"Oscillating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the eyes on the spot where they should look. Even lifeless figures, as vessels and stools—let them be drawn ever so correctly—lose all effect so soon as they lack the resting upon their centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and oscillating appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery (the only greatly affecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest and most passionless piece you can imagine; a couple of saints who worship the Virgin and ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... him from his perilous condition; but our efforts were not a little crippled by the legs of the Norwegian, which he flung violently about at every possible tangent; and one arm, moving with the rapid oscillating motion of a steam-engine, brought the fist in sharp contact with the other Norwegian's chest, and threw him, head over heels, into the identical pool whence he had himself ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... was to bring more energy into play, still using Leyden jars; and for this purpose Dr. Morton placed within the circuit between the jars a Tesla oscillating coil. He was thus able to use in his shadow pictures the most powerful sparks the machine was capable of producing (twelve inches), sending the Leyden-jar discharge through the primary of the coil, and employing for the excitation of the vacuum tube the "step up" ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... pivot like a small compass needle. This sphere follows the pole of a vibrating sphere which is presented to it, as the pole of a magnet would do, with this difference always, that in the magnet, like poles repel, while in oscillating ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... which could never be altogether eliminated. The machine was made principally of steel, the sustaining surfaces being composed of silk stretched from a steel tube with wooden attachments. The first engines were the oscillating type, but were found deficient in power. This led to the construction of single-acting inverted oscillating engines with high and low pressure cylinders, and with admission and exhaust ports to avoid the complication and weight of eccentric and valves. Boiler and furnace ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... He retained still less of those half-patriotic, half-selfish hopes, which in countries of free constitution allure every youth of talent into the political arena, and which he too like all others probably at one time felt. In such a life as his was, oscillating between passionate intoxication and more than sober awaking, illusions are speedily dissipated. Wishing and striving probably appeared to him folly in a world which withal was absolutely governed by chance, and in which, if men were to strive ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... pocket-handkerchief, whose vivid hue approximated closely to the general tint of his cheeks and eagle-like beak, and which he held loosely, ready for action, in his disengaged left hand; for, his right was ever at work oscillating between the magazine of snuff in his deep waistcoat pocket and the nasal promontory that consumed it with almost rhythmical regularity, sniff and snort and resonant trumpet blast of satisfaction succeeding each other in systematic sequence, as the veteran came down ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... had exchanged bows with little Molineux, seated himself in an armchair near the bookshelves. He looked at the card-players, listened to the conversations, and went to the doorway every now and then to watch the oscillating bouquet of flowers formed by the circling heads of the dancers in the moulinet. The expression of his face was that of a true philosopher. The men were dreadful,—all, that is, except du Tillet, who had acquired the manners of the great world, little La Billardiere, a budding fashionable, ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... to interview Nadar on the Place Saint Pierre at Montmartre, above which his captive balloon the "Neptune" was oscillating in the September breeze. He was much the same man as I had seen at the Crystal Palace a few years previously, tall, red-haired, and red-shirted. He had begun life as a caricaturist and humorous writer, but by way of buttering his bread had set up in business as a photographer, ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... The German maneuvered for position and prepared to attack, but our fellow was too quick for him, and darted into a higher plane. The German tried to circle round and follow, and so in short spurts they fought for mastery, firing at each other all the time, the machines swaying and oscillating violently. The British airman, however, well maintained his ascendency. Then suddenly there was a pause, the German machine began to reel, the wounded pilot had lost control, and with a dive the aeroplane came to earth half a mile away. ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... with a view to showing Pedersen that he knew something about it. "Break system relay—operator can overhear any interference while transmitting—transformation by a single throw of a six-point switch which tunes the oscillating and open circuits to resonance. Very clever—very efficient. By the way, Pedersen, are you the only person aboard who can ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... refrain from darting a look at my fellow-traveller. To my horror I perceived that the paper he was reading was the same as the one I had; and that the page between which and myself his eyes were uncomfortably oscillating was the very page on which ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... tonally realized, for the succeeding number is in a widely divorced key. But it must have pressed hard the philistines. And this prelude, the twenty-third, is fashioned out of the most volatile stuff. Aerial, imponderable, and like a sun-shot spider web oscillating in the breeze of summer, its hues change at every puff. It is in extended harmonics and must be delivered with spirituality. The horny hand of the toilsome pianist would shatter the delicate, swinging fantasy of the poet. Kullak points out a variant in the fourteenth ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... Computer City the solenoids moved their contacts and the filaments turned cherry red. Oscillating circuits hummed silently to themselves in perfect Q. The life warmth of hysteresis pulsed and throbbed along wires and channels. Three-plus-one, two-plus-two—tell me which is really true. The problem criss-crossed in and out, around, about, ...
— Two Plus Two Makes Crazy • Walt Sheldon
... is found by a back and front sight arranged upon the right side of the sleeve in which the gun is mounted. The back side permits of aiming while the gun is being loaded. It carries a small oscillating level that indicates the elevation of the gun during ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... troops could be seen almost as clearly as by day. Their positions were distinctly marked, however, by the flashes from the rifles, coming thick and fast, making them look, as they moved along, bending and oscillating, like rolling waves of flame, throwing off fiery spray. When my brigade had moved far around upon the left, and had taken position, obliquing toward the enemy's rear, it suddenly opened. The Federal line recoiled, and closed from both ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... than a sudden jar, of the bedsteads and chairs—sometimes of the floor; a motion which was quite perceptible to the touch when a hand was laid on the chairs, which was sometimes sensibly felt at night in the slightly oscillating motion of the bed, and which was occasionally perceived as a sort of vibration even when standing on the floor. After a time also, the noises varied in their character, sounding occasionally like distinct footfalls ...
— Hydesville - The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism • Thomas Olman Todd
... our precious beverage, I pulled out watch and compass to notice duration and direction of the shock. It was undulatory, very violent, and oscillating from S.S.W. to N.N.E. The duration was exactly four minutes two seconds. The earthquake began at 5.20 P.M. and ended ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... English and continental needle telegraphy in which the message is transmitted by the movements of an index normally vertical, but oscillating to one side or the other under the influence of the current, the latter being controlled by the transmitter of the message, the left hand swings of the needle are interpreted as dots, the ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... machines worked by water pressure the author proposes to refer only to two which appear to him in every respect the most practical and advantageous. One is the piston machine of M. Albert Schmid, engineer at Zurich. The cylinder is oscillating, and the distribution is effected, without an eccentric, by the relative motion of two spherical surfaces fitted one against the other, and having the axis of oscillation for a common axis. The ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... characterized most of the doings of his shipmates, and in following the bent of his own joyous nature, in the hours of solitude and in the dark night, when no one saw him, his mind ever reverted to the one engrossing subject, like the oscillating ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... The table, slowly oscillating, struck nine raps. According to a slip of paper, in which the number of raps were translated by letters, this ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... name of Zamua there existed a number of small states scattered along the western slope of the Iranian Plateau north of the Cossaeans.* Many of them—as, for instance, the Lullume—had been civilized by the Chaldaeans almost from time immemorial; the most southern among them were perpetually oscillating between the respective areas of influence of Babylon and Nineveh, according as one or other of these cities was in the ascendant, but at this particular moment they acknowledged Assyrian sway. Were they excited to rebellion against the latter power by the emissaries of its rival, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... shaking like an oscillating toy ... his eyes were starting from his head through force of his invective ... he was jerking about, in his ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... of each Allied nation in the great victory, mankind will conclude that the heaviest cost in proportion to prewar population and treasure was paid by the nations that first felt the shock of war, Belgium, Serbia, Poland and France. All four were the battle-grounds of huge armies, oscillating in a bloody frenzy over once fertile ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... arises from the peculiar oscillating or swinging movements that the plant exhibits. The most marked movement is a swaying from side to side, combined with a rotary motion of the free ends of the filaments, which are often twisted together like the strands of a rope. If the filaments are entirely ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... of country which lies about thirty miles south of Rouen. Presently the Seine came in sight again, and for some miles we ran parallel with it. We had just rushed through a little wayside station beyond Mantes, the train oscillating so severely as it rattled over the points that Dulcie, Connie Stapleton and Lady Fitzgraham became seriously alarmed, while other occupants of the car glanced ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... merely as an illustration. I say that if we imagine this sort of action greatly exaggerated and greatly prolonged Parliamentary government becomes impossible. If there are three parties, no two of which will steadily combine for mutual action, but of which the weakest gives a rapidly oscillating preference to the two others, the primary condition of a Cabinet polity is not satisfied. We have not a Parliament fit to choose; we cannot rely on the selection of a sufficiently permanent executive, because there is no fixity ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... of the embrasures, a small part of the carriage, and now and then a head or arm raised above the parapet,—the ratio of exposed surfaces being not less than twenty to one. In the vessel the guns are fired from an oscillating deck, and the balls go at random; in the fort the guns are fired from an immoveable platform, and the balls reach their object with unerring aim. There is always more or less motion in the water, so that the ship's guns, though accurately pointed ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... the snake from her body and held it by the tail high above her. The hideous creature stretched up its head towards the roof of the cavern, which it was just able to reach. It then began to move its head backwards and forwards, with a slow, oscillating motion, as if looking for something At the same moment, the witch began to walk round and round the cavern, coming nearer to the centre every circuit; while the head of the snake described the same path ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... was turning rapidly now, oscillating from side to side. The hole seemed to travel in a wavering loop, dipping lower, swinging up high, then ...
— Gambler's World • John Keith Laumer
... produces a considerably higher pitched note than the longer one. If a mirror be attached to one of the prongs of each fork, and a beam of light be cast upon each mirror successively and then reflected in a revolving mirror, the oscillating spot of light is converted into a series of waves; and if the waves obtained by reflecting the light from the mirror of the smaller one be counted and compared with those reflected from the mirror attached to the larger fork, it will be found that ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... did not do. Once out of the inlet, they went about and headed northward, up the coast, and we remained watching them until Mr. Trevor became a mere oscillating black speck against ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... tyranny. Their master was working them too hard. I ran up the stair on all fours: it was my way when I was in a hurry. Swinging went the pendulum in the window, and the wind roared in the chimney. I seized hold of the oscillating thing, and stopped it; but to my amaze and consternation, the moment I released it, on it went again. I must sit and hold it. But the voice of my aunt called me from below, and as I dared not explain why I would rather not appear, I was forced to ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... a simple rotary gap, indirectly excited spark and provided with nine taps on the inductance coil of the closed oscillating circuit. Five varying toothed discs for the rotary spark gap yield five different signal tones and nine ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... up, with the lever of the middle wheel rhythmically moving up and down, and the stooping figure of the engine-driver covered with frost. Behind the tender, setting the platform more and more slowly swaying, came the luggage van with a dog whining in it. At last the passenger carriages rolled in, oscillating ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... heard the thud of the arrows that transfixed them. The next instant they were down on the ground, floundering and gasping, and the rest of us were stampeding for the trees. An arrow drove past me and entered the ground, its feathered shaft vibrating and oscillating from the impact of its arrested flight. I remember clearly how I swerved as I ran, to go past it, and that I gave it a needlessly wide berth. I must have shied at it as a horse shies at an object ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... down at the detector plate. "Here we are," he said. "The dial's oscillating between four and eight, all right. ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... formed a semicircle in front of them, with a fringe of the oscillating heads of the camels. Before them was a cooking fire, which threw its red light over the group. The Emir was standing with his back to it, and his fierce face towards the prisoners. Behind the four men was a line of guards, and behind ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... untwined the snake from her body, and held it by the tail high above her. The hideous creature stretched up its head towards the roof of the cavern, which it was just able to reach. It then began to move its head backwards and forwards, with a slow oscillating motion, as if looking for something. At the same moment the witch began to walk round and round the cavern, coming nearer to the centre every circuit; while the head of the snake described the same path over the roof that she did ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... only necessary to life—it is life. Out of the varying chances of its warfare is born that incessant ebb and flow of chemical change, that inability to reach an equilibrium, which we term "vitality." The course of life, like that of a flying express train, is not a perfectly straight line, but an oscillating series of concentric curves. Without these oscillations movement could not be. Exaggerate one of them unduly, or fail to rectify it by a rebound ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... one hundred and twenty horse-power, with oscillating cylinders, took up but little space; its force was large for a vessel of one hundred and seventy tons, which carried a great deal of sail, and was, besides, remarkably swift. Of her speed the trial trips left no doubt, ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... and oscillating between the poles of Life and Death, he slowly came back to life, to find in its suffering and in its joys a shield against the darkness of the void and the horror ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... creations of silk or other soft fluffy stuffs that gave forth the iridescence and sheen of a perfect opal; a coal of unquenchable, oscillating ruby fire in the heart of a milky diamond. She was a gorgeous little humming bird. So John described her to his mother and she knew he had not found the girl he ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... insulation against extremes of temperature, developed by the Erentz Kinetic Energy Corporation in the twenty-first century. Within the hollow double shell of a shelter-wall, or an explorer's helmet-suit, or a space-flyer's hull, an oscillating semi-vacuum current was maintained—an extremely rarified air, magnetically charged, and maintained in rapid oscillating motion. Across this field the outer cold, or heat, as the case might be, could penetrate only with slow radiation. This Erentz system gave the most perfect ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... direct themselves towards moisture, and their leaves towards air and light,—although the parts of some plants exhibit oscillating movements without any perceptible cause, and the leaves of others retract when touched,—yet none of these movements justify the ascription to plants of perception or of will. From the mobility of animals, Cuvier, with his characteristic partiality for teleological ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... in mocking and ridicule. The open and oscillating hand touches the point of the nose with that of the thumb. It has the particular sense of stigmatizing the person addressed or in question as a dupe. A credulous person is generally imagined with a ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... field of force around a wire conveying an electric current. 2. The effect upon other circularly vibrating bodies within that field of force corresponding to the action and reaction of electric currents upon one another. 3. The effect on pulsating and oscillating bodies similarly immersed, illustrating the mutual effects upon one another of magnets and electric currents. The first of these effects is one of induction, and, from what has been said from an earlier part of this article, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... no easy matter to dress and undress in an oscillating room. That the vessel's motion could have changed so markedly within the one hour since he left the cabin, astonished Frederick. The simple operation of drawing off his boots and trousers, finding others in his trunk, and putting them on again became a gymnastic feat. He had ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... betray me? Has she not entered into an alliance with me, and does she not now wish to forsake me merely because she imagines that it would be more advantageous to her to side with my enemies? Austria is oscillating, and Metternich thinks he can preserve her equilibrium by placing Austrian promises as weights now into this, now into that scale. But the cabinet of Vienna deceives itself. Count Metternich wants his intrigues to pass for policy, while the whole object of Austria is to recover ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... game, and the Colonel fumes inwardly and frets outwardly. In the intervals of pressing down the unlit tobacco in his pipe with an oscillating thumb, he alternately pokes his king out of the corner and pulls it back again; while his transparent impulse is to scrap the board, wreck the ante-room and run amok. The Adjutant continues his innocent amusement until at last the pleasure wanes. The two heroic pawns are carried decently ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... welcome to do so, to all lengths. Popery cannot come back, any more than Paganism can,—which also still lingers in some countries. But, indeed, it is with these things, as with the ebbing of the sea: you look at the waves oscillating hither, thither on the beach; for minutes you cannot tell how it is going; look in half an hour where it is,—look in half a century where your Popehood is! Alas, would there were no greater danger to our Europe than the poor old Pope's revival! Thor may as soon try to revive.—And ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... and he was glad, punching on wearily and endlessly with his one arm, battering away at a bloody something before him that was not a face but a horror, an oscillating, hideous, gibbering, nameless thing that persisted before his wavering vision and would not go away. And he punched on and on, slower and slower, as the last shreds of vitality oozed from him, through centuries and aeons and enormous lapses of time, until, in a dim way, he became aware that the ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... to the entrance of the mind into a superior condition, such as whirling, twisting, and reeling, we all took a part. Henry, for that was the name of the youth who was so zealous in his aspersions, united awkwardly and derisively in these exercises. Amid so many arms, legs, and bodies, revolving, oscillating, staggering, and tripping, it is not remarkable that a few should be thrown prostrate (not violently, however) upon the floor. One evening, in a boy's meeting at a time of great excitement, when the spirits of some of our companions were reported ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... to these rivers applies more or less to all the objects of Vedic worship. They all are still oscillating between what is seen by the senses, what is created by fancy, and what is postulated by the understanding; they are things, persons, causes, according to the varying disposition of the poets; and if we ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... aims with insufficient means. The most daring strategical moves of the enemy, in war as in diplomacy, they ridiculed as either bluff or madness. The journalistic campaign in neutral countries they scoffed at as vain, and put their faith in the final triumph of truth. Their financial measures, oscillating from one extreme to another, denoted the absence of any settled plan, of any clear-cut picture of the needs of the moment. The odds in their favour, which circumstance had given and circumstance might take away again, they looked upon as inalienable, until ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... wind around it do the same; for they accompany it, both when it rushes to those parts of the earth, and when to these. And as in respiration the flowing breath is continually breathed out and drawn in, so there the wind, oscillating with the liquid, causes certain vehement and irresistible winds both as it enters and goes out. When, therefore, the water rushing in descends to the place which we call the lower region, it flows through the earth ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... heats, and, above all, intense colds. The very term "Siberian" has justly become synonymous with a land of winds, frosts, and snows. The mean annual temperature in this region comprised between the rivers Anabara and Indigirka is 20 deg. Fahr. below freezing point. The pole of cold, oscillating diversely with the force of the lateral pressure from Yakutsk to the Lena estuary, is the meteorological centre round which the atmosphere revolves. Here are to a large extent prepared the elements of the climate ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... Bayonne, when, having been invited to dine with the Emperor, it was necessary to enter a modern carriage with two steps. He did not dare to put his foot on the frail things, which he feared would break under his weight; and the oscillating movement of the body of the carriage made him terribly afraid that it ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... the atoms down and directed the charges of their electrons. Then his motors amplified the discharges and, through the medium of an electric current, projected them in the form of invisible atomic rays which he could control and direct against any object and sustain and move at will by means of oscillating currents. ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... of the civil community. But neither the doctrines of the Stoics nor the science and able reasoning of the jurists were lights and guides within the reach and for the use of the populace, who remained a prey to the vices and miseries of servitude or public disorders, oscillating between the wearisomeness of barren ignorance and the corruptiveness of a life of adventure. All the causes of decay were at this time spreading throughout Roman society; not a single preservative or regenerative ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... his childish scratchings and barbarous glimmerings; Indian, Egyptian, and Assyrian art in his boyish rigidity and crude fixedness of idea and purpose; Mediaeval, or pre-Raffaelle art is seen in his youthful timid darings, his unripe fancies oscillating between earth and heaven; there where we expect truth, we see conceit; there where we want little, much is given—now a blank eyed riddle,—dark with excess of self,—now a giant thought—vast but repulsive,—and now angel visitors startling us with wisdom and touches of heavenly beauty. ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... that matter, so simple in appearance, is wonderfully complicated in its vital structure,—and that other discovery, that its molecules, oscillating with a rapidity almost infinite, convey their impressions to the surrounding ether, which, in turn, transmits them over inconceivable distances, in an inconceivably short space of time,—these discoveries lead us to the even more marvellous discovery, that any kind of molecules are affected ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... not bear-track." He then pointed with his gun-rod to some spears of grass that grew near the impression, but I did not comprehend the mystery until he dismounted and explained to me that, when the wind was blowing, the spears of grass would be bent over toward the ground, and the oscillating motion thereby produced would scoop out the loose sand into the shape I have described. The truth of this explanation was apparent, yet it occurred to me that its solution would have baffled the ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... coolly looking at facts, the old lumbering fashion of having a beautiful, showy, emotional revolution now on one side, and then waiting to have another beautiful, showy, emotional revolution on the other, each oscillating back and forth year by year until people finally settle down, look at facts together, become scientific, and see things as they are—has gone by. We have not time for revolutions nowadays. They may be amusing, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... that dragging, interminable time which I now lived through, that complete despair, where you rest quite finally on bedrock and have nothing to dread in the way of further tumbles, must be a much happier state than the dreadful one of oscillating between hope and fear. For a leaden-footed eternity, it seemed to me, I oscillated, longing for, yet dreading, the signs that Cookie's powerful dope had begun to work upon our guards—for might not the first symptoms be quite different from the anticipated blind staggers? Fancy ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... picture soon faded. Love—and this ridiculous George vowed he was in love—love is a mental see-saw. The nicely- balanced mind is set suddenly oscillating: now up, commandingly above the world, intoxicated with the rush and the elevation; now down to depths made horribly deep by contrast, wretchedly ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... each oscillating link of the straight-line linkage was thus reduced to one-fourth instead of one-half the beam length, and the entire mechanism could be constructed so that it would not extend beyond the end of the working beam. This arrangement soon came to be known as Watt's "parallel ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... and many a time cross'd the river of old, Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies, Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest in strong shadow, Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south, Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water, Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams, Look'd at the ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... to be effective in the present predicament of a human race (oscillating uneasily between the possibility of social advance and the probability of recession into another Dark Age of ignorance, superstition and social stagnation), must include certain essential elements. ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... the result—the light slowly begins to move, and slowly increases in movement. In forty seconds it will have acquired its highest velocity, and in forty more it will have stopped at 5 feet 81/2 inches from the starting point, after which it will slowly move back again, oscillating about ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... the more varied his discomfitures, so long as they are temporary, the better does he enjoy his ease in the cool of the day.... Now the novelty of the plot in the moral play, lay in the fact that the movement was of this oscillating, upward kind—a kind unknown as a rule to the miracle, whose conditions were less fluid, and to the farce, which was too shallow ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... then succumb to a progressive suppression, which is in turn broken through by the proper advances of the sexual development and which can be checked by individual idiosyncrasies. Nothing is known concerning the laws and periodicity of this oscillating course of development. It seems, however, that the sexual life of the child mostly manifests itself in the third or fourth year in ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... moved down the car, oscillating heavily, steadying himself with his gold-headed cane, and got out in front of a portentous mansion, Andrew would scarcely have recognized the look in his own eyes had he seen himself ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... permission to revisit Field Place, and had an allowance made him of 200 pounds a year. His uncle, Captain Pilfold of Cuckfield, was instrumental in effecting this partial reconciliation. Shelley spent some time at his uncle's country house, oscillating between London, Cuckfield, and Field Place, with characteristic rapidity, and paying one flying visit to his cousin Grove at Cwm Elan, near Rhayader, in North Wales. This visit is worth mention, since he now for the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... from his oscillating head, through his set teeth, in one malign monotone. As he quoted the preacher he mechanically drew his revolver. There was no bravado in this; he might lie, but he did not know how to sham; did not know, now, that his face ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... before a north-east window for only [page 21] two or three minutes whilst a glass filament was fixed vertically to the hypocotyl; it was then again placed in darkness for half an hour and afterwards observed by light passing through bichromate of potassium. The point, oscillating as usual, crossed five divisions of the micrometer (i.e. 1/100 inch) in 1 m. 30 s. The seedling was then left in darkness for an hour, and now it required 3 m. 6 s. to cross one division, that is, 15 m. 30 s. to have crossed five divisions. Another seedling, ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... now—he talking, she saying nothing. It was difficult for him to master himself. He begged her to tell him what she was thinking of. She answered. He listened. Then, as if she had said nothing, he begged her again, still harder, to tell him. There he was, uncertain, oscillating between night and day. All he needed was for her to say one word, if he only believed it. You saw him, in the immense city, clinging to that one being. The next instant I was separated from these two lovers who watched and ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... a time crossed the river, the sun half an hour high; I watched the twelfth-month sea-gulls—I saw them high in the air, floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies, I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow, I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... all ages and in all its forms, oscillating by virtue of its principle between two opposite terms,—extreme division and ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Major Marchand was at Fashoda brought down to Omdurman on the 7th September by the dervish steamer "Tewfikieh." I boarded her and had a long chat with the captain (reis) and members of the crew, all of whom wore jibbehs. The little craft was an ex-Thames, above-the-bridges, penny steamer with Penn's oscillating engines. She was one of the boats Gordon sent from Khartoum in 1884 to meet the Desert Column at Metemmeh. She was, if possible, more dilapidated-looking than ever. By guarded questioning I ascertained that the "Tewfikieh" was ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... reached the middle of the Wimerra, but then the hollow deepened, and the water rose to the middle of the wheels. The bullocks were in danger of losing their footing, and dragging with them the oscillating vehicle. Ayrton devoted himself to his task courageously. He jumped into the water, and hanging on by the bullocks' horns, dragged them back into the ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... 346,030), designed to combine the advantages of a direct acting motor and an oscillating shaft, mounts the whole machine, motor and all, on a rocking frame. The spindle is of course in fixed bearings in the frame. However, the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... fully know of that treaty of Nov. 1656 by which the Polish King had bought off the Elector from the Swedish alliance by ceding to him the full sovereignty of East Prussia, or else that since then the Elector had been oscillating back to the alliance.—SCHLEZER had been in London since 1655, and had lodged at Hartlib's house in the ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... noticed nothing unusual about it. I then put up my flask and took a step or two forward, when in a moment there burst, apparently from the base of the rock, about eight feet from the ground and a hundred yards from me, a strange, lurid glare, flickering and oscillating, gradually dying away and then reappearing again. No, no; I've seen many a glow-worm and firefly—nothing of that sort. There it was, burning away, and I suppose I gazed at it, trembling in every limb, for fully ten minutes. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... he did not even notice that he had gone more than half-way. He did not want to wake Marya Dmitrievna, he lightly pressed Lisa's hand and said, "I think we are friends now, aren't we?" She nodded, he stopped his horse, and the coach rolled away, lightly swaying and oscillating up and down; Lavretsky turned homeward at a walking pace. The witchery of the summer night enfolded him; all around him seemed suddenly so strange—and at the same time so long known; so sweetly familiar. Everywhere near and afar—and ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... graduating class. Those four were notably the most advanced and the only thoroughly-grounded boys of the sixteen. A few of the others had attended nearly all the private schools in the city, while two of them had been oscillating between the public and private schools for years at their own sweet wills, and could never decide whether the commercial or classical department of the school in question was the one for which they were best fitted. It may well ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... itself the further positive consideration of a nonentity {72} enveloping the being of its datum; and as that leads nowhere, back recoils the thought toward its datum again. But there is no natural bridge between nonentity and this particular datum, and the thought stands oscillating to and fro, wondering "Why was there anything but nonentity; why just this universal datum and not another?" and finds no end, in wandering mazes lost. Indeed, Bain's words are so untrue that in reflecting men it is just when the attempt ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... of sustaining itself on the height of dependence on the unseen, spiritual power of God, and was ever oscillating between alliances with the Northern and Southern powers, linking itself with Assyria against Egypt, or with Egypt against Assyria. The effect was that whichever was victorious it suffered; it was the battleground ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... But in the end he seems genuinely a man—a man of the sort we see about us in the real world—not a patent and automatic fellow, reacting docilely and according to a formula, but a bundle of complexities and contradictions, a creature oscillating between the light and the shadow—at bottom, for all his typical representation of a race and a civilization, a unique and inexplicable personality. More, he is a man of the first class, an Achilles of his world; and here the achievement of Dreiser is most striking, for he succeeds where ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... blows, it is a study to see three or four of these air-kings at the head of the valley far up toward the mountain, balancing and oscillating upon the strong current; now quite stationary, except for a slight tremulous motion like the poise of a rope-dancer, then rising and falling in long undulations, and seeming to resign themselves passively to the wind; or, again, sailing high ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... His style is plain, clear, and compact. He addresses himself directly to the subject of which he is treating, spinning no curious refinements, and admitting no irrelevant digressions. Nor does he keep the reader oscillating between text and notes, in a state of dizzying, unstable equilibrium which would task an acrobate. There be books we have seen printed, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, in which the text was so shingled over with layers of notes, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... was oscillating like a pendulum, its little tongue playing like forked red lightning, its loathsome red eyes holding his own. Terror gripped his heart, and his soul curdled. He would have cried out, but that his tongue clave to the roof ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... window. The convicts, to the number of fifteen hundred, were drawn up on the parade-ground. They looked chill in the cold light of early morning; their gray jackets lay loose on their spare shoulders; their hands hung inertly at their sides, and they walked with the oscillating motion of men whose feet were sore in their heavy boots. The civil guard was drawn up, the chief warder whistled, and then the men fell out into gangs of twenty-five each, ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... the studies of rolling and oscillating bodies, there was developed what is usually spoken of as the third law of motion—namely, the law that a given force operates upon a moving body with an effect proportionate to its effect upon the same body when at rest. Or, as Whewell states the law: "The dynamical effect of force is as the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... subduing, drawing, insensibly constraining you into their moulds. They have stronger wills, stronger natures than yours; and between the two forces of your own nature and theirs you will be always oscillating, so that you will never show what you can do, working either in your own way or yet in theirs: your life will be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... which the pride of human reason has always aspired, which would grasp at every thing at once by one despotic clutch, and by a violent bound of logic bestride and beride the ALL, is, and remains, an oscillating abortion that always would be something, and always can be nothing. A living, personal, moral God, the faith of nations, the watch-word of tradition, the cry of nature, the demand of mind, received not invented, existing in the soul not reasoned into it—this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... eager delight in it, Lady Manby's broad amusement, Robin Pierce's carefully-controlled indignation, Mr. Bry's sardonic and always cold gratification, Lady Cardington's surprised, half-tragic wonder—she was oscillating between two courses, one a course of reserve, of stern self-control and abnegation, the other a course of defiance, of reckless indulgence of the strong temper that dwelt within her, and that occasionally ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... other hand, it will be regarded by multitudes as the casual caprice of an individual—a caprice of vanity by those who do not know Lord Carlisle's personal qualities, a caprice of patriotic benevolence by those who do. According to the construction of the case as thus indicated, oscillating between a question of profound revolution moving subterraneously amongst us, and a purely personal question, such a discussion would ascend to the philosophic level, or sink to the level of gossip. The other direction of the public surprise points to a question that will interest ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... attentive Capua, whose eyes had been for some time oscillating with indecision between Helen Heath and Mrs. Laudersdale. "Hannibal Raleigh's my name; though Massa alwes call me Cap," he added, insinuatingly,—which, by the way, "Massa" never ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... and with difficulty; for the car was oscillating so greatly that they were obliged to hold on, by its side, not to be thrown out. The descent was less rapid than it had been, ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... contradictions value is that which, dominating the others and summing them up, holds in a sense the sceptre of society, I had almost said of the moral world. Until value, oscillating between its two poles,—useful value and value in exchange,—arrives at its constitution, thine and mine remain fixed arbitrarily; the conditions of fortune are the effect of chance; property rests on a precarious ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... touched the ground, and perhaps its whole body would soon have been elongated upon the earth but for the shout of Saloo. At this it suddenly jerked up its head, but without taking in any of its coils above; and with jaws agape and tongue protruding, it commenced oscillating around as if trying its range, and ready to pounce upon any creature that came within the radius of that wide circle of which its forked tongue ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... who well remembered him. He had a full, expansive forehead, strong features, florid complexion, a mouth firm without harshness, and clear gray eyes. His head, which was set firmly and proudly upon giant shoulders, had a peculiar and incessant oscillating motion. His expressive eyes also were singularly volatile in their movement—seldom at perfect rest. He was always clean shaven, so that nothing was lost of the changes of expression which animated his mobile face in conversation. ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... does not occur it lies in the nature of things that the course of a battle resembles rather a slow disturbance of equilibrium which commences soon, but as we have said almost imperceptibly at first, and then with each moment of time becomes stronger and more visible, than an oscillating to and fro, as those who are misled ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... Regaining a macadam surface, he set oil at random, causing considerable annoyance to the motoring public. Finding that his cutaway coat caused jeers and merriment, he removed it; and when any one showed a disposition to inquire, he explained that he was doing penance for an ill-judged wager. His oscillating perch above the boiler was extraordinarily warm, and he bought a gallon jug of cider from a farmer by the way. Cheering himself with this, and reviewing in his mind the queer experiences of the past months, he went thundering ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... player stopped suddenly and shot an oath at him. The deacon staggered under the shock of it. His whiskers seemed to lift a bit like the hair of a cat under provocation. Then he tried to speak, but only stuttered helplessly a moment as if his tongue were oscillating between silence and profanity, and was finally pulled down by his wife, who had laid hold of his coat tails. If it had been any other man than Deacon Hospur it would have gone badly with the musician then and there, but we boys saw his discomfiture ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... was chiefly of bygone days. Almost every speech began with "Do you remember?" Vixen was gayer than she had been for a long time, save once or twice, when a pang shot through her heart at the idea that Bullfinch was being shaken about in a railway-box, oscillating helplessly with every vibration of the train, and ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... was to be seen, so to speak, but his attitudes, which indeed were extremely entertaining. The little gentleman was balancing himself very deftly on the edge of matrimony, and Durant watched with a fearful interest the rash advance and circumspect retreat, the oscillating hair's-breadth pause, the perilous swerve, and desperate ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... indeed encouraged, to do to our brother, our sister is to be left to the tyranny of authority and tradition. With few insignificant exceptions, girls have been educated either to be drudges, or toys, beneath man; or a sort of angels above him; the highest ideal aimed at oscillating between Claerchen and Beatrice. The possibility that the ideal of womanhood lies neither in the fair saint, nor in the fair sinner; that the female type of character is neither better nor worse than ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... it were, into his clothes, and stood in the middle of the hearthrug, gently oscillating, with his hands behind his back. But at some faint rumour out of the silent house his posture suddenly stiffened, and he lifted a little, with heavy, ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... does, occur that the plain man is practising physical and intellectual calisthenics, and running a vast business and sending ships and men to the horizons of the earth, and keeping a home in a park, and oscillating like a rapid shuttle daily between office and home, and lying awake at nights, and losing his eyesight and his digestion, and staking his health, and risking misery for the beings whom he cherishes, and enriching insurance companies, and providing joy-rides ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... fashioning toil of her wasteful, greedy, and slatternly children. In her genial bosom, the exhausted gathers life, the effete becomes generant, the disintegrate returns to resting and capable form. The rolling oscillating globe dips it for an aeon in growing sea, lifts it from the sinking waters of its thousand year bath to the furnace of the sun, remodels and remoulds, turns ashes into flowers, and divides mephitis into diamonds ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... the air ring with their melodious barking cries! How different again are all these from the aerial pastimes of the snipe, in which the bird, in its violent descent, is able to produce such wonderful, far-reaching sounds with its tail-feathers! The snipe, as a rule, is a solitary bird, and, like the oscillating finch mentioned early in this paper, is content to practise its pastimes without a witness. In the gregarious kinds all perform together: for this feeling, like fear, is eminently contagious, and the sight of one bird mad with joy will quickly make the whole flock ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... made in several sizes (from 3 to 50 degrees of arc) in black, but the smallest size should also be prepared in colors matching the several discs. Such a disposition, then, presents a disc of fused color, rotating at a uniform rate, and in front of this a radial sector oscillating from side to side concentrically with the disc, and likewise at a uniform rate. Several variations of this apparatus will be described as the need and purpose of ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... depreciated Zuyder Zee. It was now three in the morning, and none of us had slept. Just as we began to try to sleep a little, my diabolical compass showed that the balloon was turning back again. 'Where are you going to take us to?' cried out Yon to the immense mass of canvas which was oscillating above our heads. Louis Godard again proposed to descend; but we said, 'No! forward! forward!' Two hours sped away without our being able to tell where we were. At five o'clock day broke, and broad daylight came on with marvellous ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... said Hamoud, turning his limpid eyes toward her face which was veiled by swaying fringes of the awning. She unclenched her fists; her body slowly relaxed; and a look of incredulity appeared in her eyes, as she returned from afar to this oscillating world of steamy heat, throbbing with aboriginal song, impregnated with the smell of putrefying foliage and of sweat. From under the feet of the machilla carriers a cloud of mauve butterflies rose like flowers to strew ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... feet and, rigid still, but oscillating from side to side, as though his strength did not suffice to hold him quite erect, was surveying them with eyes sunk so deeply in his head that they looked like dying sparks reanimated for an instant ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... rivalry between France and England in the Eastern Mediterranean, though often overshadowed by their common antagonism, first to Russia and subsequently to Germany, was a perennial cause of discord which kept Greece oscillating ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... is introduced, there is still an insensible mass, for the germ itself is only an inert fluid. How does this mass pass to another organisation, to life, to sensibility? By heat. What will produce heat? Movement. What will be the successive effects of movement? First, an oscillating point, a thread that extends, the flesh, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... at the pit, an extraordinary and terrifying thing happened. The earth under his feet began to shake. At first he could not believe it, but when he steadied himself and watched closely, the oscillating motion was undoubtedly there. It was accompanied, too, by a rumble, dull and low, but which steadily grew louder. It seemed to Dick that the round pit was the center of ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... for bringing up the "blue ground" to the surface. This is rather a perilous adventure. To go down by a wire rope, some five or six hundred feet perpendicular into the bowels of the earth with lightning rapidity, standing up in an open receptacle, the top of which does not approach your waist, oscillating like a pendulum, while you are holding on "like grim death" by your hands, is something more than a joke. It certainly ought not to be attempted by anyone who does not possess a cool head and ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young
... certainly been looking in her direction as she spoke; he had the opposite place to her at table; but instead of replying, even with a motion of the head, he, after a moment, turned to Professor Valeyon, who was gently oscillating himself in the rocking-chair he always occupied at meals, and asked him whether he knew any thing about a place in town ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... Europe, and vegetating in filth with longing eyes directed towards the Messiah's ass or other member of the long-eared fraternity; the other occupied with fingering state securities and the pages of a cyclopaedia, and constantly oscillating between wealth and bankruptcy, oppression and tolerance. Their own science is dead among Jews, and the intellectual concerns of European nations do not appeal to them, because, faithless to themselves, they are strangers to abstract truth and slaves of self-interest. This abject wretchedness ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... than to pick up and retain in the lenses of a telescope, levelled by hand, a spark of light so minute and faint as to be invisible to the unaided eye in the midst of the surrounding darkness, and the difficulty is enhanced when the attempt is made from the deck of a small vessel oscillating though ever so gently on the ridges of a long, low-running swell, and for the life of me I could not again find the feeble glimmer that had seemed to swim athwart the instrument, try ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... the crossing of the roads the name Fairfield on the sign-post seemed to be the thing that tipped the oscillating balance of decision in ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... remembering the third was distracted by the fourth, and made amends whenever she went wrong by giving the unfortunate fowls an extra spin, which made their chance of ever getting cooked exceedingly doubtful. But it was pleasant cookery too. Meanwhile Miss Lavinia, oscillating between the kitchen and the opposite room, prepared the dining-table in the latter chamber. This office she (always doing her household spiriting with unwillingness) performed in a startling series of whisks and bumps; laying the table-cloth as if she were raising the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... and an over-great supply) depress the price below the point of cost, then the discouragement of further production presently shortens the supply and brings the price up again. Price is thus like an oscillating pendulum seeking its point of rest, or like the waves of the sea rising and falling about its level. By this same mechanism the quantity and direction of production, argued the economists, respond automatically ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... His hand hung oscillating at the edge of his coat. A ghastly pallor overspread his face. His eyes took on a look of supernatural brightness. His mouth dropped open. He crouched a trifle forward, staring fixedly at the table. His hand had fallen at his side. He ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... occurs, but that the inflected waves abolish each other by their mutual interference. Young also discerned a fundamental difference between the waves of light and those of sound. Could you see the air through which sound-waves are passing, you would observe every individual particle of air oscillating to and fro, in the direction of propagation. Could you see the luminiferous ether, you would also find every individual particle making a small excursion to and fro; but here the motion, like that assigned to the water-particles above referred to, would be across the ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... a deep and all-absorbing passion—the great reality of her spirit-life; for love such as hers, outstripping the bounds of time, links itself even with our hopes beyond the grave;—how, when he lay stretched upon the bed of suffering, oscillating between life and death, the bitter anguish that the thought of separation occasioned her, enlightened her as to the true nature of her feelings; how, as his recovery progressed, to watch over him, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... despising them as so many outlived stages, but also fearing and fleeing them because they know his secrets, pry into his plans, watch his rise with envy, and look forward to his fall with pleasure. From this relationship springs his dual, indeterminate character, oscillating between love of distinction and hatred of those who have already achieved it. He says himself that he is an aristocrat, and has learned the secrets of good company. He is polished on the outside and coarse within. He knows already how to wear the frock-coat with ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... spot. Their combined action may therefore be graphically represented by three systems of lines, the 'isodynamic, isoclinic', and 'isogonic' (or those of equal force, equal inclination, and equal declination). The distances apart, and the relative positions of these moving, oscillating, and advancing curves, do not always remain the same. The total deviation (variation or declination of the magnetic needle) has not at all changed, or, at any rate, not in any appreciable degree, during a whole century, at any particular point on the Earth's surface,* as, for instance, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... his neighbour's neck, so as to establish a sort of living wall. Not the smallest aperture was left in it; nothing whatever could pass. Still, these human barriers staggered under the pressure of the unfortunate creatures who hungered for life, who wished to touch, to kiss Jesus; and, oscillating and recoiling, the bearers were at last thrust against the canopy they were defending, and the canopy itself began swaying among the crowd, ever in danger of being swept away like some holy bark in peril ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... not build steamships in Birmingham, it was James Watt who proposed the use of screw propellers (in 1770); Wm. Murdoch, who invented the oscillating cylinder (in 1785); Watt and Boulton, who furnished engines (in 1807) for the first regular steam picket in America; and James Watt, jun., who made the first steam voyage on the sea (October 14, 1817), crossing the Channel ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... whose natural cosine is three-fourths, the velocity westward is over 700 miles per hour; but at its extreme limits north, the motion is much slower, and is repeated for two or three days in nearly the same latitude, for then it begins to return to the south; thus oscillating in about one sidereal period of the moon. At its southern limit, the vortex varies but slowly in latitude for the same time, but the velocity is much greater. The extreme latitudes vary at different times with the eccentricity of the lunar orbit, ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... rock bank that bordered the lawn. I found it out when I was sitting on the garden seat near by, learning Latin irregular verbs. I saw the minute preposterous round birds going and coming, and I found something so absurdly amiable and confiding about them—they sat balancing and oscillating on a standard rose and cheeped at me to go and then dived nestward and gave away their secret out of sheer impatience—that I could not bring myself to explore further, and kept the matter altogether secret from the enthusiasm of Mr. Siddons. And in a few ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... the plank was yet oscillating beneath his feet, one of the men in the trench below, by a dexterous drive of his pick, loosened the earth on the side of the excavation; and, hardly had Mr Flinders got out his defiant words than he and the plank on which he was standing came tumbling down, the ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Jack slid out of the doorway and down the oscillating bamboo stairs, and when, an hour later, the Major went to the little dock where the Manhattan lay he found the two boys working over her, sweating and complaining in loud voices against the inefficiency of modern motor ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... adventure in finance to propose. If Ascher goes into the scheme I shall have an opportunity of watching an interesting variant of the trapeze act. We shall get the people, who own the existing cash registers on the swing and then hold them to ransom. We shall set our small trapeze oscillating right across their airy path and decline to remove it unless they agree to part with some of the very shiniest of their spangles and hand them over to us for our adornment. I wondered how Ascher, who is so deeply moved ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... to touch the control panel, and his arm did not respond. It was shaking, uncontrollably, and moved off to the right of where he wanted it to go. When he tried to correct, it swung too far to the left, waving as if it were alive. It hung there before him as in a dream, oscillating ...
— Sound of Terror • Don Berry
... the shoulder-shaking, oscillating dancing of to-day, is really not intended to be vulgar or immoral at all, despite the crusades of the anti-immorality dancing committees! What is dancing, after all, if not the expression of one's ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... this position seven minutes and ate a meal during the interval. There were two clowns at the Cirque Franconi who duplicated this feat, and the program called their dinner "Un dejouner en tete-a-tete." Some other persons perform wonderful feats of a similar nature on an oscillating trapeze, and many similar performances have been witnessed by the spectators ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... she came to a stop at about five yards from me; then to my horror I saw that it was beside her naked feet. Although no longer advancing, the head was still raised high as if to strike; but presently the spirit of anger appeared to die out of it; the lifted head, oscillating a little from side to side, sunk down lower and lower to rest finally on the girl's bare instep; and lying there motionless, the deadly thing had the appearance of a gaily coloured silken garter just dropped from her leg. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... my whole being. I must forth into the free world."[214] Goethe did eventually take the decision of Fernando, but not just yet. On March 25th he wrote to Herder: "It seems as if the twisted threads on which my fate hangs, and which I have so long shaken to and fro in oscillating rotation, would at last unite."[215] On the 29th, Klopstock, who had come on a few days' visit to Frankfort, found him in "strange agitation." As so often happened in Goethe's life, it was an accident ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... except where sides were already fixed. Americanism would have been bad form in the liberal Edinburgh Review; it would have seemed eccentric even for a Scotchman, and Reeve was a Saxon of Saxons. To an American this attitude of oscillating reserve seemed more eccentric than the reckless hostility of Brougham or Carlyle, and more mischievous, for he never could be sure what preposterous commonplace it ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... the suite," he added, with a large wave of the hand towards a door that was still oscillating. "Be here ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... came straight up from below drew the weight of her body towards the abyss. It seemed to her that the ground of the oscillating square went up the walls and that the floor dipped on end like a tossing boat. She was right at the edge, almost hanging, surrounded by vast space. The blue of the heavens suffused her, the air was whirling in her hollow head; she had but to yield, to let herself ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... you well know—I know it, because I live among the population of Lancashire, and I doubt not the same may be said of the population of this city and county—that just above the level of the 1,100,000 there is at least an equal number who are ever oscillating between independence and pauperism, who, with a heroism which is not the less heroic because it is secret and unrecorded, are doing their very utmost to maintain an honourable and independent position before their fellow men? While Irish labour, notwithstanding ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... difficult of our experiences in fine weather was the intense drowsiness brought on by constantly watching the oscillating compass at night: even in the daytime this motion would make ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... devised by Mr. C.J. Woodward, and recently presented to the Physical Society of London, is an adaptation of this experiment to the production of an oscillating motion by alternations in the internal and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... commonly called Primitive; granite, gneiss and mica-slate (or gneiss oscillating between granite and mica-slate); very little primitive clay-slate; weisstein with serpentine; granite with disseminated amphibole; amphibolic slate; veins and small ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... see a globular mass with a moon-like face oscillating in the night. With hands held out and groping for the rails of the bedsteads, it is seeking its way. The orb of its belly distends and stretches its shirt like a crinoline, and shortens it. The mass is carried ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... habit, so that we can live comfortably with it. Only now and then, by way of special excitement, it starts up wide awake. We perceive how delicately our fortune is poised and balanced on the pivot of a single incident. We get a peep at the oscillating needle, and, because we have happened to see it tremble, we call our ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... commencing at low water, passes over the summit of the tide down to the next low water—this is a wave of the first order. In waves of the second order, the force raising them acts only on the surface, and there the effect is greatest (as in the wind waves)—where one assists in giving to the water oscillating motion which maintains the next, and gradually puts the whole surface in commotion; but at a short distance down that effect ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... being equipped with rotary screens or oscillating sieves, that segregate the imperfectly pulped cherries so that they may be put through again. Pulpers are also equipped with attachments that automatically move the imperfectly pulped material over into a repassing machine for ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... for Ann, the old head-housemaid—the younger housemaids were friendly and did not count. Ann located, came a dash across the open space at the foot of that great staircase that has never been properly descended since powder went out of fashion, and so to the saloon door. A beast of an oscillating Chinaman in china, as large as life, grimaced and quivered to one's lightest steps. That door was the perilous place; it was double with the thickness of the wall between, so that one could not listen beforehand ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... such that the utmost possible precision is secured, and the mechanical engineer can calculate on a degree of exactitude that does not admit of a deviation beyond the thousandth part of an inch. When the powerful oscillating engines of the 'Warrior' were put on board that ship, the parts, consisting of some five thousand separate pieces, were brought from the different workshops of the Messrs. Penn and Sons, where they had been made by workmen who knew not the places they were to occupy, and ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... few days before the trial, Donald after oscillating between the hotel and his club and finding each equally intolerable, jumped on the car and went out to the Queeringtons. It was a cold, raw day, with a fine mist filling the air, and even the dull formality of the drab parlor seemed a ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice |
