"Diurnal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course With rocks, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... learning and loyalty. Here he began a paper war with the opposite party, and wrote some smart satires against the Rebels, especially the Scots. His poem called the Mixt Assembly; his character of a London Diurnal, and a Committee-man, are thought to contain the true spirit of satire, and a just representation of the general confusion of the times. From Oxford he went to the garrison of Newark, where he acted as judge advocate till that garrison was surrendered, and by an excellent temperature, of both, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... evening, from every village within three or four miles of the metropolis, may be remarked a tide of young men wending diurnal way to and from their respective desks and counters in the city, preceded by a ripple of errand-boys, and light porters, and followed by an ebb of plethoric elderly gentlemen in drab gaiters. Now these individuals compose—for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... thews upon their calves. Another is impatient for their place. But they strain still, locked together, and forgetful of the world. At length they have enough: then slowly, clingingly unclasp, turn round with gazing eyes, and are resumed, sedately, into the diurnal round of common life. Another pair is in their room upon ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Whatever idea may be adopted on this subject, if it is very certain that, independent of those exterior causes, which are competent to totally change its face, as the impulse of a comet may do, this globe contains within itself, a cause adequate to alter it entirely, since, besides the diurnal and sensible motion of the earth, it has one extremely slow, almost imperceptible, by which every thing must eventually be changed in it: this is the motion from whence depends the precession of the equinoctial points, observed by Hipparchus and other mathematicians, now well understood ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... was abroad by day. And inconsistent as it may seem with the hours of the night watch and the many references to the rising of the morning star, it is no singular exception. I could never find a case of another who had seen this ghost, diurnal and arboreal in its habits; but others have heard the fall of the tree, which seems the signal of its coming. Mr. Donat was once pearling on the uninhabited isle of Haraiki. It was a day without a breath of wind, such as alternate in the archipelago ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the great discoveries which Copernicus made relates to the rotation of the earth on its axis. That general diurnal movement, by which the stars and all other celestial bodies appear to be carried completely round the heavens once every twenty-four hours, had been accounted for by Ptolemy on the supposition that the apparent movements were the real movements. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... has no nation, it costs no weariness, it knows no bonds. The terrestrial scenery—the tourist's—is a prisoner compared with this. The tourist's scenery moves indeed, but only like Wordsworth's maiden, with earth's diurnal course; it is made as fast as its own graves. And for its changes it depends upon the mobility of the skies. The mere green flushing of its own sap makes only the least of its varieties; for the greater it must wait upon the visits ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... at the Pole and are very small over the entire Arctic Ocean. As a consequence the semidiurnal portion of the tide wave in these regions is almost wholly derived from the tides in the Atlantic Ocean. The diurnal forces attain a maximum at the Pole and produce sensible tides in the deeper waters of the Arctic Ocean. Such tides are essentially equilibrium tides for this nearly enclosed body of water. The diurnal portion of the Baffin Bay tide produces the ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... faster than a twenty-four-pound cannon-ball flies, which goes one hundred and ninety-five fathoms a second. It moves, then, seven leagues and six tenths per second; you see it is very different from the diurnal movement of ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... myself I shouted, "Father—an owl!" For although I had never seen its like before I knew it was an owl. Not until that moment had I known any owl except the common burrowing-owl of the plain, a small grey-and-white bird, half diurnal in its habits, with a pretty dove-like voice when it hooted round the house of ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... Brown slept we do not know, but can imagine, for here is the Diurnal Record, made up in bed:—"December 29th, Saturday.—Dreamed Victoria Villa turned into a hydropathic establishment—that I was being frozen, thawed, and suffocated; did wake, this day, with an enlarged cheek—the influenza ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... who are legally employed a sufficient time for recreation. But who cares for, or thinks about, the wandering Romany? True, Police-Constable Argus receives authority by which he, sans ceremonie, commands them to 'move on,' should he come across any by the roadside in his diurnal or nocturnal perambulations. But it often occurs that the object for which they 'camped' in the spot has been accomplished. The farmer's hedge has been made to supply them with fuel for warmth and for culinary purposes; his field has ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... stolidity gives place to a nervous restlessness; at the least tremor it leaps violently, and often swims actively from one food-plant to another. This blue fit lasts till daybreak, and is then succeeded by the prawn's diurnal tint. ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... became aware of a dull, continuous sound, and knew that the stream which intersected the park on its way to the river had been freed from ice by the January thaw, and was pouring its swollen waters over the dam. The note was deep and full, like a solemn recitative, as if Nature's diurnal harmonies had sunk to this one transitional key. Above all, the mildness of the air, full of the alluring witchery of a false spring, affected the imagination ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... time of year at which the larger birds of prey, both diurnal and nocturnal, rear up their broods. Throughout January the white-backed vultures are occupied in parental duties. The breeding season of these birds begins in October or November and ends in February or March. The nest, which is placed high up in a lofty ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... daily rotation takes place is an imaginary straight line passing through the centre of the earth, and its extremities are called poles, hence the names of the North and the South pole. The diurnal movement is from West to East and takes ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... line from simple prose to the most impassioned eloquence and the most ethereal imagination, we shall be equally astonished. Every chord of the poet's lyre is touched, from the deep bass string that echoes the diurnal speech of such a man as Shelley was, to the fine vibrations of a treble merging its rarity of tone in accents super-sensible to ordinary ears. One passage from the "Letter to Maria Gisborne" may here be quoted, not for its poetry, but for the light ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... THROUGH THE DARKNESS, spinning still The rapid line of motion, then at once Have I reclining back upon my heels Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs Wheeled by me—even as if the earth had rolled With visible motion her diurnal round! Behind me did they stretch in solemn train, Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched Till all was tranquil as a ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... must be tainted!" said her father to himself, but added, "—from her mother's side;" and his attacks upon her after this were at least diurnal. It was a relief to his feeling of having wronged her, to abuse her with justice. For a while she tried hard to convince him now that this now that that notion of her conduct, or of Gibbie's or Donal's, was mistaken: ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... leagues; but as, in my opinion, each degree is exactly seventeen leagues, the circuit will then be only 6120 leagues. However this may be, the whole circuit of the globe has been discovered and sailed over, from east to west, even almost as it is encompassed and visited by the sun in its diurnal course. It is quite otherwise, however, in respect to the northern, and southern parts of the earth. For, towards the north pole, there has only been discovered hitherto to the latitude of 77 deg. or 78 deg., which make an extent of 1347 leagues; and between the equinoctial and the south pole, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... in a corner. If attended to, it becomes an excellent weather-glass, for as sure as it walks elate, and as it were on tiptoe, feeding with great earnestness in a morning, so sure will it rain before night. It is totally a diurnal animal, and never pretends to stir after it becomes dark. The tortoise, like other reptiles, has an arbitrary stomach as well as lungs; and can refrain from eating as well as breathing for a great part of the year. When first awakened ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... hundred hours, or seven inches a day—a very slow motion; and had we run a line nearer to the end of the glacier, the motion would have been slower still. At the end itself it is nearly insensible. [Footnote: The snout of the Aletsch Glacier has a diurnal motion of less than two inches, while a mile or so above the snout the velocity is eighteen inches. The spreading out of the moraine is here very striking.] Now I submit that this is not the Place ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Mount Vernon, as this indicated, Washington rode daily about his estate, and he has left a pleasant description of his life immediately after retiring from the Presidency: "I begin my diurnal course with the sun;... if my hirelings are not in their places at that time I send them messages expressive of my sorrow for their indisposition;... having put these wheels in motion, I examine the state of things further; and the more they are ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... western waves. Apollo became the god of the sun, as Diana was the goddess of the moon. But the early Greek inquirers did not attempt to explain how the sun found his way from the west back again to the east; they merely took note of the diurnal course, the alternation of day and night, the number of the seasons, and their regular successions. They found the points of the compass by determining the recurrence of the equinoxes and solstices; but they had no conception of the ecliptic,—of that great circle ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... is discussed in the papers numbered 4, 12, 16, and 17 at the end of this chapter. In these, the existence of diurnal and other periods is clearly established. Professor Omori also shows that the mean daily barometric pressure is subject to fluctuations with maxima occurring on an average every 5-1/2 days, and that earthquakes are least frequent ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... the lesson of renunciation, and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun. If her earthly career had taught her few book philosophies it had at least well practised her in this. Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... precede the rainy monsoon, fitful and wayward, never continuing long in one stay, and lasting but four out of the twelve months. Rare is the wind from the west, rarer from the south-west. North-easters are a pronounced feature. They work up by diurnal and easy grades from gentleness to strength, thunder coming as a climax. After a succession of calm days and days of gentle breezes from the east-south-east and east, the north-easter begins softly, and daily gathers courage and assumption, to find in the course of a week or two its haughty spirit ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... both the horizontal and vertical components as well as the absolute value of the total force are important, and the determination of these "elements" is the work of the magnetician. Affecting the average values of the "magnetic elements" at any one spot on the Earth's surface are regular diurnal oscillations, apparent only by the application of very delicate methods of observation: also there are sudden large irregular movements referred to as magnetic storms; the latter are always specially noticeable ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... and the greatest part of them has been lost, or perhaps, destroyed in a precipitate burning of his papers a few days before his death, which must ever be lamented. One small paper-book, however, entitled 'FRANCE II,' has been preserved, and is in my possession. It is a diurnal register of his life and observations, from the 10th of October to the 4th of November, inclusive, being twenty-six days, and shows an extraordinary attention to various minute particulars. Being the only memorial of this tour that remains, my readers, I am confident, will peruse it with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... made, he replied that it Would be necessary to pour a bottle of sea-water into each river a fortnight before the sacrifice, and that this ceremony was to be performed by Semiramis in person, at the first diurnal ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... I have heard my uncle, who was a learned hedgehog, say,—"the animal man is a diurnal animal; he comes out and feeds in the daytime." But a second cousin, who had travelled as far as Covent Garden, and who lived for many years in a London kitchen, told me that he thought my uncle was wrong, and that man comes out and feeds at night. He said he knew of at least one house in which ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... ethereal ocean of infinite space. It has the form of an orange, being an oblate spheroid, curiously flattened at opposite parts, for the insertion of two imaginary poles, which are supposed to penetrate and unite at the center; thus forming an axis on which the mighty orange turns with a regular diurnal revolution. ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... organ. In order to exercise the function of sight the facets need a greater pencil of light rays by night than by day. To obtain the same result we dilate the pupil. But nocturnal insects are dazzled by the light of day, and diurnal insects cannot see by night, for neither possess the faculty of accommodation. Insects are specially able to perceive motion, but there are only very few insects that ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... needle is to the east of the true meridian, and vice versa. Declination is different for different places; it is at present west in Europe and Africa, and east in Asia and the greater part of North and South America. The declination is subject to (a) secular, (b) annual and (c) diurnal variations. These are classed as regular; others due to magnetic storms are transitory and are classed as irregular, (a) Secular variations. The following table shows the secular variations during some three hundred years at Paris. These ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... or vivacity; because, as in drunkenness, the irritative motions are all increased, and a greater production of sensation is the consequence, which when in a certain degree, is pleasureable, as in the diurnal fever of weak people. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... in winter, when the straits are filled with ice, which, in the shape of floe, and berg, and pinnacle, pass in ghostly procession to and fro, as the wind wafts them, or they feel the diurnal impetus of the tides they cover, to escape in time from the narrow limits of the pass, and lose themselves in the vast ice-barrier that for five long months shuts out the havens of St. Jean from ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... sum, I determined to quit a business which had always gone rather against my conscience, and in a more liberal way still to indulge my talents for fiction and embellishments, through my favorite channel of diurnal communication; and so, sir, you have my history. R. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... are steadily inflated. These reflections within us! Might not one almost say that the retreat for the prophet is the wilderness, far from the hustled editor's desk; and annual should be the uplifting of his voice instead of diurnal, if only to spare his blood the distemper? A fund of gout was in Rockney's, and he had begun to churn it. Between gouty blood and luminous brain the strife had set in which does not conduce to unwavering sobriety of mind, though ideas remain closely consecutive ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... methods employed allow the diurnal variations both of velocity and altitude to be successfully measured. The velocity observations confirm the results that have been obtained from mountain stations—that, though the general travel of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... light our pipes and sit and gaze awhile after our retreating visitors. They go from us silent as great white moths; but, silent themselves, they take, as they brought, all the noise and racket with them. Our revel is over; behind us the harbour lies almost deserted, and we row back to our diurnal peace. ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of the earth; but as all the apparent movements of the celestial bodies depend on the same principle, and the first observation leads on to all the rest, less effort is needed, though more time, to proceed from the diurnal revolution to the calculation of eclipses, than to get a thorough ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... pretty handsome sum, I determined to quit a business which had always gone rather against my conscience, and in a more liberal way still to indulge my talents for fiction and embellishment, through my favourite channels of diurnal communication—and so, sir, you have my history. Sneer. Most obligingly communicative indeed! and your confession, if published, might certainly serve the cause of true charity, by rescuing the most useful channels of appeal to benevolence from the cant of imposition. But, surely, Mr. ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... depress the standard of vitality, there seems to be—I think I may venture to say there is—a rhythmic undulation in the flow of the vital force. The 'dynamo' which furnishes the working powers of consciousness and action has its annual, its monthly, its diurnal waves, even its temporary ripples, in the current it furnishes. There are greater and lesser curves in the movement of every day's life,—a series of ascending and descending movements, a periodicity depending on the very nature of the force at work ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... labours during the whole of this day, the 3rd of January, without thinking further of the volcano, which could not, besides, be seen from the shore of Granite House. But once or twice, large shadows, veiling the sun, which described its diurnal arc through an extremely clear sky, indicated that a thick cloud of smoke passed between its disc and the island. The wind, blowing on the shore, carried all these vapours to the westward. Cyrus Harding and Gideon Spilett remarked these ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... own firm conviction rests That he was dead (in fact they buried him) —That he was dead and then restored to life By a Nazarene physician of his tribe: 100 —'Sayeth, the same bade "Rise," and he did rise. "Such cases are diurnal," thou wilt cry. Not so this figment!—not, that such a fume, Instead of giving way to time and health, Should eat itself into the life of life, As saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones and all! For see, how he takes up the after-life. The man—it is one Lazarus a Jew, Sanguine, proportioned, fifty ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... respectable inhabitants were dressed in mourning, thus announcing, that the death of some relation gave them a deep private interest in the public sorrow. The unemployed manufacturers crowded the streets, eagerly perusing libellous pamphlets, or diurnal chronicles, disputing furiously on points which none could clearly explain or indeed comprehend, asking for news as if it were bread, and shewing by the lean ferocity of their faces, and the squalid negligence of their attire, that from unpitied poverty sprung all the virulent passions ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... permanent cause why she now miss'd and fail'd That firm hold upon life she so keenly assail'd, Was, in all those diurnal occasions that place Say—the world and the woman opposed face to face, Where the woman must yield, she, refusing to stir, Offended the world, which ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... year with its Seasons. To the former of these, animal life seems most directly related; to the latter, the life of the vegetal orders. It is evident that the forms of animal life on the globe are necessarily determined by the periodic law of the Earth's diurnal rotation. This accounts for the alternations of waking and sleeping, working and resting, and so forth. In like manner the more inert vitality of the vegetable kingdom is determined by the periodic law of the Earth's annual revolution. When fanciful speculators seek to imagine ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... existence, being conveyed to his optic or auricular nerves not from without, but from within, by the agency of a disordered brain. These the reason, hitherto unimpaired, combats at first, especially when they are nocturnal only; but being reproduced, and becoming diurnal, the judgment succumbs under the morbid impression produced so repeatedly. These are the ordinary antecedent symptoms characteristic of the incubation of insanity; to which are frequently added somatic exaltation, or, in popular language, physical excitability—a ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... author, who to great learning, judgment, sagacity, and luminous fancy, joined unparalleled industry, gratified the British public for a long time with a diurnal paper wholly from his own pen, called "the Inspector." In the course of this work he gave some of the most admirable strictures upon the plays and players of his day. From that work we intend to give some select passages. The ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... sleep the organism responds to the Earth's axial periodicity, for in the interval of night a period of impoverishment has to be endured. Thus the diurnal waves of energy also meet a response in the organism. These tides and waves of activity would appear as larger ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... in order most readily to reach the truth. It must, then, have been from conviction, not out of mere contradiction, that Bacon declared himself in favour of the Ptolemaic system. In fact, he speaks of the diurnal motion of the earth as 'an opinion which we can demonstrate to be most false;' doubtless having in his thoughts some such arguments as misled ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... the gaiety and sprightliness of the dwellers in garrets is probably the increase of that vertiginous motion, with which we are carried round by the diurnal revolution of the earth. The power of agitation upon the spirits is well known; every man has felt his heart lightened in a rapid vehicle, or on a galloping horse; and nothing is plainer, than that he who towers to the fifth story, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... for example, discourse with authority upon the heteropterous mictidae or tell you in what genus or genera the prothorax and femora are digitate; or whether climatic and polymorphic forms of certain diurnal lepidoptera occur within certain boreal limits. I have only a vague and superficial knowledge of any science, ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... accounts of public affairs in actis and ex actis, in two letters to Cassius and one to Brutus, written previously to the triumvirate. Suetonius also makes mention of them, and says that Julius Caesar, in his consulship, ordered the diurnal acts of the senate and the people to be published. Tacitus relates a speech of a courtier to Nero to induce him to execute Thrasea, and among other things he says: 'Diurna populi Romani per provinciam per exercitus accuratius leguntur ut noscatur quid Thrasea ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... busily engaged reading Paradise Lost. Homer hurried me along with rapid impetuosity; every passion that he portrayed I felt; I loved, hated, and resented just as he inspired me. But when I read Milton I felt elevated 'above this visible, diurnal sphere.' I could not but admire such astonishing grandeur of description, such heavenly sublimity of style. Much as I admire Milton, I must confess that Homer is ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... and stinging pain out of the remains of a feeble and befooling pleasure. Neither doth it befit men of continence and sobriety to exercise their thoughts about such poor things, or to do what one twitted Carneades with, to reckon, as out of a diurnal, how oft they have lain with Hedia or Leontion, or where they last drank Thasian wine, or at what twentieth-day feast they had a costly supper. For such transport and captivatedness of the mind to its own remembrances as this is would show a detestable and bestial restlessness ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... that the decent burgess who, in 1572, kept The Diurnal of such daily events as he deemed important, cautiously records the death of the great Scottish Reformer. The sorrows, the "cumber" of which Knox was "alleged" to bear the blame, did not end with his death. They persisted in the conspiracies and rebellions of ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... "this visible diurnal sphere" There floats a World that girds us like the space; On wandering clouds and gliding beams career Its ever-moving murmurous Populace. There, all the lovelier thoughts conceived below Ascending live, and in celestial shapes. To that bright World, O Mortal, wouldst thou go? Bind but thy ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I had the art of finding work," said he. He smiled. "I'll get it," he added, breaking their last crust in two. "I have the science already. Why, look you, Mary, the quiet, amiable, imperturbable, dignified, diurnal, inexorable haunting of men of influence will get you whatever ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... critical periodical itself, that some rare etchings by Hablot Knight Browne and Leech to a novel entitled "The Diurnal Revolutions of David Diddledoff," which appeared in its pages, failed to keep the dreary serial alive, and a quarrel ensuing between the proprietors and himself, Browne was dismissed and Leech supplied his place. Leech's ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... warlike a character. Like the other, he had a powder-horn and pouch, but instead of knife and pistol, a canvass bag or haversack hung from his shoulder; and had you looked into it, you would have seen that it was half filled with shells, pieces of rock, and rare plants, gathered during the day—the diurnal storehouse of the geologist, the palaeontologist, and botanist—to be emptied for study and examination by the night camp-fire. Instead of the 'coon-skin cap he wore a white felt hat with broad leaf; and for leggings and mocassins he had trousers of blue cottonade and laced buskins ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... same red and black colours, and are very distinct from all the other butterflies of their respective countries. There is reason to believe also that many of the brilliantly coloured and weak-flying diurnal moths, like the fine tropical Agaristidae and burnet-moths, are similarly protected, and that their conspicuous colours serve as a warning of inedibility. The common burnet-moth (Anthrocera filipendula) and the equally conspicuous ragwort-moth (Euchelia jacobeae) have ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... dragging days of it, with their dreary round of domestic duties. She was not a week home, and already sleep was her dearest friend, and to open her eyes in the morning upon the sunny but silent room and miss the clangour of Edinburgh streets was a diurnal grief. ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... undertaking the superintendence of these sheets in their passage through the press; to Mr. W.C. Hewitson, of Oatlands Park, I am under many obligations, for taking charge of my entomological collections, for naming many of my butterflies, and for access to his magnificent collection of Diurnal Lepidoptera. Mr. Osbert Salvin and Dr. P.L. Sclater have named for me my collection of birds; and for much entomological information I am indebted to Professor Westwood, Mr. F. Smith, and Dr. D. Sharp; ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... Copernicus, the conception of the "universe" was defensible on scientific grounds: the diurnal revolution of the heavenly bodies bound them together as all parts of one system, of which the earth was the centre. Round this apparent scientific fact, many human desires rallied: the wish to believe Man important in the scheme of things, the theoretical desire for ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... after a protracted performance of charades in the house of Luke Doyle, Kimmage, he had awaited with patience the apparition of the diurnal phenomenon, seated on a wall, his gaze turned in the direction ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... and night will continue to be as invariably and unconditionally each other's antecedents as sunlight will continue to be the antecedent or concomitant of day. True, Mr. Mill denies that the earth's diurnal motion is part of the present constitution of things, because, according to him, 'nothing can be so called which might possibly be terminated or altered by natural causes:' but, if so, then neither ought ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... August 1534, is the date assigned for the trial, "befoir the Bishop of Ross, be ane commission of the Bischope of Sanctandrois," of Kirk and others. (Diurnal of Occurrents, p. 18.) Of these persons, Calderwood informs us, that Sir William Kirk, as his name denotes, was a priest; but "whether he compeared and abjured, or fled, we can find no certaintie;" that Adam Dayes, or Dease, was "a ship-wright that dwelt on the north side of the bridge of Leith;" ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... 29th came by the last mail, exactly, as heretofore, on the eighth day after the date of your last preceding. Whether it be invariably Sunday or not, at least it is always octo-diurnal. Pray get an eight-day clock, and then all family matters will move on in strict uniformity. Thank your husband for his ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... whence the Voice comes. Faith and Reputation have ever been built on Doubt and Mystery, and sometimes the Art of being unintelligible does not a little advance the Credit of a Writer. There are many Reasons why we, who take upon Us the Task of Diurnal or Weekly Lucubrations, should be like the River Nilus, sending abroad fertile Streams to every Quarter, and still keeping our Heads undiscover'd. But why should I be compell'd to give Reasons for every thing? ...
— The Theater (1720) • Sir John Falstaffe
... of the night. The vast majority of owls, being strictly nocturnal, escape observation. Usually the presence of any species of owl in a locality is made known only by its voice. I may here remark that diurnal birds know as little about nocturnal birds as the man in the street does, hence the savage manner in which they mob any luckless owl that happens to be abroad in the daytime. Birds are intensely conservative; ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... the cheerful Boulevards. The morning's amusements are over; those of the night have not yet begun. It is the moment of the interlude, the hour of dine, and Paris is busied in the most important of its diurnal acts. But, alas for the briefness of earthly joys, and the limited capacity of mortal stomachs! Sad is it that not even in this Golden Mansion can a feeble child of clay dine twice. We long for the appetite of a Dando, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... disinter Kosinski, whom I felt pretty certain of finding at a certain coffee-stall where, at that advanced hour, he was in the habit of making his one and only diurnal, or rather nocturnal repast. This coffee-stall was situated at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and a side street, and there, sure enough, stood Kosinski, munching sardines on toast, and buns, and drinking coffee, ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... or which follow simple nebulae," says Arago, "and a fortiori, groups of nebulae, contain generally few stars. Herschel found this rule to be invariable. Thus every time that during a short interval no star approached in virtue of the diurnal motion, to place itself in the field of his motionless telescope, he was accustomed to say to the secretary who assisted him,—'Prepare to write; nebulae are ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... their eyes on, are but ill conversation to themselves, and others, and instead of celebrating, censure their superiors. It is by a curious person, and industrious friend of mine, observ'd, that the sap of this tree rises and descends with the sun's diurnal course (which it visibly slackens in the night) and more plentifully at the root on the south side, though those roots cut on the north were larger, and less distant from the body of the tree; and not only distill'd from ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... sometimes even dangerous, as in the ease of those devoted persons who venture their lives in the deglutition of patent medicines (dolus latet in generalibus, there is deceit in the most of them) and thereafter are wonderfully preserved long enough to append their signatures to testimonials in the diurnal and hebdomadal prints. I say not this as covertly glancing at the authours of certain manuscripts which have been submitted to my literary judgment, (though an epick in twenty-four books on the "Taking of Jericho" might, save for the prudent forethought of Mrs. Wilbur in secreting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... versa. But hold! That would be as seen from the sun—if the planets could be seen from the sun. The earth is but one of their own number, and from it the point of view must be disadvantageous. The diurnal motion must perplex. But no. The apparent motion of the heavens need not disturb the observation. Let the course of the planets through the fixed stars, be marked, and though, from the peculiarity of the point of observation, their motion may at one time seem more rapid, and ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... of the weekly journals contrasts refreshingly with the license of their diurnal brethren. Sporting papers are nearly the same all the world over; but, in the rest of these placid periodicals, there is little of violence or virulence to be found. They are enthusiastic about the ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... Samos, an island in the Archipelago; he flourished about 500 years before Christ, in the time of Tarquin, the last King of Rome. Pythagoras was the first among the Europeans who taught that the Earth and Planets turn round the Sun, which stands immovable in the centre;—that the diurnal motion of the Sun and Fixed Stars is not real, but apparent,—arising from the Earth's motion round its own axis, &c. After the time of Pythagoras, Astronomy ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... from the transcendental regions, the vast extra-mundane spaces, of his own prior existence and history. And so, round our fair universe, newly-created and wheeling softly on its axle, conscious as yet of no evil, conscious only of the happy earth and sweet human life in the midst, and of the steady diurnal change from day and light-blue sunshine into spangled and deep-blue night, Milton was figuring and mapping out those other infinitudes which outlay and encircled his conception of all this mere Mundane Creation. Deep down beneath this MUNDANE CREATION, and far separated from it, he ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... nocturnal emissions. The reason may be sought in one of two directions: (1) The usual cause of absence of nocturnal emissions is to be found in the fact that in the man in question the seminal vesicles are periodically drained by involuntary diurnal emissions, occurring usually when the individual is at stool. These emissions are likely to occur once in two to four weeks and take the place of the nocturnal emission. (2) Rarely we find virile, continent men whose ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... knew the springs of that public opinion which is delivered ready digested to the nation every morning, and who have not scrupled to work them for their own diurnal glorification, even although the recoil might injure their colleagues. But Lord Russell has never bowed the knee to the potentates of the Press; he has offered no sacrifice of invitations to social editors; and social editors have accordingly ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... the semblance that from time immemorial has given the mountain its name. Yet the imagination needs but scant aid when suddenly the elusive simulacrum is revealed to the eye. In a certain slant of the diurnal light, even on bright nights at the full of the moon, sometimes in the uncanny electric flicker smitten from a storm-cloud, a gigantic peaked sinister face is limned on the bare, sandy slope, so definite, with such fixity of lineament, that one is amazed that the perception of ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... his private opinion that he should not be in the least surprised, on going up there, to find that the two old women had made away with Caddy, and hidden her remains in the coal-bin. Whilst she was thus engaged, to Charlie was assigned the duty of transporting to Winter-street her diurnal portion of food, without a hearty share of which she found it impossible to maintain herself in a state of efficiency; her labours in chasing the women about the house being of ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... now; no force, She neither hears nor sees, Roiled round in earth's diurnal course With rocks and ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... serves to counterpoise the telescope, and the screws s, s, s, s, serve to adjust the instrument so that the polar axis shall be in its proper position. The advantage gained by the equatorial method of mounting is that only one motion is required to follow a star. Owing to the diurnal rotation of the earth, the stars appear to move uniformly in circles parallel to the celestial equator; and it is clear that a star so moving will be kept in the field of view, if the telescope, once directed to ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... heart that vivifying freshness that characterizes the air near a lake of cool water; the sweet serenity of my father's soul exhaled as a perfume from the dusty leaves I was unfolding. The journal of his life lay open before me; I could count the diurnal throbbings of that noble heart. I began to yield to the influence of a dream that was both sweet and profound, and in spite of the serious firmness of his character, I discovered an ineffable grace, the flower of kindness. While I read, the recollection of his death mingled with the narrative ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... the air is but a part of the solid globe, or rather an appendage to it, moving with it in all respects like the denser fluid which constitutes the mighty ocean. But there must be a point in the ascent upward, where the centrifugal force of the particles of air, in the diurnal rotation, must over-balance the power of gravitation; and from that limit, the motions of the atmosphere must be subject to a law of a wholly different character—partaking of the nature of planetary revolution, rather than of axial rotation. The latest speculations ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... appear to have the same power of leaping or springing by which the rats in general avoid danger. Its food seems to be vegetable, the only contents of the stomach being the roots of the haryalee grass. Its habits are solitary (except when the female is bringing up her young) and diurnal, feeding in the mornings and evenings." Dr. Jerdon says: "The Yanadees of Nellore catch this rat, surrounding the bush and seizing it as it issues forth, which its comparatively slow actions enable them to do easily. According to Sir Emerson Tennent the Malabar ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... extent that might be inferred, because, in the first place, many small streams descend from the mountain ranges, supplying the means of both natural and artificial irrigation; and, next, that the country near the coast is favored with a diurnal land and sea breeze; and, from the comparatively low temperature of the sea, the latter is always in summer accompanied with fogs, in the latter part of the night, and which are dissipated by the morning's ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... Summer glory, Not on god or angel story Loyal poet-fancy dwells! Not on streams for rich men flowing, Not on fields for rich men's mowing,— Graves he sees, of graves he tells. Pain, oppression, woe eternal, Open heart-wounds deep, diurnal, Nothing comforts or allays; O'er God's Acre in each nation Sings he songs of tribulation Tunes his ...
— Songs of Labor and Other Poems • Morris Rosenfeld
... she will read or these or none. And first—the man's own firm conviction rests That he was dead (in fact they buried him) —That he was dead and then restored to life By a Nazarene physician of his tribe: 100 —'Sayeth, the same bade "Rise," and he did rise, "Such cases are diurnal," thou wilt cry. Not so this figment!—not, that such a fume, Instead of giving way to time and health, Should eat itself into the life of life. As saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones, and all! For see, how he takes up the after-life, The man—it ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... recesses of the great vacancy. It was all very crude at the start; for years a great electric light was simply suspended in the centre of the cavern's roof and the light did not vary in color. A son of the first king suggested the plan of giving the sun diurnal movement and the changing light. The moon and stars were a later development. They found, too, that the light could not be made to reach certain recesses in the cavern where the roof approached the earth, ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... its caldron in the Gulf of Mexico, it carries a freight of caloric towards the North Atlantic. Owing partly to the diurnal motion of the Earth on its axis, its flow trends towards the east; hence its warm waters embrace our favoured coasts, and ameliorate our climate, while the eastern sea-board of North America is left, in winter, to the rigour ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... variations, and can be determined with a precision and an ease which compel its employment. Still it is true that the second is an arbitrary and a variable unit—arbitrary, in as far as it has no relation with the properties of matter, with physical constants; variable, since the duration of the diurnal movement undergoes causes of secular perturbation, some of which, such as the friction of the tides, are not ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... their true light. At the period when these things were done the public mind was in a state of heat and effervescence —it was in such a fever of political delusion and delirium, that what was written and published at the time, particularly by the diurnal press of the day, instead of enlightening, was calculated only to mislead and deceive the people. Far from recording fairly what was passing in the world of politics, the principal object of the great mass of public writers, and more especially of the conductors of ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... The diurnal and annual revolutions of the sun, as having been, from the beginning of nature, constant, regular, and universally observable by all mankind, and supposed equal to one another, have been with reason ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... impossible to guess his native tint. His wife's qualities, if they had affected him at all, had acted negatively. He did not apologize for the mutton, and he wandered off after luncheon without pretending to wait for the diurnal coffee and liqueurs; while the few remarks that he had contributed to the conversation during the meal had not been in the direction of abstract conceptions of life. As he strayed away, with his vague oblique step, and the stoop that suggested the habit of dodging missiles, Vibart, ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... journalism? Is it a trade, a commercial business, or a profession? Our word journal comes from the French. It has different forms in the several Romantic languages, and all go back to the Latin diurnalis, daily, from dies, a day. Diurnal and diary are derived from the same source. The first journals were in fact diaries, daily records of happenings, compiled often for the pleasure and use of the compiler alone, sometimes for monarchs or statesmen or friends; later to be circulated for the information ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the fields and woods. The day was such as I would have selected from a thousand. It was towards the last of May—a season wherein if a man's heart fail to dance blithely, he must indeed be a victim of dulness. The sun was moving upward in his diurnal course, and had just acquired sufficient heat to render the shade of the wood desirable. The heaven was cloudless, and soft languor rested on the face of nature, stealing the mind's sympathy, and wooing it to ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... also acquired an incidental value from the passage of time. Addison hints at this in his citations from an imaginary history of Queen Anne's reign, supposed to be written three hundred years later. In 'those little diurnal essays which are still extant'—two-thirds of the time has elapsed, and at present the Spectator is certainly extant—we are enabled 'to see the diversions and characters of the English nation in his time.' [Footnote: Spectator 101.] It is in the literature of a nation that we find the history ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... appointment only of a private gentleman. This potentate, for a long series of time, appeared from the hour of twelve till that of two at a coffee-house near the 'Change, and had a seat (though without a canopy) sacred to himself, where he gave diurnal audiences concerning commerce, politics, tare and tret, usury and abatement, with all things necessary for helping the distressed, who were willing to give one limb for the better maintenance of the rest; or such joyous youths, whose philosophy is confined to the present hour, and were ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... colonists, he described as loose and random shots, fired by inexperienced hands. In reducing the plan of clubs to practical details, he insisted they were unequal, and even impossible. The minute appraisement, both of good and evil; reckoning up the diurnal merits of the men—the balance of which was to furnish their capital stock, to discharge their fines, to find them food and clothing, and liberty—he described as a gigantic scheme of finance.[223] He amused himself by supposing the number of chances ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... ground as below. There is an abstruse astrologer that saith, If it were not for two things that are constant (the one is, that the fixed stars ever stand a like distance one from another, and never come nearer together, nor go further asunder; the other, that the diurnal motion perpetually keepeth time), no individual would last one moment. Certain it is, that the matter is in a perpetual flux, and never at a stay. The great winding-sheets, that bury all things in oblivion, are two; deluges and earthquakes. As for conflagrations ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... the sense of unlikeness plays a decisive role in the diurnal schedule of the individual. His sense of resemblance to his father and mother, his kin and clan, mark him and them off against the cosmos as an alliance of defense and offense. Yet no matter how closely he is like them and ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... feared he had come after him for his diurnal eighty florins, but something very much worse than that was in store ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... empires black with shade. And continents of sand, will turn his gaze To mark the windings of a scanty rill That murmurs at his feet? The high-born soul Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing Beneath its native quarry. Tired of earth And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft Through fields of air; pursues the flying storm; Rides on the vollied lightning through the heavens; Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast, Sweeps the long trace ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... me, From Thy throne eternal; Make pure unto Thee This my hymn diurnal. I my grateful voice would ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... earth in its true position in the solar system, making it merely one of a number of other worlds revolving about a central luminary. And observe that there are two phenomena to be thus accounted for and explained: first, the diurnal revolution of the heavens; second, the annual motion of the sun ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... will always return to it even when it is set free at a considerable distance. Notwithstanding the fact these insects are blind, and that darkness reigns in this immense cavern, they have periods of rest corresponding with the diurnal rest-periods of kindred species living in daylight; hence, it is easy to study their habits at ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... persecuted a deacon for contending that the earth was round, in opposition to the opinion of the rhetorical Saint Austin. In the fifteenth, the ignorance of another pope, much more inexcusable, delivered Galileo into the hands of the inquisition, accused of having proved the diurnal and annual motion of the earth. The greatest genius that modern Italy has given to the sciences, overwhelmed with age and infirmities, was obliged to purchase his release from punishment and from prison, by asking pardon of God for ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... subterranean passage, in the tunnels on the highways, in the galleries of the fortifications, in the roofs of the bungalows, and the ruins of every temple and building. At sunset they are seen issuing from their diurnal retreats to roam through the twilight in search of crepuscular insects, and as night approaches and the lights in the rooms attract the night-flying lepidoptera, the bats sweep round the dinner-table and carry off their tiny prey within the glitter of the lamps. Including the frugivorous section ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... definition, a day is local; it is limited to a single meridian. At some point on the earth's surface one day is always at its commencement and another always ending. Thus, while the earth makes one diurnal revolution, we have continually many days in different stages of progress on ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... Fromundus with great effect. It appears never to have occurred to him to test the matter by dropping a stone from the topmast of a ship. Bezenburg has mathematically demonstrated just such an aberration in falling bodies, as is mathematically required by the diurnal motion of the earth. See Jevons, Principles of Science, pp. 388, 389, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... hour, when of diurnal heat No reliques chafe the cold beams of the moon, O'erpower'd by earth, or planetary sway Of Saturn; and the geomancer sees His Greater Fortune up the east ascend, Where gray dawn checkers first the shadowy cone; When 'fore me in my dream a woman's shape There ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... diverted herself with throwing her shoes at her bonne and grimacing at her sisters—over- flowed, in short, with unmerited health and evil spirits; only languishing when her mamma and the physician paid their diurnal visit. Madame Beck, I knew, was glad, at any price, to have her daughter in bed out of the way of mischief; but I wondered that Dr. John did not tire ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... equally indicative of evil. On the other hand, the thalerophagous petalocera, forming the typical group of the same division, present us with all the perfections and habits belonging to their kind. These families of beetles live only upon fresh vegetables; they are diurnal, and sport in the glare of day, pure in their food, elegant in their shapes, and beautiful ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... cruel firmament, With thy diurnal swegh that croudest ay, And hurtlest all from Est til Occident, That naturally wold hold ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... indicated by dotted lines. The reflector and conical heater are sustained by a flat hub and eight radial spokes bent upward toward the ends at an angle of 45 deg.. The hub and spokes are supported by a vertical pivot, by means of which the operator is enabled to follow the diurnal motion of the sun, while a horizontal axle, secured to the upper end of the pivot, and held by appropriate bearings under the hub, enables him to regulate the inclination to correspond with the altitude of the luminary. The heater is composed of rolled plate iron 0.017 inch thick, and provided ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... scale of values, and let intuition have its way with you, you open up by this act new levels of the world. Such an opening-up is the most practical of all activities; for then and then only will your diurnal existence, and the natural scene in which that existence is set, begin to give up to you its richness and meaning. Its paradoxes and inequalities will be disclosed as true constituents of its beauty, an inconceivable splendour will be shaken out from its dingiest ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... have been answered by themselves, as the prodigious current which set them through the Straits of Le Maire with such rapidity, could not have originated from any such cause. Currents are well known to be occasioned by the tides, the diurnal revolution of the earth, and by prevailing winds, influenced and directed by the bendings of coasts, the interposition of islands, and the position of straits. No such currents could possibly come from rivers ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... Within the whole bright round Of Sol's diurnal course I knew but one Who to compare with Caesar could be found; And that one, Caesar, thou didst call thy son! 'Twas only Caesar could destroy a Rome; Brutus alone that Caesar could withstand— Where Brutus lives, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... holy pictures, when a little procession filed into the church; four girls carrying a flower-bedecked coffin, half a dozen elders, and a pack of children carrying candles—a sight at once terrible and diurnal, ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... the standard of vitality, there seems to be,—I think I may venture to say there is,—a rhythmic undulation in the flow of the vital force. The "dynamo" which furnishes the working powers of consciousness and action has its annual, its monthly, its diurnal waves, even its momentary ripples, in the current it furnishes. There are greater and lesser curves in the movement of every day's life,—a series of ascending and descending movements, a periodicity depending on the very nature of the force at work ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... shadow—if my life has no roots in the Eternal, nor any consciousness of a life that does not pass, and a light that never perishes, if it is derived from, directed to, 'cribbed, cabined, and confined' within this visible diurnal sphere, then it is all flat and unprofitable, an illusion while it seems to last, and all its pursuits are folly, its hopes dreams, its substances vapours, its years a lie. For, if life be thus short, I who live ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... mighty, powerful, dark-dispelling sun, Now thou art risen, and thy day begun. How shrink the shrouding mists before thy face, As up thou spring'st to thy diurnal race! How darkness chases darkness to the west, As shades of light on light rise radiant from thy crest! For thee, great source of strength, emblem of might, In hours of darkest gloom there is no night. Thou shinest on though clouds hide thee from sight, And ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... times more favourable for a concentrated mind than in this age of scattered thoughts and of the fragments of genius, the custom long prevailed: and we their posterity are still reaping the benefit of their lonely hours and diurnal records. It is always pleasing to recollect the name of Alfred, and we have deeply to regret the loss of a manual which this monarch, so strict a manager of his time, yet found leisure to pursue: it would have interested us much more even than his translations, which have come down ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... called great; and should it happen to be very large, great great, which is an Italian idiom also. This occasions their computations of time and space to be very confused and incorrect. Of the former they have no measure but the visible diurnal motion of the sun or the monthly revolution ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... are not the only insects who have prolonged their existence by imitating the great protected group of Heliconidae;—a genus of quite another family of most lovely small American butterflies, the Erycinidae, and three genera of diurnal moths, also present species which often mimic the same dominant forms, so that some, as Ithomia ilerdina of St. Paulo, for instance, have flying with them a few individuals of three widely different insects, which are yet disguised with exactly the same form, colour, and markings, so as to be ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... is no idea of bringing them "within the visible diurnal sphere" to the vulgarity of practical application. The instance of the novel before-mentioned, proves, that we may be extremely affected by what we know to be merely ideal incidents and beings. By much thinking or talking of any one; by using our minds to dwell on ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... birds seen on the wing, never resting except in chimneys of houses, or hollow trees, where they nest. Tips of tail feathers with sharp spines, used as props. They show their kinship with the goatsuckers in their nocturnal as well as diurnal habits, their small bills and large mouths for catching insects on the wing, and their weak feet. Gregarious, especially at ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... cheese and soup she feeds her priceless "Pekie"— Stilton and Cheddar, Bortch and Cocky-leekie; And Max, her shrill-voiced "Pom," politely begs For his diurnal dole ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... multifarious as those of a Land's Husband (not inferior to his Father in that respect); and, like the benefits of the diurnal Sun, are to be considered incessant, innumerable and, in result to us-ward, SILENT also, impossible to speak of in this place. From the highest pitch of State-craft (Russian Czarina now fallen plainly hostile, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... after having run the critical gauntlet for a certain class of faults which I had, nothing having come before the judgment-seat in the interim, I should, year after year, quarter after quarter, month after month—(not to mention sundry petty periodicals of still quicker revolution, "or weekly or diurnal")—have been, for at least seventeen years consecutively, dragged forth by them into the foremost ranks of the proscribed, and forced to abide the brunt of abuse, for faults directly opposite, and which I certainly had not. How shall ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... bear the test of accuracy as regards the cause of the disease or the pathological condition of the sufferer;" that the forms in use "were merely the changing external symptoms, often having scarcely a diurnal continuance before passing from one to another," and constituting a division useless as regards moral or medical treatment—he expressed in a nutshell all the objections since urged against the orthodox classification by the other alienists I have mentioned. These, however, substituted a mixed ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... tells how Odin thrust into her side a thorn—evidently the sharp sting of icy winter—and how the spell rendered her unconscious until awakened by Siegfried. There are many other mythological factors in the story, and either a diurnal or seasonal myth may be indicated by it. But it would require a separate volume to set forth the arguments in favour of a partial mythological origin of the Nibelungenlied. One point is to be especially observed—a point which we have not so far seen noted in a controversy ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... in the very dawn of science, Pythagoras or his disciples explained the apparent motion of the heavenly bodies about the earth by the diurnal revolution of the earth on its axis. But this theory, though bearing so deeply impressed upon it the great seal of truth, simplicity, was in such glaring contrast with the evidence of the senses, that it failed of acceptance ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... good-night: "Weel, we hae had a grand nicht, Alfred." It is in one of Tourgenieff's own prose-poems that the dialogue of the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn across the centuries is darkly shadowed. The evening of the world falls upon spirits sensitive to its intimations as the diurnal twilight falls upon the hearts of travellers descending a broad stream near the Ocean and the haven of ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... stubbornness and pride of heart of Mr. Woolly would not give over, and the next pass [he] was killed on the spot. The Earl fled to Chelsea, and there took water and escaped. The jury found it chance-medley."—Rugge's "Diurnal," ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Washington gave personal attention to many matters and exercised a general oversight over everything. Like most good farmers he "began his diurnal course with the sun," and if his slaves and hirelings were not in place by that time he sent "them messages of sorrow for their indisposition." Having set the wheels of the estate in motion, he breakfasted. ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth |
