"Pre-eminently" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... impelled by a variety of causes—such as climatic and economic influences, a long course of misgovernment, Byzantinism in religion, and an inherited leaning to Oriental mysticism—to distort their reasoning powers, and far from using them, as was the case with the pre-eminently sane Greek genius, to temper the excesses of the imagination, to employ them rather as an oestrus to lash the imaginative faculties to ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... now happily concluded was characterized by some very remarkable features. It was on the part of Britain the war of a highly civilised country, in a pre-eminently mechanical, and, with all its faults, singularly humane age,—in an age, too, remarkable for the diffusion of its literature; and hence certain conspicuous traits which belonged to none of the other wars in which our country had been previously engaged. ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... literary merits. Much as we admire "his wit, his festive merriment, and inimitable satires, and the ingenious imagery, and the elaborate melody and finish of every period of his prose"—we are disposed to think him pre-eminently successful in delineating the plaintive and pensive woes of deep and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 12, No. 349, Supplement to Volume 12. • Various
... Laud gave nearly 1,300 manuscripts, among which there is one (E. 2) that enjoys pre-eminently the title of "Codex Laudianus." This is a famous manuscript of the Acts of the Apostles, which has been variously dated from the sixth to the eighth century. It is the only known manuscript that exhibits certain irregular ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... (as Shakespeare's only untried style was the simple one) almost never simple ones; and certainly he has controlled them all to profoundly interesting artistic ends by his own powerful personality. The world and all its action, as a show of thought, that is the scope of his work. It makes him pre-eminently a modern poet—a poet of the self-pondering, perfectly educated, modern world, which, having come to the end of all direct and purely external experiences, must necessarily turn for its entertainment to the ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... up with you, Mrs. Brattle?" Here was a question to ask of an old lady, whose dominion over her son was absolutely none! Sam had become so frightfully independent that he hardly regarded the word of his father, who was a man pre-eminently capable of maintaining authority, and would no more do a thing because his mother told him ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... virtue of Lucretia, wife of Collatinus, a distinguished Roman. Beautiful and, for the time in which she lived, highly accomplished, she was the idol of her husband. Loving and faithful to him, and attentive to the ordering of her household, she was pronounced a model Roman dame. Virtue was pre-eminently a characteristic of the Roman matron. A heartless libertine, annoyed that Lucretia should stand so high, and fired by wine and evil passion, determined to accomplish her downfall; and, while she was helplessly in his power, effected his vile purpose. The outraged woman waited till ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... sword across the path of access to the tree of life, as well as to that favoured angel who now hastened to the cottage of the virgin of Nazareth; because each was accomplishing a purpose in which he knew that the divine perfections were pre-eminently displayed; but as, in executing the will of God, the holiest of men must necessarily experience a different kind and degree of satisfaction, according to the nature of the service itself to which they are called; and as we have scriptural evidence that the ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... to be the quality which pre-eminently distinguishes and segregates man from the lower animals. As we trace the scale of animated nature downward, we find this faculty of the mind (as it may truly be called) diminished in the savage, and quite extinct in the brute. The first object which civilized man proposes ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... Church was pre-eminently a free society; and, with a view to united action, its members were taught to consult together respecting all matters of common interest. Whilst the elders were required to beware of attempting to domineer over each other, they ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... point more than another, it was from the manner in which it displayed the wonderful organising faculty of the French mind. The most trifling details no more than the largest combinations can disconcert this pre-eminently national aptitude. ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... of Fern Hall—a great old manor-house, standing deep in a thickly-wooded dell not half a mile from Tattleton. So far as I could learn, the Stopfords had given no ornaments to state or church, but theirs was pre-eminently a safe house. Its martlets were generally fortunate in their connections; and its chiefs had supported the character of moderate reformers, each in his generation. At home, they were lenient magistrates and prudent landlords, never overtaxing their ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... numerous remarkable productions ushered into the Old Continent from the New World, there are two which stand pre-eminently conspicuous from their general adoption. Unlike in their nature, both have been received as extensive blessings—the one by its nutritive powers tends to support, the other by its narcotic virtues to soothe and comfort the human frame—the potato and tobacco; but very different ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... only a detail and an occasion. Back of that lay an immensely greater thing; the defense of their rights—the most sacred cause given men on earth, to maintain at every cost. It is the cause of humanity. Through ages it has been, pre-eminently, the cause of the Anglo-Saxon race, for which countless heroes have died. With those men it was to defend the rights of their States to control their own affairs, without dictation from anybody outside; ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... known as the "arms." In the Cystideans, on the other hand, there are either no "arms" at all, or merely short, unbranched, rudimentary arms. The Cystideans are principally, and indeed nearly exclusively, Silurian fossils; and though occurring in the Upper Silurian in no small numbers, they are pre-eminently characteristic of the Llandeilo-Caradoc period of Lower Silurian time. They commenced their existence, so far as known, in the Upper Cambrian; and though examples are not absolutely unknown in later periods, ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... under them, success could not have been achieved, the historian still finds that Lincoln's judgment and will were by no means governed by those around him; that the most important steps were owing to his initiative; that his was the deciding and directing mind; and that it was pre-eminently he whose sagacity and whose character enlisted for the administration in its struggles the countenance, the sympathy, and the support of the people. It is found, even, that his judgment on military matters was astonishingly acute, and that the advice and instructions ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... several successful novels; but none, perhaps, will have greater interest for his American readers than this volume, in which he writes reminiscently of the Ireland of his youth and the stirring events which marked that period. It is pre-eminently an old-fashioned novel, befitting the times which it describes, and written with the delicate touch of sentiment characteristic of Mr. McCarthy's fiction. The book takes its name from the heroine, a charming type of the gentle-born ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... imagine that the vernacular of the Hinchinbrook Islanders was not pre-eminently adapted for the noble intricacies of diplomatic intrigue. In the first place it contains but few words, and none representing any number higher than five, so that even the courtly nobleman now presiding over Foreign Affairs, would find the smooth ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... the Art and History of War is pre-eminently necessary to men of the profession, but there are reasons which commend it also, suitably presented, to all citizens of our country. Questions connected with war—when resort to war is justifiable, preparation ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... positive sequence of these little masterpieces has been hopelessly confused. Three stories in particular, however, may be mentioned, La Maison Tellier, 1881; Les Soeurs Rondoli, 1884, and Miss Harriett, 1885, because the collections which originally bore these names were pre-eminently successful in drawing the attention of the ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... that, long before the dawn of history, is known to have been man's close companion. Step by step, we see him advancing with those to whom he is linked, until he raises himself immeasurably above all other animals, and takes his place pre-eminently as the friend of man. No one of those from whom he originally sprang was known to bark, and no wild species does so. By and through man, the dog was endowed with this means of expression, and was thus able to act as his more efficient guard. It is an established fact that the ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... towards the Rue Royale, it having been arranged with my father that we should take dejeuner at a well-known restaurant there. It was called "His Lordship's Larder," and was pre-eminently an English house, though the landlord bore the German name of Weber. He and his family were unhappily suffocated in the cellars of their establishment during one of the conflagrations which marked the Bloody Week of the Commune. At the time when I met my father, ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... Mr. Thomas Long were a pair admirably suited to the concern, and to one another. Each possessed pre-eminently the various requisites and qualifications in which the other happened to be deficient. Tall, slender, elderly, with a fine bald head, a mild countenance, a most insinuating address, and a general air of faded ...
— Mr. Joseph Hanson, The Haberdasher • Mary Russell Mitford
... to recall the truism that first-class art never reproduces its surroundings; but such banality is often justified by our human proneness to shuffle over the fact that many truisms are true. And this one is pre-eminently indisputable: that what mankind has generally agreed to accept as first-class art in any of the varied forms of fictitious narrative has never been a truthful reproduction of the artist's era. Indeed, in the higher walks of fiction art has never ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... game undoubtedly adds to the pleasure of the guests at a dinner-table; for game seems pre-eminently to be composed of such delicate limbs and tender flesh that an inapt practitioner appears to more disadvantage when mauling these pretty and favourite dishes, than larger and more robust pieces de resistance. ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... say in the regulation of Greece, we can understand why Corinth was singled out for punishment, and why the Romans not only destroyed the city as it stood, but also prohibited any future settlement on a site so pre-eminently favourable for commerce. The Peloponnesian Argos thenceforth became the rendezvous for the Roman merchants, who were very numerous even in Greece. For the Roman wholesale traffic, however, Delos was of greater importance; a Roman free port as early as 586, it had ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and the field, and unless we perform the mission set before us he will raise up another people through whom to bring about Christian union on the primitive gospel, to our eternal shame, but to their eternal glory. Thus it seems that, pre-eminently, our neglected fields lie among the teeming millions of America, ripe unto the harvest for our plea, but who, through our negligence, have not even heard that there ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... But man is pre-eminently a political animal, and social needs are almost as fundamental in him as vital functions, and often more conscious. Friendship, wealth, reputation, power, and influence, when added to family life, constitute surely the main elements ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... always been religious. Its very literature was pre-eminently religious. That their venerable writings should be received as sacred was thus wholly natural. They ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... sad discouragement, for I had counted much on Trevanion's clear head and that extraordinary range of accomplishment in all matters of business—all that related to practical life—which my old patron pre-eminently possessed. The next thing would be to find Trevanion's lawyer (for Trevanion was one of those men whose solicitors are sure to be able and active). But the fact was that he left so little to lawyers that ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the people with him, and presently the poorer classes followed suit, or professed to do so. Having seen the triumph of his principles, he was gathered to his fathers, and no doubt entered at once into full communion with that unseen power whose favour he had already so pre-eminently enjoyed. ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... the region two stand out as pre-eminently important-the wheat-plant and the date-palm. [PLATE IV., Fig. 2.] According to the native tradition, wheat was indigenous in Chaldaea; and the first comers thus found themselves provided by the bountiful hand ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... Regime that the happiness of a people depended altogether upon the wisdom and goodness of the king; and in an age when 'feeling was everything' it was natural that goodness of the heart should count for more than mere sagacity. What the king was believed to need pre-eminently, was to keep alive his human sympathies; and how could he do this better than by having some one ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... of the cross, found in every country and in every out-of-the-way corner of the globe, is fundamentally, originally and pre-eminently a bi-une sex symbol, and although volumes have in recent years been written on its history and meaning, the whole story may be summed up by examining its form and by realizing its antiquity ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... invasions, as they were to defend their rights against usurpation. It has been a spectacle displaying to the highest advantage the value of republican government, to behold the most and the least wealthy of our citizens standing in the same ranks as private soldiers, pre-eminently distinguished by being the army of the constitution—undeterred by a march of three hundred miles over rugged mountains, by the approach of an inclement season, or by any other discouragement. Nor ought I to omit to acknowledge the efficacious ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... not as a direct chemical manure that farmyard manure is pre-eminently valuable. We must seek for perhaps its most valuable properties ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... "Pre-eminently qualified for arboreal habits, and displaying among the branches amazing activity, the Gibbons are not so awkward or embarrassed on a level surface as might be imagined. They walk erect, with a waddling or unsteady gait, ...
— Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... receive a fair lady's refusal with a good-natured shrug, as merely the result of a bad venture, and hope for better luck next time; but to a greater number this is impossible, especially if they are played with and deceived. Walter Gregory pre-eminently belonged to the latter class. In early life he had breathed the very atmosphere of truth, and his tendency to sincerity ever remained the best element of his character. His was one of those fine-fibred natures most susceptible to injury. Up to this time his indiscretions had only been those ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... consecration, might include the pouring of some of the wine from the flagon into the chalice (if not previously done); also the separation of a part of the bread from the remainder which the Priest does not now intend to consecrate, and pre-eminently the arranging conveniently the individual piece to be broken during ...
— Ritual Conformity - Interpretations of the Rubrics of the Prayer-Book • Unknown
... rough bad lands far from the mountains. Now, except a few in the "breaks" of the Missouri, they occur only on the highest and most inaccessible mountains, along with the white goats, which, although pre-eminently mountain animals, were in early days sometimes found ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... be a much more uninteresting animal than the hard-hided, knock-kneed Hyaena, which is pre-eminently African, although he is found in the East; having, according to the opinion of some naturalists, migrated thither in the wake of caravans. He has a ferocious, ill-natured look, yet the first impression made ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... of distant as well as proximate causes, and of the large, slow and permanent evolution of things. It should include, as Buckle and Macaulay saw, the social, the industrial, the intellectual life of the nation as well as mere political changes, and it should be pre-eminently marked by a true perspective dealing with subjects at a length proportioned to their real importance. All this requires a powerful and original intellect quite different from that of a mere compiler. It requires too, in a high degree, the kind ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Surveys and examinations are progressing throughout the arid States and Territories, plans for reclaiming works being prepared and passed upon by boards of engineers before approval by the Secretary of the Interior. In Arizona and Nevada, in localities where such work is pre-eminently needed, construction has already been begun. In other parts of the arid West various projects are well advanced towards the drawing up of contracts, these being delayed in part by necessities of reaching agreements or understanding as regards rights of way or acquisition ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... abundantly possessed, more profoundly applied, by others, we believe that it would be difficult to cite an instance in which they have been so entirely combined or so continuously exercised. M. Sainte-Beuve is pre-eminently an artist in criticism. He has exhibited that self-absorption which it is easy to imagine, easy to find examples of, in poetry, in painting, and in music, but which in criticism had hitherto been hardly conceivable. "There is in him," wrote Gustave Planche in 1834,—and the force of the eulogy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... right,' said Mr Sparkler, 'and I know I have a habit of it. What I wished to declare was, that nothing can be a greater happiness to myself, myself-next to the happiness of being united to pre-eminently the most glorious of girls—than to have the happiness of cultivating the affectionate acquaintance of Amy. I may not myself,' said Mr Sparkler manfully, 'be up to the mark on some other subjects at a short ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... lecturing you," he said in his usual even tones, "Forgive me for thinking that you are setting about your plan in a way that can never be successful. As you say, we talk and talk, and the more we talk the less do we understand each other. It is a foolish world, and a pre-eminently lonely one." ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... heroine who is combating class-prejudices, and surely she is pre-eminently noteworthy. True, she fights only for her family, and is virtually the champion of the opposing institution misplaced. That does not matter: the Fates may have done it purposely: by conquering she establishes a principle. A Duke adores her sister, the daughter of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and gave the Austrians an opportunity to retire in order. Only Benedek, who had twice beaten back the Sardinians at various points, continued the struggle for some hours longer. On the French side Marshal Niel had pre-eminently distinguished himself by acuteness and bravery. It was a day of bloodshed, on which two great powers had measured their strength against each other for twelve hours. The Austrians had to lament the loss of 13,000 ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... the case with Pontack's in the city, Locket's was pre-eminently the resort of the "smart set." The prices charged are proof enough of THAT, even though they were not always paid. The case of Sir George Ethrege is one in point. That dissolute dramatist and diplomat of the Restoration ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... practical, and yet always open to the influence and guidance of correct theory. His main consideration in laying out his lines of railway was what would best answer the intended purpose, or, to use his own words, to secure the maximum of result with the minimum of means. He was pre-eminently a safe man, because cautious, tentative, and experimental; following closely the lines of conduct trodden by his father, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... an admirable paper (3/78. 'Journal of the Asiatic Soc. of Bengal' volume 16 pages 1007, 1016.) on the sheep of the Himalaya infers from the distribution of the several races, "that this caudal augmentation in most of its phases is an instance of degeneracy in these pre-eminently Alpine animals." The horns present an endless diversity in character; being not rarely absent, especially in the female sex, or, on the other hand, amounting to four or even eight in number. The horns, when numerous, arise from a crest on the frontal bone, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... have, no doubt, been exceptions,—and I should pronounce Lord Byron, from my own experience, to be one of them,—but it would not be difficult, perhaps, to show, from the very nature and pursuits of genius, that such must generally be the lot of all pre-eminently gifted with it; and that the same qualities which enable them to command admiration are also those that too often ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... that somehow the soul is so possessed by God, that doubt of His existence ceases; and the task of life becomes to keep step with Him, so that there may be correspondence between the outer and the inner conditions of life. Men have known this communion in such a degree that they have been called pre-eminently the Friends of God, but something of the experience which underlies the term is true of the ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... pride that PUNCH avails himself of the opportunity presented to him, from sources exclusively his own, of laying before his readers a copy of the original draft of the Speech decided upon at a late Cabinet Council. There is a novelty about it which pre-eminently distinguishes it from all preceding orations from the throne or the woolsack, for it has a purpose, and evinces much kind consideration on the part of the Sovereign, in rendering this monody on departed Whiggism as grateful as possible to its surviving friends ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... saw in them a vastness of comprehension, a maturity of judgment and critical discrimination, which gave large promise of future usefulness and eminence. Before his retirement from the State Department, he commended the youthful statesman to the favorable regard of President Washington, as one pre-eminently fitted for public service. ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... arising out of his want of steady resolution and earnest will, there was a habit of putting off till to-morrow what should be done to-day, of which he was himself fully sensible, and which he speaks of in one of his letters, as that "fatal habit of delay and procrastination, for which I am so pre-eminently distinguished." ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... Louise Michel was pre-eminently qualified to meet the child's soul cravings. Was she not herself of a childlike nature, so sweet and tender, unsophisticated and generous. The soul of Louise burned always at white heat over every social injustice. She was invariably in the front ranks whenever the people of Paris rebelled ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... of, the highest room—as we are taught to give a feeling of reality to the higher per medium commune with the lower, and thus gradually to see the reality of the higher (namely, the objects of reason), and finally to know that the latter are indeed, and pre-eminently real, as if you love your earthly parents whom you see, by these means you will learn to love your Heavenly Father who is invisible;—yet this holds good only so far as the reason is the president, and its objects the ultimate aim; and cases may arise in which ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... is an illustration of what can be done for the prosperity and elevation of a country by a man whom we personally abhor, and whose character is stained by glaring defects and vices. If there was a statesman in French history who was pre-eminently unscrupulous, selfish, tyrannical, and cruel, that statesman was the able and wily priest who ruled France during the latter years of Louis XIII. And yet it would be difficult to find a ruler who has rendered more signal services to the state or to the monarch whom he served. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... State, especially that for the Blind, at which I spent a day, and was charmingly entertained by Dr. Raney and his accomplished wife. The matron also dispensed hospitalities with so much true dignity and grace, and I never visited an institution in which the inmates were so pre-eminently refined, its sixty-five pupils ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... temper of the day, and his speaking won the favour of the best judges in the House of Commons. Though he disappointed ardent crusaders like Lord Shaftesbury by his apparent coldness and calculating caution, he impressed his fellow members as pre-eminently honest and as anxious to advance in the most effective manner those causes which his judgement approved. He was not the man to lead a forlorn hope, but rather the sagacious commander who directed his troops ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... an end to posting, no relays existing in this part of Switzerland, and I had been compelled to confide in the honesty of an unknown voiturier; a class of men who are pre-eminently subject to the long-established frailty of all who deal in horses, wines, lamp-oil, and religion. Leaving this functionary to follow with the carriage, we walked along the banks of the river, by a common-place and dirty road, among forges and mills, to the cataract of the Rhine. ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... word slang is an extension which every one will not admit. For our part, we reserve to the word its ancient and precise, circumscribed and determined significance, and we restrict slang to slang. The veritable slang and the slang that is pre-eminently slang, if the two words can be coupled thus, the slang immemorial which was a kingdom, is nothing else, we repeat, than the homely, uneasy, crafty, treacherous, venomous, cruel, equivocal, vile, profound, fatal tongue ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Beginning with a long dialogue between Reason and the Lover, he was equally anxious to display his freedom of criticism and his universality of knowledge, both scientific and anecdotical. His vein was pre-eminently satirical and abundantly allusive; and among the chief objects of his satire are the two favourite themes of medieval satire in general, religious hypocrisy (personified in "Faux-Semblant," who has been described as one of the ancestors of "Tartuffe"), and the foibles of women. To the gross ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... is thus, in contrast to the argument of Hobbes, pre-eminently social in character. There may be war or violence; but that is only when men have abandoned the rule of reason which is integral to their character. But the state of nature is not a civil State. There is no common superior to enforce the law of nature. ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... historical features of exceptional import. What wonder that it has had so direct a bearing on the spiritual development of the people on its banks, and that it entered into the very texture of their lives! It was, for the Egyptian, pre-eminently the sacred river—deemed to be one of the primitive essences—ranked with those highest deities who were not visible objects of adoration. As a form of God "he cannot (says an ancient hymnist) be figured in stone; he is not to be seen ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... about doing business at that season, he received his visitors with much civility. They came to inform him that a new edition of the English poets, from Cowley downwards, was in contemplation, and to ask him to furnish short biographical prefaces. He readily undertook the task, a task for which he was pre-eminently qualified. His knowledge of the literary history of England since the Restoration was unrivalled. That knowledge he had derived partly from books, and partly from sources which had long been closed; from old Grub Street traditions; from the talk of forgotten poetasters and pamphleteers who had ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his solution of the nationalist difficulty in Lower Canada was possibly a greater triumph of statesmanship; for the present modus vivendi, which still shows no signs of breaking down, dates from the years of Elgin's governorship. The decade which included his rule in Canada was pre-eminently the epoch of nationalism. Italy, Germany, and Hungary, with Mazzini as their prophet, were all struggling for the acknowledgment of their national claims, and within the British Islands themselves, the Irish nationalists furnished, in Davis and the ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... intellectual coin. He gave it a form that commended itself to the scientific and public intelligence of the day, and he won wide-spread conviction by showing with consummate skill that it was an effective formula to work with, a key which no lock refused. In a scholarly, critical, and pre-eminently fair-minded way, admitting difficulties and removing them, foreseeing objections and forestalling them, he showed that the doctrine of descent supplied a modal interpretation of how our present-day fauna and flora ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... brought no troops—only one white officer—and it soon became known that he had brought no money. Even the Mahdi himself made his contribution to the general tribute, by sending General Gordon on his arrival a formal salaam or message of respect. Thus hailed on all hands as the one pre-eminently good man who had been associated with the Soudan, Gordon addressed himself to the hard task he had undertaken, which had been rendered almost hopeless of achievement by the lapse of time, past errors, and the blindness of those who ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... he did in England. That the rainfall was scanty, but the deficiency was supplied by artesian wells, which could be sunk at a small cost anywhere in the valley, and with certain results. That California was known to be a great fruit country, and that the valley in question was pre-eminently fitted for all kinds of fruit. That settlers had only begun to go there a few months before, and were increasing in number at a great pace. That a railroad ran through the valley, and that all the land in its vicinity was taken up, but that, if I went out soon, I could probably get ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... South, will increase in proportion as he becomes an educated, thrifty, law-abiding land-owner. The time has come when the Negro can no longer afford to play upon the sympathies of his friends, but as a man among men he must be pre-eminently fitted for his place; fitted in intellect, in the knowledge of his craft and ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... than her; and if she could be transported hither by the stroke of a fairy's wand; if she could entertain him this evening at supper; if she were familiar with all his tastes, there would, perhaps, be sufficient reason for you to tremble for your power. But Princes are, above all, pre-eminently the slaves of habit. The King's attachment to you is like that he bears to your apartment, your furniture. You have formed yourself to his manners and habits; you know how to listen and reply to his stories; he is under no constraint with you; ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 2 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... been formed of him: he is called "the Lord of the starry heavens," "the Lord of Darkness," "the first-born, the oldest, the Father of the Gods." EA, retaining his ancient attributions as "Lord of the Deep," the pre-eminently wise and beneficent spirit, represents the Divine Intelligence, the founder and maintainer of order and harmony, while the actual task of separating the elements of chaos and shaping them into the ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... another story of Watt's childhood that proclaims the coming man. Precocious children are said rarely to develop far in later years, but Watt was pre-eminently a precocious child, and of this several proofs are related. A friend looking at the child of six said to his father, "You ought to send your boy to a public school, and not allow him to trifle away his time at home." "Look how he is occupied before you ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... meritorious asylum, famed over the three worlds, of him, O bull of the Bharata race, who is the Present, the Past and the Future, who is called Narayana and the lord Vishnu, who is eternal and the best of male beings, and who is pre-eminently illustrious. Near Vadari, the cool current of Ganga was formerly warm, and the banks there were overspread with golden sands. There the gods and Rishis of high fortune and exceeding effulgence, approaching the divine lord Narayana, always worship him. The entire universe with ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... should represent to his Majesty how their sole concern was for the gospel and for the removal of abuses which no one could deny to exist; how, at the same time, they had resisted the iconoclasts and other riotous fanatics, nay, how the suppression of the Anabaptists and the peasants was pre-eminently due to them, and how they had been the first to bring to light and vindicate the rights and majesty of authority. A representation of this kind, he hoped, must surely have an influence on the Emperor. He flatly rejected any alliance with those,—namely, the Swiss,—who 'strive thus against ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... Around the city cluster innumerable literary and historic associations, and the points of special interest lying within easy reach will outnumber those in any section of similar extent in the entire country. If one purposes to make the tour by rail, London is pre-eminently the center from which to start and to which one will return at various times in his travels. All the principal railways lead to the metropolis. The number of trains arriving and departing each day greatly exceeds that of any other city in the world, ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... contains many passages which not only testify to the unequalled skill of this great artist in words, but show a certain moral dignity. In the Essay, more than in any of his other writings, we have the difficulty of separating the solid bullion from the dross. Pope is here pre-eminently parasitical, and it is possible to trace to other writers, such as Montaigne, Pascal, Leibniz, Shaftesbury, Locke, and Wollaston, as well as to the inspiration of Bolingbroke, nearly every argument which he employs. He unfortunately worked up the rubbish ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... as those on the barrel of a musical box, told that the luxury of shaving had hitherto been withheld. There are some professions that tend more than others to grade the men that follow them into distinct types. The Sea is one of these, the Church, and pre-eminently the Church of Rome, is another. The ecclesiastical types vary no less than the nautical ones, and neither need here be enumerated. It is sufficient to say that Father Sweeny, when in his usual robust health, in voice, in appearance, and ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... death. The genuine interest with which these volumes were welcomed did much to lighten the last years of a somewhat sombre and solitary life. His posthumous poems were collected in 1902. The characteristics of De Tabley's poetry are pre-eminently magnificence of style, derived from close study of Milton, sonority, dignity, weight and colour. His passion for detail was both a strength and a weakness: it lent a loving fidelity to his description of natural ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... 'Pussy' among a gang of disrespectful subordinates. He really did as little to earn respect as he did to forfeit it; in fact he was a pre-eminently respectable mediocrity of the kind that, towards the close of the mid-Victorian period, clung like barnacles to office, and he was a Whig during the period ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... scurvy; Mrs. Porter, Mrs. Bickerdyke, and several others are deserving of mention for their untiring zeal both in these and Sherman's Georgian campaigns. Mrs. Bickerdyke has won undying renown throughout the Western armies as pre-eminently the friend of the ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... hunger, let me thank The giver of the feast. For feast it is, Though of ethereal, translunary fare— His story who pre-eminently of men Seemed nourished upon starbeams and the stuff Of rainbows, and the tempest, and the foam; Who hardly brooked on his impatient soul The fleshly trammels; whom at last the sea Gave to the fire, from whose wild arms the winds Took him, and shook him broadcast ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... auxiliary preparatory exercises."[120] So far was S. Clement from thinking that the teaching of Christianity should be measured by the ignorance of the unlearned. "He who is conversant with all kinds of wisdom will be pre-eminently a Gnostic."[121] Thus while he welcomed the ignorant and the sinner, and found in the Gospel what was suited to their needs, he considered that only the learned and the pure were fit candidates for the Mysteries. "The Apostle, in contradistinction to Gnostic ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... that English moral climate, with its neutral tint and temperate tone, so often sneered at in these days by its new German title of Philistinism, so often deserving of the bitterest scorn in some of its inexpressibly mean manifestations—respectability, the pre-eminently unattractive characteristic of British existence, but which, all deductions made for its vulgar alloys, is, in truth, only the general result of the individual self-respect of individual Englishmen; a wholesome, purifying, and preserving element in the homes and lives of many, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the caution, and the mystery of Philip and his minister, there was among the nobles one man who saw through all. This individual, endowed with many of the highest attributes of political genius, and pre-eminently with judgment, the most important of all, entered fearlessly into the contest against tyranny—despising every personal sacrifice for the country's good. Without making himself suspiciously prominent, he privately warned some members of the states ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... sick-chamber just as a doctor is more or less wont to do on such occasions, and pre-eminently when the room is that of a humble cottager, looking round towards the patient with that preoccupied gaze which so plainly reveals that he has wellnigh forgotten all about the case and the whole circumstances since he ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... exclusive of 6,000 pounds previously paid off, and of heavy disbursements made to supply food and forage for the British soldiers who were quartered in Sungei Ujong for a considerable time. Apart from this harassing debt, the expenses are pre-eminently for "establishments," the construction of roads and bridges, and pensions to Rajahs whose former sources of revenue have been interfered with or abolished. The sources of revenue are to some extent remarkable, and it is possible that some of them might be altogether ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... Boswell, a biographer who could have rendered the effect of his splendid power of conversation, we might have had a book which could have been put on the same level as the life of Johnson, because Carlyle again was pre-eminently a "figure," a man made by nature to hold the enraptured attention of a circle. But it would have been a much more difficult task to represent Carlyle's talk than it was to represent Johnson's, because Carlyle was an inspired soliloquist, and supplied ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of the Swan, of the Ring of the Nibelungen, the Search for the Grail, of Lohengrin and of Parsifal, are among the richest and deepest of the great mediaeval stories. They are pre-eminently the natural food for children of imagination, and in this volume these stories are retold in ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... to the table. It is evident from what we have found, that there is no colour which pre-eminently appears to be the colour of the table, or even of any one particular part of the table—it appears to be of different colours from different points of view, and there is no reason for regarding some of ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... little during the next few days to notice in Lucille, whom he had always looked on as pre-eminently a girl who knew her own mind, a curious streak of vacillation. Quite half a dozen times he suggested various spots on the wall as suitable for the Venus, but Lucille seemed unable to decide. Archie wished that she would settle on something definite, for he wanted to invite J. B. Wheeler ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... definitely the cell of the Hotel-Dieu, the Hopital des Fous, and the grated corridor with the dripping slabs of the Morgue, having its central root thus in the Ile de Paris—or historically and pre-eminently the "Cite de Paris"—is, when understood deeply, the precise counter-corruption of the religion of the Sainte Chapelle, just as the worst forms of bodily and mental ruin are the corruption of love. I have therefore called it "Fiction mecroyante," with ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... was recognized for many years as the leader of the American Bar. He was not only a profound lawyer, but one of the greatest public speakers of the day. I remember him as a good natured, agreeable man, who was pre-eminently capable of filling the highest places in public life. He was Attorney-General under President Johnson, Secretary of State under President Hayes, and counsel representing the United States before many great international tribunals. He defended President ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... Tagore. Everywhere there is scale, gradation, grade. The differences between individuals is not on the level but on ascending stages. Even in very primitive communities, where all men are equal to the extent that there are no formal chiefs, one or two men always stand out pre-eminently above the rest, above the younger, the less ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... fisherman in the kingdom ought to be a member of this Society, for it is pre-eminently useful, and no one can tell when he ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... to be a person considered pre-eminently suitable to minister to a mind diseased? Doesn't it give you a sense of being, as it were, rice pudding, or Brand's essence, or Maltine; something essentially safe and wholesome? You should have heard how Sir Deryck jumped at you, ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... of the Interior, the political head of the Government. In other words, this is the same process as the appointment of officials by the people, described a few pages back, but with one intermediary the less. It is pre-eminently the Minister of the Interior who represents the political will of the nation at any given date. And it is the Minister of the Interior who through his prefets appoints the elementary school teacher. It is then the political will of the nation which chooses the school teachers. It would be impossible ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... waltzes; making his bow in a Cabinet Minister's vestibule, and taking up the thread of the same flirtation at three different balls; showing himself for a moment at a Premier's At-home, and looking eminently graceful and pre-eminently weary in an ambassadress' drawing room, and winding up the series by a dainty little supper in the gray of the morning, with a sparkling party of French actresses, as bright as the bubbles of their ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... so-called "Triumvirate" administration. Immediately he found himself called upon to face American questions in which he was destined to play so important a part. Some time before he took office, Fox, in one of his shrewd letters to Bute, had marked out Shelburne as a man pre-eminently fitted to effect "that greatest and most necessary of all schemes, the settlement of America;" and he had hardly been a month at the Board of Trade when a communication from Lord Egremont, the "Southern" secretary of state, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... religions and philosophies: everywhere you see them produced in an invariable order. Everywhere religion appears with new societies, and everywhere, just so far as societies advance, from religion springs philosophy."[40] This was pre-eminently the case in Athens, and we shall therefore direct our attention first to the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... had purchased on their way to the capital, Hsiang Ling by name, and that she had after all become an inmate of the household of that big fool Hsueeh. Since she's had her hair dressed as a married woman she does look so much more pre-eminently beautiful! But that big fool Hsueeh has ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... (full certainty was indeed established only some time later through the investigations of Davy and Rumford into heat generated by friction) - human thinking was led into a one-sided conception of combustion which was merely the opposite of the one held earlier. Whereas formerly man's mind was pre-eminently occupied by the liberation of the imponderable element through combustion, it now turned entirely to what goes on in the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... (1756-1791), was, in regard to art problems, no more of a broad thinker than Haydn (Mozart and Schubert being pre-eminently men whose whole nature centered in music), yet on hearing his works we are aware that aspects of form and content have certainly changed for the better. In the first place he was more highly gifted ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... greatest: since it is a fair inference that those districts which were the least accessible were the most Keltic. These are North Wales, Cornwall and Devonshire, the Wealds of Sussex and Kent, Lincolnshire, and the district of Craven. On the other hand, the pre-eminently Roman tracts are— ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... of the war. Washington at once took the offensive. He was eminently aggressive; but neither hasty nor rash. Baron Jomini said that "Napoleon discounted time." So did Washington. Baron Jomini said, also, that "Napoleon was his own best chief-of-staff." So, pre-eminently, was Washington. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... number of free colored men in the North, a few of them wealthy and cultivated, lent their time and their means to this cause. But it was reserved for Douglass, by virtue of his marvellous gift of oratory, to become pre-eminently the personal representative of his ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... to escape from its enemies or to entrap its prey. Desert animals as a rule are desert-coloured. The lion is a typical example of this, and must be almost invisible when crouched upon the sand or among desert rocks and stones. Antelopes are all more or less sandy-coloured. The camel is pre-eminently so. The Egyptian cat and the Pampas cat are sandy or earth-coloured. The Australian kangaroos are of the same tints, and the original colour of the wild horse is supposed to have been a sandy ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... rule. This is how I came to marry your mother. There was not the slightest community of thought, sentiment, or interest between us. The things I liked did not interest her; what she liked bored me; yet she was pre-eminently a sensible woman, and when she learned the real state of affairs was the first to suggest a separation, which was effected. We parted with the kindliest feelings, and, as you know, remained fast friends up ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... object, but also for objects upon which it does not touch at all. This country of ours contains many such individuals—individuals of that well-known class who, cultivating "the beautiful," not only discourse of their cult to all and sundry, but speak of it pre-eminently in FRENCH. It may seem a strange and ridiculous thing to say, but I am convinced that among us we have had in the past, and still have, a large section of society—notably women—whose love for their friends, husbands, or children would expire to-morrow if they were debarred from dilating ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... went to Venice, which we found enveloped in a white fog, with a network of lagoons meandering through streets of the foulest mud. Venice is pre-eminently a hot-weather city. In winter, with her cold canals and wet alleys, deep rains and dense mists, her huge, unwarmed palaces, and her bare, draughty hotels, she is a veritable wet place of punishment. We stayed in Venice for some days, and made several pleasant acquaintances. I had with me a German ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... I said, and we went to the Music Hall and got a box, and he wrote a little note to Emilienne D'Alencon, and she came afterwards to supper with us. Though her face was pretty she was pre-eminently dull and uninteresting without two ideas in her bird's head. She was all greed and vanity, and could talk of nothing but the hope of getting an engagement in London: could he help her, or would Monsieur, referring to me, as a journalist get her some good puffs in advance? ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... himself in readiness to be kissed. If kissing went by favor he was pre-eminently a favored one. But Lucy clutched his arm with a pretty air ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... interest me, I should be truly delighted, and in this case would write in some detail. If you have the means to repeat Gartner's experiments on variations of Verbascum or on maize (see the "Origin"), such experiments would be pre-eminently important. I could never get variations of Verbascum. I could suggest an experiment on potatoes analogous with the case of Passiflora; even the case of Passiflora, often as it has been repeated, might be with advantage repeated. I have worked ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... local, never bases its appeal on small private sympathies and understandings and pass-words which leave the world at large cold, or mystified, or even disgusted. Nor is it perhaps uncritical to set down that pre-eminently happy use, without abuse, of dialect, which has attracted the admiration of almost all good judges, to this same humour, warning him alike against the undisciplined profusion and the injudicious selection which have not been and are not unknown in some followers of his. And, further, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... This is pre-eminently a story of American character and American issues. The hero, though a New Yorker engaged in Sixth Ward politics, keeps his friends true to him, and his record clean. Gotham's Irish politician is vividly characterized, though the "boss" is ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... doubt that Washington, like the Virginian of his time, was pre-eminently social. It is true that late in life he complained, as already quoted, that his home had become a "well resorted tavern," and that at his own table "I rarely miss seeing strange faces, come as they say out of respect for me. Pray, would not the word curiosity answer as well?" ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... She was so genuinely fond of him that she hated to give him pain. Looking at him, standing before her in his splendid young manhood, she wondered irritably why she didn't love him. He was pre-eminently loveable. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... speak and act as if they believed rules to be in themselves only a necessary evil, of which the less we have the better, and an entire absence of which would be the desirable state. Rousseau might be said to be the leader of this class, educationally speaking, for this is pre-eminently the doctrine which he teaches, though I fancy that those who object most to rules are not often aware that they are ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... realized that such questions were useless at that time—that time was pre-eminently one of action. She put the letter back in the rosewood box, took the box in her arms, and carrying it off to her own room, locked it up in a place of security. And that had scarcely been done when Kitteridge came seeking ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... the death-blow of the old metaphysics in the realm of philosophy. And, in fact, if science to the end of the last century was chiefly a collecting of knowledge, the science of actual things, so is science in our day pre-eminently an arranging of knowledge, the science of changes, of the origin and progress of things, and the mutual connection which binds these changes in nature into one great whole. Physiology, which examines the earlier forms of plant and animal organisms; embryology, which deals with the development of ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... that if Mr. Everett, holding views in opposition to the South, was confirmed, the Union would be dissolved! Mr. Clay sprang to his feet, and pointing his long arm and index finger at Mr. King, said: "And I tell you, Mr. President, that if a gentleman so pre-eminently qualified for the position of Minister should be rejected by the Senate, and for the reason given by the Senator from Alabama, this Union is ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Neuroptera, some of the dragon-flies are pre-eminently beautiful; one species, with rich brown-coloured spots upon its gauzy wings, is to be seen near every pool.[1] Another[2], which dances above the mountain streams in Oovah, and amongst the hills descending towards ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... doctrines which then dwelt alive in every heart, have now in a manner died out of all hearts." Only the cant of them dwells alive with us. The same clear-sighted author, who sees the Christian doctrines so beautifully and pre-eminently developed in the Ironsides of Cromwell, in the troopers of Lambert and Harrison, sacking, pillaging, slaughtering, and in all that tribe of men who ever shed blood the readier after prayer-time—men who had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... clear, ringing laugh of his father, which had often allayed an incipient mutiny below the gangway, and charmed aside the impending disaster of a snatch-division. And it is on one's own side in the House of Commons that good temper tells pre-eminently. ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Lorado Taft's colossal "Black Hawk" stands wrapped in his stony blanket upon the banks of the Rock River; while the Indian is to keep company with the Goddess of Liberty in New York Harbor, besides many other statues of him which pre-eminently adorn the public parks and halls of ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials S. W. F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous. Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honoring us whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... asked, "What of Dr. Pusey?"; when I said that I did not see symptoms of his doing as I had done, I was sometimes thought uncharitable. If confidence in his position is, (as it is,) a first essential in the leader of a party, this Dr. Pusey possessed pre-eminently. The most remarkable instance of this, was his statement, in one of his subsequent defences of the Movement, when moreover it had advanced a considerable way in the direction of Rome, that among its more hopeful peculiarities was its "stationariness." He made it in good faith; it was ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... the New Testament—that which saves—is not anything that Jesus said, but what He did; not His teaching, but His death. This, the Gospels themselves being witness, is the culmination and crown of Revelation; and it is this which, in the Epistles, and pre-eminently the Epistles of Paul, fills so large a place. Moreover, it ought plainly to be said that the Church has never been guilty of ignoring the words of her Lord in the wholesale fashion suggested by some popular religious writers of our day. Really, the Gospels are not a discovery of yesterday, nor even ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... Ody is apt to be particularly severe in his strictures upon the Tinkers, because he feels an aggravated form of rivalry existing between him and them. For the wiliness which is understood to be Ody's forte also pre-eminently characterises many of the Tinkers' nefarious proceedings, and this makes it seem to him that they not only set their wits against his, but throw discredit upon his favourite quality by the glaring moral defects which they exhibit in conjunction with it. One's pleasure in ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... facts were but so much material, to be treated as he pleased for the carrying out of his purpose. He was a colorist and a chiaroscurist; and he had a great deal more interest in light and in landscape than most of the painters of his time. If he had been pre-eminently a draughtsman, like Michelangelo, he would have reduced his light and shade to the amount strictly necessary to give that powerful modelling of the figure which is the draughtsman's means of expression, would have greatly increased the relative size and importance of the figure, and would have reduced ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... some reference to Aqueducts, which were among the noblest and most beneficial works that any ruler of Italy could accomplish. Ravenna, situated in an unhealthy swamp where water fit for drinking was proverbially dearer than wine[69] was pre-eminently dependent on such supplies of the precious fluid as could be brought fresh and sparkling from the distant Apennines. Theodoric issued an order to all the farmers dwelling along the course of the Aqueduct to eradicate the shrubs growing by its side, which would ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... of those pre-eminently sweet resting-places which are vouchsafed to some, though not to all, of the pilgrims of earth, in their toilsome journey through the wilderness towards that eternal rest, in the blessedness of which all minor resting-places shall be forgotten, ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... may, it was in this poem so pre-eminently Christian that I found the something which I missed and craved for in modern French masterpieces; even yours,—a something spiritual, speaking to my own soul, calling it forth; distinguishing it as an essence apart from mere human reason; soothing, even when it excited; making ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... obtained the generic term of superstitions, which may not quite be omitted, and which are, for many reasons, difficult to estimate rightly. In treating of this subject, we encounter, prima facie, the difficulty of giving a definition of superstition. The Irish are supposed to be pre-eminently a superstitious people. Those who make this an accusation, understand by superstition the belief in anything supernatural; and they consider as equally superstitious, veneration of a relic, belief in a miracle, a story of a banshee, or a legend of Finn Mac Cumhaill. ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... Their History.—But these were pre-eminently a people of peace and good order. This is shown in part by the spirit and form of the declaration of independence. They had no idea of allowing themselves to lapse or drift into anarchy. They understood the necessity for ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... Mima/m/sa two branches have to be distinguished, the so-called earlier (purva) Mima/m/sa, and the later (uttara) Mima/m/sa. The former undertakes to systematise the karmaka/nd/a, i.e. that entire portion of the Veda which is concerned with action, pre-eminently sacrificial action, and which comprises the Sa/m/hitas and the Brahma/n/as exclusive of the Ara/n/yaka portions; the latter performs the same service with regard to the so-called j/n/anaka/nd/a, i.e. that part of the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... were already greater than his master's, he learned much, and would never have made his Sixtine Chapel frescoes with the ease he did but for this early grounding. For Ghirlandaio, although not of the first rank of painters in genius, was pre-eminently there in thoroughness, while he was good for the boy too in spirit, having a large way with him. The first work of Ghirlandaio which the boy saw in the making was the beautiful "Adoration of the Magi," in the Church of the Spedale degli Innocenti, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... downright trouble to a slight difficulty or entanglement. "I'm in a pilikia," or "very pilikia," or "pilikia!" A revolution would be "a pilikia." The fact of the late king dying without naming a successor was pre-eminently a pilikia, and it would be a serious pilikia if a horse were to lose a shoe on the way to Kilauea. Hou- hou, meaning "in a huff," I hear on all sides; and two words, makai, signifying "on the sea-side," and mauka, ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... have one term of praise peculiarly characteristic of their highly endowed nature. They say of such and such, Ha una phisonomia simpatica,—"He has a sympathetic expression"; and this is praise enough. This may be pre-eminently said of that of Pius IX. He looks, indeed, as if nothing human could be foreign to him. Such alone are the genuine kings ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... numbers of holiday-makers, who seem to take almost as lively an interest in the crime that was committed over a century ago as if it were an event of the present day. At the time the murder aroused the greatest possible excitement in the neighborhood, and pre-eminently in ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... especially the poet of the vie des humbles. His talent is not pre-eminently lyric, and he ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... Philosophers of Nature; the Political and Legal Philosophers; the Skeptics; the Mystics; the Founders of the Exact Investigation of Nature. In Italy the new spiritual birth shows an aesthetic, scientific, and humanistic tendency; in Germany it is pre-eminently religious emancipation—in the Reformation. ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... it gave one envious gaze Upon the Fountain's height, While glittering in the morning rays Pre-eminently bright. ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... true pupal stage, a few larval types were chosen for description in Chapter VI, and a review of these suggests again the thought of increasing divergence between larva and imago. Reference has been made previously to the many instances in which the former has become pre-eminently the feeding, and the latter the breeding stage in the life-cycle. It seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the active, armoured campodeiform grub differing less from its parent than an eruciform larva differs from its parent, is as a larval type more primitive ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... something about the plant itself, or only to tell us the place it holds in relation to other plants: as, for instance, in the Herb-Robert, would it be well to {179} christen it, shortly, 'Rob Roy,' because it is pre-eminently red, and so have done with it;—or rather to dwell on its family connections, and ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), who was pre-eminently the thinker among the literary men of his generation, that the new German thought found its way into England. During the fourteen months which he spent in Germany—chiefly at Ratzburg and Goettingen—he had familiarized himself with the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... school goes back at least a hundred years for the field of his best stories. The eighteenth century, whose politics, philosophy, and literature seemed to Carlyle's somewhat bookish conception to be flat, prosaic, and comparatively uninteresting, was in truth for Englishmen pre-eminently the age of energetic activity, which touched the high level of romantic enterprise at two points, the Scottish rebellions and the exploits of famous buccaneers. Mr. Stevenson has reopened, with great skill and success, these mines of literary ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall |
