"Fragmentary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but these are cut short—as I hold, spoiled—by circular and triangular forms of rose and trefoil resting on them as such forms never rest in Nature; and the whole, though beautiful, is only half beautiful. It is fragmentary, unmeaning, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... gazing through the autumn sunglow at the hazy Mesa Verde, while my mind rebuilt and shifted the scenes of the long, long drama in which Old Pine had played his part, and of which he had given us but a few fragmentary records. I lingered there dreaming until twilight. I thought of the cycles during which he had stood patient in his appointed place, and my imagination busied itself with the countless experiences that had been recorded, and the scenes and pageants he had witnessed but of which he had made ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... or institutions which are prominent in Matthew are omitted or else explained; hence there is nothing which would prove unintelligible to a Greek. The book of the Acts of the Apostles, dedicated to the same patron, is virtually a continuation of the third Gospel, tracing, in a more or less fragmentary manner, the history and growth, of the early Christian Church, and especially the ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... standard, if it is a legitimate and reasonable one to apply, we shall be able to understand why classical Greek literature was the basis of education throughout all later antiquity; why its re-discovery, however fragmentary and however imperfectly understood, was able to intoxicate the keenest minds of Europe and constitute a kind of spiritual 'Re-birth', and how its further and further exploration may be still a task worth men's spending their ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the sun, and for a while subdued his fierceness. We were all out on the piazza—as the coolest place we could find—my wife, my sister-in-law and I. The only sounds that broke the Sabbath stillness were the hum of an occasional vagrant bumble-bee, or the fragmentary song of a mocking-bird in a neighboring elm, who lazily trolled a stave of melody, now and then, as a sample of what he could do in the cool of the morning, or after a light shower, when the conditions would ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... are dealing with. "Expect nothing more of my power of construction,—no ship-building, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs tied together."—"Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." We have then a moralist and a poet appearing as a Lecturer and an Essayist, and now and then writing in verse. He liked the freedom of the platform. "I preach in the Lecture-room," ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his letters and papers still remain in his family; contemporary newspapers had much to say both for and against him; the reviewers of his day noticed his poems, sometimes with approbation, sometimes with bitterness. There are fragmentary sketches of him in encyclopaedias and biographical dictionaries, and several pigeonholes in the State Department are filled with musty documents written by him when abroad in his country's diplomatic service. From these sources alone is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... intellectual energy went into service of his philosophy. His earliest philosophical work (rediscovered (1862) in translated Dutch manuscript) was a Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being. It is a fragmentary, uneven work, chiefly valuable for the insight it gives into the workings and development of Spinoza's mind. The Ethics, in the completed form in which we have it (no manuscript of it is extant) has the ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... out his fragmentary clues and arranged them on a sheet of cardboard on his knee. The house ...
— A Double Barrelled Detective Story • Mark Twain
... William E. Dodge, Jr.—all of these and many others—not omitting Astor's American Fur Company—at various times down to, and including the period of, the monumentally corrupt Tweed "ring," got grants from corrupt city administrations. Some of these water rights, that is to say, such fragmentary parts of them as pertained to wharves and bulkheads, New York City, in recent years, has had to buy back at exorbitant prices. From the organization of the Dock Department down to 1906 inclusive, New York City had expended $70,000,000 for the purchase of bulkhead and wharf ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... to eliminate all private comment and emotion, cannot dispense with the elementary dramatic feelings of sympathy, suspense, and wonder. sthetic expression is always integral, embodying a total state of mind, the core of which is some feeling; scientific expression is fragmentary or abstract, limiting itself to thought. Art, no less than science, may contain truthful images of things and abstract ideas, but never these alone; it always includes their life, their feeling tones, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... of the solar ray, the identity of magnetism and electricity, the polar nature of chemical affinity, the optical polarities of crystals, and the interaction of magnetism and light. Since then the once meagre and fragmentary science of physics has become one of the grandest and richest departments of human thought; and the illustrious names of Helmholtz, Joule, and Mayer, of Grove, Faraday, and Tyndall, may be fitly named ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... almost as bright as day. A September moon rose red, and in a broken and fragmentary way the various aspects of the journey that lay before her were anticipated: as she ran across the garden swards she saw the post-horses galloping in front of her; as her nervous fingers strove to unfasten the wicket, she thought of the railway-carriage; and as she passed ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... the dancing of the two tribes of natives and the two genera of birds, and the further element, perhaps not so strong, as to the similarities in distribution upon the bodies of their decorations, and bearing in mind the evidence obtained from native sources, which, though obviously only fragmentary and insufficient in character, is so far as it goes distinctly confirmatory, I am impelled to suggest that Father Clauser's theory is not without foundation, and indeed amounts, subject to the question of the species of bird of paradise, to a ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... so many other colossal undertakings. Of the three parts of his Recluse, thus planned, only the second, (the Excursion, published in 1814,) has been completed. Of the other two there exists only the first book of the first, and the plan of the third. The Recluse will remain in fragmentary greatness, a poetical Cathedral ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... other spiritual aspects of African culture, we can speak at present only in a fragmentary way. Roughly speaking, Africa can be divided into two language zones: north of the fifth degree of north latitude is the zone of diversity, with at least a hundred groups of widely divergent languages; south of the line ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... weapon, he might possibly have broken his neck in a fox-hunt. The character of Sir Thomas Warren is excellent; consistent throughout. That of Mr. Addison not bad, but sketchy, a mere outline—wanting colour and finish. The man's portrait is there, and his costume, and fragmentary anecdotes of his life; but where is the man's nature—soul and self? I say nothing about the female characters—not one word; only that Lydia seems to me like a pretty little actress, prettily dressed gracefully appearing and disappearing, and ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... and little-read Vindication of the Rights of Women, careless and fragmentary as it is, and by no means so startling to us as to her contemporaries, shows Mary Wollstonecraft as a woman of genuine insight, who saw the questions of woman's social condition in their essential bearings. ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... decoration were in the capital often superior to what was to be found in a provincial town like Pompeii, is evidenced by beautiful wall-paintings and reliefs discovered in Rome in 1879 and now preserved in the Museo delle Terme. More or less fragmentary remains of Roman houses have been found in almost every corner of the Roman empire, but nowhere exhibiting as completely as in ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... true of Hawthorne's romances that the interest centres in one strongly defined protagonist, to whom the other characters are accessory and subordinate,—perhaps we should rather say a ruling Idea, of which all the characters are fragmentary embodiments. They remind us of a symphony of Beethoven's, in which, though there be variety of parts, yet all are infused with the dominant motive, and heighten its impression by hints and far-away suggestions at the most unexpected moment. As in Rome the obelisks are placed at points ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... the right is a sacristy occupying a small structure, and to the westward is a fragmentary edifice known as the Basse OEuvre,—one of the oldest existing buildings in France; a Romano-Byzantine work, variously stated as of the sixth to eighth century and forming a portion of the original church which occupied the site of ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... Progress! Progress to what, and from whence? Amid empires shrivelled into deserts, amid the wrecks of great cities, a single column or obelisk of which nations import for the prime ornament of their mud-built capitals, amid arts forgotten, commerce annihilated, fragmentary literatures and populations destroyed, the European talks of progress, because, by an ingenious application of some scientific acquirements, he has established a society which has mistaken ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... from ill' of the Republic. The point of view in both is the same; and the differences not really important, e.g. in the myth, or in the account of the different kinds of states. But the treatment of the subject in the Statesman is fragmentary, and the shorter and later work, as might be expected, is less finished, and less worked out in detail. The idea of measure and the arrangement of the sciences supply connecting links both with the Republic and ...
— Statesman • Plato
... next morning we had much talk in regard to American writers. Kingsley admitted Emerson's high merit, but thought him too fragmentary a writer and thinker to have enduring fame. He had meant that this should be implied as his opinion in the title he gave to Phaethon—"Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers"—a book he had written in direct opposition to what he understood to be the general ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... I hear fragmentary conversations about fancy dress balls, valentine parties, church sociables, flirtations and clothes. Almost all of the girls wear shoes with patent leather and some or much cheap jewelry, brooches, bangles and rings. A few draw their corsets in; the majority are not laced. ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... the boat now, and through the crowd came the tall Frenchman, bearing in the hollow of each arm a child who clasped a bundle to its breast. His eyes grew brighter at sight of Necia, and he broke into a flood of patois; they fairly bombarded each other with quick questions and fragmentary answers till she remembered her companion, who had fallen back a pace and was studying the newcomer, ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... felt any, was soon soothed; he passed on successfully through his course. Not only did he graduate well, but he had also, as we shall see, begun to prepare himself for his career. Here is a letter which gives, in a fragmentary way, his ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... of the masked ball. What new light is thrown, first, on the characters and, then, on the plot by means of these fragmentary bits of dialogue heard as the revellers pass on ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... uncouth, lascivious gestures. This musical drunkenness; this eternal license; this want of repose, refinement, musical feeling—all these we are to believe make great music. I'll not admit it, gentlemen; I'll not admit it! The piano concerto—I only know one—with its fragmentary tunes; its dislocated, jaw-breaking rhythms, is ugly music; plain, ugly music. It is as if the composer were endeavoring to set to melody the consonants of his name. There's a name for you, Tchaikovsky! 'Shriekhoarsely' is more like it." ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... her cushions in the studio, ostensibly reading a long letter from her father. Actually, her mind was intent on Nevil, who stood at his easel absorbed in fragmentary studies for a new picture—flying draperies; ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... her chair, pale and appalled, May took her hand and began to talk with her in a low, murmuring tone. The others fell into a fragmentary conversation, constantly recurring with their eyes to Mr. Newt. The talk went on in broken whispers, and it was quite late in the evening when a stumbling step advanced to the door, which was burst open, ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... note, until it was quite gone out of sight. You know it is possible that he, the editor, may not please to have the fourth paper; but even in that case, it is better for the 'Remarks' to remain fragmentary, than be compressed till they are as dry as a ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... on more certain ground in our next and last chapter of Viking exploration in the north-west, in the fragmentary notices of Greenland and Vinland voyages to the middle of the fourteenth century, and in the fairly clear and continuous account of the two Greenland settlements of the ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... text. One should flatter neither the king, nor the people, nor one's dearest friend. I maintain, therefore, that no one has told you forcibly enough how the very persons who justly admire your work, constantly complain of this fragmentary style of publication, which is the despair of those who have not the leisure to place your scattered sheets where they belong and disentangle the skein.* (* Owing to the irregularity with which he received and was forced to work up his material, Agassiz was often either ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... of seven degrees, in which, it was alleged, the traditions of the people have been preserved to the present time. Owing to the shortness of his visit, one month and eleven days, he was unable to gain more than fragmentary accounts of the society, including parts of two traditions, from several Osage who had ...
— Osage Traditions • J. Owen Dorsey
... soldier and statesman, who died in 1853, after doing enough to convince men since that the revolution of 1848 produced no finer mind. He left among other things two or three volumes of short fragmentary pieces on politics, religion, literature, and art. They are intelligent and elevated, but contain hardly anything to our point to-night, unless it be this,—that what is called Stupidity springs not at ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... can almost always see the train leading from a young girl's eye or lip to the "I love you" in her heart. But the Three Words are not the Great Secret I mean. No, women's faces are only one of the tablets on which that is written in its partial, fragmentary symbols. It lies deeper than Love, though very probably Love is a part of it. Some, I think,—Wordsworth might be one of them,—spell out a portion of it from certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others. I can mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... of consciousness, just because I can, by an act of recollection, bring together any two portions of this stream of experience, and so recognize the unbroken continuity of the whole. If this is so, it would seem to follow from the very fragmentary character of our recollections that our sense of identity is very incomplete. As we shall see presently, there is good reason to look upon, this consciousness of continuous personal existence as resting only in part on memory, and mainly on our independently ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... bailiff, on mines and interest, on money and economical questions; not shrinking from politics either, until the squire cries out to the males assisting in the performance, 'Gad, she 's a head as good as our half-dozen put together,' and they servilely joined their fragmentary capitals in agreement. She went so far as to retain Peterborough to teach her Latin. He was idling in the expectation of a living in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the man, though, she reflected afterward. He'd taken his part, adequately and politely, of course, in the introduction and the fragmentary word or two of small-talk that had followed it, but Alice doubted if he'd really seen her at all. And when a man didn't see Alice—this was a line of reasoning she was quite candidly capable of—it meant an intensity of preoccupation that one ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... course are those which suffered most severely from the flames, and are indeed in so fragmentary a condition as to render any close criticism of them impossible. But enough has been quoted to show that Sydney Smith, so far as he was in any sense concerned with philosophy, was a sworn foe to mysticism and ideality, and a worshipper of Baconian common-sense ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... combative. Fighting was not his special gift; he met misfortune with patient passivity Resistance he found a mistake. But for all this a certain sense of superiority was, never wanting in Nickie the Kid; the shabbiest clothes, a deplorable hat, fragmentary boots, shirtlessness, the most distressing situations all failed to wholly eliminate a touch of impudent dignity, a trace of rakish self-satisfaction which as a rule escaped the attention of his clients; but, here and there, a student of human nature found ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... Of all the fragmentary pictures which those crowded twelve hours left registered upon Stephen O'Mara's brain, none proved more enduring than did the change which Garry Devereau's first haltingly weak but very sane greeting wrought ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... that statement of fact has ended Hudson's story. The fragmentary documents which I have been so fortunate as to obtain from the Record Office carry it a little, only a little, farther. Unhappily they stop short—giving no assurance that the mutineers got to the gallows that they deserved. All that they prove is that the few survivors ...
— Henry Hudson - A Brief Statement Of His Aims And His Achievements • Thomas A. Janvier
... shows you the result of treating this, as well as other curves, in the manner just described. You see that whether the fragmentary curves are steep and receding far from the equator; or whether they are flat and lying close along the equator; whether they span less or more than 180 degrees; the curves determined on the supposition that they are the work of satellites revolving round Mars ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... with all the fragmentary nature of literature, we find thousandfold repetition; which shows how limited ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... copious extracts from what I read, and also write critical analyses of the books that please or displease me, in the language—French or Italian—in which they are written; but these are fragmentary, and do not, I think, entitle me to say that I am writing anything. No one here is interested in anything that I write, and I have too little serious habit of study, too little application, and too much vanity and desire for the encouragement of praise, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... fragmentary story having exhausted itself, Daddy Jack turned up his coat collar until it was as high as the top of his head, and then tried to button it under his chin. If this attempt had been successful, the old African would have presented a diabolical appearance; but the coat refused ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... original English poems, which we present to the public for the first time to-day, will be ultimately found to constitute Toru's chief legacy to posterity. These ballads form the last and most matured of her writings, and were left so far fragmentary at her death that the fourth and fifth in her projected series of nine were not to be discovered in any form among her papers. It is probable that she had not even commenced them. Her father, therefore, to give a certain continuity to the series, ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... political or juristic shelter. Compared with it, all modern systems are complex and chaotic, crowded with self-contradictions, anomalies, impracticable functions and outworn inheritances; but beyond all their practical shortcomings is their fragmentary character. An economic civilization troubles itself about the universe much as a hive of honey-bees troubles about the ocean, only as a region to be avoided. The hive of Saint Thomas sheltered God and man, mind and matter, the universe and the atom, the one and the multiple, within the ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... well connected" in England, but going out for their meals. The girl was but indirectly communicative; though seemingly less from any plan of secrecy than from the habit of associating with people whom she didn't honour with her confidence. She was fragmentary and abrupt, as well as not in the least shy, subdued to dread of Madame Carre as she had been for the time. She gave Sherringham a reason for this fear, and he thought her reason innocently pretentious. "She ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... that complex thought into its elements, it just comes to this, first, that trust makes steadfastness. Most men's lives are blown about by winds of circumstance, directed by gusts of passion, shaped by accidents, and are fragmentary and jerky, like some ship at sea with nobody at the helm, heading here and there, as the force of the wind or the flow of the current may carry them. If my life is to be steadied, there must not only be a strong hand at the tiller, but some outward object which shall be for me the point ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Lincoln-Halleck could create a military department on the moon, they would instantly send thither some troops and a major-general, so strong is their passion to break up the armies into fragmentary bodies. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... his hands on the editor of the paper, yet there was not a word, not a suggestion, not an implied allusion for which any man in his senses could have demanded an apology. It was the plain truth, and nothing else; except that it was adorned by fragmentary panegyrics of himself, which made it even more exasperating if that were possible. He had not only wrecked Sabina's reputation by his quixotic folly; he was to be praised to ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... thus to utilise the splendid health I have had, unbroken, for the last year and a half, and the working powers that are fully as great as, if not greater, than I have ever had. I brought with me here (this letter was written from Eastbourne) the MS., such as it is (very fragmentary and unarranged) for the book about religious difficulties, and I meant, when I came here, to devote myself to that, but I have changed my plan. It seems to me that that subject is one that hundreds of living men could do, if they would only try, much better than ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... death. Moreover, suicide, the one offence with which he is definitely charged, was not in his or his contemporaries' eyes the horrid felony which, I hope, it will always be in yours. That his work—of which this volume forms but a fragmentary part—had made its way into this country, with unusual rapidity, in little more than ten centuries from its publication, is shown by its being frequently quoted by the English churchman John of Salisbury, the pupil of Abelard and friend and biographer of Becket (the Saint, not the boxer), who ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... asked me this summer to represent the interests of the county in Parliament, I asked them how they came to make such a mistake as to fancy that I knew what was their interest, or anyone else's? I am becoming more and more of an animal; fragmentary, inconsistent, seeing to the root of nothing, unable to unite things in my own mind. I just do the duty which lies nearest, and looks simplest. I try to make the boys grow up plucky and knowing-though what's the use of it? They will go to college with even less principles ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... her. From her gestures I deduced that the Kro-lus were a people who were armed with bows and arrows, had vessels in which to cook their food and huts of some sort in which they lived, and were accompanied by animals. It was all very fragmentary and vague, but the idea seemed to be that the Kro-lus were a more advanced people than the Band-lus. I pondered a long time upon all that I had heard, before sleep came to me. I tried to find some connection between these various races that would explain the universal hope which each of them harbored ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the Author has received is, that God is indeed inscrutable and incomprehensible to us from the infinity of His attributes, so that our minds can, as it were, only take in, in a most fragmentary and indistinct manner (as through a glass darkly), dim conceptions of infinitesimal portions of His inconceivable perfection. In this way the partial glimpses obtained by us in different modes differ ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... sources we have fragmentary glimpses of Jean, Paul's youngest son. When Jean was three weeks old he jumped from his cradle one night and seizing an axe, chopped the four posts out from under his father's bed. The incident greatly tickled Paul, who used to brag about it to any one who would listen to ...
— The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan • W.B. Laughead
... class of articles which are made by careful study of books of reference and form a new setting for fragmentary information, such as is often lost if not rearranged; but what can be said in favor of the sort of work where a standard recipe forms the basis ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... of documents which still await explanation.[77] There would seem to be a possible exercise of personal force not dependent upon muscular pull or pressure, bodily movements operating against known laws and even the building of this mysterious force into complete or fragmentary body-like forms. ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... weakness of his subservient and impetuous nature. I have not named the Greeks, nor the English Bible, nor Milton, as his inspirers. These he would claim; they are not his. He received too partial, too fragmentary, too arbitrary an inheritance of the Greek spirit, too illusory an idea of Milton, of the English Bible little more than a tone;—this poet of eager, open capacity, this poet who is little more, intellectually, than a too-ready, too-vacant capacity, ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... are in the highest degree monotonous. There is nothing to attract his attention or stimulate his love for reading. The selections filling fourth, fifth and sixth readers are too often far above the mental grasp of the pupil, and are also of so fragmentary a nature as to be almost unintelligible to the average student. Word pronouncing, and that alone, is the only refuge of ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... the least, fully as well clad, as well fed, as their fathers ever were, and living in better houses than their fathers ever lived in. He lived to see our banking capital, whether invested in public banks, in savings institutions, and in the hands of private bankers, swell above the fragmentary portion which the old Bank of the United States could afford to allot to us, to somewhat over two millions of dollars, almost wholly owned by our own people; and to read our monthly bills of mortality, which ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... verse, and when he commenced his Hermes in 1783 his ambition was to condense the Encyclopedie of Diderot into a poem somewhat after the manner of Lucretius. This poem was to treat of man's position in the Universe, first in an isolated state, and then in society. It remains fragmentary, and though some of the fragments are fine, its attempt at scientific exposition approximates too closely to the manner of Erasmus Darwin to suit a modern ear. Another fragment called L'Invention sums Chenier's Ars Poetica in the verse "Sur des pensers ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... others, slowly lighted a cigarette, then seated himself at the piano. For the rest of the evening he made no attempt to join in the fragmentary conversation. Instead he sang softly, as if to himself, touching the keys so gently that their notes seemed only the echo of his mellow voice. He sang bits of Spanish love-songs, of Mexican lullabies. But for the most part he kept to ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... color, quality, and season of perfection; their hardiness, productiveness, and comparative value for cultivation,—these details, a knowledge of which is important as well to the experienced cultivator as to the beginner, have heretofore been obtained only through sources scattered and fragmentary. ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... animates its commercial brother has been shown more than once, but never better than at the memorable fire in the Hotel Royal, which cost so many lives. No account of heroic life-saving at fires, even as fragmentary as this, could pass by the marvellous feat, or feats, of Sergeant (now Captain) John R. Vaughan on that February morning six years ago. The alarm rang in patrol station No. 3 at 3.20 o'clock on Sunday morning. Sergeant Vaughan, hastening to the fire with his men, found the whole five-story ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... richly moulded mullions and stained-glass, but through which the blue sky is now visible. This vacant circle is the only symmetrical form in these lofty masses that at a distance strikes the eye—all else is shapeless and fragmentary. Around these huge unsightly vestiges of ancient magnificence the types of modern comfort and commercial wealth cluster thickly, in the shape of a small but busy manufacturing town, with its mills, tall chimneys ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... finally fell under the power of the Carthaginians, and thus remained until Carthage was destroyed by the Romans. We have mentioned only the most important of the Grecian colonies, and even the history that we have of these, the best known, is unconnected and fragmentary. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... left the Fair Harbor, perhaps fifteen minutes later, with that thought still uppermost in his mind. This was not at all the Egbert Phillips he had expected. From Judge Knowles' conversation, from Judah Cahoon's stories, from fragmentary descriptions he had picked up here and there about Bayport, he had fashioned an Egbert who had come to be in his mind a very real individual. This Egbert of his imagining was an oily, rather flashily dressed adventurer, ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... conversations extended to thirteen, the class meeting once a week at noon, and remaining together for two hours. The class were happy, and the interest increased. A new series of thirteen more weeks followed, and the general subject of the new course was "the Fine Arts." A few fragmentary notes only of these hours have been shown me, but all those who bore any part in them testify to their entire success. A very competent witness has ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... made; but they faithfully portray the great features of the case, and present a true and living picture to the mind of every thoughtful man. The jealousies, the rivalries, the antipathies of the sections; the foreign intrigues and eventual foreign domination among our fragmentary governments; the large standing armies, and the competing naval forces; and finally, 'the endless war and numberless miseries' which will inevitably result—all these mighty evils will not only afflict our own unhappy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... How strangely fragmentary our memories of her are, and yet (when we piece them together) how they erect a comfortable background for all we are and dream. She built the earth about us and arched us over with sky. She created our world, taught us to dwell therein. The passion of her love compelled the rude ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... From fragmentary recollections of such tales as these (it may be observed in passing) may have sprung the strange fancy of the modern Cornishmen, which identifies these very Celtic saints of their own race with the giants who, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, inhabited the ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... the Constellation) wrote Captain Byron a letter of acknowledgment for his great courtesy and kindness. [Footnote: The correspondence between the two captains is given in full in "Niles' Register," which also contains fragmentary notes on the action, principally ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... months of exile among his loyal subjects in Jersey. A man who had been buried alive in such a fragmentary bit of the world must have required some ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... she was able to articulate and to make her wishes known; and soon after the doctor's first visit she had begun to regain control of her facial muscles. But the alarm had been great; and proportionately great was the indignation when it was gathered from Mrs. Mingott's fragmentary phrases that Regina Beaufort had come to ask her—incredible effrontery!—to back up her husband, see them through—not to "desert" them, as she called it—in fact to induce the whole family to cover and condone ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... the Battle of Bannockburn close at hand. They were arranged on the walls of the house of the manager of the Carron Ironworks. There were swords, daggers, lances, battle-axes, shields, and coats of chain-armour. Some of the latter were whole, others in fragmentary portions. I was particularly interested with the admirable workmanship of the coats of mail. The iron links extended from the covering of the head to the end of the arms, and from the shoulders down to the hips, in one linked iron fabric. The beauty and exactness ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... the cycle have reached us only in a fragmentary way, but they can be in part reconstructed from the Latin Isengrinus of Nivard of Ghent (about 1150), and from the German Reinhart Fuchs, a rendering from the French by an Alsatian, Henri le Glichezare (about 1180). The wars of Renard and Isengrin are here sung, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... history in the face." And moreover, we look with triumph, and with hearts swelling with fervent gratitude that our anti-slavery teachers schooled us so well. What is it but ludicrous (if mirth be possible on such a question) for those who are thus seeking the enfranchisement of but half of even the fragmentary colored race, to charge with selfishness, compromise, and treachery, the association, or any of its members, that are earnestly laboring to extend the ballot to every American citizen, irrespective of all distinctions ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... in the wilds of America. They married two sisters, the Misses Fricker, and a third sister married Robert Lovel, also a poet. The experiment of pantisocracy was fortunately never carried out, and Southey's career for the next eight years was exceedingly fragmentary; but in 1803 there was a reunion of the three sisters at Keswick, though one of the husbands, Lovel, was dead. Here Southey entered steadily and industriously on the life of an author for livelihood; it ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... recent illustration is so extreme that it will doubtless seem fantastic beyond belief. But the student at home will have to take these seeming fantasies seriously if he wishes to appreciate the present atmosphere of China. Cables have brought fragmentary reports of some addresses of Baron Goto in America. Doubtless in the American atmosphere these have the effect of reassuring America as to any improper ambitions on the part of Japan. In China, they were ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... some of the great Occult Fathers of the Mystic Orders, and each generation hoped that the event would come in his day. They had been taught that when the event took place, they would be informed by means of the planets, according to the Higher Astrology. All students of even our modern fragmentary astrology will understand this. And so they waited and carefully scanned the ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... tear a fragmentary interview from the "bereaved railway magnate," as he was called in the potted phrase of the journalist. Apparently the poor, trapped man had been too soft-hearted or too dazed with grief to put up a forceful resistance, and ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... From these fragmentary records we learn enough to indicate that the first marshal of the Massachusetts colony was a man of no ordinary character. His was a semi-military position, devolving upon him, not only the duty of executing the ordinary behests of the General Court, but of ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... Urn," and yet he was one of the greatest of poets. Viewed from all sides he was far greater than Shelley, far nobler than Keats. In a few poems Shelley reached almost the perfect, but many are weak, feeble, fragmentary, almost meaningless. So Keats in three poems reached a great height—in "St. Agnes' Eve," "The Grecian Urn," and "The Nightingale"—but most of his poetry is insipid, without thought, beauty ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... witness to the unity of knowledge, and strives by the constructive criticism of the categories of science to render that unity explicit. Its function is, no doubt, valid and important, for it is evident that man cannot rest content with fragmentary knowledge. But still, it might be objected that it is premature at present to endeavour to formulate that unity. Physics, chemistry, biology, and the other sciences, while they necessarily presuppose the unity of knowledge, and attempt in their own way and in their own sphere to discover ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... in spite of its notable length—affording, as it did, an excellent opportunity for undisturbed work,—Colonel Musgrave found, with a pricking conscience, that he made astonishingly slight progress in an exhaustive monograph upon the fragmentary Orderly Book of an obscure captain in a long-forgotten regiment, which if it had not actually served in the Revolution, had at least been demonstrably granted money "for services," and so entitled hundreds of aspirants to become the Sons (or Daughters) ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... she said. "You know far more than any of the students entering high school, and yet you can't pass the examinations. It is because what education you have is fragmentary, sketchy. You need the discipline of study, such as only skilled teachers can give you. You must be thoroughly grounded. Professor Hilton is right, and if I were you, I'd go to night school. A year and a half of it might enable you to catch up that additional six months. Besides, that ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... never pass away. Nothing is more difficult than to preserve the scanty and fugitive literature of an early age. A great work will live; but those fragments which are thrown off here and there, in a careless or earnest moment, perish, because they are fragmentary. They do not belong together in a book, and cannot stand alone. In a later period of the history of the country, this would be of little consequence, because there is enough else to stand as exponents of that age. But these fragments are all that is left to tell us how our fathers felt, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... say," I answered, "that I am so well familiar with Mr. Dannevig's adventures as to be quite competent to supplement his fragmentary statements. I shall be very happy ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... my legends, I came to some sheets whereon his lordship had written some hasty remarks, to the effect that the case Napier versus Napier was the most curious puzzle that ever he had witnessed since he had taken his seat on the bench. The papers were fragmentary, consisting of parts of a Reclaiming Petition and some portion of a Proof that had been led in support of a brieve of service; but I got enough to enable me to give the story, which I shall do in such a connected manner as to take the reader along with me, I hope pleasantly, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... we should desire Him.' We have to think, not of the outward form, howsoever lovely with the loveliness of meekness and transfigured with the refining patience of suffering it may have been, but of the beauty of a soul that was all radiant with a lustre of loveliness that shames the fragmentary and marred virtues of the best of us, and stands before the world for ever as the supreme type and high-water mark of the grace that is possible to a human spirit. God has lodged in men's nature the apprehension of Himself, and of all that flows ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... progressive, and the clay-slate (thonschiefer) and mica-slate appear to me to constitute here but one formation. The presence of cyanite, rutile-titanite, and garnets, and the absence of Lydian stone, and all fragmentary or arenaceous rocks, seem to characterise the formation we describe as primitive. It is asserted that even in Europe ampelite and green stone are found, though rarely, in ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... They may give a weak imitation of discourse. They may assume a vague resemblance to some other individual, but they can never give a full statement or a new statement. This is why all the so-called spirit communications are so fragmentary and so futile. The cure of any such state is to set up a ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... the fashion of the town. The concert was one of those fragmentary drearinesses that people endure because they are fashionable; tours de force on the piano, and fragments from operas, which have no meaning without the setting, with weary pauses of waiting between; there is the comic basso who is so amusing and on such familiar terms with the ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... which the machinery of our bodies executes in its own way, often rendering our thoughts more precise in the process, or totally transforming them. We do roughly what we meant to do, barring accidents. The reasons lie deep in our compound nature, being probably inarticulate; and our action in a fragmentary way betrays our moral disposition: betrays it in both senses of the word betray, now revealing it unawares, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... housewives, businessmen, office workers, teachers, preachers—rich, poor—from Florida to Alaska. Just when you called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too fragmentary." ...
— The Plague • Teddy Keller
... shut their doors against him. Besides, it is hard for a man of intellect to be satisfied with charity pure and simple: it waters such a very small corner of the kingdom of wretchedness! Its effects are almost always piecemeal, fragmentary: it seems to move by chance, and to be engaged only in dressing wounds as fast as it discovers them: generally it is too modest and in too great a hurry to probe down to the roots of the evil. Now it was just this probing ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... manhood and womanhood. How many of these are conversant with the history of their own country? Beyond a very vague knowledge of what has been taught to them in a superficial manner in our schools and colleges, and the fragmentary reminiscences that may have been recounted to them by their sires and grandsires who passed through these troublous times, it is doubtful whether even one-tenth of our present population have any idea of just how near Canada came to being absorbed ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... next few centuries, knowledge of Krishna remains in this fragmentary state. Nothing further is recorded and not until the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, crystallizes out between the fourth century B.C. and the fourth century A.D. does a more detailed Krishna make his appearance.[4] By the end of this period, many ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... the first laws of domestic economy that the largest families must inhabit the smallest houses—a state of things which is somewhat awkward when the heads wish to discuss affairs of state. Some preserve a certain amount of secrecy by the use of fragmentary sentences eked out by nods and blinks and by the substitution of capital letters for surnames; a practice likely to lead to much confusion and scandal when the names of several friends begin with ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... might have known, had I more faithfully walked in the light I had, is beyond my conjecture or confession: but as I never wrote for my own pleasure or self-proclaiming, I have been guarded, as men who so write always will be, from errors dangerous to others; and the fragmentary expressions of feeling or statements of doctrine, which from time to time I have been able to give, will be found now by an attentive reader to bind themselves together into a general system of interpretation of Sacred literature,—both classic and Christian, ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... itself, lying over the wide silence of the noon-day fields, historic doubtless, but noon-day certainly. Something lives upon the warm stretches of the Appian Way, something that talks of the eternal and unchangeable, and yet has the pathos of the fragmentary and the lost. Perhaps it is the ghost of a genius that has failed of reincarnation, and inspires the weeds and the leaf-shadows instead. Thinking of it, one remembers only an almond tree in flower, that grew ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... in juxtaposition three versions in ballad-form of the same story, though fragmentary in the two latter cases, not only because each is good, but to show the possibilities of variation in a popular story. There is yet another ballad, Erlinton, printed by Sir Walter Scott in the Minstrelsy, embodying an almost identical tale. ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... whilst the bulk of the cacao is good and sound, a little of the cacao grown in any district is liable to have suffered from drought or from attacks by moulds or insect pests. It will be realised from these fragmentary remarks that the buyer must exercise ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... been more celebrated in poetry than any other song-bird. Shelley's famous poem is too long to quote and too symmetrical to present in fragmentary form. It is almost as musical ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... could ultimately obtain it. There was passion, as in a little poem called "Stagyrus," deep and searching; there was unaffected natural feeling, expressed sweetly and musically; in "The Sick King of Bokhara," in several of the Sonnets and other fragmentary pieces, there was genuine insight into life and whatever is best and noblest in it;—but along with this, there was often an elaborate obscurity, one of the worst faults which poetry can have; and indications that the intellectual struggles which, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... Hawes, the description of the Antiquary's study, and the storm and rescue, must have had a generation of idiots for an audience if it had not been successful. Moreover, it had, as Scott's unwearied biographer has already noted, a new and special source of interest in the admirable fragmentary mottoes, invented to save the greater labour of discovery, which adorn its chapter-headings.[22] Lockhart himself thought that Scott never quite equalled these first three novels. I cannot agree with him there; ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... year of the publication of his first great work, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in 1781.[1] Kant was indeed himself, both intellectually and spiritually, the product of tendencies which had long been gathering strength. He was the exponent of ideas which in fragmentary way had been expressed by others, but he gathered into himself in amazing fashion the impulses of his age. Out from some portion of his works lead almost all the paths which philosophical thinkers since his time have trod. One cannot say even of his ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... labor-saving devices in order that much of the disagreeable work may be eliminated is unquestioned. Inventive genius has only given a fragmentary attention to the problems of the housewife. Most of the devices in use are far beyond the means of the poor and even the lower middle class. Furthermore, though they save labor many of them do not save time. The tests by which ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... and complex universe. It sees but the immediate, the obvious, the superficial. So instead of being concrete, it is, in truth, the very opposite. Nor is empirical science with its predilection for "facts" better off. Every science able to cope with a mere fragmentary aspect of the world and from a partial point of view, is forced to ignore much of the concrete content of even its own realm. Likewise, art and religion, though in their views more synthetic and therefore more concrete, are one-sided; they seek to satisfy ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... strengthening the general government and conferring on the provincial bodies only such powers as may be required for local purposes.' When Chandler of New Brunswick perceived with acuteness that in effect this would mean legislative union, Macdonald, as we gather from the fragmentary notes of his speech, made an impassioned appeal for ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell,—misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact:—John Wilkes's—the ugliest man's in England—saying, that with half-an-hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... knows very little about the Malay, and cares less. Any fragmentary ideas that he may have concerning him are, for the most part, vague and hopelessly wrong. When he thinks of him at all, which is not often, he conjures up the figure of a wild-eyed, long-haired, blood-smeared, howling and naked savage, armed with what Tennyson ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... Wretched Miser, and the form had become a Scottish convention before Burns produced his Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie. As important as any of these was the example set by Ramsay and bettered by Burns of refurbishing old indecent or fragmentary songs. Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) was regarded by Burns still more highly than Ramsay, and his influence was even more potent. In his autobiographical letter to Doctor Moore he tells that about 1782 he had all but given up rhyming: "but meeting with Fergusson's ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... fully explains the language here ascribed to Ignatius. A prisoner smarting under such treatment naturally dwells on the dark side of the picture, without thinking how a critic, writing in his study centuries afterwards, will interpret his fragmentary and impulsive utterances. In short, we must treat Ignatius as a man, and not as an automaton. Men will not talk mechanically, as critics ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... profession, of ambition, of love, of home—he had never wholly lost hold of a sustaining hope, and now it would seem that this long-abiding faith was at last to be rewarded. Yet he realized, as he fronted the facts, how very little he really had to build upon,—the fragmentary declaration of Slavin, wrung from him in a moment of terror; an idle boast made to Brant by the surprised scout; a second's glimpse at a scarred hand,—little enough, indeed, yet by far the most clearly marked trail ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... of Charlotte's closed hand there issued an entirely new sound. At first it was so faint and fragmentary that only two of us heard it. Then it became stronger and more continuous, and presently we were all gazing at each ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... legends of a popular mythology He casts His shadow, and is dimly discerned in the ode or the epic, as in troubled water or in fantastic dreams. All that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, all that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect or fragmentary, natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as material, comes ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... by which water was drawn from the well at the palace was designed by him), but this very ingenuity was the beginning of his difficulties. During a long siege, he invented a machine for casting large stones against the walls, or rather put it together from the fragmentary descriptions he had seen in authors, whose works had almost perished before the dispersion of the ancients; for he, too, had been ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies |
