"Acme" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... acme of audacity—yes. The telegram has just come. 'Must see you tonight on important business affecting the past. Shall hope to be with ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... being in a beautiful and fertile country, where abound rich fields of grain and running streams of pure water, denotes the very acme of good times is at hand. Wealth will pile in upon you, and you will be able to reign in state in any country. If the country be dry and bare, you will see and hear of troublous times. Famine and sickness will be ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... to which they had been accustomed had been far from the Shakespearian standard, was wholly absorbed in the development of the tragedy. It was a complete revelation to them, and they were carried out of themselves, and found in the sympathy awakened by this heart-crushing spectacle of the acme of human woe an unconscious solace for their ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... themselves were of a sort that I am afraid boys would smile at nowadays. When you went to get a pair of skates forty or fifty years ago, you did not make your choice between a Barney & Berry and an Acme, which fastened on with the turn of a screw or the twist of a clamp. You found an assortment of big and little sizes of solid wood bodies with guttered blades turning up in front with a sharp point, or perhaps curling over above the toe. In this case they sometimes ended in an ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... keep his eyes upon the floor as he said this, and after he had finished, so as not to spy upon her confusion. She stood silent for a moment, then walked suddenly away, and falling on her uncle's chair, fairly burst out sobbing. Denis was in the acme of embarrassment. He looked round, as if to seek for inspiration, and seeing a stool, plumped down upon it for something to do. There he sat, playing with the guard of his rapier, and wishing himself dead a thousand times over, and buried in the nastiest kitchen-heap in France. His eyes ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... started a canvass of the big buildings in the theatrical district. After four or five had been searched without result they entered the 30-story Acme Theater building. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... into the country. A few skins and horns, and some cattle, make up the remainder of the exports. English goods, sugar, tea, and coffee are the articles received in exchange. All the natives of these parts soon become remarkably fond of coffee. The acme of respectability among the Bechuanas is the possession of cattle and a wagon. It is remarkable that, though these latter require frequent repairs, none of the Bechuanas have ever learned to mend them. Forges and tools have been at their service, and teachers willing ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... upper lip lifted from her teeth in a sneer that was the acme of insult. The fire was beginning to play ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... I or did I not do right, in shewing him how truly I admire and love his virtues? Was I or was I not guilty of any crime, when, in the very acme of the passions, I so totally disregarded the customs of the world? Or rather, for that is the true question, could it produce any other effect than that which I intended? I am persuaded it could not. Nor, blame me who will, do I repent. And yet, my friend, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... crack player throws with such force and accuracy as to split a bait top. This is the acme of the game and the crowning glory of the player. Often the bait consists of toothless, battered wrecks, but this does not lessen ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... bosom pressing His Acme, said, "I love thee, Acme— All my life-long will love thee, Acme! Nor day shall come to love thee less in. Or should it come, like common lover, In such poor love I love thee only; May Libyan lion dun discover, Or torrid India's beast attack me, Wandering forlorn from thee, and lonely ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... as she always did when he asked anything of her. He drew her down close to his side, and for a long time they remained quiet. Jinnie was facing the acme of joy. The day had only begun, and she was with the object of her dreams. Just as when she had lived in the hills the fiddle had held the center of her soul, so now Theodore King occupied that sacred place. The morning light rose in her eyes, ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... themselves engaged in operations of reclamation; that they abused their power by despoiling the peasants, and that dishonest farmers made a practice of evading taxes and tribute by settling within the bounds of a manor. These abuses reached their acme during the reigns of Uda and Daigo (888-930), when people living in the vicinity of a manor were ruthlessly robbed and plundered by the intendant and his servants, and when it became habitual to elude ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... nature; and in the depths of this western wilderness, many hundreds of Alexanders and Caesars, who have never been heard of. At the time I emigrated to Ohio the deadly hatred of the red men toward the whites had reached its acme. The rifle, the tomahawk and the scalping knife were daily at work; and men, women and children daily fell victims to this sanguinary spirit. In this state I found things when I reached the small village opposite ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... the dark electioneering tricks and gutter legislation which for years had been committed by the Magyars to the end that the Autonomists and they should have all the amenities of some one else's house, it surely is the acme of ingratitude to call this tottering benefactor "Hote insalue." If the Autonomists did not desire to reap advantages from any Magyar corruption, they might at any time since November 17, 1868, have torn the swindling piece of paper, the "krpitsa," from the Agreement made between ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... Jehu of an eight-horse wagon salutes the lips of his rosy inamorata, (scarcely less audible than the crack of his heavy thong on Smiler's dull sides,) may have been perfectly consistent with the acme of politesse some centuries bygone. We speak here somewhat confidently. Hear what an amorous votary of the Muses in the olden time, Robert Herrick, saith with respect ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... in England may almost be said to have commenced with him. Whether we look at home or abroad, we discover no man in Christendom worthy to be ranked with him, in genius or wisdom, in peace or war. His figure towers far above all his contemporaries; he constitutes the acme of the purely Saxon mind. No taint of foreign blood was in him.... Godwin's lot was cast upon evil days. The marriage of Ethelred with Emma originated a fatal connection between this country and Normandy, the first fruits of which, forcing themselves but too obviously on his notice, he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... So far as the known record can inform us, the trilobites are exclusively Palaeozoic in distribution, but their course must have begun long before that era, as is shown by the number of distinct types among the genera of the lower Cambrian. The group reached the acme of abundance and relative importance in the Cambrian and Ordovician; then followed a long, slow decline, ending in complete and final disappearance before the end of the Permian. The newly-hatched and tiny trilobite larva, known as the protaspis, is very near to the primitive larval ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... clear idea of whether it was his money, or his successor's money, or his brother's money, or the Marconi Company's money, or the Liberal Party's money, or the English Nation's money. It was buried treasure; but it was not private property. It was the acme of plutocracy because it was not private property. Now, by following this precedent, this unprincipled vagueness about official and unofficial moneys by the cheerful habit of always mixing up the money ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... have a way of giving their secretaries a number to send through and then wandering off somewhere out of sight so that when the person is finally connected he has to wait several minutes while the secretary locates the man who started the call. It is the acme of discourtesy to keep any one waiting in this manner. It implies that your time is much more valuable than his, which may be true, but it is hardly gracious to shout it in so brazen ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... of reputable use. No person would consider vulgarisms reputable. When a person says "I hain't got none," he has reached about the acme of vulgarisms, the language of the illiterate. Grammar has been disregarded; a word has been used which is not a word; and another word has no reason for its appearance in the sentence. Yet sometimes this expression is heard; seldom seen written. It is always set down to the account of an illiterate ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... been to school before, and of this school he often bragged as the acme of desirability and wickedness. He was always telling boys what they did at "his old school," and he quite inflamed the minds of such as fell under his influence by marvellous tales of the wild and wilful things which he and his former school-fellows had done. ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... scrape a hollow in the ground, of the shape shown in fig. 2 (next page), before spreading their sleeping-rugs. It is disagreeable enough to lie on a perfectly level surface, like that of a floor, but the acme of discomfort is to lie upon a convexity. Persons who have omitted to make a shapely lair for themselves, should at least scrape a hollow in the ground, just where the hip-bone ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... at times, strange, deep, night-blue, cat-like eyes, a long nose, a rather pleasant mouth, perfect teeth, and a really good chin, she moved always with a feline grace that was careless, superior, sinuous, and yet the acme of harmony and a rhythmic flow of lines. One of her mess-hall tricks, when unobserved by her instructors, was to walk with six plates and a water-pitcher all gracefully poised on the top of her head after the fashion of the Asiatic and the African, her hips ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... antiquity became more marked, and a consuming desire impelled him to spend two years in Italy (1786-1788). The rest of his years Goethe spent in Weimar, his life enriched above all else by his friendship with Schiller. In this second Weimar period Goethe reached the acme of his powers. Even his declining years, although marked by loneliness and bringing him a full measure of grief (his wife, Christiane Vulpius, whom he had met shortly after his return from Italy, died in 1816, followed in ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... machine to be used must be determined wholly by the character of the land and the purposes for which it is to be fitted. Lands that are hard and cloddy may be reduced by the use of the disk or Acme harrows, shown in Fig. 86; but those that are friable and mellow may not need such heavy and vigorous tools. On these mellower lands, the spring-tooth harrow, types of which are shown in Fig. 87, may follow the plow. On ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... at Monte Carlo stands in one of the loveliest settings on earth. Facing the blue Mediterranean and enhanced by the exquisitely kept marble villas of Monaco, it may justly be called the acme of gambling institutions. It has become an institution through the years. Time has ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... Tonogen is the acme of chemical perfection, both as a tonic and as a beverage. It is the captured and crystalized outcome of years of scientific observation focussed upon the true ingredients of healthy blood cells as viewed from both the theoretical and practical biological standpoint. It represents, in fact, a life ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... of a swaggering comedian. In like manner words of contempt spoken of ourselves by ourselves, unless they are absolutely heartfelt and come from a mind thoroughly convinced of the fact of its own misery, are truly the very acme of pride, and a flower of the most subtle vanity; for it rarely happens that he who utters them either believes them himself or really wishes others to believe them: on the contrary, the speaker is mostly only anxious rather to be considered humble, and consequently ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... an evening of delicious coolness, there so coveted, that a cavalier issued on horseback from the gates of the castle, which was then at the acme of its pride and strength. Numerous retainers stood on either side by the drawbridge their heads bared to the evening sun, until the horseman should have passed, but he went forth unattended; and the men resumed their caps, and swung to the drawbridge, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... to all keepers, he dearly loved to see a fox killed, no matter how or where; but to see one "chopped," without any of that "muddling round and messing about," as he delighted to call a hunting run, seemed to him the very acme of satisfaction and despatch. ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... that blew against me fanned the pain to an awful intensity, and, instead of enjoying the bliss of these never-to-be-repeated moments, I looked at the printed song to see how many verses had to be sung before I could step away from the torture which the cold air sent through my teeth. It was the acme of suffering. As the glow of the piled-up torches subsided, my pain subsided too. How thankful I was, though! Gentle eyes were fastened upon me all around. All wanted to speak with me, to press my ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... men and women of the Renaissance in the works of all its painters: heavy in Ghirlandajo, vulgarly jaunty in Filippino, preposterously starched and prim in Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; while mediaeval stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the little boys, companions of the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo Gozzoli's Building of Babel. These are the prosperous townsfolk, among whom the Renaissance artist is but too glad to seek for models; but besides ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... pastorali, but to censure the individual work because it is not of a type to which its author never had the remotest intention of making it conform, and to which except for something like a miracle it was impossible that it should even approach, is the acme of critical fatuity. Judged in accordance with the intention of the author the Amyntas is no inconsiderable achievement for a young writer, and compared with other works belonging to the same tradition it occupies a highly respectable place. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... affairs, preferably even of historic fame. The canon erred in mistaking one means of securing credible intensity or richness for the many which are possible. The end in view is to represent human qualities at their acme. In other times as a matter of fact persons highly placed were most likely to exhibit such development; birth, station, and their opportunities for unrestrained and conspicuous action made them examples of the compass of human energy, passion, and fate. New ages brought other conditions. ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... result of which is the selection, that is to say, the survival of those forms which, on the whole, are best adapted to the conditions which at any period obtain; and which are, therefore, in that respect, and only in that respect, the fittest. The acme reached by the cosmic process in the vegetation of the Downs is seen in the turf with its weeds and gorse. Under the conditions, they have come out of the struggle victorious; and, by surviving, have proved that they ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... as being a policeman, or a performer on the high trapeze. The poet would not have been the "Peoples' Laureate," had his fairy god- mother granted his boy-wish, but the Greenfield baker. For to his childish mind it "seemed the acme of delight," using again his own happy expression, "to manufacture those snowy loaves of bread, those delicious tarts, those toothsome bon-bons. And then to own them all, to keep them in store, to watch over ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... produce a single seed, but yet are affected by the pollen of certain other species, for the germen swells. It is here manifestly impossible to select the more sterile individuals, which have already ceased to yield seeds; so that this acme of sterility, when the germen alone is affected, cannot have been gained through selection; and from the laws governing the various grades of sterility being so uniform throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms, we ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... surgical cases. I accepted his offer without hesitation, and, burning to distinguish myself as an anatomical expert with the brush, I gave instruction to our family butcher to send me, as a model to study from, a kidney, which was to be the acme of goriness and as repulsive in appearance as possible. Of this piece of uncooked meat I made a quite pre-Raphaelite study in water-colours, but so realistic was the result that the effect it had ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... kinds at one meal is another secret of health; and if this seems harsh to those whose day is at present divided between anticipating their food and eating, I must ask them to consider whether such a life is not the acme of selfish shortsightedness. In case they should ever be at a loss what to do with the time and money thus saved from feasting, I would point on the one hand to the mass of unrelieved ignorance, sorrow, and suffering, and on the other to the doors of literature and art, which ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... chains were less obtrusively displayed, she had to thank Mr. Sheldon for the refinement in her taste. Her views of life in general had expanded under Mr. Sheldon's influence. She no longer thought a high-wheeled dog-cart and a skittish mare the acme of earthly splendour; for she had a carriage and pair at her service, and a smart little page-boy to leap off the box in attendance on her when she paid visits or went shopping. Instead of the big comfortable old-fashioned farmhouse at Hyley, with its mysterious passages ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... which had been fitted with crude showers. We were turned in twenty in a batch and were given four minutes to soap ourselves all over and rinse off. I was in the last lot and had just lathered up good and plenty when the water went dead. If you want to reach the acme of stickiness, try this stunt. I felt like the inside of a mucilage ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... was vanishing amid the glory of success, was to him to be wretched at his last moment, and to be wretched at his last moment, or to anticipate that he should be so, was to him,—even so near his last hours,—the acme of misery. How much of life was left to him, so that he might recover something of success? Or was any moment left ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... in their language, signifies "pig;" apparently they called the Spaniards "swine," as expressing the acme ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... propitiate them acquire an organised ritual in simple forms of ancestor-worship, such as the Rev. Mr. Turner describes among the people of Tanna (l.c. p. 88); and this line of development may be followed out until it attains its acme in the State-theology of China and the Kami-theology [26] of Japan. Each of these is essentially ancestor-worship, the ancestors being reckoned back through family groups, of higher and higher order, sometimes with strict reference to the principle of agnation, as in old ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... his son Yungcheng (1722-1736), who was followed by Kienlung (1736-1796), during whose reign the dynasty reached the acme of splendour. Under Kienlung, Turkestan was added to the empire. The Grand Lama of Tibet was also enrolled as a feudatory; but he never accepted the laws of China, and no doubt considered himself repaid by spiritual homage. ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... tightly as possible, to such an extent that the poor brute grunted and groaned under the apparently painful operation, and when fastened he seemed to be cut in two. This always appeared to be the very acme of cruelty to the uninitiated, but it is the secret of successful packing; the firmer the saddle, the more comfortably the mule can travel, with less risk of being chafed and bruised. The aparejo is furnished with a huge crupper, and this ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... in full ruddy gleaming light these rough tatterdemalions are seen at their boisterous revel wringing from Fate another hour of wassail and good cheer." Over the whole is flung a half-humorous, half-savage satire—aimed, like a two-edged sword, at the laws and the law-breakers, in the acme of which the graceless crew are raised above the level of ordinary gipsies, footpads and rogues, and are made to sit "on the hills like gods together, careless of mankind," and to launch their Titan thunders of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... play approached its close and the preparation for the marriage, even the details of the settlement were narrated, suspense reached its acme. Then came the letters of reprieve, the deliverance from the bondage of Peterson's vindictive malice, the power of establishing her claim; and when she wept her thanksgiving for salvation, many wept in sympathy; while Regina, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... strokes, which would be fatal blows to the peace of a truly delicate mind; she heeds not "the trifles light as air" which would be confirmation strong to a soul of genuine sensibility. My influence over the mind of L—— increases rapidly, and I shall let it rise to its acme before I seem to notice it. Leonora, re-assured, I suppose, by a few flattering words, and more, perhaps, by an exalted opinion of her own merit, has lately appeared quite at her ease, and blind to all that passes before her eyes. It is not for me to dissipate this illusion prematurely—it is ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold—the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... closed lids and the deepened lines of the thin face moved in her compassion as tender as she felt for the bleeding bruise on the cheek. She remembered how he had nursed her, and given her, by his mere sympathy and control, that hour's wonderful sleep. She remembered him crawling, at the acme of her terror, through the slit of the window; saving her from the Dutch woman; turning his back while she dressed; leaping like a heaven-sent devil over the stair-rail; fighting Ockley with his fists—and refused to remember that same enemy brought ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... have collected, children and older human brutes spit, hiss, yell, snarl, bite noses and ears, scratch, gouge out eyes, pull hair, mutilate sex organs, with a violence that sometimes takes on epileptic features and which in a number of recorded cases causes sudden death at its acme, from the strain it imposes upon the system. Its cause is always some form of thwarting wish or will or of reduction of self-feeling, as anger is the acme of self-assertion. The German criminalist, Friedrich, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... points of view which cannot be circumvented either with arguments or counter-arguments. One cannot refute Christianity: it is impossible to refute a diseased eyesight. That people should have combated pessimism as if it had been a philosophy, was the very acme of learned stupidity. The concepts "true" and "untrue" do not seem to me to have any sense in optics.—That, alone, which has to be guarded against is the falsity, the instinctive duplicity which would fain regard this antithesis as no antithesis at all: just as Wagner did,—and his ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... was at the acme of bliss. "Yes, I shall make my farewell; I shall say my Merci and depart and there... in Karlsruhe... I shall close my eyes." Karmazinov was ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... apparently sure principles, the people of France, in the year 1780, at twenty-four millions six hundred and seventy thousand. But was this the probable ultimate term under the old establishment? Dr. Price is of opinion that the growth of population in France was by no means at its acme in that year. I certainly defer to Dr. Price's authority a good deal more in these speculations than I do in his general politics. This gentleman, taking ground on M. Necker's data, is very confident that since the period of that minister's calculation ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Raf to share in his own pride. To the pilot's mind it bore little resemblance to any form of aircraft past or present with which he had had experience in his own world. But he did not doubt that it was the present acme of alien construction, and he was ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... Herculean labour. In fact I never looked beyond the moment of composition, and published merely at the request of my friends. Notwithstanding so much has been said concerning the "Genus irritabile vatum," we shall never quarrel on the subject—poetic fame is by no means the "acme" of my ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... 'Denzil Place'? Be easy, Leo; the cold remains of my ossified affection will lie in as decorous repose as the harmless ash heaps of some long buried damosel of the era of Lars Porsenna, dug out of Vulci or Chiusi. To make a safe and brilliant marriage is the acme of social success. What else does the world to which ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... one of those English wives, so popularly portrayed as representing the acme of submission, was delightful. A slight, slim little figure, looking slighter and slimmer in the wake of her overshadowing husband, with an outward appearance of unsurpassed mildness and meekness which her conversation readily ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... They were, as all thy royal line have been, Yet none of those who went before have reached The acme of Sardanapalus, who 10 Has placed his joy in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... GENTLEMEN:—That I am here this evening is as complete a mystery to me as to you. I do not know why your Society, at whose annual meetings orators are as the sand upon the seashore for multitude, should call upon Philadelphia, a city in which the acme of eloquence is attained by a Friends' Yearly Meeting, "sitting under the canopy of silence." I can only suppose that you designed to relieve the insufferable brilliancy of your annual festival, that you wished to dilute the highly-flavored, richly-colored, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... altogether in Dr. Sommer's reprint, but as these are long quarto lines, let us multiply them by some three to get the equivalent of the "skipping octosyllables." There will remain fifty to a hundred and fifty, with, in the prose, some extra matter not in the verse. But the acme of the contrast is reached in these words of the prose, which answer to some forty lines of the poet's watering-out. "Great was the joy that they made each other that night, for long had each suffered for the other. And when the day came, they ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... popularity was at its height, a gentleman, feeling the hand of a thief in his pocket, turned suddenly round and caught him in the act, exclaiming, "Who are you?" The mob which gathered round applauded to the very echo, and thought it the most capital joke they had ever heard, the very acme of wit, the very essence of humour. Another circumstance of a similar kind gave an additional fillip to the phrase, and infused new life and vigour into it just as it was dying away. The scene occurred in the chief criminal court of the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... a negro orator, he possessed far more common sense than the old Puritan before whom he stood. He opposed his plea as the acme of absurdity. The attack on the Federal Arsenal would be treason. It would array the whole Nation against him. It would hurl the army of the United States with the militia of Virginia on his ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... acme; and then end. Fassmann, a fellow not without sarcasm and sharpness, as you may still see, has one evening provoked Gundling to the transcendent pitch,—till words are weak, and only action will answer. Gundling, driven to the exploding point, suddenly seizes his Dutch smoking-pan, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... by the pollen of the other species, as shewn by the swelling of the germen. It is here manifestly impossible to select the more sterile individuals, which have already ceased to yield seeds; so that the acme of sterility, when the germen alone is affected, cannot have been gained through selection. This acme, and no doubt the other grades of sterility, are the incidental results of certain unknown differences in the constitution ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... when the bicycle marked the acme of progress and Bryan could be a hero, in a flat-roofed Texas town, whose intellectual glory was a Baptist college and whose answer to arguments, "ropes and revolvers," Brann wrote for only three years, and ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... no lives, and seldom broke bones. They were chiefly opportunities for the display of brilliant enamelled and gilt armour, at the very acme of cumbrous magnificence; and of equally gorgeous embroidery spread out over the vast expanse provided by elephantine Flemish horses. Even if the weapons had not been purposely blunted, and if the champions had really desired to slay one another, they ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never loyal to the successful. We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination. Dominus! Lord! Where is the spirituality? Lord Jesus? Lord Salisbury? A sofa in a westend club. But ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... features, informed by his mother's spirit. The result in his expression was an absolute ferocity instead of severity of gloom, a fury of resentment against his fate, instead of that bitter leaning towards it which is the acme of defiance. ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... merino!—it was something made up,—the gayest, prettiest, jauntiest dressing gown; with bunches of tiny carnations all over it, as bright as Faith's own. Though that be saying much, for at this hers reached their acme. ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... practised it with impunity: it gave a finish to the character of a woman, proved she would sometimes act for herself, not always be in leading-strings; it gave a taste of power, gratified her ambition; in short, flirtation was the very acme of enjoyment, and gave a decided ton before ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... the concentration of Bonaparte and Julius Caesar, and the alacrity of a wild cat, doesn't bring out your good points. Give us an andante maestoso movement, or a diminuendo rallentando that reaches the very climax and acme of slowness itself just before the applause comes! It was rather as a meditation in contrasts, though, that Sally thought thus to herself; for detached musical jerks of diabolical rapidity, that have ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... working, walks about the room, and appears less calm; to a superficial observer he would seem to show signs of fatigue. But after a few minutes he undertakes some much more difficult work, and becomes so deeply absorbed in this, that he shows us he has reached the acme of his activity (additions and writing down the results). When this work is finished, his activity comes to an end in all serenity; he contemplates his handiwork for a long time, then approaches the teacher, and ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... unusual occurrences in the little village of Acme. Of course this one furnished a topic for ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... Winter Lettuce.—Crossman's New Improved, Early White Cabbage, Early Curled Simpson, Black-Seeded Simpson, Early Prize Head, Big Boston, Grand Rapids, All the Year Round, Yellow-Seeded Butter Musk Melons.—Extra Early Hackensack, Fine Large Green Nutmeg, Baltimore Acme Cantaloupe, Jenny Lind, Montreal Market, Bay View, Cosmopolitan, Long Island Beauty, Paul Rose or Petoskey, Delmonico, Early Christiana, Banana, Tip Top Water Melons.—Cole's Early, Green Gold, Florida Favorite, Pride of Georgia, Hungarian Honey, Seminole, Black ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... contempt of all speculation—simply as speculation—reaches its acme in the Essay on Bacon. The curious naivete with which Macaulay denounces all philosophy in that vigorous production excites a kind of perverse admiration. How can one refuse to admire the audacity which enables a man explicitly to identify philosophy with humbug? It is what ninety-nine ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... surrounding heights and bulks; but along my sublime upper Fifth Avenue there is spire after spire that does not unduly dwindle, but looks as if tenderly, reverently, protected by the neighboring giants. They are very good and kind giants, apparently. But the acme of the sublimity, the quality in which I find my fancy insisting more and more, is in those two stately hostelries, the Gog and Magog of that giant company, which guard the approach to the Park like mighty pillars, the posts of vast ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Tartar Sultan Malik Shah of Mero, and Hassan ibu Sabbah, the ambitious and revengeful founder of the sect of the Assassins. The scene is laid partly at Naishapur, in the Province of Khorasan, which about the period of the First Crusade was at its acme of civilization and refinement, and partly in the mountain fortress of Alamut, south of the Caspian Sea, where the Ismailians under Hassan established themselves towards the close of the 11th century. Human nature is ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... woman's constancy, single-heartedness, and such chimerical stuff—the kind of stuff, that, with youth, takes the place of the recently discarded nursery fiction. I think of the hundreds of women that I have loved, beginning in my early boyhood, passing through my adolescence to the acme of my powers, and even now as I stand on the verge of my desuetude! Surely some one of these many women would have been constant, if women have any constancy in their make-up. Show me a woman howling out her life on my grave, and then I'll believe Bainbridge. But I know all about Bainbridge. ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... tears herself regretfully from the artful temptations of the shop-window. As she hurried along, the Marquis de Monpavon, vivacious and superb, with a flower in his buttonhole, saluted her at a distance with the grand flourish of the hat so dear to the vanity of woman, the acme of elegance in the way of street salutations, the hat raised high in air above a rigid head. She answered with the polite greeting of the true Parisian, hardly expressed by an imperceptible movement of the figure and a smile in the eyes; and, seeing ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... which Schiller pronounced the acme not only of Goethean but of all modern art, was written professedly as an attempt in the Homeric[7] style, motived by Wolf's "Prolegomena" and Voss's "Luise." It is Homeric only in its circumstantiality, in the repetition of the same epithets applied to the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... simultaneously, more or less, as the planet approaches or departs from the sun. It means also that about the same conditions that Secretary Deepwaters suggested as desirable for the earth, prevail here, and that Jupiter represents, therefore, about the acme of climate naturally provided. On account of its rapid rotation and vast size, the winds have a tornado's strength, but they are nothing at this distance from the sun to what they would be if a planet with its present rate of rotation and size ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... much mind other people being so. He says what he thinks, and you have got to lump it. Sometimes he is good-natured enough, and even brave. There is an admirable sketch of a good-natured cad in one of Mrs. Walford's novels, who is the acme of kind indelicacy. The cad is dreadful to live with, because he is always making one ashamed, and ashamed of being ashamed, because many of the things he does do not really matter very much. Then, when he is out of sight and hearing, you cannot ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... very slowly," replied the younger man with a calmness that struck the other as the acme of effrontery. "My light has been burning for ten minutes ... but I don't make out how you saw my window if you came from the front ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... the streets were more agitated than ever: Is it a new September, then, that these Anarchists intend? Finally, that no September came;—and also that hysterics, not unnaturally, had reached almost their acme. (Meillan, pp. 23, 24; Louvet, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... met by the leading pickle manufacturers who prepare special brands, generally according to German recipes, and sell them to the delicatessen and the grocery stores. If they were to rely upon me for business, they would soon go bankrupt. To my palate the dill pickle appeals as almost the acme of disagreeableness. ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... we may well affirm that no solution whatever could even be imagined of the difficulty—if we are never again to live; if those we here loved are forever lost to us; if our faculties can receive no further expansion; if our mental powers are only trained and improved to be extinguished at their acme—then indeed are we reduced to the melancholy and gloomy dilemma of the Epicureans; and evil is confessed to checker, nay, almost to cloud over our whole lot, without the possibility of comprehending why, or of reconciling its existence ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... reliance on inward experience instead of on external authority, which makes its appeal necessarily to the reason. Here we see elements of revolt. For, as Dr. L. Ginzberg well says, 'while study of the Law was to Talmudists the very acme of piety, the mystics accorded the first place to prayer, which was considered as a mystical progress towards God, demanding a state of ecstasy.' The Jewish mystic must invent means for inducing such a state, for Judaism cannot endure a passive waiting for the moving spirit. The mystic soul ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... wanted me to be a school-teacher, in her eyes the acme of respectability. But as it happens, there are two things I wouldn't be: one's a school-teacher, the other a minister's wife. If I had to marry the average minister, I should infallibly hate all church-goers; if I had to teach ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... blue breathed between them at the zenith, and green blue nearer the horizon, form the scales and chords of color possible to the morning and evening sky in pure and fine weather; the keynote of the opposition being vermilion against green blue, both of equal tone, and at such a height and acme of brilliancy that you cannot see the line where their edges pass ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... his closed sanctum Livingstone still sat with intent gaze, poring over the page of figures before him. The expression on his face was one of profound satisfaction. He had at last reached the acme of his ambition—that is, of his later ambition. (He had once had other aims.) He had arrived at the point towards which he had been straining for the last eight—ten—fifteen years—he did not try to remember just how long—it had been a good while. He had at length ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... code of ethics a man's loyalty to his wife occupied a very definite and unassailable position, the realisation came to him fraught with the acme of bitterness and self-contempt. Nor did he propose to yield to the madness in his blood. Hour after hour, as he tramped blindly across country, he thrashed the matter out. This love which had come to him was a forbidden thing—a thing which must ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... bed for the repose of the whole family. Need I attempt to describe my sensations? The statement alone cannot fail of conveying to a mind like yours an adequate idea of them—I could not long remain a witness to this acme of human misery. As I left the deplorable habitation the mistress followed me to repeat her thanks for the trifle I had bestowed. This gave me an opportunity of observing her person more particularly. She was a tall figure, her countenance composed of interesting features, ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... chord which gave to the work its descriptive title. Needless to say that this chord does not "surprise" our modern ears to any great extent. The Minuet is one of Haydn's best—full of queer antics in rhythm and modulation. The Finale (Allegro di molto), in the Rondo Sonata form, is the acme of Haydn's vivacity and is a "tour de force" of brilliant writing for the strings. In many passages they ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... he wandered on, while she proceeded to undress him; and bit by bit she was able to piece together what had happened. "He was an unknown from Chicago. They sprang him on me. The secretary of the Acme Club warned me I'd have my hands full. An' I'd a-won if I'd been in condition. But fifteen pounds off without trainin' ain't condition. Then I'd been drinkin' pretty regular, an' I didn't ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... union and security and prosperity in our Mother-land. So lauded be Almighty Allah and to Him be praise and thanks and goodly gratitude! And may He bless the King and us all his subjects and vouchsafe unto us and him the acme of felicity and make his life-tide happy and his endeavour constant!" Then arose the sixth Wazir and said, "Allah favour thee with all fell city, O King, in this world and in the next world! Verily, the ancients ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... mount the stairs. This house, where he had been born and sheltered, had never seemed to him so warm, and rich, and cosy, as during this last pilgrimage to his father's room. It was not his taste; but in its own substantial, lincrusta way it was the acme of comfort and security. And the night was so dark and windy; the grave so ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Everything was recklessly thrown about, torn, and trodden under foot. Hargrave flew from the sight, and hid her tears and stifled her sobs in the darkest corner of the cavern. From that hour they were doomed in her estimation as the acme of wickedness ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton |
