"Compass" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... about the elliptical basin, and catching occasional glimpses between bubbles of a vivified hair trunk of monstrous compass, whose knobby lid opened at one end and showed a red morocco lining, when the pretty girl, in leaning over to point out the rising monster, dropped into the water one of her little gloves, and the swash made ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... things, to two years of his life, to one half of his prime, but soaring in the blue, retiring, as a saint might do, into his inner self, giving himself up to that inmost guide. He was the captain of the ship, but the pilot, the chart and compass, all, were that deep-implanted instinct. One thousand feet above the trees the inscrutable whisper came, and Arnaux in arrowy swiftness now was pointing for the south-southeast. The little flashes of white ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... their heyday. If the Colleges could be transferred to the dry and bracing top of some hill, doubtless they would be more evidently useful to the nation. But let us be glad there is no engineer or enchanter to compass that task. Egomet, I would liefer have the rest of England subside into the sea than have Oxford set on a salubrious level. For there is nothing in England to be matched with what lurks in the vapours of these meadows, and in ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... thou shouldst keep on thy road, and be drawn aside by no wanderings, still thou must pass amid the horns of the threatening Bull, and the Haemonian[6] bow, and {before} the visage of the raging Lion, and the Scorpion, bending his cruel claws with a wide compass, and the Crab, that bends his claws in a different manner; nor is it easy for thee to govern the steeds spirited by those fires which they have in their breasts, and which they breathe forth from their mouths and their nostrils. Hardly are they restrained by ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... through quite enough of the busy turmoils of existence to be grateful for anything that promised ease and competence, and that serenity of mind which is the dearest possession which any one can compass. ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... Magic formula demanded nothing less than this—else dread disaster would fall upon the man who sinned, and upon the whole brotherhood. Here, and in a hundred similar rites, we see the three phases of tribal psychology—the first, in which the individual member simply remains within the compass of the tribal mind, and only acts in harmony with it; the second, in which the individual steps outside and to gratify his personal SELF performs an action which alienates him from his fellows; and the third, in ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... equations of Mathematics; but from Hamilton's innovations no such thing results. This cannot be said, however, of the equations of Symbolic Logic; which are the starting-point of very remarkable processes of ratiocination. As the subject of Symbolic Logic, as a whole, lies beyond the compass of this work, it will be enough to give Dr. Venn's equations corresponding with the four ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... the world, from the tramp to whom she gave food she could ill afford to the butcher who sold her a cheap cut of steak across the meaty board. The other phase was sealed up somewhere in that expressionless mummy who lay with his face turned ever toward the light as mechanically as a compass needle and waited dumbly for the last wave to wash over ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Baptist, now able to choose his own spot within the compass of those walls for the exercise of his faculty of going to sleep when he would, lay down upon the bench, with his face turned over on his crossed arms, and slumbered. In his submission, in his lightness, in his good humour, in his short-lived passion, in his easy contentment ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... hose violet, with slashes which showed a lining of the same colour with the jerkin. A mantle ought, according to ordinary custom, to have covered this dress; but the heat of the sun, though the season was so early, had induced the wearer to fold up his cloak in small compass, and form it into a bundle, attached to the shoulders like the military greatcoat of the infantry soldier of the present day. The neatness with which it was made up, argued the precision of a practised ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... opinion expressed by Isaac Reed, in 1782, that "This play, ... in respect to originality, force of mind, and well-adapted satire, may dispute the palm with any dramatic piece that has appeared within the compass of half a century...."[2] Originally it had been performed in Dublin in 1764 under the title The True-born Scotchman, but in 1770 the Examiner of Plays in London refused to license it. It was re-submitted in 1779 and again forbidden, ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... of spray forward and splitting with shrieks upon the ropes, and the canvas soaking up the damp till every stretch might have been owned for the matter of color by a coalman. 'Twas 'bout ship often enough, Mr. Robinson being full of anxiety and impatience, and watching the compass for a shift of wind as if he was a cat and there was a mouse in the binnacle. I could have sworn the handsome party would have been beam-ended by the dance; it turned the stomachs of two of the crew, anyhow, and one of them said that if he had known the 'Evangeline' was to cross the bay, ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... they are numerous on the surface of the moon. Nearly all oblong or circular, and as if traced with the compass, they seem to form one vast archipelago, equal to that charming group lying between Greece and Asia Minor, and which mythology in ancient times adorned with most graceful legends. Involuntarily the names of Naxos, Tenedos, and Carpathos, rise before the mind, and we seek vainly for Ulysses' vessel ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... musician the care of a richer and fuller development. Metastasio is musical throughout; but, to follow up the simile, we may observe, that of poetical music, melody is the only part that he possesses, being deficient in harmonious compass, and in the mysterious effects of counterpoint. Or, to express myself in different terms, he is musical, but in no respect picturesque. His melodies are light and pleasant, but they are constantly repeated with little or no variation: when we have read a few of his pieces, we know ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... name. Some of them he had seen, some of them were still inhabited, their aspect, so he reported, being practically indistinguishable from that represented in the old engravings. He picked out five or six as being well within the compass of a day's or a two days' expedition. If, said the Princess, I wished to see these places I might as well begin doing so at once, as she was before long going to receive some visitors whom she trusted that I would help her to entertain. Matters were arranged accordingly. ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... adds a circumstance of little moment, which happen'd after it, or at the very instant of it. Upon the whole it is certain, that by this word is not only meant suffocation by hanging, but also excessive grief, with which those who are violently overpowered, frequently compass their own death. For, as Ovid says: strangulat inclusus dolor. And indeed Perizonius has clearly proved this point by a number of examples, drawn from ancient authors.[145] Nor is it less to be doubted, but that the expression [Greek: prenes genomenos], may be used for one, who voluntarily ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead
... veer how vain! on, onward strain, Brave barks, in light, in darkness too; Through winds and tides one compass guides,— To that, and your own ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... Only the morning of that day he had arrived at the pretty town of Herridon among the hills and moors, set apart for the idle and ailing of this world. Of the world literally, for there might be seen at the pump-room visitors from every point of the compass—Hindoo gentlemen brought by sons who ate their legal dinners near Temple Bar; invalided officers from Hongkong, Bombay, Aden, the Gold Coast and otherwhere; Australian squatters and their daughters; attaches of foreign embassies; a prince from the Straits Settlements; ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... hesitated. Clouds and snow whirled up in a solid mass, blinding and choking me. The cold penetrated my heavy clothing. I went on. In a few minutes I was in the midst of the turmoil, utterly lost, buffeted about. I tried to keep the wind in my face for compass, but it was so variable, eddying from all directions, that it was not reassuring. Near the top of the mountain a blast knocked me down, and half smothered me with flying snow. I arose groggily, uncertain which way to head; it was impossible to see even a step in front. The staff ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... in riotous living among the rowdies and courtesans of Boston. Then you will, be arrested, tried, condemned to be hanged, thrown into prison. Now is your happy day. You will be converted—you will be converted just as soon as every effort to compass pardon, commutation, or reprieve has failed—and then!—Why, then, every morning and every afternoon, the best and purest young ladies of the village will assemble in your cell and sing hymns. This will ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... time, it has, for so elaborate and apparently integral a form, a singular faculty of hooking itself on to stanzas preceding and following, so as not to interrupt continuous narrative when continuous narrative is needed. Its great compass, admitting of an almost infinite variety of cadence and composition, saves it from the monotony from which even the consummate art of Milton could not save blank verse now and then, and from which no writer has ever been able to save the couplet, or the quatrain, or the stanzas ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... into this!" called Wade, and he leveled the gun that quivered momentarily, like a compass needle, and then crashed fire and smoke. The bullet spat into a log. But it had cut the lobe of Belllounds's ear, bringing blood. His face turned a ghastly, livid hue. All in a second terror possessed ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... in her mind is bent To slay herself with her own hand, before That fell barbarian compass his intent; And be the means to make her wrong so sore That cavalier, by cruel Fortune spent, Within her loving arms, to whom she swore With mind to him devoted, his to be, Vowing ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... blasphemy; to acknowledge Him is a filial duty and a just confession of His majesty and dominion. The Lord's Prayer is closed with a solemn "Amen," set as a seal to the document of the supplication, attesting its genuineness as the true expression of the suppliant's soul; gathering within the compass of a word the meaning of all that has been uttered or thought. So let it be is the literal ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... may be,' Charley said, making out the points with some difficulty on the pocket-compass, one of which they each carried, as the danger of being lost upon the pathless Pampas ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... was by no means local. Burkburnett became a name to conjure with and there was no lack of conjurers. These latter spread to the four points of the compass, and the printing presses ran hot to meet their demands. A flood of money flowed into their pockets. While this boom was at its height a new pool, vaster and richer, was penetrated and the world heard of the Northwest Extension of the Burkburnett field, a veritable ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... the two called again, when the gentleman made an examination of the room selected the day before, having met Mr. Brown in the hall-way and invited him in. On entering, the new occupant took from his pocket a piece of chalk and a compass and made a number of circles and figures on the floor to determine when the sun would shine in the room. Brown watched him with a certain degree of curiosity and amusement, and finally, concluding he was half crazy, returned to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... Now there is nothing in the whole Universe so REAL as the Vital Germ of the actual Form and Being of the living, radiant, active Creature within each one of us,—the creature who, impressed and guided by our Free Will, works out its own delight or doom. The WILL of each man or woman is like the compass of a ship,—where it points, the ship goes. If the needle directs it to the rocks, there is wreck and disaster,—if to the open sea, there is clear sailing. God leaves the WILL of man at perfect liberty. His Divine Love neither constrains nor compels. ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... the custom of the wind clan of the Omahas to flap their overalls to start a breeze, while a sorcerer of New Britain desirous of appeasing the wind god throws burnt lime into the air, and towards the point of the compass he wishes to make a prosperous journey, chanting meanwhile a song. Finnish wizards made a pretence of selling wind to land-bound sailors. A Norwegian witch once boasted of sinking a vessel by opening a wind-bag she possessed. Homer speaks of Ulysses ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear. The ideal was so completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle remained, the place just resting on its oars. But what our human emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... the most striking Indian characteristics is the keenness of perception by which they are enabled to track their game or find their way through pathless forests without the aid of chart or compass. The Indian captive, Gyles, relates the following incident which may be mentioned ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... tallest being 7 feet high. It is not easy to discover any particular form from the standing and recumbent stones, for they neither make a circle nor do they seem to be directed to any particular point of the compass; but it is quite possible that these monoliths were put up by Early Man as a means of recording the seasons, in somewhat the same manner as Stonehenge is an example of the orientated ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... hurrying that, in the full enjoyment of the much-coveted departure. His pleasure was, perhaps, rather damped by a running commentary he overheard through the lattice-window of the stable, from Leather, as he stripped his horses and tried to roll up their clothing in a moderate compass. ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... heightened in interest by his genius as those of Orkney, he is entitled to a monument. To the critical student of the philosophy and history of poetic invention it is not uninstructive to observe how completely the novelist has appropriated and brought within the compass of one fiction, in defiance of all those lower probabilities which the lawyer who pleaded before a jury court would be compelled to respect, almost every interesting scene and object in both the Shetland and Orkney islands. There ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... true, none could escape the direst misfortune, as every one of us is at some time or another the object of the hate or jealousy of other human beings. Moreover, as most of us believe, there is a being, not human, that hates us individually and collectively, and certainly would compass our destruction, had he the power, which happily he has not, unless we ourselves ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... chain and compass nodded. Nothing abashed by the lawyer's cool manner, Mr. Hardwick turned to the surveyor, and asked if he undertook to say that Walter Kinloch's deed called for land that was covered by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... the sword by which she makes them respected. This figure is said to be the portrait of the Duchess Anne. Temperance, in a monastic dress, is characterised by a bit and a lantern. Prudence, double faced, holds a mirror and a compass, and has a serpent at her feet. This figure is in the costume of a peasant girl of St. Pol; the second face, that of an old man, is also in the dress of Lower Brittany. Strength or Fortitude, handsome, resolute, and calm, strangles a dragon ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... the path down to the drift being little better than a track worn at a long diagonal down the bank. It was steep enough going down, but when we had crossed the shallow river and begun the ascent of the other bank we found the track very soft and almost perpendicular. By fetching a compass and putting the horses to it at a great pace the two Cape carts managed to reach the top, but a four-wheeled American waggon stuck fast at the bottom and could not be moved. At that moment the last of the daylight ebbed, and darkness began ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... good and kind people, honest at heart, who yet are full of distractions of another sort; who are of double mind—look two ways at once, and are afraid to be quite open, quite straightforward—who like to COMPASS their ends, as the old saying is, that is to go round about, towards what they want, instead of going boldly up to it; who like to try two or more ways of getting the same thing done; and, as the proverb has it, have many irons in the fire; who ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... acquainted with the topography of the city, each point of the compass leading directly to the mountains, while the town itself forms a perfect level. The chief business street leads from the railroad depot to the Plaza Mayor. The most fashionable shopping street is that known as the Street of the ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... him,... on the vast throne of Mexico and Peru, on the greatness of the sovereigns who should possess them.. .. and on the results which these great foundations would have on the universe. I had often heard him, but under no circumstances had I ever heard him develop such a wealth and compass of imagination. Whether it was the richness of his subject, or whether his faculties had become excited by the scene he conjured up, and all the chords of the instrument vibrated at ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... dispute. Some learned and ingenious writers, disdaining the obvious 'new,' have gone very far afield in their researches. Among other derivations which have been suggested, is one taken from the four cardinal points of the compass, N. E. W. S.; because the intelligence conveyed came from all quarters of the globe. This suggestion is contained ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... He was well received by the Shah on his visit to Tehran in 1890 as a man of learning and letters, and it is said that he accepted and enjoyed his hospitality. This, however, did not prevent him plotting against his royal host, and doing his utmost to compass the downfall of the Kajar dynasty. He probably saw clearly during his stay in Persia then that the Shah's authority rested too strongly in the minds of the people, by reason of his long and peaceful reign and mild rule, to give any hope of a successful revolution during his lifetime. And it ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... frame of reference the compass points of the postwar era we've relied upon to understand ourselves. And that was our world until now. The events of the year just ended, the Revolution of '89, have been a chain reaction, changes so striking that it marks the beginning ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the little party rode forward in silence, winding in and out between pretty lakes and bunches of timber, with no path to guide them, but with the help of the compass, managing to edge slowly to the west. Charley still maintained the lead, but in the open country through which they were traveling it was possible to ride abreast, and Walter soon ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... to stop under a tree and cut a stick presently," Hawtry said. "It will not do to get down, for I should never be able to climb up again. Mind, we must take our bearings carefully, else we shall never get back again. We have neither chart nor compass. Hallo! ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... like fury it returned back again with the ebb, during which time we found eleven fathom water, and the flood and ebb continued from five to six hours. The next day the captain and the pilot went up to the ship's top and saw all the land full of sand in a great round compass and joining itself with the other shore; and it was so low that whereas we were a league from the same we could not discern it, and it seemed there was an inlet of the mouths of certain lakes, whereby the sea went in and out. There were divers opinions amongst us, and some thought ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... one after the other. Her husband and Sebright, with a grave mien, stamped busily around the binnacle aft, changing places, making way for each other, stooping in turns to glance carefully along the compass card at the low bluff, like two gunners laying a piece of heavy ordnance for an important shot. The steward, emerging out of the companion, rang a handbell violently, and remained scared at the failure of that appeal. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... partaken of an early supper Jim went off to find his friend who owned the team, while the others busied themselves getting their belongings in as small a compass as possible, looking forward to what was expected to happen ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... Unfortunately the soil was soft so that their footprints might be followed by any one versed in woodcraft. At times they were forced to skirt unusually thick places, but in spite of these deviations Mr. Heatherbloom was enabled generally to keep to their course by consulting a small compass he had found in the boat. It was essential to maintain as straight a line as possible. People sometimes walked round and round in forests; he took no chance of that; better a moment lost now and then, while stopping to wait for the quivering ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... overthrown My scruples. If you love me, marry me Before the sun has dipped behind those trees. You cannot be wed twice, and Grootver, foiled, Can eat his anger. My care it shall be To pay your father's debt, by such degrees As I can compass, and for years ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... Church,—the man of divers tongues. The very existence of the "Sketch-Book" was probably unknown to his intelligent admirer. "All I could do," added Mr. Crayon, with that rich twinkle in his eye,—"all I could do was to take my tail between my legs and slink away in the smallest possible compass." ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... batn, from the North hither bahitz-ue, to bahitzuai, to the north nearly btecon. The Indian ever has the points of the compass present to his mind and expresses himself accordingly in words, although it shall be of matters in his house. No, quta, ca. Nose, ...
— Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language - Shea's Library Of American Linguistics. Volume III. • Buckingham Smith
... barrens, its mighty forests, its solemn charm. All at once this post of Conjuror's House, a month in the wilderness as it was, seemed very small and tame and civilized for the simple reason that Death did not always compass it about. ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... followed a compass needle, he slowly swung them until his gaze set toward his desire, and because vaguely he thought of New York as the center of the great outer world, his face was to ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... out. All this, had she but known it, had happened to the three men sleeping in the lean-to: the trapper, when he was eighteen, found barely breathing after twelve days of torture, the dog chain which he had wrapped round his waist after starting a deer, having deflected the needle of his compass; Holcomb, picking his way out along the shores of a chain of lakes, with no matches and but a handful of cartridges; and the Clown, blind drunk on Jamaica ginger and peppermint essence, in a country whose ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... monsters, propelled in a blind manner through space; proud perhaps of accumulating many barnacles as decoration; only recognizing our destination by bumping against the dock-wall; and with no cognizance of the deck and cabins above us, or the spars and sails—no thought of the sextant, and the compass, and the captain—no perception of the lookout on the mast—of the distant horizon. With no vision of objects far ahead—dangers to be avoided—destinations to be reached—other ships to be spoken to by means other than by bodily contact—a region of sunshine and cloud, of space, or perception, and ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... need fear the effect of absence upon the man who honestly loves her. The needle of the compass, regardless of intervening seas, points forever toward the north. Pitiful indeed is she who fails to be a magnet ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... slender knowledge of boating was called into use, for the bends in the river were so frequent that the boat was headed towards nearly every point of the compass within a single hour. Her progress was necessarily very slow, and the Indians on the shore soon began to manifest their impatience by grunting and growling. As the bateau proceeded, Fanny became more skilful in its management. She soon learned where the deepest water might be found, and ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... cay known as Dead Men's Shoes, near Nassau, in the Bahama Islands; about fifty feet (50 ft.) south of this Dead Men's Shoes is a rock, on which we cut the form of a compass. And twenty feet (20 ft.) East from the cay is another rock on which we cut a cross (X). Under this rock it is buried four feet (4 ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... speaking to the poor musician, I should find him willing to take my letter to the post, to invoke the assistance of some active magistrate, or of the commanding-officer of Carlisle Castle, or, in short, to do whatever else I could point out, in the compass of his power, to contribute to my liberation. But to obtain speech of him, I must have run the risk of alarming the suspicions of Dorcas, if not of her yet more stupid Corydon. My ally's blindness prevented his receiving any communication by signs from the window—even if I could have ventured ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... make sure of everything, he sent people the next morning to examine whether I had anything concealed on my person. They stripped me with the utmost rudeness of all my gold, amber, my watch, and pocket-compass. The gold and amber were gratifying to Moorish avarice, but the compass was an object of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... other way. It obviously does not affect the problem whether this seventh row is a hundred miles long or a hundred feet, so long as they were really in a straight line—a point that might perhaps be settled by the captain's pocket compass. ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... religious enthusiasm which led men on frenzied quests for the destruction of the heretic in their own land and of the Saracen abroad, causing them to become at one and the same time unjust and heroic. In a word, within the compass of three hundred lines of verse, Chaucer contrives to body forth his age—to give us something which ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... a deliberate manner, casting alert eyes about me, for, to use an expressive idiom, I was not doing this for my health. On the contrary I had two very definite purposes; the first, which I could probably compass, was to save Miss Falconer from further intercourse with Blenheim and to conceal the presence of the wounded, helpless Firefly from his enemies; the second, surprisingly modest, was to make the four Germans prisoners and hand them over in triumph ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... picturesque period of the Civil War, when the sharp-shooting Pennsylvania mountain boys (and older ones) went forth to snip; for did not Jake Karstetter, of Sugar Valley, Clinton County, enlist as 37 when he was 57 and compass the death of seven Confederate general officers? Notched on the walnut stock of his favorite weapon, the work of Henry Barner, a wayside Sugar Valley gunsmith, were seven sets of minute carvings in the form of collar ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker
... compass sea and land to make proselytes; and after they have gained them, they are afraid of them, for their respective antecedents are so different, that it is impossible for them to think together. They get the submission of a poor deluded pervert, but he gets nothing in return from ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... The compass—known in Italy as early as the twelfth century, but little used until the fourteenth—enabled the mercantile navy to discover new routes, and it was thus that true maritime commerce may be said regularly to have ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... avidity with which such books as the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments," and others of a still wilder cast, are, or at least were in my time, sought for by the boys. I remember when some half-dozen of them set off from school, without map, card, or compass, on a serious expedition to find out Philip ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... wounds which Milichus alledged that he had ordered, he denied the statement altogether. He had not given any such orders. The whole story was the fabrication of a vile slave, attempting, by these infamous means, to compass his master's destruction. Scevinus said all this with so bold and intrepid a tone of voice, and with such an air of injured innocence, that Nero and his friends were half disposed to believe that he was unjustly accused, and to dismiss him ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... is not calm. He is the coward slave of his environment, hopelessly surrendering to his present condition, recklessly indifferent to his future. He accepts his life as a rudderless ship, drifting on the ocean of time. He has no compass, no chart, no known port to which he is sailing. His self-confessed inferiority to all nature is shown in his existence of constant surrender. It ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... Charlotte's uneasiness, and occupied as she was with Edward's passion for Ottilie, she easily satisfied herself that her abstraction and distress were owing to her husband's behavior; and she set herself to consider in what way she could best compass ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... have had the coarse-growing, yellow-flowered, daisy-like PRAIRIE ROSIN-WEED (Silphium laciniatum) in mind when he wrote this stanza of "Evangeline," his lines apply with more exactness to the delicate prickly lettuce, our eastern compass plant. Not until 1895 did Professor J. C. Arthur discover that when the garden lettuce is allowed to flower, its stem leaves also exhibit polarity. The great lower leaves of the rosin-weed, which stand nearly vertical, with their faces to the east ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... effrontery. I thought she was trying to fetter me again with her chains; and although I had no inclination for them, I made up my mind to render her the service she claimed at my hands, and which she believed I alone could compass. She felt certain of her success, but in what school had she obtained her experience of the human heart? Was it in reading novels? Most likely the reading of a certain class of novels causes the ruin of a great many young girls, but I am of opinion that from good romances they acquire graceful ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and became useless. Under these unhappy circumstances, we pushed forwards with favourable gales till within 80 leagues of Guam, one of the Ladrones, when we encountered dismal weather and tempestuous winds, veering round the compass. This was the more frightful, as we were unable to help ourselves, not above six or seven, being able for duty, though necessity obliged even those who were extremely low and weak to lend what help they could. In the boisterous sea raised by these gales, our ship so laboured ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... are difficult in the beginning, but when they are brought to an end they are easie to be understood and apprehended. If you do truly observe the Spirit and the Soul of Luna, and learn to know it truly, you may quickly compass the midst of the Work, how it shall afford the end with profit; wherefore I will now propose to you an Example, and instruct you by a Countrey-Rule, that you may apprehend it, and consider of it, as Childrens Play, in a high and weighty ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... out of the reach of science, and yet the compass of science is practically illimitable. Hence it is that from time to time we are startled and perplexed by theories which have no parallel in the contracted moral world; for the generalizations of science sweep on in ever-widening ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley
... is a large district in the south of Invernesshire, having Ben Nevis and other Grampian heights within its compass. It is a classic name in Scottish literature owing to Allan Ramsay's plaintive ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... I have fetched all this compass to arrive at. By Spenser's time, or earlier, in England, all traces of Chaucer's French accent had gone; the language and the poetry had developed on lines of their own, as true expressions of the national soul. But in Rome, not so. Two centuries later great Roman poetry was being written: ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... does it," muttered Bandy-legs, as he fumbled with a little compass he carried all the time nowadays; for having been lost once upon a time in the woods, he was determined not to take chances ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... an object from a vessel; either by compass, or with reference to the vessel itself. Thus, the lighthouse bears north; the enemy bears abeam, or two points ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... and the four sets of golden wings that formed the setting? From the blood of Charlemagne was the ruby made, so history tells us, and the setting represented the protecting wings of the power of the kings of Lutha spread to the four points of the compass. Now your majesty must recall the royal ring, ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... proportions. The differing lines of shadow, caused by the difference in the solders, were visible evidence that a new means of detecting flaws and chemical variations in metals had been found. A photograph of a compass showed the needle and dial taken through the closed brass cover. The markings of the dial were in red metallic paint, and thus interfered with the rays, and were reproduced. "Since the rays had this great penetrative ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... this, he bethought himself of a device by which he might compass his desire; and presently the warders, being minded to sleep, clapped him into the prison and locked the door. He heard the Persian weeping and bemoaning himself, in his own tongue, and saying, 'Woe is me for my sin, that I sinned against myself and ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... Exports want a jolly lot more things done for them than the Imports. To-day I've got to go to Mudie's to change a book, then I've to get a scarf-pin mended for Crow, and buy a pair of flannel drawers for Wallop, and go and offer two shillings for a five-shilling mariner's compass at the stores for Doubleday. I shall have to get my grub when ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... and a digest to our history; to revise the ancient schools of philosophy and elocution, which last has been reckoned by Pancirollus among the artes perditae. All these were "to bring all the parts of knowledge into the narrowest compass, placing them in the clearest light, and fixing them to the utmost certainty." The religion of the Oratory was to be that of the primitive church in the first ages of the four first general councils, approved by parliament in the first year of the reign of Elizabeth. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... that the post-office and the surveyor's compass were not making a rich man of him, they were sufficient to enable him to live decently, and during the year he greatly increased his acquaintance and his influence in the county. The one followed the other naturally; every acquaintance he made became his friend, and even before the end of ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... or, as it is generally designated "Grand Medicine Lodge," is usually built in an open grove or clearing; it is a structure measuring about 80 feet in length by 20 in width, extending east and west with the main entrance toward that point of the compass at which the sun rises. The walls consist of poles and saplings from 8 to 10 feet high, firmly planted in the ground, wattled with short branches and twigs with leaves. In the east and west walls are left open spaces, each about 4 feet ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... knotted at one end of the rope a cradle in which I could sit. while being lowered, and so long as the rope held, of which there appeared to be no reason to doubt, for my weight was well within its compass, I did not ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... difficult; and, if at the critical moment the hazard of their situation proved too much for their resolution, it was exactly what might have been expected. The initial error of the Federals was in sending two detached forces, under men of no particular strength of character, from opposite points of the compass, to converge upon an enemy who was believed to be superior to either of them. Jackson at once recognised the blunder, and foreseeing the consequences that were certain to ensue, resolved to profit by them. His escape, then, was the reward ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... heart And flung it to the dogs: but I am raised Above, or sunk below, all further sense Of provocation. Leave me, with the weight Of that old Man's forgiveness on thy heart, Pressing as heavily as it doth on mine. Coward I have been; know, there lies not now Within the compass of a mortal thought, A deed that I would shrink from;—but to endure, That is my destiny. May it be thine: Thy office, thy ambition, be henceforth To feed remorse, to welcome every sting Of penitential anguish, yea with tears. When seas and ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... fear of being confronted again with HER fear and of being unable to pacify her, at last decided him to remain. But he crept softly through the grass, and in the dust of the track traced the four points of the compass, as he could still determine them by the sunset light, with a large printed W to indicate the west! This boyish contrivance particularly pleased him. If he had only had a pole, a stick, or even a ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... vague, far hope, and for her how wide the world is, how very hard to compass! But she stands silent, in her well-learnt patience; and he is about to speak again, when suddenly from outside a ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... Lace, Madam, lies in a small Compass, and is of easy Conveyance. But you are apt, Madam, to think ...
— The Beggar's Opera • John Gay
... the cry directs, his course he bends; Great Ajax, like the god of war, attends, The prudent chief in sore distress they found, With bands of furious Trojans compass'd round.(223) As when some huntsman, with a flying spear, From the blind thicket wounds a stately deer; Down his cleft side, while fresh the blood distils, He bounds aloft, and scuds from hills to hills, Till life's warm vapour ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... composure by the following morning and was addressing Mr. Skinner as "Skinner, my dear boy," when another telegram from Matt Peasley created a very distinct variation in his mental compass. ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... contain the absolute determinations of the magnetic inclination and declination made in the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake on shore. A very large series made almost daily at sea with Fox's instrument and the Azimuth Compass require several corrections before they ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... these circuitous movements that, by confining the action to so small a compass, enabled the youth to keep near his companions. More than twenty times both the pursued and the pursuer glided by him, just without the reach of his oars, until he thought the best way to view the sport was to remain stationary, ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... mere violence and disturbance will fill less space in the eyes of mankind; its permanent creations, more. As an epoch of purely political energy, concentrating the work of generations within the compass of twenty five years, it will ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... was evident that that venture, too, had failed, the sisters determined to try and earn a livelihood by writing. They could no longer leave their home, their father being helpless and Branwell worse than helpless; yet, with ever-increasing expenses and no earnings, bare living was difficult to compass. The future, too, was uncertain; should their father's case prove hopeless, should he become quite blind, ill, incapable of work, they would be homeless indeed. With such gloomy boding in their hearts, with such stern impelling necessity ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... in my days might offer to dispute de omni scibile, and in accepting the challenge I, as a young man, was not guilty of any extraordinary presumption, for all which books could teach was, at that time, within the compass of a diligent and ardent student. Even then we had difficulties to contend with which were unknown to the ancients. The curse of Babel fell lightly upon them. The Greeks despised other nations too much to think of acquiring their languages for the love of knowledge, and the Romans ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... carried away the bulwarks on the larboard quarter and stove those on the starboard quarter and amidships ... upper cabin filled with water. Through the night strong gales.... Lightning at all points of the compass." ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... steersman's eye to have wandered; "You ——, ——, little, mutton-faced Dutchman," Nares would bawl, "you want a booting to keep you on your course! I know a little city-front slush when I see one. Just you glue your eye to that compass, or I'll show you round the vessel at the butt-end of my boot." Or suppose a hand to linger aft, whither he had perhaps been summoned not a minute before. "Mr. Daniells, will you oblige me by stepping clear of that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... asked what kind of wine we preferred I must say I was struck all in a heap, for wines to Jone and me is like a trackless wilderness without compass or binnacle light, and we seldom drink them except made hot, with nutmeg grated in, for colic; but as I wanted her to understand that if there was any luxuries we didn't order it was because we didn't approve of them, I told her that we was total ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... obedience to a divine command, apparently impossible of execution, for which the way is suddenly made plain. He becomes instrumental in alleviating such a state of affairs as he deplores in i. 4 of his Prophecy: "for the wicked doth compass about the righteous, etc." So in the hymn "Warum betrübst du dich mein Herz?" doubtfully attributed to Hans Sachs, we find the seventh ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... Meantime the dawn grew slowly in the east but even when the mountains were huge and black against flaming colors of the horizon sky, there was no breaking of Marianne's gloom. Now and then, hopelessly, she raised her field glasses and swept a segment of the compass. But it was an automatic act, and her own forecast of failure obscured her vision, until at last, saddle-racked, trembling with weariness and grief, she stopped ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... unwritten law or code of morality or hygiene among an idolatrous, barbarous, and ignorant population such as it had to encounter. To its professors, the formation of that monachism which has been so much misunderstood and abused was but an inevitable condition.[32] These men had not the steady compass to guide them in the path that was possessed by the Jewish people. The martyrdom of Christ and many of his apostles, and the teachings of the early church, pointed to physical denials, castigations, humiliations, and sufferings ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... representation of a book duly clasped and ornamented, having on it a silver penny; while above the book rests a dove, holding in its beak a crow-quill! This was to commemorate one of the family having, with a crow-quill, actually achieved the exploit of writing the Lord's Prayer within the compass of a silver penny. Amongst the most objectionable of the arms of this class are those which were granted to distinguished naval and military officers—arms, that certainly ought to have conferred fresh honour on illustrious names, instead of inflicting dishonour ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... when I finally dozed off, and the last thing I remember was the howl of a dog in front of the house. It wailed a crescendo of woe that trailed off hopefully, only to break out afresh from a new point of the compass. ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... or inquire from what quarter they are to come? No, sir, I was there with match lighted, bullet in my mouth, and my harquebuss shouldered, to encounter as many devils as hell could pour in, were they countless as motes in the sunbeam, and although they came from all points of the compass. The Papists talk of the temptation of St. Anthony—pshaw! let them double all the myriads which the brain of a crazy Dutch painter hath invented, and you will find a poor Presbyterian divine—I will answer for one at least,—who, not in his own strength, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... with Aegina, and who is contemporary with the presumably later portion of this monument, was above all a worker in bronze. Here again, in this lurking spirit of metal-work, we have a new element of complexity in the character of these precious remains. And then, to compass the whole work in our imagination, we must conceive yet another element in the conjoint effect; metal being actually mingled with the marble, brought thus to its daintiest point of refinement, as the little holes indicate, bored into the marble figures for the attachment of certain accessories ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... power should be given to the people to legislate in regard to slavery, and to frame constitutions with or without slavery. Congress was to bind itself to admit them as States, without any restrictions upon the subject of slavery. The wording of the territorial bills, which would compass these ends, was carefully agreed upon and put in writing. On the basis of this agreement Douglas and McClernand drafted bills for both the Senate ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... could he gather, because of the sinking of his feet; the main chance was of bulk and weight; and his rider left him free to choose. For a few steps he walked, nimbly picking up his feet, and then, with a canter of the best spring he could compass, hurled himself into the depth of the drift, while Jordas lay flat along his neck, and let him plunge. For a few yards the light snow flew before him, like froth of the sea before a broad-bowed ship, and smothered as he was, he fought onward for his life. But very soon the power of his ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... than mine: just as if it were your lot to carry on your loaded shoulder the basket of bread among slaves, you would receive no more [for your own share] than he who bore no part of the burthen. Or tell me, what is it to the purpose of that man, who lives within the compass of nature, whether he plow a ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... obvious that, if time and capacity permitted, hundreds of volumes might be filled with drawings of the forms built by different pieces of music under different conditions, so that the most that can be done within any reasonable compass is to give a few examples of the leading types. It has been decided for the purposes of this book to limit these to three, to take types of music presenting readily recognisable contrasts, and for the sake of simplicity in ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... "Domestic Architecture," and were collected in 1861, under the title of "Our English Home: its Early History and Progress." In this little volume the author, who does not give his name, has drawn together in a succinct compass the collateral information which will help to render the following pages more luminous and interesting. An essay might be written on the appointments of the table only, their introduction, ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... not for my future Being! You needs must live with me, and I will love you; I've many things that will invite you to't, I have a Garden compass'd round with Sea, Which every day shall send fresh Beauties forth, To make the Wreaths to crown thy softer Temples. Geron shall deck his Altar up no more; The gaudy Flowers shall make a Bed for thee, Where we will wanton out the heat o'th' day— What things are these, that rise ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... nobody cared for; If any old book reached a fiftieth edition, He could fill forty pages with safe erudition: He could gauge the old books by the old set of rules, And his very old nothings pleased very old fools; But give him a new book, fresh out of the heart, And you put him at sea without compass or chart,— His blunders aspired to the rank of an art; For his lore was engraft, something foreign that grew in him, 210 Exhausting the sap of the native and true in him, So that when a man came with a soul that was new in him, Carving new forms of truth out of Nature's old granite, New and old ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... from almost all the things that distract and disturb us. Away go all the storms of passion, and we are no more at the mercy of vagrant inclinations. We are no longer agitated by having to consult our own desires, and seeking to find in them compass and guide for our lives—a hopeless attempt! All these sources of agitation are dried up, and the man who has only this desire, to do his duty because God has made it such, has an ever powerful charm, which makes him tranquil ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... box. She seized it with all the eagerness and curiosity of eleven years. In it was wrapped up a heart-diamond ring, and a paper in which, in a hand as small as Buckinger's[1] who used to write the Lord's Prayer in the compass of a silver penny, were ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... castle-keeper,' said Dane, proceeding to attach it properly to Wych Hazel's belt. 'My mother used to wear it. This,'taking up a little gold key,'you will observe, is the key of your money-box. These seals you will study at your leisure. Here is a wee gold compass, Hazel; this is symbolical. It means, "Know where you are, and take care which way you go." Your vinaigrette you will never get again. I shall have ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... escape then. Once more the stronger will prevailed. Without another word she turned from him and went upstairs. She might have defied him, but she knew in her heart that he could compass his ends in spite of her. And ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... "The Spoiled Child"—"What next? as the Frog said when his tail fell off"—and a host of others?)—and all the more ludicrous and effective for being drawn more childishly and less artistically than was within Hood's compass. One may occasionally see some water-color landscape-bit or the like from his hands pleasantly done; and during his final residence in England he acted upon an idea he had long entertained, and produced some little in the way of oil-painting. ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... to conceal the burning blushes of shame with his hands, while his recollection of past circumstances confirmed his uncle's accusation. Ambition was the crime of both his parents; hypocrisy the means used by the cautious Lord Bellingham in seeking to compass those ends which his bolder consort pursued with the effrontery of determined versatility. Sedley remembered his mother a court-beauty, the favourite of the Queen, and the glass which reflected the smiles and frowns ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... love and good will."—It hath reached me, O King of the Age, that Alaeddin ate and drank and was cheered and after he had rested and had recovered spirits he cried, "Ah, O my mother, I have a sore grievance against thee for leaving me to that accursed wight who strave to compass my destruction and designed to take my life.[FN104] Know that I beheld Death with mine own eyes at the hand of this damned wretch, whom thou didst certify to be my uncle; and, had not Almighty Allah rescued me from him, I and thou, O my mother, had been cozened by the excess of this Accursed's ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... element of beauty, as with the paper employed by Baskerville, but it must not be a shiny surface. The great desideratum in modern paper from the point of view of the book-buyer is a paper that, while opaque and tough, shall be thin enough to give us our books in small compass, one more akin to the dainty and precious vellum than to the heavier and coarser parchment. ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... the magnetic needle were not first applied to navigation, as has been thought, by Flavio Gioja, but long before his time, as early as the twelfth century, the compass came into general use. Navigation was no longer confined to the Mediterranean and to maritime coasts. The sailor could push out into the ocean without losing himself on ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... vibrations being the key to memory and heredity involves the action of more wheels within wheels than our imagination can come near to comprehending, and also that it supposes this complexity of action as going on within a compass which no unaided eye can detect by reason of its littleness, so that we are carried into a fairy land with which sober people should have nothing to do, it may be answered that the case of light affords us an example of our being truly aware of a multitude of minute actions, the hundred million ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... steady as the great, deep eyes that were fixed on the compass-card before her. Her heavy, lustrous hair streamed about her from under the golden circlet; in each lightning flash she stood out, a thing of wild, awful beauty; the rain glistened on her bare shoulders and arms, rendering her golden skin a gleaming, fairylike armor. And the blustering ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sdeath, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... temper and fashion represented by the appearance and the vogue of the medieval French romances is a change involving the whole world, and going far beyond the compass of literature and literary history. It meant the final surrender of the old ideas, independent of Christendom, which had been enough for the Germanic nations in their earlier days; it was the close of their heroic age. ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... he resists them, a fresh mutiny forces him to yield; and even when they cannot be executed, he has to answer for their being carried out. In the meantime, in a room between decks, far away from the helm and the compass, our club of amateurs discuss the equilibrium of floating bodies, decree a new system of navigation, have the ballast thrown overboard, crowd on all sail, and are astonished to find that the ship heels over on its side. The officer of the watch and the pilot ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... more and more assured her of coming triumph. At last she persuaded Lewis, the manager of Covent Garden, to give her a metropolitan hearing. Though her voice at this time had not attained the volume and power of after-years, its qualities were exceptional. Its compass was in the upper notes extraordinary, though in the lower register rather limited. She was well aware of this defect, and tried to remedy it by substituting one octave for another; a license which passed unnoticed by the ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... ingenious, govern that mighty province and command their armies. From Lisbon directly westward there are in the chart twenty-six spaces, each of which contains two hundred and fifty miles, to the most noble and vast city of Quinsai, which is one hundred miles in compass—that is, thirty-five leagues. In it there are ten marble bridges. The name signifies a heavenly city, of which wonderful things are reported, as to the ingenuity of the people, the buildings, and ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... of physical science had already attained a height which mere books do not record." "Unpublished MSS. by Leonardo contain discoveries and anticipations of discoveries," says Mr. Hallam, "within the compass of a few pages, so as to strike us with something like the awe of ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... of amusements, it only remains for me to speak of a few juvenile employments of a mixed nature. Of these I shall treat very briefly, as they are a branch of the subject which does not necessarily come within the compass of my present plan. They are exercises, too, which should more properly come under the head of ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... dame at a country school, who had never been able to compass the word Nebuchadnezzar, used to desire her pupils to "call it Nazareth, and let ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... wind, then blowing from the W.S.W., began to increase and veer into the westward; from whence it suddenly chopped into the northward. The mate paced the quarter wrapt in his fearnought jacket, and at every turn giving a glance aloft, then looking at the compass, and again to the man at the wheel, as if he had an instinct of what ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... period has been a time of stress and suffering for my people. Once they had departed from the broad democracy and pure idealism of their prime, and undertaken to enter upon the world-game of competition, their rudder was unshipped, their compass lost, and the whirlwind and tempest of materialism and love of conquest tossed them to and fro ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... impossible to sit down and scribble glibly of such a people. In Japan there is no record. It is a new race appearing almost for the first time among civilized nations. It has given the world nothing, but how widely different here! It is to China the world owes the compass, gunpowder, porcelain, and even the art of printing, and to her also alone the spectacle of a people ruled by a code of laws and morals embracing the most minute particulars, written two thousand four hundred years ago, and taught to ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... after passing the schooner that was in distress when they "spoke," as the quartermaster called it, the revenue cutter which had been sent to help the disabled vessel, steaming swiftly toward the point of the compass where the schooner was wallowing. Mr. Sparks, as the wireless operator was called, had exchanged messages with the Government vessel and he told the little Bunkers that the lumber schooner would be towed into Hampton Roads, from which ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Mammy June's • Laura Lee Hope
... He motioned the driver to a certain twig, got in, and shut his mouth firmly, thus closing debate. We smoked silently, waiting for the doctor's mind to fog. He turned uneasily in his seat, like the agitated needle of a compass, and even in time hazarded the remark that something did not look natural; but there was nothing to look at but flat land and flat sky, unless a hawk sailing here and there. At noon we lunched at the tail of the ambulance, and gently "jollied" ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... without moving, "is not my mark. I never make a mark of the moon, nor yet of an object utterly beyond the compass of my shafts." ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... still more," he averred, with as near an approach to severity as one of his characteristics could compass. "I don't wish to make or meddle to the extent of telling Polly what I have heard and what you have admitted. But in justice to her and to me, you should be man enough to stay away from the house and let ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... by the way, and where the journey will end. We propose to finish the work that is thus left incomplete, and to set forth the doctrine in its plainest terms. We would reduce the theory at once to its narrowest compass and simplest expression; but at the same time, would incorporate into it every doctrine which properly belongs to it, and follow out each hypothesis to its remote, though necessary, inferences and conclusions. To this end, it is requisite to separate, as far as possible, the doctrines ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... I hastened to explain. Now, Indiman is not musical, and I had some trouble in convincing him that within the compass of a semitone a veritable gulf may yawn. This particular organ played the phrase in the third bar correctly—F sharp and not F natural—and consequently it could not be the same instrument that had vexed my ears half an hour ago at No. ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... speak, nor think of love; and she had been so far too much restricted on this subject, that, absolutely ignorant and unconscious even of her danger, she now pursued her own course without chart or compass. Her injudicious tenderness soon imposed such restraint upon her husband, as scarcely any lover, much less any husband, could have patiently endured. She would hardly ever suffer him to leave her. Whenever he went out of the house, she exacted from him a promise ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... Lieutenant Sergeev and Sublieutenant Thur, seeing a Turkish schooner, attacked it by opening machine-gun fire. The crew thereupon left the schooner. Our aviators, having sunk their machine after taking from it the compass, machine gun, and valuable belongings, boarded the schooner and set ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... born in Genoa about the year 1447, when the navigation of Europe was scarcely extended beyond the limits of the Mediterranean and the other narrow seas that border the great ocean. The mariner's compass had been invented and in common use for more than a century; yet with the help of this sure guide, and prompted by a laudable spirit of discovery, the mariners of those days rarely ventured ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... of the king, which Madame Roland did so much to compass, led not indirectly to the ruin of her own most trusted political friends and associates. The murder of the queen, for which she had longed and laboured, was brought to pass, on October 16, 1793, by men who had then made up their minds to send herself to the scaffold, and who sent her to it, three ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... husbands, loved nobody else, giving themselves entirely up to vanity and dissipation, neglecting every domestic duty; nay, even squandering away all the money which should have been saved for their helpless younger children, yet have plumed themselves on their unsullied reputation, as if the whole compass of their duty as wives and mothers was only to preserve it. Whilst other indolent women, neglecting every personal duty, have thought that they deserved their husband's affection, because they acted in this respect ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... disgrace would be equivalent to a great victory. The method is not to be approved on general grounds, but Taitsong conceived that he was justified in bribing persons in Pekin to discredit Chungwan and compass his ruin. The emperor was persuaded that Chungwan was too powerful a subject to be absolutely loyal, and it was asserted that he was in communication with the enemy. Chungwan, who had been so long the buttress of the kingdom, ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... them a small ivory compass, which he had with him, and, by signs, explained many wonderful things to them, till his enemies were inspired with a most profound respect, and resolved not to kill the extraordinary ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... found that in all walks of life the men who most influenced their generation despised superfluous knowledge. They learned thoroughly all that they thought it necessary to learn within a very limited compass; they learned, above all, to think; and they then were ready to speak or act without reference to any authority save their own intellect. If we turn to the great book-men, we find mostly a deplorable record of ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman |
