"Potency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nature is infused by mechanical means. Sacraments and the like have a magical or miraculous potency. The Homeric hymn to Demeter insists only on ritual purity as the condition of salvation, and we hear that people trusted to the mystic baptism to wash out all their previous sins. Similarly the baptism of blood, the taurobolium, was supposed to secure eternal happiness, at any rate if ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... yet, however much they may be worn away, or battered and shattered, the grace and nobility seem as deep in them as the very heart of the stone. It cannot be destroyed, except by grinding them to powder. In short, I do really believe that there was an excellence in ancient sculpture, which has yet a potency to educate and refine the minds of those who look at it even so carelessly and casually as I do. As regards the frieze of the Parthenon, I must remark that the horses represented on it, though they show great ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... very well observed, was good to behold, standing there with the light on his handsome head. She did not miss the potency of his smile. Nor, being a woman who dealt in lights and shades herself, was the flattering significance of his words wasted ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... a bale of hay and listened to Slim's peroration. As it grew in power and potency the listener ceased to chew his straw and began to shake his head. When Slim paused for breath, searching his mind for searing adjectives, a mild voice took advantage ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... her cunning.' We cannot quite manage to substitute London for Zion in singing psalms, though there are some in England—Eton, Winchester, Oxford, Cambridge—which do evoke these feelings. These emotions of loyalty and devotion are by no means to be checked or despised. They have an infinite potency for good. In spiritual things there is no conflict between intensity and expansion. The deepest sympathy is, potentially, also the widest. He who loves not his home and country which he has seen, how shall he love humanity in general which he has not seen? ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... with all the intensity of an original discovery, devilish unpleasant to grow old; to die progressively on one's feet, he elaborated the fact. That was what happened to a man—his liver thickened, his teeth went, his veins became brittle pipes of lime. Worse than all that, his potency, the spirit and heat of living, met without any renewal its inescapable winter. This might, did, occur while his being was rebellious with vain hope. Today, in spite of the slight clogging of his breath, his body's loss of flexibility, his imagination was as vigorous, as curious, as ever ... take ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... readily than others, but any 462:3 student, who adheres to the divine rules of Christian Science and imbibes the spirit of Christ, can demonstrate Christian Science, cast out 462:6 error, heal the sick, and add continually to his store of spiritual understanding, potency, enlightenment, and success. ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... had begun, so it had continued, losing none of its potency for evil. In the little world of Wahaska, which was to have been the theatre of Utopian demonstration, the curse had persisted. The money, used with the loftiest intentions, had served only as a means to an end, and the end had proved to be the rearing ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... of forgiveness, the duty of devout submission? He had no religion, for he was no saintly "Uncle Tom," and Slavery's black shadow seemed to darken all the world to him and shut out God. Should I have warned him of penalties, of judgments, and the potency of law? What did he know of justice, or the mercy that should temper that stern virtue, when every law, human and divine, had been broken on his hearthstone? Should I have tried to touch him by appeals ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... since Wagner has any modern music-maker perfected a style so saturated with personality—there are far fewer derivations in his art than in the art of Strauss, through whose scores pace the ghosts of certain of the greater dead. All that Wagner could teach him of the potency of dissonance, of structural freedom and elasticity, of harmonic daring, Debussy eagerly learned and applied, as a foundation, to his own intricately reasoned though spontaneous art; yet Wagner would have gasped alike at the novelty and the exquisite art of Pelleas ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... grandest traits that, in them, can have freedom to thrive and bear fruit? Who can estimate the length and breadth, the height and depth of the loftiest inspirations or the noblest joys that, in them, can be experienced? To give a full expression to the utmost intelligence, potency, amiability, purity, meritoriousness and majesty that can reside in the capability—rooms of a human soul—would be equivalent to picturing the imaginable or to portraying the infinite, and to do either the one or the other is impossible. One may be sadly ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... as to the Evil Eye ([Greek: ophthalmos baskanos]). From the earliest ages of the world, the potency of the eye in fascination has been recognized. "Nihil oculo nequius creatum" says the Preacher; and the philosopher calls it alter animus, "another spirit." "It sends forth its rays," says Vairus, "like spears and arrows, to charm ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... in the sense of freedom of contract, judicially translated into what one Justice has labelled the Allgeyer-Lochner-Adair-Coppage doctrine,[157] lost its potency as an obstacle to the enforcement of legislation calculated to enhance the bargaining capacity of workers as against that already possessed by their employers. Prior to the manifestation, in Senn v. Tile Layers Protective Union,[158] decided in 1937, of a greater willingness ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... an overwhelming majority of undertakers, adventurers, and Puritan representatives of boroughs, from which all the Catholic electors had been excluded. 'The Protestant interest,' a phrase of tremendous potency in the subsequent history of Ireland, counted 198 members against 64 Catholics in the Commons, and in the Lords 72 against 21 peers. A court was established under an act of parliament in Dublin, to try the claims of 'nocent' and ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... and probably roused her conscience. Robert followed the pair, saw them enter The Great Labourer—what could the name mean? could it mean The Good Shepherd?—and turned away helpless, objectless indeed, for he had done all that he could, and that all was of no potency. A world of innocence and beauty was about to be hurled from its orbit of light into the blackness of outer chaos; he knew it, and was unable to speak word or do deed that should frustrate the power of a devil who so loved himself that he counted it an honour to a girl to have ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... country the interest of scientists has not yet been aroused to an extent comparable with that of European investigators. Old prejudices have not entirely lost their potency. One of the most eminent professors of a leading university is said to have been subjected to ridicule from his colleagues because of a marked interest shown in the subject, and a Boston physician of high standing within a few months confided ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... hearthstone. Again do we kneel at mother's knee to lisp the evening prayer. Again she takes us in her arms, and sings to her tired child the soft, low lullaby of childhood's happy days.—Oh, Music, Music! Art Divine! Thou dost move and stir the heart as nothing else can do! Yet never canst thy sweet potency be better used than when it inspires praise and gratitude to the great Lord ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... Prynne's ears were for something in the overwhelming potency of the argument. But another and scarcely less important article of the indictment related to some pictures of the Life and Passion of our Lord, which Laud had once had bound up in Bibles. He had been so greatly pleased with ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... the laws of quarantine were disregarded. The people, weary of anarchy, and trembling in view of the approaching Austrian invasion, were almost delirious with delight in receiving thus as it were from the clouds, a deliverer, in whose potency they could implicitly trust. When warned that the ships had recently sailed from Alexandria, and that there was imminent danger that the plague, might be communicated, they replied, "We had rather have the plague than the Austrians," Breaking over all the municipal ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... additional power on the Devil, as well as on his new subject; for the doctrine seems to have prevailed, that, for him to act with effect upon men, the intervention, instrumentality, and co-operation of human beings was necessary; and almost unlimited potency was ascribed to the combined exertions of Satan and those persons in league with him. A witch was believed to have the power, through her compact with the Devil, of afflicting, distressing, and rending whomsoever she ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... group of which he was one had joined hands to receive a galvanic shock; the circle had dislinked again in a moment, with cries of surprise and pleasure; but to Howard it had meant much more than that; the current gave him a sense of awful force and potency, the potency of death. What was this strange and fearful essence which could pass instantaneously through a group—swifter even than thought—and leave the nerves for a moment paralysed and tingling? Even so it was with him now. What was happening ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... if no error appears, the more completely does it establish itself as the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Liberalism applies the wisdom of Gamaliel in no spirit of indifference, but in the full conviction of the potency of truth. If this thing be of man, i. e. if it is not rooted in actual verity, it will come to nought. If it be of God, let us take care that we be not ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... affection on the oft-depicted picture, and repeat the oft-repeated words, and join in the old, old Hallelujahs of the shepherds with something of the zest and freshness of a first love. The story is so unlike all others, and touches with such unerring potency chords in the human soul which call it to a higher and nobler life, that, no matter who gazes upon the Babe of Bethlehem, he feels a kinship with all the world in hailing the Desire of all Nations. The manger, the silent companions of the stable, the swaddling clothes—what a touch ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... to do it fairly and fully; so many matters of character and circumstance must ever be to him unknown, and therefore will be by him unrecorded. And even as to autobiography, who, short of the Omniscient Himself, can take into just account the potency of outward surroundings, and still more of inborn hereditary influences, over both mind and body? the bias to good or evil, and the possession or otherwise of gifts and talents, due very much (under Providence) to one's ancient ancestors and one's modern teachers? ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and two wounded; the Constitution had ten killed and forty wounded. Captain Lambert's worst fears had been realised, and the death of that gallant and skilful sailor aroused a tongue which, in Great Britain, has a potency and influence, such as official insolence cannot withstand, nor official incapacity escape from. The spirit of the "Times" was up. The voice of the many loudly condemned the incompetency of the few. The conduct of the war ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... betrayed herself to the principle of evil. She was lost. Her thoughts were at once incredibly rapid and entirely vivid, logical: Edward Dunsack, ruined, in China; herself blinded, confused, destroyed in America. Yesterday she had held him powerless with the mere potency of her righteousness; but now she ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... albeit he worked fourteen hours a day, slept eight, and consumed the remaining two at his meals. But through all those fruitful years of toil he had still found time to dream, and the spell of the redwoods had lost none of its potency. He was still checker-boarding the forested townships with his adverse holdings—the key-positions to the timber in back of beyond which some day should come to his hand. Also he had competition now: other sawmills dotted the bay shore; other three- masted schooners carried Humboldt redwood ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... these same men to victory at Moskowa has lost its potency and its magic. The men cry "Vive Ney!" but they do not stand. The stampede has become general. In the valley below the infantry has started to run up the slope of La Belle Alliance: after it the cavalry with reins hanging loose, stirrups lost, casques, sabretaches, ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... the ground; "Callous I feel my mouth become, in form "A crooked snout; and feel my brawny neck "Swell o'er my chest; and what but now the cup "Had grasp'd, that part does marks of feet imprint; "With all my fellows treated thus, so great "The medicine's potency, close was I shut "Within a sty: there I, Eurylochus "Alone unalter'd to a hog, beheld! "He only had the offer'd cup refus'd. "Which had he not avoided, he as one "The bristly herd had join'd; nor had our chief, "The ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... confronted with a task so gigantic. Mobilized technology has revealed and demonstrated the fact that it is possible to generate almost unlimited power and has shown the way to do it; at the same time it has demonstrated the measureless potency of engineering and our utter helplessness without it. Technology is comparatively a new science; by some it is called a "semi-science" because it deals primarily with the application of science to practical issues. But when it became necessary "to do things," an engineer had to be called; the ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... frequently dangerous, and simply sent to the prospective victim to impress him and draw him on; that the medicine furnished, is, as a rule, made of the cheapest of drugs, bought in large quantities from parties, whose reputation in the drug trade is not of the best; that the medicine has no special potency nor value, that it is in all likelihood a worthless mixture, which in the advertisements is given false and lying properties; that when they have got all the money out of the victim possible they will sell his letters to other nostrum venders. It is a sorry reflection on our civilization that ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... amid clouds of Latakia, of wars and rumours of wars, distress of nations, and perplexity, seen by the light, not of the Gospel, but of the stock-exchange; while the storm fell without in lightning, hail, rain, of right Rhenish potency. ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... sophistries, Unlawful magic, and enticing lies. Corinthians! look upon that gray-beard wretch! Mark how, possess'd, his lashless eyelids stretch Around his demon eyes! Corinthians, see! My sweet bride withers at their potency." 290 "Fool!" said the sophist, in an under-tone Gruff with contempt; which a death-nighing moan From Lycius answer'd, as heart-struck and lost, He sank supine beside the aching ghost. "Fool! Fool!" repeated he, while his eyes still Relented not, nor mov'd; ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... new element, of the smallest in numbers, but with the promise and potency of a great future. Four days after Webster, Seward spoke in the Senate. He advocated the admission of California as a free State, with no additions or compromises. No equilibrium between freedom and slavery was possible; if established to-day it would be destroyed to-morrow. ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... or earth Holds potency more weird Than our hearts hold, that throb from birth With ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... of the existence of such elemental beings; frequent accidents in mines showed the potency of the metallic spirits, which so tormented the workmen in some of the German mines by blindness, giddiness, and sudden sickness, that they have been obliged to abandon mines well known to be rich in silver. A metallic spirit at one sweep annihilated twelve miners, who ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... in zealous friendship with the grandfather whose hope had yearned toward him when he was unborn, and who, though dead, was yet to speak with him in those written memorials which, says Milton, "contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are," he seemed to himself to be touching the electric chain of his own ancestry; and he bore the scrutinizing look of Kalonymos with a delighted ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... carbohydrates, or salts. Hopkins therefore suggested the existence of unknown factors in milk of the type to which he had earlier given the name "accessory factors." This work has recently been repeated by Osborne and Mendel who fail to find the high potency in milk ascribed to it by Hopkins but the latter's work, at that time, was accepted without question and became the ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy
... known. Many of them, probably also of proteid nature, are much more resistant to heat; thus the intracellular toxins of the tubercle bacillus retain certain of their effects even after exposure to 100deg C. Like the extracellular toxins they may be of remarkable potency; for example, fever is produced in the human subject by the injection into the blood of an extremely minute quantity of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... choice, and sooner or later we must inevitably acquire some of the power and responsibility of gods. A fall it might seem, just as a vicious man sometimes seems degraded below the beasts, but in promise and potency a rise ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... realizes the vivid potency of the picture when Baccio Ugolino, as Orpheus, clad in a flowing robe of white, with a fillet around his head, a "golden" lyre in one hand and the "plectrum" in the other, appeared at the iron gates, and, striking the strings of the sweet sounding instrument, ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... much. The immense moral progress which we owe to the Gospel is the result of its exaggerations. It is thus that it has been, like stoicism, but with infinitely greater fulness, a living argument for the divine powers in man, an exalted monument of the potency of the will. ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... filled with woe. Citizens sat and stared aimlessly for hours, thinking of naught but the disaster so near at hand and so unavoidable. The whole nation surged as if in the last throes of death. To-morrow the potency of Graustark was to die, its domain was to be cleft in twain,—disgraced ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... eye was upon her; his arm was extended across the table, and she knew the potency of that arm, as well as something about the strength and fund ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... were beside themselves, and knew not which way to turn. It was evident that nothing had occurred within a half-century to create anything like the excitement that existed. Mien-yaun's prospects of eternal potency never seemed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... not; but, on the other hand, the analgesic influence of antipyrin, phenacetin, morphine, and other like remedies lasts very much longer, and their dose may be reduced, or—what is the same thing—their pharmaco-dynamic potency may be enhanced by the sequestration of the blood contained within the extremities. So far as I know, I was the first to announce this fact. In so far as a simple expression of the above truth is concerned, we may employ the ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... unostentatious people; they were educated and refined; they troubled themselves but little about the two other orders of nobility, but moved serenely in their wide orbit, confident in their own strength and well aware of the potency of their influence. They had no troublesome appearances to keep up, no rivalries which they cared to distress themselves about, no jealousies to fret over. They could afford to mind their own affairs and leave other combinations to do the same or do otherwise, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... could only be satisfied by conquest, the four secondary passions must have very soon come into play. In the conquests of modern industrialism, the secondary passions have been almost wholly dominant, since those who directed them had no need to fear hunger or thirst. It is the potency of vanity and love of power that gives hope for the industrial future of Soviet Russia, since it enables the Communist State to enlist in its service men whose abilities might give them vast wealth in ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... and our own time, and must remind us of our daily inference from the affairs we see busy all about us. The drama of facts cannot be transplanted; it cannot be made in France or Germany and remade in America; it is localised in place and time, and has no potency beyond the bounds of its locality. But the drama of suggestion is unlimited in its possibilities of appeal; ideas are without date, and burst the bonds of locality and language. Americans may see the ancient ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... charging you with seeing, (not, not 'looking for')—seeing undue 'security' in that, in the form,—I meant to say 'you talk about me being 'free' now, free till then, and I am rather jealous of the potency attributed to the form, with all its solemnity, because it is a form, and no more—yet you frankly agree with me that that form complied with, there is no redemption; yours I am then sure enough, to repent at leisure &c. &c.' ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... passed, new apprehensions came on the mind of the lonely woman. Her son still slept under the influence of the draught; but what if, being stronger than she had ever known it administered, his health or his reason should be affected by its potency? For the first time, likewise, notwithstanding her high ideas on the subject of parental authority, she began to dread the resentment of her son, whom her heart told her she had wronged. Of late, she had observed that his temper was less docile, and his determinations, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... is to lead the people toward the shambles. This is done by "moulding public opinion," and for this interesting function the "System" and Wall Street have an equipment of magical potency. Public opinion is made through the daily press, through financial publications of various kinds, and through "news bureaus." Every great daily has a financial editor and a corps of experts in finance who spend their days on "the Street" cultivating the friendship of ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... a poison he had not the slightest doubt. Aware that one poison only, thus administered, would have the potency to slay an adult human being practically on the instant, he realized at once that here, at the little, unimportant drug-shop of the place, the simple test for such a stuff could be made in a ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... through miracle, but to obtain faith in Thee freely and apart from any miraculous influence. Thou thirstest for free and uninfluenced love, and refuses the passionate adoration of the slave before a Potency which would have subjected his will once for ever. Thou judgest of men too highly here, again, for though rebels they be, they are born slaves and nothing more. Behold, and judge of them once more, now that fifteen centuries have elapsed since that moment. Look ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... best hotel; the one recommended by the guidebook had been closed for years, he said. I, who had not found the guide-book infallible, believed him, until he landed us at one which looked well enough, but whose chief furnishing was smells of such potency that I fled, handkerchief clapped to nose, while the limp waiter, with his jaw bound up like a figure from a German picture-book, called after me that "perhaps the drains were a little out of order." Thrifty Vanka, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... However, as I returned home, something happened which put the joke entirely out of my head. It is curious when a new subject of trouble or anxiety has been suggested to the mind in an unexpected way, how often a second advertisement follows immediately after the first, and gives to that a potency which in itself it had ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... conclude that it will be with us even as it was with Jesus? His resurrection was not only a pledge of what that of believers will be, carrying within itself the seed and potency of a blessed immortality, but it was also a sample of what ours will be. Death will produce far less change in us than we imagine it will do. We shall go on with living very much as if nothing had happened. Dying is an experience ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... functioning of human organs, and more certainly as time passed he drew to the conclusion that in the goat, and in the goat alone, was to be found that gland-tissue which, because of its rapid maturity, potency, and freedom from those diseases to which humanity is liable, was most sure under right conditions of implantation to feed, nourish, grow into and become ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... mauvaise etoile! You catch the sense admirably. Yes, I was born under an evil star; just that! But if I haven't pondered the mysteries unprofitably I shall emerge from the shadow in due season. When you see me scribbling I am calculating the potency of the dark fate that overhangs me and trying to estimate when if ever the cloud will pass. Don't trouble your head with those fancies; leave them to me. Hope is buoyed in me by the fact that never yet have my ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... going where he will be fed and get strength. I trust it does not seem flippant to say that I look on all church organizations in the same way, and that the tradition of a long past suggests to me the inefficiency of a dotage, quite as much as the stimulating aroma of potency which, as in the case of some wines, can only be acquired by the lapse of time. Some will say that this Modernism has no sense of obligation, no sense of veneration, makes no allowance for the idiosyncrasies of others. Well, that ...
— What the Church Means to Me - A Frank Confession and a Friendly Estimate by an Insider • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... tambourine set round with tinkling bells, and thumping it on its parchment head. Without interrupting his brisk, though measured movement, Donatello snatched away this unmelodious contrivance, and, flourishing it above his head, produced music of indescribable potency, still dancing with frisky step, and striking the tambourine, and ringing its little bells, all in one ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... going to school to Japan. Since Japan renounced her policy of seclusion in 1868 along with her antiquated form of government, and since Korea has been forced out of her hermit life, the potency of vicinal location around this enclosed sea has been suddenly restored. The enforced opening of the treaty ports of Japan, Korea and China simply prepared the way for this basin to reassert its power to unite, and to unite now more closely ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... "there are in the mineral world certain crystals, certain forms, for instance of fluor-spar, which have lain darkly in the earth for ages, but which nevertheless have a potency of light locked up within them. In their case the potential has never become actual, the light is, in fact, held back by a molecular detent. When these crystals are warmed, the detent is lifted, and an outflow of light immediately begins." How often subtle analogies ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... things had no attraction for him. Rome indeed appealed to his imagination, Roma pulcherrima rerum, but it was the invisible Rome rather than the fumum et opes strepitumque, it was the city of pristine ideals, of irresistible potency, of Anchises' pageant of heroes. When he walked through the Forum he saw not only the glistening monuments in their new marble veneer, but beyond these, in the far distant past, the straw hut of Romulus and the sacred grove on the Capitoline where the spirit of Jove had guarded a folk ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... said Donato, who had seen much of the world; "it is a petty superstition of the age; it is not the fault of the man, who hath sterling qualities. And by that same potency of credulity have his fears been set at rest. It is a proof of weakness to undervalue the strength of an adversary—for so at least he hath recently declared himself on this question of temporal power, by his petty aggressions and triumphs in Malta, ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... mile or two away; the water is supposed to possess rare medicinal virtues, and invalids still come to test its potency, but there is no life, no gayety; the Springs and the ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... to Carlyle to solve her difficulties. Carlyle knew German almost as well as if he had been born in Dresden; and the full and almost overflowing way in which he answered her gave her another impression of his potency. Thus she weighed the two men who might become her lovers, and little by little she came to think of Irving as partly shallow and partly narrow-minded, while Carlyle loomed up more ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... we have, in what we can do, in what people think of us, in the thought of the friends we have at our back, or in anything whatever but the living, outgoing power of the self-alive—the one causing potency in the heart of our souls, and in every clothing of those souls, from nerve, muscle, and skin to atmosphere and farthest space. The living life is the one power, the only that can, and he who puts his trust or hope in anything else whatever is a worshipper of idols. He who does not believe in ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... chiefly the interior system, constitution and the like. Where the parents are of the same breed, it appears that the proportions contributed by each are governed, in a large measure, by the condition of each in regard to age and vigor, or by virtue of individual potency or superiority of physical endowment. This potency or power of transmission, seems to be legitimately connected with high breeding, or the concentration of fixed qualities, obtained by continued descent for many generations from such ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... seemed to me that the lower potencies lose in power as they are kept for a longer period; hence, I consider it safer to prepare them fresh every year. As a general rule, I have found either the third or the thirtieth potency, sufficient. ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... many different parts of the body. It hardly seems credible at first sight that the same agent can give rise to the many different kinds of diseases it does give rise to. In fact, the universality of its action has blinded even learned men as to its potency ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... breakfast." Out from the train, like bees from the hive, swarmed the hungry passengers, and made their way with all speed to the lunch-counter, followed more deliberately by conductor, engineer, and brakesmen. The demands of the lunch-counter are of universal potency; few have the hardihood to resist them; that particular train was emptied in the first of ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and the James River fluid were about equal, which would indicate that the proper combining proportions would be, say a bucket of beans (or peas) to a bucket of water. They held that the nutritive potency was increased by the dilution, and the best results were obtainable when the symptoms of hunger were combated by the trituration of a bucketful of the peas-beans with a ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... in Paris again, in his old attic; it was spring, and his beloved city as beautiful as ever. He had expected a return of his old-time gaiety, but somehow the charm lacked potency. He wanted to paint, but his ideas were turgid and fragmentary. He wanted excitement, but the city only seemed to offer memories. The lapse of a short eighteen months had scattered his friends surprisingly. Adolph remained, but Nanette was married. Louise had left Paris, and ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... absorptions, to judge by the colours, are almost complementary, are the chemically active rays the same? The general relation of colour to chemical action is worthy of the application of the method by which Dr. Draper proved so conclusively the chemical potency of the ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... spirit of a man's life, more than his special actions and peculiar theories, is that by which other men are moved and admonished. I have extreme faith in the potency of this species of influence, and comparatively less in the effect of example, in special cases and particular details of conduct. Christ's teaching was always aimed at the spirit which should govern us, not at its mere application to isolated instances; ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Mr. Allen's romances Nature is not behind the action; she is involved in it. Her presence is everywhere; her influence streams through the story; the deep and prodigal beauty which she wears in rural Kentucky shines on every page; the tremendous forces which sweep through her disclose their potency in human passion and impulse. There was a fine note in Mr. Allen's earliest work; a prelusive note with the quality of the flute.... In Summer in Arcady a deeper note in the treatment of Nature was struck, and Mr. Allen's style ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... Marius, into the ideal of a perfect imaginative love, centered upon a type of beauty entirely flawless and clean—an ideal which never wholly faded from his thoughts, though he valued it at various times in different degrees. The human body in its beauty, as the highest potency of all the beauty of material objects, seemed to him just then to be matter no longer, but, having taken celestial fire, to assert itself as indeed the true, though visible, [93] soul or spirit in things. In contrast with that ideal, in all the pure brilliancy, and ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... races, represented as slaves, sixteen hundred years before the Christian era. Although repeatedly drawn from their native barbarism and carried among civilized nations, they soon forget what they learn and relapse into barbarism. If the inherent potency of the prognathous type of mankind had been greater than it actually is, sufficiently great to give it the independence of character that the American Indian possesses, the world would have been in a great measure deprived of cotton and sugar. The red man ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... of a ne'er-do-well had caught my attention. The day had been a hot, languorous Sunday on which all things had seemed to be exhibiting their better side, and telling the sun that it was not in vain that he was pouring out his brilliant potency, and diffusing his living gold; while the man of whom I speak had, dressed in a new suit of blue serge, a new cap cocked awry, and a pair of brilliantly polished boots, been standing at the edge of the wharf, and ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... historian. He must conjure up the past; he must play the Witch of Endor. His lists and indices, his catalogues and note-books, must be but the spells which he uses to invoke the dead. The spells have no potency until they are pronounced: the lists of the kings of Egypt have no more than an accidental value until they call before the curtain of the mind those monarchs themselves. It is the business of the archaeologist to awake the ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... my illness to the consequences of the sabre-cut, and my recovery to the potency of the drugs he had exhibited. I attributed my illness in great measure to the constant contemplation of my early history, no longer checked by any regular employment; and my recovery in equal measure to the power of his ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... left behind are nourished and tended, with thorough belief and devoted care, by her who shared his authority in life, and now bears alone the family sceptre, there can be no bound set to their possible potency in a mind of high spiritual order. The primary impulse became with Alister a large portion of his religion: he was the shepherd of the much ravaged and dwindled Macruadh-fold; it was his church, in which the love of the neighbour was intensified in the love of the relation and dependent. To aid ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... potency, potentiality; jiva^; puissance, might, force, energy &c 171; dint; right hand, right arm; ascendency^, sway, control; prepotency, prepollence^; almightiness, omnipotence; authority &c 737; strength &c 159. ability; ableness &c adj.^; competency; efficacy; efficiency, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... noble, grand, lovely, only ignorant of the one secret, of which he, haunting the steps of the Unbound Prometheus, had learned a few syllables, broken yet potent, which he would fain, could he find how, communicate in their potency to her. And besides, to help her now looking upon him from the distant height of conscious superiority, he must persuade her to what she regarded as an unendurable degradation! The circumstances assuredly protected him from any danger of offering her ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... potency, reaching you, made you turn away, and then the immense disorder of the camp seized and ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... city,—but all in vain. Every convent, every castle, every city of his vast dominions beheld in him the visitation of the Almighty. The diadem was obscured by the tiara, and loyalty itself yielded to the superior potency of religious fear. Only Bertha, his neglected wife, was faithful and trusting in that gloomy day; all else had defrauded and betrayed him. How bitter his humiliation! And yet his haughty foe was not contented with the punishment he had inflicted. He declared that if the sun went down on the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... standpoint—obtain in nearly all the accepted modes of killing a man. Even the use of venom a second time possesses the disadvantage of a certain alertness against the very thing on the part of the victim. Werner was a dope fiend, fully aware of the potency of a tiny skin puncture. I'll wager he was on constant guard against any ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... oratory Grattan's speeches are dangerously suggestive, overpowering spirits that will not leave when bid. Yet, with all this terrible potency, who would not bask in his genius, even at the hazard of having his light for ever in your eyes. The brave student will rather exult in his effulgence—not to rob, not to mimic it—but to catch its inspiration, and then go on his way resolved to create a glory of his own which, however small, ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... 1913, Massy Baker the explorer, discovered a lake probably 100 miles or more in shore-line, which had remained hidden in the midst of the dark forests of the Fly and Strickland River regions, and here savages still in the stone age, who had never seen a white man, measured the potency of their weapons ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... however, occupied the mind of the minister just fallen; he did not content himself with the facile gratifications of a temporary and disputed power, he had wanted to reform, he had hoped to found; his successors did not raise so high their real desires and hopes. M. Turgot had believed in the eternal potency of abstract laws; he had relied upon justice and reason to stop the kingdom and the nation on the brink of the abyss; M. Necker had nursed the illusion that his courage and his intelligence, his probity and his reputation would suffice for all needs and exorcise all dangers; both ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... highly imprudent in him to proceed without them. A palaver was held, and all the arguments which Stibbs could bring forward, failed to produce the desired effect upon his alarmed crew. He, however, suddenly bethought himself, that he had an argument in his possession, of greater potency, than any that could be afforded by the most persuasive arguments, and taking a bottle of brandy from his chest, he gave to each man a glass of the spirit, when, on a sudden, a very extraordinary change appeared to take place in their opinions and sentiments. They might ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... from certain chemically prepared crystals which, treated in one way, yielded electricity in enormous volumes, while, powdered and treated with a certain acid, they evolved an expansive gas of stupendous potency, capable of being advantageously used in place of any of the known explosives, or of steam. And it was known to a few of the more intimate friends of the professor and of Sir Reginald, that the former had designed and constructed of his wonderful ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... character of effective suggestion: Feeling. When the idea is charged with emotion, it is far more likely to be realized. War neuroses have taught us the dreadful potency of the emotional stimulus of fear; but this power of feeling over the unconscious has its good side too. Here we find psychology justifying the often criticized emotional element of religion. Its function is to increase the energy of the ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... way to put all things allusively, using strange figures and metaphors. Yet, when one was used to him and to them, their potency seemed greater than polished speech and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... powerful, always behind the scenes, coming no man knows whence, and dying, or pretending to die, obscurely—you never find authentic evidence of his decease. In other later times, at other courts, such an one reappears and runs the same course of luxury, marvel, and hidden potency. ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... had returned with Parson Holden. With this view, she descended to the hall, where she found Nicholas Assheton fast asleep in a great arm-chair, and rocked rather than disturbed by the loud concussions of thunder. The squire was, no doubt, overcome by the fatigues of the day, or it might be by the potency of the wine he had swallowed, for an empty flask stood on the table beside him. Mistress Nutter did not awaken him, but proceeded to the chamber where she had left Nowell and Potts prisoners, both of whom ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... bosom a new seed of mingled good and evil, which was destined to bear fruit, precious perhaps as well as bitter. God knows, it has hung on the tree long enough. Sour and harsh from the first, it has been many a year in ripening. But the sweetness of the apple, the potency of the grape, as the chemists tell us, are born out of acidity—a developed sourness. Will it be so with my thoughts? Dare I assert, as I sit writing here, with the wild waters slipping past the ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood is—by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant incredulity, and be ready to abide by this; that though the Sperm Whale stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... affectionate expressions of her attachment. Such expressions, coming from any woman, must have been rapturous and soothing in the extreme; but, when they flowed from a voice whose very sound was melody, they acted on the heart of Captain de Haldimar with a potency that was as irresistible as the love ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... form of the transmutative hypothesis," as Darwin's is said to be, (p. 252, Amer. reprint,) so happily that the prescription is repeated in the second (p. 259) and third (p. 271) dilutions, no doubt, on Hahnemann's famous principle, with an increase of potency at each dilution. Probably the supposed transmutation is per saltus. "Homoeopathic doses of transmutation," indeed! Well, if we really must swallow transmutation in some form or other, as this reviewer intimates, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... warning gesture. The little doctor was undermining several things. She was teaching the women to live decently, cook decently, and take a human interest in their children. Her charm, too, was having effect; more than Martin Morley had tested its potency and taken to holier ways. The Forge doctor often told Crothers that the She-Saw-Bones ought to be behind bars, but even in Lost Hollow you couldn't put a person behind bars for cleaning souls ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... could come of so splendid an enlightenment seemed as silly as the notion that the atheists would steal all our spoons. The physicists went further than the Darwinians. Tyndall declared that he saw in Matter the promise and potency of all forms of life, and with his Irish graphic lucidity made a picture of a world of magnetic atoms, each atom with a positive and a negative pole, arranging itself by attraction and repulsion in orderly crystalline structure. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... holocaust is to be offered on the Veiled Shrine,—or so it hath been publicly proclaimed throughout the city,—and the crowd will flock to see a virgin's blood spilt on the accursed altars where Lysia, in all the potency of triumphant wickedness, presides. But if the auguries of the stars prevail, 'twill be for the last time!" Here he paused and looked fixedly at Theos. "Thou dost return straightway to Sah-luma ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Protestants as regards these principles there is little to distinguish; for in the race of abomination, they have kept pretty nearly neck and neck. The author of this Apology has no sympathy with either, but of the two much prefers Popery. There is about it a breadth of purpose, a grandeur, and a potency which excites some respect, even in the breast of an enemy. Unreasonable it assuredly is, but Christians who object to it on that ground, may be told—religion was never meant to be reasonable; and that an appeal to rational principles ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... world of science and philosophy, so the undoubted fact that man was unmoral at the start is no obstacle to the belief that the moral law was as existent then as now. Nay, just as the cosmic process itself from the first contained the promise and potency of an organic form ultimately to be called man and to become "the crowning glory of the universe," so also, we hold, it contained the potentialities of that whereby man was enabled to crown the splendid ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... should manifest not the maximum, but the total absence of aesthetic faculty. The disinterestedness of this pleasure is, therefore, that of all primitive and intuitive satisfactions, which are in no way conditioned by a reference to an artificial general concept, like that of the self, all the potency of which must itself be derived from the independent energy of its component elements. I care about myself because "myself" is a name for the things I have at heart. To set up the verbal figment of personality and make it an object of concern apart from the interests ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... miserably decayed and corrupted mendicant orders,—ever the most effective arm in the missionary service of the Latin Church,—and, a little later, the founding of the Society of Jesus, with its immense potency for good and for evil. At the same time the court of Rome, sobered in some measure, by the perilous crisis that confronted it, from its long orgy of simony, nepotism, and sensuality, began to find time and thought for spiritual duties. The establishment of the "congregations" or administrative ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... of certain green places and a lilac hedge; there is about them the taste and odor of the ideal. They are for the future as well as for the past. Perhaps in some subtle way they do after all have potency for beauty. I fancy that some day I too shall stow away bags of them amid my worthless precious junk, and when prying hands disturb the dust the nostrils of a youngster now unborn will be greeted by a frail yet pungent aroma. I can only trust that ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... already discussed the operation of the laws of inheritance. It was then stated that the whole story of maternal influence had not been told—that the mother could communicate qualities she never possessed. The potency of imagination at the time of conception over the child has been mentioned. It is now our design to consider its effects, during the period of pregnancy, upon the physical structure and the mental attributes of the offspring. We shall have occasion hereafter, ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... happen to meet with a true man in music. They pretend to be shocked, as though they had come across something improper. The spirit of their shyness, which originally served to conceal their own impotence, now attempts the defamation of other people's potency. Defamatory insinuations and calumny find ready acceptance with the representatives of German Philistinism, and appear to be at home in that mean and paltry state of things which, as we have seen, environs our ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... on the other hand, sends its image to the object, and no portion whatever of the object is lost in the images it throws off, for any reason either in the eye or the object. Therefore we may rather believe it to be the nature and potency of our luminous atmosphere which absorbs the images of the objects existing in it, than the nature of the objects, to send their images through the air. If the object opposite to the eye were to send its image to the eye, the eye would have to do the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... become especially obnoxious to the Indians. Twice he had escaped from them, under circumstances which greatly mortified their vanity. They recognised the potency of his rifle in the slaughter of their own warriors at the Blue Lick; and they were well aware that it was his sagacity which led the army of General Clarke in its avenging march through their country. It thus became with them ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... measure. We may mean by potentiality a merely dormant or quiescent state—a capacity to become something different under external influences. But we also mean by capacity an ability, a power; and by potentiality potency, force. Now when we say that immaturity means the possibility of growth, we are not referring to absence of powers which may exist at a later time; we express a force positively ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... but greater than Macaulay, because of his spiritual fervor and his moral force, stands Thomas Carlyle, the great prophet and preacher of the nineteenth century, whose influence will outlast that of all other writers of his time. And this spiritual potency, which resides in his best work, is not weakened by his love of the Strong Man in History or his fear of the rising tide of popular democracy, in which he saw a dreadful repetition of the horrors of the French Revolution. ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... of the water's potency seems to have been solved. It is not chemical in solution which clears the system of its ills and restores the jaded tissues to buoyancy, but the newly discovered principle of radioactivity. Somewhere deep ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... about her to be ornamented, because it was a point of honour with her to advertise the King's devotion to her in the costliness of all her surroundings. He loved her so much that he had paid for all this ornamentation. She, like Cleopatra, was always proving the potency of her charms by melting pearls in vinegar. Like a prize ox, she was hung with the trophies of her physical pre-eminence. In all the art which we call Louis Quinze there is this advertisement of the labour spent upon it. It proclaims ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... that and the other one, that your power against the sun could not reach its full until the morrow; and so if any would save the sun and the world, you must be slain to-day, while your enchantments are but in the weaving and lack potency. Odsbodikins, it was but a dull lie, a most indifferent invention, but you should have seen them seize it and swallow it, in the frenzy of their fright, as it were salvation sent from heaven; and all the while ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is in part metaphysical, is founded on the difficulty of ascribing any ultimate reality or potency to forces diminishing through eternal time. Thus, against the assumption that our universe is the result of material aggregation progressing over eternal time, which involves the primitive infinite separation of the particles, we may ask, ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... never-flagging runner; while the quick and feeble breathing of the girl told how she was fast losing in the race with the all-omnipotent hours. On a small table stood two phials, in which were imprisoned dull-coloured liquids, powerless, despite their supposed potency, to stay the hunger of the disease so rapidly consuming the patient; and by their side was a plate of shrivelled fruit, the departing lusciousness of which had failed to tempt an appetite in her whose mouth was baked with the fever that fed on its own flame. ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... thine, Sir John; not an empire's worth, Nor wealth of Ind could buy The like, for never was jewel seen Of such wondrous potency. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... half a mile. The influence of the death-bone is so completely under the control of the operator that it usually goes straight to the person against whom he in the dead waste of the night breathes his moody and angry soul away. Should the medicine-man, however, be conscious that the potency is inclined to swerve, if he but put his hand to the right or left it must fly in accordance with ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... door as you enter hangs a stenciled, uneven, unpunctuated sign, "NO CREDIT CASH OR BARTER." But that sign has lost its potency. It is yellow with age and no longer is there anyone who believes in it. It was hung when John Marion first opened his store, and before he knew his people and wanted cash ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... not, in fact, leave the hands of the physician. Invaluable for the detection of diseases of the throat which impair the voice and which have to be cured either by treatment or operation before the voice can be restored to its original potency or charm, its value in studying the physiology of voice-production and the functions of the vocal organs is doubtful. In fact, it is its use by amateur laryngoscopists that has resulted in the promulgation ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... burning lyric, and Major-General Joab to the privacy of his tent, there to calm his perturbed spirit with Drake's Plantation Bitters. In humble imitation of another, I would state that this indorsement of the potency of a specific is entirely gratuitous, and that I am stimulated thereto by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... America until the German artists at the Metropolitan had completed their missionary labors. Indeed, there are aspects of the case in which Weber's opera, with all its affluence of melody and all its potency of romantic and chivalric expression, is yet further removed from popular appreciation than the dramas of Wagner. In these there is so much orchestral pomp, so much external splendor, so much scenic embellishment, so much ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... such men he filled his own regiment, and, while he subjected them to a discipline more rigid than had ever before been known in England, he administered to their intellectual and moral nature stimulants of fearful potency. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... were injured in the concussion; many tossed into the water; twenty perished. The survivors crept again on board their ship, as it now lay, and as it still remains, keel to the waves, a monument of the sea's potency. In still weather, under a cloudless sky, in those seasons when that ill-named ocean, the Pacific, suffers its vexed shores to rest, she lies high and dry, the spray scarce touching her—the hugest structure of man's hands within a circuit of a thousand ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we all despise money; in fact, we find it of wondrous potency. Behold this hotelkeeper mentally taking his feet from his desk and removing his hat when he learned that one of these hermits had unlimited credit at the bank. Mr. Willing's cashier was ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... succeeds in his adventure. Papageno is commanded to accompany him, and as aids the ladies give to Tamino a magic flute, whose tones shall protect him from every danger, and to Papageno a bell-chime of equal potency. (These talismans have hundreds of prototypes in the folk-lore of all peoples.) Papageno is loath to accompany the prince, because the magician had once threatened to spit and roast him like the bird he resembled if ever he was caught in his domain, but the magical bells give ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the precious metals, gold and silver, found in various parts of the country, whether in public or private lands, belonged to the State by virtue of her sovereignty. To this opinion a decision of the Supreme Court of the State, made in 1853, gave great potency. In Hicks vs. Bell, decided that year, the court came to that conclusion, relying upon certain decisions of the courts of England recognizing the right of the Crown to those metals. The principal ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... halfway to reality again in the course of a generation. To our children they are not evidently shams; they are powerful working suggestions. Human institutions are things of life, and whatever weed of falsity lies still rooted in the ground has the promise and potency of growth. It will tend perpetually, according to its nature, to recover its old influence over the imagination, the thoughts, and ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Ever possessed it as they drew along: Yet throughout all it symboled none the less Potency ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... she admitted too freely rich "Western girls" whose parents were "nobodies," but were keenly anxious to have their daughters become "somebodies," she was in danger of watering her wine to the point where it would lose all its potency. A constant equilibrium between the good-family class and the merely rich must be maintained if the school was to preserve its position. And so it can be understood why the proprietor and the teachers of Herndon Hall carefully scrutinized ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... peninsula is about thirty degrees higher than the average temperature of the British Isles, and if there were no counteracting forces at work, crimes of violence in India should be much more numerous than they are with us. But the counteracting forces acting upon Indian society are of such immense potency that the malign influences of climate are very nearly annihilated as far as the crimes we are now discussing are concerned; and India stands to-day in the proud position of being more free from crimes against the person than the most highly ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... of Mr. FECHTER is only a new proof of the potency of yellow hair. It is the yellow hair of the British blonde, joined to that kindliness of disposition with which—like a personification of Charity—she "bareth all things," that makes her a thing of beauty in the eyes of R.G.W., and a joy for as many seasons as her hair will ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 1, Saturday, April 2, 1870 • Various
... discontent. A powerful movement, which had for long been checked by adverse circumstances, was now spreading throughout the country. New passions, new desires, were abroad; or rather old passions and old desires, reincarnated with a new potency: love of freedom, hatred of injustice, hope for the future of man. The mighty still sat proudly in their seats, dispensing their ancient tyranny; but a storm was gathering out of the darkness, and already there was lightning in the sky. But the vastest forces must needs operate through ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... magazine, for which its editor, Mr. Bijapurkar, a Brahman, who until 1905 had been Professor of Sanscrit at the Rajaram College, was subsequently prosecuted and convicted. The article, which was significantly headed "The potency of Vedic prayers," recalled various cases in which the Vedas lay down the duty of retaliation upon "alien" oppressors. "To kill such people involves no sin, and when Kshatriyas and Vaidhyas do not come forward to kill them, ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... was pounding hard. He rode with a dash and a swing as he rounded up the ponies. As he caught up her horse he happened to think of his own faded shirt and overalls. He was wearing the essentially proper clothing for his work. For the first time he realized the potency of carefully chosen attire. As he rode back with the pastured pony trailing behind him, he felt peculiarly ashamed of himself for feeling ashamed of his clothing. Silently he saddled Chinook, accepted her thanks silently, and strode ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... found for evil. Directly evil becomes personal it ceases to be evil, because personality is the supreme achievement of life. And directly evil is expressed in a living, objective, historic, mythological image it ceases to be evil, because such an image instantaneously gathers to itself some potency of creative energy. Evil is a positive thing, a spiritual thing, an eternal thing; but it is positive only in its opposition to creation, in its corruption of the soul, and in its subtle undermining of the divine moments of the soul by the power of eternal ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... hero was conveyed, and laid upon some bedding in the corner of the room. There was a slide in the partition to admit air, and with it a few faint rays of light. Jasper stirred a little while he was being moved, but the sleeping potion had too much potency to allow ...
— Frank and Fearless - or The Fortunes of Jasper Kent • Horatio Alger Jr.
... faces to that "fresh, unbounded, magnificent wilderness." Accustomed to camp life and scenes of exciting interest, the humdrum days at the old homestead became distasteful. The West was the hunter's paradise. The toil held beneath it the potency of harvests of extraordinary richness, and the soldier who had faced the disciplined battalions of Great Britain recked little of ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... be the ways in which Science has exerted her influence upon Religion, and it is needless to dwell upon the potency of their united effect. No one can read even a newspaper without perceiving how great this effect has been. On the one hand, sceptics are triumphantly confident that the light of dawning knowledge has begun finally to dispel the darkness of superstition, while ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... our country's card— The special style and mode of Muscovy. We have grown great upon it, my dear son, And may such practice rule our centuries through! The necks of those who rate themselves our peers Are cured of stiffness by its potency. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy |
