"Palpable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Nothing palpable had happened. Nothing had been said openly to convince him that his secret was known and that it was evil. Yet the air about him seemed full of suspicion and suspense and menace. The mere way in which his mother ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... Little need to trace the career of the fair and ill-starred Jacqueline. Few chapters of historical romance have drawn more frequent tears. The favorite heroine of ballad and drama, to Netherlanders she is endued with the palpable form and perpetual existence of the Iphigenias, Mary Stuarts, Joans of Arc, or other consecrated individualities. Exhausted and broken-hearted, after thirteen years of conflict with her own kinsmen, consoled for the cowardice ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... wine which had been ordered by her physicians, and hastened across the chamber to procure it. But, as I stepped beneath the light of the censer, two circumstances of a startling nature attracted my attention. I had felt that some palpable although invisible object had passed lightly by my person; and I saw that there lay upon the golden carpet, in the very middle of the rich lustre thrown from the censer, a shadow—a faint, indefinite ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... supreme importance of the Louisiana purchase and its value as a national accomplishment, when seen in the incidents of its short history and in the light of its present and prospective effects, and judged solely by its palpable and independent merits, can not be better characterized than by the adoption of the following language from the pen of a brilliant American historian: "The annexation of Louisiana was an event so portentious as to defy measurement. ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... beautiful, in the tarnishing of what has been clean and pure, in the forgetfulness of what is long past, in daily habits, which are the forgetfulness of what is near. We catch only glimpses of life. Death is the one thing we really have time to see. Death is the only palpable thing. Of what use is it to be beautiful and chaste? They will walk over our ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... Chump. Certain salient quiet remarks dropped by him were cherished after his departure; they were half-willing to think that he had been directed to come to them, bearer of a message from a heavenly world to urge them to action. They had need of a spiritual exaltation, to relieve them from the palpable depression caused by the weight of Mrs. Chump. They encouraged one another with exclamations on the oddness of a visit from their mother's brother, at such a time of tribulation, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... hand, is more than equal to that task. Rage and phrensy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years. The errors and defects of old establishments are visible and palpable. It calls for little ability to point them out; and where absolute power is given, it requires but a word wholly to abolish the vice and the establishment together. The same lazy but restless disposition, which loves sloth and hates quiet, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... proposals from so wise and peaceable a divine as Baxter. How mighty must be the force of an old prejudice when so generally acute a logician was blinded by it to such palpable inconsistencies! On what ground of right could a magistrate inflict a penalty, whereby to compel a man to hear what he might believe dangerous to his soul, on which the right of burning the refractory individual might not ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... love of country was more than a sentiment—it was a passion. She was the Genius of Patriotism—she was Patriotism embodied, concreted, made flesh, and palpable to the touch and visible to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... not appear to have gone deeply into the study of original sources, but it is only in his incidental treatment of continental history that his deficiencies in this respect become palpable. Here he is often inaccurate, and even when his facts are correct his mode of stating them shows that he is not master of the whole field, and has little appreciation of mingled motives and attendant circumstances. Such a sentence as this: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... its proofs that it is divine, for I am persuaded there never was a book naturally more repulsive either to the human head or heart. All the prejudices of man are necessarily arrayed against it. I felt these prejudice, I am now distinctly conscious; nor was I insensible to the palpable advantages of infidelity;—its accommodating morality; its Large margin for the passions and appetites; its doubts of any future world, or its certainty that, if there were one, it would prove a universal paradise (for doubts and certainties are equally ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... if, in the night scene, amid a generous exposure of physical facts, we missed the less palpable atmosphere of impending doom. Certainly the Holofernes of Mr. CLAUDE KING never for a moment suggested it. I admit that I had not hitherto seen an Assyrian officer making love on the edge of his grave and so ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... unsatisfactory than the impotence of the type is the obscurity of the thing typified. We can lay down no premises, because no basis can be found for them,—and establish no axioms, because we have no mathematical certainties. Objects which present the assurance of palpable facts to-day may vanish as meteors to-morrow. The effort to crystallize into a creed one's articles of faith in these mental phantasmagoria is like carving a cathedral from sunset clouds, or creating salient and retreating lines of armed hosts in the northern lights. Though willing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... at first nor in a later skirmish at the West Bow did he fire himself. There was much "cross swearing" at the trial of Porteous (July 20); the jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to be hanged on September 8. A petition from him to Queen Caroline (George II. was abroad) drew attention to palpable discrepancies in the hostile evidence. Both parties in Parliament backed his application, and on August 28 a delay of justice for ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... 12th in the markets "diverse groups of the low class call Petion a scoundrel," because "he saved the Swiss in the Palais Bourbon"; accordingly, "he and the Swiss must be hung to-day."-In these minds turned topsy-turvy the actual, palpable truth gives way to its opposite; "the attack was not begun by them; the order to sound the tocsin came from the palace; it is the palace which was besieging the nation, and not the nation which was besieging the palace."[3107] The vanquished "are the assassins of the people," caught in the act; and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... against the importation of pleurises and catarrhs from the colder regions of Europe; a practical joke of this kind has been known to succeed after reason, argument, and evidence, amounting to the most palpable demonstration, had proved of ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... become self-respecting and country-loving citizens. Disfranchise them, and the mark of Cain is set upon them less mercifully than upon the first murderer, for no man was to hurt him. But this mark of inferiority—all the more palpable because of a difference of color—not only dooms the negro to be a vagabond, but makes him the prey of insult and outrage everywhere. While nothing may be urged here as to the past services of the negro, it is quite within the line of this appeal to remind the nation of the possibility that a ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... countries where fools most abound, did one ever read of more monstrous, palpable folly? In any country, save this, would a poet who chose to write four crack-brained verses, comparing an angel to a dove, and a little boy to a reed, and calling upon the chief magistrate, in the name of the angel, or dove (the Princess Mary), in her tomb, and the little infant ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... appeared to be a man of few words; and of gesture he made a like limited use: having passed me, without even the courtesy of a bow. On the contrary, I was honoured with a glance of cynical regard—so palpable in its expression, as to cause an itching in my fingers, notwithstanding the saintly gown. I contented myself, however, with returning the glance, by one I intended should bear a like contemptuous expression; and, with this exchange, we separated from each other. I remained by my stand, without ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... a man of consummate genius, should have been, one would have thought, to make everything that he did faultless and strong, no less than lovely. But of all men, deserving to be called "great," Fra Angelico permits to himself the least pardonable faults, and the most palpable follies. There is evidently within him a sense of grace, and power of invention, as great as Ghiberti's:—we are in the habit of attributing those high qualities to his religious enthusiasm; but, if they were produced by that enthusiasm in him, they ought ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... he committed palpable and even discreditable mistakes. Hauling to windward—away—when the Marlborough forced him ahead, abandoned that ship to overwhelming numbers, and countenanced the irresolution of the Dorsetshire ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... of Lutheran command was already giving Charles the expected opportunities. The princes withdrew westward, a palpable confession of weakness. They had been the aggressors, and yet they now surrendered the initiative to Charles. Their retirement enabled the Count of Buren to march in with his Netherland division, and with him the troops of Albert and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... his face to the lamp, and it was one of the moments at which he had, in his extraordinary way, most his air of designedly showing himself. It was as if at these instants he just presented himself, his identity so rounded off, his palpable presence and his massive young manhood, as such a link in the chain as might practically amount to a kind of demonstration. It was as if—and how but anomalously?—he couldn't after all help thinking sufficiently well of these things to ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... it to be very much like a fox, and certainly 'tis as much like a lion as that in the zodiac, or as ursa major is like a bear." [99] This last remark of the old mathematician is "a hit, a very palpable hit," at those unpoetical people who catalogue the constellations under all sorts of living creatures' names, implying resemblances, and then "sap with solemn sneer" our ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... be self-evident, that all men are created free and equal." In other words, he put forth the astonishing proposition that human equality is self-evident. Many of us would incline to the opinion that the opposite is self-evident, that the inequalities which subsist between men are so palpable that we cannot overlook them. If, however, we inquire what led Jefferson to this statement, we shall find that, at the time when the Declaration of Independence was written, there existed a basis of fact that gave color to his assumption. The population ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... on the water, the glow-worms of lanterns glimmered more sharply, and the softness of the night grew more palpable. ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... this reading arose. The initial letter of [Greek: synantesas] has been reduplicated through careless transcription: [Greek: OSSYN]—instead of [Greek: OSYN]—. That is all. But the instructive feature of the case is that it is in the four oldest of the uncials that this palpable ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... goes by the same name which clusters at its foot, is one of the most spectacular of the ruined fortresses to be found in Southern England. At the periods of the year when there are no strangers in the village, the ruins and the village leave an impression on the mind which is not so palpable when there are the distractions caused by other visitors. But even then, the grand view across the wild downs forming the backbone of the island of Purbeck, over which one gazes from the shattered towers and curtain walls, ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... piece of light biographic study, necessary to my plan, and as conveniently admissible in this place as afterwards;—namely, the account of the manner in which Scott—whom we shall always find, as aforesaid, to be in salient and palpable elements of character, of the World, worldly, as Burns is of the Flesh, fleshly, and Byron of the Deuce, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... which greeted his senses, dulled as they were to the finer things of life, as a subtle something belonging to the past which had been lost and was regained. Now and then he would stop, rest his bag on the ground, and breathe in the crisp air as if it were a palpable substance that was pleasing to his palate. At such moments, when the open spaces between hanging boughs, tangled vines, and trunks of trees would permit, his glance, half doubtful, half confident, would rest on the palatial ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... the madness of their declaration of the pretended rights of man,—the childish, futility of some of their maxims, the gross and stupid absurdity and the palpable falsity of others, and the mischievous tendency of all such declarations to the well-being of men and of citizens and to the safety and prosperity of every just commonwealth. He was prepared to show, that, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... be in the way of quitting earth, if not of attaining heaven. Our business is solely to treat of man, and this fair scene on which he acts, and that not in his subtleties, and metaphysical contradictions, but in his palpable nature, that all may understand our meaning as well as ourselves—whereby we may manifestly reject the prodigious advantage of being thought a genius, by perhaps foolishly refusing the mighty aid of incomprehensibility to ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... sepulcher that destiny Appoints me in this land. Hither, this way, For this way Hermes leads, the spirit guide, And Persephassa, empress of the dead. O light, no light to me, but mine erewhile, Now the last time I feel thee palpable, For I am drawing near the final gloom Of Hades. Blessing on thee, dearest friend, On thee and on thy land and followers! Live prosperous and in your happy state Still for your welfare think on me, the dead. [Exit THESEUS followed by ANTIGONE ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... was palpable: but did he intend it? Surely not, after what he had just said. And yet there was a sadness in the tone which made Valencia fancy that some feeling for her might still linger: but he evidently had been speaking to himself, forgetful, for the moment, of ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... increase his own credit and interest. Hence arises the difficulty, to those who write the history of that period, of tracing the hand of the king in all these conspiracies, carried on in his name, and to pronounce either his entire innocence or his palpable treachery. He did not betray his country, or sell his subjects; but he did not observe his oaths to the constitution or his country. An upright man, but a persecuted king, he believed that oaths, extorted by ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... save the fact that there was "something dark" somewhere. The "painted quid" had done its work more thoroughly than Willon and the welsher had intended; they had meant that the opiate should be just sufficient to make the favorite off his speed, but not to make effects so palpable as these. It was, however, so deftly prepared that under examination no trace could be found of it, and the result of veterinary investigation, while it left unremoved the conviction that the horse had been doctored, could not explain when or how, or by what medicines. Forest King had ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... manner of Horace and of your lordship in this kind of satire to that of Juvenal, and, I think, reasonably. Holyday ought not to have arraigned so great an author for that which was his excellency and his merit; or, if he did, on such a palpable mistake he might expect that some one might possibly arise (either in his own time, or after him) to rectify his error, and restore to Horace that commendation of which he has so unjustly robbed him. And let the manes of Juvenal forgive me if I say that this way of Horace was the ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... book, every chapter of every book, were the fruit of ample meditation and repeated revision, if he had never written with any thought of profit, never written but what he could not contain hidden within him—this is to tell us palpable nonsense. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... she must go out into the streets and scream. Now she knew why she had been sent for. It was in order that the Baron might talk to her in parables—in order that he might show her by means of an object lesson, as palpable as pitiless, what was the impediment which made her marriage with David ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... indeed, an inexpressibly strange tenant, a tenant of the darkness. He was on a plain and on a hill, and he was not. He was palpable, yet vanished. He was a shadow accruing to the night. After the disappearance of day into the vast of silent obscurity, he became in lugubrious accord with all around him. By his mere presence he increased the gloom of the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... all this the undisputed fact that within the walls of lying-in hospitals there is often generated a miasm, palpable as the chlorine used to destroy it, tenacious so as in some cases almost to defy extirpation, deadly in some institutions as the plague; which has killed women in a private hospital of London so fast that they were buried two in one coffin to ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... port or custom-house, and scarcely any settlement. His purpose, therefore, was not to sell his goods to the inhabitants of Florida, but to citizens of the United States, in exchange for their productions, which could not be done without a direct and palpable breach of our laws. It is known that a regular systematic plan had been formed by certain persons for the violation of our revenue system, which made it the more necessary to check ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... region of thought. There are people who collect and hold in themselves some knowledge of contemporary events as the air collects and holds moisture; it may be that we all do, but only one here and there becomes aware of the fact. As the impalpable moisture in the air changes to palpable rain so does this vague cognisance become a comprehensible revelation by being resolved into a shower of words on occasion by some process psychically analogous to the condensation of moisture in the air. It is a natural phenomenon known to ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... should they but shoot one of the oxen of the leading waggon of the convoy, and thus block the cramped defile, all chance of getting safely through to Ladysmith would be at an end. This was by no means a happy reflection to fill men's minds in the dripping, almost palpable, darkness of the night, and the resolute spirit of the gallant fellows who unmurmuringly stowed away all personal wretchedness and stuck manfully to their grim duty is for ever to be marvelled at and admired. Fortunately the Dutchmen, "slim" as ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... result of progress surely every one is assured. In the matter of thoughtless and instinctive cruelty—and that is a very fundamental matter—mankind mends steadily. I wonder and doubt if in the whole world at any time before this an aged, ill-clad woman, or a palpable cripple could have moved among a crowd of low-class children as free from combined or even isolated insult as such a one would be to-day, if caught in the rush from a London Council school. Then, for all our sins, I am ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... this palpable evasion of justice through obstinate non responsion, will it please the Court to overrule ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... not attempted to set down in words the palpable image and body of what he is, or of what he seems to himself, can possibly conceive the difficulty ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... great State of California and her indignant people may be once more proclaimed with bitter protest and earnest appeal to all the citizens of our sister States throughout our vast commonwealth; and to the end that no such palpable embodiment of political infamy may continue to stalk without rebuke through all the open ways and sacred recesses of popular power crystallized at Washington—I propose to revive the recollection of—and to briefly ...
— How Members of Congress Are Bribed • Joseph Moore
... Adolphus impatiently, "no, father, you shall not. You shall not accept this artfully contrived invitation. You dare not go to Prussia. My God, sir, are your usually keen and penetrating eyes so blinded that they can not see what is so very palpable? Do you really not perceive that the Elector only wants to entice you away, in order to get you in his power, in order noiselessly and quietly to put you out of the way? Ostensibly you are to go to Koenigsberg to advise the ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... your undisguised perception of that emotion," remarked Captain Blessington, "that drew down his severity upon your own head. It was, however, too palpable not to be noticed by all; and I dare say conjecture is as busily and as vaguely at work among our companions as it is with us. The clue to the mystery, in a great degree, now dwells with Frank Halloway; and to him we must look for ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... moment, he saw himself controlling the situation, the foremost figure in his State, feared, respected, thousands of men beneath him, his ambition at length gratified; his career, once apparently brought to naught, completed; success a palpable achievement. What if this were his chance, after all, come at last after all these years. His chance! The instincts of the old-time gambler, the most redoubtable poker player of El Dorado County, stirred at the word. Chance! To know it when ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... a stranger to the subtleties of metaphysical thought, it appears quite inconceivable, when he is told that the existence of the visible and palpable scene before him should be converted into a problem of apparently invincible difficulty. Yet so it is. The metaphysician first carries off in triumph what are called its secondary qualities, as colour and heat, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... no man could see this exquisite creature without feeling it possible to fall in love with her; but all the fervor of his nature was engaged on the side of precaution. There are personages who feel themselves tragic because they march into a palpable morass, dragging another with them, and then cry out against all the gods. Deronda's mind was ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... British Army or Nation, or dispositions towards them which were other than friendly. Now there is a fact, furnished by Sir Arthur Wellesley himself, which may seem to render it in the highest degree probable that, previously to any recorded or palpable act of disregard or disrespect to the situation and feelings of the Portugueze, the general tenour of his bearing towards them might have been such that they could not look favourably upon him; that he was not a man framed to conciliate them, to compose their differences, or ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... this, Jervis," said he, stooping to peer under a laurel-bush. "The inspector is on a hot scent—a most palpable red herring on a most obvious string; but that is his business. Ah, here comes the porter, intent, no doubt, on pumping us, whereas—" He smiled genially at the approaching custodian, and asked: "Where did you ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... you are going to say, slave; for I know the men of your nation. Take care, if the accusation you are making by way of revenge is not supported by visible, palpable, and positive proofs, you shall be punished as an ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... palpable truth in what Ned said; and the governor, unbending, expressed his readiness to receive and help them. He then asked a few more questions about the manner in which they had become separated from their friends; and seeing no ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... and I had long known, that that hand of M. Emanuel's was on the most intimate terms with my desk; that it raised and lowered the lid, ransacked and arranged the contents, almost as familiarly as my own. The fact was not dubious, nor did he wish it to be so: he left signs of each visit palpable and unmistakable; hitherto, however, I had never caught him in the act: watch as I would, I could not detect the hours and moments of his coming. I saw the brownie's work in exercises left overnight full of faults, and found ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... from the lace mantillas; the graceful arms holding the guitars; the sweet rich voices threading through the roar of the ocean like the melody in a grand recitativo; the old men and women crouching like buzzards on the stones, their sharp eyes never closing; enfolding all with an almost palpable touch, the warm voluptuous air. Now and again a bird sang a few notes, a strange sound in the night, or the soft wind murmured like the ocean's ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... since poor men are blind, they love their darkness more than the light, as Christ says John 3, and insist on criticizing and falsifying God's truth by means of blind philosophy, which, forsooth, is a shame and a palpable sin, if we but had eyes to see and know.... Whatsoever blind reason produces in such articles of faith against the Word of God is false and wrong. For it is said: Mulier in ecclesia taceat! Let philosophy and human wisdom ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... attempt explaining, in the theological province, what in reality cannot be explained. Some weak abortion of the human reason is always substituted, in the attempt, for some profound mystery in the moral government of God; and men ill-grounded in the faith are led to confound the palpable abortion with the inscrutable mystery, and are injured ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... like the father of them; gross as a mountain, open, palpable. Why, thou clay-brained, nott-pated fool; thou ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... regard to the tale itself. There is a necessary anachronism in the book, of too palpable a nature not to be detected at a glance by the reader. It will. however, be perceived, that such anachronism does not in any way interfere with historical fact, while it has at the same time facilitated the introduction of events, which ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... I have likewise dined with Horne Tooke. He is a clear-headed old man, as every man must needs be who attends to the real import of words, but there is a sort of charlatanry in his manner that did not please me. He makes such a mystery out of plain and palpable things, and never tells you any thing without first exciting, and detaining your curiosity. But it were a bad heart that could not pardon worse faults than these in the author ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... is no less important. What is the most palpable fact of the child's play? It is enjoyment. We have done for ever with the elegant morality which grown-up people, very particular about their own meals, used to impose upon children, and which was based upon the idea ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... the most spotless innocence open a door to the blast of calumny. I will not say that such a step may not be sometimes justifiable. I will not say to what I may myself be urged. But oh, how unmingled the triumph, how sincere the joy if, by persevering in a conduct, in which the path of duty is too palpable to be mistaken, propitious fate may rather grant me the happiness after which I aspire, than I be forced, as it were, myself to wrest it from the hands ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... do not mean deceitful. I saw nobody but nice people there, smooth, kind, and polite. By artificial I mean wrought up. You don't get at the heart of things. Artificialness spreads and spans all with a crystal barrier,—invisible, but palpable. Nothing was left to grow and go at its own sweet will. The very springs were paved and pavilioned. For green fields and welling fountains and a possibility of brooks, which one expects from the name, you found a Greek temple, and a pleasure-ground, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... there reigned over the Judge's table a palpable silence, and as soon as the solids were despatched he rose ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... upon us from within ourselves, and our most secret thoughts may as surely be drawn from the path of duty by secret temptation, by the admission of evil suggestions, and they will affect our characters as injuriously as those more palpable and tangible temptations that ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... cabin a reddish blur by contrast. The icy flood swept over the land, bringing out with a new emphasis the close, glossy foliage and broken facade—it appeared unreal, portentous. The odors of the flowers, of the orange blossoms, uncoiled in heavy, palpable waves across the water, accompanied by the owl's fluctuating cry. The sense of imminence increased, of a genius loci unguessed and troublous, vaguely ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... hand, finger, forefinger, thumb, paw, feeler, antenna; palpus[obs3]. V. touch, feel, handle, finger, thumb, paw, fumble, grope, grabble; twiddle, tweedle; pass the fingers over, run the fingers over; manipulate, wield; throw out a feeler. Adj. tactual, tactile; tangible, palpable; lambent. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... insisted upon, viz. That no Practice, no Action or good Quality, how useful or beneficial soever they may be in them selves, can ever deserve the Name of Virtue, strictly speaking, where there is not a palpable Self-denial to be seen. In Tract of Time, the Sense of the Word Virtus received still a grated Latitude; and it signify'd Worth, Strength, Authority, and Goodness of all Kinds: Plautus makes ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... voice of success. Still, she could not keep her secret. She tried to be calm and indifferent, but it was a palpable sham. ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... under the hand of the great critick[1129].' Johnson, in a tone of displeasure, asked him, 'Why do you praise Anson [1130]?' I did not trouble him by asking his reason for this question. He proceeded, 'Here is an errour, Sir; you have made Genius feminine.' [1131] 'Palpable, Sir; (cried the enthusiast) I know it. But (in a lower tone) it was to pay a compliment to the Duchess of Devonshire, with which her Grace was pleased. She is walking across Coxheath, in the military ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... certain royal family had not yet left, and this fact made the arrangements possible. It was now very warm. Dust lay everywhere, on the huge palms, on the withered plants, on the chairs and railings, and swam palpable in the air. Breitmann was nowhere to be found, but he had seen the manager of the hotel and secured rooms facing the bay. Later, perhaps two hours after the arrival, he appeared. In this short time he had completed his plans. As ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... blank look, as he follows this by the discovery that his neither garments have no pockets whatsoever, not even a watch-fob, where it may lie perdue in a corner! Amid the suppressed giggle of the bridesmaids, the disconcerted look of the bride herself, at such a palpable instance of carelessness on the part of the bridegroom thus publicly displayed before all her friends, and the half-repressed disapprobation of the numerous circle around, he fumbles in the coat-pockets, and turns them inside-out. A further but useless search causes increased ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... grouping mineral atoms into organic forms, than is the heat which converts water into steam. But in neither case is the force destroyed. When the vaporous steam is condensed into the liquid water, all the heat is restored, and becomes palpable. By the ultimate decomposition of vegetable substances all the force expended on their production is liberated, and, in some form, ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... thought about it. What might they not do with forty thousand pounds divided between them, or even with a thousand a-year each, settled on them for life? and surely their secret was worth that money! Nay, was it not palpable to the meanest calculation that it was worth much more? Had they not the selling of twelve thousand a-year for ever and ever ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... thus. The gospels are accused of being written by credulous and superstitious authors whose names are not certainly known; as containing too inconsistent and contradictory accounts of prodigies and miracles; and also palpable marks of forgery. Now to convince a thinking man, that histories of such suspected character, containing relations of miracles, are divine or even really written, by the persons to whom they are ascribed, and not either some of the many spurious productions, with which it is notorious and acknowledged, ...
— Letter to the Reverend Mr. Cary • George English
... the nascent interest of the spectator. It is true that light, in its final plenitude, is calculated to disperse all darkness. But this effect belongs to its consummation. In its earlier and struggling states, light does but reveal darkness. It makes the darkness palpable and "visible." Of which we may see a sensible illustration in a gloomy glass-house, where the sullen lustre from the furnace does but mass and accumulate the thick darkness in the rear upon which the moving figures are relieved. ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... it is remembered for nothing else, will be remembered in that place for its strange sunset. It looked like the end of the world. All the heaven seemed covered with a quite vivid and palpable plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers, and of feathers that almost brushed the face. Across the great part of the dome they were grey, with the strangest tints of violet and mauve and an unnatural pink or pale green; but ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... first place, it was confidently asserted by one party, represented by Valdarno and his set, that Giovanni had taken offence at Del Ferice for having proposed to call him to be examined before the Duchessa d'Astrardente in regard to his absence from town: that this was a palpable excuse for picking a quarrel, because it was well known that Saracinesca loved the Astrardente, and that Del Ferice was always in ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... about that department of criticism employed in determining the genuineness of ancient writings. As to this little poem being a youthful prolusion of Homer, it seems sufficient to say that from the beginning to the end, it is a plain and palpable parody, not only of the general spirit, but of numerous passages of the Iliad itself; and, even if no such intention to parody were discernible in it, the objection would still remain, that to suppose a work of mere burlesque to be the primary effort of poetry in a simple ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... them. But alas, the dispassionate search for truth is the rarest virtue on earth. Even Gall himself had not enough of this to recognize the discoveries of Spurzheim. Nor had Spurzheim enough to get rid of some of the palpable errors of Gall, such as placing Acquisitiveness in the temples, Mirthfulness in the philosophic group, and reversing the true positions of Tune and Constructiveness, extending the latter into the middle lobe. Spurzheim, however, was a better and more faithful observer than Gall, and greatly improved ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... palpable reason against protesting is, that literature in its different branches, now as ever, commands the services of the finest minds. It is the literary character, of which the elder Disraeli has written ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... charged with electricity, either actual or potential; the sun is hot with it, and doubtless our own heart-beats, our own thinking brains, are intimately related to it; yet it is palpable and visible only in this sudden and extraordinary way. It defies our analysis, it defies our definitions; it is inscrutable and incomprehensible, yet it will do our errands, light our houses, cook our dinners, and pull ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... of by fictions is in accordance with universal experience. Great is the art of interpretation; and by a natural process, which when once discovered was always going on, what could not be altered was explained away. And so without any palpable inconsistency there existed side by side two forms of religion, the tradition inherited or invented by the poets and the customary worship of the temple; on the other hand, there was the religion of the philosopher, who was dwelling in the heaven of ideas, but did not therefore refuse to offer ...
— The Republic • Plato
... then it dawned upon Fyne that this was just it. The great smash, in the great dust of vanishing millions! Was it possible that they all had vanished to the last penny? Wasn't there, somewhere, something palpable; some ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... suspects that it is there, ought to pray very humbly to be delivered from it, as he would from any other darling bosom-sin. He ought to eschew diplomacy and practise frankness, he ought to welcome failure and to rejoice when he makes humiliating mistakes. He ought to be grateful even for palpable faults and weaknesses and sins and physical disabilities. For if we have the hope that God is educating us, is moulding a fair statue out of the frail and sordid clay, such a faith forbids us to reject any experience, however disagreeable, however painful, however self-revealing it may be, as of ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... comprehends this subject in its wide relations, and is not swayed by the popular demand for an express sign at every step, but can reason inferentially as well as when proofs are demonstrative and palpable; and who has in his mind the whole system of redemption, with its various economies, interdependent, and none made perfect without the rest. When all our church-members come to understand and feel the power ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... piety, he had been led by training, and afterwards by personal experience, to view this matter from a very different standpoint from that of Sir Richard. He made no reply, however, but, turning round the corner of the Home of Industry, entered a narrow street which bore palpable evidence of being the abode of deepest poverty. From the faces and garments of the inhabitants it was also evidently associated ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... them, and ghastly eyes glaring from the darker folds, and, when these rustled, were heard stifled meanings, and smothered shrieks as of horror: and I noted that she stood upon a wreath of lightnings, that darted about like a nest of young snakes in the midst of a sullen cloud, black, palpable, and rolling inwards as thick smoke from ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... clamoured for an insurgent, Barabbas, a man caught red-handed in the very crime for which these hypocrites professed in their new-fledged loyalty to Caesar to be anxious to have Jesus executed. The cynicism of their choice is palpable. By daring to make it, they show in what contempt they hold Pilate. The governor loses ground considerably by this false move. Then he tries to throw the blame of the murder of Jesus, which he sees he cannot prevent, on the Jews. A new motive urges him to escape from the ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... heights, brawling torrent, and stony road, butterflies beautiful and innumerable, flowers to match, sky cloudless. At last we are there; through the town, or rather village, the river rushes furiously, the dismantled houses and gaping walls affording palpable traces of the fearful inundations of the previous year, not a house near the river was sound, many quite uninhabitable, and more such as I am sure few of us would like to inhabit. However, it is Cervieres such as it is, and we hope for our vin ordinaire; but, alas!—not a human being, man, ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... in the description of Mr. Rutledge. I therefore had a tooth made, which I have the honor of forwarding you with this letter; observing, at the same time, that as many of their machines are without teeth as with them, and of course, that the advantage is not very palpable. It seems to follow, then, that the rice of Lombardy (for though called Piedmont rice, it does not grow in that county but in Lombardy) is of a different species from that of Carolina; different in form, in color and in quality. We know that in Asia they have ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... this country, to transfer the naval war to America. The number of ports friendly to them and hostile to the British, the materials for repairing their disabled ships, the extensive supplies towards the subsistence of their fleet, are circumstances which would give them a palpable advantage in the contest of the sea. No nation will have it more in its power to repay what it borrows than this. Our debts are hitherto small. The vast and valuable tracts of unlocated lands, the variety and fertility ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... millions; but the planters had estimated them at seventy. The truth, however, might possibly lie between these extremes. He by no means wished to depreciate their importance; but he did not like that such palpable ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... to a standstill, for what could it add to these wonders? Yet the fairyland of which Ludo and I had dreamed was more beautiful and more real than this palpable magnificence of tin and pasteboard; which is, perhaps, one reason why the overexcited imagination of a city child shrinks back and tries to find in reality what a boy brought up in the quiet of the country can conjure up before his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... among us climbed up to the masthead, having in his teeth a piece of the True Cross set in a silver heart; and called aloud to the wild weather, "Save, Lord, we perish!" as was said of old by very sacred persons. To which palpable truth so urgently declared an answer was vouchsafed, not indeed according to our full desires, yet (doubtless) level with our deserts. The wind veered to the north; and though it abated nothing of its force, preserved ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... impetuous movement towards her, when the strong grasp of a fellow-passenger checked him in time to prevent discovery. It is singular how much is understood by trifles when the mind has a clue to the subject, and how often signs, that are palpable as day, are overlooked when suspicion is not awakened, or when the thoughts have obtained a false direction. The attorney and the officer were the only two present who had not seen the indiscretion of the young man, and ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... which these vesper hymns were stealing, was lighted up, and the tapers gleamed like flashes of starlight across that end of the edifice, rendering the gorgeous gloom in which they stood more palpable by contrast. ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... the heroic was, in Thackeray, so palpable to Thackeray himself that in his original preface to Pendennis, when he began to be aware that his reputation was made, he tells his public what they may expect and what they may not, and makes his joking complaint ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... which is a man who strives to make his visions palpable, Wixon thought of his own home town and the colony of boys that prospered there in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... protection of British interests. The sunshine has appeared to rest upon scattered clusters of red-coats, while the background has been enveloped in a sort of chaotic and fuliginous dimness. The red-coats, according to their number, have been palpable and definite, though a great many other things have been inconveniently vague. At the beginning of the year, when Parliament was opened in the queen's name, the royal speech contained a phrase which that boisterous organ of the war-party, the Pall Mall Gazette, pronounced "sickening" in its ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... in which he had played a part, and he spoke in the toneless voice of one who relates a fable of which, through frequent repetition, he is tired. Instinctively, in order to make the truth of his story palpable, he began to corroborate it with particulars which he would otherwise have spared his auditor, but with the same impersonal accent. He told Clarice of the condition of the village after Gorley's raid, as he first came within view of it: here the body of a negro ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... interfering in any way whatever, so that, if any one mission has the good fortune to be superintended by an industrious and discreet padre, the Indians disfrute in abundance all the real necessaries of life; at the same time the nakedness and misery of any one mission are a palpable proof of the inactivity of its director. The missions extend their possessions from one extremity of the territory to the other, and have made the limits of one mission from those of another. Though they do not require all this ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... of melancholy examples whose notorious failure shall serve as a warning to those who do not cultivate a power of immoral self-control which shall prevent them from saying, or even thinking, anything that shall not be to their immediate and palpable advantage.' To do our countrymen justice, it is often not self-interest, but a tendency to deal with the concrete instance, in disregard of the general law, that blinds them to the larger aspects of great problems. Those ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... in such representations to represent the Virgin with a sword in her bosom, and even with seven swords in allusion to the seven sorrows. This very material and palpable version of the allegorical prophecy (Luke ii, 35) has been found extremely effective as an appeal to the popular feelings, so that there are few Roman Catholic churches without such a painful and literal interpretation of the text. It occurs ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... particularly in England, has sometimes been equivalent to the most permanent and fruitful legislation. But the people responsible for the government of European countries have rarely been trained lawyers, whereas American statesmen, untrained in the law, are palpable exceptions. This dominion of lawyers is so defiant of precedent that it must be due to certain novel and ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... to the accumulation of back cases that have been sentenced, I believe that that can only be understood from the year 1838, or even from that of 1839, because of the lack of judges in which the court found itself in 1837. No matter how it is considered, the increase is palpable, for the causes alone for murder of last year amount to more than all those of any of the years of the first five years, and it is incredible that at that time they neglected to try people for homicide, although they did dissimulate in regard to ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... woman, and had I dare say, while accepting my offer, a delightful vision of helping me to live up to the duties of my position. I can only say that she soon began to impress the importance of this upon me by hints more or less palpable; and it was not long before she was to all intents and purposes the real house-keeper. It was still, to be sure, I that ordered the dinners and engaged the servants, but even in these minor details I was alive to her suggestions; while in the matter of the general direction of what went ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... professor's words—rather let me say such the words of the fate—enounced to destroy me. As he went on I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being; chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein—more, far more, will I achieve; ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... Witchcrafts, among a thousand other unaccountable things, the Spectres have an odd faculty of cloathing the most substantial and corporeal Instruments of Torture, with Invisibility, while the wounds thereby given have been the most palpable things in the World; so that the Sufferers assaulted with Instruments of Iron, wholly unseen to the standers by, though, to their cost, seen by themselves, have, upon snatching, wrested the Instruments out of the Spectres hands, and every one has then immediately not only beheld, but handled, ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... published a paper, which, if I recollect right, was called the Bristol Gazette. He was equally a thick and thin supporter of the other faction, the Whigs; he was their time-serving dirty tool; no falsehood, no absurdity, however palpable, so that it served his masters, the Whig faction, was too gross for his depraved appetite. This gentleman, also, was equally lavish of his abuse against me, for having dared to interfere with a privilege which ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... respectively of the laws and of the legal administration of justice in the kingdom, should run only with the assent and sanction of the Crown. They were to carry with them a double force—a force of coercion, visible and palpable; a force addressed to conscience, neither visible nor palpable, and in its nature only capable of being inwardly appreciated. Was it then unreasonable that they should bear outwardly the tokens of that power to which they were to be indebted for their outward observance, and should work only within ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... injury to the skin, which was soft and delicate, like a woman's. Neither were there signs of any preparation having been previously applied. I have often seen conjurers and others handle red-hot coals and iron, but there were always palpable signs ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... youth and age, but also, like the human body, with a quotidian life, a periodical recurrence of ebbing and flowing tides. Its old particles daily run to waste, and give place to new. What is hoped among us is, that which has usually been found, that evils will become palpable before they have grown ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... not at all sure whether the look she gave him was one of astonishment or resentment. At any rate, it was a quick glance, followed by the palpable suppression of words that first came to her lips, and the substitution ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... the apostle, is the evidence of things not seen. There would be no merit in believing what is perfectly evident to the senses. Yet some would argue that the evidence ought to be more clear and palpable. If so, would not the awe be also removed, and would religion gain by it? We have enough imparted to convince us that all is right; and is not that which is hidden or secret purposely intended to produce that awe, without which the ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... caught the gun-cutter and hurled her end-over-end, sending von Schlichten and Paula sprawling at full length on the deck, still clinging to one another. There was a blast of almost palpable sound, and a sensation of heat that penetrated even the airtight superstructure of the Elmoran. An instant later, there was another, and another, similar shock. Two more bombs had gone off behind them, in Keegark; that meant that ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... does with that little set of hers at her retreat of the "Hermitage." Persons, even places, have their nicknames. St. Petersburg is the "Duck-pond"; Grimm himself the "Fag," "Souffredouleur," George Dandin, "M. le Baron de Thunder-ten-Tronck." Frederick the Great appears as "Herod" (a palpable hit that!), the diplomats as "Wind-bags," "Pea-soup," "Die Perrueckirte Haeupter;" Maria Theresa becomes "Maman;" Gustavus of Sweden, "Falstaff;" and so on. There is no question here of making a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... dropped a light, turned, and circled round to the left. Five minutes later another shell screamed over, and this time fell crashing into the hamlet. The hit was palpable and unmistakable; a huge dense cloud of smoke and mortar-, lime-, and red brick-dust leapt and billowed and hung heavily ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... giving power to make laws, and another power to resist them. The sages, whose memory will always be reverenced, have given us a practical, and, as they hoped, a permanent constitutional compact. The Father of his Country did not affix his revered name to so palpable an absurdity. Nor did the States, when they severally ratified it, do so under the impression that a veto on the laws of the United States was reserved to them, or that they could exercise it by application. Search ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... depend upon constant previous intercourse with its object. Love at first sight is common enough, and in this instance Eustace was not altogether dependent upon the spoken words of his adored, or on his recollection of her very palpable beauty. For he had her books. To those who know something of the writer—sufficient, let us say, to enable him to put an approximate value on his or her sentiments, so as to form a more or less accurate guess ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... benefit of such a promise, and yet could always absolve himself from the penalties of responsibility which it imposed, by appealing to the evidence of those who happened to stand in the first ranks of his audience. The blunder was gross and palpable; and yet, with the unreflecting and dull-witted soldier, it did him service greater than all the subtilties of all the schools could have accomplished, and a service which subsisted to ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... among them like wolves into the sheep-fold), the fierce and impious Saxons, a race hateful both to God and men, to repel the invasions of the northern nations. Nothing was ever so pernicious to our country, nothing was ever so unlucky. What palpable darkness must have enveloped their minds-darkness desperate and cruel! Those very people whom, when absent, they dreaded more than death itself, were invited to reside, as one may say, under the selfsame roof. Foolish are the princes, as it is said, of Thafneos, giving counsel to ...
— On The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) • Gildas
... have been a pleasant thing to Angela but for one patent fact, and this fact was rendered more palpable every hour. It requires a woman to thoroughly analyze another woman's feelings, and Angela experienced little difficulty in probing the heart of Natalie. From the moment when Jim had first stepped through the doorway Angela had been aware of the fact that all ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... I were looking at it through the penumbra of an aquarium; it was I myself, an I composed of three, which was changing into something that was floating adrift in something, though what it was I did not know, composed of palpable fog and intangible water, and it was ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... head above the waves for an instant, and immediately I am overwhelmed—"all Thy waves and Thy billows have gone over me." My nights are a terror to me, and I fear for my reason. That last grip of Sophy's hand is distinctly on mine now, palpable as the pressure of a fleshly hand could be. It is strange that without any external circumstances to account for it, she and I often thought the same things at the same moment. She seemed to know instinctively what was passing in my ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... forever invisible flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... hands and their feet. And thus these awful, supernatural, bright, majestic, delicate apparitions, much as we may in our hearts acknowledge their sovereignty, are no match as a foundation of Science for the hard, palpable, material facts which make up the province of Physics. Recurring to my original illustration, it is as if the India Commander-in-Chief, instead of being under the control of a local seat of government ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... you know, and they don't get married to backwood Southern girls who haven't a nigger to bless themselves with since the war! No," she continued, lifting her proud little head so promptly after Ford had recovered from his surprise as to make the ruse of emptying her shoe perfectly palpable, "no, that's what we've both allowed, dear, all along. And now, honey, it's near time for me to go. Tell me something good—before I go. Tell me that you love me as you used to—tell me how you felt that night at the ball when you first knew ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... time. After such prophets the almanac-makers hardly deserve to be mentioned; not even the renowned Partridge, whose prognostications set all England agog in 1708, and whose death while still alive was so pleasantly and satisfactorily proved by Isaac Bickerstaff. The anti-climax would be too palpable, and they and their doings must ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Wilkinson, "I cannot take a mere assurance in the present instance. Had not the case been so palpable, I should have been bound to believe you until I had had reason to mistrust your word—but with these facts I cannot, Louis;" and he added, in a very low tone, so as to be heard only by Louis, who was much nearer to him than ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... position which the Natives occupy to-day in the body politic as the natural result of their lack of education and civilization. He is devoted to his own people, and notes with ever-increasing regret the lack of understanding and knowledge of those people, which is so palpable in the vast majority of the letters and leading articles written on the native question. As an educated Native with liberal ideas he rather resents the power and authority of the uneducated native chiefs who govern by virtue of their birth alone, and he writes and speaks for an entirely ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... with decorum, Harry being appointed to prosecute him, and George to defend the prisoner. George did it vigorously, too, but it was a plain and palpable case, and he was found guilty. This proceeding was another entirely new manner of treating an offender, and the people marveled at the attempt ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Conquest of the Savages • Roger Thompson Finlay
... But it was the custom of his housekeeper to air the rooms once a week; and, this being Wednesday, she had lighted a fire there, while Lydia, a young housemaid and general factotum, had allowed all other fires to go out. There was a palpable sense of chilliness about the room, and in one corner of it the green-and-gold wall-paper showed stains of damp. Long gilded mirrors between tall windows occupied one side of the room, and had ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... greenish-grey, and a broad livid scar across the left cheek—are component parts in producing this aspect; while a red cotton kerchief, wound turban-like around the head, and pulled low down in front, renders its expression more palpable and pronounced. ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... period above-named, yet in being. And lastly, we have the opinions of the Micmacs, who are so satisfied of the continued existence of the Red Indian tribe, that they can with difficulty be made to comprehend that it is possible to entertain a doubt of a fact, which to them appears so palpable. Their opinion is that the whole tribe of Boeothicks passed over to the Labrador some twenty or twenty-five years since, and the place of their final embarkation, as they ...
— Lecture On The Aborigines Of Newfoundland • Joseph Noad
... of transgression of the plain laws of temperance, abstinence, purity, bring with them, in like manner, a visible and palpable punishment in the majority of cases. Whoso pulls down the wall of temperance, a serpent will bite him. Trembling hands, broken constitutions, ruined reputations, vanished ambitions, wasted lives, poverty, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... upon an appeal to the sword. The secretary of state contents himself with objecting the privilege or sanctity of the place, they being within the precincts of the royal residence. At the height of this debate, Alphonso enters. Here, again, the minister has a most palpable advantage over the poet. He insists upon the one point of view in which he has the clear right, and will not diverge from it; Tasso has challenged him, has done his utmost to provoke a duel within the walls of the palace; and is, therefore, amenable to the law. The Duke can do no other than decide ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... indescribable enjoyment that music gave. When it ceased, we went out to the world again, and the recollection of it seems now like a dream—but a dream whose influence will last longer than many a more palpable reality. ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... misunderstanding took place, France and England might have mutually reproached each other, but justice was apparently on the side of France. It was evident that England, by refusing to evacuate Malta, was guilty of a palpable infraction of the treaty of Amiens, while England could only institute against France what in the French law language is called a suit or process of tendency. But it must be confessed that this tendency on the part of France to augment her territory ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... existence of what is called a sentimental grievance as the best reason for trying to find out whether there is not some practical evil at the root of the complaint. Certainly, in Lord Grey's time, the grievances were open and palpable enough to have attracted the attention of any man whose mind was not as well contented with the wisdom of his ancestors as ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... that would give a tottering support to so comforting a generalisation. Alas! the births of the great slopes of antiquity are shrouded in a night scarcely ruffled by the minute researches of patient archaeologists and impervious to the startling discoveries by experts of more or less palpable forgeries. Of these critical periods we dare not speak confidently; nevertheless we can compare the fifth century with the nineteenth and draw our ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... while the solemn Turk of rank perambulated the area, involved, like pious Eneas at Carthage, in a veil of clouds exhaling from a long amber headed pipe. All around you you might hear much hard swearing in favor of the most palpable lies; the seller in favor of his goods, and the buyer in favor of his Egyptian piasters. In one place a crowd collects around somebody or other lying on the ground without his head on, on account of some misdemeanor; a little farther on, thirty or forty soldiers are engaged ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... has added to the collection of his poems; and in the same year he published, without his name, the Pleasures of Melancholy; having, perhaps, been influenced in the choice of a subject, thus sombre, by the loss of his parent. In this poem, his imitations of Milton are so frequent and palpable, as to discover the timid flight of a young writer not daring to quit the track of his guide. Yet by some (as appears from the letters between Mrs. Carter and Miss Talbot) it was ascribed to Akenside. In 1746 was produced his Progress of Discontent,—paraphrase ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... amusing measurement of Joe, no sounding of his shallows with her quick perception like a sunbeam finding the pebbles in the bottom of a brook. There was something in his presence which seemed like a cool wind on the forehead, palpable, yet profound from the ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... name; nouns are the names of persons and things, as well as of things not material and palpable, but of which we have a conception and knowledge, such as courage, firmness, goodness, strength; and verbs express actions, movements, etc. If the word used signifies has been done, or is being done, or is, or is to be done, then that word ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... apprehend, that the individual having now found a separate interest, the bands of society must become less firm, and domestic disorders more frequent. The members of every community, being distinguished among themselves by unequal possessions, the ground of a permanent and palpable ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... at issue was just that: the Italian Neutralists stood for material advantages, advantages tangible, ponderable, palpable; the Interventionists stood for moral advantages, intangible, impalpable, imponderable—imponderable at least on the scales used by their antagonists. On the eve of the war these two Italian characters stood facing each other, scowling and irreconcilable—the one on the aggressive, ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... bliss. My life is hid with him in Christ, Never therefrom to be enticed; And in his strength have I such rest As when the baby on my breast Finds what it knows not how to seek, And, very happy, very weak, Lies, only knowing all is well, Pillow'd on kindness palpable. ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... that what I have called a "feudal influence," in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in no slight degree affected the general composition of Coats of Arms. In very many instances the working of this influence is still palpable; and it is always interesting to the student of Heraldry, as it must always be eminently useful to the student of History, to detect its presence and to explore its method of action. Like Cadency, feudal Differencing ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... true! But why are they true? Because real epileptics are so common in the underworld, and their sufferings so palpable and striking, that parasites, even though afflicted themselves, nay, because of their own disabilities, can and do simulate the weird sufferings of epileptics. Will mendicity societies, when they tell us about, enumerate for us, and convict for us the hoary impostors, also ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... times interrupted by flitting thoughts which took the place of several bars, and resumed at a point it would have reached had its continuity been unbroken) now received a more palpable check, in the shape of "Ho-i-i-i-i-i!" from the crossing lane to Lower Mellstock, on the right of the singer who had ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... There was nothing ahead of the sloop's fixed bowsprit. We were driving into a curtain of blackness that had been let down from the sky to the sea. It is seldom that there is not some little light playing over the surface of the water. This night a palpable cloud had settled upon the face of the waters and I could not even see the foam on the crests of the waves, save where they ran past ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... within as if something living were twisted round my vitals, and, finding no other food, preyed, though with a sickly and dull maw, upon them. This disease came upon me slowly: it was not till the beginning of the second year, from its obvious and palpable commencement, that it grew to the height that I have described. It began with a distaste to all that I had been accustomed to enjoy or to pursue. Music, which I had always passionately loved, though from some defect in the organs of hearing, I was incapable of attaining ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this Ranny was silent, for it seemed to him that Boots was mad, or near it. But at that threat, so terrible to him, so terrible to the Polytechnic, so terrible to Booty, and so palpable a sign of his madness, he gave in. He said it was all right, only he didn't know what on earth he was to ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... strokes, which seemed to her excited fancy as if they would never cease tolling, she thought she heard the ringing footsteps approach: in an agony of terror, she rushed through the darkness, which was indeed to her a darkness which could be felt, a palpable thing, towards the chimney place, hoping to find enough of flame to light her lamp; but in vain. The air felt to her so thick and heavy, as if her lungs could scarcely breathe it: she listened for the sound of a step, but heard only the beating of her own heart. At length she summoned courage to ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... they are arraigned the law is administered with such laxity and partiality that the escape of the criminal is both easy and possible. In no instance is the penalty of the law enforced against a white man for the murder of a Negro, however palpable the case may be; whilst in most instances the bare accusation of a Negro committing a homicide upon a white man is sufficient for law, with all its forms, to be ruthlessly set aside and the doctrine of lynch, swift and certain to ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... I have got to accept whatever may come is manifest and the wherefore has ceased to trouble me, if it ever did. In the instances that have thus far come up in my life, what I should do has always been palpable enough and has required more determination or will. My inclination is to do as little as I can to maintain my peace of conscience. While I have no feeling of lassitude, I also feel no incentive, and while without ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff |
