"Pendulum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is changed. In a single hour, the whole process of thought, the whole ebb and flow of emotion, may be revulsed for the rest of an existence. Nothing can ever seem to us as it did: it is a blow upon the fine mechanism by which we think, and move, and have our being—the pendulum vibrates aright no more—the dial hath no account with time—the process goes on, but it knows no symmetry or order;—it was a single stroke that marred it, but the harmony ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various
... Kempelen and his Discovery Mesmeric Revelation The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar The Black Cat The Fall of the House of Usher Silence—a Fable The Masque of the Red Death The Cask of Amontillado The Imp of the Perverse The Island of the Fay The Assignation The Pit and the Pendulum The Premature Burial The Domain of Arnheim Landor's Cottage William Wilson The ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... no people except those who added to his trials or his welfare. The men spent much of their time at the Fort, conferring with others en route to the river bed below Sutter's mill. When they came back to the camp there was lively talk under the old tree. The silence of the trail was at an end. The pendulum swung far, and now they were garrulous, carried away by the fever of speculation. The evening came and found them with scattered stores and uncleaned camp, their voices loud against the low whisperings ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... adopting for the purpose Mr. Sturgeon's very useful form of Arago's experiment. This consists in a circular plate of metal supported in a vertical plane by a horizontal axis, and weighted a little at one edge or rendered excentric so as to vibrate like a pendulum. The poles of the magnets are applied near the side and edges of these plates, and then the number of vibrations, required to reduce the vibrating arc a certain constant quantity, noted. In the first description of this instrument[A] ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... the war fever raged, and the pendulum swung backwards and forwards. The cables between Berlin and St. Petersburg were never idle. There was a rumor, amongst those behind the scenes, of an enormous bribe offered to France in return for her neutrality alone. Its instantaneous and scornful refusal practically brought the crisis ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... longer astonished at the sudden swinging of the pendulum. "They did n't swallow it," he said grimly, "and it took Emmet's personal appeal for fair play to make them stop their hissing and catcalls. I thought there 'd be a riot at one time, but instead, the men began to get up and walk out, leaving Swigart ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... negative sense. Lack of response is a manifestation of this negative suggestibility. My contention is that you are definitely suggestible. Let us see what happens to you in trying the following classical experiment. It is called the Chevreul's Pendulum test. ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... ministers. The language, the style, the tone of the correspondence is the same. It is always a great people addressing and instructing their pro-consuls and administrators. But the influence inclines backwards and forwards as the pendulum of politics swings. And as the swing in 1895 was a very great one, a proportionate impulse was given to the policy of advance. "It seemed" to the new ministry "that the policy... continuously pursued by successive Governments ought not to be lightly ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... Cambridge men agree, Their voice to raise in their Captain's praise with thrice and three times three. Then Number Five is all alive, and for hard work always ready, As to and fro his broad back doth go, like a pendulum strong and steady. Then FORTESCUE doth pull it through without delay or dawdlin'; Right proud I trow as they see him row are the merry men of Magdalen. Then comes a name well known to fame, the great and gallant BOURKE; Who ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... trapeze, a sight to have induced any passing citizen to question his sanity. With might and main I sought to check the swing of the pendulum, for if I should come within reach of the window behind I doubted not that other knives awaited me. It was no difficult feat, and I succeeded in checking my flight. Swinging there above Museum Street I could even appreciate, so lucid was my mind, the ludicrous element ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... junkyard, a hall of distorting mirrors. A cemetery by the sea, a peak of glory, a slough of despond. A radiant light, an encroaching dark, the sweetest of melody, the sourest of discord. A library of trivia, museum of curiosa, sideshow of freaks, and shrine of greatness. It was the lowering pendulum, the waiting pit, the closing walls. It was the vaulting spirit, the gallant heart, the just and the kind and the merciful. Withal, it was a haunted castle, perpetually besieged, the towers soaring but the structure toppling. It was himself. His memories, his experiences, his ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... a clock with weights and chains And pendulum swinging up and down! A dresser filled with shining delft, Speckled and white and blue ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... Imperial Granaries, Limited," he said, "has been responsible for the ruin of a good many people. It is time now that the pendulum swung the other way.—Come, make up ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... stick, that had not been rubbed, she experienced no effect whatever.[11] Yet when M. de Faremont, on the nineteenth of January, tried the same experiment with a stick of sealing-wax and a glass tube, well prepared by rubbing, he obtained no effect whatever. So also a pendulum of light pith, brought into close proximity to her person at various points, was neither attracted nor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... and the plane lurched sideways in response to the new strain. Usanga clutched wildly at the control and the machine shot upward at a steep angle. Dangling at the end of the rope the ape-man swung pendulum-like in space. The Englishman, lying bound upon the ground, had been a witness of all these happenings. His heart stood still as he saw Tarzan's body hurtling through the air toward the tree tops among which it seemed he must inevitably ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... assailed in unknightly fashion below the knee: there, to his unspeakable delight, was Abdiel, clinging to him with his fore-legs, and wagging his tail as if, like the lizards for terror, he would shake it off for gladness! What a blessed little pendulum was Abdiel's tail! It went by that weight of the clock of the universe called devotion. It was the escapement of that delight which is of the essence of existence, and which, when God has set right "our disordered clocks," ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... them backward and forward at such a rate as your will determines, don't you?—On the contrary, they swing just as any other pendulums swing, at a fixed rate, determined by their length. You can alter this by muscular power, as you can take hold of the pendulum of a clock and make it move faster or slower; but your ordinary gait is timed by the same mechanism as the movements of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... too. She puts a little side on, perhaps, when she's talking to strangers; but that's nothing. His brother was at Oxford when I was there, I remember—an awfully fast fellow; but they say all the sons of clergymen are; the other swing of the pendulum, you know. There's a medium in all things; and if one generation gives itself over too much to piety, the next goes as far the other way. I ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... third of the case, which was of thick plate-glass bound and backed with gilt metal. There was no apparent means of opening the case. From what one could see, however, the workmanship was perfect, exquisite. The compensating pendulum alone was ornamented—with a conventional sun in diamonds, and one could imagine the effect when it swung in brilliant light. At present it was at rest, held up to the right wall of the case by a loop of fine silk passed through a minute hole in the glass, brought round to the ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... with, he had plunged yet deeper in debt to Mr. Tregaskis. The total, to be sure, amounted to something under twenty-five shillings; but to a man with just one penny in his pocket this left no choice but between recklessness and panic, and the Commandant's spirits swung from one to the other like a pendulum. Panic asserted itself in the small hours, when he awoke in his bed and wondered what would happen when pay-day came, should it bring no pay with it ... and to a man lying sleepless in the small hours, the worst seems not only possible but likely. Then, as daylight waxed and he awoke again ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... for looking upon physical life as a mode of frequency, akin to Light, Electricity, Magnetism, Chemical Action, the Vibration of a Tuning Fork, or the Swing of a Pendulum, and therefore a transient phenomenon having to do only with the Race; Life can under these conditions only be looked upon as a reality in the same sense in which all other forms of energy or matter appear real to our finite senses—namely, as ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... counterfeits, I'll make them serve for perpendiculars As true as e'er were us'd by bricklayers. 1020 They're guilty, by their own confessions, Of felony, and at the sessions, Upon the bench, I will so handle 'em, That the vibration of this pendulum Shalt make all taylors yards of one 1025 Unanimous opinion, A thing he long has vapour'd of, But now shall wake it ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... proportion, has been hailed as an exquisite artist, one of the few truly great and permanent English figures not only of fiction but of letters. But in the most recent years, again a change has come: the pendulum has swung back, as it always does when an excessive movement carries it too far beyond the plumb line. Dickens has found valiant, critical defenders; he has risen fast in thoughtful so well as popular estimation (although with the public he has scarcely fluctuated ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... which is next to Mrs. Moon's bedroom, and she and the lady from Michigan, who is visiting her, were talking and paying no attention to us. Presently something the lady said—her name is Mrs. Grey—made everything in me stop working, and my heart gave a little click like a clock when the pendulum don't ...
— Mary Cary - "Frequently Martha" • Kate Langley Bosher
... follow the ether still further into its hiding-places. Suspended before you is a pendulum, which, when drawn aside and liberated, oscillates to and fro. If, when the pendulum is passing the middle point of its excursion, I impart a shock to it tending to drive it at right angles to its present course, what occurs? The two impulses compound themselves to a vibration ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... So the pendulum swung, this way and that, lacerating her heart each time it swept forward or back. But the blind agony of her recoil, when she had first learned the story of that tragic happening on ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... that contain sets of dancing figures, which issue from the dial-plate when the hour is struck; or like those, where a ship sails across the face of the clock, and is seen tossing up and down on the waves, as often as the pendulum vibrates. ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had been placed in the basket, silence reigned in the nest. The yellow hen settled down on her remaining eggs, emitting, at intervals, an agitated cluck. Peggy vibrated between the woodshed and the covered basket behind the stove, like an erratic pendulum. The other girls, weary at last of waiting for more chickens, trooped to the living-room, and Graham, who like many young gentlemen of twenty, could on occasion conduct himself like a boy half that age, sought to create a diversion by ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... it's really so. I've had instructions to tell everybody, and I've told. I got Kate on the telephone, and she's coming over. You KNOW what SHE'LL be. Dong Ling is having what I suppose are Chinese hysterics in the kitchen; and Pete is swinging back and forth like a pendulum in the dining-room, moaning 'Good Lord, deliver us!' at every breath. I would suggest that you follow me down-stairs so that we may be decently ready for—whatever comes." And he turned about and stalked out of the room, followed by Cyril, who was too ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... not due to the mother's intentions: her training was too weak to overcome that coming from another quarter. It has been said that Ninon's father and mother were as opposite as the Poles in character and disposition, and Ninon was suspended like a pendulum to swing between two extremes, one of which had to prevail, for there was no midway stopping place. It may be that the disciple of heredity, the opponent of environment will perceive in the result a strong argument in favor of ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... of one or more of the newspapers, and she felt ashamed that the thought had not struck her before. She almost, but not quite, decided to insert such an advertisement at once; but, as she pondered, she questioned the wisdom of such an action. Her mind swung, like a pendulum, from one side to the other, and at last she fell asleep, still undecided, but ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... not only in history, but by the nature of thought and attention that does not move in a continuum, but flies and perches alternately, or on stepping-stones and as if influenced by the tempo of the leg swinging as a compound pendulum. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... point of cost. If circumstances (such, for example, as miscalculation and an over-great supply) depress the price below the point of cost, then the discouragement of further production presently shortens the supply and brings the price up again. Price is thus like an oscillating pendulum seeking its point of rest, or like the waves of the sea rising and falling about its level. By this same mechanism the quantity and direction of production, argued the economists, respond automatically to the needs ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... a good sport, and he wanted Becky to be happy. But it was not easy to sit there and see those two—with the pendulum swinging between them of joy and dreams, and the knowledge of a ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... the shadow of death above them, and yet their minds were all absorbed in some personal grievance so slight that they could hardly put it into words. Misfortune brings the human spirit to a rare height, but the pendulum ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was perfectly quiet; the loud ticking of the clock was the only sound heard, the swing of its pendulum the only motion seen, except that a few black beetles were creeping on the sanded floor. The fire, which must have been a very large one, had almost burnt out; but a few red embers still were glowing, and served to light us on our way, though, as I have mentioned ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... the cabin-doors rattled, the rudder kicked as the water swirled and gurgled about it and under her counter with the heave of her, and the jerk of the spars aloft, or the slatting of the braces as she swayed, pendulum-like, from side ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... clinical instructor I listened to while a medical student. Nous avons change tout cela is true of every generation in medicine,—changed oftentimes by improvement, sometimes by fashion or the pendulum-swing from one extreme ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the law which it here affirms. History is full of the same thing; the tides of faith and feeling now ascend and now subside, through all the ages, in the soul of humanity; each new affirmation prepares the way for new doubt, each honest doubt in the end furthers and enlarges belief; the pendulum of destiny swings to and fro forever, and earth's minutest life and heaven's remotest star swing with it, rising but to fall, and falling that they may rise again. So does rhythm go to the very bottom of the world: the heart of Nature pulses, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... puppet-show; "one of the small figures on the face of a large clock which was moved by the vibration of the pendulum" (Whalley). ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... Student." Edgar Allan Poe entered upon his new journalistic venture "The Stylus." For this he wrote his stories of "The Tell-Tale Heart," "Leonore," and his "Notes upon English Verse." For other publications he wrote "The Pit and the Pendulum," and the striking poem, "The Conqueror Worm." His fearful tale of the "Black Cat" was published in the "Saturday Evening Post." At this time he was ailing in health, while his young wife, Virginia, was dying. During these trying months his principal ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... grey, and somewhat stern, And thro' the smoke-clouds from his short clay pipe Look out upon his riches; while his thoughts Swung back and forth between the bleak, stern past, And the near future, for his life had come To that close balance, when, a pendulum, The memory swings between me "Then" and "Now"; His seldom speech ran thus two diff'rent ways: "When I was but a laddie, this I did"; Or, "Katie, in the Fall I'll see to build "Such fences or such sheds about ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... is a mind as well as a temperament. Experience is a swing of the pendulum between the momentary ecstasy of immediate contact and the subsequent reaction upon the moment, which is consciousness of it. In order to make his vision actual, the artist rises out of the domain of feeling into ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... wonderful processes we find many evidences of that great principle of Action and Reaction, which, like the forward and backward swing of the pendulum, changes cause into effect, and effect into cause, in a never ending series. We find this principle in effect in the psychic relation of mental states and colors. That is to say, that just as we find that certain mental and emotional ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... like a heavy weight in a clock movin' half the time, or he would be jest swept to and frow like a pendulum. ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... Government which had wrought so much for the public benefit would have been appreciated by the great mass of the electors, and they were unfeignedly astonished at the verdict returned by the country. They had not taken into account that swing of the pendulum which has so large an influence in popular constituencies. Nor had they noted the extent to which the unity of the Liberal party, and its consequent strength, had been impaired by the action of advanced sections, who were so passionately bent upon carrying the measures in ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... doors are of bronze finely sculptured. In the nave the guide will call our attention to a large bronze hanging-lamp, the oscillations of which are said to have suggested to Galileo the theory of the pendulum. The Baptistery, or Church of St. John, is situated nearly opposite the Cathedral, a most beautifully shaped church, which is noted ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... few weeks the pendulum swung as far to the other extreme. My hypocrisy made me sick of living in my own body with myself. I threw off the transient cloak of assumed belief. Once more I attacked the stupidity of belief in a six-day God, inventor of an impossible paradise, ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... out of the grimy, dishevelled head that drooped very still with its mouth closed askew. The colonel ground his teeth with rage and struck. The rope vibrated leisurely to the blow, like the long string of a pendulum starting from a rest. But no swinging motion was imparted to the body of Senor Hirsch, the well-known hide merchant on the coast. With a convulsive effort of the twisted arms it leaped up a few inches, curling upon itself ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... increased in intensity as the solar crescent grew more slender; at length the crescent disappeared, darkness suddenly succeeded light, and an absolute silence marked this phase of the eclipse with as great precision as did the pendulum of our astronomical clock. The phenomenon in its magnificence had triumphed over the petulance of youth, over the levity which certain persons assume as a sign of superiority, over the noisy indifference ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... pocket-watches were first made about 1477, at Nuremberg, in Germany. The most ancient clock of which we possess any certain account, was made in 1634 by Henry de Wycke, a German artist; it was erected in a tower of the palace of Charles V., king of France. The pendulum was applied by Huygens, ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... of the heavier masses shoot out from the face of the precipice, and pass the ledges upon which at other times they are exploded. Occasionally the whole fall is swayed away from the front of the cliff, then suddenly dashed flat against it, or vibrated from side to side like a pendulum, giving rise to endless variety of forms ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... dipping bows. She was a small, old-fashioned boat, and because she carried 3,000 tons of railway iron she rolled distressfully. Her tall spars swayed athwart the vivid blueness of the morning sky with the rhythmic regularity of a pendulum. The girl was not troubled by any sense of sea-sickness. The keen north-wester that sang amid the shrouds was wonderfully fresh; and, when she met Wyllard crossing the saloon deck, her cheeks were glowing from the sting of the spray, and her ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... glanced at the clock. He got up and stopped the pendulum. "I can't bear the sound of it," he said to John as he sat down again. They remained in silence for a while longer, and then Uncle William got up and started the clock again. "Mebbe ... mebbe, it's better for it to ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... of Cincinnati. Almost simultaneously, Air Defense Command radar picked up a target in that area. A minute or two later the Forestville and Loveland GOC posts, also in Hamilton County, made sightings. Now, three UFO's, described as brilliant white spheres, swinging in a pendulum-like motion, were on the ADC plotting boards- confirmed by radar. All pretext of ignoring the UFO's was dropped and at 11:58P.M., F-84's of the Ohio Air National Guard were scrambled. They were over Cincinnati at 12:10A.M. and made contact. Boring in at 20,000 feet, ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... A long steady pendulum-like swing or two of the bait followed, and then away it went out over the stern and into the water with a splash. Leicester who was leaning over the taffrail and watching the proceedings with the greatest interest, saw the great fish turn like a flash and rush to the spot where ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... slashed with all my force at the portion of the body within reach, ducking simultaneously. Shooting over me, the head of the enemy struck the rock with brain-bemuddling impact. For once the serpent had been foiled. With jaws awry, the head swung limply, like a ceasing pendulum. One blow with the back of the tomahawk established the right of man to wander at will among the rough and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... point, however, each of which wounded, consciousness fought itself free again. Such violent extremes of emotion were, in truth, contrary to his nature. They made him unsure. And, as the pendulum swung back, something vital ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... midst of my reverie, which the kind-hearted Admiral did not interrupt, I observed the wind just touch the drooping flag; but the air was so light and transient, that it merely produced on it a gentle motion from side to side, like that of a pendulum, imitated in the mirror beneath, which lay as yet totally unbroken by the sea-breeze. Presently the whole mighty flag, after a faint struggle or two, gradually unfolded itself, and, buoyed up by the new born gale, spread far beyond the ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... of the fall, with the same fortune on the remaining distance; and thus the most charming fretwork of watery nodules, each trailing its vapory train for a hundred feet or more, is woven all over the cascade, which swings, now and then, thirty feet each way, on the mountain side, as if it were a pendulum of watery lace. Once in a while, too, the wind manages to get back of the fall, between it and the cliff, and then it will whirl it round and round for two or three hundred feet, as if to try the experiment of twisting it to wring ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the pendulum has swung to its extreme. At every depression of business, armies of the unemployed perish in sight of the land they abandoned in the hope of a brighter future. Their children have forgotten the traditions of the soil, and the energies of our people must now be concentrated ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... which had been conducted in silence, I had a curious sensation, caused by my intense sympathy with Maxine's suffering. I felt as if my heart were the pendulum of a clock which had been jarred until it was uncertain whether to go on or stop. Once, when the gendarmes were peering under the sofa, or behind the sofa cushions, a grey shadow round Maxine's eyes made her beautiful face look like ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... he had acquired since his venture in trade, upon entomology, especially books upon butterflies. Since his retreat from the law he had developed suddenly, perhaps by the force of contrast, or the opposite swing of the pendulum, an overwhelming taste for those airy flowers of animated life. The two walls of the office not occupied with books were hung with framed specimens. He had also under the riverward window a little table equipped with the necessary paraphernalia for mounting them. Many a sunny day ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and workbasket stood by a latticed window; she seated herself and took up her sewing, watching him where he stood before the fireplace fussing over a little mantel clock—a gilt and ebony affair of the consulate, shaped like a lyre, the pendulum being also the clock itself and containing ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... lamb, for she had been killed a great many times, and was used to it. But it did not please Flyaway; neither did aunt Martha's collection of shells and pictures call forth a single smile. There was a beautiful clock in the parlor, and the pendulum was in the form of a little boy swinging; but Flyaway would not have cared if it had been a gallows, and the boy hanging ...
— Dotty Dimple's Flyaway • Sophie May
... individuals, keeps up such a due balance between the Prince's authority and the people's obedience as to make all things succeed and prosper. But the present Prime Minister has neither judgment nor strength to adjust the pendulum of this State clock, the springs of which are out of order. His business is to make it go slower, which, I own, he attempts to do, but very awkwardly, because he has not the brains for it. In this lies the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... beginning of the second period of my religious development. He helped me to see myself as God sees the "unprofitable servant," and to be ashamed. He started me working for all I was worth, and made religion real fun—a new field brimming with opportunities. With me the pendulum swung very far. The evangelical to my mind had a monopoly of infallible truth. A Roman Catholic I regarded as a relic of mediaevalism; while almost a rigour went down my spine when a man told me that he was a "Unitarian Christian." Hyphenation was loyalty compared to that. I mention this ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... the modern world has done deep treason to the eternal intellect by believing in the swing of the pendulum. A man must be dead before he swings. It has substituted an idea of fatalistic alternation for the mediaeval freedom of the soul seeking truth. All modern thinkers are reactionaries; for their thought is always a reaction from what went before. When ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... ever departs from the sun on either side varies approximately from sixteen to twenty-eight degrees. Its motion resembles a pendulum, swinging from one side of the sun to ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... question" he said no word and made no sound, but his eyes took on so terrible a fixity, and he cast upon the two great princes who were watching him a glance so penetrating, that the duke and cardinal were forced to drop their eyes. Philippe le Bel met with the same resistance when the torture of the pendulum was applied in his presence to the Templars. That punishment consisted in striking the victim on the breast with one arm of the balance pole with which money is coined, its end being covered with a pad of leather. One ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... of those moods which every student passes through, which turn and return upon the mind, irresistible and mysterious? What are the causes of those strange and delightful exaltations of mind in which thought runs like a clock when the pendulum is off, and crowds a week of existence into an hour of time? Whence are those dull days which come so unexpectedly, and sometimes lead a troop of dull followers, to interrupt our life's work for a week at a time? Where are we to search for obstructions in the channels of the mind ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... chill ran down his back, for a raven perched on the black doll and pecked so fiercely at it with its hard beak, that bird and image swayed to and fro like a pendulum. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... gale seemed to have suddenly softened to the strength of no more than a moderate breeze; there were no repetitions of those sickening lee lurches as the ship was flung aloft on the steep breast of a mountainous, swift-running sea, but, in place of it, a gentle, rhythmical, pendulum-like swinging roll, and a long, easy, gliding rush forward, with an acre of foam seething and hissing about our bows as those same steep, mountainous seas caught us under the quarter and hurled us headlong forward with ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... in all Latin countries he is the best known of American authors. Certainly no American writer has been as widely accepted in France. Nothing better of its kind has ever been done than "The Pit and the Pendulum," or than "The Fall of the House of Usher," which Mr. Stoddard has compared recently with Browning's "Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower came" for its power of suggesting intellectual desolation. Nothing better of its kind has ever been done than "The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... study of astronomy. Here, as before, they used the Greek knowledge, but they advanced the study of the science greatly by the introduction of instruments, such as those for measuring time by the movement of the pendulum and the measurement of the ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... I felt that I was of no use on this side of the Atlantic, so, giving the pendulum a swing, and seizing time by the forelock, I went to Europe. There I furtively pulled the wires of several exhibitions, among which that of Tom Thumb may be mentioned for example. I managed a variety of musical and ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... of the clock, whose pendulum and wheels stopped one day, appalled by the discovery that they would have to move and tick over three million times a year for many wearisome years, but resumed work again when reminded that they would only have to ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... something of these Bird boys. They have a future before them, I believe. And if I'm any judge of up-to-date things I even suspect they've gone and applied that latest device the Wrights patented, where a little pendulum under the machine warps the planes automatically, at the slightest motion of the body, keeping the aeroplane in an exactly ...
— The Airplane Boys among the Clouds - or, Young Aviators in a Wreck • John Luther Langworthy
... up to the top flat, where the chimes were played, I had to pass through the vault in which the great pendulum was slowly swinging in its ghostly-like tick-tack, tick-tack; while the great ancient clock was keeping time with its sudden and startling movement. The whole scene was almost as uncanny as the witches' cell underneath. There was also a wild rumbling thumping sound overhead. I soon discovered ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... humour. She permitted men to amuse her if she did not amuse them, to all out- door sports she was faithful, and she read the new books and talked intelligently of the fashions. When the conversation swung with the precision of a pendulum from clothes and love to war with Spain, her mind leapt at once to action, and she argued every advocate of war into a state of fury. She had responded heavily to the President's appeal in behalf of the reconcentrados, but her ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... Changing Speed Hours to Seconds. Pressure as the Square of the Speed. Gyroscopic:Balance. The Principles Involved. The Application of the Gyroscope. Fore and Aft Gyroscopic Control. Angle Indicator. Pendulum Stabilizer. Steering and Controlling Wheel. Automatic Stabilizing Wings. Barometers. Aneroid Barometer. Hydroplanes. Sustaining Weight of Pontoons. Shape ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... well-preserved white hand—always suggestive of poultices to me—with its signet ring, to droop in front of it—a hand which he moved up and down habitually, as he conversed, in a singularly soothing and mechanical fashion—his "pendulum" we used to call it in old times, Evelyn and I, when it was one of our chief resources for amusement to laugh at "Cagliostro," our sobriquet for this ci-devant jeune homme, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... beyond all hope of resuscitation; but from it the soul of Slippy McGee would emerge, with a larger knowledge and a clearer brain, a thousand-fold more deadly dangerous than of old; because this time he knew better and had deliberately chosen the evil and rejected the good. By the law of the pendulum he must swing as far backward into wrong as he had swung forward ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... directly in front of the pilot seat. It showed positively how the machine was flying, on the top or down bank. It comprised a cup with lines set about ten degrees, and gave a sure safety limit. Only the pendulum was movable. This was mounted on an arm always perpendicular, a small mirror reflecting the variations of ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... which habit of many years prevented my hearing. Once, as I lay awake in bed, I heard it tick suddenly three times, then fall silent and stop. The occurrence interested me, I quickly got a light and examined the clock closely. The pendulum still swung, but without a sound; the time was right. I inferred that the clock must have stopped going just a few minutes before. And I soon found out why: the clock is not encased and the weight of the ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... realizing that this was no jaunt of ten or twenty miles, held to his steady, machine-like lope that measured the distance of each swing with the accurate regularity of a pendulum; while the lean, loose body of his rider, resting easily in the saddle, yielded without resistance to the horse's every movement so that those laboring muscles, working so smoothly under the yellow hide, might not be called upon to adjust themselves ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... was listening to the slow, pendulum-like thud, thud, thud, against the logs of the cabin. It seemed to come more distinctly as David crushed out the life of the mouse, as if pounding a protest upon ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... good hearing! Peggy held her head high for the rest of that evening, and felt as if nothing would have power to depress her for the future. But, alas, when the pendulum is at its highest it begins to swing downwards. Peggy's heart sank as she watched Robert drive away from the door the next morning, and it went on sinking more and more during the next twenty-four hours, as she realised the responsibility which weighed upon her shoulders. When she ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... There is such matter for all feeling: —Man! Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear, Ages and realms are crowded in this span, This mountain, whose obliterated plan The pyramid of empires pinnacled, Of Glory's gewgaws shining in the van Till the sun's rays with added flame were filled! Where are its golden roofs? where those ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... out the tide of the ticketless, through which the current of the privileged had equal difficulty in permeating. The streets all around were thronged with people longing for a glimpse of Gladstone. Mortlake drove up in a hansom (his head a self-conscious pendulum of popularity, swaying and bowing to right and left) and ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... Joe braced their feet on the rocks and pulled. They could feel the rope sway like a pendulum as the man left the floor, and then, hand over hand they drew him to the surface. While the Indian had gone for the blankets, Connie had cut a stout pole to be used to support the load while they got the man out of the hole. Even with the pole to sustain the weight it was no small task ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... freshness has gone and its complexion becomes darker. A very pretty and uncommon object to copy is that of an old-fashioned clock, a veritable "my grandfather's clock," an upright tall eight-day clock that has a long chain and a heavy pendulum concealed within its tall case, and that shows a big square face with large figures printed on it. I will give you a few details about my cork clock, and I think you will make one and set it upon a bracket to be admired ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... piece of very fine wire-gauze put at the bottom of the pipe, between the receiver and the pipe through which we were forcing the current. In one of these experiments I was watching the flame in the tube, my son was taking the vibrations of the pendulum of the clock, and Mr. Wood was attending to give me the column of water as I called for it, to keep the current up to a certain point. As I saw the flame descending in the tube I called for more water, and Wood ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... friends; where the birds astonish the imagination by the variety of their notes and their aptness; where one bird serves for a clock, and another makes a sound like a postilion cracking of a whip, and a third imitates a knife-grinder, and a fourth the motion of a pendulum; where one laughs when the sun rises, and another cries when the sun sets! Oh, strange, illogical country, land of paradoxes and anomalies, if ever there was one on earth—the learned botanist Grimard was right when he said, 'There is ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... subsequent wars, even in the recent terrible war, he was among the bravest. Help her to make a scrap book that she may pass her knowledge on to others. While authorities in history say that a race once great, can never attain greatness again, as truly as the pendulum swings this mixed race will surely come into its own. The colored race comes from several lines of white ancestry, and as fruit is grafted to a finer degree of species, so the colored race will some ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... shadow of premonitory fear. The silence prevailing was painful—almost terrible. A great ormolu clock in the room, one of the Holy Father's "Jubilee" gifts, ticked the minutes slowly away with a jewel-studded pendulum, which in its regular movements to and fro sounded insolently obtrusive in such a stillness. Gherardi abstractedly raised his eyes to a great ivory crucifix which was displayed upon the wall against ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... intellectual asceticism which is inclined to accept without question the modern doctrine and methods of "psychotherapy" and mind-cure in place of the more rational and certain measures of hygiene and medicine. The further a pendulum swings in one direction, the further will it swing in the other, when released. And I believe that the modern extreme acceptance of faith and mind-cure in all its forms is but the moral and intellectual and spiritual ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... one being double the length of the other, gave the diapason-interval, or an eighth; and the same was effected from two strings of similar length and size, the one having four times the tension of the other. Belonging to the same cycle of invention-anecdotes are Galileo's discovery of the pendulum by the lustre of the Pisan Duomo; and the kettle-lid, the falling apple and the copper hook which inspired Watt, Newton ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... might also be used appropriately in each of the primary grades. Simple Aesopic fables in prose seem best for the first two grades. More complex forms might be chosen for the third grade, for example, "The Story of Alnaschar," "The Good Samaritan," "The Discontented Pendulum," "The Musical Ass," "The Swan, the Pike, and the Crab," and "The ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... used to begin English history with William the Conqueror; since Freeman wrote his five thick volumes and proved—not that the Norman Conquest was unimportant—but that it did not involve a breach of continuity, a new start in national life, the pendulum has swung too much the other way, and the tendency of late years has been to underestimate the importance of the ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... ran up your clock, and then when the clock struck one, down I had to come. But I ran down so fast that I tripped over the pendulum. The clock reached down its hands and tried to catch me, but it had no eyes in its face to see me, so I slipped, anyhow, ...
— Uncle Wiggily and Old Mother Hubbard - Adventures of the Rabbit Gentleman with the Mother Goose Characters • Howard R. Garis
... red-brick quadrangle, guarded by stone lions disrespectfully throwing somersaults over the escutcheons of the noble family. Then, our services accepted and we insinuated with a candle into the stable-turret, we should find it to be a mere question of pendulum, but one that would hold us until dark. Then, should we fall to work, with a general impression of Ghosts being about, and of pictures indoors that of a certainty came out of their frames and 'walked,' if the family would only own it. Then, should we work ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... footsteps ceased to echo in the gallery, and then, he scarcely knew why, he furtively opened the door and peeped out. All was dark; and save for the regular tick of the pendulum on the stairs, the house was still. Mr. Thomasson, wondering which way Julia's room lay, stood listening until a stair creaked; and then, retiring precipitately, locked his door. Lord Almeric, in the gloom of the green moreen curtains that draped his huge four-poster, had ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... age, and died four years later in 1642. In addition to the work which caused him so great misfortunes he published Discorso e Demonstr. interna alle due nuove Scienze, Delia Scienza Meccanica (1649), Tractato della Sfera (1655); and the telescope, the isochronism of the vibrations of the pendulum, the hydrostatic balance, the thermometer, were all invented by this great leader of astronomical and scientific discoverers. Many other discoveries might have been added to these, had not his widow submitted the sage's MSS. to her confessor, who ruthlessly ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... other experiments of Galileo which led to scarcely less-important results. The experiments in question had to do with the movements of bodies passing down an inclined plane, and with the allied subject of the motion of a pendulum. The elaborate experiments of Galileo regarding the former subject were made by measuring the velocity of a ball rolling down a plane inclined at various angles. He found that the velocity acquired by a ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... world. No whisper had come from outside regarding his past, and it was only when he himself talked that any light was thrown upon his former years. He seemed, in consequence, to be enviably free and ready for anything. Unfettered by tradition or association, he was a pendulum, balanced to swing potently in either direction. And what darkened Belding's horizon was the thought that Clark, at any moment, might swing ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... meridians, nearly thirty of those lines would then have been covered in by the east and west span of the crystal roof. Mr Dent's clock might have been set to the precise time of the Greek Slave, and it would yet have been nearly two seconds wrong by the time of the Liverpool Model. The pendulum swinging so steadily within its case had a longer and more stately stride than most of its congeners. It took a second and a half of time to complete its step from side to side. But notwithstanding this, if a string had been suddenly stretched across ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... conclusion that is forced upon any one who will take the trouble to read a whole volume of the modern Variorum. There has been much editing, much comment, but singularly little criticism of Shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of bread to an intolerable deal of sack. The pendulum has swung violently from niggling and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressing exercise of human ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is a typical example in the opening sentence of Mr Masefield's remarks upon the play: 'Like the best Shakespearean ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... experiment he verified the law, and the isochronism of the pendulum was discovered. An immensely important practical discovery this, for upon it all modern clocks are based; and Huyghens soon applied it to the astronomical clock, which up to that time had been a crude ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... morning of the day when Mr. Dubourg had called at the house, she had been cleaning the mantelpiece. She had rubbed the part of it which was under the clock with her duster, had accidentally struck the pendulum, and had stopped it. Having once before done this, she had been severely reproved. Fearing that a repetition of the offense, only the day after the clock had been regulated by the maker, might lead perhaps to the withdrawal of her leave of absence, she had determined ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... "But, come to think of it, there is a connection. In Capua everybody yawned their heads off. In Flanders and Champagne they are shot off. Life swings like a pendulum between boredom and pain. When the world is not anaemic, it is delirious. If ever again its pulse registers normal, sensible people will go back to Epicurus, whose existence was one long lesson in mental tranquillity. By the Lord Harry, the more I consider it, the more convinced I become that ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... Dutch in South Africa. Certainly, the all- British dominions have been more advanced in their political experiments than those in which the flighty Anglo-Saxon has been tempered by more stolid elements; and the pendulum swings little more in French Canada than it does in Celtic Ireland. In New Zealand old age pensions were in force long before they were introduced into the mother-country; and compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes, ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... hissing sound there succeeded a wheezing one, until, putting forth its best efforts, the thing struck two with as much clatter as though some one had been hitting an iron pot with a cudgel. That done, the pendulum returned to ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... you try and get me up again, Rob?" he asked piteously. "I can't hang on here for very long, like a regular old pendulum to a clock. I'm not wound up for a seven-day-goer. And say, I'd hate to have to drop kerplunk into all that water down there. Think up some way to grab me out ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... in sundry of the cases we have quoted as at variance with M. Comte's doctrine. It was thus with the application of Huyghens's optical discovery to astronomical observation by Galileo. It was thus with the application of the isochronism of the pendulum to the making of instruments for measuring intervals, astronomical and other. It was thus when the discovery that the refraction and dispersion of light did not follow the same law of variation, affected both astronomy and physiology by giving us achromatic telescopes and microscopes. It was ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... use and to the smaller portable clocks and still smaller and more portable pocket watches. In mechanical refinement a similar continuity may be noted, so that one sees the cumulative effect of the introduction of the spring drive (ca. 1475), pendulum control (ca. 1650), and the anchor escapement (ca. 1680). The transition from de Dondi to the modern chronometer is indeed basically continuous, and though much research needs to be done on special topics, it has an historical unity and ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... delightful place among beams and ropes, close to the five great bells. Old Mr Kidbrooke on the floor beneath was planing a piece of wood, and Jimmy was eating the shavings as fast as they came away. He never looked at Jimmy; Jimmy never stopped eating; and the broad gilt-bobbed pendulum of the church clock never stopped swinging across the white-washed ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... sometimes observe a dozen men employed in this way, on one of our beaches, while the cold wind blows keenly off shore, and the spray drifts back like snow over the green and sluggish surge. The men pace in and out with the wave, going steadily to and fro like a pendulum, ankle-deep in the chilly brine, their steps quickened by hope or slackening with despair. Where the maidens and children sport and shout in summer, there in winter these heavy figures succeed. To them the lovely crest of the emerald billow is but a chariot for clams, and ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... electricity are swift, but thought is swifter. As I said, this was all in the fraction of a second. Then Mrs. Laughton was on her feet again and before a pendulum could have more than swung backward. The man must know she saw him. She took the light brass bedstead and sent it rolling away from her with all her might and main leaving the creature uncovered. He lay easily on one side, a ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... of Nuremberg invented the mainspring as a substitute for the weight, and the watch appeared soon afterwards (1525 A.D.). The pendulum was first adopted for controlling the motion of the wheels by Christian Huygens, a distinguished ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... candles on the table, which had burned low, shed but a dim light in the room. The chancellor noticed two figures sitting on both sides of the door leading into the adjoining room, and slowly swinging to and fro, like the pendulum of a clock. He softly approached the two sleepers. "Ah," he whispered, with a smile, "there sleeps Timm, the chamberlain, who is to announce my arrival to the king; and here sleeps Major Natzmer, to whom ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... their mutual opposition. A peasant can give no better reason for the stopping of any clock or watch, than to say that it does not commonly go right. But an artist easily perceives that the same force in the spring or pendulum has always the same influence on the wheels; but fails of its usual effect, perhaps by reason of a grain of dust, which puts a stop to the whole movement. From the observation of several parallel instances, philosophers form a maxim, ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... He was pale to the lips. "Go on, man," he cried, beseechingly, almost in a shout. Lean swung back the shovel. It went forward in a pendulum curve. When the earth landed ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... confer together. They seemed to keep a strict watch on my movements. At last, when an opportunity offered, I asked Jones what this 'Sheriff' was doing about the House. 'He seems to have no business, and is constantly watching the proceedings of both Houses, vibrating between them like an animated pendulum,' said I. 'Oh,' said Jones, 'he is a member of the Third House!' Here was a new thing to me. I evidently had not learned all the machinery of legislating. I asked for an explanation, and soon learned ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... grasp a branch. Once or twice, when a fitful breeze blew at sunset, I had a magnificent exhibition of aeronautics. The birds came upwind slowly, beating their way obliquely but steadily, long legs stretched out far behind the tail and swinging pendulum-like whenever a shift of ballast was needed. They apparently did not realize the unevenness of the wind, for when they backed air, ready to descend, a sudden gust would often undercut them and over they would go, legs, wings, and neck sprawling in mid-air. ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... moment vociferated in his ears, while the active and industrious mercantile pedestrian, with a swing of his head, which was in continual motion from right to left, gave Bob a wipe in the eye with his tail, which by the velocity of the wearer was kept in full play like the pendulum of a clock, or the tail of Matthews in his admirable delineation of Sir ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... left their owner's nose and, as they had a way of doing when the old man was abstracted, swung like a pendulum from his fingers. ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... male skeleton contrasts with the female as the stronger, larger, heavier and straighter because it is an expression of a greater capacity to utilize, store and keep lime in the system. Women throughout their reproductive period are liable to rapid and pendulum-like fluctuations of ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... life, and of men who speak to be understood, should be used more in our books. A great principle anchored to a common word or a familiar illustration never looses its hold upon the mind; it is like seeing the laws of Astronomy in the swing of a pendulum, or in the motion of the boy's ball,—or the law of the tides and the seasons appearing in the beating of the pulse, or in inspiring and expiring the breath. The near and the remote are head and tail of the same law, and good writing unites ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... of Jewish and Christian ethics the pendulum has swung between irrational extremes, without ever stopping at that point of equilibrium at which alone rest is possible. Yet this point was sometimes traversed and included in the gyrations of our tormented ancestral conscience. It was passed, for example, at the moment when the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... occurred the first of a series of accidents which came near resulting fatally to the whole party. Contrary to my strict injunctions, the men hauling the rope gave a sudden and violent pull, wrenching the pole from my grasp, and communicating to the plank a motion like that of a pendulum, which sent me flying out into space, with the immediate prospect of being dashed by the retrograde swing against the solid wall of rock. Happily, I preserved my presence of mind, and grasped instantly the only chance of escape. Tilting myself back as far as the rope ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... acquiesce in that which it pleases God to send. Midway between two vulgar errors: steering a sure track between Scylla and Charybdis: the grovelling multitude to the left, the romantic few to the right; stand the words of inspired wisdom. The pendulum had probably oscillated many times between the two errors, before it settled at the central truth; 'Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full and deny Thee, and say, Who is the Lord? Or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... the pendulum moved from a position of the colony ignoring any Indian rights in the land to a gradual recognition of the Indian right of occupation. This sweep of the pendulum brought the establishment of boundary lines between the whites and the Indians with ...
— Mother Earth - Land Grants in Virginia 1607-1699 • W. Stitt Robinson, Jr.
... have the deni- zens of earth awaited the approach of to-day. Some sufferer has counted the vibrations of the pendulum impatient for its dawn, who, now that it has arrived, is anxious for its close. The vo- tary of pleasure, conscious of yesterday's void, wishes for power to arrest time's haste till a few more hours of mirth shall be enjoyed. ...
— Our Nig • Harriet E. Wilson
... the pendulum was starting to swing in the opposite direction. The crisis of 1819 and the decisions of the supreme court asserting the constitutionality of the national bank under the broad national conception of the Constitution, produced protests and even resistance from various states whose interests were most ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... of the act creating the commission might well rest upon the fact that an overshadowing emergency had arisen, where necessity becomes the paramount law. "The pendulum of history swings in centuries," and a single term of the great office weighed little in view of the perils that surely awaited a failure ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... sun, and this in a still greater degree about the times of the equinoxes. This decrease of the gravity of all bodies during the time the moon passes our zenith or nadir might possibly be shewn by the slower vibrations of a pendulum, compared with a spring clock, or with astronomical observation. Since a pendulum of a certain length moves slower at the line than near the poles, because the gravity being diminished and the vis inertiae continuing the same, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... contest and Horatio Seymour's success preceded many surprises and disappointments which were to be disclosed in the campaign of 1844. Never were the motions of the political pendulum more agitated or more irregular. For three years, public sentiment had designated Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren as the accepted candidates of their respective parties for President; and, until the spring of 1844, the confidence of the friends of the Kentucky statesman ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... idiot went forth, and his irregular clumsy footsteps sounded on the pebble-paved yard. When the noise of them ceased in the soft roadway, Froyle jumped off the table again. Gradually his body, like a stopping pendulum, came to rest under the hook, and hung twitching, with strange disconnected movements. The horse in the stable, hearing unaccustomed noises, rattled his chain and stamped about in ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... body into his own body and then encasing his skin in the seal's, the cheery Eskimo strides the strand, a veritable compensation-pendulum. The seal is so much an integral part of this people that if a geologist were to freeze a typical Eskimo and saw him through to get a cross-section he would have in the concentric strata a hybrid of Husky and seal. Holding up his transverse section ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... furnished with soft cushions of thistle down, made a good bed for the little wonder; and the nursery maid, wife of a neighboring clockmaker, and a person of ingenuity, conceived the admirable idea of suspending the cocoanut cradle from the pendulum of a great clock, in order that the infant might be rocked all the time. Madam Tom Thumb was enchanted with the invention. She adhered to the old-fashioned notions, and could not suppose it possible that her little one could sleep without rocking. What the good little mother found the most trouble ...
— Piccolissima • Eliza Lee Follen
... was one of those which, in the young man's life, testified to the variety of his ties. Strether wasn't otherwise concerned with it than for its so testifying—a pleasant multitudinous image in which he took comfort. He took comfort, by the same stroke, in the swing of Chad's pendulum back from that other swing, the sharp jerk towards Woollett, so stayed by his own hand. He had the entertainment of thinking that if he had for that moment stopped the clock it was to promote the next minute this still livelier motion. ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... some sort. Light, heat, electricity, are merely different forms of motion. Taste and smell, as well as sound, are merely modes of motion. The beating heart; the winking of the eyelids; the rhythmic breathing of the body; the swinging of the pendulum; the movement of the sap in trees and the unfolding of the leaves; the light mists which go up and the rains which bring the particles back again; the winds and the waves; and the giant swings of the planets through space, ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Conquest of the Savages • Roger Thompson Finlay
... stood the wheel at which Cree had to fill his own pirns. There was a plate-rack on one wall, and near the chimney-piece hung the wag-at-the-wall clock, the timepiece that was commonest in Thrums at that time, and that got this name because its exposed pendulum swung along the wall. The two windows in the room faced each other on opposite walls, and were so small that even a child might have stuck in trying to crawl through them. They opened on hinges, like a door. In the wall of the dark passage leading from the outer door into the room ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... scratching on—He moves away, marvelous condescension!—and leaves you his soiled page. You meander up and down his scratching table, obviously in quest of mischief, your nose wrinkled up, your tail giving quick little jerks back and forth like a pendulum. She watches you laughing, while He announces "the promenade of devastation." How ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... to hear the clock cuckoo and fixed the pendulum so that it would not work, saying that she always had the time in her head. And it was indeed wonderful how true this was—at any minute she could tell what time it was, although it was of very little consequence to her. In fact, this waiting, expectant woman possessed a remarkable degree of alertness, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... of hundreds of cannon, while the earth rose simultaneously under his feet. There are two kinds of earthquakes—that of trepidacion, which comes directly from below, with an upward motion; the other, de oscilacion, where the earth sways to and fro like a pendulum, and which is generally less dangerous. Unfortunate Cua experienced both: the first shock was one vast upheaval, the whole town being uprooted from its foundations and every house uplifted and overturned, and before the bewildered population could ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... how the seasons came slipping round, each bringing its own fruit and flowers—here in Australia in Prue's Time, and there in Chauncery in her own Time. She turned her head and stared at the shabby old grandfather clock which stood in a corner of the veranda. For forty years, she thought, its pendulum would slowly swing, till it said "How d'ye do" to the ticking clock in Grannie's morning-room. Forty years was a long time to ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... only a cloud which makes it hard for our eyes to perceive the oneness of them. In the history of the exact sciences we are perhaps most impressed by the close bond uniting us with the days of Alexander and ancient Greece. The pendulum of history seems merely to have swung back to that point from which it started when it plunged forth into unknown and mysterious distance. The picture represented by our own times is by no means a new one: to the student ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... his rush, for Bulger's musket was at the far end of its pendulum swing, but the old seaman saw his danger in time. With a movement of extraordinary agility in a man of his bulk, he swung on his heel, presenting his side to the rapier that flashed in Diggle's hand. Parrying the thrust with ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... was of the same size, had the same kind of furniture, and appeared to be equally well stocked with china; one prominent article it possessed, however, which the other room did not exhibit—namely, a clock, which, with its pendulum moving tick-a-tick, hung against the wall opposite to the door, the sight of which made me conclude that the sound which methought I had heard in the stillness of the night was not an imaginary one. There it hung ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... followed close by General Logan and the head of the Fifteenth Corps. When I reached the Treasury-building, and looked back, the sight was simply magnificent. The column was compact, and the glittering muskets looked like a solid mass of steel, moving with the regularity of a pendulum. We passed the Treasury building, in front of which and of the White House was an immense throng of people, for whom extensive stands had been prepared on both sides of the avenue. As I neared the brick-house opposite the lower corner of Lafayette ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... irreconcilable that he hoped for nothing better than to be able to keep her pacified; anything in the nature of a conversion seemed an idle dream. But he had noticed the change in her manner, and wondered what it meant; he hoped that the pendulum had not swung too far, and that it was not she who was being bullied now by this imperious girl ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... attack of infectious fever, until the awful will of Heaven, for the safety of humanity, lays hands on their power for mischief. The popularity of a public servant is always in danger of a tragical end if he lives long enough. One slip of inevitable misfortune seals his doom when the pendulum swings against him. And it is generally brought by a rhetorical smiling Judas who can sway a capricious public. The more distinguished a popular man may be, the greater is the danger that the fame and reputation for which he strove may be swiftly ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... race we are indebted for our knowledge of arithmetic, and many of the principles of algebra and geometry. The pendulum, the mariner's compass, and the manufacture of silk and cotton textiles were introduced into Europe by the Arabs. They claim to have used gunpowder as far back as the eleventh century. In the year 706 paper was made ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... themselves. For there was not a particle of evidence that the electors of Great Britain had changed their minds on this subject, and there were great numbers of voters in the country—those voters, unattached to party, who constitute "the swing of the pendulum," and decide the issue at General Elections—who felt free to vote Liberal in 1906 because they believed Home Rule was practically dead, and if revived would be again given its quietus, as in 1893, by the House of Lords. ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... of oscillation coincided nearly with the direction of the shock, the only effect would be a temporary change in the period of oscillation; but if it was at right angles to the direction of the shock, the clock might be stopped by the point of the pendulum catching behind the graduated arc in front of which it oscillated. The planes of the first three clocks, it will be seen, were approximately at right angles to the direction of the Woodstock epicentre, and B and C were indeed stopped in the manner just described; while the plane ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... dealing with a positively awe-inspiring and unimaginable series of aeons, each of which occupied its own enormous and incalculable epoch, and each of which saw the dawn, the rise, the culmination, and the downfall of innumerable types of plant and animal. On the cosmic clock, by whose pendulum alone we can faintly measure the dim ages behind us, the brief lapse of historical time, from the earliest of Egyptian dynasties to the events narrated in this evening's Pall Mall, is less than a second, less than a unit, less than the smallest item by which we can possibly ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... place felt cool and dark, and the motion of the swing seemed to set the breeze blowing. It waved Katy's hair like a great fan, and made her dreamy and quiet. All sorts of sleepy ideas began to flit through her brain. Swinging to and fro like the pendulum of a great clock, she gradually rose higher and higher, driving herself along by the motion of her body, and striking the floor smartly with her foot, at every sweep. Now she was at the top of the ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... what has hastened our present paganism has been the removal from the forefront of our consciousness of Jesus the Saviour, the divine Redeemer, the absolute Meeter of an absolute need. Of such preaching of Jesus we have today very little. The pendulum has swung far to the left, to the other exclusive emphasis, too obviously influenced by the currents of the day. It was perhaps inevitable that He should for a time drop out of His former place in Christian preaching under this combined humanistic and naturalistic ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... though a skilful one, but that in the "priest and father" of the cottage there were the truth and reality from which the artist drew. No bolt was drawn across the outer door as we retired for the night. The philosophic Biot, when employed with his experiments on the second pendulum, resided for several months in one of the smaller Shetland islands; and, fresh from the troubles of France—his imagination bearing about with it, if I may so speak, the stains of the guillotine—the state of trustful security in which he found the simple inhabitants filled him with astonishment. ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller |
