"Gradation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... abrupt as you think, Master Jack," said Wolston; "those who take the trouble to study Nature, observe an admirable gradation and easy progression from a simple to a complex organization. There is no race or species that is not connected by a perceptible link with that which precedes ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... hers, so often as they can then? That is, of all times, the only time when you can breathe with her breath for hours together; feel every little warming of the colour on her cheek marking its own changes on the temperature of yours; follow every slight fluttering of her bosom, every faint gradation of her sighs, as if her heart was beating, her life glowing, within yours. Surely it is then—if ever—that we realize, almost revive, in ourselves, the love of the first two of our race, when angels walked with them on the same garden paths, and their hearts ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... is this more marked than in the matter of pitch, or key. With the study of landscape, the range of gradation from light to dark has broadened. A picture may now be painted in a "high key;" the picture may be, from the highest to the lowest note in it, far lighter than would have been thought possible even thirty ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... individuals to such a wide extent that the average wool-sorter leaves many an artist behind in his perception of colour-shades. The same odour is perceptible by one person and unrecognisable by another. In the gradation of sound, too, the same differences of perception will be commonly noticed. But quite apart from the scale or range of perception, the quality of a sense-impression is found to vary with different persons. By this we mean ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... present day succeeds to the art of past centuries not immediately nor by an insensible gradation. It is preceded by an interval of absolute deadness in matters artistic. Sixty years ago art in almost every branch was a sealed book to the majority of even well-educated persons, and contentedly contemplated by them ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... therefore, never allowed to trouble himself about it; if he makes the ball look as oval as an egg, the degree of error is simply pointed out to him, and he does better next time, and better still the next. But his mind is always fixed on the gradation of shade, and the outline left to take, in due time, care of itself. I call it outline, for the sake of immediate intelligibility,—strictly speaking, it is merely the edge of the shade; no pupil in my class being ever allowed to draw ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... considered, that in the gradation between the smallest and largest States, there are several, which, though most likely in general to arrange themselves among the former are too little removed in extent and population from the latter, to second an ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... appearance of understanding each other, and of working for a common aim; and the observer, therefore, is apt to endow them with reasons and intellect that they truly are far from possessing. He will pretend to account for each action, show a reason behind every movement; and from thence the gradation is easy to proclaiming them marvels, or monsters, of innumerable ideas. Whereas the truth is that these ten thousand individuals, that have been produced simultaneously, that have lived together, and undergone metamorphosis at more ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the most rigorous, is a blessing; that it accords with the creative intent of God, and with his revealed institutions; that a nation cannot be homogeneous, and should not aim at it; that there is a law and scale of gradation, on which the top is privilege and authority, the bottom labor and obedience. These are the radical theories of the respective sections of the land. Men often are profoundly ignorant of the principles ...
— Conflict of Northern and Southern Theories of Man and Society - Great Speech, Delivered in New York City • Henry Ward Beecher
... sphere and from its own point of view. But perfection with reference to things of earth is a very relative concept; many an organism which is perfect in itself, appears very imperfect when compared with others. If, then, there is a gradation of animals and plants from the lower to the higher, it is the task of the theory of Descent to explain this gradual perfection. The crude and aimless activity of Darwinian selection, which necessarily operates through "chance," can never explain this ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... judges inferior to himself, who themselves might judge all smaller matters, but all great and hard matters to be brought to Moses, Exod. xviii. 22, 26. And our Saviour seems to insinuate, that the Jews had their inferior courts for inferior causes, superior judicatories for greater, in that gradation of his, Matt. v. 22. Likewise they had lesser and greater ecclesiastical assemblies, (as after will appear.) Now, to what use are greater and lesser judicatories, civil or ecclesiastical, but that the lesser and lighter causes may be judged in the inferior, ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... difficulty in attempting to reduce these various facts to any rule or law. The inconstant number of the additional digits—their irregular attachment to either the inner or outer margin of the hand—the gradation which can be traced from a mere loose rudiment of a single digit to a completely double hand—the occasional appearance of additional digits in the salamander after a limb has been amputated—these various facts appear to ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... which was kindly and delicately offered as a means of employment and support to himself and of pecuniary relief to his parents, as a stepping-stone to fortune; while the romance with which his disposition was tinged, served to picture to his prophetic vision, scenes of official gradation and pre-eminence. How often do young men of similar temperament indulge in the same enticing speculations, and allow themselves to be carried away by the blissful creations of a fertile fancy; alas! only to awake from the intoxication of their delightful ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... there is the Cathedral of Reims, there is the Sainte-Croix of Orleans. But the three zones mingle and amalgamate along the edges, like the colors in the solar spectrum. Hence, complex monuments, edifices of gradation and transition. One is Roman at the base, Gothic in the middle, Greco-Roman at the top. It is because it was six hundred years in building. This variety is rare. The donjon keep of d'Etampes is a specimen of it. But ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... by Prayer and Fasting.—The Savior's statement concerning the evil spirit that the apostles were unable to subdue—"Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting"—indicates gradation in the malignity and evil power of demons, and gradation also in the results of varying degrees of faith. The apostles who failed on the occasion referred to had been able to cast out demons at other times. Fasting, when practised in prudence, and ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... public gets only a portion of the picture, and from an enormous group of cases, a few contrasted ones are picked out for the sake of the dramatic effect. The limelight of public notice is upon them and the softer lights and shadows are omitted. The public does not see the gradation. On the one hand we see the rich woman, the millionaire art dealer, the financial pirate being leniently dealt with, on the other hand we see the little milliner, the Italian fruit vender, and the ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... courtliness of his manner disarmed hostility; but when he sat down to the piano, ran his fingers over the keys, and sang a few bars, the exquisite voice found its way to every heart. With every moment his voice became more powerful. Each gradation of emotion was rendered with an ease, an art, an expression, that made every heartstring vibrate. Then he suddenly stopped, bowed, and retired. The house rang with bravos. The dress-circle forgot its reticence and joined in the tumult of applause. He was recalled. This ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... series of electric lamps shaded by coloured glass screens, so tinted as to permit, by the simple manipulation of certain concealed mirrors, the effect of every description of light, from that of the unclouded midday sun, through every gradation of morning or afternoon light, to that of sunset, the softest dusk of evening, or even the ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... of possible scientific precision. There is, I allege, a not too clearly recognised order in the sciences which forms the gist of my case against this scientific pretension. There is a gradation in the importance of the individual instance as one passes from mechanics and physics and chemistry through the biological sciences to economics and sociology, a gradation whose correlations and implications ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... and character depended little on his manipulation of theatrical machinery. His unassailable supremacy springs from the versatile working of his insight and intellect, by virtue of which his pen limned with unerring precision almost every gradation of thought and emotion that animates the ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... and Lohar, that is in what I have designated the grade of village menials above the impure and below the cultivating castes. In Bengal the Kumhars have a much higher status and Brahmans will take water from their hands. But the gradation of caste in Bengal differs very greatly from that of other ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... of high spirits, he had burst through the invariable monotony of his articulation. Without the slightest gradation of sound, his voice broke suddenly into a screech, prolonged in its own discord until it became perfectly unendurable to hear. The effect that he had produced upon us was not lost on him. His head sank on his breast; horrid shudderings shook ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... and would regard everything as right that his sisters did, before he went there; and was a languid, long-legged, indifferent cavalier, representing men to them: things made to be managed, snubbed, admired, but always virtually subservient and in the background. Now, without perceptible gradation, his superiority was suddenly manifest; so that, irritated and apprehensive as they were, they could not, by the aid of any of their intricate mental machinery, look down on him. They tried to; they tried hard to think him ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... events, culminating in the production of mineral veins, has been proved to have taken place,* (* "Mineral Veins" page 16.) and it appears that the origin of such veins is the natural result of the plutonic intrusion. There is, also, sometimes a complete gradation from veins of perfectly crystallised granite, through others abounding in quartz at the expense of the other constituents, up to veins filled with pure quartz, as at Porth Just, near Cape Cornwall; and, again, the same ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... of a full green, the colour of emerald without, of course, its gleam. It was not by any means dull, however, either in colour or substance, and was of infinite hardness and fineness of texture. The surface was almost that of a jewel. The colour grew lighter as it rose, with gradation so fine as to be imperceptible, changing to a fine yellow almost of the colour of "mandarin" china. It was quite unlike anything I had ever seen, and did not resemble any stone or gem that I knew. I took it to be some unique mother-stone, ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... hushed—patience awhile! Though slowly night to day gives birth, Soon the young babe with radiant smile Shall gladden all the waiting earth. By fair gradation changes come, No harsh transitions mar God's plan, But slowly works from sun to sun His perfect ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... marriage with the daughter of Agricola, and its influence on his character and prospects, as also of his passing in regular gradation through the series of public honors at Rome, beginning with the quaestorship under Vespasian, and ending with the consulship under Nerva, Tacitus informs us himself (A. 9, His. i. 1), barely alluding to them, however, in the general, and leaving all the details to mere ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... if ... the great law which has regulated the peopling of the earth with animal and vegetable life is, that every change shall be gradual; that no new creature shall be formed widely different from anything before existing; that in this, as in everything else in nature, there shall be gradation and harmony—then these rudimentary organs are necessary and are an essential part of the system of nature. Ere the higher vertebrates were formed, for instance, many steps were required, and many organs had to undergo modifications from the rudimental condition in ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... care can cure him, he shall be cured,' said Ida, with a steadfast look, which gave new nobility to her beautiful face in the observant eyes of the physician—a man keen to appreciate every gradation of the physical and the mental, and to tell to the nicest shade where sense left off and soul began. Here was a woman assuredly in ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... painters are so organized that they do their best work without effort: but analyze the touches afterwards, and you will find the structure and depth of the colour laid mathematically demonstrable to be of literally infinite fineness, the last touches passing away at their edges by untraceable gradation. The very essence of a master's work may thus be removed by a picture- ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... offer in the personage of Mrs. Winter, whom you wittily propose -to turn into a mermaid. I approve the idea much: I like too the restoration of Mrs. Vernon to a plain reasonable woman. She will be a contrast to the bad characters, and but a gradation to produce Barbara, without making her too glaringly bright without any intermediate shade. In truth, as you certainly may write excellently if you please, I wish you to bestow your utmost abilities on whatever you give to the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... By this gradation of exorbitant claims and oppressive measures, have they at length arrived, my lords, at the summit of insolence; by these steps have they ascended once more the towering throne of universal monarchy; nor was any thing wanting ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... a very beautiful Gradation of Thoughts to shew how amiable Virtue is. We love a virtuous Man, says he, who lives in the remotest Parts of the Earth, though we are altogether out of the Reach of his Virtue, and can receive from it no Manner ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... to lines, gradation is to shade and color; it is their infinity—dividing them into an infinite number ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... classify the textile fabrics of the mound region it is found that, although there is an unbroken gradation from the rudest and heaviest textile constructions to the most delicate and refined textures, a number of well-marked divisions may be made. The broadest of these is based on the use of spun as opposed to ...
— Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States • William Henry Holmes
... rising art by just gradation moves, Toil builds on toil, and age on age improves: The Muse alone unequal dealt her rage, And graced with noblest pomp her earliest stage. 20 Preserved through time, the speaking scenes impart Each changeful wish of Phaedra's tortured heart; Or paint the curse that mark'd the Theban's[54] ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... the prow uppermost, as if it had sunk in a storm.... Almost every one of these ancient boats was formed out of a single oak-stem, hollowed out by blunt tools, probably stone axes, aided by the action of fire; a few were cut beautifully smooth, evidently with metallic tools. Hence a gradation could be traced from a pattern of extreme rudeness to one showing great mechanical ingenuity.... In one of the canoes a beautifully polished celt or axe of greenstone was found; in the bottom of another a plug of cork, which, as Mr. Geikie remarks, 'could only have come from the latitudes ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... descend by almost imperceptible degrees from the most perfect creature to the most formless matter—from the most highly organized animal to the most entirely inorganic substance. He will recognize this gradation as the great work of Nature; and he will observe it not only as regards size and form, but also in respect of movements, and in the successive generations ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... organization. I admit that there are certain great powers, such as magnetism, electricity, and chemistry, whose action may be traced, even by the limited means which science at present possesses, in admirable gradation, from purely unorganized to the most highly organized matter: and, I think, that Mr. Coleridge has done this with great ingenuity and striking effect; but what I object to is, that he applies to the combined operation of these ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and on all countenances an expression of reverence and confidence, as towards the just steersman of all our destinies. The King rode quite alone in front, and saluted people, CONTINUALLY taking off his hat. In doing which he observed a very marked gradation, according as the on-lookers bowing to him from the windows seemed to deserve. At one time he lifted the hat a very little; at another he took it from his head, and held it an instant beside the same; at another he sunk it as far as the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... drawen a briefe description of the Newfoundland, with the commodities by sea or lande alreadie made, and such also as are in possibilitie and great likelihood to be made: Neuerthelesse the Cardes and plats that were drawing, with the due gradation of the harbors, bayes, and capes, did perish with the Admirall: wherefore in the description following, I must omit the particulars ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... good taste, there should be, as in a picture, a judicious disposal of light and shadow, with a gradation of very bright and of very dark tints; some almost white, and ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... citizen who aspired to the consulship had to pass through a regular gradation of public offices, and the earliest age at which he could become a candidate for them was fixed by a law passed in B.C. 179, and known by the name of the Lex Annalis. The earliest age for the Quaestorship, which was the first of these magistracies, ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... between Catherine and Isabella was quick as its beginning had been warm, and they passed so rapidly through every gradation of increasing tenderness that there was shortly no fresh proof of it to be given to their friends or themselves. They called each other by their Christian name, were always arm in arm when they walked, pinned up each other's train for the dance, and were not to be divided in the set; ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... evident que l'etat ou nous voyons tous les animaux, est d'une part, le produit de la composition croissante de l'organisation, qui tend a former une gradation reguliere, et de l'autre part qu'il est celui des influences d'une multitude de circonstances tres differentes qui tendent continuellement a detruire la regularite dans la gradation de la composition ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... delicacy of one individual sense—not merely combining memory with reflection—but possessing qualities of the mind that stagger us in the contemplation of them, and which we can alone account for in the gradation existing in that wonderful system which, by different links of one vast chain, extends from the first to the last of all things, until it forms a perfect whole on the wonderful confines of the spiritual ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... chance of safety consisted in standing still. At daybreak, however, a grey light spread over the scene, and the travellers found themselves surrounded by a ring of lofty mountains, rising one above the other in grand gradation, and superbly dominated by one mighty, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... genera, until we come to leaves as representing species, the height of the branch from which they are hanging indicating their place in the growth of the great life-tree." (Clodd, "Story of Creation," p. 103.) There is an exact gradation from the lowest life forms to the highest. First such simple forms as the sponges and corals, then, through the worms, crabs, oysters, and snail to the fish, and thence through amphibia, reptiles, beasts ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... fits of unfriendliness. The bucolic character at Hayslope, you perceive, was not of that entirely genial, merry, broad-grinning sort, apparently observed in most districts visited by artists. The mild radiance of a smile was a rare sight on a field-labourer's face, and there was seldom any gradation between bovine gravity and a laugh. Nor was every labourer so honest as our friend Alick. At this very table, among Mr. Poyser's men, there is that big Ben Tholoway, a very powerful thresher, but detected more than once in carrying away his master's corn in ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... of your lily-of-the-valley bed plant two or three rows of the lovely poets' narcissus (poeticus). It opens its white flowers of the "pheasant's eye" cup at the same time as the lilies bloom, it grows sufficiently tall to make a good upward gradation, and it likes to be let severely alone. But do not forget in covering in the fall to put leaves over the narcissi instead of manure. Of other daffodils and narcissi that I have found very satisfactory, besides the good mixtures offered by reliable houses at only a dollar or a dollar ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... could observe, stood singing TE-DEUM, greatly at leisure, in his old Camp, 20th June, while Friedrich, from the first gray of morning, and diligently all day long, was withdrawing from the trenches of Prag,—Friedrich's people, self and goods getting folded out in the finest gradation, and with perfect success; no Daun to hinder him,—Daun leisurely doing TE-DEUM, forty miles off, helping on the WRONG side by that exertion! [Cogniazzo, ii. 367.]—"Poor Browne, he is dead of his wounds, in Prag yonder," writes Westphalen, in his Leitmeritz Journal, "news came to us July ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... had become accumulated, it not only formed banks, but every bush was submerged in it. The fresh sand must be derived from decomposition of the hard level plain by the action of the air: yet there should be a regular gradation in size of the waves; those nearest the windward side of the desert ought to be the smallest. Rock pigeon of ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... even the most indifferent observers of human society. Yet, nevertheless, there have been, and are, short-sighted individuals, in every gradation of it, with minds and views so warped and distorted by an ignorant selfishness, that they have opposed every improvement which tended to make the least change in their long-established habits. Such persons were they, who, during the last ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various
... publike view, and tels them their faults on the stage, not as being sorry for them, but rather wishes still hee might finde more occasions to worke on. He is the generall corrupter of spirits, yet vntainted, inducing them by gradation to much lasciuious deprauity. He is a perspicuity of vanity in variety, and suggests youth to perpetrate such vices, as otherwise they had haply nere heard of. He is (for the most part) a notable ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... strength, from the finest Merino wool to the rigid bristles of the wild boar. At just what point it can be said that the animal fiber ceases to be wool and becomes hair, is difficult to determine, because there is a gradual and imperceptible gradation from wool to hair.[1] The distinction between wool and hair lies chiefly in the great fineness, softness, and wavy delicacy of the woolen fiber, combined with its highly serrated surface—upon which the luster of the ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... every gradation, from symptoms which cannot be described in language, to severe grand mal. Gowers says: "The elements of an epileptic attack may be extended, and thereby be made less intense, though not less distressing. ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... in intensity of colouring in examples of this species, the thorax and legs being sometimes pale ferruginous; in the specimen described they are dark; every shade of gradation occurs in different individuals. ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... revenue collectors, the bureau of government works and other departments, with several hundred thousand officials, who all rank as gods beyond the grave. These deities are civilians; the military having a similar gradation for the armies of Hades, whose captains are gods, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... it may sound a ridiculous thing that a forlorn governess should be comforted for a lost love by the love of children; but it is true to nature. Women's lives have successive phases, each following the other in natural gradation—maidenhood, wifehood, motherhood: in not one of which, ordinarily, we regret the one before it, to which it is nevertheless impossible to go back. But Fortune's life had had none of these, excepting, ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... the more opulent, who could afford to post to town in aristocratic style, became reconciled to railway travelling. In the opinion of many, it was only another illustration of the levelling tendencies of the age. It put an end to that gradation of rank in travelling which was one of the few things left by which the nobleman could be distinguished from the Manchester manufacturer and bagman. But to younger sons of noble families the convenience and cheapness of ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune. It happened, however, on several occasions, that persons of rank were driven to America by political and religious quarrels. Laws were made to establish a gradation of ranks; but it was soon found that the soil of America was opposed to a territorial aristocracy. To bring that refractory land into cultivation, the constant and interested exertions of the owner himself were necessary; and when the ground was prepared, its produce was found to be insufficient ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... causeless ruin of a soul, a ruin insufficiently motived by complete trust in men and spendthrift generosity. If there was ever a man who gave so lavishly as Timon, if there was ever one so senseless blind in trusting, then he deserved his fate. There is no gradation in his giving, and none in his fall; no artistic crescendo. The whole drama is, as I have said, a scream of suffering, or rather, a long curse upon all the ordinary conditions of life. The highest qualities of Shakespeare are not ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... herself. She only felt a slight shock, such as a word or a look from one we love too often gives us,—such as a child's trivial gesture or movement makes a parent feel,—that impalpable something which in the slightest possible inflection of a syllable or gradation of a tone will sometimes leave a sting behind it, even in a trusting heart. This was all. But it was true that what she saw meant a great deal. It meant the dawning in Myrtle Hazard of one of her as yet unlived secondary lives. Bathsheba's virgin perceptions had ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... [Relative quantity.] Degree. — N. degree, grade, extent, measure, amount, ratio, stint, standard, height, pitch; reach, amplitude, range, scope, caliber; gradation, shade; tenor, compass; sphere, station, rank, standing; rate, way, sort. point, mark, stage &c. (term) 71; intensity, strength &c. (greatness) 31. Adj. comparative; gradual, shading off; within the bounds &c. (limit) 233. Adv. by degrees, gradually, inasmuch, pro tanto[It]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... presses his finger on a string he makes it shorter and tighter, and thus, causing it to vibrate more speedily, heightens the pitch. Imagine such a player to move his fingers slowly along the string, shortening it gradually as he draws his bow, the note would rise in pitch by a regular gradation; there would be no gap intervening between note and note. Here we have the analogue to the continuous spectrum, whose colours insensibly blend together without gap or interruption, from the red of the lowest pitch to the violet of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... young children. But Darius had chosen the site of his palace at some distance from the stronghold; where the river bent suddenly round a spur of the mountain, and watered a wider extent of land. The spur of the hill ran down, by an easy gradation, into the valley; and beyond it the hills separated into the wide plain of Merodasht that stretched southward many farsangs to the southern pass. Upon this promontory the king had caused to be built ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... a weight in it, and a peculiar emphasis. There is a gradation that the mystery goes upon till it come to the top. Every word hath a degree or stop in it, whereby it rises high, and still higher. "God sent,"—that is very strange; but God sent "his own Son,"—is most strange. ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its opposite, but—as its refinement! It is to be hoped, indeed, that LANGUAGE, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness, and that it will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many refinements of gradation; it is equally to be hoped that the incarnated Tartuffery of morals, which now belongs to our unconquerable "flesh and blood," will turn the words round in the mouths of us discerning ones. Here and there we understand it, and laugh at the way in which precisely the best knowledge ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... awaken the sympathy of human beings; and Raphael, in learning how to portray it, had found the way to the heart. In mere grandeur of invention he was surpassed by Michael Angelo. Titian excelled him in coloring, and Correggio in the beautiful gradation of tone; but Raphael knew how to paint the soul; in this he stood alone. This was the great secret of a power which seemed to operate like magic. In his paintings there is something which makes music on the chords ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... pressure in which is necessarily hydrostatic, and must be exerted equally in every direction. And this applies, not only to a fluid, but to a body which will yield viscously to an impressed force. There will be a gradation, according as viscosity gives place to rigidity, between the states in which the applied force resolves itself into a purely hydrostatic pressure, and in which it is transmitted through the material as a directed thrust. The nature of the force, in the most general case, of ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... pale cowardise growing over your festred reputation, which no Balm or gentle Unguent could ever make way to; and I am happy that I was the Surgeon that did apply those burning corrosives, that render you already sensible o'th' danger you were plung'd in, in teaching you, and by a fair gradation, how far, and with what curious respect and care the peace and credit of a man within, (which you ne'er thought till now) should be preferr'd before a gawdy outside; pray you fix here, for so far I ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher - Vol. 2 of 10: Introduction to The Elder Brother • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... neither an idealist, nor a philistine, nor a pleasure lover, surely he is compounded of such elements, and does not escape their implications. He desires something most of all, even though his highest ideal be only an inference from the gradation of his immediate purposes. This highest ideal represents what he conceives to be the greatest worth or value attainable in the universe, and its adoption is based upon the largest generalization that he can make or borrow. The complete justification of his ideal would involve a true knowledge ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... after him, although at some distance, Giorgione da Castelfranco, who obtained a beautiful gradation of colour in his pictures, and gave a sublime movement to his works by means of a certain darkness of shadow, very well conceived; and not inferior to him in giving force, relief, sweetness, and grace to his pictures, with his colouring, was Fra Bartolommeo di San Marco. ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... by this change of scenes the passions are interrupted in their progression, and that the principal event, being not advanced by a due gradation of preparatory incidents, wants at last the power to move, which constitutes the perfection of dramatick poetry. This reasoning is so specious, that it is received as true even by those who in daily experience feel it to be false. The interchanges of mingled scenes seldom fail to produce the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... dancing, little trays of tea and of cakes are repeatedly carried round,—astonishing cakes, in every gradation of insipidity, with the oddest names: white poison, nuns' kisses, angels' crops, cats' tails, heavenly bacon, royal eggs, coruscations, cocked hats, and esquecidos, or oblivion cakes, the butter being omitted. It seems an unexpected symbol of the plaintive ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... door and no walls; everybody can come in. To make a morning call on an Esquimaux acquaintance, one must creep through a long tunnel; his house is all walls and no door, except such a one as an apple with a worm-hole has. One might, very probably, trace a regular gradation between these two extremes. In cities where the evenings are generally hot, the people have porches at their doors, where they sit, and this is, of course, a provocative to the interchange of civilities. A good deal, which ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... nicely discriminative. Mistress of the art of pleasing, and perfectly acquainted with all the shades of politeness, she knew how to dispose them so as to conceal their boundaries, and even their gradation, from all but the most skilful observers. They might, indeed, have formed, from Mrs. Falconer's reception of each of her guests, an exact estimate of their rank, fashion, and consequence in the world; for by these standards she regulated ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... to you several sums which will increase by gradation; you will stop me when I reach the one representing the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and superb chain of the Pyrenees which forms the embattled isthmus of the peninsula, in the centre of those blue pyramids, covered in gradation with snow, forests, and downs, there opens a narrow defile, a path cut in the dried-up bed of a perpendicular torrent; it circulates among rocks, glides under bridges of frozen snow, twines along the edges of inundated precipices to scale the adjacent mountains of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... real atom of biune life can, and does, go forward, irrespective of the gradation of physical types, needs no convincing proof, other than ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... intermarriages with Roumanians are of daily occurrence; many of the gipsies do not even know their own language; and their number is rapidly diminishing. Intellectually they are talented, but lazy. Many of the men, and still more of the women, are very handsome. Although every gradation of shade is to be found amongst their faces, pretty much as one sees in the negro race in the United States, the features of the Roumanian gipsies are generally well-formed Indo-European. Nothing is more striking than to see two women pass each other, or walking ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... precisian; but I never lost hold of something better through it all. I have been a bad boy, Mr. Cassilis; I do not seek to deny that; but it was after my wife's death, and you know, with a widower, it's a different thing: sinful - I won't say no; but there is a gradation, we shall hope. And talking of that - Hark!" he broke out suddenly, his hand raised, his fingers spread, his face racked with interest and terror. "Only the rain, bless God!" he added, after a pause, and ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to them out of the fog—seemingly from a great distance— the sound of a laugh, a low, deliberate, soulless laugh, which had no more of joy than that of a hyena night-prowling in the desert; a laugh that rose by slow gradation, louder and louder, clearer, more distinct and terrible, until it seemed barely outside the narrow circle of their vision; a laugh so unnatural, so unhuman, so devilish, that it filled those hardy man-hunters with ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... musicians) that, with the help of the Omdeh, be became familiar with the remarkable peculiarity in the Arab system of music—its division of tones into thirds. Egyptian musicians consider that the European system of music is deficient in sounds. This small and delicate gradation of sound gives a peculiar softness to the performance of ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... CHURCH.—The Christian Church very early in its history became an organized body, with a regular gradation of officers, such as presbyters, bishops, metropolitans or archbishops, and patriarchs. There were at first four regular patriarchates, that is, districts superintended by patriarchs. These centred in the great cities of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch. Jerusalem ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... style—the Washington government simply collected and sifted the varied mass of opinion and material—to form from it a composite amalgam-policy that proved its only salvation. Through every change in that policy—through every gradation of animus that affected the complexion of the war—the masses of the North really believed they were fighting for the Constitution—for the flag, and for ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... After sunset there were very distinct rays proceeding from the sun, but they were shorter than on the evening of the 3d. These are caused by the tops of the great cumuli of the storm, when sunk below the horizon, intercepting the sun's rays, which still shine on the upper atmosphere. The gradation was very marked, and accorded with the different distances of the central vortex on the 3d and 4th—although, on the 4th, the nearest distance must have been over four hundred miles to the southern boundary ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... composers of North Germany. In character of subject-matter and in form there is decided advance as compared with the B flat Sonata. Kuhnau still seems rather limited in figures, and therefore repeats himself;[45] then again his movements do not always show gradation of interest. Their order and number are, indeed, perplexing, and not always satisfactory. The 2nd Sonata, in D, for instance, commences with a fine Allegro, followed first by a short Adagio, commencing in the relative minor, and intermixed with short ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... intertissued with white and yellow flowers, like a broidery of pearls and gold. The whole scene was bathed in the exquisite light, and rich with the delicate perfumes of a glorious evening, which filled the sky over his head with every perfect gradation of rose and amber and amethyst, and breathed over the quiet landscape a sensation of unbroken peace. But peace did not remain long in Eric's heart; each well-remembered landmark filled his soul with recollections of the days when he had returned from school, oh! ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... occasion dissatisfaction there. Supplies were necessary for some time to come. The Negros did not yet generally increase by birth. The gradation of ages was not yet duly filled. These and many defects might ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... to sit down on the stove-couch; but, on perceiving near the edge of the couch two embroidered cushions, placed one opposite the other, she thought of the gradation of seats, and did not therefore place herself on the couch, but on a chair on the eastern side of the room; whereupon the waiting maids, in attendance in these quarters, hastened to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the family of Pepys is illustrated every gradation of legal rank from Reader of an Inn of Court to Lord ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... is complete in me: In me is matter's last gradation lost, And the next step is spirit—Deity! I can command the lightning, and am dust! A monarch, and a slave; a worm, a god! Whence came I here, and how? so marvelously Constructed and conceived? Unknown! This clod Lives merely through some ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... treatment, and on it, therefore, I propose to draw for the materials of the present course. It will be best to begin with the few simple facts regarding light which were known to the ancients, and to pass from them, in historic gradation, to the more abstruse discoveries ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... the Rose the stamens exhibited almost every conceivable gradation between their ordinary form and that of the carpels, while some of the ovules contained pollen in greater or less abundance. Speaking generally, the most common state of things in these flowers was the occurrence on the throat of the calyx, in the ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... individual's life—those habits that touch his existence as an organism—are the most persistent and imperative. Beyond these come the higher wants—later-formed habits of the individual or the race—in a somewhat irregular and by no means invariable gradation. Some of these higher wants, as for instance the habitual use of certain stimulants, or the need of salvation (in the eschatological sense), or of good repute, may in some cases take precedence of the lower or more ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... connection with Goethe's Leipzig period we gave a specimen of the best work he was then capable of producing; when we place beside it such a poem as the following, we are reminded of the saying of Emerson that "the soul's advances are not made by gradation ... but rather by ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... have already related, I imagine it will be concluded that Harley was of the latter species of bashful animals; at least, if Mr. Silton's principle is just, it may be argued on this side; for the gradation of the first mentioned sort, it is certain, he never attained. Some part of his external appearance was modelled from the company of those gentlemen, whom the antiquity of a family, now possessed of bare 250 pounds ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... of the British Museum, and of uniting it with the pictures of the National Gallery, do you comprehend the whole range of the sculpture in the British Museum, commencing with the Egyptian, and going down through its regular series of gradation to the decline of the art?—Yes, because my great hope respecting the National Gallery is, that it may become a perfectly consecutive chronological arrangement, and it seems to me that it is one of the chief characteristics of a National ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... some other grammarians, inquire into the original of their form, as an antiquarian; nor into their formation and prolation by the organs of speech, as a mechanick, anatomist, or physiologist; nor into the properties and gradation of sounds, or the elegance or harshness of particular combinations, as a writer of universal and transcendental grammar. I consider the English alphabet only as it is English; and even in this narrow disquisition I follow the example of former grammarians, perhaps with ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... use, and neither can do the office of the other. Water is good to drink, coal to burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man. What is not good they call the worst, and what is not hateful, ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... classes above described blend into one another with every shade of gradation. Some are admirably proficient in the well-known sciences—that is to say, they have good health, good looks, good temper, common sense, and energy, and they hold all these good things in such perfection as to be altogether without introspection—to ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... her design, I know not; it is not improbable that the lady Mason might persuade or compel her to desist, or, perhaps, she could not easily find accomplices wicked enough to concur in so cruel an action; for it may be conceived, that those who had, by a long gradation of guilt, hardened their hearts against the sense of common wickedness, would yet be shocked at the design of a mother to expose her son to slavery and want, to expose him without interest, and without provocation; and Savage might, on this occasion, find protectors and advocates ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... aptly join'd, Is bodied forth the second whole. Regard gradation, lest the soul Of Discord ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... possible impulse that had driven him into the Vermont woods, or the natural and rational step he would have taken had he never seen her. At any rate, she felt that he was daily growing more remote, and that by a nice gradation of effort he was consciously withdrawing himself. And yet she could scarcely dwell on a single word or act, and say: "This proves it." His manner toward her was most cordial. When they conversed he looked at her steadily and directly, and would respond in ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... two or three times a month as part of their family-service—are apt to get so far down. The experienced professionals and early risers secure the best places and choice of rocks; and among the hundreds at work you can discern something like a physical gradation. At the next bridge the women look better, stronger; more young faces appear; and the further you follow the river-course towards the Jardin des Plantes, the more the appearance of the blanchisseuses improves,—so that within the space of a mile you can see well exemplified one natural ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... about Oriental etiquette not to introduce the matter on which he had come at the outset of the conversation. He passed and received the necessary compliments first, endured a discussion of local trade prospects, and then by an easy gradation led up to the powers of the local Kady. He did not speak Arabic himself, and Rad el Moussa had no English. But they had both served a life apprenticeship to sea trading, and the curse of the Tower of Babel had very little power over them. In the memories of each there were ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... 'Ideal,' and compose some very pretty music to the enclosed words, with which Rag's ideal flame has inspired Rag—surtout, let it be as good as possible, with accompaniment a l'avenant. An alteration in the music of each stanza would render the gradation of energy expressed in the words, 'Je compte sur toi.'" (How du Maurier came by the name of "Rag" I must tell later on.) Then ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... Mrs. John, Mr. and Mrs. Henry, and Mr. and Mrs. James Pendleton;" and so Mrs. Smith kept on in continuous nomenclature for a considerable time. It was only as she came down into the lower ranks of fashion, after a regular gradation, that she hesitated for a moment—and then her pauses grew ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... called an 'influence.' In the hamlets, so universal is this feeling amongst the natives, so habitual the impulse to classify themselves and to look up to some one as their superior in the scale of society, that the custom descends through every gradation of life and its occupations, and in some of the villages the missionaries found it necessary to appoint two schoolmasters, even where there was less than occupation for one—'influence,' as well as ability to teach, being an essential qualification; and ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... accumulated at a later period, and slanting at an angle of 45 deg., displayed distinct strata of light brown, a deep band of grey, then dark brown, light brown, a thin layer of grey, and then a gradation of beautiful warm burnt sienna colour, getting richer and richer in tone towards the base. Here at the bottom, all round the mountain, and in appearance not unlike the waves of a choppy sea in shallow water, rose hundreds of broken-up, pointed hillocks, the point of each ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... prime of his life like the grass of the fields. He saw the bloody funeral services in which the cruel death of the young man was mourned, {59} and heard the joyful hymns of triumph, and the gay songs that greeted his return to life. By a skilfully arranged gradation of feelings the onlookers were uplifted to a state of rapturous ecstasy. Feminine devotion in particular found encouragement and enjoyment in these ceremonies, and the Great Mother, the fecund and generous goddess, was always especially worshiped ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... women at Upoto wear no clothes whatever, and came up to us in the most unreserved manner. An interesting gradation in the arrangement of the female costume has been observed by us: as we ascended the Congo, the higher up the river we found ourselves, the higher the dress reached, till it has now, at last, culminated in absolute ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Glacial epoch or between different glacial epochs in England, when the Englishman was a savage, using rude stone tools, was then fully ascertained, and, what was more significant, there were clearly shown a gradation and evolution even in the history of that period. It was found that this ancient Stone epoch showed progress and development. In the upper layers of the caves, with remains of the reindeer, who, although he has migrated from these regions, still exists in more northern climates, were found stone ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... design is made up of divisions marked out in gold, and filled either with coloured enamels or pieces of polished stone. The general effect is one of elegance, refinement, and harmony, the three principal elements of the design becoming enlarged from the top downwards in a deftly adjusted gradation. The dead-gold of the cartouche in the upper centre is set off below by the brightly variegated and slightly undulating band of colours of the sparrow-hawk, while the urseus and vulture, associated together with one pair of wings, envelope the upper portions in a half-circle of enamels, of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... of any species. In many ants, especially those of tropical climates, the workers, again, are of two classes, whose structure and functions are widely different. In some species they are wonderfully unlike each other, and constitute two well-defined forms of workers. In others, there is a gradation of individuals between the two extremes. The curious differences in structure and habits between these two classes form an interesting, but very difficult, study. It is one of the great peculiarities of the Sauba ant to possess three ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... confided to his management. For, not only was it the strongest, and susceptible of the highest charge of coloring, but it had also the advantage of grouping together all the principal delinquents of the trial, and affording a gradation of hue, from the showy and prominent enormities of the Governor-General and Sir Elijah Impey in the front of the picture, to the subordinate and half-tint iniquity of the Middletons and Bristows ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... intermediate persons should be marched off to the dens of the wild beasts: "Tell them off," said he, "from the bald man to the bald man." Yet these were prisoners committed, not for punishment, but trial. Nor, had it been otherwise, were the charges against them equal, but running through every gradation of guilt. But the elogia or records of their commitment, he would not so much as look at. With such inordinate capacities for cruelty, we cannot wonder that he should in his common conversation have deplored ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... than black, or than other things about it, assume a given shade, as dark as, with due reference to other things, you can have it, but no darker. Mark that for your extreme dark on the object, and between those limits get as much drawing as you can, by subtlety of gradation. That will tax your powers of drawing indeed; and you will find this, which seems a childish and simple way of going to work, requires verily a thousandfold more power to carry out than all the pseudo-scientific abstractions that ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... against all applications of the Darwinian theory. As in animal life and likewise in vegetable, so in languages, the process of change is said to be insensible: sounds, like animals, are supposed to pass into one another by imperceptible gradation. But in both cases the newly-created forms soon become fixed; there are few if any vestiges of the intermediate links, and so the better half of the evidence of ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... Diadumenia'nus, whom he took as partner in the empire. 25. Macri'nus was fifty-three years old when he entered upon the government. He was of obscure parentage; some say by birth a Moor, who, by the mere gradation of office, being made first prefect of the praetorian bands, was now, by treason and accident, called ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... titles, which of course have only a general correspondence with the Greek Polemarch, Lochagus, etc.] who in their turn had to see that the required movement was executed by the men under their command: for such was the regular gradation of authority and responsibility in the Spartan army. Thanks to this perfect organization, in a very few minutes every man was in his place and ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... gathering dusky cool, In slow gradation fine? Death's lovely shadow, flickering full Of eyes ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... oasis. They had at first been struck by the sudden view of so many magnificent palaces, but they now perceived that they were intermingled with mean cottages: a circumstance which indicated the want of gradation among the classes, and that luxury had not been generated there, as in other countries, by industry, but had preceded it; whereas, in the natural order, it ought to be more or less its ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... other species continually die out and disappear, so that the present condition of the organic world is clearly derived by a natural process of gradual extinction and creation of species from that of the latest geological periods. We may therefore safely infer a like gradation and natural sequence from one geological epoch ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... a citizen; and his frankness, conciliatory disposition, and elevated demeanour, an estimable one. The expressions of regret as general as he was known, and not uttered by friends and acquaintance only, but by every gradation of class, not only by grown persons, but young children, are the test of his worth. Such too is the only eulogium worthy of the good and brave, and the citizens of Quebec have, with solemn emotions, pronounced it on his memory. ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... stone which have come down to us. They display both beauty and variety. That great variety must have taken place in the tragical department (in the comic we can have no doubt about the matter) is evident from the rich store of technical expressions in the Greek language, for every gradation of the age, and character of masks. See the Onomasticon of Jul. Pollux. In the marble masks, however, we can neither see the thinness of the mass from which the real masks were executed, the more delicate colouring, nor the exquisite ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... political life, and each member of the town learned early his inalienable right to a participation in all the benefits which the community could confer. In town-meeting he learned to vote and to be voted for; a gradation of offices from fence-viewer or hog-reeve to selectman gave training in administration to all who had any capacity for organization or leadership; the discussion of town affairs sharpened the wits, and, better still, educated the towns-man in a distinct recognition of his political relations; ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... In front, fantastic fishes, and the birds of the mountain and the lake, confessed His power, who sat there in His calm godlike beauty, His eye ranging over all that still infinity of His own works, over all that wondrous line of figures, which seemed to express every gradation of spiritual consciousness, from the dark self-condemned dislike of Judas's averted and wily face, through mere animal greediness to the first dawnings of surprise, and on to the manly awe and gratitude of Andrew's majestic figure, and the self-abhorrent humility of Peter, as he shrank ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... to understand that she had expected some other kind of painful communication—doubtless about the divorce Lord Loudwater had threatened. But he had composed a series of phrases leading up by a nice gradation to the final announcement, and he went on: "Yes. There is very little likelihood of ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... the territory of the monastery commences; and it is one that impresses itself on the imagination and the memory in a measure not likely to be forgotten. The change is like a pantomime transformation scene! The traveller passes without the slightest intermediate gradation from the dreary scene which has been described, into the shade and the beauty of a region of magnificent and well-managed forest! The bodily delight of passing from the severe glare of the sun into this coolness, welcome ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... whose solemnity prefaced millions of common place epitaphs before Tennyson taught grief to speak, lamenting his dead friend in every phase and variety of regret. With such gradation and difference of sorrow will the recent death of a very remarkable woman, Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, be mourned for by all who knew her, and with such a sense of blank loss will they long continue to lament one whose public success as an author was only commensurate with the ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... war, at present absorb the visible wealth of the nation. Amongst them are many respectable persons. The lower orders of the people have been taught, by restless visionaries, to consider the destinations of Providence, which had before, by an imperceptible gradation of social colouring, united the russet brown to the magisterial purple, as usurpations over those natural rights which have been impressed without illustration, and magnified by a mischievous mystery. In the fierce pursuit ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... their intrinsic value. The leading considerations urged in favor of the measure referred to are that in almost all the land districts, and particularly in those in which the lands have been long surveyed and exposed to sale, there are still remaining numerous and large tracts of every gradation of value, from the Government price downward; that these lands will not be purchased at the Government price so long as better can be conveniently obtained for the same amount; that there are large tracts which even the improvements of the adjacent lands ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Martin van Buren • Martin van Buren
... gradation of colour can be effected in this way, and it applies to every form of design—floral or arabesque. Natural flowers have mostly been worked ...
— Handbook of Embroidery • L. Higgin
... enough to say that there was to be found at that time one who was in every way perfect, and who brought his work, whether in invention, or design, or colouring, to the standard of to-day, and contrived the sweet gradation of his figures with the deep shades of colour, in a manner that the lights remained only on the parts in relief, and likewise contrived those perforations and certain extraordinary refinements in marble statuary that are seen in the statues of to-day? The credit ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... thermometer is from 45deg Fahr., the lowest known extreme, or 48deg, the ordinary lowest extreme of January, to 82deg, the ordinary, or 86deg, the highest known extreme of July, near the level of the sea. Between these two points (both taken in the shade) there is from month to month a pretty regular gradation of increase or decrease, amounting to somewhat less than four degrees. In winter the prevailing winds are from the north-west, west and south; in summer the most frequent are the north, north-east and east. The weather is often ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... naturally, degenerates into tinsel or pertness. Pertness is the mistaken affection of grace, as pedantry produces erroneous dignity; the familiarity of the one, and the clumsiness of the other, distort or prevent grace. Nature, that furnishes samples of all qualities, and on the scale of gradation exhibits all possible shades, affords us types that are more apposite than words. The eagle is sublime, the lion majestic, the swan graceful, the monkey pert, the bear ridiculously awkward. I mention these as more ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... certain degree, but retaining distinctly its woody texture. Dr. MacCulloch, On Rocks, p. 636., observes: "In its chemical properties, lignite holds a station intermediate between peat and coal; while among the varieties a gradation in this respect may be traced; the brown and more organised kinds approaching very near to peat, while the more compact kinds, such as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... sees material objects. It is taught to name them. It next learns the qualities of things; as the sweetness of sugar, the darkness of night, the beauty of flowers. From this it ascends by gradation to the higher attainments of knowledge as revealed in the empire of mind, as well as matter. Great care should be taken that this advancement be easy, natural, and thoro. It should be constantly impressed with the importance of obtaining clear and definite ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... acknowledged and repaid this tribute of courtesy, by a condescension still more refined, and by attentions yet more delicate than their own. The harshness of power was so ingeniously veiled, every shade of approbation was so nicely marked, and every gradation of favor so finely discriminated, that the tact of good society—that acquired sense, which reveals to us the impression we make on those with whom we associate—became the indispensable condition of existence at Versailles and Marly. The inmates of those ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... parallel this with the softness, the winding surface, the unbroken continuance, the easy gradation of the beautiful in other things; and all the diversities of the several senses, with all their several affections; will rather help to throw lights from one another to finish one clear, consistent idea of the whole, than ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... capacities, and, (what is considered as a victory in the art) an happy conjunction of utility and pleasure."[024] Hence Quintilian recommends them, as singularly useful, and as admirably adapted, to the puerile age; as a just gradation between the language of the nurse and the preceptor, and as furnishing maxims of prudence and virtue, at a time when the speculative principles of philosophy are too difficult to be understood. Hence also having been introduced by most ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... gradually extinguishing them ever since. Of these traits, stagnating influences upon their career, perhaps the most important is the great quality of "impersonality."[CGa] "The peoples inhabiting it [the northern hemisphere] grow steadily more personal as we go West. So unmistakable is this gradation that we are almost tempted to ascribe it to cosmical rather than to human causes.... The sense of self grows more intense as we follow the wake of the setting sun, and fades steadily as we advance into ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... happily expressed it—wiser than all the wise and good men who have lived before us. It was their wish, to see public and private virtues, not dissonant and jarring, and mutually destructive, but harmoniously combined, growing out of one another in a noble and orderly gradation, reciprocally supporting and supported. In one of the most fortunate periods of our history this country was governed by a connection; I mean the great connection of Whigs in the reign of Queen Anne. They were complimented upon the principle of this connection by a poet who was in high ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... mere grazes to wounds laying bare the bone. Their peculiarity was centred in the fact that a definite loss of substance accompanied them, the skin being actually carried away by the bullet; hence gaping was the rule. Every gradation in depth was met with, but the only situations in which wounds of considerable length could occur were the frontal region in tranverse shots, or, when the bullet passed sagitally, the sides of the head, or the flat area ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... sub-kingdom of plants is embraced an enormous assemblage of plants, differing widely in size and complexity, and yet showing a sufficiently complete gradation from the lowest to the highest as to make it impracticable to make more than one sub-kingdom to include them. They are nearly all aquatic forms, although many of them will survive long periods of drying, such forms occurring on moist ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... opposed to the Divine Being, and therefore having no real being, the ground of evil. (3) The fulness of divine potencies, AEons, which are thought of partly as powers, partly as real ideas, partly as relatively independent beings, presenting in gradation the unfolding and revelation of the Godhead, but at the same time rendering possible the transition of the higher to the lower. (4) The Cosmos as a mixture of matter with divine sparks, which has arisen from a ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... successive valleys by allied species, sometimes feeding on the same, sometimes on different plants. In every such case the valleys that are nearest to each other furnish the most nearly allied forms; and a full set of the varieties of each species presents a minute gradation of forms between the more divergent types found in the more ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... a habit, as it were, of perceiving and abhorring evil, however remote from the immediate sphere of sensations with which that individual mind is conversant. Imagination or mind employed in prophetically imaging forth its objects, is that faculty of human nature on which every gradation of its progress, nay, every, the minutest, change, depends. Pain or pleasure, if subtly analysed, will be found to consist entirely in prospect. The only distinction between the selfish man and the virtuous man ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... reconsideration. It is wrong, certainly, to treat ever as an affix, and to mistake the first two words of "What ever are you doing?" for the one word "whatever;" but to suppose the "ever" meaningless and inert, is to overlook a clearly marked and very useful gradation of emphasis. "What are you doing?" expresses simple curiosity; "What ever are you doing?" expresses surprise; "What the devil are you doing?" expresses anger—we need not run farther up the scale. ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer |
