"Piecemeal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... air, his fine proportions, the courtesy of his bending to Clara and touching of her hand, excused a fanatical excess of admiration on the part of a woman in her youth, who is never the anatomist of the hero's lordly graces. But now she admired him piecemeal. When it came to the putting of him together, she did it coldly. To compassionate him was her utmost warmth. Without conceiving in him anything of the strange old monster of earth which had struck the awakened girl's mind of Miss Middleton, Laetitia classed him with other men; he was "one of them". ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... much on this matter, and have figured to myself what may be the fate of our current literature, when retrieved piecemeal by future antiquaries, from among the rubbish of ages. What a Magnus Apollo, for instance, will Moore become among sober divines and dusty schoolmen! Even his festive and amatory songs, which are now the mere quickeners of our social moments, or the delights ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... for a long time there, eating fruit and bread and chocolate, on the grass, over which came to our ears, horizontal, faint, but solid still and metallic, the sound of the bells of Saint-Hilaire, which had melted not at all in the atmosphere it was so well accustomed to traverse, but, broken piecemeal by the successive palpitation of all their sonorous strokes, throbbed as it brushed ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... from morn till eve put her to all manner of torture, failed in their efforts, and declared themselves beaten, not knowing what further punishment to inflict, and marvelling that she still lived, with her body pierced through and through, and torn piecemeal by so many tortures, of which a single one should have sufficed to kill her. But that blessed saint, like a valiant athlete, took fresh courage and strength from the confession of her faith; all feeling of pain vanished, and ease returned to her at the mere ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... empty of human beings. No labourers—no household smoke. The fire of the burning villages has smouldered out, and round the houses, and in the courtyards, lie the debris of their normal life, trampled, dirty and piecemeal, under foot. Poor farms of the Ile-de-France!—dwellings of old time, into whose barns the rich harvests of the fields had been joyously gathered year by year—old tiled roofs, clothed with ancestral moss—plain ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... condition applies to the west, though I cannot speak with any authority on that subject. Apparently this obvious action of the Germans is exactly what happened. When their northern front had been combed, we find forces subtracted piecemeal from the north, reaching an aggregate of thirty divisions, or at least nearly fifteen divisions more than had been anticipated. The doom of ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... only invented occasionally some miserable tale for the day, in order meanly to sneak out of difficulties into which they had proudly strutted. And they were put to all these shifts and devices, full of meanness and full of mischief, in order to pilfer piecemeal a repeal of an act which they had not the generous courage, when they found and felt their error, honorably and fairly to disclaim. By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble councils, so paltry a sum as three-pence ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... its direct experiences, many a strange fulfilment of dreams of other days. For instance, the present writer had been a faithful student of the Scottish ballads, and had always envied Sir Walter the delight of tracing them out amid their own heather, and of writing them down piecemeal from the lips of aged crones. It was a strange enjoyment, therefore, to be suddenly brought into the midst of a kindred world of unwritten songs, as simple and indigenous as the Border Minstrelsy, more uniformly plaintive, almost always more ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... to the trout, they are still nearer to the terrible Pirai, {218b} of the Orinocquan waters, the larger of which snap off the legs of swimming ducks and the fingers of unwary boatmen, while the smaller surround the rash bather, and devour him piecemeal till he drowns, torn by a thousand tiny wounds, in water purpled with his own blood. These little fellows prove their kindred with the Pirai by merely nibbling at the bather's skin, making him tingle from head to foot, while he thanks Heaven that ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... the heart of man can imagine or the tongue relate; a single one of which was sufficient to make the hair stand erect, the blood to freeze, the flesh to melt, the bones to drop from their places—yea, the spirit to faint. What is empaling or sawing men alive, tearing off the flesh piecemeal with iron pincers, or broiling the flesh with candles, collop fashion, or squeezing heads flat in a vice, and all the most shocking devices which ever were upon earth, compared with one of these? Mere pastime! ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... and T. R. do the question in a piecemeal fashion—on the principle that the 70 per cent. and the 75 per cent., though commenced at opposite ends of the 100, must overlap by at least 45 per cent.; and so on. This is quite correct working, but not, I think, quite the best way of ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... which METHUEN has just had the good luck to publish. For the whole thing is much nearer wizardry than workmanship. I put the book down with a gasp, so close had I been to realities as conjured up by one to whom realism is a servant and not a master. I had come to know, in that piecemeal way in which one actually gets to know one's fellows—waiting for later experience to confirm or modify earlier impressions—the hapless, tragic Flora; her father, de Barral, the pseudo-financier, fraudulent through unimaginative ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... beneath the palace. What could he do against such a giant? He fancied himself before a secret tribunal in the midst of which towered San Giacinto's colossal figure. He could hear the deep voice he dreaded pronouncing his doom. He was to be torn to shreds piecemeal, burnt by a slow fire, flayed alive by those enormous hands. There was no conceivable horror of torture that did not suggest itself to him at such times. It is true that when he went to bed at night he was generally either so stupefied by opium or so ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... hours in this inn, fried by the sun, bored to death, murdered piecemeal by flies, and infuriated by the want of hospitality in this ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Marianne is interesting, though never of so absorbing an interest as to hold the reader's attention more closely than was held that of the writer himself. It is a book to be read by piecemeal, and it may be laid down at any time. Indeed, one is not surprised, nor much distressed, when the author fails to grasp again his fallen pen after the eleventh part. I would not in any way detract from the literary value of a work which, as even critical La Harpe declares, ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... Gulfs are bridged in a twinkling, as if some unseen baggage-train carried pontoons for my convenience, and while from the heights I scan the tempting but unexplored Pacific Ocean of Futurity, the ship is being carried over the mountains piecemeal on the backs of mules and lamas, whose keel shall plough its waves, and bear me to the Indies. Day would not dawn if ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... worthy of his liberty-loving ancestry, thus speaks of him in his private life at this period: "Amid the reverses of fortune, harassed by pecuniary embarrassments, during the tortures of a disease which tore away his life piecemeal, hee ever maintained the same manly and unaltered front, the same cheerfulness of disposition, the same dignity of conduct. No humiliating solicitation, no weak complaint, escaped him." At the election in the fall of 1838, the noble-spirited democrat was not wholly forgotten. A strenuous effort, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... unknown auxiliary for assistance. He exerted his voice, until the woods rang with his shouts; but hollow echoes were the only replies: neither voice nor returning footstep was to be heard; and it seemed as if he had been rescued from the Indians' hands, only to be left, bound and helpless, to perish piecemeal among their bodies. The fear of a fate so dreadful, with the weight of the old Piankeshaw, a man of almost gigantic proportions, lying upon his bosom, was more than his agonised spirits and exhausted strength ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... fair weather its sides were under water, although it had a high freeboard. Consequently, it shipped so much water that the waves washed over the decks with great noise and uproar, and entered the berths where the better-class passengers are generally quartered. The rigging had to be repaired piecemeal. Consequently, for those reasons, and as the vessel lacked other necessities, some tried to make them put back to Manila. However, this was without effect, and they proceeded on their way with some ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
... used to say something of the sort," his mother said; "but he had only heard it piecemeal from old people, and never heard enough to put the pieces together as you have done. 'What does it matter either?' he used to say; and he said those great lords had been cut-throats on the land and robbers on the river. For your father's ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... resemblance of the features. This showed that the second scene came long after the first: my father must by that time have begun to resemble his later self. A weird feeling stole over me. Was I going to relive my previous life, piecemeal? Was the past going to unroll itself in slow but regular panorama to my sleeping vision? Was my First State to become known like this in successive ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... to learn all about that wonderful adventure for yourselves; but until then I will say nothing about it, not from any wish to disappoint your curiosity, or to make myself important, but simply because the whole story partakes so much of the marvellous, that I am afraid to tell it in a piecemeal, hasty fashion, for fear I should be set down as one of those common fellows of whom there are so many in my profession, who are not ashamed to narrate things they have not seen, and even to tell wonderful ...
— Hunter Quatermain's Story • H. Rider Haggard
... damage done to his car, or listen to a word that passed between Thrush and his chauffeur; he had eyes only for those of his child who had been lost but was found, and not a thought in his head outside the story he extracted piecemeal on the spot. Poor Pocket told it very volubly and ill; he would not confine himself to simple facts. He stated his suspicion of Baumgartner's complicity in the Hyde Park affair as though he knew it for a fact; cited the murders in Holland Walk and Park Lane as obvious pieces of the same ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... know if Mrs. Stowe is aware what sort of a place her dress is being made in, and there is a letter from a dressmaker's apprentice stating that it is being made up piecemeal, in the most shockingly distressed dens of London, by poor, miserable white slaves, worse treated than ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... sequence his supreme negative act, he is a man-eater. "He seized two of my companions and hurled them against the ground as if they were dogs, then he devoured them piecemeal, swallowing all—entrails and flesh and marrowy bones." Surely Ulysses is getting some experience on the line ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... disliked by Sherman and Wilson, the latter especially declaring his willingness to remove the disqualifications as soon as possible after a settlement had been made. In point of fact they were removed piecemeal by Congress almost as freely as President Johnson had done the like, and were ended except for a few hundred by a ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... spell-bound sleep, under the nightmare, Unbelief; and, in this hag-ridden dream, mistake God's fair living world for a pallid, vacant Hades and extinct Pandemonium. But through such Purgatory pain," continues he, "it is appointed us to pass; first must the dead Letter of Religion own itself dead, and drop piecemeal into dust, if the living Spirit of Religion, freed from this its charnel-house, is to arise on us, new-born of Heaven, and with new ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... they had played awhile, they heard a mighty tumult, and a wailing of men, and a croaking of Ravens, as they carried the men in their strength into the air, and, tearing them betwixt them, let them fall piecemeal to the earth. And during the tumult they saw a knight coming towards them, on a light grey horse, and the left foreleg of the horse was jet-black to the centre of his hoof. And the knight and the horse were fully accoutred with huge heavy blue armour. And a robe of honour of yellow ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... State, by whom they manage the executive government of the kingdom. I cannot tell why they nourish suspicion against me, unless it is because I will not deliver this poor innocent army, which has followed me in so many military actions, to be now pulled asunder, broken piecemeal and reduced, so that they who have protected the state at the expense of their blood, will not have, perchance, the means of feeding themselves by their labour; which, methinks, were hard measure, since it is ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... with what had occurred and read to them the letter, whereat they were affrighted with the sorest affright and sought to soothe the King's terror with words that were only from the tongue, whilst their hearts were torn piecemeal with palpitations of alarm. But Badi'a (the Chief Wazir) presently said, "Know, O King, that there is no profit in that which my brother Wazirs have proffered, and it is my rede that thou write this King a writ and excuse ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... administration of homeopathic doses.... Inculcate Socialism? Yes, but grab all you can to be going on with. Preach revolutionary thoughts? Yes, but rely on the ameliorative method.... The minds of men are of slow development, and we must be content, we fear, to accomplish our revolution piecemeal, bit by bit, till a point is come to when, by accumulative process, a series of small changes amounts to the Great Change. The most important revolutions are those that happen quietly without anything ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... few perceive they steal; Till, like the sea, they compass all the land, From Scots to Wight, from Mount to Dover strand: And when rank widows purchase luscious nights, Or when a duke to Jansen punts at White's, Or city-heir in mortgage melts away; Satan himself feels far less joy than they. Piecemeal they win this acre first, then that, 90 Glean on, and gather up the whole estate. Then strongly fencing ill-got wealth by law, Indentures, covenants, articles they draw, Large as the fields themselves, and larger far Than ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... said, with smothered, threatening voice. "You bring out your reserves against me, and would cause the proud edifice of my power to crumble away stone by stone! You fear lest if the great Colossus falls at once it might crush you, and therefore you would destroy it piecemeal, a little at a time! You shall not succeed, though, little Elector; the Colossus will rear its head on high, ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... have little to say; and it is for the War-leader to see to this closely and piecemeal. I deem, as we all deem, that there should be no delay; yet were it best to wend not all together to Shadowy Vale, but in divers bands, as soon as ye may after the Folk-mote, by the sure and nigh ways that we shall show you. And when we are gathered ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... fairly set in, it frequently happened that the straw which composed the bed, or the excuse for a bed, occupied by members of a family dying of fever or hunger, or both combined, was, piecemeal, drawn from under them and burned on the hearth to keep up a scanty fire. It was felt, we may presume, that the dying could not require it long, and those who had still some hopes of life were famishing as much from cold as from hunger. An eye-witness, describing such a ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... to alight on? Vain all its talents for ploughing, hammering, and whatever else; there is no Earth-room for this Nation with its talents: this Nation will have to keep hovering on the wing, dolefully shrieking to and fro; and perish piecemeal; burying itself, down to the last soul of it, in the waste unfirmamented seas. Ah yes, soil, with or without ploughing, is the gift of God. The soil of all countries belongs evermore, in a very considerable ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... to break up the wreck, and to convey it piecemeal to the bay; and in this work we were ably assisted by the Esquimaux, who understood that whatever portion we did not require was to be their perquisite. They also shrewdly suspected that we should leave them, if we went away, ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... and the beadle were sore afeared. There was not a bird in sight, though the ground was inches deep in feathers they had dropped. As for the student, no one ever saw him again. Whether the birds had carried him off bodily to some secret place, or whether they had torn him piecemeal, no one knew." ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... should refuse that condition, as was suspected, the supreme authority would be given to certain lords under the nomination of the pope. In a subsequent examination before the commons, Bedloe added, (for these men always brought out their intelligence successively and by piecemeal,) that Lord Carrington was also in the conspiracy for raising men and money against the government; as was likewise Loro Brudenel. These noblemen, with all the other persons mentioned by Bedloe, were immediately committed to custody ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... stated these facts in order that it may be seen what further appropriations are involved in a settlement for all these lands upon the basis which Congress has adopted. It does not seem to me to be a wise policy to deal with this question piecemeal. It would have been better, if a remnant of title remains in the Choctaws and Chickasaws to the lands in the leased district, to have settled the whole matter at once. Under the treaty of 1855 the Choctaws and Chickasaws quitclaimed any supposed interest of theirs in the lands west of the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... perfectly secure from sudden attack. And space, especially when means of communication are scanty, and the country affords few supplies, is the greatest of all obstacles. The hostile territory must be subjugated piecemeal, state by state, province by province, as was Asia by Alexander; and after each victory a new base of supply must be provisioned and secured, no matter at what cost of time, before a further advance ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... dispositions and orders? The error in the above assumption would be that McClellan estimated Lee's troops at nearly double their actual numbers, and that what was taken for proof of Lee's superiority in force on the field was a series of partial reverses which resulted directly from the piecemeal and disjointed way in which McClellan's morning attacks ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... We were twenty in the gang, and we were to build the line across an old dry river-bed at that point. In the middle of the river there had once been a forest-clad island. This we attacked with pickaxe and spade and carried it away piecemeal in our wheelbarrows. It fell in with the hottest weather of the year. Down in the hollow where no wind blew it was utterly unbearable. I had never done such work before, and was not built for it. I did my best to keep up ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... who had been at work in his dwelling at this turbulent moment. His wife urged him to fly into the city. "Why should I fly?" said the Moor—"to be reserved for hunger and slavery? I tell you, wife, I will await the foe here, for better is it to die quickly by the steel than to perish piecemeal in chains and dungeons." He said no more, but resumed his occupation of weaving, and in the indiscriminate fury of the assault was ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... ceased, and I owed everything on this occasion to Corporal Leatherbarrow, who showed not only steadfast bravery but skill. The platoons could not, on account of the shells which sometimes fell in the roadway itself, be paraded, and each received its share of bombs piecemeal by sections. Food, to supplement which I did not scruple to issue some of the next day's rations, was partaken of at 2 a.m., but it took long, and half an hour later the whole party should have started upon its journey across the mile of open fields ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... right. I fall certainly by my own sword, but honourably. I go about and am dying piecemeal, like Athens. Did we know that we adorned our statues for a funeral procession? that we were weaving our own shrouds? that the choruses of ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... regards Life, owing to that awful business sex. Women were handicapped; they had to fight much harder to achieve equal results. People didn't give them jobs in the same way. Young men possessed the earth; young women had to wrest what they wanted out of it piecemeal. Johnny might end a cabinet minister, a notorious journalist, a Labour leader, anything.... Women's jobs were, as a rule, so dowdy and unimportant. Jane was bored to death with this sex business; it wasn't fair. But Jane was determined to live it down. She wouldn't be ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... going to her and trying to get the secret out of her—that is, if she knew it; but now fate appeared to be playing into his hands, and a voluntary confession was much more likely to be true than one dragged piecemeal from unwilling lips. ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... English Government. William Pitt, soon created Earl of Chatham, saw that the British Empire had reached a crisis in its development. Incompetence, inertia, had blurred its prestige, and the little victories which France, its chief enemy, had been winning against it piecemeal, were coming to be regarded as signs that the grandeur of Britain was passing. Pitt saw the gloomy situation, and the still gloomier future which it seemed to prophesy, but he saw also the remedy. Within a few months, under his direction, English ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... is of great importance to have materials for customers to choose from. Ladies like to be saved the trouble of shopping, and I can give a dress at a more moderate rate, if I provide everything, than they can buy it piecemeal. I hope to double the business this season, and pay you a good percentage. Even on credit I can venture to order a ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... Governments grow, piecemeal, both in their tasks and in the means by which those tasks are to be performed, and very few Governments are organized, I venture to say, as wise and experienced business men would organize them if they had a clean sheet of paper to write upon. Certainly the Government of the United States is ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... about the approaches of the janitor's lodge, tramping up and down the paved courtyard with feverish impatience, for more than three hours, watching for every officer who came up and interviewing him, and thus it was that he had become acquainted, piecemeal, with the rapid series of events; how General de Wimpffen had tendered his resignation and then withdrawn it upon the peremptory refusal of Generals Ducrot and Douay to append their names to the articles ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... free as possible from the defects of the first one. These defects, which were the natural results of the somewhat hasty development of an experimental system, were of several kinds. In the first place, so large a growth had not been contemplated, and the extensions were made more or less piecemeal, instead of being on a regular plan; the location of the central station itself was very unfavorable, both as regards the facilities for obtaining coal and other supplies; the cost of water was excessive, and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... Historiae of the Social and Civil Wars (Vell. Pat. ii. 9). Cicero thought him superior to his predecessors, but childish (Brut. 228, De Leg. i. 7), and Sallust remarks his want of frankness in speaking of Sulla's career (Iug. 95). He avoided a piecemeal and desultory treatment of events; cf. his own words quoted by Gell. xii. 15, 2, 'Nos una aestate in Asia et Graecia gesta litteris idcirco continentia mandavimus, ne vellicatim aut saltuatim scribendo lectorum animos impediremus.' ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... that the story would attract the attention due to it, if it were published even in such monthly portions as the space of "Fraser" would admit of. Even so brightened, it would not, to the best of my judgment, express itself piecemeal. It seems to me to be so constituted as to require to be read "off the reel." As a book in two volumes I think it would have good claims to success, and good chances of obtaining success. But I ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... restless tentacles are furnished, ready at the slightest touch to grip whatever is near, not only by suction, but by the great claws set all round within its circle. And in the centre of this net-work of living traps is the chasm-like mouth, with its enormous parrot-beak, ready to rend piecemeal whatever is held by the tentaculae. The very thought of it makes one's flesh crawl. Well did Michelet term them "the insatiable nightmares ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... born, and all as soon as born Deliver'd at a secret postern-gate To Merlin, to be holden far apart Until his hour should come; because the lords Of that fierce day were as the lords of this, Wild beasts, and surely would have torn the child Piecemeal among them, had they known; for each But sought to rule for his own self and hand, And many hated Uther for the sake Of Gorlois. Wherefore Merlin took the child, And gave him to Sir Anton, an old knight And ancient friend of Uther; and his wife Nursed the young prince, and rear'd him with her ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... taught me, have ennobled me, though they lived centuries since? Men whom I should have loved had I met them on earth? Men whom I may meet yet, and tell them how I love them, in some other world? Men, too, whom I might have hated, and who might have hated me, had we met on this poor piecemeal earth; but whom I may learn to regard with justice and with charity in the world where all shall know, even as they are known? Men, too—alas! how fast their number grows—whom I have known, have loved, ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... replied with spirit that he was glad to hear all this, but in the meantime what was he to do to prevent his battalion being blown piecemeal ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... heels and drew a deep breath. The communication she had now to make him was the hub round which all turned. Should he refuse to consider it.... Plucking at the fringe of the tablecloth, she brought out, piecemeal, the news that John was willing to go surety for the money they would need to borrow for the start. Not only that: he offered them a handsome sum weekly to take entire charge of his children.—"Not here, in this little house—I know that wouldn't ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... Oh! day of death, oh! chaos of hard times!— And princes, dukes, and lords, they all stood still, Feeling within their pockets' silent depths; And sailors went a-moaning out to sea, And chew'd their cables piecemeal: then they wept, And slept on the abyss without a quid. All quids were gone, cigars were in their graves; The plant, their mother, had been rooted up; Pawnbrokers had a ton of pipes apiece, And "Antis" triumph'd. Then they had no need To keep ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... appeared at Ottawa four times before the outbreak, to try to waken the Government to the seriousness of the situation.[3] The North-West Council sent strong memorials backing the requests of the Metis. And still, though some of the grievances were redressed, in piecemeal fashion, no attempt was made to grapple adequately with the difficult questions presented by the meeting {77} of two stages of civilization, to understand the disputes, the real wrongs, the baseless ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... would fare in fell attack. Not that the monster was minded to pause! Straightway he seized a sleeping warrior for the first, and tore him fiercely asunder, the bone-frame bit, drank blood in streams, swallowed him piecemeal: swiftly thus the lifeless corse was clear devoured, e'en feet and hands. Then farther he hied; for the hardy hero with hand he grasped, felt for the foe with fiendish claw, for the hero reclining, — who clutched it boldly, prompt to answer, propped on his arm. Soon then saw that shepherd-of-evils ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... tempest. As if by magic, men appeared decorated with tricolored ribbons, and all joined with the soldiers in moving directly toward the place where the white flag was flapping its misplaced triumph over eyes which glared at it in hatred and hands which quivered to rend it piecemeal. Their wishes were anticipated; for the foremost rank had scarcely reached the threshold of the palace, when down went the ensign of the Bourbons, and the much-loved tricolor streamed out amidst thunder shouts which seemed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... What we learned of the science of the invisible realm was perforce picked piecemeal by us from all that we saw, experienced, and what several different times Tako was willing to explain to us. And it was later studied by the scientists of our world, whose additional theories I can incorporate into my own knowledge. Yet much of it remains obscure. And it is so ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... I have something to say about "Resurrection," which I have read not piecemeal, in parts, but as a whole, at one go. It is a remarkable artistic production. The least interesting part is all that is said of Nehludov's relations with Katusha; and the most interesting the princes, the generals, ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... will confirm and explain. For in that pellucid atmosphere of the Greek mind, untroubled as yet by theoretic mists, there may have been visible the very things which our scientific instruments are enabling us to see and reconstruct piecemeal, great groupings of reality metamorphosed into Fata Morgana cities ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... it all, the work went on: foot by foot the wall of pile-bound rock rose and the long wooden conduit curved away down the valley; and when at length the hydraulic plant began to arrive, piecemeal, Lisle found Crestwick eminently useful. He superintended the transport, patrolling the trails and keeping them repaired. His skill with shovel and ax was negligible, but he could send a man or two to mend the gap where the path had ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... and pitiful flotsam that reluctant seas have washed to us piecemeal from a remote past, there are, as will be shown later, many things which, although proceeding from a culture and modes of thought as far removed from our own as they may well be,[1] are worth the reading, which do not require any special knowledge for their ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... controls would not permit of holding even upon the immense bulk of the vessel, to say nothing of holding upon such a relatively tiny object as the power bar. As they flashed repeatedly through the warship, they saw piecemeal and sketchily her formidable armament and the hundreds of men of her crew, each man at battle station at the controls of some frightful engine of destruction. Suddenly they were cut off as a screen closed behind them—the Earth-men ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... polymorphic, like the element carbon! Doubtless, with his extraordinary sleight of hand, he had substituted real diamonds for the shapeless mass that came out of the apparatus, in the interval between handing the pebbles round for inspection, and distributing them piecemeal to the men of science and representatives of the diamond interest. We all watched him closely, of course, when he opened the crucibles; but when once we had satisfied ourselves that something came out, our doubts were set at rest, and we forgot to watch whether he distributed ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... Lord Goring and the Lord Hopton might ship all their forces, and come by sea in two tides, and be with him in a shorter time than the enemy could follow. With two such bodies he might face the enemy, and make a day of it; but now his men were only sacrificed, and eaten up by piecemeal in a party-war, and spent their lives and estates to do him no service. That if the Parliament garrisoned the towns and castles he should quit, they would lessen their army, and not dare to see him in the field: and if they did not, but left them open, then 'twould be no loss to him, but ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... was of patrician family, and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suffering in which he wrought at what is, I suppose, our greatest history. He wrought at it piecemeal, and sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head aches which tormented him, and the disorder of the heart which threatened his life, allowed him a brief respite for the task which was dear to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... stations; or, finally, because these hill-forts, from some disadvantage of situation, were no longer used as places of strength, and so the beacon-keepers had no motive to attempt consolidating them throughout by the piecemeal application of the vitrifying agent. But the old Highland mode of accounting for the present appearance of Knock Farril and its vitrified remains is perhaps, after all, quite as good in its way as any of the modes ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... say you? Is not the life of a saint for the life of a felon more than an equal exchange? Oh! I say unto you if every one of you were to—mount the scaffold, and to have his flesh torn from his bones piecemeal with red-hot pincers, through eleven long summer days of torture, yet would it not counterbalance these tears! (With a bitter laugh.) The scars! the Bohemian forests! Yes, yes! they must be ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... not the wants of the civilized man, and therefore he does not wait to supply them before he seeks to gratify others. When man rises in the scale of civilization, his whole nature rises. You can't mount a ladder piecemeal; your head will go up first, unless you are an acrobat, and choose to go up feet foremost; but even if you are Gabriel Ravel, your whole body must needs ascend together. The savage is comfortable, not according to your ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... morning it would be surrounded by hundreds of small brown ants. It was really very interesting to watch the little creatures. They would saw off a leg, or a part of one, then several of them would drag it away to their hiding-place; and, piecemeal, they would, if given time, carry off the cockroach, leaving not a particle. Now there is a lesson for ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... friend, to rush at a bound to the extremes of friendship? You have drained the cup, offered in all sincerity, at a draught. It is true that a real feeling is never piecemeal; it must be whole, or it does not exist. Monsieur de Mortsauf," she added after a short silence, "is above all things loyal and brave. Perhaps for my sake you will forget what he said to you to-day; if he has forgotten it to-morrow, ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... dense curtain of tree and shrubbery that girds and hangs around it. Passing under a cool and shady avenue of mangoes and figs, and the archway, guarded by a porter's lodge and a detachment of the three hundred local police, we came in sight of the large, rambling residence, built piecemeal, like many an English country-house. There is little to recommend it save the fine view of the sea and the surrounding shrubbery-ground. I can well understand how, with the immense variety of flower and fruit suddenly presented to his eyes, the gentleman fresh from England ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... Rob, looking round the room, 'that when Mr Gills was going in and out so often, these last few days, he was taking little things away, piecemeal, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... for the most part, in rapt silence—perhaps the model's silence was contagious—but gradually through the days I grew to communion with his shy soul, and piecemeal I learnt his sufferings. I give his story, so far as I can, in his own words, which I often paused to take down, when they ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... huts we passed, a crippled, distorted form crawled out on its hands and knees to beg of us. It was a boy of sixteen, struck with another and scarcely less frightful form of leprosy. In this case, instead of hideous swellings and fungous excrescences, the limbs gradually dry up and drop off piecemeal at the joints. Well may the victims of both these forms of hopeless disease curse the hour in which they were begotten. I know of no more awful example of that visitation of the sins of the parents upon the ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... we encountered no more destruction by wholesale, but only destruction by piecemeal, until, nearing Liege, we passed what remained of the most northerly of the ring of fortresses that formed the city's defenses. The conquerors had dismantled it and thrown down the guns, so that of the fort proper there was nothing except a low ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... said Senator Hanway, when he and Mr. Harley conferred, "while gigantic in its unfoldment, seems a reasonable one. After all, it is the amount involved that staggers rather than what obstacles must be overcome. Taken piecemeal, I do not say that the entire scheme, even Credit Magellan, with its thirty billions, may not work through. The resolution naming a committee to look into the claims and charges against Northern Securities ought to help my Presidential ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... to the staircase, and hurried on to the drawing-room, with the massive front door being broken piecemeal by the heavy sledge-hammer; but each chain and bolt still held, and there was no way in yet but for light and noise, so that, before they gave way, Frank had time to get a light and ignite the candles in two sets ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... to move in the dense mass, he pressed his hands over his ears. He could not shut out those shrieks! When would they end? What in the name of the God of mercy were they doing? Tearing her piecemeal? Yes, and worse than that. And still the shrieks rang on, and still the great Christ looked down on Philammon with that calm, intolerable eye, and would not turn away. And over his head was written in the ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... pulses we can indeed go on to ascertain or to compute indefinitely if we have patience; but it would contradict the definition of an infinite number to suppose the endless series of them to have actually counted themselves out piecemeal. Zeno made this manifest; so the infinity which our intellect requires of the sense-datum is thus a future and potential rather than a past and actual infinity of structure. The datum after it has made itself must be decomposable ad infinitum ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... Seriously and earnestly I asked myself this question. No; I had told the truth in regard to the affair exactly as it was, and it would be a lie for me to apologize to Poodles. I could not and would not do it. I would be cut to pieces, and have my limbs torn piecemeal from my body before ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... blotted out from the home they left. It is clear that they came in detachments, as their descendants went, centuries later, to a land still further west; and the process was spread over a hundred years or more. They conquered Britain blindly and piecemeal; and the traditional three years which are said to have elapsed between the occupation of Sheppey and the landing in Kent prove not that the puny arm of the intervening sea deterred those who had crossed the ocean, but that Sheppey was as much as these ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... enemies. She could not speak. The agony she had endured silently in the dismal lime-walk had grown too strong for her, and she broke into a tempest of hysterical sobbing. It was no simulated grief that shook her slender frame and tore at her like some ravenous beast that would have rent her piecemeal with its horrible strength. It was a storm of real anguish and terror, of remorse and misery. It was the one wild outcry, in which the woman's feebler nature got the ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... us, for every modern society now, is not so much to redistribute wealth; that at best can be only a means to an end; but to use our superfluous energy to the best purpose, no longer to waste it piecemeal. That problem we solved, to a great extent, in war. We have to solve it also in peace if the peace is to be worth having and is not to lead to further wars at home or abroad. The war itself has given us a great opportunity. It has opened our eyes, if ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... was permitted to rummage among the treasures in the box until she had satisfied her perennial curiosity; conversation with her absent-minded father ensued, which ultimately included a personal narrative, dragged out piecemeal from the reticent, dreamy invalid. Then always a few pages of the diary kept by the late Herr Wilner were read as a bedtime story. And bath and bed and dreamland followed. That was the invariable routine, now once more ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... too. The King keeps his forest head of game here, and when that horn sounds, a score of wolf-dogs are let loose that will tear thee piecemeal. Linger not till the third ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... over backs and up sledge I used an ice-axe to cut steps over the cornice and thus managed to get on top, then cut steps and surmounted the edge of the cornice. Helped Bowers up with the rope; others followed—then the gear was hauled up piecemeal. For Crean, the last man up, we lowered the sledge over the cornice and used a bowline in the other end of the rope on top of it. He came up grinning with delight, and we all thought the ascent rather a cunning piece of work. It was fearfully cold work, but everyone working with rare intelligence, ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... was ceded to it, the separating walls fell, the school became a laboratory, the class rooms were replaced by halls for research, and now no trace of the former separation can be seen—so uniform a whole does the laboratory form. No one knows what patience it required to form, piecemeal as it were, so vast an establishment, and one whose every ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... taken on board, and who landed with me, broke the egg with hatchets, and having made a hole in it, pulled out the young roc piecemeal and roasted it. I had earnestly entreated them not to meddle with the egg, but they would not ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... clergyman, whether celibate or not, worked on the heathen generally in one of three capacities: As tribune of the people; as hermit or solitary prophet; as colonizer; and in all three worked as well as frail human beings are wont to do, in this most piecemeal world. ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... of his chair with his fist and babbled profanity. When he became coherent he told his story, or rather Blount got it out of him piecemeal, of how he had been employed by the "organization" to falsify the registration lists in certain districts; of how, when the work was done, he had been denied the price and driven out with cursings. In the accusation, ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... those dark and swollen waters? what use to demand of them the bright form, that, it might be, slept beneath them?-it might be, had been washed piecemeal to the ocean? ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... hung over the town of Patusan like a hawk over a poultry-yard, but he devastated the open country. Whole villages, deserted, rotted on their blackened posts over the banks of clear streams, dropping piecemeal into the water the grass of their walls, the leaves of their roofs, with a curious effect of natural decay as if they had been a form of vegetation stricken by a blight at its very root. The two parties in Patusan were not sure ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... between the rivers were but lightly occupied. The Mississippi constituted the principal outlet for the products of the Middle West; Pittsburgh furnished most of the supplies for the region, but New Orleans received its crops. The Old National road was built piecemeal, and too late, as a whole, to make a great artery of trade throughout the Middle West, in this early period; but it marked the northern borders of the Southern stream of population, running, as this did, through ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... anything at all, let them be polished to perfection; let an author "keep his piece nine years," or ninety and nine, till he has made it as musical as he can—at least, as musical as his other performances. Not that we counsel dilatory and piecemeal composition. The thought must be struck off in the passion of the moment; the sword-blade must go red-hot to the anvil, and be forged in a few seconds: true; but after the forging, long and weary polishing ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... and big, in order to get free of her; and again there would be tears, boredom, a disgusting existence, remorse, and so there would be no new life. Deception and nothing more. A whole mountain of lies rose before Laevsky's imagination. To leap over it at one bound and not to do his lying piecemeal, he would have to bring himself to stern, uncompromising action; for instance, to getting up without saying a word, putting on his hat, and at once setting off without money and without explanation. But Laevsky felt that was impossible ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the railroad was built. This I hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking two years and then lying high six months it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged past drying. I amused myself one winter day with sliding this piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied several logs together with a birch withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had a book at the end, dragged them across. ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... power says unto each, This must be; how an inherent Elasticity drives them about Space vagrantly onward; - I shall unfold: thou simply give all thyself to my teaching. Matter mingled and massed into indissoluble union Does not exist. For we see how wastes each separate substance; So flow piecemeal away, with the length'ning centuries, all things, Till from our eye by degrees that old self passes, and is not. Still Universal Nature abides unchanged as aforetime. Whereof this is the cause. When the atoms part from a substance, That suffers loss; but another ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... that bit and stung and filled the hair, penetrating to the skin. Voices were inaudible, but there was a weird chorus from the ropes and stays, and then a loud report as one of the storm sails burst into ribbons and was torn piecemeal out of the ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... and the Rhine never have any other notion of battles than that eternal flank movement!" cried a young sergeant of the voltigeurs, who had just come up from the army of Italy. "Our general used to split the enemy by the centre, out him piecemeal by attack in columns, and then head him down with artillery at short range—not leaving him time for a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... great army piecemeal. They gathered the fallen leaves that dropped of themselves from that withered tree—the French army—and sometimes shook that tree itself. By October, when the French were fleeing toward Smolensk, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... of the twenty-eighth century, or the year 2807 A.D., the moon had been completely hacked away and sent piecemeal into space, the job having required 86 years. I give, herewith, the result of John Jones's Dollar, both at the date when the moon was completely removed and also at the close of the ...
— John Jones's Dollar • Harry Stephen Keeler
... the "Jolly Beggars." The "Saturday Night" may or may not be an admirable poem; but its significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first appears, when it is set beside the "Jolly Beggars." To take a man's work piecemeal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the way to avoid, and not to perform, the critic's duty. The same defect is displayed in the treatment of Burns as a man, which is broken, apologetical, and confused. The man here presented to us is not that Burns, teres ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I dug The ingot truth, that memorable day, Assayed and knew my piecemeal gain was gold,— Yes; but from something else surpassing that, Something of mine which, mixed up with the mass, Makes it bear hammer and be firm to file. Fancy with fact is just one fact the more; To-wit, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... sprawling rail fence had lain for nearly forty years, renewed piecemeal from time to time as it rotted away, its corners full of brambles, its stakes and riders overrun with poison-vine; where this brown, jointed structure had stretched, like a fossil worm, a great transformation ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... private company, but as a government work, and to construct it gradually in sections as the progress of settlement and the state of the public treasury might warrant. Sir John Macdonald rejected this piecemeal {119} policy, and resolved to carry out the original scheme of a great national highway across the continent, to be built as rapidly as possible so as to open up quickly the resources of ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... cases ciphers, and in all cases ignorant and enslaved—with no room for expansion, and little or no hope of political or social betterment; every inch of liberty, in every direction, which they had gained, wrung from their oppressors piecemeal, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was constructed of two sticks 10 feet long, which were bolted together at the top, and secured about five feet apart at the bottom by a cross piece, as shown in Fig. 136. The derrick was then taken apart and with some difficulty hauled piecemeal up to the next ledge above. Here it was put together again. The fall and tackle used in our aerial railway was attached to the apex of the derrick, and the latter was then erected with the legs set into depressions in the ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... peklakvo. Pickpocket fripono. Picnic kampfesteno. Picquet (cards) pikedo. Pictorial ilustrita. Picture pentrajxo. Picturesque pentrinda. Pie pastecxo. Piebald multkolora. Piece (to patch) fliki. Piece peco. Piecemeal peco post peco. Pier (pillar) pontkolono. Pier (landing place) ensxipigejo. Pierce trabori, penetri. Piety pieco. Pig porko. Pigeon kolombo. Pigeon-hole (for papers, etc.) faketaro. Pigeon-house kolombejo. Pigmy pigmeo. Pike (fish) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... seest not all; but piecemeal thou must break To separate contemplation, the great whole; And as the ocean many bays will make, That ask the eye—so here condense thy soul To more immediate objects, and control Thy thoughts until thy mind hath got by heart Its eloquent proportions, ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... mob, which outbreak was not directed against Otway Bethel, but against Sir Francis Levison. Cowering like the guilty culprit that he was, shivered he, hiding his white face—wondering whether it would be a repetition of Justice Hare's green pond, or tearing him asunder piecemeal—and cursing the earth because it did not open and let ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... times over? It's well you broke it piecemeal: the old callant's A waffly heart; and any sudden joy Just sets it twittering: but the more ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... sturdy democratic fashion, had to be endured. It died hard, but did come to an end, piecemeal. Tom Breeks then retired from the front, and became a unit once more. There were flourishes that indicated a termination of the proceedings, when another fellow was propelled in advance, and he, shuffling and ducking his head, to the cries of "Out wi' it, Jim!" ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... as it looks," commented Barry as he explained the tactics to the midshipmen. "You see, they can torpedo us as much as they like, and blow the dummy sides of the ship to bits piecemeal. We can't sink, since we'll be hard aground. We can't take fire—at least, it would be quite a job to get any part of her to burn without being able to keep the flames under control. Gunnery, of course, puts a different aspect on the subject. If the enemy start shelling ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... Tully's house, Mr. Tener writes to me, "I found it being gutted by his family, who would have carried it away piecemeal. They had already taken away the flooring of one of the rooms." Thereupon Mr. Tener had the house pulled down, with the result of seeing a statement made in a leading Nationalist paper that he was "evicting the tenants and pulling ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... left his baggage on board the river-steamer, and his own hands carried it piecemeal to the bank. This was a red-brick bungalow with an ample veranda, standing back from the future street that was as yet little better than a country road. The veranda commanded a long perspective of pines, but no further bricks and mortar, ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... of the Almighty, which gives understanding to the world's great teachers. To fear science or knowledge, lest it disturb our old beliefs, is to fear the influx of the Divine wisdom into the souls of our fellow-men; for what is science but the piecemeal revelation,—uncovering,—of the plan of creation, by the agency of those chosen prophets of nature whom God has illuminated from the central light of truth for that ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... thrown over the debate by the discussion of the articles in detail. The undecided point is, shall we break our faith? And while our country and enlightened Europe, await the issue with more than curiosity, we are employed to gather piecemeal, and article by article, from the instrument, a justification for the deed by trivial calculations of commercial profit and loss. This is little worthy of the subject, of this body, or of the nation. If the treaty is bad, it will appear to be so in its mass. Evil ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... you cannot well overlook it; but if it lies near before you, and you stand above it and can look down directly upon it, then you have it in full view. So it is, that here on earth we can form no conception of this life (I speak of), for it passes on (piecemeal as it were) foot by foot, to the last day. But as to God, it all stands in a moment. For with Him a thousand years are as one day, as St. Peter says, in the next Epistle. Thus the first man is just as near to Him as the last that shall be born, and He sees all at ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... buries pyramid and sphynx, the temples of gods and the homes of men beneath its barren solid waves. The leprosy gnaws the flesh off a man's bones, and joints and limbs drop off—he is a living death. So with every soul that is under the dominion of these lying desires—it is slowly rotting away piecemeal, 'waxing corrupt according to the lusts ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Accordingly, the Austrian foot took Chotusitz, after obstinate resistance; and old Konigseck, very ill of gout, got seated in one of the huts there; and the Prussian cavalry, embarrassed to get through the gullies, could not charge except piecemeal, and then though in some cases with desperate valor, yet in all without effectual result. Konigseck sits in Chotusitz;—and yet withal the Russians are not out of it, will not be driven out of it, but cling obstinately; whereupon the Austrians set fire to the place; its dry thatch goes up in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... mean to make clean my ships, and revictual; for I have tobacco enough to pay for it.' But he was powerless, as he confesses, to govern his crew, and no one knows how the heartbroken old man spent the next two dreadful months. His ships slunk back piecemeal to English havens, and on May 23, Captain North, who had commanded the 'Chudleigh,' had audience of the King, and told him the whole miserable story. On May 26,[12] Raleigh made his appearance, with the 'Destiny,' in the harbour of Kinsale, and on June 21 he arrived in Plymouth, penniless and dejected, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... think that they can deal with our present system in this piecemeal way very much underrate the strength of the tremendous organization under which we live, and which appoints to each of us his place, and if we do not chance to fit it, grinds us down till we do. Nothing ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... torture him with vain remorse; to refer to the future was to increase his anguish; and yet to be silent was to leave him a prey to his own regrets and apprehensions. Often he dwelt with shuddering minuteness on the fate of his perishing clay—the slow, piecemeal dissolution already invading his frame: the shroud, the coffin, the dark, lonely grave, and ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... desert sands, and desert bred From dugs whose sustenance was blood alone— A life translated out of other lives, I grew the king of beasts; the hurricane Leaned like a feather on my royal fell; I took the Hyrcan tiger by the scruff And tore him piecemeal; my hot bowels laughed And my fangs yearned for prey. Earth was my lair: I slept on the red desert without fear: I roamed the jungle depths with less design Than e'en to lord their solitude; on crags That cringe from lightning—black and blasted fronts That crouch ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... his attack from the point of view of biography. He realises the hopelessness of writing a history of the Victorian Age; it can only be dealt with in detail; it must be nibbled into here and there; discredited piecemeal; subjected to the ravages of the white ant. He has seen that the lives of the great Victorians lend themselves to this insidious kind of examination, because what was worst in the pretentiousness of their age is to be found enshrined in the Standard Biographies ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse |
