us from the horrors of frozen limbs, hospitals and amputations; or first, ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... from every part of the body, attaining not only the greatest flexibility, but the most complete activity. Does any intelligent physiologist doubt that the latter will have done most for the promotion of his health? that he will have secured the most equable and complete circulation of the fluids, which is essentially what we mean by health, and have added most to the beauty and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... the production is more rapid and easy than in others. In this country, Mr. F. Currey has been the most successful in the cultivation of Sclerotia. The method adopted is to keep them in a moist, somewhat warm, but equable atmosphere, and with patience await the results. The well-known ergot of rye, wheat, and other grasses may be so cultivated, and Mr. Currey has developed the ergot of the common reed by keeping the stem immersed in water. The final conditions are small clavate bodies of the order Sphaeriacei, ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... sometimes that old Lenman was just like one of his own melons—the pale-fleshed English kind. His life, apathetic and motionless, hung in a net of gold, in an equable warm ventilated atmosphere, high above sordid earthly worries. The cardinal rule of his existence was not to let himself be 'worried.'... I remember his advising me to try it myself, one day when I spoke to him about Kate's bad health, and ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... their violence and their villainy, they were picturesque beings, and were by no means devoid of redeeming traits. Frank Vine, who evidently thought nothing of robbing his employers and was drunk more than half the time, had an equable temper which nothing apparently could ruffle, and a good heart to which no one in trouble ever seemed to appeal in vain. Mrs. McGeeney was a very "Lady of the Lamp" when any one was sick. Even Maunders had his graces. Roosevelt could not have lived ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... diminished in bulk. Yet, as always happens at such junctures, there were also present a score of brazen individuals who had succeeded in NOT losing their presence of mind, even though they constituted a mere sprinkling. Of them the Postmaster formed one, since he was a man of equable temperament who could always say: "WE know you, Governor-Generals! We have seen three or four of you come and go, whereas WE have been sitting on the same stools these thirty years." Nevertheless a prominent feature of the gathering was the total ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... fervid sentiments, of which Gaston dreamed as the true realisation of life, have not always softened men's natures: they have been compatible with many cruelties, as in the lost spirits of that very age. They may overflow, on the other hand, in more equable natures, through the concurrence of happier circumstance, into that universal sympathy which lends a kind of amorous power to the homeliest charities. So it seemed likely to be with Gaston de Latour. Sorrow came along with beauty, a rival of its ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... not even the upset, had disturbed the calm and equable current of Mr. Pickwick's temper. The villainy, however, which could first borrow money of his faithful follower, and then abbreviate his name to 'Tuppy,' was more than he could patiently bear. He drew his breath hard, and coloured up to the very ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... thing; he just didn't like givin' in." But behind all that there was a sense in the younger mind that here was a life unlike his own, which dimly he foresaw was to find its legitimate expression in battle and in striving. Here, in the person of the Colonel, no soldier fore-ordained, but a serene and equable soul wrenched out of its proper sphere by a chance hurt to a woman, forsooth! an imagination so stirred that, if it slept at all, it dreamed and moaned in its sleep, as now; a conscience wounded and refusing ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... an Ayrshire lass, of humble birth, very sagacious, with bright eyes and intelligent looks, but not beautiful, of good manners and easy address. Like her husband, she was sincerely religious, but of a more equable temper, quick to perceive character, and with a memory stored with old traditions, songs, and ballads, which she told or sang to amuse her children. In his outer man the poet resembled his mother, but his great mental gifts, if inherited ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... accustomed to it, and with that marvellous subtlety of contrivance in steering round odd tempers, that is found in sons of the soil and dependants generally, they managed to get along under her government rather better than they would have done beneath a more equable rule. ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... disadvantage anywhere they had been together. He wore evening clothes when occasion required as unconcernedly as he wore mackinaws and calked boots among his loggers. She had not yet determined whether his equable poise arose from an unequivocal democracy of spirit, or from sheer egotism. At any rate, where she had set out with subtle misgivings, she had to admit that socially, at least, Jack Fyfe could play his hand at any turn of the game. Where or how he came by this ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... mountainous form on a table in an adjoining alcove), Maltboy exchanged a look of deep, sentimental meaning with Miss Whedell, who rose at least six inches from her chair, and followed it with a slight hostile glare at Mr. Chiffield, upon whose equable face it fell harmless. Overtop bowed coldly to everybody, as if he were disappointed in the human species; and Quigg gave a parting grin at the room in general, and at nobody or ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... Provence present a terrible aspect. In the more equable climate of Northern France, one can form no conception of those parched mountain gorges where not even a bush can be found to shelter a bird, where, at most, the wanderer sees in summer here and there a withered lavender, where ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... girl, she chose him for a brother from among all her other acquaintances; called him "Morry"; scarcely ever coquetted with him; and let him freely into her secrets. It is easier to see why Maurice was attracted to her; for not only was Ephie pretty and charming; she was also adorably equable—she did not know what it was to be out of humour. And she was always glad to see him, always in the best possible spirits. When he was dull or tired, it acted like a tonic on him, to sit and let her merry chatter ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... as I believe with the object of diverting and amusing me, for she was a shrewd old soul who knew how important it was that I should be kept in an equable frame of mind at this crisis in ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... frequent repetition of this process, the mind becomes habituated to it, and there arises an equable ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... inheritance, or to lay it by, so often his misgiving that there was some one with an unsatisfied claim upon his justice, returned; and that alone was a subject to outlast the longest walk. Again, there was the subject of his relations with his mother, which were now upon an equable and peaceful but never confidential footing, and whom he saw several times a week. Little Dorrit was a leading and a constant subject: for the circumstances of his life, united to those of her own story, presented the little creature to him as the ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... have thought, he said, of competing with men from public schools, and he knew his return of love of vain-glory deserved that he should fail. However, he was now calm enough not to be likely to do himself injustice by nervousness, and Margaret hid hopes that Richard's steady equable mind would have a salutary influence. So, commending Tom's lessons to Ethel, and hearing, but not marking, countless messages to Richard, he set forth upon his emprise, while his anxiety seemed to remain as a ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... read a good deal at odd times, and had seen a great deal of men. His private morals were unstained, he was equable and amiable, had strong good sense, and never got beyond his depth. He had travelled in Europe and brought home many statistics, some new thoughts, and a few good pictures selected by his friends. He spent his money liberally for the things needful to his position, owned a yacht, ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... old age is only trouble thrown away. We fall on guard, and after all it is a friend who comes to meet us. After the sun is down and the west faded, the heavens begin to fill with shining stars. So, as we grow old, a sort of equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted for the violent ups and downs of passion and disgust; the same influence that restrains our hopes, quiets our apprehensions; if the pleasures are less intense, the troubles ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... regions, but they are widely different. Here, intense solar radiation by day, which raises the surface when dry to a temperature approaching 80 deg. F., alternates with severe frost by night. There, a sun which never sets sends feeble rays that maintain a low equable temperature, rarely rising more than a few degrees above the freezing-point. Hence the upper region of the Alps sustains a far more varied and brilliant ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of a person engaged in writing. Those who are habitually up at night, and who observe the different acoustic effects produced in absolute silence, know that a slight echo can be readily perceived in the very places where louder but more equable and continued murmurs are not distinct. At four o'clock the sound ceased. Clemence rose, anxious and trembling. Then, with bare feet and without a wrapper, forgetting her illness and her moist condition, the poor woman opened the door ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... morning seemed to have some effect, even upon his equable temper. His manner was unusually gay; his smile more placid and agreeable than usual; his voice more clear and pleasant. He laid down the newspaper he had been reading; leaned back upon his pillow with the air of one who resigned himself to a train of charming recollections; ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... earth was the centre of the universe, around which the sun and moon and planets revolved. But the Pythagoreans were the first to teach that the motions of the sun, moon, and planets, are circular and equable. Their idea that they emitted a sound, and were combined into a harmonious symphony, was exceedingly crude, however beautiful. "The music of the spheres" belongs to poetry, as well ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... fruitless, but in the end they do good. They tend, however slightly, to give the actions, the conduct, that turn which Reason approves, and which Feeling, perhaps, too often opposes: they certainly make a difference in the general tenour of a life, and enable it to be better regulated, more equable, quieter on the surface; and it is on the surface only the common gaze will fall. As to what lies below, leave that with God. Man, your equal, weak as you, and not fit to be your judge, may be shut out thence: take it to your Maker—show Him the secrets of the spirit He gave—ask Him how ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... flower from his button-hole and throw it into the box? Should he raise his face and direct one long and affectionate look upon the lady who was either his sister or his betrothed? As he found himself thus struggling among so many alternatives, he had a vision of his old equable existence in the bank, and was assailed by a thought of regret ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of himself (in this very different from Honore), indulgent towards the young, whose society he was fond of, allowing to all the same liberty that he claimed for himself, upright and sound in judgment notwithstanding his eccentricities, of equable humour, and so mild in character that he made every one around him happy. Delighting in conversation, now grave, now curious, now prophetic, he was always eagerly listened to by his elder son, whose indebtedness to him ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... way as the primary planets had been thrown off from the sun. The rule, if I can be allowed so to call it, receives a striking support from what appear to be its exceptions. While there are many chances against the matter of the rings being sufficiently equable to remain in the annular form till they were consolidated, it might nevertheless be otherwise in some instances; that is to say, the equableness might, in those instances, be sufficiently great. Such was probably the case ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... partridge, but not so large. I dare say you have sometimes seen quails alive in a poulterer's shop, where they are often displayed in long narrow cages, and are sadly crowded together. The quail is a migratory bird, except in those countries blessed with an equable temperature, such as Italy, Portugal, etc., where it is to be found in all seasons. In warm weather the quail visits our island, but nearly all those sold in London are brought from France, where they are caught in hundreds by means of a quail-pipe as it is called. ...
— Mamma's Stories about Birds • Anonymous (AKA the author of "Chickseed without Chickweed") |
