"Elemental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... remember, but never one anything like this particular specimen. To add to her quickened interest, he was not only positively good-looking, but every line of his face, the poise of his well-proportioned, upstanding figure, the tilt of his head and the squareness of his chin, all spoke of strength; of elemental strength, and of a purposeful, resolute character. And, too, she told herself that he had nice eyes. The nice eyes never wavered in their ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... steps, his thoughts still busy with Hilmer. Here was a typical case of what America could yield to the nature that had the insolence to ravish her. America was still the tawny, primitive, elemental jade who gave herself more readily to a rough embrace than a soft caress. She reserved her favors for those who wrested them from her...she had no patience with the soft delights of persuasion. It was strange how much rough-hewn vitality ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... For the first time in her two-and-twenty years, Catherine had sensed the power, the virility of a real man—not of the make-believe, manicured and tailored parasites of her own class—and something elemental in her, some urge of primitive womanhood, grappled her to that memory and, all against her will, caused her to live and re-live those moments, time and time again, as the most strange and ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... assert its prerogative and to please certain classes in England who wished relief from the burden of taxation. And because Parliament had this power, it would use it, against the dictates of expediency and the instincts of common-sense; yea, in defiance of the great elemental truth in government that even thrones rest on the affections of the people. Blinded and infatuated with notions of prerogative, it would not even learn lessons from that conquered country which for five hundred years it had vainly attempted ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... darkness trembled into light; and the stars were extinguished like the street-lamps of a human city. The whiteness brightened into silver; the silver warmed into gold, and the gold kindled into pure and living fire; and the face of the East was barred with elemental scarlet. The day drew its first long breath, steady and chill; and for leagues around the woods sighed and shivered. And then, at one bound the sun had floated up; and her startled eyes received day's first arrow, and quailed under the buffet. ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... cry. Heaven rang with it as well as hell. Space was filled with that rhythmic tumult. Chaos and empty Nox had a new discord added to their elemental throes. Another memorial was drafted below, showing that unless the missing coin was restored to its owner hell would have to close its doors. There was a veiled menace in the memorial also, for Clause 6 hinted that if hell was allowed to go by the board ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... his sharp little eyes. More big men strolled up. As a particularly fine foil to the boy's diminutive form, Benny, the baggage smasher, whose overhanging shoulders testified whence came the power that had reduced many a proud Saratoga to elemental conditions, and "Happy Jack," the mammoth, soot-black, loose-jointed negro porter, placed themselves on either side of him. They made the boy look more like an insect ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... armies which, without exception, had kept intact their fighting spirit, that is, their faith in themselves, in their leaders, in the destiny of their country, in the beauty of the cause for which they fought.... Enough can never be said of the elemental importance that lies in the morale of the fighting men on the battle field. It is lamentable to hear far distant strategists reduce the conflict of two peoples to a problem in tactics or a list of ordnance statistics. It is enough to make angels weep when spectators, at a ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... of religious toleration, which is a phrase of insult, but of religious equality, which is the natural right of mankind, was to be evolved after a lapse of, additional centuries out of the elemental conflict which had already lasted so long. Still later was the total divorce of State and Church to be achieved as the final consummation of the great revolution. Meantime it was almost inevitable that the privileged and richly endowed church, with ecclesiastical armies ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... graceful elms, Fully a mile across the landscape swells, Whose over-hanging branches form an aisle, Grander than any in Cathedral pile; Then the historic tree that was the pride Of Israel's wisest monarch, that defied The elemental strife that ages feared To build the Temple Solomon upreared. Cedars of Lebanon! how proudly they In tens of thousands clothed the mountain way, In age-timed friendship with each throbbing star, A miracle of beauty near and far. Now ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... had made a chilly inside for the man, but when he reflected upon the incompetency, or childish courier's falsity, at Patras and his discernible lack of sense from Agrinion onward, he felt that the fault was elemental in his nature. It was a mere basic inability to front novel situations which was somehow in the dragoman; he retreated from everything difficult in a smoke of gibberish and gesticulation. Coleman glared at him with the hatred that sometimes ensues ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... from whom we must thus part company there are elemental truths of the situation on which we must still agree. Some things reasonable men may take for granted—some that surely have been settled in the conflict of arms, of diplomacy, and of debate since the spring of 1898. Regret them if you choose, but do not, like children, seek to make ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... The question of the nature and extent of Burns's musical abilities may be summed up in the words of the latest and most thorough student of his melodies:—"His knowledge of music was in fact elemental; his taste lay entirely in melody, without ever reaching an appreciation of contra-puntal or harmonious music. Nor, although in his youth he had learned the grammar of music and become acquainted with clefs, keys, and notes at the rehearsals ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... innocently vary with the fashion of the age and country. With regard to the second, both parties were agreed in the belief of an intermediate state of purgation for the venial sins of the faithful; and whether their souls were purified by elemental fire was a doubtful point, which in a few years might be conveniently settled on the spot by the disputants. The claims of supremacy appeared of a more weighty and substantial kind; yet by the Orientals the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... cheek so close to his lips. Conny shrank back perceptibly. Some elemental instinct of the female pushed its way through her broad-minded modern philosophy and made her shudder at the double embrace. She controlled herself at once and again bowed her beautiful head to his. But Percy did not offer ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... Aeschylus dared two things which astonished all men, and which still astonish them—to exalt contemporary men into the personages of majestic tragedies—and to call down and embody into tragedy, without degradation, the elemental spirits of nature and the deeper essences of Divinity. We scarcely know whether to consider the Persians or the Prometheus Bound as the most extraordinary display of what has always been esteemed the most audacious spirit that ever expressed its workings in poetry. But what ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... stock of stuff more crammed, Nor ever, again, sundered by bigger gaps: For naught gives increase and naught takes away; On which account, just as they move to-day, The elemental bodies moved of old And shall the same hereafter evermore. And what was wont to be begot of old Shall be begotten under selfsame terms And grow and thrive in power, so far as given To each by Nature's changeless, old decrees. The sum of things there is no power can change, For naught ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... It was no place for trivial ideas and thoughts of little things. The mind harked back unconsciously to the broad, simpler, basic emotions, the fundamental instincts of the race. The huge spaces of earth and air and water carried with them a feeling of kindly but enormous force—elemental force, fresh, untutored, new, and young. There was buoyancy in it; a fine, breathless sense of uplifting and exhilaration; a sensation as of bigness and a return to the homely, human, natural life, ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... wanted revolution. I do not believe he did. But he wanted his chance, that outburst of popular resentment which would bring him to the front, with the excitement, the sense of power that would come from the response of the nation when his angry voice translated into words its elemental passion. ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... Greece, and the Syrian coasts. It is the archetype of manly beauty, the tradition of those races who have wandered the least from Paradise; and who, notwithstanding many vicissitudes and much misery, are still acted upon by the same elemental agencies as influenced the Patriarchs; are warmed by the same sun, freshened by the same air, and nourished by the same earth as cheered and invigorated and sustained the earlier generations. The costume of the East certainly does not exaggerate the fatal progress of time; if a figure becomes ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... became more and more abstracted in his manner. The unhappy man was consumed by a passionate love. It was for Miss Blake that he was striving to qualify as a minister; it was of her that he thought all day and dreamt all night. Into his wild and elemental nature, in which hereditary savagery was simply covered by a thin veneer of civilisation, this strong love for a woman of an alien race had struck its roots deep down, and absorbed all into itself. But instead of the savage element ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... nearer. He had come within an inch of reaching the face of Tom, when he failed to counter. A little closer, and he was sure he could "knock him out." At any rate, if he failed to do so, he had nothing to fear from a foe who did not know enough to use an elemental advantage. ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... Count of Gabalis. The Abbe Montfaucon de Villars (1635-73) had wittily satirized the philosophy of Paracelsus and the Rosicrucians and their belief in sylphs and elemental spirits in his Le Comte de Gabalis ou Entretiens sur les sciences secretes (Paris, 1670), which was 'done into English by P.A. Gent.' (P. Ayres), as Count Gabalis, or the Extravagant Mysteries of the Cabalists, exposed in five pleasant discourses (1680), and thus included in ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... they are nothing more or less than the results of evolution, natural selection and the survival of the fittest. All we require for the demonstration of our theory, is a little bit of protoplasm at the beginning of things and a mass of elemental ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... cool core in the heart of flame, so there is a certain cool centre for the spirit where horror is radiating out to a wide circumference. In the depths one must surrender one's efforts and trust to elemental powers and agonies, but in the shallows all the calls are on the 'transitory being' whose flesh and blood are pitted against machinery. How can the nerves and trembling thought bear up? Yet they have borne up, even in men quick with sense and ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... during his precipitated return, by the rudest fierceness of wintry elemental strife; through which, with bad accommodations and innumerable accidents, he became a prey to the merciless pangs of the acutest spasmodic rheumatism, which barely suffered him to reach his home, ere, long and piteously, it confined ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... who canst guide the wandering star Through trackless realms of aether's space; Who calm'st the elemental war, Whose hand from ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... were capable of the sentiments and emotions of justice and virtue which in human mortal beings are the evidences and pledge of our divine origin and immortal destiny, it would heave and throb with the energy of the elemental forces of nature, and project this enemy (referring to President Johnson) of two races of men into that vast region, there forever to exist in a solitude eternal as life or as the absence of life, emblematical of. if ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... swarmed in the old man's spirit, as Christian with Apollyon. The labour was as great. At times, as he retraced once more and yet again ground already covered, his patience was overcome by a great weariness; almost the elemental obstinacy of the man wore him down. Then his very soul clamoured within him with the desire to cut all this short, to cry out impatiently against the slow stupidity or mulishness, or avariciousness, or whatever it was, that permitted the old man to agree to every one of the premises, but to balk ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... the elements comes from perfectly concentrated Meditation on their five forms: the gross, the elemental, the subtle, the inherent, the purposive. These five forms are analogous to those recognized by modern physics: solid, liquid, gaseous, radiant and ionic. When the piercing vision of the awakened spiritual ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... Dr. Guyer's remarkable book, "Being Well Born," we read the following: "It is no exaggeration to say that during the last fifteen years, we have made more progress in measuring the extent of inheritance and in determining its elemental factors than in all previous time." If this is true, it would seem to be almost criminal for teachers and parents to neglect to acquaint themselves with the fundamental laws of heredity. This author says further: ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... his works, Creatour him they sung, Both when first Eevning was, and when first Morn. 260 Again, God said, let ther be Firmament Amid the Waters, and let it divide The Waters from the Waters: and God made The Firmament, expanse of liquid, pure, Transparent, Elemental Air, diffus'd In circuit to the uttermost convex Of this great Round: partition firm and sure, The Waters underneath from those above Dividing: for as Earth, so hee the World Built on circumfluous Waters calme, in wide 270 Crystallin Ocean, and the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... and not of understanding. I left faith to religion, and banished it from philosophy. How define with a precision to satisfy the logic of philosophy what was to live again? The body? We know that the body rests in its grave till by the process of decomposition its elemental parts enter into other forms of matter. The mind? But the mind was as clearly the result of the bodily organization as the music of the harpsichord is the result of the instrumental mechanism. The mind shared the decrepitude of the body in extreme old age, and in the full ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... believe that it is impossible to define it exactly. It was not by the force of persuasion that he agitated. It was not his thought which awakened the thought of others. But he aroused every rebellious heart and awoke there an 'elemental' anger. And this anger, transplendent with beauty, became creative and showed to the exalted thirst for justice and happiness an issue and a possibility of accomplishment. 'The desire for destruction is at the same time a creative ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... greatly exercised by the two systems of values—the two series of explanations that her comparative anatomy on the one hand and her sense of beauty on the other, set going in her thoughts. She could not make up her mind which was the finer, more elemental thing, which gave its values to the other. Was it that the struggle of things to survive produced as a sort of necessary by-product these intense preferences and appreciations, or was it that some mystical outer thing, some great force, drove life beautyward, even in spite of expediency, regardless ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... heavy rains had broken over that district two days before, and Lawrence observed that deep watercourses had been ploughed among the trees and bushes in several places, but every other trace of the elemental war had vanished, and the quiet of early morning seemed to him sweet beyond expression, inducing his earnest spirit to wish that the mystery of sin had never been permitted, and that it were still possible for man to walk humbly with his God ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... was a fair day, full of the noises, of birds, the smell of box lavender, and fried bacon, mixed with an elemental smell they had never ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... By firm immutable immortal laws Impress'd on Nature by the GREAT FIRST CAUSE, Say, MUSE! how rose from elemental strife Organic forms, and kindled into life; How Love and Sympathy with potent charm Warm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm; Allure with pleasures, and alarm with pains, And bind ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... characters will never keep together, or do the proper things or say suitable ones. They will probably get so jumbled up no one will be able to tell which is the chief hero or heroine, and there will be no logical development at all, which my English teacher insists is an elemental requirement of fiction if it isn't of life. I thought this summer I was going to begin some sort of book just for practice, but by the time I get through putting down the things I scribble about the day's ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... resumed the Shadow, 'when our thoughts are not fixed upon any particular object, that our bodies are subject to all the vagaries of elemental influences. Generally amongst worldly men and frivolous women, we only attach ourselves to some article of furniture or of dress; and they never doubt that we are mere foolish and vague results ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... her warm, living fingers such a thrill passed through the boy as made him reel. It was something blind and elemental, outside of anything that he had dreamed of in his life. She went on down the hall and left him there, and he had to lean against ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... away with me," Esther would have obeyed the elemental romanticism which is so fixed a principle in woman's nature. But when she called at the shop he only spoke of his holiday, of the long walks he had taken, and the religious and political meetings he had attended. Esther ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... and bird pattern, like the egg and dart pattern. One is a means and the other an end; they are in different mental worlds. Leaving the complications of the human breakfast-table out of account, in an elemental sense, the egg only exists to produce the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... Strong elemental passions Lane had seen and felt in people during the short twenty-four hours since his return home. All of them had stung and astounded him, flung into his face the hard brutal facts of the materialism of the present. Surely it was an ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... "psychological tricks," the creation of images by force of imagination, and in pressing them on others as a "collective hallucination"; others, such as the moving of solid articles, either by an astral hand projected to draw them towards her, or by using an Elemental; others by reading in the Astral Light, and so on. But the proof of the reality of her mission from those whom she spoke of as Masters lay not in these comparatively trivial physical and mental phenomena, but in the splendour of her heroic ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... thy anguish and thy discontent Was growth of mine, the elemental strife Towards feeling manifold with vision blent To wider thought: I was no vulgar life That like the water-mirrored ape, Not discerns the thing it sees, Nor knows its own in others' shape, Railing, scorning, at its ease. Half man's truth must hidden lie If unlit by sorrow's ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... seen that Al2O3, CaO, SiO2, etc., are dissociated at the highest temperatures only. If the temperature were above that of combination, compounds could not exist as such, but matter would exist in its elemental state. On slowly cooling, these elements would combine. It is, then, a fair inference that such compounds as need the highest temperatures to separate them, as silica, silicates, and some oxides, were formed from their elements at a much earlier stage of the earth's history than ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... knew a sculptor—another sculptor—an elemental bit of nature, original and, better still, aboriginal. He used to sleep out under the stars so as to wake up in the night and see the march of the Milky Way, and watch the Pleiades disappear over the brink of the western ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... nameless fascination. The man himself with his elemental passions was a wonder. He left on public record no speech worth reading, and yet these powerful men shrank under his glance. As the nostrils of his big three-angled nose dilated, the scream of an eagle rang in his voice, his huge ugly hand held the crook of his cane with the ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... all drove her into a deeper isolation. This isolation would have been her destruction but that something bigger than herself, a passion to do things, lifted to idealism a mind which in the past had grown materialistic, which, in gaining wit and mental skill, had missed the meaning of things, the elemental sense. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... hearth; but, for the first time that he could remember, Nasmyth felt ill at ease in it. He was fresh from the snow-covered rocks and shadowy woods and the refinement and artistic luxury of his surroundings rather jarred on him. The story he had to relate dealt with elemental things—hunger, toil, and death—it would sound harsher and more ugly amid the evidences ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... related qualities that are named in the dictionary, are MADE OF THE ELEMENTALS, by blendings, combinations, and shadings of the elementals, just as one makes green by blending blue and yellow, and makes several shades and tints of red by modifying the elemental red. There are several elemental colors; they are all in the rainbow; out of them we manufacture and name fifty shades of them. You have named the elementals of the human rainbow, and also one BLEND—heroism, which is made out of courage and magnanimity. Very ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... centuries:—"To the Sung artists and poets, mountains were a passion, as to Wordsworth. The landscape art thus founded, and continued by the Japanese in the fifteenth century, must rank as the greatest school of landscape which the world has seen. It is the imaginative picturing of what is most elemental and most august in Nature—liberating visions of storm or peace among abrupt peaks, plunging torrents, trembling reed-beds—and though having a fantastic side for its weakness, can never have the reproach of pretty tameness and mere fidelity which form too often the only ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... tremendous masses of green and purple glaciers being ground to fine powder in their swift descent on all sides of him, . . . he saw the feathery ice fragments catch fire in the moonlight, . . . he heard the elemental roar and grinding crash of ice mountains sundering in a titanic convulsion . . . then he lost hearing . . . In that same sick bewildering moment of preternatural consciousness he thought wildly of Annadoah ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... evolving itself—a vital organism whose successive developments and transformations constitute all visible phenomena. A second class laid hold on the analogy suggested by mechanical arrangements. For them the universe was a grand superstructure, built up from elemental particles, arranged and united by some ab-extra power or force, or else aggregated by some inherent mutual affinity. Thus we have two sects of the Ionian school; the first, Dynamical ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the earth Plunges in fury, when the internal fires Have reached and pricked her heart, and throwing flat The marts and temples, the triumphal gates And towers of observation, clears herself To elemental freedom. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... are prepared for elemental diseases, consist of six things, two of which are from the planets, two from the elements, and two from narcotics. For although they can be composed of three things, one out of each being taken, yet these are too weak for healing purposes. ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... beauties, in common with all artists, incapable of loving really any one but themselves. Or perhaps it will be some woman of great and exquisite culture. But chance knows that women of great and exquisite culture are usually beings lacking in those plastic elemental qualities which a poet, above all men, needs in the woman he shall love. Their very culture, while it may seem to broaden, really narrows them, limits them to a caste of mind, and, for an infinite suggestiveness, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... grab of the enemy can dislodge it; getting down under kicks fast enough to take advantage of any fumble by the enemy in trying for a "fair catch;" getting a quick start the moment the ball was snapped back, and a dozen other elemental features that constitute the alphabet of the game. The boys had practiced these things a hundred times before, but they can never be done too often or too well; and to-day under the new stimulus they outdid themselves. Each tried to ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... referring to elemental principles—in thus availing ourselves of the light of self-evident truths—we bow to the authority and tread in the foot-prints of the great Teacher. He chid those around him for refusing to make the same use of their reason in promoting ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... their horrible huts, their stupid beards. . . . On the other hand, if we suppose that you work for long, long years, your whole life, that in the end some practical results are obtained, yet what are they, your results, what can they do against such elemental forces as wholesale ignorance, hunger, cold, degeneration? A drop in the ocean! Other methods of struggle are needed, strong, bold, rapid! If one really wants to be of use one must get out of the narrow circle of ordinary social work, and try to act direct upon the mass! What is wanted, first of ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... of his speculative reason? Even popularly, do we not speak of every great poet as the exponent of the spirit of his age? What else can this mean than that the philosophy of his age, its spirit and heart in relation to all the great elemental problems, find expression in his verse? Hence I ought to include other poets in this list, and more particularly Mr. Browning and Mrs. Browning, and the late Mr. Clough. But let the mention of Mr. Tennyson ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... This elemental struggle was to resolve itself into one between Aryan and non-Aryan—the Slav and the Finn; and this again into one between the various members of the Slavonic family; then a life-and-death struggle with Asiatic barbarism in its worst form (the Mongol), with Tatar and Turk always ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... internal and political considerations, the military situation itself was one which demanded immediate action or none at all. It is an elemental military fact that a war cannot be won by defensive action alone. Defeat may be averted by such means; but victory cannot be achieved. Germany, with the exception of a single incident south of Cambrai, had been on the defensive since the close of the battle of Verdun early ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... and bitter weather, and the roads were in many places rendered dangerous, and almost impassable, by the drifting snow. Mr. Ferret, however, pressed onwards with his habitual energy and perseverance; and, spite of all elemental and postboy opposition, succeeded in accomplishing his journey in much less time than, under the circumstances, could have been reasonably expected. But swiftly as, for those slow times, he pushed on, it is necessary I should anticipate, by a brief period, his arrival at his destination, in ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... Elements or Units of the Body.—Physiologists agree that the whole organism consists of a multitude of elemental parts, which are to a great extent independent of each other. Each organ, says Claude Bernard,[891] {369} has its proper life, its autonomy; it can develop and reproduce itself independently of the adjoining tissues. The great German authority, Virchow,[892] asserts still more ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... revolutionnaire ou au fanatisme religieux." The principles of compensation and equilibrium are found also in the physical universe, the product of matter and force, whose cause is God. Force, naturally expansive and operating on the homogeneous atoms which constitute elemental matter, is subject to the law of equilibrium, or equivalence of action and reaction. The development of phenomena under this law may be divided into three stages—the physical, the physiological, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... and twaddle of Priscilla's workroom to the intense realities of an existence always verging on eternity. She dared to contrast those large, heroic fishers, with their immovable principles and their constant fight with all the elemental forces for their daily bread, with Roland Tresham; and to decide that Roland's delicate beauty, pretty, persuasive manners, and fashionable clothing were vastly superior attributes. So she was glad when the morning came, for ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... of the Indians was immeasurably improved from that of their aboriginal condition. They were kept in a state of reasonable cleanliness, were well clothed, were taught and required to do useful work, learned many new and helpful arts, and were instructed in the elemental matters of the Catholic faith. All these things were a ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... all began a season of deep and quiet contentment that was to remain in the memories of all of them as a kind of idyl. It was a life of elemental toil, hardship, and danger, and of strong, elemental pleasures—rest after labor, food after hunger, warmth and shelter after bitter cold. In that life there was no room for distinctions of social position or wealth. They respected one another and cared for one another ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... was in Greece and Rome to be banished; or, as the formula went, "to be interdicted from fire and water,"—the sacred fire of the hearth, the lustral water which served for sacrifices. The exile was deprived of these by being forced to extinguish the hearth-fire,—the elemental, fundamental religion of a Greek and Roman. "He could not, deprived of this, hold property; having no longer a worship, he had no longer a family. He ceased to be a husband and father; his sons were no longer in his power, his wife was no longer ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... loomed over the continent, and so deep was the impression which his fame had made in my mind that, when the English sailor pointed confidently over the darkening waters, and cried 'There's Boney!' I looked up for the instant with a foolish expectation of seeing some gigantic figure, some elemental creature, dark, inchoate, and threatening, brooding over the waters of the Channel. Even now, after the long gap of years and the knowledge of his downfall, that great man casts his spell upon you, but all that you ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... imbecilic steps of the day he performed in flawless sequence. Under his masterly guidance the feet of the least rhythmic were suddenly endowed with deftness and grace. One swayed with him as naturally as with an elemental force. He danced politely and almost wordlessly unless first addressed, according to the code of his kind. His touch was firm, yet remote. The dance concluded, he conducted his partner to her seat, bowed stiffly from the waist, heels together, and ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... a small mountain of blackish-gray rock. He had given orders to admit none. Fingering the pointed fragments he experienced more emotion than ever before in his kaleidoscopic life. He sat in profound contemplation of that which prehistoric and elemental fires had laid down for his use. There was in his mind no question of strangeness that it should be himself who had decided that the thing was there and must be unearthed. It was the turning of another ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... blind exaction of bigoted authority, the other the machinery of brute force—the church and the army, the mitre, and the sword, superstition and violence; with these, in all ages, have the multitude been subdued; and between these two representations of elemental despotism, clustered on a high wall, stood a crowd to watch the meek procession of worshippers, and the exactitude of the manual, or admire the spirited, yet controlled, evolutions of the officer on ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... that love is a thing like a chemical element: with a fixed symbol 84 and a rigid atomic equivalent. And so it may be; but, like the philosopher's stone, hitherto it has defied detection in its elemental form. The fact is ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... Reel your shrill lutany. What popular breath her coming does out-tell The garrulous leaves among! What little noises stir and pass From blade to blade along the voluble grass! O Nature, never-done Ungaped-at Pentecostal miracle, We hear thee, each man in his proper tongue! Break, elemental children, break ye loose From the strict frosty rule Of grey-beard Winter's school. Vault, O young winds, vault in your tricksome courses Upon the snowy steeds that reinless use In coerule pampas of the heaven to run; Foaled of the white sea-horses, Washed in the lambent waters of the sun. Let ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... dramas Shakespeare went on to deal with the deeper and more elemental things in his nature, with jealousy in "Othello," and passionate desire in "Antony and Cleopatra"; but he never, perhaps, did much better work than in this drama where he chooses to magnify a secondary and ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... nor the wit in Don Juan, nor the graceful melancholy of Childe Harold, which made their author an idol, and still make him one to multitudes of Frenchmen and Germans and Italians. One prime secret of it is the air and spaciousness, the freedom and elemental grandeur of Byron. Who has not felt this to be one of the glories of Mr. Carlyle's work, that it, too, is large and spacious, rich with the fulness of a sense of things unknown and wonderful, and ever in the tiniest part showing us the stupendous and overwhelming whole? The magnitude of the ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... that which is felt but not seen in earth and sky. He misses the mystic hour when ghosts of the green life are about. That hour has been seized by Algernon Blackwood, who makes us feel the fascination, the vague dread of the elemental powers. There is a dream-wood in which the souls of all things intermingle, and once imprisoned there, the nature-lover may not escape until he has paid toll ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... ceased. A slow, placid smile—and yet, not quite a smile—it was rather an elemental content, a gratified drifting into the warm current of the stream of this world's being—spread over the woman's face; the man's long arm wrapped around his wealth, at once protecting and defiant; his ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... his hand as prompt to express his vision as Sir Joshua's; but Gainsborough saw further, for he felt more keenly and more profoundly. But light indeed were their minds compared with Rembrandt's. Rembrandt was a great visionary; to him the outsides of things were symbols of elemental truths, which he expressed in a form mighty as the truths themselves. There is no question of comparison between him on one hand and Reynolds and Gainsborough on the other. Yet we should hesitate to destroy our Reynolds and ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of nature! Are you well up ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... is at an end," why, my dear much esteemed Sir, should you and I let negligent indolence, for I know it is nothing worse, step in between us and bar the enjoyment of a mutual correspondence? We are not shapen out of the common, heavy, methodical clod, the elemental stuff of the plodding selfish race, the sons of Arithmetic and Prudence; our feelings and hearts are not benumbed and poisoned by the cursed influence of riches, which, whatever blessing they may be in other respects, are no friends to the nobler ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... in beautiful symbols. Nature is for him the sole theme; his works are but variations on her promptings. He knows the emerald route and all the semitones of sensuousness. Fantasy, passion, even paroxysmal madness there are; yet what elemental power in his Adam as the gigantic first homo painfully heaves himself up from the earth to that posture which differentiates him from the beasts. Here, indeed, the two natures are at strife. And Mother Eve, her expression suggesting the sorrows ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Noahmic ideas of the sacredness of human life. He further instituted rules for the education of the people, that "sons may be as plants grown up in their youth, and daughters as corner stones polished after the similitude of a palace." Such were the elemental ideas of the Hebrew commonwealth, which have entered, more or less, into all Christian civilizations. I can not enter upon a minute detail of these primary laws. Each of the tribes formed a separate state, and had a local administration of justice, but all ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... widened at him in the dim light, she waited for the sound of his voice—waited as one waits for something "terrible and dear"—the whirlwind that might destroy utterly, or pass—to leave her forever exulting in a new sense of power against elemental forces. ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... abeyance, but he told himself no lies. He cared for her, he loved to be with her and to talk to her and please her, but that was not all his desire. He thought of the bitter words of an orator at Hammersmith, who had complained that in our present civilisation even the elemental need of marriage was denied. Virtue had become a vice. "We marry in fear and trembling, sex for a home is the woman's traffic, and the man comes to his heart's desire when his heart's desire is dead." The thing which had seemed a mere flourish, came back now with a terrible air of truth. Lewisham ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... the ground was in him, the red earth; The smack and tang of elemental things; The rectitude and patience of the cliff; The good-will of the rain that loves all leaves; The friendly welcome of the wayside well; The courage of the bird that dares the sea; The gladness of ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... cried out in a strident voice, raising his arm aloft, "I may say, with one foot on sea and one on land, for I hold the elemental secret of them both. And I swear by the living god—Science incarnate—that the suffering of the centuries is over, that for this earth and all that it contains, from this night and for ever, Time will ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... him indulgently, is too much an appeal for charity on behalf of one requiring but initial anatomy—a slicing in halves—to exonerate, perchance exalt him. The Egoist is our fountain-head, primeval man: the primitive is born again, the elemental reconstituted. Born again, into new conditions, the primitive may be highly polished of men, and forfeit nothing save the roughness of his original nature. He is not only his own father, he is ours; and he is also our son. We have produced him, he us. Such ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... us back some twelve thousand years to neolithic man. Squatting in his rude hovel or gloomy cave, he listens to the sounds of a storm without. The howling of the wind, the flashes of lightning, and crashing of thunder give rise to that elemental emotion—fear. Fear was always with him, as he thought of the huge stones that fell and crushed him, and the beasts which were so eager to devour him. All things about him seemed to conspire for his death: ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... physical bodies of all such souls, linked together by the medium of universal ether. But although the bodies which thus occupy different points of space are linked together by the universal ether, we are not permitted to find in this elemental ether, the medium which links the innumerable souls together. And we are not permitted this because in our original assumption such souls are themselves the half-creators, as well as the half-discoverers, of that universe whose ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... better than among these "dalesmen" can the English elemental resistance to fusion be seen. Only at the extreme point of necessity have they exchanged ideas with any other section, yet they have left their mark all over English history. In Cumberland and Westmoreland, the most pathetic romances of ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... walks abroad we meet acquaintances who view with alarm the immediate future of the self-styled human race; but we find ourself unable to share their apprehension. We do not worry about lead, or iron, or any other element. And human nature is elemental. You can flatten it, as in Russia; you can bend, and twist, and pound it into various forms, but you cannot decompose it. And so the "new order," while perhaps an improvement on the old, will not be so very different. Britannia will go on ruling the ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... reproduce artificially the frame of mind of those who first read the poem is not only an effort, but is to most people, at all events, an unsuccessful effort. What is true of 'Hudibras' is true also, though in an inconceivably smaller degree, of those great works of imagination which deal with the elemental facts of human character and human passion. Yet even on these, time does, though lightly, lay his hand. Wherever what may be called "historic sympathy" is required, there will be some diminution of the enjoyment which those must have felt who were the poet's ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... embarrassed with the accumulations of new material, revealing still more the complication of causes which undoubtedly concur to any general result, that she is prone to overlook the overpowering influence of the simple elemental passions of human nature. "Our country, right or wrong," may be very bad morality, but it is a tremendous force to reckon with. One is wise overmuch who thinks that interest can restrain or statesmen control; wise unto folly who ignores that disinterested emotion, ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... the patriarch of wisdom, a master of all kinds of brass and iron work. (Genesis IV, 22.) He had the knowledge not only of ordinary chemistry and of the fire required for it, but also of the higher chemistry and of the hidden elemental fire. After the flood there was no other man who knew the art but the righteous Noah, whom some call Hermogenes or Hermes, who possessed the knowledge ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... him whose heart is ill at ease Such peaceful solitudes displease; He loves to drown his bosom's jar Amid the elemental war: And my black Palmer's choice had been Some ruder and more savage scene, Like that which frowns round dark Lochskene. There eagles scream from isle to shore; Down all the rocks the torrents roar; ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... is she! Beautiful as morning on the summer sea, Yet terrible as is the elemental gold That cleaves the tempest and in angles clings About its cloudy temples.—Manifold The dreams of daring in her fearless gaze, Fixed on the future's days; And round her brow, a strand of astral beads, Her soul's resplendent deeds; And at her front ...
— An Ode • Madison J. Cawein
... them to complete a personality," said Claire. "I know few people who would inspire respect in their elemental state. Stripped of advertising silk and diamond, they wouldn't be so ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... Wagner because it seems to me that Wagner, alone among quite modern musicians, and though indeed he appeals to our nerves more forcibly than any of them, has that breadth and universality by which emotion ceases to be merely personal and becomes elemental. To the musicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, music was an art which had to be carefully guarded from the too disturbing presence of emotion; emotion is there always, whenever the music is fine music; but the music is something much more than a means for the expression ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... true Resemblance of the Holy Trinity in Unity, but are the Trinity itself in its most outward, lowest kind of Existence or Manifestation.... Fire compacted, created, separated from Light and Air, is the Elemental Fire of this World: Fire uncreated, uncompacted, unseparated from Light and Air, is the heavenly Fire of Eternity: Fire kindled in any material Thing is only Fire breaking out of its created, compacted state; it is nothing else but the awakening the Spiritual Properties of that ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... it seemed to visibly bowl along the heavens. In the morning it rose as baldly as it had set. And back and forth over the awful plain blew the winds,—blew from east to west and back again, strong as if fresh from the chambers of their birth, full of elemental scents and of ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... ladies to whom she had been introduced were of this high world of fancy. They conceived themselves to be perfect, even as they were represented in religious art and in fiction. Their husbands must be models, worthy of their high ideals, and other women must have no blemish of any kind. Aileen, urgent, elemental, would have laughed at all this if she could have understood. Not understanding, she felt diffident and uncertain ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... limb and superb of physique, enfolds in her arms two infants, while her mate, of no less powerful build and rude force, kneeling beside her, gives her an embrace typical of the overpowering parental instinct. Here is the suggestion of the elemental feelings, the ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... her that her management had been perfect; they appealed to her barbaric love of contrasts. It fed her pride very pleasantly to know that she could command these luxuries; to know that by her own wealth she could bring the trivialities of civilization into the elemental life of the desert excited ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... dry-goods, a man will begin a good story, I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before he has got to the fifth "says he," and listen like a three-years' child, as the author of the "Old Sailor" says. I had rather hear one of those grand elemental laughs from either of our two Georges, (fictitious names, Sir or Madam,) glisten to one of those old playbills of our College days, in which "Tom and Jerry" ("Thomas and Jeremiah," as the old Greek Professor was said to call it) was announced to be ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... it into words," answered Enoch. "But I suppose it's the pioneer in me or something elemental that never quite dies in any of us, of ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... contact with elemental and volcanic human nature and with a hero whose power breathes from ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower |
