"Circumscribed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... present, power supreme! Not circumscribed by time, nor fixt to space, Confined to altars, nor to temples bound. In wealth, in want, in freedom or in chains, In dungeons or on thrones, the faithful find ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... beloved husband's great indulgence to me in pecuniary matters, thereby allowing me to indulge in bestowing favors on those whom I considered worthy of it, it is in this respect I feel chiefly the humiliation of my small circumscribed income. If Congress, or the Nation, had given me the four years' salary, I should have been able to live as the widow of the great President Lincoln should, with sufficient means to give liberally to all benevolent objects, and at my death should have left at least half ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... cerebral defect is often manifested in a manner exceedingly embarrassing to all who hold to the prevalent notions respecting sanity and insanity. It is sometimes confined to a very circumscribed range, beyond which the mind presents no material impairment. The sound and the unsound coexist, not in a state of fusion, but side by side, each independent of the other, and both derived from a common source. And the fact is no more anomalous than that often ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... to literature, science, and art. Of the truthfulness of this assertion there is ample evidence in the poetical, philosophical, and historical writings of ancient authors, whose ideas and conceptions regarding the created universe were limited and circumscribed by this form of astronomical belief. In the works of more recent writers we find that it continued to assert its influence; and among our English poets, from Chaucer down to Shakespeare, there are numerous references ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... their secular role ruled portions of the Italian peninsula for more than a thousand years until the mid 19th century, when many of the Papal States were seized by the newly united Kingdom of Italy. In 1870, the pope's holdings were further circumscribed when Rome itself was annexed. Disputes between a series of "prisoner" popes and Italy were resolved in 1929 by three Lateran Treaties, which established the independent state of Vatican City and granted Roman Catholicism special status in Italy. In 1984, a concordat between the Holy ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... are called upon to write Latin verse themselves. In the same manner some of their first prose compositions are in a dead language. An uniform, petty, ridiculous scheme is laid down, and within that scheme all their thoughts are to be circumscribed. ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... his house and garden, envisaging them for the first time, as it were, from her point of view. They had a queer air of belonging to an era that had passed, to a yesterday already remote. They looked, somehow, curiously small, moreover—the garden circumscribed, the two-storied house, with its striped sunblinds, poor and petty. He turned his back upon them—left them behind. He would have to come home to them later in the day, to be sure; but then everything would be different. ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... completeness is the inmost craving! "A life of your own"—that was what even Bessy, in her obscure way, felt to be best worth suffering for. And how was a spirit like Justine's, thrilling with youth and sympathy, to conceive of an isolated existence as the final answer to that craving? A life circumscribed by one's own poor personal consciousness would not be life at all—far better the "adventure of the diver" than the shivering alone on the bank! Bessy, reading encouragement in her silence, returned her ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... mother Nature, repose awhile in peace where princes and nobles would envy thee, if they knew thy present lot. But that shall never be; these lips shall never breathe a tale which might endanger thy existence; fear not, therefore, their enmity, and as thou slowly creepest away thy little round of circumscribed existence, forget me not, but shed an occasional pearly tear to the memory of the persecuted, the innocent Angelicanarinella!'" What d'ye ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... transferred from things that are apart locally, to all kinds of opposition": and in like manner words that signify local movement are employed to designate all other movements, because bodies which are circumscribed by place, are best known to us. And hence it is that the word "circumstance" has passed from located things ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... Warwickshire. The figure of our Saviour in a sitting attitude, holding in his left hand a book, and with his right arm and hand upheld, in allusion to the saying, I am the way, and the truth, and the life, and circumscribed by that mystical figure the Vesica piscis, appears over Norman doorways at Ely Cathedral; Rochester Cathedral; Malmesbury Abbey Church; Elstow Church, Bedfordshire; Water Stratford Church, Buckinghamshire; and Barfreston Church, Kent; and ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... of two distinct social structures, connected, and, as it were, encased, one within the other; two governments, completely separate, and almost independent, the one fulfilling the ordinary duties, and responding to the daily and indefinite calls of a community, the other circumscribed within certain limits, and only exercising an exceptional authority over the general interests of the country. In short, there are twenty-four small sovereign nations, whose agglomeration constitutes the body of the Union. ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... Federal Union as a sovereign State, always asserting her claim to certain limits, which, having been originally defined in her colonial charter and subsequently recognized in the treaty of peace, she has ever since continued to enjoy, except as they have been circumscribed by her own voluntary transfer of a portion of her territory to the United States in the articles of cession of 1802. Alabama was admitted into the Union on the same footing with the original States, with boundaries which were prescribed ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... conditions of a country alter. If in a small degree, the relative proportions of the inhabitants will in most cases simply be slightly changed; but let the number of inhabitants be small, as on an island, and free access to it from other countries be circumscribed, and let the change of conditions continue progressing (forming new stations), in such a case the original inhabitants must cease to be as perfectly adapted to the changed conditions as they were originally. ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... acquainted on these subjects. At the same time, I must not omit to do justice to a beautifully-written and accurate Essay on Winds and Currents, by that Prince of all Voyagers, Old Dampier; who, with means far more circumscribed than most of his successors, has contrived to arrange and condense his information in such a way as not only to render it available to practical men, but to make it intelligible and interesting to every class ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... direction he may desire to go. The glider, it must be remembered, is not steerable, except to a limited extent, and moves only in one direction—against the wind. Besides this its power of flotation—suspension in the air—is circumscribed. ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... King, Ensign Barraillier came to the front as an explorer. He was notably an accurate and painstaking surveyor, and although his expeditions were circumscribed by the ever present barrier of the Blue Mountains, he was evidently an indefatigable worker in the cause of science. From a letter of Governor King's, addressed to Sir Joseph Banks in May, 1803, we learn something of Barraillier, and also of the ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... have often said it to you, I believe man incapable of tasting certain kinds of happiness, which are, so to speak, too complete, too immense for his circumscribed faculties; I think, too, that certain beings are too divinely endowed not to feel sometimes that they are alone here below, and that they feel at times vague regrets for their exquisite delicacy, which ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... shall one fathom it? I asked myself this one rainy afternoon, as I sat in the Burroughs homestead and looked from one brother to another, the two so alike and yet so unlike. The one a simple farmer whose interests are circumscribed by the hills which surround the farm on which as children they were reared; the other, whose interests in the early years were seemingly just as circumscribed, but who felt that nameless something—that push from within—which first found its outlet in a deeper interest in the life about him than ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... of insisting upon law and order wherever our jurisdiction prevails. The lesson has been hard to learn, but it has been driven home. The truth of the matter is, that a great missionary work has been begun; missionary not in the limited sense of forcing upon the understanding of a yet circumscribed people a religion unintelligible to them, but in the sense of teaching peace and harmony, respect for order, obedience to law, regard for the rights ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... has long been circumscribed by barriers of any kind, which prevent the animals from wandering beyond it, then we find that all the species, both extinct and living, constitute more or less a world of their own; while, on the other hand, where the animals are free to migrate from one area to another, the course of their ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... reason to believe that it spreads with great rapidity from old surfaces to freshly cut ones. That it is a vital phenomenon, and due to the mycelium of a fungus, I do not in the least doubt, for I have observed it occasionally circumscribed by those black lines which are often seen to bound mycelia on dead wood, and to precede a more rapid decay. I have often tried, but always in vain, to coax these mycelia into developing some fungus, by placing them in damp rooms, etc. When camping in the mountains, I frequently ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... therefore, happier than Pope in his domestic relations cannot easily have lived. It is true these relations were circumscribed; had they been wider, they could not have been so happy. But Pope was equally fortunate in his social relations. What, indeed, most of all surprises us, is the courteous, flattering, and even brilliant reception which ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... succession of affinities and the geographical distribution of a group, worked out species by species, has never yet been shown as we shall be able to show it. In this Archipelago there are two distinct faunas rigidly circumscribed, which differ as much as those of South America and Africa, and more than those of Europe and North America: yet there is nothing on the map or on the face of the islands to mark their limits. The boundary line often passes ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... perhaps only natural that the stranger and adventurer from the Old World, so often well born and cultured, should prove a more attractive study than the sons of the soil. Moreover, the latter, in their monotonous and circumscribed life, lacked much of the mystery and romance so vital to the novel of adventure. But when this has been admitted in Boldrewood's favour, there still remains a broader charge ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... daily, only an indication of the quality of his mind. Broechner's mere manner, as he remarked one day with a smile, "You do not read The Daily Paper on principle," made me perceive in a flash the comicality of my indignation over such articles as it contained. My horizon was still sufficiently circumscribed for me to suppose that the state of affairs in Copenhagen was, in and of itself, of importance. I myself regarded my horizon as wide. One day, when making a mental valuation of myself, I wrote, with the naivete ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... mountains of flowers that were heaped upon their altars; while underneath, the sun cast a square of light upon the ground, as though it had shone in upon them through a window; the scent that swept out over me from them was as rich, and as circumscribed in its range, as though I had been standing before the Lady-altar, and the flowers, themselves adorned also, held out each its little bunch of glittering stamens with an air of inattention, fine, radiating 'nerves' in the flamboyant style of ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... erratic but harmless impulse in driving off recklessly with the priest; her nature, so long restrained by residence in a dull, circumscribed village instead of a lively town, needed some such prank to reanimate and amuse it. She seized the reins dramatically, insisted upon driving, and Father Rielle was nothing loath since he did not care about nor understand horses very well, and since it was ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... was nothing more nor less than the question of equal citizenship for the Jews, was not placed in the line of the great reforms, but was pushed to the rear and solved fragmentarily—on the instalment plan, as it were—and within narrowly circumscribed limits. Like all the other officially inspired reforms of that period, which proceeded up to a certain point and halted before the prohibited zone of constitutional and political liberties, so, too, the solution of the Jewish problem was not allowed to pass beyond the border-line. For ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... 'familiar' Guarin only became Bishop of Senlis in 1214, and died in 1227, (12) so that it is certain Helinand wrote the last part of his "Chronicle" not later than the last-mentioned year. The limits of time, therefore, between which the "Chronicle" was written are clearly circumscribed; and if it is impossible to define the exact year in which this particular entry was made, it is not, I fancy, beyond the legitimate bounds ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... never mind the little Mummy's oddities. She has lived alone on extremely circumscribed means for many years, and when she gets an idea into her ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... appertains to that hobbling criticism which, in letters, would elevate Addison into apotheosis. In truth, while that virtue which consists in the mere avoidance of vice appeals directly to the understanding, and can thus be circumscribed in rule, the loftier virtue, which flames in creation, can be apprehended in its results alone. Rule applies but to the merits of denial—to the excellencies which refrain. Beyond these, the critical art can but suggest. We may be instructed to build a "Cato," but we are in vain told how to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... thought he would ask for her in marriage—which was ridiculous, and showed that life in the Far East, especially in a prison colony, affects the brain. At other times, he thought how very awkward it would be, in such a little, circumscribed community as that, if he did not ask her in marriage. Suppose she babbled—as she might well do. There is no accounting for the feeble-minded. But as the days grew on, madder and wilder he became, earlier and earlier ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... seem unlike anything that you have ever heard of or dreamed of elsewhere, the modern mind, with its somewhat narrow limitations, is apt to revolt against the accounts that are given; the modern mind, trained within the limits of the science of observation, is necessarily circumscribed within those limits and those limits are of an exceedingly narrow description; they are limits which belong only to modern time, modern to men, in the true sense of the word, though geological researches stretch of course far back into what we call in this nineteenth century ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... Mrs. Bowen had circumscribed the adventure so as to exclude dancing from it. Imogene was not to dance. One might go to the veglione and look on from a box; if one ventured further and went on the floor, decidedly ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... classical dictionary by heart, but his inspiration is more likely to have been due to his later reading of the Elizabethan poets, and their translations of classic story. One thing is certain, that he did not confine himself to any one authority, nor did he consider it necessary to be circumscribed by authorities at all. He used, rather than followed, the Greek fable, dealing freely with it and giving it his ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... appeared quite deserted, a most unusual circumstance along this coast, and not a sail nor a trail of smoke broke the gray monotony of water and sky. The limits of the horizon, too, had become much circumscribed. On land, as well as on sea, the remote distance had completely disappeared, and it seemed as though the globe had assumed ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... probably because he could look on Harmachis, a purely sun-god, as a form of Aten; and to this god he erected an obelisk at Silsilis. His monumental war upon the old religion seems also not to have been general, but narrowly circumscribed, being, in fact, confined to the erasure of Ammon's name, especially at Thebes, and the mutilation of his form in a few instances; but there does not appear to have been any such general iconoclasm practised by the "Disk-worshippers" as by the "Shepherd Kings," or any such ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... extent we can grant to our own claims. The more we amplify our need and our possession, so much the more do we expose ourselves to the blows of Fortune and adversities. The career of our desires ought to be circumscribed and restrained to a short limit of the nearest and most contiguous commodities; and their course ought, moreover, to be performed not in a right line, that ends elsewhere, but in a circle, of which the two points, by a short wheel, meet and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... service. And I have carried my notion of good service from my earlier into my later existence. I, who have never sought in the written word anything else but a form of the Beautiful—I have carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships to the more circumscribed space of my desk, and by that act, I suppose, I have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the ineffable company ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... sensed another presence and presently his trained ears detected the slow approach of naked feet across the sward. At first he suspected that it might be one stealthily searching the Forbidden Garden for him but a little later the figure came within the limited area of his vision which was circumscribed by stems and foliage and flowers. He saw then that it was the princess O-lo-a and that she was alone and walking with bowed head as though in meditation—sorrowful meditation for there were traces of ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... afternoon Luther's opponents proceeded to argue 'that Christ could not be present with His Body at the Sacrament, because His Body was in heaven, and the body, as such, was confined within circumscribed limits, and could only be present in one place at a time. Luther then asked, with reference to the objection that Christ was in heaven and at the right hand of God, why Zwingli insisted on taking those words in such a nakedly literal sense. He ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... description of the beautiful colours produced during the agonizing death of a number of trout, in the fourth part of a long poem in blank verse, published within a few years. ["The Excursion", 8 2 568-71.—Ed.] That poem contains curious evidence of the gradual hardening of a strong but circumscribed sensibility, of the perversion of a penetrating but panic-stricken understanding. The author might have derived a lesson which he had probably forgotten from these sweet ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... he had poured out some whiskey and water and lit a cigar, the lounging chairs somehow did not attract him. He moved about aimlessly in the circumscribed space, his hands in his pockets, his burly shoulders rounded, his face dulled and heavy as with a depression of doubt. The sound of the piano upstairs came intermittently to his ears. Often he ascended ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... say, primarily, that no case of appendicitis should be operated upon unless a competent surgeon is available. This, of course, does not apply to cases in which a circumscribed abscess has formed which anyone can open with safety provided he has sufficiently good judgment not to do ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... Assembly (his majesty sitting, voting and consenting therein) fearing the corruption of that office, hath circumscribed and bounded the same with a number of cautions; all which, together with such others as shall be concluded upon by the assembly, were thought expedient to be inserted in the body of the act of parliament, that is to be made ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... of these plants had grown to be trees five or six yards in height, and with a trunk the size of one's leg. Now, during the same series of years, many insects that are common throughout the rest of Great Britain did not cease to be rare with us, or rather were confined to certain circumscribed limits. Thus, the Noctuellae, with the exception of a few species abundant everywhere, were almost wanting, and I know of no other country where the dearth of common species of nocturnal butterflies was so great. But during the winter of 1878 there supervened ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... wall and forced well into Jerusalem before they could control their own motion. Once within, the host spread out so that one looking at the immense space they instantly covered wondered how so great a mass ever passed through the circumscribed limits of a fifty-foot gate. At times stopping was impossible. Again there were momentary lulls, as when the sea recoils upon itself and is stilled for an instant. They who stood to watch, wearied ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... the feelings, in which man is in unison with himself. The other world is nothing more than the reality of a known idea, the satisfaction of a conscious desire, the fulfilment of a wish. "The sum of the future life is happiness, the everlasting bliss of personality, which is here limited and circumscribed by nature. Faith in the future life is therefore faith in the freedom of subjectivity from the limits of nature; it is faith in the eternity and infinitude of personality, and not of personality viewed in relation to the idea ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... was wonderfully active, driving to his publisher's or to make an occasional visit, besides a daily walk. If to those who saw him continually the circle of his subjects of conversation began to appear somewhat circumscribed, upon those who met him only occasionally the old fascination still exerted itself. He set his door wide open when he made up his mind to receive and converse ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... for any of their light to reach us; one consequence of which was that when standing at the break of the poop it taxed one's eyesight to the utmost to see as far as the bows of the ship; the wind was freshening, with frequent rain squalls that, combined with the intense darkness, circumscribed the visible horizon to a radius of about half a cable's length on either hand; and through this all but opaque blackness the ship was thrashing along at a speed of fully ten knots, with a continuous crying and storming of wind aloft through the rigging and in the hollows of the straining ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... to the dusky town. It was like dim, bygone centuries sounding. It was all so far off. She stood in the old yard of the inn, smelling of straw and stables and petrol. Above, she could see the first stars. What was it all? This was no actual world, it was the dream-world of one's childhood—a great circumscribed reminiscence. The world had become unreal. She herself was a strange, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... life success we need a proper perspective. We need to be balanced, poised, adjusted. Most of us are too circumscribed mentally. We live so much by and for ourselves that we consider ourselves, individually, of greater importance than the facts warrant. Others do not agree with us on this point, and this is a source of disturbance. I am personally acquainted with two surgeons and several physicians who think ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... cousin replied. "Of boarding houses within my sadly circumscribed means there is a very wide but strictly numerical choice. They are all exactly alike, you understand. I changed once, twice, twenty, forty times. I grew positively dizzy caroming from one inferior boarding house to another. You would have thought I was trying a ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... The scene, though circumscribed in limit, was picturesque in effect, and might have been happily illustrated by the pencil of the painter. The immediate area of the parade was filled with armed men, distributed into three divisions, and forming, with their ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... countless ages, that makes the whole watery world like a vision of enchantment. I had found a new source of unthought of reveries, that would supply my enraptured hours with aliment according to my wishes. The objects to be seen within the short space circumscribed by the bell, or comprehended within the range of its lights, could not be many; but there was the new mode, as it were, of existence—the breathing under water, the living in the element of the creatures of the deep, all the multifarious sensations that would spring up ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... Newman's eye, a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-streaked, cloud-flecked distance on a Western prairie. But her mother's white, intense, respectable countenance, with its formal gaze, and its circumscribed smile, suggested a document signed and sealed; a thing of parchment, ink, and ruled lines. "She is a woman of conventions and proprieties," he said to himself as he looked at her; "her world is the world of things immutably decreed. But how she is ...
— The American • Henry James
... clear, impressive, and full-toned; his majestic carriage, his somewhat mystical style, commanded the reflection, as well as the admiration, of his auditors. Equally adapted to the popular tribune or the pulpit, electoral assemblies or cathedral were alike too circumscribed in limits for the crowds who flocked to hear him. It seemed as though he were a revolutionary saint—Bernard preaching political charity, or the crusade ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... opposite direction. When he had last entered the mead he was an inhabitant of the Froom valley; in forty-eight hours he had severed himself from that spot as completely as if he had never belonged to it. All that appertained to him in the Froom valley now was circumscribed by the portmanteau in ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... a uniform yellowish, or light-brownish yellow, coloration is noticed on the whole extent exposed to the vapor of iodine; in the contrary case, the surface which has been moistened, and afterwards dried in the open air, is perfectly distinguished by a different and well circumscribed tint. On the papers into which paste starch and resin have been introduced, the stains present such delicate reactions that we may sometimes distinguish by their color the portion of paper which has been moistened with alcohol from that which has been ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... McIntosh party, consisting of fully one-half the nation, emigrated to the lands granted them west of the State of Arkansas, and made there a home. The remainder of the Creeks retired to the district of country between the Chattahoochee and Line Creek, only to learn that to remain upon this circumscribed territory ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... is contained in the lymphatic vessels—nodes. Circumscribed masses of cells connected with ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... limitations as are tacitly implied in every general proposition on the character of individuals or nations, that the work set apart for them by a Divine Providence in the history of the world was the preaching of a belief in one God. Three religions have been founded by members of that more circumscribed Semitic family—the Jewish, the Christian, the Mohammedan; and all three proclaim, with the strongest accent, the doctrine that ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... tell what sinister mysteries lurked behind this phantom? The illimitable, circumscribed by naught, nor tree, nor roof, nor passer-by, was around the dead man. When the unchangeable broods over us—when Heaven, the abyss, the life, grave, and eternity appear patent—then it is we feel that all is inaccessible, all is forbidden, all is sealed. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... other parts of the kingdom. Mr. Telford pointed out that the military roads were altogether inadequate to the requirements of the population, and that the use of them was in many places very much circumscribed by the want of bridges over some of the principal rivers. For instance, the route from Edinburgh to Inverness, through the Central Highlands, was seriously interrupted at Dunkeld, where the Tay is broad and deep, and not always easy to be crossed by means of ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... the area which these pastoral flocks were allowed to occupy must have been strictly circumscribed, for more than once it is stated significantly that "the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelled in the land". The two kinsmen found it necessary, therefore, to part company. Lot elected to go towards Sodom in the plain of Jordan, and Abraham then moved towards ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... juge de paix. "Or, at any rate, the weaknesses of our national character should have been guarded against by the admirable restrictions which Napoleon's experience laid upon them. Our present system may succeed in a country whose action is circumscribed by the nature of its soil, like England; but the law of primogeniture applied to the transmission of land is absolutely necessary; when that law is suppressed the system of legislative representation becomes absurd. ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... the statement may seem, when one remembers the conditions that circumscribed his freedom of action on board the Sybarite, that he stood utterly alone in that company of conspirators and their creatures, alone and unarmed, with never a friend to guard his back or even to whisper him ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... from these various centres. In the fourteenth century, what took place for the race and language takes place also for the nation. It coalesces and condenses; it becomes conscious of its own limits; it discerns and maintains them. The action of Rome is circumscribed; appeals to the pontifical Court are prohibited,[406] and, though they still continue to be made, the oft-expressed wish of the nation is that the king should be judge, not the pope; it is the beginning of the religious supremacy of the English sovereigns. Oxford ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... sunny day, will agitate the air around him with a series of waves which affect the ear far more powerfully than the wind which sighs in the waving trees above him. Thus sound is the answering sensation of the auditory nerve to the touch of air-waves; and these waves must be within certain circumscribed limits of magnitude to awaken that sensation at all. The greater or less violence with which they strike the ear causes them to appear loud or soft. We can imagine a development of the nerves, or of the ear apparatus, which might allow them to be influenced by waves of greater volume and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... that he need not have been so cautious, for after a little more of this obscure investigation he learned that he was in a very circumscribed area, surrounded on all sides by a most heterogeneous collection of tubs, full and empty, rough cases, bales, ropes, blocks, and iron tackle, such as might be used in a fishing-boat; and the next thing his hands encountered was ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... just as it is a crime to possess burglars' tools, lottery tickets or counterfeit money."[59] This decision also overruled an intermediate case, Trupiano v. United States,[60] whereby the practical effect of the Harris decision had been circumscribed by a ruling that even where a valid arrest is made, a search without a warrant is not permissible if the circumstances make it feasible to procure a warrant ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... our race for its achievements in the field of invention our women as well as our men are entitled to share. With an industrial field necessarily more circumscribed than that occupied by our men, and therefore with fewer opportunities and fewer reasons, as well, for exercising the inventive faculty, they have, nevertheless, made a remarkably creditable showing. ...
— The Colored Inventor - A Record of Fifty Years • Henry E. Baker
... only wish we could be pelted within an inch of our lives with a hailstorm of sovereigns, so as to satisfy every one's most gorgeous hopes; but I am afraid we shall have but a gentle shower, after all. . . . I am sorry I have had the expectation of so much, because I am rather disappointed to be so circumscribed. With my husband's present constant devotion to the duties of his office, he could no more write a syllable than he could build a cathedral. . . . He never writes by candle-light. . . . Mr. Crittendon tells Mr. Hawthorne that he thinks he may save $5000 a year by economy. He himself, living ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... couldn't marry quite a young girl. How could I expect such a one to live here with me at Buston, where it is rather dull? When I looked about there was nobody except that horrid Miss Thoroughbung. You just look about and tell me if there was any one else. Of course my circle is circumscribed. I have been very careful whom I have admitted to my intimacy, and the result is that I know almost nobody. I may say that I was driven ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... Place du Carrousel provide for a division into three distinct parts, three grand pelouses, a boulingrins a la Francais, or lawns of a circumscribed area, according to the best traditions of Le Notre, a border of flowers and a few decoratively disposed clumps of flowering shrubs, the whole combined in such a way that the perspective and vista down the Champs Elysees will in no manner suffer. The architect-landscapist, M. Redon, who ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... myself wings; but I rose gradually and securely as if I were myself a part of the ascending column of light. By degrees this luminous atmosphere, which was diffused over the whole of space, became more circumscribed, and extended only to a limited spot around me. I saw through it the bright blue sky, the moon and stars, and I passed by them as if it were in my power to touch them with my hand. I beheld Jupiter and Saturn as they appear through our best telescopes, but still more magnified, all the moons ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... elsewhere said, is all the better for being to a certain degree circumscribed, relegated, and regulated by the laws of traditional usage, as well as those of good taste, and this ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... they are. Now, if the Crown and the Lords, and the judicatures, are all prescriptive, so is the House of Commons of the very same origin, and of no other. We and our electors have powers and privileges both made and circumscribed by prescription, as much to the full as the other parts; and as such we have always claimed them, and on no other title. The House of Commons is a legislative body corporate by prescription, not made upon any given theory, but existing prescriptively—just ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... Our vision is so circumscribed, our theories are so small—the garment of them not large enough to wrap us in; our faith so continually fashions itself to the fit of our dwarf intellect, that there is endless room for rebellion against ourselves: we must not let our poor ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... behaved horribly the evening before, he had not troubled her since; the tramp of his feet as he paced up and down the circumscribed space that was left to them of the chamber, being the only evidence she had till she dropped off to sleep that she was not without company. But with the daylight he was gone, and feeling almost panic-stricken with ghostly fears and loneliness, she ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... utter his mantras, to remove all kinds of maladies and misfortune that may overtake members of the family. It is impossible for a Westerner to realize how much of the life of the Hindu, in the home and in society, is circumscribed by superstitions and directed by omens only. In the case of a man setting out upon a journey forty-three different things may happen which prognosticate good, and thirty-four which forebode evil. In household matters, the eye of the Hindu man, and very specially of the Hindu woman, is ever ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... elevation would have been almost impossible, for want of space to pile them on. Nothing, we should be inclined to say, short of the most powerful action of electric fire, could have produced the complete, yet circumscribed, fusion which is here observed. Although fused into a solid mass, the courses of bricks are still visible, identifying them with the standing pile above, but so hardened by the power of heat, that it is almost impossible to break off the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... course one may err, Ellesmere, in too much aphorising as in too much of anything. But your argument goes against all expression of opinion, which must be incomplete, especially when dealing with matters that cannot be circumscribed by exact definitions. Otherwise, a code of wisdom might be made which the fool might apply as well as the wisest man. Even the best proverb, though often the expression of the widest experience in the choicest language, can be thoroughly misapplied. It cannot embrace the whole of the subject, and ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... under his chin, so that while he breathed freely enough, he could not move his head. Before him was a tangle of bracken and scrub, and beyond that the gloom of dense pines; but as he could see only directly in front his prospect was strictly circumscribed. ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... administration given to them, had to be taught to exercise the critical rights of intelligent citizenship. A sphere had to be found in which Indians could be given work to do, and be held accountable to their own people for the way they did it. That sphere had to be circumscribed at first so as not to endanger the foundations of Government, and yet capable of steady expansion if and in proportion as the experiment succeeds, until the process of political education should be complete and Indians should have shown themselves qualified for the ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... was at first dazed and fascinated, rather than attracted, by this astonishing creature, so unlike any one she had ever known. Her life had been circumscribed, her experiences of a simple sort. She had never seen anything resembling him before. Indeed, nobody had. Somewhat carelessly, even if correctly, attired; eagerly, rather than observantly, attentive; brilliant and startling, rather than cultured, of speech—a ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... life, and the conditions which surrounded it are very circumscribed. Great men, it has been observed, have often the shortest biographies; their real ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... You have been a good so universal, that almost every man in the three nations may think me injurious to his propriety, that I invade your praises, in undertaking to celebrate them alone; and that I have assumed to myself a patron, who was no more to be circumscribed than the sun and elements, which are of public ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... was no longer alone on the ledge. He had no interest in analyzing the conviction; he did not even question it. Not a sound had reached his ears. Only a moment before he had looked carefully all around. But the field of his vision was closely circumscribed by the walls about him. It was easy for an invader to come on his retreat unawares—at all events, somebody, he was almost sure, stood behind him. The silence meant an enemy. The first thing to expect was ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... annexed to this settlement of the crown a declaration of rights, where all the points which had of late years been disputed between the king and people, were finally determined; and the powers of royal prerogative were more narrowly circumscribed and more exactly defined, than in any former period of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... did to the French scientist Le Gentil, priest-ridden. Yet it was only through the Friars that Spain retained her hold at all. [73] A corrupt civil service and a futile and decrepit commercial system were through their efforts rendered relatively harmless, because circumscribed in their effects. The continuous fatherly interest of the clergy more than counterbalanced the burden of the tribute. [74] They supervised the tilling of the soil, as well as the religious life of the people; ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... squadron, too, making it expedient to sail in close order, the space which it occupied was extremely limited; and, having no frigates to detach on the look out, the chance of descrying the enemy, unless very near, amid the haze of the atmosphere in that climate, was prodigiously circumscribed. Under these circumstances, the distance of about thirty-five leagues, between Candia and the Barbary coast, must be considered as leaving more than sufficient space for two of the largest fleets ever known mutually ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... considered distinct ichthyological fauna. But these wide-spread species are not migratory. They have normally and permanently a wide range—just as some terrestrial animals have an almost cosmopolitan character—while others are circumscribed within comparatively ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... were not firing and the gunners were in a little circumscribed world of their own, dissociated from the movement around them as they busily dug pits for their ammunition. In due course someone might tell them to begin registering on a certain point or to turn loose on one which they had already registered. ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... of the household between herself and the two eldest of her children, Minnie and Helen. Unaccustomed to any thing but study and play, the girls find it very hard to have their old time appointments for enjoyment circumscribed, and complain bitterly at first. The book gives a history of their experience, and shows how the work that was so irksome at first became in the end a source of pleasure and means of ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... their notions were already formed, and their resentments already kindled; that the young duke of Gloucester, or his sister Elizabeth, should be placed on the throne; and that, under the infant sovereign, the royal prerogative should be circumscribed by law, so as to secure from future encroachment the just liberties of the people. But the majority warmly contended for the establishment of a commonwealth. Why, they asked, should they spontaneously set up again the idol which it had cost them ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... clock which he seems to have borrowed from the Babylonians. He supposes a primary and not easily definable Being, by which the whole world is governed, and in which, though in himself infinite and without limits, everything material and circumscribed has its foundation. "Chaotic matter" represents in his theory the germ of all created things, from which water, earth, animals, nereids or fish-men, human beings &c. have ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... against Socialism is the sentiment of liberty. If we find nothing obnoxious in universal regimentation; if we feel that life would have as much savor when all of us were told off to our tasks, or at least circumscribed and supervised in our activities, by a swarm of officials carrying out the benevolent edicts of a paternal Government; if we hold as of no account the exercise of individual choice and the development of individual potentialities which are the very lifeblood of the existing order of ...
— What Prohibition Has Done to America • Fabian Franklin
... temperament, which, deepening more and more, surrounded him with imaginary evils, and rendered life insupportable. Lady Nairn was too modest not to be distrustful of the extent of her genius, and presumed only to exercise it in composing words to favourite melodies. The genius of Tannahill was more circumscribed, and he was consequently more timid and painstaking. Hogg, ambitious of originality, was bold and reckless. He had the power of assuming many distinct varieties of style, his mind, taking the tone of the subject entered upon, as easily as the musician passes from one note to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... have remained there in safety, while the rest had attempted the discovery of the Islands of Solomon on the one hand, or the continent of De Quiros on the other, from neither of which they were at any great distance, and, from his neglecting this opportunity, I take it for granted that he was circumscribed, both as to his course and to the time he was to employ in these discoveries, by his instructions, for otherwise so able a seaman and so curious a man as his journal shows him to have been, would not certainly have neglected ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... Tyre and Sidon, teaching and healing; a Syro-Phcenician woman held His feet, and received her request; and one of His miracles, of feeding the multitude, was wrought for hungry Gentiles. But while His work was in Israel, it was for mankind; and while 'this fold,' generally speaking, circumscribed His toils, it did not confine His love nor His thoughts. More than once world-wide declarations and promises broke from His lips, even before the final universal commission, 'Preach the Gospel to every creature.' 'I, if I be lifted up, will draw all ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... lady, and observe the barriers with which this place is surrounded, the studious mystery with which the brightest jewel that England possesses is secluded from the admiring gaze. See with what rigour your walks are circumscribed, and your movement restrained at the beck of yonder churlish Foster. Consider all this, and judge for yourself what can ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... billions in one second. As the frequency of vibration rose still higher their organs of perception would fail them completely; a great gap in their consciousness would obliterate the rest. The brief flash of light would be succeeded by unbroken darkness. How circumscribed was their knowledge? In reality they stood in the midst of a luminous ocean almost blind! The little they could see was as nothing compared to the vastness of that which they could not. But it may be said that, out of the very imperfection of his senses, ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... borders of the Western Ghats and the sea-coast near Bombay inland to Amarantak, at the head of the Narbudda River (long. 82 deg. E.), and from Belgaum (lat. 15 deg. 31' N.) to near Goona (lat. 24 deg. 30'). The vast area thus circumscribed is far from representing the original extent of the tract overspread by the lava-floods, as outlying fragments of these lavas are found as far east as long. 84 deg. E. in one direction, and at Kattiwar and Cutch in another. The present area, however, is estimated to be not less ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... impression that the functions of the Stock Exchange should be circumscribed and controlled by some governmental authority; that it needs reforming from without. What have you to say on ...
— The New York Stock Exchange and Public Opinion • Otto Hermann Kahn
... this aspersion from suspicion that any corrupt motive can influence this court; I deprecate it from knowing that hitherto we have moved within the narrow circle of municipal justice. I am afraid, that, from the habits acquired by moving within a circumscribed sphere, we may be induced rather to endeavor at forcing Nature into that municipal circle than to enlarge the circle of national justice to the necessities of the ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to El Dorado was universal, and almost irresistible. The ability to go was much more circumscribed. For one thing, it cost a good deal of money; and that was where I bogged down at the first pull. Then I suppose a majority did have ties of family, business or other responsibilities impossible to shake off. However, we ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... narrowed down to the bleak slopes of rock and snow that immediately surrounded us, for our hope that we should get above the cloud belt was not fulfilled, and beyond a dismal tarn, lying just below us, in whose black waters forlorn little bergs of rotten snow floated, and a very much circumscribed view of dull tops swathed in flying mist, we ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... across the walk in front of the benches where they sat, in the simple belief of all people who have to do with babies that the rest of the world may be fitly discommoded in their behalf. But they did not actively molest us, and they scarcely circumscribed our choice of seats. We were by no means driven to the little kiosk in the lake for them, and I should rather say that we were fatefully led there, so apt were the associations of the place to my purpose. Nothing could have been more natural ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells |
