"Insular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... intercourse between the natives of the islands and of the mainland was unknown though the islanders frequently visited one another. Hence no doubt their dominant character and higher order of intelligence generally. Literally the insular was a floating population, and derived the advantage of intercommunication. That of the mainland was stationary. It groped dimly in the jungle, each sept, isolated by bewildering differences in language, cramped, narrow, suspicious. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... may be said that the additional bureaus necessary for the work of the Insular government were created, and given proper powers. Civil government was gradually extended to the entire archipelago. [467] The criminal code was amended and supplemented by the passage of new laws. The administration of justice was reorganized and reformed. [468] An efficient native ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... the characters I mention. As a solicitation of the eye on definite grounds these visitors too constituted a successful plastic fact; and even the most superficial observer would have marked them as products of an insular neighbourhood, representatives of that tweed-and-waterproof class with which, on the recurrent occasions when the English turn out for a holiday—Christmas and Easter, Whitsuntide and the autumn—Paris besprinkles itself at a night's notice. They had about them the ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... President of the recent autonomist council of secretaries, and other officials of the late insular government, were ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... in which he opened the defence upon the third charge. So far from denying that Smith had fled from Croydon and disappeared on the Continent, he seemed prepared to prove all this on his own account. "I hope you are not so insular," he said, "that you will not respect the word of a French innkeeper as much as that of an English gardener. By Mr. Inglewood's favour we will ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... the less content am I scientifically: would that I had received a mathematical education. I was much interested with some quotations from Lyell's Elements in a late Calcutta Courier, especially about the Marine Saurian from the Gallepagos. What further proof can be wanted of the maritime and insular nature of the world during the reigns of the Saurian reptiles? What more conclusive can be expected about the appearance of new species? This point would at once be settled if the formation of these islands can be proved not to have been contemporaneous with the Continents. ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... the causes which drew together the western half of the continent operated powerfully to exclude our own country from the current influences of the time, and made the England of 1815, in opinion, in religion, and in taste much more insular than the England of 1780. The revolution which overthrew Charles X. did no doubt encourage and stimulate the party of Reform in Great Britain; but, unlike the Belgian, the German, and the Italian movements, the English Reform movement would unquestionably have run the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... I met at Arthur's Chocolate House had black hair, a little cocked nose, and was by no means so fortunate in his personal appearance as Mr. Warrington," said the Baron, with much presence of mind. "Warrington, Dorrington, Harrington? We of the continent cannot retain your insular names. I certify that this gentleman is not the individual of whom I spoke at dinner." And, glancing kindly upon him, the old beau sidled away to a farther end of the room, where Mr. Wolfe and Miss Lowther were engaged in deep conversation in the embrasure of a ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... customs that give an individuality to a nation, and John Bull abroad loses none of his insular obstinacy; but keeps his Christmas in the old fashion, and wears his clothes in the new fashion, without regard to heat or cold. A nation that never surrenders to the fire of an enemy cannot be expected to give in to the fire of ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... such as to fit them to exercise at once so large a degree of self-government; but it is my judgment and expectation that they will soon arrive at an attainment of experience and wisdom and self-control that will justify conferring upon them a much larger participation in the choice of their insular officers. ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... behind it: hill after hill came up into view, at a distance looking like islands, which indeed many of them were; but, on a nearer approach, the parts connecting the others became visible, and the mainland of this vast insular continent gradually revealed itself ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... cumbrous, and has the further disadvantage (in these days) of not being of common gender. Now the lack of any proper word for a meaning so constantly needing to be expressed is certainly a serious defect in modern (insular) English. The Americans have some right to crow over us here; but their 'physician' is a long word; and though it has been good English in the sense of medicus for six hundred years, it ought by etymology to mean what physicien does in ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... England, like the land and its people, has been specially insular, and yet no land has undergone deeper influences from without. No land has owed more than England to the personal action of men not of native birth. Britain was truly called another world, in opposition ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... recognizable Englishman in Austrian dragoon uniform;—white tunic, white helmet, brown moustache;—ay! and eh! and oh! and ah! coming frequently from his mouth; that he stood square while speaking, and seemed to like his own smile; an extraordinary touch of portraiture, or else a scoff at insular self-satisfaction; at any rate, it commended itself to the memory. Barto dismissed him, telling him to be daily in attendance on the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... The Continental nations ought to have acted likewise; as they failed to conserve this safeguard of representation with taxation, the consequence was that everywhere excepting in England parliamentary institutions ceased to exist. England owed this singular felicity to her insular situation. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... to such museums as Horniman's at Forest Hill. The early social history may well take the form best suited to the child, and not appeal merely to surface interest. And the spirit in which the lives of other people are presented to children must not be the narrow, prejudiced, insular one, so long associated with the people of Great Britain, which calls other customs, dress, modes of: living, "funny" or "absurd" or "extraordinary," but rather the scientific spirit that interprets life according to its conditions ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... during the Middle Ages was of a twofold character. The first, Christian and Latin, was found all over Europe, and made the protection and extension of knowledge, its chief object. The other was a more insular literature for each nation, and always in the language of the people. Theodoric the Goth, Charlemagne, and Alfred the Great, the chief patrons of the literature of their age, sought to carry on, side by side, ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... Leghorn, which carried them, along with the Tenth Regiment of the line." The Sicilians at the same time determined to separate entirely from Naples and the rest of the peninsula; "and thus all the ability and spirit, the arms and wealth, of that powerful island were applied to the effort for insular independence, and drawn off from that for the independence of the nation." From Tuscany there went to this national war "about three thousand volunteers, and perhaps as many more regulars"—a number so small that Farini apologizes for it, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... she said, as she rose reluctantly from the foot of the bed. "I doubt if I can sleep for thinking what a pity it is that such an egotistic, bumptious, pugnacious, prejudiced, insular, bigoted person should be so handsome! And who wants to marry him, anyway, that he should be so distressed about international alliances? One would think that all female America was sighing to lead him ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... early insular or purely native thought, from before the Christian era until the eighth century; by which time, Shint[o], or the indigenous system of worship—its ritual, poetry and legend having been committed to writing and ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... always right has defined the lady to be in England. Even in France she is not that, and between the Frenchwoman and the Italian there are the Alps. In a word, the educated Italian mondaine is, in the sense (also untranslatable) of singular, insular, and absolutely British usage, a Native. None the less would she be surprised to find herself accused of a ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... no depth of attention—they were all referable to usual irredeemable inevitable types. It was the world of cheerful commonplace and conscious gentility and prosperous density, a full-fed material insular world, a world of hideous florid plate and ponderous order and thin conversation. There wasn't a word said about Byron, or even about a minor bard then much in view. Nothing would have induced me to look at Brooksmith in the course of the repast, and I felt sure that not even my overturning ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... evidence goes, the Minoan Empire does not appear to have been a specially warlike one. No doubt there was a good deal of fighting in its history, as was the case with all ancient empires. But the insular position of Crete, and the predominance which the Minoan navy established on the sea, saved the island Empire from the necessity of becoming a great military power, and the absence of the spirit of militarism is reflected in the national art. While an Assyrian palace ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... settled in his Duchy of Normandy, excommunicated him on pretence that his wife Matilda was too nearly related. William, in 1055, deposed and banished Maugher in consequence to the Isle of Guernsey.... Insular tradition has fixed his ...
— The Fall Of The Grand Sarrasin • William J. Ferrar
... intercepted at every turn by the abominable ghost of British Protection. What a blessing it would have been if the meddlesome palaverers of the Cobden Club, American as well as English, could ever have been made to understand the essentially insular character of Protection and the essentially continental ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... were after, he said; they went about everywhere—into factories and dock yards, and public buildings, and made funny little notes and sketches of things they didn't understand—so that they could explain them in Germany. In his fatuous, insular way, it pleased him to regard them rather as a species of aborigines benefiting by English civilization. The English Ass and the German Ass are touchingly alike. The shade of difference is that the English Ass's sublime self-satisfaction is in the German Ass self-glorification. The English ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... laudable, but the methods she adopted to set the stranger at her ease were not those most likely to endear the insular English to their cousins across the Atlantic. Ida, to begin with, had not only a spice of temper but also no great reverence for forms and formulas, and the people that she was accustomed to meeting were those who had set their mark upon wide belts of forest and long leagues of prairie. At ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... leaf-mould of countless generations ([Greek: oiae per phullon geneae]), and not from any top-dressing capriciously scattered over the surface at some master's bidding.[277] England had long been growing more truly insular in language and political ideas when the Reformation came to precipitate her national consciousness by secluding her more completely from the rest of Europe. Hitherto there had been Englishmen of a distinct type enough, honestly hating foreigners, and reigned over by kings of whom they ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... I will adopt it boldly to design these qualities. Skeltery, then, is a quality of much art. It is even to be found, with reverence be it said, among the works of nature. The stagey is its generic name; but it is an old, insular, home-bred staginess; not French, domestically British; not of to-day, but smacking of O. Smith, Fitzball, and the great age of melodrama; a peculiar fragrance haunting it; uttering its unimportant message in a tone of voice that has the charm of fresh ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Portugal, which followed England, and Naples, whose king was a Bourbon, brother to the king of Spain. Therefore, in weight of metal, which is the first thing, next to brains, we were at least 2 to 1; and in the number of ships 3 to 1, or about 230 to 76. That is the reason why the insular statesmen went to war, if not with greater enterprise and energy, yet with more determination and spirit, than their exposed and vulnerable allies upon the Continent. The difference between them is that between men who are out of reach and are 2 to 1, and ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Christ,—should be regarded as a centre of light and influence for the large number of inhabited but benighted Islands scattered over the far and vast WEST of the Pacific Ocean. This missionary enterprise in the insular world beyond, besides its intrinsic importance, is among the necessary means, by its reacting influence, of raising the Hawaiian churches to the point of self-support and self-control; and its value, in this view, is already delightfully evident. The pecuniary means for supporting ...
— The Oahu College at the Sandwich Islands • Trustees of the Punahou School and Oahu College
... difficult as well as a dangerous amusement. Many of the miners pulled down their tents, and began to work upon the spots on which they previously stood. Others began to dig all round their wooden huts, until these rude domiciles threatened to become insular, and a few pulled their dwellings down in order to get at ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... passing of a far-reaching measure by Congress, 1906, known as the Pure Food and Drugs law. It provides against the manufacture and sale of adulterated or misbranded foods, drugs, medicines, or liquors in the District of Columbia, the Territories, and the insular possessions of the United States, and prohibits the shipment of such goods from one State to another or to a foreign country. To the Department of Agriculture was given the power to enforce the law. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... finds himself paying taxes not only to endow the Church of Rome in Malta, but to send Christians to prison for the blasphemy of offering Bibles for sale in the streets of Khartoum. Turn to France, a country ten times more insular in its pre-occupation with its own language, its own history, its own character, than we, who have always been explorers and colonizers and grumblers. This once self-centred nation is forty millions strong. The total population of the French Republic is about one hundred and fourteen millions. ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... this hatred of England is a direct effect of the teachings of Treitschke can hardly be doubted, when we recall the great influence his teachings have had, and the peculiar bitterness of that dramatic personage for England, for England's pretentiousness, her middle class satisfaction, her insular conceit. ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... National Center for Medical Intelligence (Department of Defense), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (Department of Defense), Naval Facilities Engineering Command (Department of Defense), Office of Insular Affairs (Department of the Interior), Office of Naval Intelligence (Department of Defense), US Board on Geographic Names (Department of the Interior), US Transportation Command (Department of Defense), Oil & Gas Journal, and other public ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... contributions we must make to the world's peace is this: We must see to it that the people in our insular possessions are treated in their own lands as we would treat them here, and make the rule of the United States mean the same thing everywhere,—the same justice, the same consideration for the essential ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... Annam became dependencies of China, and continued to send tribute as such even up to quite modern times. Hardly so successful was Kublai Khan's huge naval expedition against Japan, which, in point of number of ships and men, the insular character of the enemy's country, the chastisement intended, and the total loss of the fleet in a storm, aided by the stubborn resistance offered by the Japanese themselves—suggests a very obvious comparison with the object and fate of ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... which includes the municipalities of Utuado, Adjuntas, Lares, Las Marias, Yauco, Maricao, San Sebastian, Mayaguez, Ciales, and Ponce. With the exception of Ponce and Mayaguez, all these districts are back from the coast; but insular roads of recent construction make them now easily accessible, and there is no point on the island more than twenty ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... well as the other hospitalities of the House, the ladies made acknowledgment by a donation to the altar, befitting rather their rank than their appearance. But this excited no suspicion, as they were supposed to be Englishwomen, and the attribute of superior wealth attached at that time to the insular character as strongly as in our ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... some extent, the "Celtic vague"—all these things are there. But they are all co-ordinated, dominated, fashioned anew by some thing which is none of them, but which is the English genius, that curious, anomalous, many-sided genius, which to those who look at only one side of it seems insular, provincial, limited, and which yet has given us Shakespeare, the one writer of the world to whom the world allows an ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... pleasantly in my ears; never so discordantly the 'Frulein Dollmann' that followed it. Every syllable of the four was a lie. Two honest English eyes were looking up into mine; an honest English hand—is this insular nonsense? Perhaps so, but I stick to it—a brown, firm hand—no, not so very small, my sentimental reader—was clasping mine. Of course I had strong reasons, apart from the racial instinct, for thinking her to be English, but I believe that if I had had none at all I should at any ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... boots it to remind The younger here of our ethereal band And hierarchy of Intelligences, That this thwart Parliament whose moods we watch— So insular, empiric, un-ideal— May figure forth in sharp and salient lines To retrospective eyes of afterdays, And print its legend large on History. For one cause—if I read the signs aright— To-night's appearance of its Minister In the assembly ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... aerial navigation was based on a desire to keep in touch with the movement rather than to hasten its development. It was felt that we stood to gain nothing by forcing a means of warfare which tended to reduce the value of our insular position and the protection of our sea-power.' When the Wright brothers offered to sell their invention to the British Admiralty, ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... of Britain are, its insular situation and the disposition of the people, and the excellent form ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... of a foreigner. In form and features he might be pronounced English, though even there one caught a dash of something Gallic; but he had no English shyness: he had learnt somewhere, somehow, the art of setting himself quite at his ease, and of allowing no insular timidity to intervene as a barrier between him and his convenience or pleasure. Refinement he did not affect, yet vulgar he could not be called; he was not odd—no quiz—yet he resembled no one else I had ever seen before; his general bearing intimated complete, sovereign ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... on them it is not only permissible but obligatory for women to propose to the men. Needless to say that the inhabitants of these islands, though so near Queensland, are not Australians. They are Melanesians, but their customs are insular and unique. Curr (I., 279) says of them that they are "with one exception, of the Papuan type, frizzle-haired people who cultivate the soil, use the bow and arrow and not the spear, and, un-Australian-like, treat their women ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... she would have preferred a good deal less disguise, but, after all, we have to take things as they come, and I throw myself into the deep comfort of gratitude that her situation has overtaken her in this country, where every perfect ministration will surround her, rather than in your far-off insular abyss of mere—so to speak—picturesqueness. I should have been, in that case, at the present writing, in a fidget too fierce for endurance, whereas I now can prattle to you quite balmily; for which you are all, no doubt, deeply grateful. Give her, please, my tender love, and say to her that ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... forms, together with Malta and some islets, an insular group lying between the eastern part of Sicily and the Lesser Syrtis. It is situated in Lat. 36 2', Long. 12 10' nearly, and is distant from Sicily only about fifty miles. The colonisation of the island ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... into each other by the softest gradations, and the heat never, even in midsummer, reaches that extreme which is felt in higher latitudes of the American continent. The climate of Florida is in fact an insular climate; the Atlantic on the east and the Gulf of Mexico on the west, temper the airs that blow over it, making them cooler in summer and warmer in winter. I do not wonder, therefore, that it is so much the resort of invalids; ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... years after the adoption of the Federal Constitution before it began in great bulk, but to-day we find in the States alone forty-six legislative bodies, and two of Territories, besides the Federal Congress and the limited legislatures of our insular possessions. Nearly all of these turn out laws every year; even when the legislatures meet biennially, they frequently have an annual session. Only in one or two Southern States have recent constitutions restricted them to once in four years. It would be a fair estimate that they average five ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... place. His Lordship was affable, and Redclyffe could not, it must be confessed, see anything to justify the prejudices of the neighbors against him. Indeed, he was inclined to attribute them, in great measure, to the narrowness of the English view,—to those insular prejudices which have always prevented them from fully appreciating what differs from their own habits. At lunch, which was soon announced, the party of three became very pleasant and sociable, his Lordship drinking a light Italian red wine, and recommending it to Redclyffe; who, ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the various incomers to Fernando Po we may next turn to the natives, properly so-called, the Bubis. These people, although presenting a series of interesting problems to the ethnologist, both from their insular position, and their differentiation from any of the mainland peoples, are still but little known. To a great extent this has arisen from their exclusiveness, and their total lack of enthusiasm in trade matters, a thing that differentiates them more than any other characteristic from the ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... in fact, two islands that are thus formed, as there is another passage into the sea about twenty-five miles north of North Bluff, are called by the natives "Kigyuektukjuar," in view of their insular character. Kigyuektuk means island, and especially a large island, King William Land being thus distinguished by them as the island. A "small island" is Kigyuektower, and ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors' wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the Philippines and Porto Rico are regarded as insular or territorial possessions of the United States, and are entitled ...
— Business Hints for Men and Women • Alfred Rochefort Calhoun
... united to constancy and perseverance; whence he experiences frequent failure and disappointment.... The peculiarities of English manners and habits are drawn vividly and distinctly, and without exaggeration. We acquire a lively idea of that wonderful combination, that luxuriant growth—of that insular life which is based in boundless wealth and civil freedom, in universal monotony and manifold diversity; formal and capricious, active and torpid, energetic and dull, comfortable and tedious, the envy and derision of the world. Like other unprejudiced travellers ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Owing to her insular position, England will lose but very little through this war, provided she is able to maintain the supremacy of her navy over the German fleet. The British merchant marine and her manufactures will ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... questionable attentions—the person who "tries to show the man he isn't wanted." But de Mersch didn't see the matter in that light at all. He could not, of course. He was as much used to being purred to as my aunt to looking down on non-county persons. He seemed to think I was making an incomprehensible insular joke, and laughed non-committally. It wouldn't have been possible to let him know ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... suggested that he was inordinately fond of the beverage prepared from it—the cup which both cheers and satisfies. It will be seen from the above that the species-name is cacao, and one can understand that Englishmen, finding it difficult to get their insular lips round this outlandish ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... require no study at all for the defection; they publish themselves through all varieties of misery. But the perfection of barbarism, as regards our island cookery, is reserved for animal food; and the two poles of Oromasdes and Ahrimanes are nowhere so conspicuously exhibited. Our insular sheep, for instance, are so far superior to any which the continent produces, that the present Prussian minister at our court is in the habit of questioning a man's right to talk of mutton as anything beyond a great idea, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... half inches high; but his head was fine, heavy, symmetrical. His features twitched when he was disturbed, but were beautiful when he smiled. To a profound observer he looked dangerous. He had the faculty of making his face signify nothing at all. He had been begotten an insular Italian, but was born a Frenchman. His wife, a Creole, more than six years older than he, was in the box with him. She sat at the front, and was seen by thousands. She wished to be seen; and when the pit shouted in the direction of the ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... Ottolini fled from Bergamo. This gave a beginning to the general rising of the Venetian States. In fact, the force of circumstances alone brought on the insurrection of those territories against their old insular government. General La Hoz, who commanded the Lombard Legion, was the active protector of the revolution, which certainly had its origin more in the progress of the prevailing principles of liberty than in the crooked policy of the Senate of Venice. Bonaparte, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... made war upon all foreigners. At length the excitement subsided, but too much damage to foreign lives and property had been done to be ignored, and the matter had an ugly look, especially as no Spaniard had suffered by this outbreak. The Insular government roused itself to punish some of the minor misdoers and made many explanations and apologies, but the aggrieved nations insisted, and obtained as compensation a greater security for foreigners and the removal of many of the restraints upon commerce and travel. ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... nomade occupation, from barrenness, from nakedness, and from insalubrity, and restore the ancient fertility and healthfulness of the Etruscan sea coast, the Campagna and the Pontine marshes, of Calabria, of Sicily, of the Peloponnesus and insular and continental Greece, of Asia Minor, of the slopes of Lebanon and Hermon, of Palestine, of the Syrian desert, of Mesopotamia and the delta of the Euphrates, of the Cyrenaica, of Africa proper, Numidia, and Mauritania, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... oblivion to which he had consigned it. But in recompense for this, there was a very black cloud darkening the horizon of 1554. The Queen had announced to her Parliament her intended marriage with Prince Philip of Spain. All the old insular prejudices against foreigners rose up to strengthen the Protestant horror of a Spanish and Popish King. The very children in the streets were heard to cry, "Down with the Pope and the Spaniards!" Elizabeth would have ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... that this was what these very colonists were engaged in doing, and for a moment the British officer felt a throb of sympathy hitherto unknown to him. He had landed at New York but a month before, filled with insular prejudices and contempt for these country lads and farmers, whom he imagined composed the Continental army; but the fight at Fairfield, which was carried on by the Hessians with a brutality that disgusted him, and the encounter with ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... its leisure, at holiday time, it baffles all tradition, and shows us the spirit of comedy clowning after a fashion that is insular and not merely civic. You hear the same twang in country places; and whether the English maid, having, like the antique, thrown her apple at her shepherd, run into the thickets of Hampstead Heath or among sylvan trees, it seems that the most humorous thing to be done ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... geography together could carry the day, and the continental Norman became a Frenchman. In the islands, where the geographical tie was less strong, political traditions and manifest interest carried the day against language and a weaker geographical tie. The insular Norman did not become a Frenchman. But neither did he become an Englishman. He alone remained Norman, keeping his own tongue and his own laws, but attached to the English crown by a tie at once of tradition and of advantage. Between states of ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... relief and happiness to me if Nickols does sanction and set the seal of artistic approval upon our plans," he said, with feverish but happy eyes. "You see, Nickols will represent the cosmopolitan in judgment upon the normally developed insular. I remember once that Mr. Justice Harlan said that in an opinion on freight rates I had sent up to him I had represented both the cosmopolitan and the insular interest with astonishing equity, and I told him that I considered that it took at least six generations ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... onions. The three 'Mudians in her were characteristic samples of the inhabitants. Their faces and skins, where exposed, were not tanned, but absolutely burnt into a fiery-red colour by the sun. They guessed and drawled like any buckskin from Virginia, superadding to their accomplishments their insular peculiarity of always shutting one eye when they spoke to you. They are all Yankees at bottom; and if they could get their 365 Islands—so they call the large stones on which they live—under weigh, they would not be long in towing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various
... growing more and more uneasy about the aggressions of the Russians and the English on the California or rather the Pacific Coast. Russia was pushing down from the north; England also had her establishments there, and with her insular arrogance England boldly stated that she had the right to California, or New Albion, as she called it, because of Sir Francis Drake's landing and taking possession in the name of "Good Queen Bess." Spain not only resented this, but began to realize another need. Her galleons from ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... which Bacon feared to use in his writings, lest they should remain forever unknown to all but the inhabitants of a relatively unimportant insular kingdom, is now the speech of two continents. The Common Law which Coke jealously upheld in the southern half of a single European island, is now the law of the land throughout the vast regions of Australasia, and of America north ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the appearance which it presents where weathered; but its general aspect is that of a porphyritic trap. Be it what it may, the fact is not at all affected, that the shores, wherever it occurs on this tract of insular coast, are strewed with reptilian remains ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... enlightenment of the last generation, the Spaniards it would appear have come off with the chicken-pox, while in the features of other nations the disfiguring variolous scars are but too visible. Living nearly in an insular situation, Spaniards have slept through the eighteenth century, and how in the main could they have applied their time better? Should the Spanish poetry ever again awake in old Europe, or in the New World, it would certainly have a step to make, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... the crowd were treacherous or ready with their knives. The servants of great houses seemed to Bruno discourteous and savage; yet he says nothing about such subtlety and vice as rendered the retainers of Italian nobles perilous to order. He paints the broad portrait of a muscular and insolently insular people, untainted by the evils of corrupt civilization. Mounting higher in the social scale, Bruno renders deserved homage to the graceful and unaffected manners of young English noblemen, from whom he singles Sidney out as ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... to ... 800 bags (of 100 lbs. net each) of Standard Fine Granulated Sugar at ... cents per pound, manufactured in the United States or insular possessions, packed in cotton-lined burlap bags, deliverable from licensed warehouse in Chicago between the first and last days of ... inclusive. Delivery within such time to be at Seller's option, upon seven, eight or nine days' notice to the buyer. If Domestic Beet ...
— About sugar buying for Jobbers - How you can lessen business risks by trading in refined sugar futures • B. W. Dyer
... time that the train reached Dover we were "as thick as thieves," for Nakamura's perfect frankness and his geniality of manner quickly conquered my insular aloofness toward the foreigner; and upon boarding the Channel steamer we at once went below and were busy with our luncheon almost before the boat had cast off ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... governing the externals of women in various particulars. And the principal result was to make the English code seem insular and antique. She had an extremely large white hat, with a very feathery feather in it, and some large white roses between the brim and her black hair. Her black hair was positively sable, and one single immense lock of it was drawn level across her forehead. ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... and Canning to Grenville and Howick brought no immediate change in our insular policy and the new government had been in office for above three months before a British force at last appeared in the Swedish island of Ruegen. It arrived too late, Danzig surrendered in May, and on June 14 ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... almost level with the sea and exactly round, being about a quarter, of a league in circuit, upon which the city of Swakem is built; not one foot of ground on the whole island but is replenished with houses and inhabitants, so that the whole island, is a city. On two sides this insular city comes within a bow-shot of the main land, that is on the E.S.E. and S.W. sides, but all the rest is farther from the land. The road, haven, or bay surrounds the city on every side to the distance of a cross-bow shot, in all of which space, ships may anchor in six or seven fathoms ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... associations. At Cealchythe a synod was held in 785. A similar name occurs in a Saxon charter of the 11th century and in Domesday; in the 16th century it is Chelcith. The later termination ey or ea was associated with the insular character of the land, and the prefix with a gravel bank (ceosol; cf. Chesil Bank, Dorsetshire) thrown up by the river; but the early suffix hythe is common in the meaning of a haven. The manor was originally in the possession of Westminster ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... intelligent and high-minded American couple, Mr. and Mrs. Dewy, people whose character, culture, and society I should value anywhere; a young Englishman, brother of a celebrated African traveler, who, because he rides on an English saddle, and clings to some other insular peculiarities, is called "The Earl"; a miner prospecting for silver; a young man, the type of intelligent, practical "Young America," whose health showed consumptive tendencies when he was in business, ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... that our insular manners form at first a bar to our intercourse with the Spaniard, who has been brought up in a school of deliberate and stately courtesy somewhat foreign to our business turn of mind; but how superficial this difference is may be seen by the strong attachment Englishmen form to the country ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... prices now prevalent in England, and the paralyzing of great branches of trade which could not occur in an England that really ruled the sea, may be attributed in chief part to this war of the submarines. The advantage of the insular position of England has been greatly lessened, thanks to this excellent German weapon, even if it cannot be completely eliminated. But if one compares with the total voyages of the English merchant shipping the losses of the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... morning air, (for they were hot with exertion,) and regardless of moving shadows, or cooing doves, my two friends gave up the sense of hearing to their reels, and that of seeing to the career of the little zinc hooks at the end of their gut lines. When I looked at the insular P——, and his active rod, I thought him like to Archimedes who had found his extramundane spot of ground, and, as he threw the fly, and bent his back to let it touch the water lightly, was endeavouring to fasten ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... litterateur, although in the most modest and hidden manner, stamped me as a volatile, flighty creature, who was no more to be depended upon than a feather in the wind; or, as the Italians say, qu' al piume al vento. It is a curious prejudice, and a purely insular one. And sometimes I think, or rather I used to think, that there was something infinitely grotesque in these narrow ideas, that shut us out from sympathy with the quick moving, subtle world as completely as if we were fakirs by the banks of the sacred Ganges. For what does ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... estate. Their private opinion had been that Mr. Vanderpoel's knowledge of his son-in-law must have been limited, or that he had curiously lax American views of paternal duty. The firm was highly reputable, long established strictly conservative, and somewhat insular in its point of view. It did not understand, or seek to understand, America. It had excellent reasons for thoroughly understanding Sir Nigel Anstruthers. Its opinions of him it reserved to itself. If Messrs. Townlinson ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the original evidence which they have produced. * Note: Compare Gallet, Memoires sur la Bretagne, and Daru, Histoire de Bretagne. These authors appear to me to establish the point of the independence of Bretagne at the time that the insular Britons took refuge in their country, and that the greater part landed as fugitives rather than as conquerors. I observe that M. Lappenberg (Geschichte von England, vol. i. p. 56) supposes the settlement of a military colony formed of British soldiers, (Milites limitanei, laeti,) during ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... eternity of His being, and of our own, nothing is more reasonable than that He has ordained a fitting opportunity beyond the boundary of time. Let us only rid ourselves of our insular, contracted ideas, and we will see how worthy of the Infinite Wisdom is such a ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... remembered with all our fortifications is that it is almost useless to make them impregnable from the sea if they are left open to land attack. This is true even of our own coast, but it is doubly true of our insular possessions. In Hawaii, for instance, it is worse than useless to establish a naval station unless we establish it behind fortifications so strong that no landing force can take them save by ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... outlook on life, and casts a black shadow over his existence. When I got to know M. Bayol better during our evening tramps up and down the deck, he asked me confidentially what remedies I adopted when "ronge de spleen," and how I combated the attacks of this deplorable but peculiarly insular disease, and was clearly incredulous when I failed to understand him. This amazing man also told me that he had been married five times. Not one of his first four wives had been able to withstand the unhealthy climate ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... industrially alike Great Britain stands at the head of all European nations. Its abundant mineral wealth, especially in coal and iron, has stimulated manufactures to the highest degree, while its insular character and numerous seaports have had a similar stimulating effect upon commerce. Its revenue, aside from that of the colonies, amounts to about $920,000,000 annually, and its public debt ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... days would think the solemn walk of the Pavan quite as lively an amusement as good society could allow. There are other passages too which show that Shakespeare (or his characters) had a fine 'insular' feeling against these 'newfangled' fashions ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... centuries of momentous change, when the wreck of the Roman Empire threatened civilization and Christianity with ruin like its own, the civilization and Christianity of the great district between the Loire, the Alps, and the Pyrenees rested mainly on the Abbey of Lerins. Sheltered by its insular position from the ravages of the barbaric invaders who poured down on the Rhone and the Garonne, it exercised over Provence and Aquitaine a supremacy such as Iona till the Synod of Whitby exercised over Northumbria. All the more illustrious sees of Southern Gaul were ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... artistic impressions, musical in preference to plastic or pictorial. Both preferred a continental to an insular manner of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence. Both indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of heterodox resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox religious, national, social and ethical doctrines. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... keenest of observers, noting and satirizing as no one before his time had attempted, or indeed had been able to do, the cant and hypocrisy, the pride and selfishness, the upstart and arrogant exclusiveness, the insular prejudices and weaknesses, which form a part of our national character; but doing this, he loved his countrymen and countrywomen for their finer qualities, and hated the bungling foreigners who presume to caricature them ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... shrewdly that perhaps it would relieve the stranger from embarrassment to engage him in conversation, with beautiful tact brought him to tell the company of his own country, remarking that "We insular people have but a vague ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... no insular feeling that we express the same sentiment; but, nevertheless, we do feel it to be something to boast of, that our countrywomen will not have to learn the art of Wax Flower Modelling from foreigners, many of whom however have been amongst the now ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey
... denied by fate all sense of duty to a father, I was naturally driven to double my duty to my mother, whose life was left hanging upon mine. So we two for many years wandered about, shunning islands and insular prejudice. I also shunned your father, though (so far as I know) he neither sought me nor took any trouble to clear himself. If the one child now left him had been a son, heir to the family property and so on, he might have behaved quite otherwise, and he would have ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... it. This land, although we did not perceive that it joined the continent, made a passage through the opening very doubtful. It also made it doubtful, whether the land which we saw to the S.W., was insular or continental, and, if the latter, it was obvious that the opening would be a deep bay or inlet, from which, if once we entered it with an easterly wind, it would not be so easy to get out. Not caring, therefore, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... would call your insular prejudice. We are accustomed to less self-assertion on the part of women than is customary with them. We prefer women to rule us by seeming to yield. In the States, as I take it, the women never yield, and the men have to fight their own battles ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... England into France. The sea is a wall; and if Voltaire—a thing which he very much regretted when it was too late—had not thrown a bridge over to Shakespeare, Shakespeare might still be in England, on the other side of the wall, a captive in insular glory. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... inclined her to selfishness, and her timidity to reserve and aloofness. She bid fair to grow up an insular, somewhat unlovable woman; but child though she was, conversion meant a radical change in character and purpose. She realized at once that as a follower of Jesus she might not live to please herself. She became interested in other people, their well-being and sorrows and needs. Then the joy of ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... quantity is nevertheless utterly disproportioned to the magnitude of our wealth and our wants. We have been, therefore, under the necessity of resorting to other means of representing the first and supplying the second; and, taking advantage of our insular situation, we have introduced these small pink shells, which abound all round the coast. Being much more convenient to carry, they are in general circulation, and no genteel person has ever ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... political union with the US; federal funds to the Commonwealth administered by the US Department of the Interior, Office of Insular Affairs ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... is an insular variety of the Mus hirsutus of W. Elliot, found in Southern India. They inhabit the forests, making their nests among the roots of the trees, and feeding, in the season, on the ripe seeds of the nilloo. Like the lemmings of Norway and Lapland, they migrate in vast numbers on the occurrence ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... observed, without being able to improve. The garrison of New York and its immediate dependencies, was supposed to be reduced to ten or eleven thousand effectives; and the security heretofore derived from its insular situation no longer existed. The ice was so strong that the whole army, with its train of wagons and artillery, might pass over without danger. This circumstance afforded a glorious occasion for ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... to the climate of England,—its insular form, geographical position, and its exposure to the warm currents of the Gulf Stream give it a temperature generally free from great extremes of heat or cold. On this account, it is favorable to the full and healthy development of both animal and ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... the mythical geography of the Hindus, the earth consisted of seven islands, or rather insular continents, surrounded by seven seas. That inhabited by men was called Jambudwipa, and was in the centre, having in the middle of it the sacred mountain Meru or Sumeru, a kind of Mount Olympus inhabited by ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... and also turned its eye more to political mechanisms. For this very reason it kept up more of fellowship with the broad world, and had the benefit of this in a larger measure of social fructification. Whatever is separated dies. Quakerism uttered a word so profound that the utterance made it insular; and, left to itself, it began to be lost in itself. Nevertheless, Quakerism and Puritanism are the two richest historic soils ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... sentenced, and executed in the face of heaven and earth. Our liberty is neither Greek nor Roman; but essentially English. It has a character of its own,—a character which has taken a tinge from the sentiments of the chivalrous ages, and which accords with the peculiarities of our manners and of our insular situation. It has a language, too, of its own, and a language singularly idiomatic, full of meaning to ourselves, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... probably throw some light, discussing as they do, at great length, the lives of such English Saints as Edward the Confessor and Wilfrid of York; and yet they are not too favourably disposed towards our insular Saints, since they plainly express their opinion that our pious simplicity has filled their Acts with incredible legends and miracles, more suited to excite ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... to get your note and the Notts. Newspaper. I have seldom been more pleased in my life than at hearing how successfully your lecture (At the Nottingham meeting of the British Association, August 27, 1866. The subject of the lecture was 'Insular Floras.' See "Gardeners' Chronicle", 1866.) went off. Mrs. H. Wedgwood sent us an account, saying that you read capitally, and were listened to with profound attention and great applause. She says, when your final allegory (Sir Joseph Hooker ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... the proximity of such oceanic surface to large masses of land, and these masses presenting two essentially different features, the one consisting of land particularly characterized as continental, the other as insular, regard has been accordingly had to such distribution of land ...
— The Hurricane Guide - Being An Attempt To Connect The Rotary Gale Or Revolving - Storm With Atmospheric Waves. • William Radcliff Birt
... most damaging fact. Testimony of opposite results in the smaller islands would hardly countervail it. Such testimony would be good to prove that the freedom of the negro works well in densely peopled insular communities, where the pressure of population compels industry. The opponents of emancipation are willing sometimes to acknowledge that where the laboring population are, as they say, in virtual slavery to the planters, by the impossibility of obtaining land of their own, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... little Iberian. Caradoc and Regnus were tall middle-aged men of the fair flaxen British type. All three were dressed in the draped yellow toga after the Latin fashion, instead of in the bracae and tunic which distinguished their more insular fellow-countrymen. ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Borda. The peaks of Mouna Kaah appeared to be about half a mile high; and as they are entirely covered with snow, the altitude of their summits cannot be less than 18,400 feet. But it is probable that both these mountains may be considerably higher. For in insular situations, the effects of the warm sea air must necessarily remove the line of snow in equal latitudes, to a greater height than where the atmosphere is chilled on all sides by an ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... sent to Flanders; the English officers learned the theory and practice of war in the best of all schools, and under the best of all teachers; that ignorance of the military art, the result in every age of our insular situation, and which generally causes the four or five first years of every war to terminate in disaster, was for the time removed, and that mighty genius was developed under the eye of Louis XIV., and by the example of Turenne, which was destined to hurl back to their own ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... messenger Uluka which kindled the wrath (of the Pandavas). The next that comes, you must know, is the story of Amba. Then comes the thrilling story of the installation of Bhishma as commander-in-chief. The next is called the creation of the insular region Jambu; then Bhumi; then the account about the formation of islands. Then comes the 'Bhagavat-gita'; and then the death of Bhishma. Then the installation of Drona; then the destruction of the 'Sansaptakas'. Then the death of Abhimanyu; and then the vow of Arjuna (to slay Jayadratha). ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... man towards inspiring the whole country with the desire for unity. Herein lies his great work. Without Mazzini, when would the Italians have got beyond the fallacies of federal republics, leagues of princes, provincial autonomy, insular home-rule, and all the other dreams of independence reft of its only safeguard which possessed the minds of patriots of every party in Italy and of nearly every well-wisher ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... drew a parallel distinction between Anglicanism quiescent, and Anglicanism in action. In its formal creed Anglicanism was not at a great distance from Rome: far otherwise, when viewed in its insular spirit, the traditions of its establishment, its historical characteristics, its controversial rancour, and its private judgment. I disavowed and condemned those excesses, and called them "Protestantism" or "Ultra-Protestantism:" I ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... partly prepared for some such answer, but I shall be just to you in my thoughts, Viscount Medenham. I know you are a brave man. It is not cowardice, but your insular convention that restrains you from facing me on the field. ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... obviously the work of a great abundant mind—a mind giving out its criticisms like flutters of birds—a heroic intellect always in the service of an ideal liberty, courage, and gracious manners—a characteristically island brain, that was yet not insular. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... appropriations for naval increases. The lull in naval construction, however, was of short duration. The wisest statesmen realized, from the time when Japan first emerged from her Oriental seclusion and eagerly set out to learn the lessons of western civilization, that their country's insular situation made a strong navy the first requisite of national independence. It was the warships of the western world that forced the Japanese to open their door to the foreigner. Fifteen years after the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... groan or complaint: folding the scanty coverlet around him, he would subside gradually into his berth, composing his little limbs as gracefully as Caesar. His courtesy was invincible and untiring: he was anxious to defer and conform even to my insular prejudices. Discovering that I was in the habit of daily immersing in cold water—a feat not to be accomplished without much toil, trouble, and abrasion of the cuticle—he thought it necessary to simulate a like performance, though nothing would have tempted him to incur such ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... in the physical history of the world when the patches of land already raised above the water became so united as to form large islands; and though the aspect of the earth retained its insular character, yet the size of the islands, their tendency to coalesce by the addition of constantly increasing deposits, and thus to spread into wider expanses of dry land, marked the advance toward the formation of continents. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... mean to imply that Sir Richard Calmady would have the insolence, is so much the victim of insular prejudice as, to ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... with which an island like Corsica might be absolutely isolated from the silkworm epidemic. And with regard to other epidemics, Mr. Simon describes an extraordinary case of insular exemption, for the ten years extending from 1851 to 1860. Of the 627 registration districts of England, one only had an entire escape from diseases which, in whole or in part, were prevalent in all the others: 'In all the ten years it had not a single ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... During the four years since his puppyhood he had lived the life of a sated aristocrat; he had a fine pride in himself, was even a trifle egotistical, as country gentlemen sometimes become because of their insular situation. But he had saved himself by not becoming a mere pampered house-dog. Hunting and kindred outdoor delights had kept down the fat and hardened his muscles; and to him, as to the cold-tubbing races, the love of water had been a tonic and ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... "grenadier," with temporarily distressing results—though all comes right at last—and a lyrical description of an upset of his coach, the only one he ever had, written by a gifted hostler. But on call he could give "The Tight Little Island," "Rule Britannia" or any one of a dozen other insular melodies. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... flowery forms of speech in his compliments to officials, with an eye that accurately gauges situations—usually in Persia very difficult ones—a man full of resource and absolutely devoid of ridiculous insular notions—a man who studies hard and works harder still—a man with unbounded energy and an enthusiast in his work—a man who knows his subject well, although he has been such a short time in Teheran—this is our British ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... to a minute, all arranged to a strawbreadth. She would suit Robert. But what could I do with anything so nearly faultless? She is my equal, poor as myself. She is certainly pretty: a little Raffaelle head hers—Raffaelle in feature, quite English in expression, all insular grace and purity; but where is there anything to alter, anything to endure, anything to reprimand, to be anxious about? There she is, a lily of the valley, untinted, needing no tint. What change could improve her? What ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... of our gallant generals. Lord Kitchener, however, obtained nine votes, and I myself included Christian De Wet; but on discovery of documents he was ruled out, in spite of my pleading for him on imperialistic grounds. I thought it rather insular, too, I must confess, that Mr. Henry James and Mr. Sargent were denied to me because they are American subjects. My own final list, as pasted in the Album at Ivanhoe, along ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... States is to all intents an insular power, like Great Britain. We have but two land frontiers, Canada and Mexico. The latter is hopelessly inferior to us in all the elements of military strength. As regards Canada, Great Britain maintains a standing army; but, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... he says that "ideas, if they occur to him, he rejects like temptations to sin." Of Ranke, thinking perhaps also of himself, he declares that "his intimate knowledge of all the contemporary history of Europe is a merit not suited to his insular readers." Of a partisan French writer under Louis Napoleon he says that "he will have a fair grievance if he fails to obtain from a discriminating government some acknowledgment of the services which mere historical science will ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... lower and outer Sikkim Himalaya, though on a much more gigantic scale, is not comparable in beauty and luxuriance with the really tropical vegetation induced by the hot, damp, and insular climate of these perennially humid mountains. At the Himalaya forests of gigantic trees, many of them deciduous, appear from a distance as masses of dark gray foliage, clothing mountains 10,000 feet high: here the individual ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... adjutant general's department, inspector general department, judge advocate general department, quartermaster corps, medical department, corps of engineers, and ordnance department, signal corps, officers of the bureau of insular affairs, militia bureau and ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... Italy is fighting for, nor any appreciation of the splendid part she is playing in the war. This lack of knowledge, and the consequent lack of interest, is, however, primarily due to the Italians themselves. They are suspicious of foreigners. They are by nature shy. More insular than the French or English, they are only just commencing to realize the political value of our national maxim: "It pays to advertise." Though they want publicity they do not know how to get it. Instead of welcoming neutral correspondents and publicists, they have, until very ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... insular point in space; Yet, what man stirs a finger, breathes a sound, But all the multitudinous beings round In all the countless worlds, with time and place For their conditions, down to the central base, Thrill, haply, in vibration and rebound; Life answering life across the vast profound, In full antiphony, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... impracticable to bring the parties to an understanding satisfactory to both. The relative geographical position and the respective products of nature cultivated by human industry had constituted the elements of a commercial intercourse between the United States and British America, insular and continental, important to the inhabitants of both countries; but it had been interdicted by Great Britain upon a principle heretofore practiced upon by the colonizing nations of Europe, of holding the trade of their colonies each ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... You Americans are the most insular of all the great peoples of the world. You know nothing of other people. You know only your own history and not even that correctly, your own geography, and your own political science. You know nothing ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... the elite of their troops, and having beaten them in pitched battles! Five years of life it was worth paying down for the privilege of an outside place on a mail-coach, when carrying down the first tidings of any such event. And it is to be noted that, from our insular situation, and the multitude of our frigates disposable for the rapid transmission of intelligence, rarely did any unauthorised rumour steal away a prelibation from the first aroma of the regular despatches. The government news was ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... thoughts that had assailed us on the reception of the bad news, was the necessity of engaging an English medical man. But at the first sight of the French doctor, as, clad in a long overall of white cotton, he entered the sick-room, our insular prejudice vanished, ousted by complete confidence; a confidence that our future experience of his professional skill and personal ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... hackneyed. Out of these six satires, you may perhaps select some twenty lines, which fit so well as many thoughts, that they will recur to the scholar almost as readily as a natural image; though when translated into familiar language, they lose that insular emphasis, which fitted them for quotation. Such lines as the following, translation cannot render commonplace. Contrasting the man of true religion with those who, with jealous privacy, would fain carry on a secret commerce with ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... arduous and responsible position which I now hold, I did not dream of instituting any steps for the acquisition of insular possessions. I believed, however, that our institutions were broad enough to extend over the entire continent as rapidly as other peoples might desire to bring themselves under our protection. I believed further ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... impression is that they are entirely soft. Then one comes suddenly upon something very hard, and you know that you have reached the limit and must adapt yourself to the fact. They have, for example, their insular conventions ...
— His Last Bow - An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... prose but were offensive in the recitation of verse, and he wanted to know why she couldn't speak like her mother. He had justly to acknowledge the charm of Mrs. Rooth's voice and tone, which gave a richness even to the foolish things she said. They were of an excellent insular tradition, full both of natural and of cultivated sweetness, and they puzzled him when other indications seemed to betray her—to refer her to more common air. They were like the reverberation of ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Irving was an English writer. The idea has been more than once echoed here. The truth is that while Irving was intensely American in feeling he was first of all a man of letters, and in that capacity he was cosmopolitan; he certainly was not insular. He had a rare accommodation of tone to his theme. Of England, whose traditions kindled his susceptible fancy, he wrote as Englishmen would like to write about it. In Spain he was saturated with the romantic story of the people and the fascination of the clime; ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... part of the march, while there was a hot and dusty walk of half an hour before we reached the village. As he accompanied us in person, we had the satisfaction of frequently telling him our mind with insular frankness. He pretended to be much distressed, but assured us each time we returned to the charge—about every quarter of an hour—that we were close to the desired spot. From the village to the source, the way led us through such pleasant scenery and such acceptable ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... their turn received a salutary mitigation, till in process of time the conqueror and conquered, having a common interest, were lost in each other. To neither of these modes was unfortunate Ireland subject, and her insular territory, by physical obstacles, and still more by moral influences arising out of them, has aggravated the evil consequent upon independence lost as hers was. The writers of the time of Queen Elizabeth have pointed out how unwise ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... were never better, and it is sincerely to be hoped by all who wish well to the human race that Hawaii-nei may long continue to prosper in every way, and to send light and gladness to the peoples of the insular countries which are scattered like lovely gems all over the ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve |
