"Pivot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... followed them, though he did not move. Sebastiano looked up at him uneasily from time to time, but Ruggiero gazed steadily at the sea with the affectation of proud indifference to scrutiny, which is becoming in a boy of twelve years. At last the old man stirred, turned slowly as on a pivot ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... meet this principle of beauty-worship in metaphysical love, the adoration of woman; thanks to Plato, it has for all time become the inalienable property of the human mind. The striving to rise above all individualism was another ideal which a later period revived. But the pivot round which the emotions revolved was the love for a beloved individual, the modern, European, fundamental motive, as opposed to the antique Platonic cult of ideas. Thus Plato, too, was a citizen of the old world, at whose threshold stood universal sexual intercourse, tolerating nothing personal, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... sweeping oar, balanced on a pivot at either end, with the handle reaching almost to the middle of the boat. That portion considered the stern (although in no respect did it differ from the bow) had the covered space, used as sleeping quarters ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... infibulation^, inosculation^, symphysis [Anat.], anastomosis, confluence, communication, concatenation; meeting, reunion; assemblage &c 72. coition, copulation; sex, sexual congress, sexual conjunction, sexual intercourse, love-making. joint, joining, juncture, pivot, hinge, articulation, commissure^, seam, gore, gusset, suture, stitch; link &c 45; miter mortise. closeness, tightness, &c adj.; coherence &c 46; combination &c 48. annexationist. V. join, unite; conjoin, connect; associate; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... could be summed up in a newspaper paragraph!" Here, Carlyle was at once right and wrong. The theme, looked at dispassionately, is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed for eternity. But the poet looked upon the central incident as the inventive mechanician regards the tiny pivot remote amid the intricate maze of his machinery. Here, as elsewhere, Browning's real subject is too often confounded with the accidents of the subject. His triumph is not that he has created so huge a literary monument, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... to reconcile God to man, but man to God; and this is effected in proportion as Christ dwells in us, bringing us more and more into harmony with the Divine. The Atonement is indeed the central doctrine, the pivot of Christianity, but it is an atONEment, a making of one mind. To which Tanner's Lane listened with much wonderment and not without uncomfortable mental disturbance, the elder members complaining particularly that this was not the simple gospel, and that the trumpet gave an uncertain sound. ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... advantages of situation, on the very highway between two oceans, are added a soil of unsurpassed richness, and a fascinating, undulating beauty of surface, with a health-giving climate, calculated to nurture a powerful and generous people, worthy to be a central pivot of American institutions. A few short months only have passed since this spacious and mediterranean country was open only to the savage who ran wild in its woods and prairies; and now it has already drawn to its bosom a population of freemen larger than Athens crowded within ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... the central pivot of a whirlpool of excitement? God knows he loved peace even if Fate never permitted him to sample it. He laid the whole thing unconditionally at Brian's door. Let Brian, instead of shirking his usual numismatic responsibilities in some indefinite green world ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... defence was concerned, was lamentable. The regular C. S. naval fleet consisted of the Louisiana (Captain McIntosh) and carrying the flag of Commodore Mitchell; the steamer McRae (Captain Huger), carrying six light 32-pounders and nine-inch pivot gun; the steamer Jackson (Captain Renshaw), with two pivoted smooth bore 32-pounders; the small ironplated "Ram" Manassas (Captain Warley), carrying one 32-pounder carronade in the bow; and two ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... we generally obtained excellent bread of unbolted wheat flour, rye being rarely used. There were many windmills of clumsy construction, the wheels having but four wings, and the whole concern turning on a pivot to bring its face to the wind. No bolting apparatus has been introduced, and the machinery is of the simplest and most primitive character. It was a period of fasting, just before Christmas, and our whole obtainable bill of fare comprised bread ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... fairly common is having the axes of the hinges out of alignment. Especially is this the case when three hinges are used to hang a wardrobe or other large door. It is absolutely necessary in all cases that the exact centres of the pivot-pins of the hinges should be in a ...
— Woodwork Joints - How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used. • William Fairham
... is what the author Soljenitsyne observed about his Russian countrymen in an interview with M. Pivot in the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... courtiers that are assembled on such occasions by their dress of ceremony. The civilians have a bird, and the military a tyger, embroidered on the breast and back of their upper robe; and their several ranks are pointed out by different coloured globes, mounted on a pivot on the top of the cap or bonnet. The Emperor has also two orders of distinction, which are conferred by him alone, as marks of particular favour; the order of the yellow vest and of the ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... tells me more of your affairs than you ever condescend to inform your cousin of. Your mother was different, Leon. Dame! I could never pass her door after your father died but she would stop my wagon and ask me for just five minutes' counsel. But you young ones are all alike: the world has got a new pivot, it seems, for this generation, and it will move round more easily when we graybeards ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... foreleg was caught over her own head, and so she held herself from rising. The sand was rolled and grooved into a wheel by her circlings; her body heaved and fell with breathing, and the sand was wet where her pivot nostrils had ground it. While Genesmere untangled her and gave her tongue the last of his canteen the calf walked round and round. He placed the cow upon her feet, and as soon as he moved away to his horse the calf came to its mother, who began to lick it. He presently marked ahead the position ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... and shortly after the other, flew out, and commenced sailing in circles, at the height of an hundred feet or so above the water. Nothing could be more graceful than their flight. Now they would poise themselves a moment in the air, then turn their bodies as if on a pivot, and glide off in ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... that greeted the charge was not defiant, for the elephants turned simultaneously as upon a pivot and set the example of making for the nearest points of the jungle; and to the charging men it seemed as if they formed part of some immensely extended human hay-making machine, whose glittering spikes were about to sweep off a living crowd which, excited and ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... as the reader skilful in the antique language of the drama must at once perceive, turned on the same pivot as in the old minstrel tales of the Drinking Horn of King Arthur, and the Mantle made Amiss. But the audience were neither learned nor critical enough to challenge its want of originality. The potent relic was, after such grimace ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... ax and it gave, swinging upward on a pivot. Then a minute later the door swung inward, yielding to his ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... her at Myrtlewood, while the two boys were each accommodated with a window; but each moment they were claiming their mother's attention, or rushing across the ladies' feet to each other's window, treating Rachel's knees as a pivot, and vouchsafing not the slightest heed to her attempts at intelligent pointing out ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... d'implorer la piti des rvolts; mais tous, jusqu' l'interprte, qui ne leur avait jamais fait de mal, furent impitoyablement massacrs. Le lieutenant mourut avec gloire. Il s'tait retir l'arrire, auprs d'un de ces petits canons qui tournent sur un pivot, et que l'on charge de mitraille. De la main gauche, il dirigea la pice, et, de la droite, arm d'un sabre, il se dfendit si bien qu'il attira autour de lui une foule de noirs. Alors, pressant la dtente du ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... influence of my life has been The Spectator, and, therefore, as will be seen, I have made The Spectator the pivot of my book, or, shall I say, the centre from which in telling my story I have worked backwards and forwards. But this is not all. Though I pay a certain homage to chronology and let my chapters mainly ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... a standstill. It was turning as if on a pivot. It had been caught in one of the numerous eddies at the mouth of a small tributary stream. Vigorously he strove to gain the channel. He hugged the bank, hoping to free himself from the whirlpool, but his outrigger became entangled in some weeds, and the boat slowly began to tip. Frantically ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... have plenty of hands for working them, if we only have to fight one side at once; but we shouldn't be very strong handed, if we had to work both broadsides. There are four sixteen pounders, four twelves, and the pivot; so that gives three men to a gun, besides officers and idlers. Three men is enough for the twelves, but it makes rather slow work with the sixteens. However, we may hope that we sha'n't have to ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... Division, which, with a French division, was under command of our First Corps, acted as a pivot of the movement toward Soissons. On the 18th it took the village of Torcy while the Third Division was crossing the Marne in pursuit of the retiring enemy. The Twenty-sixth attacked again on the 21st, and the enemy ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... until he found a hidden spring. In the seemingly solid stone wall a large block of stone swung around on a pivot, disclosing a larger ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Philippines - or, Following the Flag against the Moros • H. Irving Hancock
... gleam of satisfaction in seeing so lucidly the springs of his failure as a human being. Happiness was the child of fixedness—in opinions, in space. Soul and body had need of a centre, a pivot, a home. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and ladled the soup out of the old china tureen. It was her consecrated hour—the single hour of her toiling day that she dedicated to personal happiness; and because it was her hour, her life had gradually centred about it as if it were the divine point of her universe—the pivot upon which her whole world revolved. Nothing harsh, nothing sordid, nothing sad, ever touched the sacred precincts of her twilight hour with ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... that no large ship would willingly approach it. The muzzles of some smaller guns appeared through the embrasure of the parapet wall, which was also flanked by a buttress, or rather a circular outwork at either end at the foot of the towers, where pivot guns were placed, so that the one on the west could fire directly up the voe or gulf, and served to flank the western wall. The two principal front towers were connected with the dwelling-house, and had small chambers in them, one above the other, ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... does that again, Mr. Passford, we must be ready to return her fire," said the captain. "Have the pivot gun ready, and aim for her Armstrong, which seems to be sufficiently prominent on her deck ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... millions began to argue, it would not be easy to persuade them to obey Queen Victoria, or anything else. Effectual arguments to convince the people who need convincing are wanting. Just so, an immense system of credit, founded on the Bank of England as its pivot and its basis, now exists. The English people, and foreigners too, trust it implicitly. Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone: but what we have requires no proof. The whole ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... tray. Thirteen times sixty-five ... eight hundred and forty-five things to collect, lay, square up symmetrically. I make little absurd reflections and arrangements—taking a dislike to the knives because they will not lie still on the polished metal of the tray, but pivot on their shafts, and swing out at angles after my fingers have ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... in the log-book, folded his hands and shut his eyes. The Leyden jars rattled in their mahogany sockets as the Vandalia climbed a wave, faltered, and sped into the hollow. Far removed from her pivot of gravity, the wireless house behaved after the manner of an express elevator. But the wireless house chair was bolted to ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... the facility with which folks will turn right round and revolve, I will tell how Josiah seemin'ly forgot mawlstroms, bad air, rumatiz, ages, meetin' housen, principles, etc., and turned right round on the pivot of his inclination. A day or two after he heard down in the office about the dancin' parties they had in the parlor anon or oftener, and he come up into our room enthused with the idee and wanted to branch out and go that ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... of the ears and eyes running down into the heart is constantly being sounded out in the old Book. A famous bit in Isaiah puts it very clearly, and becomes a sort of pivot passage of all others of this sort. That fine-grained, intense-spirited young Hebrew was caught in the temple one day by a sight of God. That wondrous sight held him with unyielding grip through all the after years. With the sight came the voice, and the ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... the statue of Nepomeck down into the earth, the seventh step was movable and turned on a pivot; if you stood on one end of this, the statue above raised itself, but if you stood on the other end, it sank gently down, The builders of this subterranean passage had chosen well the guardian of their ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... launches into the immensity of space and the eternity of time: there he is presented with a new order of the universe of which the atom-globe which he inhabited appeared no longer to be the centre; this important post was reserved to the enormous mass of the sun; and that body became the flaming pivot of eight surrounding spheres, whose movements were ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... June 1913. Ariadne in Naxos. Is Strauss, our one musician of genius, himself the pivot on which the wheel is beginning to swing? Having drained the cup of Wagnerism and turned it upside down, is he now going to ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... had also its rules: on the left, was the town to which the palace, temple, or whatever occupied the middle, belonged; on the right, the open country, landscape, mountains, sea-coast, &c. The side-scenes were composed of triangles which turned on a pivot beneath; and in this manner the change of scene was effected. According to an observation on Virgil, by Servius, the change of scene was partly produced by revolving, and partly by withdrawing. The former applies to the lateral decorations, and the latter to the middle ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... a very light and elastic triangle of tempered steel bands, that rests on the front of the abdomen, and is held in place by a soft silk-elastic waist-band. In each of the slanting arms of the triangle are small holes that admit the central pivot of a bell-pad, having a central spring, and so adjusted that it adapts itself to every movement of the body without being misplaced. By means of a thumb-screw and the perforations, it (the spring bell-pad) can be set at any point in the ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... floor—of statuettes yellow with smoke, of desks crowded with paper-weights, paper-knives, pens, and inkstands of "artistic" pat terns. He was seated at the table, with his back to the fire, his arm lifted, and a hairpin between his finger and thumb—the pivot round which his paper twist was spinning briskly. Across the table stood his daughter, leaning forward with her chin on her hands and her white teeth showing as she laughed for laughing's sake, to give play to her ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... on the ground and his assailant bending over, each intent on stabbing the other. See how the prostrate man plants his foot on the thigh of his enemy, and note the tremendous energy he exerts to keep off the foe, who, turning as upon a pivot, with his grip on the other's head, exerts no less force to keep the advantage gained. The significance of all these muscular strains and pressures is so rendered that we cannot help realising them; we imagine ourselves imitating all the movements, ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... continued the coxswain, with admirable dignity and self-possession; and the Zephyr, acted upon by this maneuver, came about as though upon a pivot, without going ...
— All Aboard; or, Life on the Lake - A Sequel to "The Boat Club" • Oliver Optic
... Schumann's Nachtstueck, the fourth of the set. He had a peculiar way of turning the hand on the middle finger, as on a pivot, for the extended chords, at the same time raising the whole outer side of the hand, so that the fifth finger should be able to play the upper melody notes round and full. In the middle section he desired ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... diameter, the escapement is jewelled, and the pendulum, which is in itself a curiosity, is over fourteen feet in length. It is a curious fact that the pendulum bob weighs over three hundred pounds; but so finely finished is every wheel, pinion, and pivot in the clock, and so little power is required to drive them, that a weight of only one hundred pounds is all that is necessary to keep this ponderous mass of metal vibrating, and turn four pairs of hands on the dials of the cupola. The clock does not stand, as many suppose, ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... that should rouse the whole neighbourhood, when Clare, having reached the top, seated himself upon the wall, and Tommy restrained himself in the hope of what a parley might bring. But he sat down only to wheel on the pivot of his spine, as he had seen them do on the counter in the shop, and sit with his legs alongside of the water-but. Then he drew Tommy from his shoulder, in spite of his clinging, and laid him across his knees; and Tommy, ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... table, in the round pivot-chair he always used,—a chair which enabled him to swing round suddenly and face a patient, or to turn away very quietly and bend over ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... introducing the subject of the Campanile, "it really seems as if the town is waking up! I hear there is a lift in the tower, and the old angel on the top has been actually placed on a pivot, to act as a weather vane as well as a thing of beauty. That's more than could have been expected of slow Venetians. If it were only possible to get in a few automobiles there might be some hope for ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... have surpassed this fight. The elephant was mad with rage, and nevertheless he seemed to know that the object of the hunters was to get behind him. This he avoided with great dexterity, turning as it were upon a pivot with extreme quickness, and charging headlong, first at one, and then at another of his assailants, while he blew clouds of sand in the air with his trunk, and screamed with fury. Nimble as monkeys, nevertheless the aggageers could not get behind ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... more merit in the broad comedy of "Your Five Gallants," a curious burlesque study of manners and morals not generally commendable for imitation. The ingenious and humorous invention which supplies a centre for the picture and a pivot for the action is most singularly identical with the device of a modern detective as recorded by the greatest English writer of his day. "The Butcher's Story," told to Dickens by the policeman who had played the part of the innocent young butcher, may be profitably compared by lovers of detective ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... social pivot, the focus of the life, of the civilisation of the East is to be found in their idea of the home. The home is the centre of gravity of their existence, round which everything else revolves. In China it is the all-pervading, all-vivifying idea of social life, of religion, and of government. ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... vain attempts to get away, the sufferer lies down flat and refuses to do his duty, the fowler is able to stimulate him without stirring from his hut. A long string sets in motion a little lever working on a pivot. Raised from the ground by this diabolical contrivance, the bird flies, falls down and flies up again at ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... with the danger, and the vessel was slowly drawing ahead; but every moment its broadside was set nearer to the rock, which was now within fifty feet of them. The fore-chains were past the point, though little hope remained of clearing it abaft. A ship turns on her centre of gravity as on a pivot, the two ends inclining in opposite directions; and Captain Truck hoped that as the bows were past the danger, it might be possible to throw the after-part of the vessel up to the wind, by keeping away, and ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... to the painful industry of Minot. Our events seem to fall short of that colossal proportion which befits the monumental style. Look grave as we will, there is something ludicrous in Counsellor Keane's pig being the pivot of a revolution. We are of yesterday, and it is to no purpose that our political augurs divine from the flight of our eagles that to-morrow shall be ours, and flatter us with an all-hail hereafter. Things do really gain in greatness by being acted on a great and cosmopolitan stage, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... Beaugard in the cinders, the ashes and the dust. His chin dropped on his breast, and a cloud like a fog on the coast of Gaspe settled round him. Yet even as his head drooped, something else happened—one of those trivial things which yet may be the pivot of great things. A cock crowed—almost in his very ear, it seemed. He lifted his head quickly, and a superstitious look flashed into his face. His eyes fastened on the burnished head of the Cock among the ruins. To his excited imagination it was as though the ancient ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of life is a pivot on which turns the whole action of our after-lives; and so, indeed, of the after-lives of the whole world. But we are so purblind that we only see this of certain special enterprises and endeavors, which we therefore ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... that instant, whatever was more soft and holy in the passions and darkness of my mind seemed to vanish away like a scroll. I again returned to the intense and withering remembrance which was henceforward to make the very key and pivot of my existence. I again recalled the last night of Gertrude's life; I again shuddered at the low murmured sounds, whose dreadful sense broke slowly upon my soul. I again felt the cold-cold, slimy grasp of those wan and dying fingers; and I again nerved my heart to an iron strength, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of an inch broad. On this rim is melted some gutta-percha, upon which the plate is pressed into contact and adhers quite firmly when the gutta-percha is solidified. The stick is perforated at the lower end and revolves on an iron pivot fixed at the bottom of the support, being held in the opening on the platform of the same, as shown in the ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... only now and then that we could see the Barrier over our heads. All of a sudden we were close upon a lofty iceberg, so that we had to put the helm hard over to go clear. The Fram steers splendidly, however, when she is in proper trim, and turns as if on a pivot; besides ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... sharp insight had partially penetrated when she first warned him that their partnership must be dissolved—was a scheme which she could now plainly see must be abandoned as hopeless, in the case of Michael Vanstone's son. The father's habits of speculation had been the pivot on which the whole machinery of her meditated conspiracy had been constructed to turn. No such vantage-ground was discoverable in the doubly sordid character of the son. Noel Vanstone was invulnerable on the very point which had presented itself in his father ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... rapidity of the current proportionably great. I entertained hopes that the passage was clear, and that we should shoot down it without interruption; but in this I was disappointed. The boat struck with the fore-part of her keel on a sunken rock, and, swinging round as it were on a pivot, presented her bow to the rapid, while the skiff floated away into the strength of it. We had every reason to anticipate the loss of our whale-boat, whose build was so light, that had her side struck the rock, instead of her keel, ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... ages, were formality and vice to conspire with each other! Jeremiah scorns the people's trust in the Temple as utterly as he had scorned their trust (it is the same word) in the Baals or in Egypt and Assyria. The change in the pivot of their false confidence is to be marked. So much at least had Deuteronomy effected—shifting their trust from foreign gods and states to something founded by their own God, yet leaving it material, and unable to restrain them from ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... mind? He is one of those who take nothing for granted. A weight of authority is little in his mind when compared to the personal investigation of the fact—facts for the people, and for himself as one of the people—that's the pivot on which Mathew Mizzle turns and returns, one fact being to his mind worth whole volumes of speculative assumption; and to Mizzle all facts, let them relate to what they may, are of peculiar interest. It is useless to tell him so. He must go, see and examine for himself. Often, for instance, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... separation between the two canals drifted bodily outward, as far as the rocks at the mouth of the bay and the ice that lay upon them would permit, taking with it a heavy-grounded mass that lay near the Hecla, and on which it had before been turning as on a pile or pivot; shortly after a second mass on the eastern side of the canal broke off, the separation taking place upon the line where the ice had been weakened by the sand we had laid upon it. Our work was now at an end, and we had only to wait for a ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... the Best Known Sovereign is a PIVOT around which all the other Sovereigns are directly or indirectly related. How, we will proceed to show. Something of the method will be intimated by the difference of type and ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... cause why men visit each other and converse, abstracting all considerations of business, seems to be simply the love of pleasure. This is the passion truly universal; this is the pivot upon which the world intellectual, as well as the world of sense, turns. Philosophers and saints feel it in their speculations and devotions, and yield to it too, in their way, as completely as the Sybaritish gourmand, whose stomach is his Baal and Ashtaroth. Nor is this ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... different bolts drawn back, and then there was a pause. He thought he heard whispering, so he resumed his thunder. Almost at once there followed the unmistakable squeak of a big beam turning on its pivot, and the door opened about ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... whose beauty was as famous as her wealth and importance. How often Alexander had stared at the blue line of the hills above her! Forty miles away, within the range of his vision, was a bit of the great world, the very pivot of maritime trade, and one cause and another had prevented him from so much as putting his foot on a sloop ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... accompanies its coming. Reaching the zenith, it seems there to hang poised awhile,—a ghostly bridge arching the empyrean,—upreaching its measureless span from either underside of the world. Then the colossal phantom begins to turn, as on a pivot of air,—always preserving its curvilinear symmetry, but moving its unseen ends beyond and below the sky-circle. And at last it floats away unbroken beyond the blue sweep of the world, with a wind following after. Day ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... great political and religious convulsions of the South, the earthquake-like throes of which were felt even in the capital, Nimes has always taken the central place; Nimes will therefore be the pivot round which our story will revolve, and though we may sometimes leave it for a moment, we shall always ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Ghat mountains, or rather the smaller hills or offshoots from the range. He found them sandstone, but very singularly formed or broken into huge blocks—some like the masses which I saw on the route from Ghadamez to Ghat, with a very narrow base, on which they might turn as on a pivot. ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... were not effected when the plough was swung round, the furrow would be made opposite. Next he leans heavily on the handles, still standing on the same spot; this lifts the plough, so that it turns easily as if on a pivot. ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... all as the tide of battle subsided. None realised more than himself what the sustaining help and comradeship of married life had wrought for him, alike in making his life worth living and in making his life's work possible. Here he found the pivot of his happiness and his strength; here he recognised to the full the care that took upon itself all possible burdens and left his mind free for ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... exists a highly elastic medium, pervading all space, conveying to us the light of the most distant stars, and that this medium is not affected by gravity. In this summary way, therefore, we have arrived at the pivot ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... by each rank successively and on the same ground. At the second command, the pivot man of the front rank faces to the right in marching and takes the half step; the other men of the rank oblique to the right until opposite their places in line, then execute a second right oblique and take the half step on arriving abreast of the pivot man. All glance ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... to an astonishing length, however, the nest was at last discovered, the poor birds were dispersed, and our hero took his ill-fledged flight to perch upon distant sprays, and to pick his meat from the hand that caters for the sparrow. This was the pivot upon which the whole life of Hodgkinson turned. The irresistible impulse of a vigorous genius would, most probably, under any other circumstances, have sent him ultimately to the goal of his destination; but this event hastened ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... ball around the corners, do not stand still and pivot. Go after it, again with a series of short steps with your racquet head up and cocked, and your body in proper position so that you are ready to make ...
— Squash Tennis • Richard C. Squires
... current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a bar of iron lying within it, but not touching it. So a woman is turned into a love-magnet, by a tingling current of life running round her. I should like to see one of them balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch if she did not turn so as to point north and south, as she would if the love-currents are like those ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... and, as I grasped the reins, I heard a sharp growl and a thrashing through the brush. I knew the old one was coming, and the next instant she streamed over a log, and alighted in the road. She ran with her eyes flaming, her hair bristling, and her teeth grinning. She turned as on a pivot, and gave an unearthly squall, as she saw me racing away, and bounded after, with such yells and fury, and gained on me so fast, that for very fear I threw the kitten out, and lashed the flying horse; but she scarcely paused for that, but ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... design, having been carefully worked out by Galloway after much experience with the problem, and after building many boats. He finally settled on the design furnished us by Mr. Stone. The flat bottom, sloping up from the centre to either end, placed the boats on a pivot one might say, so that they could be turned very quickly, much more quickly than if they had had a keel. There was a four foot skag or keel under the stern end of the boat, but this was only used when in quiet water; and as it was never replaced after being once removed ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... the region of the North Pole, the Pole-Star has captivated all eyes by its position in the firmament. It is the providence of mariners who have gone astray on the ocean, for it points them to the North, while it is the pivot of the immense rotation accomplished round it by all the stars in twenty-four hours. Hence it is a very important factor, and we must hasten to find it, and render it due homage. It should be added that its special immobility, ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... the old dad would stare if I could only have him in Dawson for a day. He'd never be able to get things just in focus any more. He would be knocked clean off the pivot on which he's revolved these thirty years. Seems to me every one's travelling on a pivot in the old country. It's no use trying to hammer it into their heads there are more points of view than one. If you don't just see ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... little epoch of time only three weeks long, to count for anything. It was to be a holiday and no more. And lo! with that inexplicableness, that unforeseenness which is so curious a quality of human life, it had become a turning point of existence, the pivot perhaps upon which Chatty's being might hang. Mrs. Warrender was not so decided as Chatty. She saw nothing final in the parting. She was able to imagine that secondary causes, something about money, some family arrangements that would have to be made, had prevented any ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... flirtation which distracted Cressy from her studies was displeasing to McKinstry and inimical to his plans. Blindly ignorant of Mr. Ford's possible relations to her daughter, and suspecting nothing, she felt towards him only a dull aversion as being the senseless pivot of her troubles. Seeing no one, and habitually closing her ears to any family allusion to Cressy's social triumphs, she was unaware of even the popular admiration their ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... be long remembered. I told myself, in a premonition of things to come, that I should always remember Captain Riggs and the Rev. Luther Meeker and Trego and Rajah, and the very pattern of the parti-coloured cloth on the table, the creak of the pivot-chairs and the picture of the Japanese girl in the mineral-water calendar which swayed on the bulkhead opposite ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... between the American and other republics, consists in the principle of representation; which is the pivot on which the former move, and which is supposed to have been unknown to the latter, or at least to the ancient part of them. The use which has been made of this difference, in reasonings contained in former papers, will have shown that I am disposed neither to deny its existence nor to undervalue ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... the appliance is as follows: The casing or receiver is a steel cylinder, which has a pivot at the bottom to receive the step for an upright hollow shaft, to which a second cylinder of smaller diameter is attached. The second cylinder is perforated, and a fine wire cloth is inserted. The mercury, after passing through the cloth, is discharged through the perforations. ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... strength would have been wholly insufficient to get her into the water without the aid of the lever and rollers. Taking the former they placed its end under the stern post, and placing a roller under its heel to serve as a pivot they threw their weight on the other end of the lever and at once raised the boat some inches in ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... full length and spinning round and round like a wagon wheel upon its nave. They revolve with great rapidity, using their humped shoulders as a pivot, and their legs as levers. They sometimes continue this motion for half-an-hour at a time. No doubt they do this, as has been said, to scratch themselves; for, notwithstanding their thick hides and hair, they are much annoyed by insect-parasites. They do it, too, for amusement, or to give themselves ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... again have to choose the alternative of entering upon such an agony or of forgetting its honour towards God. Force, it would seem, must long remain the last remedy, but might it not be force resting on a pivot and striking with effect wherever international crime seeks to disturb the peace of the nations? The mere knowledge of such a united determination would at least be a powerful persuasive. That may be only a dream. The immediate fact is that the doctrine of Will to ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... governor, by which it may be turned forward or back as the load requires. The three points of lead, or admission and exhaust and compression, are fixed and independent of the changes and cut off. The motion of the main eccentric is given to a rocker arm, the pivot of which is at the bottom, and from the upper end the valve rod transfers the motion to the valve without reversing the motion, as is done sometimes in the slide valve to overcome the effects of the angularity of the connecting rod. The ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... and I regard Alcyone as that star of all others, composing the group which is favored by most of the probabilities as being the true central sun of the universe," Moses tells us they were known as "the hinge, or pivot," of the heavens; and God asks, "Canst thou bind the secret influences of the Pleiades?" Though Peter was no geologist, and probably incapable of calculating the ratio of the central heat, he tells us that the heavens ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... in military engineering and fortification to walk round these wonderful defences. The wiring too was most ingenious and often carefully concealed in the hedges or ditches. Inside the gun shelters, you found that the gun was fixed on a central pivot and worked round a wooden platform with every degree carefully marked. Whilst on the walls stood a painted board with every barrage line and target carefully worked out, and the range and code call set out as well. The O.P. was sometimes in a high tree, ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... smile on his big mouth, no twinkle about the corners of his little eyes. He looked at Mrs. Moon as much as to say, "What is to be done? The boy has been going the wrong way: must we disown him?" The moon neither shook her head nor moved her lips, but turned as on a pivot, and stood with her back to her husband, looking very miserable. Not one of the star-children moved from its place. They shone sickly and small. In a little while they faded out; then the moon paled and paled until ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... of the oar." (The word kaji to-day means "helm";—the single oar, or scull, working upon a pivot, and serving at once for rudder and oar, being now called ro.) The mist passing across the Amanogawa is, according to commentators, the spray from the ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... other remedies have failed, the whole population go forth with the priest at their head to a place at some distance from the village. Here at sunset they erect a couple of poles with a cross-bar between them, to which they attach bags of rice, wooden models of pivot-guns, gongs, bracelets, and so on. Then, when everybody has taken his place at the poles and a death-like silence reigns, the priest lifts up his voice and addresses the spirits in their own language as follows: "Ho! ho! ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... pivot of a magazine. On him everything turns. If his gauge of the public is correct, readers will come: they cannot help coming to the man who has something to say himself, or who presents writers who have. And if the reader comes, the advertiser must come. He must go where his largest ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... the boat lightly touched a rock. Blondin saw that there was not sufficient depth in a passage which he had intended to traverse. With a shout to the steersman he thrust his pole over the side with all his might. The obedient craft turned as if on a pivot, and would have gone straight into a safe stream in another second, if Blondin's pole had not stuck fast either in ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... our journeying all Europe turned on a Burgundian pivot, and the Fates were busy in that land. It was the stage of the world, on which the strong, the great, and the enterprising of mankind were playing; and I hoped that Max, who was strong and enterprising, would find his part in this Burgundian drama. ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... his engine is cut off and he has not the time to start it again, the machine tilts and slides down sideways. If it occurs higher up a vrille is the probable result. In this the plane plunges toward the ground spinning round and round with the corner of one wing as a pivot. In either case a serious accident is ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... power. You remember Felix, the jack that Whitey rode across the prairie, and Felix's job of turning the little grinding-mill? The horses had the same sort of job, except that there were teams of them, revolving around a central pivot, that furnished the power that worked the great machine in whose maw sheaves of wheat were fed, to ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... is a master work of that kind of fiction which makes vice alluring under the sophistical veil of innocence. Longus knew very well that nothing is so tempting to libertines as purity and ignorant innocence; hence he made purity and ignorant innocence the pivot of his prurient story. Professor Rohde (516) has rudely torn the veil ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... perpendicular red and black stripes. The railway carriages have always two foot-boards, and the doors besides the usual handles have a second one half-way down the panels presumably for additional security. It is really in the nature of a bolt that turns on a pivot and falls into a bracket. On the doors, the class of the carriages is always marked in heavy Roman numerals. The third-class compartments have windows only in the doors, are innocent of any form of cushions and are generally only divided half-way up. The second ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... reach the ground the man astride the body will grasp the body with his hands, the balls of the thumb resting on either side of the pit of the stomach, the fingers falling into the grooves between the short ribs. Now, using his knees as a pivot, he will, at the moment the patient's hands touch the ground, throw (not too suddenly) all his weight forward on his hands, and at the same time squeeze the waist between them, as if he wished to force something in the chest upward out of the mouth; he will deepen the pressure ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... over to a corner of the room and threw back the corner of a rug. Where the baseboard was mortised at the corner there appeared to have been a patch put in. Ted placed his hand against this, near the top, and it tipped back. It was hung on a pivot, and, as its top went in and the bottom came out, there was revealed a boxlike receptacle about two feet long and ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... utterly instantly as if he had run into a brick wall, pawed, stamped, snorted, and went off once more into furiously insane caperings—a new set—all the time circling, with the little, black-and-gray, erect figure of the surprised ratel as a pivot. ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... made plain by a few illustrations. In Fig. 128, A is a pulley four times larger, diametrically, than B, and C is the pivot on which they turn. The pulleys are, of course, secured to each other. In this case we have the two weights, one of four pounds on the belt, which is on the small pulley (B), and a one-pound weight on the belt ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... matter of broken ribs and a damaged leg. And there is no doubt that if the local surgeon had not been allowed to have his own way, I should soon have been cured. As it was I became a cripple. The great central fact—the very pivot upon which all the wheels of my life have since been turning—is that for two years during the impressionable period of childhood I walked ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... his legs and pelvis are as elastic as India rubber, so that he can twist and twirl about in a marvelous way, pointing his head one moment to the east and the next, without losing his hold, in the opposite direction. He is able to swing himself around almost as if he were hung on a pivot. ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... earlier works the guiding theme is used with increasing frequency, it is true, so that in 'Lohengrin' its employment adds materially to the poetical interest of the score; but in 'Das Rheingold' we are in a different world. Here the guiding theme is the pivot upon which the entire work turns. The occasional use of some characteristic musical phrase to illustrate the recurrence of a special personality or phase of thought has given way to a deliberate system in which not only each of the characters in the drama, but ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... laugh that pealed above the noise, blue eyes that seemed to pursue some converse of their own, and a hand that grasped and cheered, where other hands withdrew and repelled. This one man's will had now, for some years, made the pivot on which vast issues turned—issues of peace and war, of policy embracing the civilized world; and, here, one saw him in drawing-rooms, discussing Alaric's campaigns with an Oxford professor, or chatting with a ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of pride, threw up her chin, lifted her arms, and turned as if on a pivot, to show herself off in her elegance. She had on the wine-colored street-dress bordered with black fox; over its white satin waistcoat embroidered with gold hung in a splendid loop her pink corals. The restraining Paris corset gave to her luxuriant form ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... House in the North Carolina Back Country, on the 15th of March—Greene made them pay so dearly for their victory that Tarleton called it "the pledge of ultimate defeat"; and, three days later, Cornwallis was retreating towards Wilmington. In a sense, then, King's Mountain was the pivot of the war's revolving stage, which swung the British from their succession of victories ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... village with country houses, and the street would end in another busy town; and so on until I began to think there was no real country, at least, in the direction we was going. It is my opinion that if London was put on a pivot and spun round in the State of Texas until it all flew apart, it would spread all over the State and settle up the ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... schemes were involved in the struggle, Ellesmere was the pivot on which arguments and contentions centred. In such a conflict, needless to say, all the old rivalries of "leviathan" interests, of which we have already heard so much, re-emerged. What was still called the "Montgomeryshire party"—the men who had brought the other local ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... beards, eyelashes, and eyebrows; of wicks steeped in oil and wound round the fingers of a victim's hands, and then set on fire so as to form a pair of five-flamed candelabra; of a case turning on a pivot in which a man who refused to be converted was sometimes shut up, the case being then made to revolve rapidly till the victim lost consciousness; and lastly of fetters used when taking prisoners from one town to another, and brought to such perfection, that when ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... what your hearing and sight together are to you. In large measure we travel the same highways, read the same books, speak the same language, yet our experiences are different. All my comings and goings turn on the hand as on a pivot. It is the hand that binds me to the world of men and women. The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter. ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... Troilus and Cressida, the same subject is worked over very fully and is indeed the main pivot of the drama, in which Achilles is substantially deposed from his heroship and replaced by Ulysses. The contest between mind and might or skill and courage, is what the English poet took from his Greek elder brother in part and in part derived from later legend. ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... into battle with Macdonough's fleet was slightly superior. It was headed by the flagship "Confiance," a frigate of the class of the United States ship "Constitution," carrying thirty long twenty-fours, a long twenty-four-pounder on a pivot, and six thirty-two or forty-two pound carronades. The other vessels were the "Linnet," a brig mounting sixteen long twelves; and the "Chubb" and "Finch" (captured from the Americans under the names of "Growler" and "Eagle"),—sloops carrying ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... military skill against the wary old Marshal's, he was offering incentives to conspiracy. Distrusting the revolution, which was a force behind him, he placed such reliance on its efforts in his front as to make it the pivot ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the canal: and of course, if a method of lifting the gate at one stroke could be found, it would reduce the passage from eight to seven days, and the freight equally. I suggested to Monsieur Pin and others a quadrantal gate, turning on a pivot, and lifted by a lever like a pump-handle, aided by a windlass and cord, if necessary. He will try it, and inform me of the success. The price of transportation from Cette to Bordeaux, through the canal and Garonne is ——— the quintal: round by the straits of Gibraltar is ———. Two hundred ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... my agent's office I was fastened upon by a fellow fresh from Madagascar with a little scheme for a wonderful piece of business. It had something to do with cattle and cartridges and a Prince Ravonalo something; but the pivot of the whole affair was the stupidity of some admiral—Admiral Pierre, I think. Everything turned on that, and the chap couldn't find words strong enough to express his confidence. He had globular eyes starting out of his head with a fishy glitter, bumps on his ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... or hammer steel Facing and welding steel Pick steel Fork steel Pivot steel Gin saw steel Plane bit steel Granite wedge steel Quarry steel Gun barrel steel Razor steel Hack saw steel Roll turning steel High-speed tool steel Saw steel Hot-rolled sheet steel Scythe steel Lathe spindle steel Shear knife steel Lawn mower knife steel Silico-manganese ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... his hotel in a sweat, through long tracts of glare and passages of freezing shadow. But the peculiar outdoor sport of this district is tobogganing. A Scotsman may remember the low flat board, with the front wheels on a pivot, which was called a hurlie; he may remember this contrivance, laden with boys, as, laboriously started, it ran rattling down the brae, and was, now successfully, now unsuccessfully, steered round the corner at the foot; he may remember scented summer evenings passed in this diversion, and many ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an Erasmicus, and, altogether, I hate those party names. We are all followers of Christ, and to His glory we all drudge, each for his part.' But he knows that now the question is: for or against him! From the brilliant latinist and the man of wit of his prime he had become the international pivot on which the civilization of his age hinged. He could not help beginning to feel himself the brain, the heart and the conscience of his times. It might even appear to him that he was called to speak the great redeeming word or, perhaps, ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... Justice; I might no more hope to make Egypt free and great and sit upon my lawful throne. Khem was lost, and lost was I, Harmachis. In the rush and turmoil of events, the great plot of which I had been the pivot was covered up and forgotten; scarce a memory of it remained. The curtain of dark night was closing in upon the history of my ancient Race; its very Gods were tottering to their fall; I could already, in the spirit, hear the shriek of the Roman eagles as they flapped their wings ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... reached the mature age of sixteen,—for a moment she was impelled to make a clean confession of her own egotism, and to ask his pardon for having, under the tuition of her mother, made him the unconscious pivot of all her worldly ambitions,—then, with a sudden impetuous movement, she swept past him without a ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... of old may have gazed upon the vision of the grail. His mother looked at him, and her lips quivered. Artificial and frivolous though she was, her only son was dear to her heart. Since the hour of his birth he had been to her as a pivot round which the world revolved. Her son—the last of the Grevilles who had owned the Manor since the days of the Tudors. To be alienated from him would be the bitterest grief which ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... its arrangements and effects and its admirable technique. In point of fact, Berne is a city where a German dialect is spoken, but among the lively groups of bourgeois who carry on this effective little drama a prettier and politer language is in vogue. Madame Carouge, whose personality is the pivot upon which the story revolves, is a native of southern France, and is the proprietor of the Hotel Beauregard. Her husband, who married her as a mere child and carried her away from a life of poverty and neglect, has died before the opening of the story and bequeathed all his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... Clavicytherium, or keyed cithara. The invention of keys permitted the strings to be covered over, and therefore the strings of the clavicytherium were enclosed in a box, instead of being stretched on a box. The first keys were merely long levers with a nub at the end of them, mounted on a pivot, which the player canted up at the strings on the see-saw principle. It has required four hundred years to bring the mechanism of the piano key to its present admirable perfection. The clavicytherium was usually a very small instrument,—an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... difficult, account of the meaning of religion is to be found in his Truth of Religion and his Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt. It is important to deal with the concept of the spiritual life at this stage of our inquiry, for it is the pivot around which the ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... shaped like the bottom of a flatiron, with a blunt stern and a sharp nose, is the boat with which the boy in the country first makes acquaintance. It is propelled by two oars, usually fastened to the sides by pivot row-locks. This is a handy boat for getting about in, but it is quite impossible to learn the art of rowing ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... space I could go on multiplying cases where the same results have followed when the cross of Christ has been the pivot of all Christian teaching, and prayer has been the source ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... exclaimed, jumping to her feet, and taking up a pad and pencil she hastily began to write a lecture in which she used the material gained in her hospital experience. She called it "Hospital Life." When she gave it on that night at Concord with a heavy heart it proved to be the pivot on which her success as a lecturer swung to its greatest height. As she drew her vivid pictures of the hospital experience and horrors of war and slavery she melted her audience to tears by her impassioned delivery. The secretary of the ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... ask. By simply willing to relax. Hold your arm out straight from your shoulder. Now—withdraw all power and let it fall. Practise relaxation of the muscles of the throat by letting your neck and head fall forward. Roll the upper part of your body around, with the waist line acting as a pivot. Let your head fall and roll around as you shift the torso to different positions. Do not force your head around—simply relax your neck and let gravity pull it ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... had better be made hereditary, and therefore endeavor to lead towards that all the forms and principles of its administration. Others will view it as an energetic republic, turning in all its points on the pivot of free and frequent elections. The great body of our native citizens are unquestionably of the republican sentiment. Foreign education, and foreign connections of interest, have produced some exceptions in every part of the Union, north and south; and perhaps other circumstances in your quarter, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the bill. Not for kindness,—oh, dear no,—Carol staunchly disclaimed any such niceness as that. She did it for fun, pure and simple. She said she liked to show off. She insisted that she liked to feel that she was the pivot on which little old Mount Mark turned. But this was only when she was found out. As far as she could she kept her little "seeds of fun" carefully up her sleeve, and it was only when the indiscreet adoration ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... occipital foramen being situated entirely at the base of the cranium of man and not carried up behind, as in the other vertebrates, causes his head to be posed at the extremity of the vertebral column as on a pivot, not bowed down forward, his face not looking towards the ground. This position of the head of man, who can easily turn it to different sides, enables him to see better a larger number of objects at one time, than the much inclined position of the head of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... in all her sister's doings, and always spoke of herself as the invalid, precluded from all service except that of being a pivot for Jane, the stationary leg of the compasses, as she sometimes called herself. This repose, together with her prettiness and sweetness of manner, was very attractive; especially to Gillian, who had begun to feel herself in the ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dragon" and "hot cockles" are supposed to be relics either of the "ordeal by fire" or of the days of the ancient fire-worshippers. The former consists of snatching raisins from a bowl of burning brandy or alcohol, and the latter of taking frantic bites at a red apple revolving rapidly upon a pivot in alternation ...
— Myths and Legends of Christmastide • Bertha F. Herrick
... learn what was following him. Then if it were worth while he could trail his pursuers and, coming up behind them, could take them unaware. But if all this happened on a lake or in open country, where he could not circle back under cover, he would suddenly turn in his tracks, as though upon a pivot, and without losing the least headway or causing a moment's delay in his pace, he would continue walking, but now in a backward direction, long enough to give himself ample time to scrutinize his distant trail. By manoeuvring thus, he could study his pursuers without ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... traveler all this while was pointing out this thing and that to me—showing how the telephone operated; how his field glasses poised just before his eyes, being swung and balanced on a delicately adjusted suspended pivot; telling me how on a perfectly clear day—this October day was slightly hazy—we could see the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the Cathedral at Rheims; gyrating his hands to explain the manner in which the horses, trotting away from us as we climbed upward, had given to the drum on the wagon ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... miss it particularly...the dancing at the restaurants was better and he didn't have to talk...whether people stopped asking him or not, now that his wife was away, or whether they entertained or not, didn't so much matter. He had the Club. That was the all important pivot of his life, his altar, his fetish...a lot he cared what went so ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... Brigade, protecting right; the force having got over open ground should arrive at daybreak on enemy; 9th Brigade having secured Table Mountain to swing round left and keep on high ground, and then advance east to west on A (on plan; not printed); Guards Brigade conform, being pivot; then Guards advance on east edge of Mount Blanc, guns clearing entire advance with shrapnel; cavalry to get round rear of enemy, ...
— 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
... great strength it is evident could not be accomplished without the assistance of some mechanical power. This in the more modern bows is attained by the application of a piece of steel, which lies along the front of the stem, and is moved forward on a pivot until the string is caught by a hook, and a lever is thus obtained, by means of which the bow is drawn to its proper extent. It seems to me that this is the description of bow of which your correspondent has furnished a drawing. Another mode, and which appears to have been applied to the ancient ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... needle, when rubbed with a lodestone, has the mysterious power of pointing to the north. The Arabs may have introduced this rude form of the compass among Mediterranean sailors. The instrument, improved by being balanced on a pivot so that it would not be affected by choppy seas, seems to have been generally used by Europeans as early as the thirteenth century. It greatly aided sailors by enabling them to find their bearings in murky ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... convexities I have described seven little circles of light sprang out. They gleamed, glimmered, grew brighter—shone. The gigantic slab before me glowed with them, silver wavelets of phosphorescence pulsed over its surface and then—it turned as though on a pivot, sighing ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... apprehension. How would the affair proceed after Clark had taken with him his unrivaled and intimate knowledge of the works; for, and in spite of all the dictates of prudence, it seemed impossible to think of the vast enterprise at St. Marys without its central pivot. ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... The pivot on which the Loggan Stone is thus easily moved, is a small protrusion in its base, on all sides of which the whole surrounding weight of rock is, by an accident of Nature, so exactly equalized, as to keep it poised in the nicest balance on the one little point in its lower surface which ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... Jim's life need scarcely be dwelled upon in any detail. It was so amazing, so unexpectedly baffling, that it sent him clean off his pivot of balance. All that marvelous happiness in his heart was shattered little by little. The first night at the hotel at Nice left him pondering. It wasn't due to the fact that Angela occupied a separate room, but that ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... division, the extreme right of the Union line. Immediate success attending this assault, Hardee extended the attack gradually along in front of Davis, hip movement taking the form of a wheel to the right, the pivot being nearly opposite the left of my division. Johnson's division soon gave way, and two of Davis's brigades were forced to fall back with it, though stubbornly resisting ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... suggestions of his self-love; instinctive evasions of everything that threatens to interrupt the career of his triumphant jollity and self-complacency. His very size floats him out of all his difficulties in a sea of rich conceits; and he turns round on the pivot of his convenience, with every occasion and at a moment's warning. His natural repugnance to every unpleasant thought or circumstance, of itself makes light of objections, and provokes the most extravagant and licentious answers in his own justification. His indifference to truth ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... analogy. After the Crimean War the enthusiasm was of a vague, eclectic kind, and consequently it could find satisfaction in practical administrative reforms not affecting the essence of the Autocratic Power, the main pivot round which the Empire has revolved for centuries. Now, on the contrary, it is precisely on this pivot that the reform enthusiasm is concentrated. Mere bureaucratic reforms can no longer give satisfaction. All sections of the educated classes, with the exception of a small group of Conservative ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, a mast-pivot, 15 inches in length and weighing between seven and eight pounds, which had passed obliquely through the body of a sailor. The specimen is accompanied by a colored picture of the sufferer himself in two positions. The name of ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... of Acts the pivot on which all else rests and turns is the unhindered presence of the ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... really talk, because of the glassy ravel of women's excited, cold laughter and running voices. They waited, uneasy, suspended, rather bored. But Gerald remained as if genial and happy, unaware that he was waiting or unoccupied, knowing himself the very pivot of ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... amiability the Superintendent whirled back into place in her pivot-chair and with her left hand which had all this time been rummaging busily in a lower desk drawer proffered Rae Malgregor ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... Paul but in Jesus Christ. "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me" (Gal. i. 15, 16). The man had seen his Saviour with his whole soul. And because of—not the man who saw but—the Saviour who was seen, behold, the life is lifted off the pivot of self-will and transferred to that of "the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." The same "revealing" grace can lift us also. We are not St Pauls; but the Jesus Christ of St Paul is absolutely the same, in Himself, for us. ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... heard. It is simply the pounding of the ponderous pestle of the kometsuki, the cleaner of rice—a sort of colossal wooden mallet with a handle about fifteen feet long horizontally balanced on a pivot. By treading with all his force on the end of the handle, the naked kometsuki elevates the pestle, which is then allowed to fall back by its own weight into the rice-tub. The measured muffled echoing of its fall seems to me the most pathetic ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... had a right to vote, and this after a careful examination of the question, the whole subject assumes new importance.... How grateful to Judge Selden must all the suffragists be! He has struck the strongest and most promising blow in their behalf that has yet been given. Dred Scott was the pivot on which the Constitution turned before the war. Miss Anthony seems likely to occupy a similar position now.—New York ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... done for them in their financial scheme? Nothing that was calculated, if he had heard aright, to benefit the agricultural population. Well, then, what would they do? Protection had been a failure when it reached a prohibitory duty of 80s. a quarter; it had been a failure when it reached the pivot price of 60s.; and it was a failure now when they had got a sliding-scale; for they had admitted the lamentable condition of their tenantry and peasantry. Let them accede, then, to his proposition for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan |
