"Elemental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sparkled. Never before had the man at her side seen her so fair to gaze upon; but despite the excitement, despite the rush of action, there was a jarring note in her beauty. Deep in his nature, ingrained, elemental, was the love of fair play. Though he was in the chase and a part of it, his sympathies were far from being with the hounds. That the girl should favor the strong over the weak was something he could ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... seasons the sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds, at my call, have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command; I have restrained the rage of the dog-star, and mitigated the fervors of the crab. The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have hitherto eluded my authority, and multitudes have perished by equinoctial tempests, which I found myself unable to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... help for an instant," he gasped, "and the cold of space will soon cool us down. I had to give the ship a tremendous start or the tubes of the Sons of God would have reduced us to elemental atoms. Keep away from the walls and don't exert yourselves. I can handle the ship alone for ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... consonants, the breath breaking against the vocal organs, especially the teeth, lips, etc., much as the waves of the sea against a rocky beach. So far then as musical quality is concerned, a consonant is an unmitigated nuisance. On the other hand, none but the most elemental communication by sounds could be carried out by the use of vowels alone. The consonants stop the breath-current, separate the vowels, and thus lay the foundation for the expression of ideas. Ideas imply differences; a new idea is conveyed by a new word, which ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... eye are swept back nigh two thousand years along the stream of the ages, for the frigidarium of the Baths of the Palace of the Caesars is before us, a fabric of imperial architecture, spoiled of its decorations but yet massive and strong, as of elemental strength, defiant of time, the imperishable mark of Rome. We descend and find in the centre the altar (p. 17), bearing the inscription of the Nautae. A statue of the Emperor Julian; some thirteenth and fourteenth-century statues are also ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... understanding and the Rajas born of acts, as also the very puissance that Yoga begets, succeed in keeping their linga form under complete control.[1090] The Jiva that dwells in such Yogins, always endued with the seven subtile entities (viz., Mahat, consciousness, and the five tanmatras of the five elemental entities), roves in all regions of bliss, freed from decrepitude and death. I say "always", and "freed from death" only in accordance with the common form of speech, for in reality, that linga form is terminable.[1091] That man, however, who ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... that he had made with Steve. "We was just colts then," he said. He dwelt on their coltish doings, their adventures sought and wrought in the perfect fellowship of youth. "For Steve and me most always hunted in couples back in them gamesome years," he explained. And he fell into the elemental talk of sex, such talk as would be an elk's or tiger's; and spoken so by him, simply and naturally, as we speak of the seasons, or of death, or of any actuality, it was without offense. It would be offense should I repeat it. Then, ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... to seek A friendly shelter, ere it bursts upon him. But where? and how? I fear the Tyrant's soul— Sudden in action, fertile in resource, And rising awful 'mid impending ruins; 5 In splendor gloomy, as the midnight meteor, That fearless thwarts the elemental war. When last in secret conference we met, He scowl'd upon me with suspicious rage, Making his eye the inmate of my bosom. 10 I know he scorns me—and I feel, I hate him— Yet there is in him that which makes me ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the romance of the forest with the romance of man's heart, making a story that is big and elemental, while not lacking in sweetness and tenderness. It is an epic of the life of the lumberman of the great forest of the Northwest, permeated by out of door freshness, and the glory ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... changed, and I don't believe either of them was aware of it. They lived absolutely in the past. So far as I could see they hated each other—not, you understand with any petty, feminine spite, but splendidly, like elemental beings. I never went into the house without feeling that hot, suppressed atmosphere of hate. And yet there they were, tied together, as absolutely alone as though they had been left on ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... any one can achieve a sort of excess. You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities, the sweat of your death-bed. So I think it was with my uncle; so, very ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... No, it was not I; I had no concern in the thought that then fell upon me unbidden and undesired; my individual voice can give you but praise and loving words; and the voice that said "I am glad" was not my voice, but that of the will to live which we inherit from elemental dust through countless generations. Terrible and imperative is the voice of the will to live: let him who is innocent ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Since the night of the storm the wolverines were again more amenable to the very light discipline he tried to keep. Perhaps the fury of that elemental burst had tightened the bond between men and animals, both alien to this world. Now Taggi and his mate padded toward him in answer to his summons. But would the wolverines trust the boat? Shann dared not risk their swimming, nor would he agree to ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... monologue, and the law of the sonnet tempers monologue with mercy. In The Excursion we are driven to the subterfuge of a French verdict of extenuating circumstances. His mind had not that reach and elemental movement of Milton's, which, like the trade-wind, gathered to itself thoughts and images like stately fleets from every quarter; some deep with silks and spicery, some brooding over the silent thunders of their battailous armaments, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... OF THE ELEMENTS OR UNITS OF THE BODY.— Physiologists agree that the whole organism consists of a multitude of elemental parts, which are to a great extent independent of one another. Each organ, says Claude Bernard, has its proper life, its autonomy; it can develop and reproduce itself independently of the adjoining tissues. A great German authority, Virchow, asserts still more emphatically that ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... might have found some compensation for his disappointment in the weird aspect of that vicinity. There were huge fissures on the hillside, and displacements of the red soil, resembling more the chaos of some primary elemental upheaval than the work of man; while halfway down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some forgotten antediluvian. At every step smaller ditches crossed the road, hiding in their sallow ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... developments and transformations constitute all visible phenomena. A second class laid hold on the analogy suggested by mechanical arrangements. For them the universe was a grand superstructure, built up from elemental particles, arranged and united by some ab-extra power or force, or else aggregated by some inherent mutual affinity. Thus we have two sects of the Ionian school; the first, Dynamical or vital; ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... of expectation. But after long observation, I have come to the deliberate conclusion that nothing whatever gave Robin such ineffable joy as an explosion! A crash, a burst, a general reduction of anything to instantaneous and elemental ruin, was so dear to him that I verily believe he would have taken his chance, and stood by, if I had proposed to blow the roof off Dr McTougall's mansion. Nay, I almost think that if that remarkable waif had been set on a bombshell and blown ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... Government can no longer stop to consider money in dealing with the problems of internal economy and of elemental humanity. The floods create an emergency as definite and imperative as war. It is time now to start some movement for the preservation of life and property against ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... limited to nature in her most elemental forms and having the simplest generic relations to human life, characterizes Bryant. He, too, had slender academic training, and came from the same social origins as Irving and Cooper; but, owing ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... cosmic occurrences recurring alternatively forever. They must not become a mere egg and bird pattern, like the egg and dart pattern. One is a means and the other an end; they are in different mental worlds. Leaving the complications of the human breakfast-table out of account, in an elemental sense, the egg only exists to produce the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's senior, an old Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the plane of buddhi. The life esoteric is not for ordinary person. O.P. must work off bad karma first. Mrs Cooper Oakley once glimpsed our very illustrious sister H.P.B.'s elemental. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... surface have smoothed themselves away. In outside appearances everything is as before. Yet for the present generation, at least, the persistence of the old independent self-reliance of the people is assured. They have been tested, and they have been made to think of elemental things seriously. For some time to come the slow process of standardization ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... rocks, which threw him back in foam, whirling wildly, or it was that fringe of gaunt skeleton trees hanging from the bank playing a "pull devil, pull baker" contest that made him hiss with vexation. But this was an elemental roar. I said to M'bo: "That's a thunderstorm away among the mountains." "No, sir," ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... was far from every thing that could disturb those dreams in which the tranquility of nature never failed to entrance her. There was where the mysterious spirit that raises the soul above the impulses of animal life, mingled with her being—and poured upon her affection the elemental purity of that original love which in the beginning ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... these walls of flesh, wherein the soul doth seem to be immured before the resurrection, it is nothing but an elemental composition, and a fabrick that must fall to ashes. "All flesh is grass," is not only metaphorically, but literally, true; for all those creatures we behold are but the herbs of the field, digested into flesh ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... after a while, of camels and bedouin maidens and all the picturesque paraphernalia of Arab life; or at least they end in becoming so trite that his eyes cease to take note of them; but there are two spectacles, ever new, elemental, that correspond to deeper impulses: this of palms in the waste—the miracle of water; and that of ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... mineralogic aspect of positivism—or Iron that strove to break away from Sulphur and Oxygen, and be real, homogeneous Iron—failing, inasmuch as elemental iron ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... same show, the same songs, jests, dances at different houses. But Eastward ... there, large and full, blossoms Life—a rather repellent Life, perhaps, for Life is always that. Hatred, filth, love, battle, and death—all elemental things are here, undisguised; and if elemental things repel you, my lamb, then you have no business to be on this planet. Night, in the particular spots of the East to which these pages take you, shows you Life in the raw, stripped of its silken wrappings; and it ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... others and which she had supposed most impossible in herself. There were so many unforeseen possibilities within herself that she devoted her entire attention to her own actions and impulses, and was completely drawn away from the consideration of the motives of others by her struggle with the elemental forces in which she found herself engulfed. The temper aroused by John's objection to her Thanksgiving company had indications in spite of the fact that she had controlled it. Elizabeth knew that she had but barely kept her ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... learned the art of making them from the Magic Horn, from Uhland, and from Eichendorff, and he carried the art to the highest pitch of virtuosity. They are the forms of the German Folk-song, a fit vehicle for homely sentiments and those elemental passions which come and go like the tide in a humble heart, because the humble heart is single and yields unresistingly to their flow. But Heine's heart was not single, his passion was complex, and the greatest of his ironies was his use of the most unsophisticated of forms for his most sophisticated ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... who canst guide the wandering star Through trackless realms of aether's space; Who calm'st the elemental war, Whose hand from ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... and the man as he uttered them seemed suddenly galvanized with a new force, a force irresistible, elemental, even sublime. The elder brother's brows went up in amazement. He did not know Stumpy in that mood. He found himself confronted with a power colossal manifested in the meagre frame, and before that power instinctively, wholly involuntarily, he ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... of his speculative reason? Even popularly, do we not speak of every great poet as the exponent of the spirit of his age? What else can this mean than that the philosophy of his age, its spirit and heart in relation to all the great elemental problems, find expression in his verse? Hence I ought to include other poets in this list, and more particularly Mr. Browning and Mrs. Browning, and the late Mr. Clough. But let the mention of Mr. Tennyson ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... Citizens of the five great warring countries and their descendants, to a very great extent, constitute our population. Partiality of any kind tends to destroy the elemental ties which bind us together, to disrupt our Union, and to make us a house divided against itself. James M. Beck's article in last Sunday's TIMES is of the kind which, serving no good purpose, helps to loosen, if not sever, our most vital domestic ties. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... hidden horror of glaciers in its bosom. The brooding heat of the profligate vegetation; the cool charm of the running water; the terrific splendor of the June thunder-gust in the deep and solitary woods, were all sensual, animal, elemental. No European spring had shown him the same intermixture of delicate grace and passionate depravity that marked the Maryland May. He loved it too much, as though it were Greek and half human. He could not leave it, but loitered on into ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... beautifully elemental. As does not too often happen, two souls as well as two bodies were drawn towards each other by the Magnet of Being. When he had exhibited himself for a minute or two he came back to ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... with whimsical tenderness. They had nothing to do with the pre-war, dilettante past, the sophisticated gaiety of the young century. Their childhood had been lived during the great war, and they had emerged from it hot with elemental things, discussing life, lust, love, politics and social reform, with cool candour, intelligent thoroughness and Elizabethan directness. They wouldn't mind having passions and giving them rein; they wouldn't think it vulgar, or even tedious, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... astonished to find a liar in the lightning of heaven over the telegraphic wires. Let us get over our surprise. The lie is human altogether, not elemental at all. The operator has his private object to carry, the partisan his political end to serve, the government itself flatters the people it fears with incorrect accounts of military movements and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... old Bouvard it was who proposed to prove to me that nerve-force put in motion by the magnetizer was, not indeed infinite, for man is under immutable laws, but a power acting like other powers of nature whose elemental essence escapes our observation. ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... to find a large number of women, away up in the heart of that elemental country of fire and water and earth. But they remained untouched by any kind of pessimism, nor were they greatly interested in the campaign as a military affair. All their interest was in their work. They were a wonderful stimulus. Where a man unwittingly tended to let things ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... this the musical instinct. So elemental is it that man shares it, in some degree, with other living things. The birds are accomplished musicians, and their movements, and those of many other creatures, are ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... songs of his own and of every land and age; if he can see in the divine poetry of David and Solomon, of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and, above all, in the parables of Him who spake as never man spake, the models and elemental laws of a people's poetry, alike according to the will of God and the heart of man; if he can welcome gallantly and hopefully the future, and yet know that it must be, unless it would be a monster and a machine, the loving and obedient ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... all imbibed traditional ideas with our mother's milk, however much our intellects may have modified them. Instinct is stronger than intellect, because it is more elemental. ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... This narrative brings us into contact with elemental and volcanic human nature and with a hero whose power ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... under scientific speculation, felt on solitary hill or shore those tides of the blood stir again that are ruled by the sun and the moon and travelled as if to tryst where an apparition might take form. Poets ordained themselves to this vigil, haunters of a desert church, prompters of an elemental theatre, listeners in solitary places for intimations from a spirit in hiding; and painters followed ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... colour and sound is there no more than this length of vibration of that. We have reached to a conception of that universe of molecular physics by a great enterprise of organised analysis, and our universe of daily experiences stands in relation to that elemental world as if it were a synthesis ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... a few great poems, elemental, natural—poems that seem to be a part of nature, ample as the sky, having the rhythm of the tides, the ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... cheek so close to his lips. Conny shrank back perceptibly. Some elemental instinct of the female pushed its way through her broad-minded modern philosophy and made her shudder at the double embrace. She controlled herself at once and again bowed her beautiful head to his. But Percy did not offer to ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... tempted to go on to a comparison of wit with humour, but I shall only remark that wit is an intellectual thing, whereas humour is emotional. Humour is elemental, but wit is cultural. Without a language you could have humour, but without language there could be ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... delight. There was one movement, when heads were tossed back and then brought swiftly forward over hollowed breasts and lifted knees that had in it an exquisite fleeting beauty. But memory holds best the grace of the simpler and more elemental movements, the airy swing and poise of feet and limbs in straight ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... find the hand in time and history, working, building, inventing, bringing civilization out of barbarism. The hand symbolizes power and the excellence of work. The mechanic's hand, that minister of elemental forces, the hand that hews, saws, cuts, builds, is useful in the world equally with the delicate hand that paints a wild flower or moulds a Grecian urn, or the hand of a statesman that writes a law. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of thee." Blessed ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... anything to believe. That's neither here nor there. But—Enoch, if anybody should cut my right hand off—Enoch"—Her voice fell brokenly. She was a New England woman, accustomed neither to analyze nor talk. She could only suffer in the elemental way of dumb things who sometimes need a language of the heart. One thing she knew. The man was hers; and if she reft herself away from him, then she ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... were fated to be joined together, and both of them were well aware of it. Each felt the other's presence exert a magnetic thrill. Each listened eagerly to what the other said. Each thought of nothing, and each cared for nothing, in the other's absence. It was a great compelling elemental force which drove the two together and bound them fast. Beside this marvelous experience, how pale and pitiful and paltry seemed the affectations of ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... of the appearance of Lenorme, to go out as in the old days after the herring, both for the sake of splicing, if possible, what strands had been broken between him and the fishers, and of renewing for himself the delights of elemental conflict. ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... shepherd. Her pagan father, learning of her hiding-place, quickly ascended the height and beheaded her with his own hand. The legends of St Barbe abound in strange details, which are more intelligible if we regard the Saint as being the survival of some elemental goddess connected with fire. The vengeance of heaven descended upon her enemies, for both her father and the shepherd who betrayed her were destroyed, the former being struck by lightning on his descent from the mountain, and the latter ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... question of faith and not of understanding. I left faith to religion, and banished it from philosophy. How define with a precision to satisfy the logic of philosophy what was to live again? The body? We know that the body rests in its grave till by the process of decomposition its elemental parts enter into other forms of matter. The mind? But the mind was as clearly the result of the bodily organization as the music of the harpsichord is the result of the instrumental mechanism. The mind shared the decrepitude ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... my poet,—an amphitheatre of precipitous rock, slightly veiled with a delicate growth of verdure, enclosing a few acres of prairie-like land, once the site of an ancient lake, now a garden of unknown depth and fertility. Elemental ruggedness, savageness, and grandeur, combined with wonderful tenderness, modernness, and geniality. There rise the gray scarred cliffs, crowned here and there with a dead hemlock or pine, where, morning after morning, I have ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... literature which O'Grady was the first to reveal in a noble manner. He had the spirit of an ancient epic poet. He is a comrade of Homer, his birth delayed in time perhaps that he might renew for a sophisticated people the elemental simplicity and hardihood men had when the world was young and manhood was prized more than any of its parts, more than thought or beauty or feeling. He has created for us or rediscovered one figure which looms in the imagination ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... incomparable Saga may become accessible to those readers with whom a good story is the first consideration and its bearing upon a nation's history a secondary one—or is not considered at all. For Burnt Njal may be approached either as a historical document, or as a pure narrative of elemental natures, of strong passions; and of heroic feats of strength. Some of the best fighting in literature is to be found between its covers. Sir George Dasent's version in its capacity as a learned work for the study has had nearly forty years of life; it is now offered afresh ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... veiled from townspeople. My chance acquaintance at the inn recited a number of Bon songs and next morning brought me some more that he had remembered and had been kind enough to write down. They merely established the fact that bucolic wit is as elemental in Japan as in other lands. Most of the songs had a Rabelaisian touch, some were nasty, but nearly all had wit. The following is an entirely ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... William Shaw, to do what others dared not. One dark and stormy winter's night, when all Everton was at rest—for there were no old watchmen then to wake people up with their cries—two persons might have been seen stealing towards the Cross, in the midst of the elemental war which then raged. One of them bore a lantern, while the other wheeled before him a barrow, laden with crowbar, pickaxe, and spade. The rain descended in torrents, and the night was as dark as the deed they were about to commit could possibly require. They approached the ancient gathering place, ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... heat of the past weeks was broken just after sunset by a terrific thunderstorm, and the fury of the elemental outburst covered all noises and allowed the toilers to work without any precaution. But, alas! their very haste was their undoing. The head, blunted and worn, broke off short in the depth of the wall. Attempts to extricate it in the darkness only wedged it in more tightly. ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... Cafferty came into the room. She was, as every woman is in the morning, primed with conversation about husbands, for in the morning husbands are unwieldy, morose creatures without joy, without lightness, lacking even the common, elemental interest in their own children, and capable of detestably misinterpreting the conversation of their wives. It is only by mixing amongst other men that this malignant humor may be dispelled. To them the company of men ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... middle of January the war between Baree and Bush McTaggart had become more than an incident—more than a passing adventure to the beast, and more than an irritating happening to the man. It was, for the time, the elemental raison d'etre of their lives. Baree hung to the trap line. He haunted it like a devastating specter, and each time that he sniffed afresh the scent of the factor from Lac Bain he was impressed still ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... seemed that every ascent, every descent, must mark the end. But the storm was so terrific, Madden's sense of personal fear was blotted out in the tremendous conflict about him. Indeed, there was something deeply moving, almost gratifying in this elemental rage. Then he discovered that he was taking a part in it. Mechanically he had been straining and pulling at the wheel to hold those signal lights in line. Now he realized that his tiny human force formed a third ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... plain that Browning separates us altogether from the elemental life of these gigantic beings. And what is true of these passages is true, with one or two exceptions, of all the natural descriptions of Browning in which the pathetic fallacy seems to be used by him. I need not say how extraordinarily apart this method of his is from that of ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... great city with all its attractions has failed to help me realize my life. So have friends failed. So has the world. What can solitude and grandeur do?... All this obsession of mine—all this strange feeling for simple elemental earthly things likewise will fail me. Yet I am driven. They would call me a ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... fight. So he swaggered, heeding not the reproving spear; he fumed; he mocked; for no warrior affected to notice his vainglorious absurdities. He was as much in earnest as those who fought on account of elemental love, and far more so than any of the blusterers who talked big and looked small. He longed to fight, and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... footwork was infallible. The intricate and imbecilic steps of the day he performed in flawless sequence. Under his masterly guidance the feet of the least rhythmic were suddenly endowed with deftness and grace. One swayed with him as naturally as with an elemental force. He danced politely and almost wordlessly unless first addressed, according to the code of his kind. His touch was firm, yet remote. The dance concluded, he conducted his partner to her seat, bowed stiffly ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... king of beasts in his isolated kingdom, but her listeners beheld him steal cautiously from the underbrush. They saw him crouch in abject terror at the foot of a wide-spreading, gigantic tree, lashing his tail in elemental rage. Then another scintillating flash of lightning, and the beast caught it full in the face. The slender hand of the little player was poised above the strings for a single vibrating moment, during which she ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... The elemental passions—man-love, jealousy, the lust for possession—are ugly things at best, even when locked in the bosom of a poet. In their simplest terms they make for treachery and stealth; but when complicated with the higher ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... might innocently vary with the fashion of the age and country. With regard to the second, both parties were agreed in the belief of an intermediate state of purgation for the venial sins of the faithful; and whether their souls were purified by elemental fire was a doubtful point, which in a few years might be conveniently settled on the spot by the disputants. The claims of supremacy appeared of a more weighty and substantial kind; yet by the Orientals the Roman bishop had ever been respected ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... Aztecs that the harmless Mexican ritual was supplemented with the blood of human sacrifices, which drenched the altars of their war-god, Huitzilopochtli, and the tearing out of the hearts of the victims on the summit of the Teocali may be regarded as a direct survival of the elemental-worship of their Turanian ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... imperceptibly towards him, drawn by the mere blind elemental force, as the plummet was attracted to the side of Schehallion. Her lips were parted, and she breathed a little faster than so healthy a girl ought to breathe in a state of repose. The steady nerves of William Murray Bradshaw felt unwonted ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... all, and made a seared dearth, By one consuming flame: it doth immerse 370 And suffocate true blessings in a curse. Half-happy, by comparison of bliss, Is miserable. 'Twas even so with this Dew-dropping melody, in the Carian's ear; First heaven, then hell, and then forgotten clear, Vanish'd in elemental passion. ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... innermost of truth is taught, The mystery dimly understood, That love of God is love of good, And, chiefly, its divinest trace In Him of Nazareth's holy face; That to be saved is only this,— Salvation from our selfishness, From more than elemental fire, The soul's unsanctified desire, From sin itself, and not the pain That warns us of its chafing chain; That worship's deeper meaning lies In mercy, and not sacrifice, Not proud humilities of ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... extremity of the Jewish law. All Israel was called together to the Temple. An awful air of dread hung over the assemblage; in a silence as of the grave each man upheld a black torch that flared weirdly in the shadows of the synagogue. A ram's horn sounded shrill and terrible, and to its elemental music the anathema was launched, the appalling curse withdrawing every human right from the outlaw, living or dead, and the congregants, extinguishing their torches, cried, "Amen." And in a spiritual darkness ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and with the same, an elemental passion took possession of my mind; ousted all else. I had been anxious about the sheet, had thought John foolhardy. Now I didn't care. I could have cried out aloud for joy as the brave old craft rose to the seas with a marvellous easy motion ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... swiftly to its proper shore, The whirlwind now the vessel drives, Where by the elemental ...
— Ballads - Founded On Anecdotes Relating To Animals • William Hayley
... a two-fold reason for the success which Cooper's novels won at home and abroad. In the first place, Cooper could invent a good story and tell it well. He was a master of rapid, stirring narrative, and his tales were elemental, not deep or subtle. Secondly, he created interesting characters who had the restless energy, the passion for adventure, the rugged confidence, of our American pioneers. First among these great characters came Harvey Birch in 'The Spy', but Cooper's real triumph was Natty ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... poet springs from earth and is speedily away beyond sight—almost beyond conception—like an elemental thing. But his starting-point is definite enough. Man is exempt from awe and worship; from spiritual as well as political and social slavery; king over himself, ruling the anarchy of his own passions. And the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... impossible to define it exactly. It was not by the force of persuasion that he agitated. It was not his thought which awakened the thought of others. But he aroused every rebellious heart and awoke there an 'elemental' anger. And this anger, transplendent with beauty, became creative and showed to the exalted thirst for justice and happiness an issue and a possibility of accomplishment. 'The desire for destruction is at the same time a creative desire,' Bakounin ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... no lies. He cared for her, he loved to be with her and to talk to her and please her, but that was not all his desire. He thought of the bitter words of an orator at Hammersmith, who had complained that in our present civilisation even the elemental need of marriage was denied. Virtue had become a vice. "We marry in fear and trembling, sex for a home is the woman's traffic, and the man comes to his heart's desire when his heart's desire is dead." The thing which had seemed a mere flourish, came back ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... tried a series of experiments upon this point. I found that in liquids, and in compounds, the force had a disintegrating effect. The well-known experiment of the electrolysis of water will, of course, occur to you. But I found that in the case of elemental solids the effect was a remarkable one. The element slowly decreased in weight, without perceptibly altering in composition. I hope that I make myself clear ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not clever. Clever men—like Pomp— Might jest. And fools might laugh. But when a man, Simple as all great elemental things, Makes his whole heart a sacrificial fire To one whose love is in her supple skin, There comes a laughter in which jests break up Like icebergs in a sea of burning marl. Then dreamers turn to murderers ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... genuinely large and innocent and elemental in Victor Hugo. The austere simplicity of his life may have been perhaps too self-consciously flung at the world's face; but it was a natural instinct in him. I hesitate to call him a charlatan. Was it Goethe who said ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... attempted the first part, February being the very worst month. After many days of glorious weather the temper of the atmosphere gave way; the mercury fell to 28.5, and we were indulged with a succession of squalls and storms, mists and rain. The elemental rage, it is true, was that of your southern coquette, sharp, but short, and broken by intervals of a loving relapse into caress. In the uplands and on the northern coast, however, it shows the concentrated spleen and gloom of a climate ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... blood. It was justified because there was no other means. We have to cast our imagination back through the centuries and realize that then there were no railroads, no telegraph, no newspapers; that man was bound by narrow limits; and the elemental processes of the world were undiscovered. We do not criticize Alexander for conquering the eastern perils, for he carried in his phalanxes the spirit of new-discovered thought. We do not denounce Rome for piercing the unknown realms with ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... his precipitated return, by the rudest fierceness of wintry elemental strife; through which, with bad accommodations and innumerable accidents, he became a prey to the merciless pangs of the acutest spasmodic rheumatism, which barely suffered him to reach his home, ere, long and piteously, it confined him, a tortured prisoner, to his bed. Such ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "psychological tricks," the creation of images by force of imagination, and in pressing them on others as a "collective hallucination"; others, such as the moving of solid articles, either by an astral hand projected to draw them towards her, or by using an Elemental; others by reading in the Astral Light, and so on. But the proof of the reality of her mission from those whom she spoke of as Masters lay not in these comparatively trivial physical and mental phenomena, but in the splendour of her heroic ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... divorces and suicides. Were people perhaps moved by desire to hear about the misfortunes of others? No, because they also welcomed with eagerness the more cheerful domestic episodes reported. Was it, then, some fundamental, elemental interest in fundamental things, such as love, hate, birth, death? That was possibly it. The relation of states one with another are the product of civilisation, and need an at least rudimentarily political ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... is more complete and self-sufficing, and less sordid and low- thoughted than you might imagine. It is bovine and slow in some respects, but it is never empty. You and I are inclined to put the cart before the horse, and to forget that it is the man that is elemental, not the book. 'The corn and the cattle are all my care, And the rest is the will of God.' Why should such folk look up from their immemorially appointed round of duty and interests to meddle with the unknown and fuss with voting-papers. How would you, atop of all your interests care ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... they are partly found in the want of cutting edge to her sober comprehensive teaching, partly in the characteristics often theoretically so justifiable but practically so awkward, of the Prayer Book. There is little in our Church which corresponds to that elemental regimen or discipline which possesses simple-minded Roman Catholics. The power of cultus, of institutional and ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... written three centuries ago tells of semen being carried by wind. Notoriously there was no limit either to the absurdity or crudity of these conceptions. Were these men—the wisest of their time—insane? Here again we may quote the last patient—"Insanity," he says, "is the elemental human mind left to itself, unimproved by other minds." The last is the important phrase. What minds were there to improve those of the alchemists? What critic was there to tell Joan of Arc that visions and voices were pathological? That was the regulation form ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... mistress, seemed to be determined, at last, on fury, and threw herself into the most extravagant attitudes. I again had my tent pitched, and sat down quietly to wait till the tempest should subside; but up to a late hour at night the elemental war continued, and, committing myself to the Divine mercy, I put out my candle and retired to ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... to be very expert in astronomy, in geography, and in all parts of mathematical knowledge; and authors speak in a very exaggerated strain of their excellence in these, and in many other sciences. Some elemental knowledge I suppose they had; but I can scarcely be persuaded that their learning was either deep or extensive. In all countries where Druidism was professed, the youth, were generally instructed by that order; and yet was there little either in the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... lives of those Who love and dream great dreams and deeply feel may be The elemental cells and nervules that compose Its divine consciousness and ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... sacrifice and prayer are the resource of the pious and enlightened portion of the community, while magic is the refuge of the superstitious and ignorant. But when, still later, the conception of the elemental forces as personal agents is giving way to the recognition of natural law; then magic, based as it implicitly is on the idea of a necessary and invariable sequence of cause and effect, independent of personal will, reappears ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... these "dalesmen" can the English elemental resistance to fusion be seen. Only at the extreme point of necessity have they exchanged ideas with any other section, yet they have left their mark all over English history. In Cumberland and Westmoreland, the most pathetic romances of the Red Rose were enacted. In the strength ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... Artistic Touch of the Japanese Religion Without Morals Buddhism in Fact vs. Buddhism Idealized by Arnold Official Notices Prohibiting Christianity Christianity "Puts Too High an Estimate on Woman" The Worth of the Individual Not Recognized The Elemental Significance of Japan's Awakening ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... rarely strikes a man save for his sins, and the nature of the special sin thus punished may be inferred from the bodily organs smitten. A few years later, in Protestant Swabia, Pastor Georg Nuber issued a volume of "weather-sermons," in which he discusses nearly every sort of elemental disturbances—storms, floods, droughts, lightning, and hail. These, he says, come direct from God for human sins, yet no doubt with discrimination, for there are five sins which God especially punishes with lightning and hail—namely, impenitence, incredulity, neglect ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... son of Noah! mercy on thy kind! What! wilt thou leave us all—all—all behind? While safe amidst the elemental strife, 830 Thou sitt'st within thy ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... fire-eater, I know," the Congressman admitted. "But Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most serious blow the South has received from the Abolitionists. And what makes it so difficult is that its appeal is not to reason. It is to sentiment. To the elemental emotions of the mob. No matter whether its picture is true or false, the result will be the same unless the minds who read it can be cured of its poison. It has become a sensation. Every Northern Congressman has read it. A half million copies have been printed and the presses can't keep ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... of lightning, followed by a peal of thunder that jarred the house, stopped her for a moment on her way to the piano. A sudden summer tempest was gathering, and crash after crash made it impossible for her to begin. As she stood waiting for the "elemental fury" to subside, her attitude was quite worthy of the niece of Mrs. Siddons. When the thunder had grown less frequent, she threw back her beautiful classic head and touched the keys. The air she had been called upon ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... cannot be omitted by the biographer of such a man as Shelley. He was an elemental and primeval creature, as little subject to the laws of custom in his habits as in his modes of thought, living literally as the spirit moved him, with a natural nonchalance that has perhaps been never surpassed. To time and place he was equally ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... forty-four and the nerve to handle both, were frankly unconventional. Touched later by the black magic of development, bringing brick buildings, prohibition, picture shows, real-estate boosters, speculation and attendant evils or benefits as one chooses to classify them, they became neither elemental nor ethical—mere gawky mimics ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... what I suppose was the longest speech I ever made in my life, and studied my lord and master's face. It was not an easy map to decipher, for man, after all, is a pretty complex animal and even in his more elemental moments is played upon by pretty complex forces. And if there was humility on that lean and rock-ribbed countenance of my soul-mate there was also antagonism, and mixed up with the antagonism was a sprinkling of startled wonder, and tangled up with the wonder ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... speculative and the religious, penetrates the monotonous disorder of everyday life, and lays bare "the impassioned expression" which is there for those who can read it. The dramatist, for instance, with whom the novelist is here compared, shows us some elemental force of humanity, stripped of the accidents of time and place, working itself out in free conflict with other forces, and finally breaking itself against the eternal fact that no man can gain the world without first losing himself. It is this catastrophe which ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... as the trees in summer, enduring as the rocks in snow. Over this deep-rooted heart of humanity sweeps the living hail and thunder of the armies of the earth. These are the warp and first substance of the nations, divided not by dynasties but by climates, strong by unalterable privilege or weak by elemental ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... separated into definitely isolated groups. Such groups are usually small, consisting of men, women, and children belonging to several closely related families and numbering two or three hundred souls. Each group, forming an elemental community, occupies, and considers itself the owner of, a definite tract of country; there is developed in them a feeling—an attachment—which serves to bind them to the soil on which they live. When we look at the nature of the bonds ...
— Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View • Arthur Keith
... menace of the wintry storm; But all exposed, in naked nature lie, A shivering crowd beneath the inclement sky, Of reason void, by every foe subdued, Self-ruin'd, self-deprived of sovereign good; Reckless of Him, whose universal sway, Matter, and all its various forms, obey; Whether they mix in elemental strife, Or meet in married calm, and foster life. His nature baffles all created mind, In earth or heaven, to fathom, or to find. One glimpse of glory on the saints bestow'd, With eager longings ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... evening at the Cafe des Ambassadeurs, as it styled itself, for the habit of preferring French to Spanish designations for places of refreshment had come in since the great revolution. Sir John went, therefore, to the cafe, and with characteristic scorn of elemental disturbance chose to resort thither on the evening of the great gale. The few other occupants of the gorgeous room eyed his half-bottle of claret with a grave and decorous wonder, but made no attempt to converse ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention—that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... Besides these elemental playthings the child gets much valuable pleasure out of the rhythmic use of his own muscles. All such plays Plato thought should be regulated by music, and with this Froebel agreed, but in the Household this is often ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... found security . . . In a second's space he caught a clear vision of tremendous masses of green and purple glaciers being ground to fine powder in their swift descent on all sides of him, . . . he saw the feathery ice fragments catch fire in the moonlight, . . . he heard the elemental roar and grinding crash of ice mountains sundering in a titanic convulsion . . . then he lost hearing . . . In that same sick bewildering moment of preternatural consciousness he thought wildly of Annadoah . . . he saw her appealing wan face amid the blur of white moonlight . . . he knew ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... strange shrinking from bloodshed, however politic and needful—for my Leo, as yet thou art no true philosopher—this were quickly done, since I can command a weapon which would crush their armouries and whelm their navies in the deep; yes, I, whom even the lightnings and Nature's elemental powers must obey. But thou shrinkest from the sight of death, and thou believest that Heaven would be displeased because I make myself—or am chosen—the instrument of Heaven. Well, so let it be, for thy will is mine, and therefore we ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... pendulum, first drives one way, and then swings back in the opposite direction. At present, we may be said to be returning at full speed towards a taste for everything old, neglected, and for ages despised. Science and refinement have had their day, and now rude nature and the elemental are to be in the ascendant. In our boyhood, we learned the Roman alphabet; but youngsters now had need to add a knowledge of black-letter, which is rapidly getting back into fashion. Perfection is only to be found in the darkness and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... "cortesia," not "curtsey,") and read "quiet" for "whist," if you want the full sense. Then you may indeed foot it featly, and sweet spirits bear the burden for you—with watch in the night, and call in early morning. The vis viva in elemental transformation follows—"Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made." Then, giving rest after labour, it "fetches dew from the still vext Bermoothes, and, with a charm joined to their suffered labour, leaves men asleep." Snatching away ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... greater stream, I proceeded along a road running nearly south and having a range of fine hills on the east. Presently violent gusts of wind came on, which tore the sear leaves by thousands from the trees, of which there were plenty by the roadsides. After a little time, however, this elemental hurly-burly passed away, a rainbow made its appearance, and the day became comparatively fine. Turning to the south-east under a hill covered with oaks, I left the vale of the Towey behind me, and soon caught a glimpse of some very lofty hills which I supposed to be the Black Mountains. It ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... an instant Chloe's glance rested upon her companions; Big Lena sat scowling murderously at Vermilion's broad back. Harriet Penny had fainted and lay with the back of her head awash in the shallow bilge water. A strange alter ego—elemental—primordial—had taken possession of Chloe. Her eyes glowed, and her heart thrilled at the sight of the tense, vigilant figure of Vermilion, and the sweating, straining scowmen. For the helpless form of Harriet Penny she felt only contempt—the savage, intolerant contempt of the ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... exhibits a mastery of the elemental passions of life that places hum high among the foremost of ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... civic society into its elemental parts, on the one hand, into the individuals, on the other hand, into the material and spiritual elements, which formed the vital content, the civic situation of these individuals. It released the political spirit, which was imprisoned in fragments in the various ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... bald abstract of the unfortunate mission. He reflected that commonly he would have fitted a different mask to the ugly skull of fact, but this young barbarian, as he chose to regard her, excited the elemental truth in him, defying him to appear at his worst. He was astonished to see her eyes suddenly soften and her ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... expression. This is emphatically the case with the expression given to the emotional side of human nature. The love of man for maid, rising everywhere from the same spring, must find lyric outlets that look a good deal alike. The family resemblance between the love poems of various peoples is due to the elemental kinship of the love. Every true lover is original, yet most true lovers, including those who have no familiarity with poetical literature, fall instinctively on the same terms of endearment. Differences only make ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... totally undisturbed by any animosity against heresy, and is concerned only with a certain ultimate demoniacal justice visiting the wrongdoer. Thus far the elemental tissue of the superstition has something in common with that of the German secret tribunal of the steel and cord; with this difference, however, that whereas the latter punishes in secret, even as the deity, the former makes conscious compact with the powers of evil, that whatever justice shall ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... faithful tribute. She saw and knew only from a spiritual basis; and she reaped the rewards incident thereto. His life and hers were such as fools might label madness, a colorless, vegetative existence, devoid of even the elemental things that make mundane existence worth the while. But the appraisal of fools is their own folly. Jose knew that the torrid days which drew their monotonous length over the little town were witnessing a development in both himself and the child that some day would bear ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... attracting to himself a force sufficient to blot out Dewetsdorp in the presence of a bewildered enemy, who, though in overwhelming numbers, was feebly strung out in lengths without breadth. The British Army had still to learn, not only in the Free State, but also elsewhere, the elemental fact in geometry that neither one straight line nor two, nor under certain conditions even three, can ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... back curtains, revealing part of audience, left. He steals off. OCEANA gradually awakens, raises her head, lifts herself to her knees, stretches out her hands in worship to the Sun-god. Then slowly she rises, rapt in wonder. The robe falls back, revealing a filmy costume, primitive, elemental, naive. She begins to sway, and gradually glides into an ecstatic dance, which portrays the joyful awakening ...
— The Naturewoman • Upton Sinclair
... He was the foreman of the Landson crowd—Landson, against whom her father had been voicing something very near to murder threats not many hours ago. Had she met him before the fire she would have spurned and despised him, but nothing unites the factions of man like a fight against a common elemental enemy. Besides, there was the question, How DID the fire start? That was a question which every Landson man would be asking. Grant had been generous about it; he had asked her to be equally generous about the episode of the stakes.... And there was something about the man that appealed to her. ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead |
