"Intricacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nerves, like a great electrical system by which messages are conveyed from the brain to all parts of the body. He has power to reason and to plan and carry out these plans. Truly no machine can be compared to man for intricacy of construction and harmony of action. Who, then, is the Creator of this wonderful thing? We must conclude that there was a great First Cause who made and put into action all things visible in the universe, as well as things to us invisible. And who is ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... ownership of materials which go to make the goods we need. Private ownership of land, tools, and raw materials may at one stage of economic development be a method of stimulating production and one which does not greatly interfere with equitable distribution. When, however, the intricacy and length of technical production increased, the ownership of these things becomes a monopoly, which easily makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. Today, therefore, we are challenging this ownership; we are demanding ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... that they are inspired by race hatred. They believe that an Irish legislature would be controlled by a majority, representatives mainly of small farmers, men who had no knowledge of affairs, or of the peculiar needs of Ulster industry, or the intricacy of the problems involved in carrying on an international trade; that the religious ideas of the majority would be so favored in education and government that the favoritism would amount to religious oppression. They are also convinced that no small country in the present state of the world ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... trousers had won the approbation of a man as expert in such matters as he who had spoken to him. He went straight to the point indicated by the young man, saw the person he was seeking dancing an ete, which seemed, by the intricacy of its weaving, if I may be pardoned for this technical term, to have issued from ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... domestic hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has cost steady ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... were so frequent, and their changes for special occasions were so many, that they created some confusion and intricacy in the old Services. We may, however, recognise the beauty and worshipfulness of the plan. In the Visitation of the Sick, the words O Saviour of the world &c. as used with Psalm lxxi. are a survival of it. The verse Remember not Lord &c. was introduced ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... who is shocked by 'slabby-bellies,' 'mucus,' 'Priapulids'; the reader who is awed by the paraded learning of 'Splendour by Numbers,' by the deliberate intricacy of 'Beauty,' or the delicate fatigue of 'The Death of Lully' in Limbo—these are no audience for an artist. It tickles the author's fancy, stretches his wits, flatters his deviltry to provoke and witness such consternation and such respect. But the process ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... attention; the way in which they fortify their villages appears almost scientific. The town in which I lived was surrounded by several deep moats, or ditches, one within the other, arranged with so much intricacy, that it was at first difficult to find my way out of it; then there were several walls, and in the centre a sort of citadel on a hill surmounted by a rock. On the summit of the rock stood a flagstaff, on which was hoisted, in war-time, the ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... outskirts of a forest, just where its intricacy had broken away into picturesque openings, leaving visible some strange old trees with knotted trunks and mysteriously twisted branches, sat a young girl sketching. She was intently engaged, but as her eyes were ever and anon raised from ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... amounting almost to awe, for the men who alone understood and were able to expound the interminable complexity of the rights of property, and the relations of commercial and personal dependence involved in your system. What, indeed, could possibly give a more powerful impression of the intricacy and artificiality of that system than the fact that it was necessary to set apart from other pursuits the cream of the intellect of every generation, in order to provide a body of pundits able to make it even vaguely ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... fully mastered the intricacy of the brain structure, he will find his difficulties removed by studying two more skilful dissections. The following engraving presents the appearances when we cut through the middle of the brain horizontally and reveal the bottom of the ventricles, in which we ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... I have a problem of any intricacy, I invent a case which fits the facts and the assumed motives of one of the parties. Then I work at that case until I find whether it leads to elucidation or to some fundamental disagreement. In the latter case I reject it and begin the ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... end of the egg is entirely spotless, and I have a beautiful specimen now before me in which the only markings consist of a ring of delicate lines round the large end. Some idea of the delicacy and intricacy of these lines may be formed when I mention that this zone is barely one tenth of an inch broad, and yet in a good light between twenty and thirty interlaced lines making up this zone ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... manuscripts of different ages and characters induced me to consult the two great Benedictine works, the Diplomatica of Mabillon, and the Palaeographia of Montfaucon. I studied the theory without attaining the practice of the art: nor should I complain of the intricacy of Greek abbreviations and Gothic alphabets, since every day, in a familiar language, I am at a loss to decipher the hieroglyphics of a female note. In a tranquil scene, which revived the memory of my first ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... in her imagination with the fairies in an intricacy that would have defied the best reasonings ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... to his neighbor the arrangement and intricacy of our trenches. He has seen a military map and made some calculations. In the sector occupied by our regiment there are fifteen lines of French trenches. Some are abandoned, invaded by grass, and half leveled; the others solidly upkept and bristling with men. These parallels are joined up ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... that with many of us the recommendation of our own favorite pursuits is rooted more in conceit of ourselves, than affection towards others, so that sometimes in our very pointing of the way, we had rather that the intricacy of it should be admired than unfolded, whence a natural distrust of such recommendation may well have place in the minds of those who have not yet perceived any value in the thing praised, and because also, men in the present century understand ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... made this English Translation something more plain and correct than the Spanish. Some few notorious faults either of the Printer or the Interpreter, I am sure I have redressed. But the Spanish Translator complaining much of the intricacy of Stile in the Original (as flowing from a person who, as hath been said, was no Scholar) as he was pardonable, being in great haste, for not rendring his own Version so distinct and elaborate as he could desire; so must I be excused from the one, that is to say, Elegancy, if I have cautiously declined ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin
... intellectual science, all is simple; it is only an easy chapter in acoustics. But in studying it on the side of the emotions, in studying the laws of counterpoint and of musical form, which are governed by the effect upon the ear and the heart, we find intricacy and difficulties, increased beyond our ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... curiously solitary youth as I remember him, who played the 'cello with great perseverance and considerable success. At soldiers he was something of a genius, though his games were of an intricacy which failed to commend itself to me altogether. In his great soldier days he not only made history, but wrote it—a height to which ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... captivity; but long ere that he will have other bonds thrown around him, some of which he can never break. He will weave with his own hands the silken cord of love, coil it about him, knot it with Gordian intricacy, net it with Vulcan strength, and then, with blind simplicity, place it in Beauty's hand to lead him captive to her capricious will. My dear Madam, did not Tommy's father do the same foolish thing? And is he not grateful to the lovely Mrs. Asmodeus for the gentleness with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... these very lapses is that they remain purely exceptional. They do not affect either the tone of his writing or the value and intricacy of his argument. They may be compared to those undignified and valueless chips of conversational English that pop up in the best rhetoric if it be the rhetoric of an ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... his avowed enemy? Even if Gwendoline meant to marry the young fellow Granville, with her father's consent, how could Nevitt himself levy blackmail upon Gilbert Gildersleeve by his knowledge of the two Warings' claim to the property? A complication surely. Was there not some unexpected intricacy here which the cunning schemer himself didn't yet understand, but which might redound, if unravelled, to his ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... him—on purpose; indeed he wouldn't have needed to—he knows every page, as I do, by heart. They all worked in him together, and some day somewhere, when he wasn't thinking, they fell, in all their superb intricacy, into the one right combination. The figure in the carpet came out. That's the way he knew it would come and the real reason—you didn't in the least understand, but I suppose I may tell you now—why ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... narrow streets I steered the car out of Cadiz. In all directions they branched off from one another, interlacing, overlapping with the intricacy of a puzzle. The houses were high, too, and there was not a window with glittering balcony of glass and iron, where dark-eyed women did not lean between heaven and earth, to smile down upon our humming motor. It was all ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... introduction of Pitt's bill the ministry to which he then belonged fell. The one which followed refrained from dealing at all with the subject, except by recourse to an expedient not uncommon with party leaders, dealing with a new question of admitted intricacy. They passed a bill leaving the whole matter to the Crown for executive action. Accordingly, in July, 1783, a proclamation was issued permitting intercourse between the islands and the American continent, in a long list of specified articles, but only ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... various grotesque dances, which are originals in their kind, being extremely difficult to execute, not only for the variety of the steps, but for the intricacy and uncommonness, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... predilection for law and chicanery, and a respect amounting to veneration for written documents, red tape, and sealing-wax. Master Pothier's acuteness in picking holes in the actes of a rival notary was only surpassed by the elaborate intricacy of his own, which he boasted, not without reason, would puzzle the Parliament of Paris, and confound the ingenuity of the sharpest advocates of Rouen. Master Pothier's actes were as full of embryo disputes as a fig is full of seeds, and usually ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... man's relation to man constitutes one of the primary problems of life. Where this adjustment is complicated by diverse physical peculiarities and by different inherited or acquired characteristics, the problem becomes one of the greatest intricacy that has ever taxed human wisdom and patience ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 3, September, 1898 • Various
... the second, an amphibrachys; the third, a trochee; and the fourth an amphimacer; and yet our schoolboy, with no other liberty but that of inflicting pain, had triumphantly scanned it as five iambs. Perceive, now, this fresh richness of intricacy in the web; this fourth orange, hitherto unremarked, but still kept flying with the others. What had seemed to be one thing it now appears is two; and, like some puzzle in arithmetic, the verse is made at the same time to read in fives ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... suffice to illustrate the intricacy of the legislation passed in pursuance of this policy. It describes a change of detailed policy in support and regulation of ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... saw also in 'Falstaff' the wittiest and most brilliant musical comedy since 'Die Meistersinger', and in 'Madama Butterfly' a lyric of infinite delicacy, free from any suggestion of unworthy emotion. Among recent French operas, works of tragic import, treated with all the intricacy of the most advanced modern schools, have been received with far greater favour than have been shown to works of the lighter class which we associate with the genius of the French nation; and of late years the vogue ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... colour in the organic world we have been led to realise the wonderful complexity of the adaptations which bring each species into harmonious relation with all those which surround it, and which thus link together the whole of nature in a network of relations of marvellous intricacy. Yet all this is but, as it were, the outward show and garment of nature, behind which lies the inner structure—the framework, the vessels, the cells, the circulating fluids, and the digestive and reproductive processes,—and behind these again those mysterious ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... gray reception-room, the soft, fat rugs, the intricacies of banisters and alcoves and curtained cubby-holes—all reflected his personality, all corroborated the ensemble. It was his habitat, his distinctly, from the pronounced but meaningless intricacy of the architecture to the studied but unconvincing tints, like a man who suddenly starts to speak, but checks himself, realising he has nothing in particular ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... vessels solely with a wish for vengeance, since it was not usual for ships of the force of the Proserpine to turn aside to molest the poor fishermen and coasters. A few execrations followed, quite as a matter of course, but the intricacy of the channel and the necessity of having all his eyes about him soon drove every other thought from the mind of the dashing privateersman but such as were connected with the care and safety of his ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... drawing, in silver-point, of an orange-tree in mingled fruit and bloom—an exquisite piece of work, of a Japanese truth, intricacy, and perfection. Fenwick looked at it in silence. These silver-point drawings of Welby's were already famous. In the preceding May there had been an exhibition of them at an artistic club. At the top of the drawing was an inscription in a minute handwriting—'Sorrento: Christmas Day,' with ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... could barely make the son of a simple esquire a match for an emperor's daughter, and the suit did not prosper. Political reasons may have interfered. Suffolk, too, is accused by the Venetian ambassador of having already had three wives.[187] This seems to be an exaggeration, but the intricacy (p. 081) of the Duke's marital relationships, and the facility with which he renounced them might well have served as a precedent to his ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues on March 15, 1649. He removed from High Holborn to Spring Gardens to be near the scene of his labours, and was soon afterwards provided with an official residence in Whitehall Palace, a huge intricacy of passages and chambers, of which but a fragment now remains. His first performance was in some measure a false start; for the epistle offering amity to the Senate of Hamburg, clothed in his best Latin, was so unamiably regarded by that body that the English envoy never formally delivered ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... case—that ambiguity runs through him in everything. Burke has found an admirable word for it in the Persian tongue, for which we have no translation, but it means an intricacy involved so deep as to be ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... spoiled; great pumpkins elsewhere; pastures; mowing ground;—all cultivated by the boys. Their residence, a great brick building, painted green, and standing on the summit of a rising ground, exposed to the winds of the bay. Vessels flitting past; great ships, with intricacy of rigging and various sails; schooners, sloops, with their one or two broad sheets of canvas: going on different tacks, so that the spectator might think that there was a different wind for each ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Exquisite intricacy! Wilfrid worked through all the intervolutions, and nearly forgot his wretchedness in admiration of his sister's mental endowments. He was the more willing to magnify them, inasmuch as he thereby strengthened his hope that liberty would follow the speaking of the talismanic name of Eltham to Lady ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... reach the limit of ingenuity and intricacy; and it is well for the sanity of his readers that the author gives a list of solutions at the ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... of an earlier form of the word, which has nothing to do with fire at all, but only with mixing or staining; and then, to make the whole group of thoughts inextricably complex, yet rich and subtle in proportion to their intricacy, the various rose and crimson colors of the murex dye,—the crimson and purple of the poppy, and fruit of the palm,— and the association of all these with the hue of blood,—partly direct, partly through a confusion between the word signifying "slaughter" and ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... the English party and the people themselves, the two lines of mounted men helped to keep back the rush of the crowd who pressed forward to see the great man of whose deeds they had just heard, and the length, the intricacy, and narrowness of the streets played their part in lessening the gathering; but it was a weary journey—one which grew slower and slower, till the city was completely traversed, and the mounted men rode off to one side, leaving ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... unfortunate turn, for the policeman saw him take it, and, knowing every intricacy of the town, he was enabled to take a cross cut by a lane, accompanied by several of his brother constables, who had joined him by this time, and by such of the ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... penetrated far, far into its depths, finding their greatest enjoyment in so doing. Starting with the simpler forms of the art left by their predecessors, they deepened, they broadened and varied those forms; while, with every intricacy created, they experienced the sweetest of pleasure. And one of the most fitting tributes that can be paid to these and others of the noble masters of harmony is beautifully embodied in ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... The intricacy of these dialects is another peculiarity. In the Missionary College at Lahainaluna, on Mowee, one of the Sandwich Islands, I saw a tabular exhibition of a Hawiian verb, conjugated through all its moods and tenses. It covered ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... most watchful jealousy. Its headwaters approached those of the Canadian river Chaudiere, the mouth of which is near Quebec; and by ascending the former stream and crossing to the headwaters of the latter, through an intricacy of forests, hills, ponds, and marshes, it was possible for a small band of hardy men, unencumbered by cannon, to reach the Canadian capital,—as was done long after by the followers of Benedict Arnold. Hence it was thought a matter of the ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... which the serious imagination loves to brood,—fortune, mutability, death,—just as inevitably as the runnel, trickling among the summer hills, on which sheep are bleating, leads you to the sea; or as, turning down the first street you come to in the city, you are led finally, albeit by many an intricacy, out into the open country, with its waste places and its woods, where you are lost in a sense of strangeness and solitariness. The world is to the meditative man what the mulberry plant is to the silkworm. The essay-writer ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... called to his aid in writing the conclusion of Old Mortality, assured him, as the fruit of her experience in reading through the stock of three circulating libraries that, in a novel, young people may fall in love without the countenance of their parents, "because it is essential to the necessary intricacy of the story." But apart from his characters, who are so colourless that they hardly hold our attention, Walpole bequeathed to his successors a remarkable collection of useful "properties." The background of his story is a Gothic castle, singularly unenchanted it is true, but capable of being ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... classic figures and arabesques, but the column of design is naively broken by the far perspective of a formal garden. The Italian cartoonist would have built his border, figure and arabesque, one above another like a fantastic column (vide Mr. Blumenthal's Mercury border). The Fleming saw the intricacy, the multiplied detail, but missed the intellectual harmony. But, such trifles apart, the Flemish examples of this style that have come to us are thrilling in their beauty of colour, and borders such as this are an infinite joy. This tapestry was woven ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... unreasonable to suppose that any army under competent leadership could be committed to them. The same might surely be said of the route by the Nuksan Pass into the valley of Chitral and the Kunar, which joins the Khyber route not far from Jelalabad. Its length and intricacy alone, independently of the intractable nature of the tribes which border it on either side, and of the fact that the Nuksan Pass is only open for half the year, would surely place it beyond the consideration of any general who aspired to invade India ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... realms of fantastic speculation, shaped by argument, faultlessly cast in logical moulds. Too faultlessly methought, for looking at the mere heaps of architectural rubbish, let alone the earth, the various vegetations which have accumulated upon it, I had a sense of the infinite intricacy of all reality, and of the partiality and insufficiency of the paths which our reason (or our fancy in the garb of reason) cuts into it. Rituals and laws whose meaning had become mere shibboleths two thousand years ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... Embankment and in Cheapside should have seized Ludgate Hill to the top of the steps of St. Paul's and left the body of the cathedral to its opponent. The lines securing this important salient are of immense strength and intricacy, with many great avenues of approach. The front line is double across the greater part of the crest, and behind it is a very deep, strong, trebly wired support line which is double at ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... 1782, and is thus entered: "Charles Cooper, of the City of Norwich, eldest son of Charles Cooper of the same place, merchant, admitted 22nd of April, 1782." Prior to this, a remarkable incident occurred in his life: he undertook the conduct of a cause of great intricacy and importance for a pauper, a labouring blacksmith. An extensive and valuable landed property, well-known as Oby Hall, with its extensive demesnes, had been for a long time in abeyance; the property was estimated at that period, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... no idea till last night how difficult it was for a Queen to indulge in a bit of flirtation! A most elaborate intrigue is, it seems, necessary to procure for her a tender interview with her innamorato. A plan was invented, whose intricacy would have bothered the inventor of spinning-jennies, whereby Henrico was to be closeted with her most Christian Majesty,—its grand accomplishment to take place when the Queen called for a glass of ice (the original Scribe wrote "water," but the Adelphi adapter thought ice would be more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... remain in our memory as soon as they are learned, while to know others it is not enough to have learned them, for our knowledge slips away from us unless it be kept up—I allude to geometry and astronomy, and such other sciences as are Hard to remember because of their intricacy—so the greatness of some benefits prevents their being forgotten, while others, individually less, though many more in number, and bestowed at different times, pass from our minds, because, as I have stated above, we do not constantly think about them, and do not willingly recognize how much we ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... says: "At the opening of this century it was thought that a successful reaping machine had been invented, and a reward had been voted by Parliament to its author. The machine was employed here and abroad, but from its intricacy, fell into disuse. Another has been lately devised in one of our Colonies, which cuts off the heads of the corn, but leaves the straw standing, a fatal defect in an old settled country, where the growth of corn is forced by the application of dung. Our farmers may ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... the other, and to involve England in embarrassing questions. The attempt of the German democracies, triumphant in 1848, to fuse the powers of Germany into a whole, a new Germanic empire, also involved questions of great intricacy, and which, however England might desire to keep aloof, tended to affect treaties in which she was concerned. The union of all Germany as one authority would introduce a new element into European relations, disturbing ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... would have seemed marvelous and beautiful in its combination of simplicity and intricacy, to have noted the delicate tactics with which Bertie conducted himself between his two claimants—bending to his Countess with a reverent devotion that assuaged whatever of incensed perception of her unacknowledged rival might be silently lurking in her proud heart; wheeling up to the pony-trap ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... of gongs, drums, and other warlike instruments arose on the other side, and crowds of boatmen were seen running down to the vessels. These were soon manned, and oars got out, and they began to row up the river. As, owing to the intricacy of the channel, the steamboat and flotilla had not yet arrived, a few shots were fired at the boats by the field guns. This had the desired effect, many of the boatmen jumping overboard, leaving their craft to drift down the river; ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... test, as something to reckon by, the revelation to Lindsay still in prospect, of the single visit Captain Filbert did make, was perhaps lacking in essentials. It would be an experiment of some intricacy, it might very probably work out in shades. So much would infallibly have to be put down for surprise and so much reasonably for displeasure, without any prejudice to the green hope budding underneath; the key to Hilda's theory might very well be lost in contingencies. ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... The intricacy of the next facsimile, No. 7, is an ugly but a very active piece of movement. This group of curves is equal to about a two-feet length of pen-stroke, a fact which indicates an extraordinary amount of personal energy. Dickens was then writing his "Sketches by ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... tale. Its interest is not derived from intricacy of plot or mysterious developments; it presents us with admirable studies of male and female character, the traits of which are manifested in the progress of the plot. The portraits are detailed, natural, and living; the heroine feminine and lovely. The moral is ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... occurred to us for teaching geography and history together. Priestley's Chart of History, though constructed with great ingenuity, does not invite the attention of young people: there is an intricacy in the detail which is not obvious at first. To remedy what appears to us a difficulty, we propose that eight and twenty, or perhaps thirty, octavo maps of the globe should be engraved; upon these should be traced, in succession, the different situations of the different ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... to come, the labour of interpreting these words and phrases with brevity, fulness, and perspicuity; a task of which the extent and intricacy is sufficiently shown by the miscarriage of those who have generally attempted it. This difficulty is increased by the necessity of explaining the words in the same language; for there is often only one word for one idea; and though ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... Nature is not more natural to my body than God is to my soul. Every animal and plant has its own Environment. And the further one inquires into the relations of the one to the other, the more one sees the marvelous intricacy and beauty of the adjustments. These wonderful adaptations of each organism to its surroundings—of the fish to the water, of the eagle to the air, of the insect to the forest bed; and of each part of every ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... view to bringing thought, feeling, action, home to the consciousness of the spectator from the artist's consciousness on which they have been impressed. Painting can tell a story better than sculpture, can represent more complicated feelings, can suggest thoughts of a subtler intricacy. Through colour, it can play, like music, directly on powerful but vague emotion. It is deficient in fulness and roundness of concrete reality. A statue stands before us, the soul incarnate in ideal form, fixed and frozen for eternity. The ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... comprehending what she said. He sat down again upon the stone, and leaned his head upon his hands. In truth he felt dazed and helpless, as if he had reached suddenly the mouth of many roads and knew not which to take. The intricacy of the situation was fairly paralyzing to an order of mind like his, which was wont to grasp, though shrewdly enough, only the straight course of cause and effect. He revolved dizzily in his mind the fact that he could not tell Madelon ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... out the partition between front parlor and back parlor, thrown it into a long room on which she lavished yellow and deep blue; a Japanese obi with an intricacy of gold thread on stiff ultramarine tissue, which she hung as a panel against the maize wall; a couch with pillows of sapphire velvet and gold bands; chairs which, in Gopher Prairie, seemed flippant. She hid the ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... affairs, who, without sharing any of those conflicting opinions, were able to take a detached view of what was going on at the staff at headquarters and to consider means of escape from this muddle, indecision, intricacy, and weakness. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... a centre, should be simple and clean. We should never believe that simplicity of life might make us unsuited to the requirements of the society of our time. It is the simplicity of the tuning-fork, which is needed all the more because of the intricacy of strings in the instrument. In the morning of our career our nature needs the pure and the perfect note of a spiritual ideal in order to fit us for the complications of our ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... They scarcely retired and the umpire repeated the words 'To the fight! Ready! Go!' and the duel began in earnest. Both were accomplished swordsmen, and the combat promised to be a long one. They exhibited to the admiring spectators every intricacy of schlager fencing, in all its wonderful neatness and quickness of cut and parry. From time to time a halt was called, and each man retired to his original place, his right arm being caught and held in air by the 'bearing-fox,' as ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... Much intricacy and difficulty attends the subject of ancient punctuation; nor could any satisfactory account of the rules and exceptions that have been gathered from existing MSS. be given, which should subserve the intention of this work. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... would he smoke, shaking his right knee with a constant motion, and fixing his eye for hours together upon a little print of Amsterdam, which hung in a black frame against the opposite wall of the council chamber. Nay, it has even been said, that when any deliberation of extraordinary length and intricacy was on the carpet, the renowned Wouter would shut his eyes for full two hours at a time, that he might not be disturbed by external objects—and at such times the internal commotion of his mind was evinced by certain regular guttural sounds, which his admirers declared were merely the noise ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... among the theologians of his time by a subtility in distinction resembling that of the schoolmen, and by a peculiar art of expressing himself on doctrinal points in terms so nicely balanced, and in a style of such labored intricacy, that it was scarcely possible to discover his true meaning, or pronounce to which extreme of opinion he most inclined. These dubious qualifications, by which he disgusted alternately both Calvin and the more zealous Lutherans, were ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... remember, and am not likely ever to forget, a winter wren who favored me with what I thought the most bewitching bit of vocalism to which I had ever listened. He was in the bushes close at my side, in the Franconia Notch, and delivered his whole song, with all its customary length, intricacy, and speed, in a tone—a whisper, I may almost say—that ran along the very edge of silence. The unexpected proximity of a stranger may have had something to do with his conduct, as it often appears to have with the thrasher's; but, however that may be, the cases are ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... The diversity and intricacy of American mythology have been greatly fostered by the delight the more developed nations took in rhetorical figures, in metaphor and simile, and in expressions of amplification and hyperbole. Those ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... course of his own life, or the conduct of the world around him, unworthy his attention; yet, among the sons of learning, many seem to have thought of every thing rather than of themselves, and to have observed every thing but what passes before their eyes: many who toil through the intricacy of complicated systems, are insuperably embarrassed with the least perplexity in common affairs; many who compare the actions, and ascertain the characters of ancient heroes, let their own days glide away without examination, and suffer vicious ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... were to come upon some lawyer's deed which dealt with matters of such unspeakable intricacy, that it baffled his imagination to conceive how it could ever have been drafted, and if in spite of this he were to find the intricacy of the provisions to be made, exceeded only by the ease and simplicity with which the deed providing ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... nearly exhausted the day. The intermingling mists of the season and the heavy smoke of the town were now shrouding the streets in a dense obscurity. There were no gas lights then. Profoundly ignorant of the intricacy of the streets of the metropolis, I was completely at the mercy of the hackney-coachmen, and they made me buy it extremely dear. Merely from habit, I again repaired to the White Horse, and concluded my nineteenth natal day in ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the Prussian Cabinet to forget its ancient rivalry and jealousy of Austria and to coalesce with the latter power, in resisting the encroachments of Napoleon, in order to prevent the latter from attempting the overthrow of the whole fabric of the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, with the intricacy and fragility of which no prince in Germany was better acquainted than the Elector of Saxony. Prussia however was still reluctant to engage in the contest and gave no support whatever to Austria. Napoleon defeats the Austrians at Austerlitz and dictates peace. Six months ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... subdivision of its structure, every convolution and every group of fibres and cells having a function appreciably distinct from the functions of all neighboring parts, the vast multiformity and intricacy of its structure corresponding to the vast multiformity and intricacy of our psychic nature, which has never yet been thoroughly portrayed ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... The schoolmaster declined to go alone with me, on the ground that neither of us knew the mountain, and threatening clouds were gathering all around. When, at last, I proposed to go by myself, they became menacingly obstructive, and declared that I should certainly not be allowed to face the intricacy of the mountain in a fog. Besides, as the maire put it, he was sure of the way to the third glaciere; and if I were to go up alone to look for the second, I should lose a certainty for a chance, as there was not time to visit both. So with an ill grace I continued the descent with them, ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... yourself unequal to dealing satisfactorily with the increasing intricacy of our financial operations, become confused by the multiplicity of detail, suffer from pains in the head?" Sir Abel had commented, with a certain largeness of manner. "I own, my good friend, I was not ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... revolutions. It was hung in the year 1682, and was baptized in the presence of Louis XIV. and Queen Theresa. Its weight is thirty-two thousand pounds—the clapper alone weighing a thousand pounds. A clock in one of the towers is world-renowned for the intricacy and curiosity of its mechanism. The feats it performs every time it strikes the hour and quarter-hour, can hardly be credited by one who has ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... to hold no opinion unaccepted by her master, denied all reason and forced to frequent churches where she is forbidden the exercise of her common-sense, and where she is told: "Men are logical; women lack this quality, but have an intricacy of thought. There are those who think that women can be taught logic; this is a mistake. They can never, by any process of education, arrive at the same mental status as that enjoyed by man; but they have a quickness of apprehension—what is usually ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... invisibly dealing, as usual, through a third person, would not sell her for one and a quarter; he wanted one and a half. Besides, another Party was trying to get her; and now ensued a negotiation which for intricacy and mystery surpassed all the others. It was conducted in my friend's interest by one who had the difficult task of keeping the owner's imagination in check and his demands within bounds, for it soon appeared that he wanted even more than one and a half for her. Unseen and inaccessible, ...
— Buying a Horse • William Dean Howells
... warned the reader that, in spite of the way in which the intricacy of organization inseparable from great masses and the manifold disposition of a modern army will mask the general nature of such an operation, that operation cannot be understood unless its simplest lines are clear. I have further insisted that in practice ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... Gaul had been an exploit of extraordinary military difficulty. The intricacy of the problem had been enhanced by the venom of a domestic faction, to which the victories of a democratic general were more unwelcome than national disgrace. The discomfiture of Crassus had been more pleasant news to the Senate ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... crews from getting to sea in favourable weather, is sometimes fortified by the assertion that the people of Shetland are singularly defective in arithmetic. Even if we assume this statement to be correct, there is so little intricacy in a calculation of the price of 18 cwt. of fish at 6s. 6d. per cwt., and dividing the sum among five or six men, that a very low arithmetical faculty would not be severely taxed in checking it. There ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... different problems. The first is manifestly to account for the existence of this machine, for such a completed piece of mechanism as a man or a tree cannot be explained as a result of simple accident, as the existence of a rough piece of rock might be explained. Its intricacy of parts and their purposeful interrelation demands explanation, and therefore the fundamental problem is to explain how this machine came into existence. The second problem is simpler, for it is simply to explain the running of the machine after it is made. If ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... he had begun a Hebrew rhyming dictionary for the use of poets. He himself added several hymns to the liturgy. In these Saadiah's poetical range is very varied. Sometimes his style is as pure and simple as the most classical poems of the Spanish school. At other times, his verses have all the intricacy, harshness, and artificiality of Kalir's. Perhaps his mastery of Hebrew is best seen in his "Book of the Exiled" (Sefer ha-Galui), compiled in Biblical Hebrew, divided into verses, and provided with accents. As the title ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... equal sum, and Fort Ryan was not far behind. By noon the fifty thousand dollars had been distributed to the Indians; by one o'clock every cent of it was put up on the race in equal bets. Who was to be stake holder? How much was each stake to be held or awarded? These were problems of some intricacy in view of the fact that the Indians could not read a word or trust any white man except the Indian Agent and Father Cyprian, the Jesuit missionary, both of whom declined to have any hand or part in ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... animal microbes, such as that which causes Sleeping Sickness. The life-histories and the weird ways of many important parasites have been unravelled; and here again knowledge means mastery. To a degree which has almost surpassed expectations there has been a revelation of the intricacy of the stones and mortar of the house of life, and the microscopic study of germ-cells has wonderfully supplemented the epoch-making experimental study of heredity which began with Mendel. It goes without saying that no one can call himself educated who does not understand ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... embarrassment of the eye, and cannot for an instant be separately regarded as works of accomplished art. Even the later and more imitative examples profess little more than picturesque vigor or ingenious intricacy. The oak leaves and acorns of the Beauvais moldings are superbly wreathed, but rigidly repeated in a constant pattern; the stems are without character, and the acorns huge, straight, blunt, and unsightly. ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... of a new government, whatever care or wisdom may distinguish the work, cannot fail to originate questions of intricacy and nicety; and these may, in a particular manner, be expected to flow from the establishment of a constitution founded upon the total or partial incorporation of a number of distinct sovereignties. 'Tis time only ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... intricacy of mood—came a whole new set of emotions due to the mere spectacle of Mr. Gilman's august back! She was intimidated by Mr. Gilman's back. She knew horribly that in the afternoon she had treated ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... was glorious, and some of us even achieved an answering reverberation and a sympathetic flush. I at times responded freely. We all accepted from him unquestioningly that these melodies, these strange sounds, exceeded any possibility of beauty that lay in the Gothic intricacy, the splash and glitter, the jar and recovery, the stabbing lights, the heights and broad distances of our English tongue. That indeed was the chief sin of him. It was not that he was for Greek and Latin, but that he was fiercely against every beauty that was neither classic ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... met with among the vulgar, but the second is rarer than can be imagined, and yet abundantly more necessary for great enterprises; and is there a greater in the world than heading a party? The command of an army is without comparison of less intricacy, for there are wheels within wheels necessary for governing the State, but then they are not near so brittle and delicate. In a word, I am of opinion there are greater qualities necessary to make a good head of a party than to make an emperor who is to govern the whole world, and that resolution ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... when his suit has prospered that a man feels utterly idiotic and moonstruck in the presence of the woman he adores. Why, when life is scarce endurable but at her side, he should become a bore in her presence, is only another intricacy in the many puzzles that constitute the labyrinth of love. So long as he flutters unsinged about its flame, the moth is all the happier for the warmth of the candle, all the livelier for the inspiration ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... This, I may remark in passing, is by no means an easy task for the comic writer: he must contrive at last skilfully and naturally to get rid of the contradictions which with their complication and intricacy have diverted us during the course of the action; if he really smooths them all off by making his fools become rational, or by reforming or punishing his villains, then there is an end at once of everything like a pleasant and ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... is so well framed, the intricacy so artful, and the disentanglement so easy, the suspense so affecting, and the passionate parts so properly interposed, that I have no doubt of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... intricacy of these ingenious arrangements was only discovered at the cost of bitter experience. Later on, a great deal of after-the-event wisdom was forthcoming, and the ignorance of all concerned regarding the nature of the position to be attacked was severely commented upon. It was said that no satisfactory ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... happening to be rather an evil dream of old times than a waking episode of these, may afford the reader some diversion, besides relieving the necessary tedium of the thousand particulars of finance that render the five farms a study of the utmost intricacy. ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... it was transfigured; its implication was manifest. That's all I can say—except this, that, untried as I was, I jumped into the poetic skin of the thing, and felt as if I had written it. I knew all about it, "e'l chi, e'l quale"; I was privy to its intricacy; I caught without instruction the alternating beat in the second line, and savoured all the good words, gilded car, glowing axle, Star that bids the shepherd fold. Allay ravished me, young as I was. I knew why he had called the Atlantic stream steep, ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... not the subtleties of the laws, nor the intricacy of pleadings. First, let me assert that I have never robbed; but I have restored unto the plundered: I have never murdered; but I have stood between the assassin's knife and his victim. For this have I been hated and reviled by my associates, and for this is my life ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... cord. Moreover, it was this cord which not only held fast my supreme affections, but also first drew me into the moral concerns of life, and later afforded a clew there to which I somewhat wistfully clung in the intricacy of its mazes. ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Chicago needs draining. In order that it may be drained, Mr. Sanitary Superintendent RAUCH has made a report which is extremely figurative and which quite bristles with the nine digits. Mr. PUNCHINELLO has read it until perfectly bewildered by the intricacy of the computations; but what he does understand is that if Chicago be not drained immediately, the amiable cholera may be expected to put in an early appearance. Mr. Superintendent RAUCH prints an aggravating table to show, by multiplication, addition, subtraction, division, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 14, July 2, 1870 • Various
... thought it, and more convenient. It is a perfect model for cottages, and, I think, for palaces of magnificence,—only enlarging, not altering, its proportions, and adding ornaments, and not principles. Nothing can be more grand than its simplicity and usefulness. Simple, without intricacy, it seems to be the spontaneous expression of humanity, congenial to the wants of man. No other formed house can ever please me so well, nor shall I ever be persuaded, I believe, that it can be improved, either in beauty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... thus commenced went on for many months, with no other obstruction than the complication and intricacy which attend all matrimonial arrangements where the interests of kingdoms, as well as the personal happiness of the wedded pair, are involved in the issue. Ambassadors were sent, and contracts and treaties were drawn up, discussed, ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... whom the expressiveness and the beauty of the human structure is all in all—drapery is a means of rendering the masses and the movement of the figure more apparent than they would be in the nude. In such works as these it is a thing beautiful in itself, for its own ripple and flow and ordered intricacy. The figure is there beneath the drapery, but the drapery is expressive of the mood of the artist and of the sentiment of the work rather than ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... or others are full of them), you will see that, though good and forcible general effect is produced, the lines are thrown in by thousands without special intention, and might just as well go one way as another, so only that there be enough of them to produce all together a well-shaped effect of intricacy: and you will find that a little careless scratching about with your pen will bring you very near the same result without an effort; but that no scratching of pen, nor any fortunate chance, nor anything but downright skill and thought, will imitate so much as one leaf ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... the home government of the Republic less copious and valuable. Each magistracy has its own series of documents, the daily record of its proceedings: in this we find the whole of that elaborate machinery of State laid bare before us in all its intricacy of detail; and we are enabled to study the construction, the origin, development, and ossification, of one of the most rigid and enduring constitutions that the world has ever seen; a constitution so strong ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... always a hope of Peace through England; as well as contrariwise, especially till Bavaria settle itself (in April next), a hope of great assistance from the French. Here are potentialities and counter-potentialities, which make the Bavarian Intricacy very agitating to the young King, while it lasts. And indeed his world is one huge imbroglio of Potentialities and Diplomatic Intricacies, agitating to behold. Concerning which we have again to remark how these huge Spectres of Diplomacy, now filling Friedrich's world, came mostly in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle |
