"Recurrent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reports or reading the latest magazines, old Burton had studied, with the aid of his spectacles and of Ferris, his professional dog handler, the pedigree of a young pointer that lived in this town. He had noted how at recurrent intervals in the family tree occurred the word Champion. Already, in the years since he entered, as a hobby, the field-trial game, he had bought, at the recommendation of handlers, some hundreds of bird dogs. All of them had been disappointments. ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... girl, there would have been little to disturb his healthy slumbers. Vassie was not one to waste time over the regrets that eat at the heart, and, though she could not altogether stifle pain at the outset, her strong-set will made the inevitable period of recurrent pangs shorter for her than for most. Killigrew had played the game quite fairly according to his code; it was Vassie's ignorance of any form of philandering beyond the crude interchange of repartee and kisses of the young clerks she had hitherto met that had made the playing ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... at the phenomenon. In most parts of the East such an occurrence is even now seen with dread—the ignorant mass believe that the orb of day is actually being devoured or destroyed, and that the end of all things is at hand—even the chiefs, who may have some notion that the phenomenon is a recurrent one, do not understand its cause, and participate in the alarm of their followers. On the present occasion it is said that, amid the general fear, a desire for reconciliation seized both armies. Of this spontaneous movement two chiefs, the foremost of the allies on either side, took advantage. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... lame dog condition of Tyndall and Hirst and Spencer and my own recurrent illnesses, the x is not satisfactory. But I don't see that much will come from putting new patches in. The x really has no raison d'etre beyond the personal attachment of its original members. Frankland told me of the names that had been mentioned, and none could be more personally welcome to ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... pleasure than many feel when excited by grand ones; and knowing this deeper phase, he could not be content with the hasty admiration on which tourists flatter themselves. The beauty of a scene which he could absorb in peace was never lost upon him. Every year the recurrent changes of season filled him with untold pleasure; and in the spring, Mrs. Hawthorne has been heard to say, he would walk with her in continuous silence, his heart full of the awe and delight with which the miracle of buds and new verdure inspired him. Nothing could be more accurate or sensitive ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... purchasers. But despite this secrecy, charges of counterfeiting and imitating popular preparations were widespread. In many cases, the alleged counterfeits were probably genuine—to the extent that either of these terms has meaning—for it was a recurrent practice for junior partners and clerks at one drug house to branch off on their own, taking some of the secrets with them—just as Andrew B. White left Moore and joined the Comstocks, bringing the Indian Root Pills ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... the county town, flocked into the park for their Bank Holiday amusement. The local hospital profited handsomely, and it was this fact alone which prevented Mr. Wimbush, to whom the Fair was a cause of recurrent and never-diminishing agony, from putting a stop to the nuisance which yearly desecrated his ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... left by the fire on the Eve of All Souls for the visit of her dead son. It had bothered Adam Craig and made him shudder. It bothered Kenny now. He wished he hadn't remembered it last night or to-day. But the sound of Nellie's hoofs plodding along the soft dirt road was no more recurrent than his own foreboding. It filled him with sadness and guilt. Adam perhaps had dragged himself to the sitting room fire in a drunken fit of superstition. Seeking what? Someone he had wronged? The sinister spark inflamed ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... the cars sang on in a hollow, monotonous tune, the windows rattled systematically and outraged brakes screeched at every recurrent jolt. Finally we saw a dim row of lights and a long, thin whistle from our engine told us that the journey was done. Again was that noticeable lack of excitement: everyone calmly took his personal belongings and prepared ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... occasionally from great exertion of the body or mind,—in the pleasure of our daily meals, and especially in the pleasure derived from sociability, and from loving our families. The sum of such pleasures as these, which are habitual or frequently recurrent, give, as I can hardly doubt, to most sentient beings an excess of happiness over misery, although many occasionally suffer much. Such suffering is quite compatible with the belief in natural selection, which is not perfect in its action, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... over fifty, without work for eight months—last worked in October—due to recurrent difficulty regarding back. Sole support wife and wife's sister. One child (Ramon, 27), living on West Coast. Preliminary inquiries ...
— Hex • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)
... bed's edge, sat Eve Strayer, her deep eyes fixed on space. Vague emotions, exquisitely recurrent, new born, possessed her. The whole world, too, all around her seemed to have become misty and golden and all pulsating with a faint, still rhythm that indefinably thrilled her pulses ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... and then quickly return to their normal. Sometimes these blue spells alternate with periods of exaltation and happiness, but in my experience this is far less common than periodic blue spells, a kind of recurrent anhedonia. ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... fingers on the table, or tapping the foot upon the floor; how deep lay the instinct to bring into strict sequence, where it was possible, the mechanical movements of nature, the creaking of the boughs of trees, the drip of water from a fountain-lip, the beat of rolling wheels, the recurrent song of the thrush on the high tree; and then there came in the finer sense of intricate vibration. The lower notes of great organ-pipes had little indeed but a harsh roar, that throbbed in the leaded casements of ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... years had gone on, with their recurrent dreaded anniversaries, carrying misery almost too great to be borne by this woman mated to the loathed phantom of a sad, dead life; and when this black day of each year was over, for a few days afterwards she went nowhere, was seen by none. Yet, when she did appear again, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... not that they did not keep faith, though that was a matter which gave them little concern, but that they took care to think beforehand of what they should do in order to gain their own ends. If they should make a mistake, someone else should bear the burthen of it. This was so perpetually recurrent that it seemed to be a part of a fixed policy. It was no wonder that, whatever changes took place, they were always ensured in their own possessions. They were absolutely cold and hard by nature. ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... in our captain's mind, that means the personnel of the ship can survive. Captain Muller, I must regard your constant attempt to return to Earth as highly suspicious in view of this recurrent sabotage of the expedition. Someone here is apparently either a complete madman or so determined to get back that he'll resort to anything to accomplish his end. And you have been harping on returning over and ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey
... preparations for war, and the consequent expense involved in national armaments; but before its meeting the hope of disarmament had fallen into the background, the vacant place being taken by the project of abating the remoter evils of recurrent warfare, by giving a further impulse, and a more clearly defined application, to the principle of arbitration, which thenceforth assumed pre-eminence in the councils of the Conference. This may be considered the point at which we have arrived. The assembled representatives of many nations, including ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... work. He remarks that "considering their weakness and their size, the work they are represented to have accomplished is stupendous." Here we have an instance of that inability to sum up the effects of a continually recurrent cause, which has often retarded the progress of science, as formerly in the case of geology, and more recently in that of the principle ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... and plants reared by man there is no severe or recurrent struggle for existence, and the principle of economy will not come into action. So far, indeed, is this from being the case, that in some instances organs, which are naturally rudimentary in the parent-species, become partially redeveloped in the domesticated descendants. Thus cows, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... pressure by rivals, in former times sent a horde of these hardy shepherds on a raid into the nearest settled province; and if, like the Tartars, they were mounted, they usually killed, plundered, and conquered wherever they went, until the discovery of gunpowder saved civilisation from the recurrent peril of barbarian inroads. Barbarians of another type, hunters with fixed homes, seldom increase rapidly, partly because the dangers of forest-life for young children are much greater than on ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... illustrated works bear prices enhanced by the eagerness of collectors, who are bent upon possessing the designs of some favorite artist, while some amateurs covet a collection of far wider scope. This demand, although fitful, and sometimes evanescent, (though more frequently recurrent,) lessens the supply of illustrated books, and with the constant drafts of new libraries, raises prices. Turner's exquisite pictures in Rogers's Italy and Poems (1830-34) have floated into fame books of verse which find very few readers. ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... Sanchia and her vindictiveness. She had mentioned Courtot; for a little as he rode into the hills he puzzled over Courtot's recurrent disappearances. He recalled how, always when he came to a place where he might expect to find the gambler, he had passed on. Here of late he was like some sinister will-o'-the-wisp. What was it that urged him? A lure that beckoned? A menace that drove? He thought ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... certain passages of Ruskin which I copied out and carried about with me, without in the least caring to read as a whole the books from which they came; my first visit to the House of Commons in 1863; the recurrent visits to Fox How, and the winter and summer beauty of the fells; together with an endless storytelling phase in which I told stories to my school-fellows, on condition they told stories to me; coupled with many attempts on my part at poetry and fiction, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... persistently rough condition of the hair in many insane patients, in part to their minds being always somewhat disturbed, and in part to the effects of habit,—that is, to the hair being frequently and strongly erected during their many recurrent paroxysms. In patients in whom the bristling of the hair is extreme, the disease is generally permanent and mortal; but in others, in whom the bristling is moderate, as soon as they recover their health of mind the hair recovers ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... bread; another to utensils for cooking condiments; another to utensils for the bath; another connected with the kneading trough; another with the service of the table. All these we assigned to separate places, distinguishing one portion for daily and recurrent use and the rest for high days and holidays. Next we selected and set aside the supplies required for the month's expenditure; and, under a separate head, [11] we stored away what we computed would be needed for the year. [12] For in this way there is ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... President himself, their armies in the field were accomplishing just nothing at all, and, as this agitating year, 1861, closed, a deep gloom settled on the North, to be broken after a while by the glare of recurrent disaster. ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... these stories, of Christian and heathen origin alike, Richard began dimly, almost unconsciously, to trace, recurrent as a strain of austere music, the idea—very common to ages less soft and fastidious than our own—of payment in self-restraint and labour, or in actual bodily pain, loss, or disablement, for all good gained ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... eclectic. It would not be easy to specify any particular master as a model. He admires Wagner and has proper appreciation of the dramatic values, the continuity of idea, and the effect of development which flow from the recurrent use of significant phrases; but his manner is not at all that of the later Wagner whose influence, if found at all, must be sought in a few harmonic progressions and in a belief in the potency of orchestral color. Nearer to him than the master poet-musician are Verdi, Ponchielli, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... swayed in the darkness, chanting in a dialect not altogether familiar to me, a monotonous wailing chant, with a single recurrent phrase: "Kamaina! Kama-aina!" It began on a high note, descending in weird chromatics to the lowest tone the human ear ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... readers Mr. Carlyle wearies with his ever-recurrent fallacy that might is right. In Heaven's name, what are all the shams whose presence he so persistently bemoans,—worldly bishops, phantasm-aristocracies, presumptuous upstarts, shallow sway-wielding dukes,—what ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... the Admiral. "It is a rather mild case of irritation, somewhat analogous to granuloma, but rather stubborn. He had an attack several weeks ago and while it did not yield to treatment as readily as I could have wished, it did clear up nicely in a couple of weeks and I was quite surprised at this recurrent attack. His sight is ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... But as to repudiation, there is not a hint or notion of it in any responsible quarter whatever, any more than with regard to our British Consols, although the colony is, for the time, in the extremity of a depression, ever recurrent in such young, fast-going societies, caused by a continuous subsiding of previous too-speculative values. To this I may add, in reference to the smaller issues of colonial municipalities, that of the very great number of these, New Zealand's included, brought for many years ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... of keeping the suggestion of such misfortunes before us, as some people might allege, the act of insurance substitutes for vague and recurrent fears a formal and periodical recognition of possibilities, a recognition, too, that contains within itself a precaution against some of the results of the misfortune should it ever occur. What we buy, at the cost of a fixed number of pounds or shillings of money and a few minutes of time once ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... we shall consider only the frosts of still nights. And it should not be forgotten that the accumulated losses of these frosts may equal the losses of the individual freezes, for the latter occur at long intervals, while the quiet frosts of the early fall and the late spring are recurrent, destroying flowers, fruits and tender vegetation in many sections, year ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... carry her out into the country, where she has imaginary love confabs with the devil, but the world is so empty, dreary, and cold, and it is all so hard to bear when one is a woman and nineteen. She has a litany from which she prays in recurrent phrases "Kind devil, deliver me"—as, e.g., from musk, boys with curls, feminine men, wobbly hips, red note-paper, codfish-balls, lisle-thread stockings, the books of A.C. Gunter and Albert Ross, wax flowers, soft old bachelors ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... shower, like our leonids in November. It rained pellets or balls of fire, these phosphorescent trains gleaming spectrally, while a kind of half audible crackling accompanied the fall. Shooting in irregular shoals or volleys, they would increase and diminish, and recurrent explosions announced the arrival at the ground of some ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... and I shall till the soil. Around our home will grow in floral splendor A hedge of roses, sweet forget-me-nots, The silent tokens of a chastened soul, When as some youthful comrade you can greet Each memory recurrent of the past. ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... the four women joined, one end of the boat answering the other. They sang through their noses, and high up in the falsetto. By shutting one's eyes one could imagine a great ox waggon drawn uphill by four bullocks and one of the wheels ungreased. Yet it was not unpleasing, this queer shrill, recurrent rhythm, the monotonous creak and splash of the oars, the mystery of feeling one's way in the blue gloom, through reed and water-lily beds, up this cliff-bound river, and far away the faint twitter—also ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... of virtue, the whole-hearted attack on vice, the genial humour, the sunny portraits of humanity, the splendid cheerfulness of Tom Jones, that 'Epic of Youth,' came from a man in middle age, immersed in disheartening struggles, and fighting recurrent ill health. Superficial critics have called Fielding a realist because his figures are so full-blooded and alive that we feel we have met them but yesterday in the street; to eyes so shortsighted life itself ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... her generation grasp how rude and brutal life was? Ever since he knew of his boy's arrival at Cape Town the thought of him had been a kind of recurrent sickness in Jolyon. He could not get reconciled to the feeling that Jolly was in danger all the time. The cablegram, grave though it was, was almost a relief. He was now safe from bullets, anyway. And yet—this enteric ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... impudent vulgarity of Leontine and Adelaide, to the occasional consonantal slips of Wehrhahn. The egregious Mrs. Wolff, in the same play, cannot deny her Silesian origin. Far finer shades of character are indicated by the amiable elisions of Mrs. Vockerat Senior in Lonely Lives, the recurrent crassness of Mrs. Scholz in The Reconciliation, and the solemn reiterations of Michael Kramer. Nor must it be thought that such characterisation has anything in common with the set phrases of Dickens. From the richness and variety of German colloquial speech, from the ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... upon telling me that it is nearly over,—that is, as far as the reign of complete garden colour is concerned. And amid our vagrant summer wanderings among gardens of high or low degree, no one point has been so recurrent or interesting as the distribution of colour, and especially the dominance of white flowers in any landscape or ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... whose temperaments carried them again and again into the territories of vivid danger. Criticism notes in the later annalists of "red blood" their spasmodic energy, their considerable technical knowledge, their stereotyped characters, their recurrent formulas, their uncritical, Rooseveltian opinions, their enormous popularity, their almost complete lack of distinction in style or attitude, and passes by without further obligation than to point out that Stewart Edward White ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... death are the allurements that act on the heart of man." Under the spell and with the reward of those grim allurements the battles of freedom, so visible in the resurrection of Italy, so unrecognised in freedom's recurrent and contemporary conflicts, must invariably be fought. We may justly talk, if we please, of the joy in such conflicts, but Thermopylae was a charnel, though, as Byron said, it was a proud one; and it is always against the wind that the banner ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... the Koran. Similarly, in Judaism, the Rabbinites obeyed the traditions of the earlier authorities, and the Karaites (from Kera, or Mikra, i.e. "Bible") claimed the right to reject tradition and revert to the Bible as the original source of inspiration. Such reactions against tradition are recurrent in all religions. ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... drinking. Water is said to be potable; indeed, some declare it our natural beverage, although even they find it palatable only when suffering from the recurrent disorder known as thirst, for which it is a medicine. Upon nothing has so great and diligent ingenuity been brought to bear in all ages and in all countries, except the most uncivilized, as upon the invention of substitutes for water. ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... without the assent of Parliament. Parliament, during the period 1603-1640, was convened but seldom, and it was repeatedly prorogued or dissolved to terminate its inquiries, thwart its protests, or subvert its projected measures. Under the disadvantage of recurrent interruption the Commons contrived, however, to carry on a contest with the crown which was essentially continuous. During the reign of James I. (1603-1625) there were four parliaments. The first, extending from 1604 to 1611, was called in session ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... scarcely add, the centre of my daily revolution—quite thereby on the circumference—was the great Company of Four in their sequestered corner; objects of regularly recurrent pious pilgrimage, if for no other purpose than to see whether each would each time again so inimitably carry itself as one of a group of wonderfully-worked old ivories. Their charm of relation to each other and to ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... night of Constance's reception, Stefan had shown every evidence of contentment, but as the winter dragged into a cold and slushy March he began to have recurrent moods of his restless irritability. By this time Mary was moving heavily; she could no longer keep brisk pace with him in his tramps up the Avenue, but walked more slowly and for shorter distances. She no longer sprang ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... careless, half-contemptuous affection for his mother could never again be what it had been. Supposing, indeed, her story was all true! But in the case of a character like Lady Tressady's, there are for long, recurrent, involuntary scepticisms on the part of the bystander. It seems impossible, unfitting, to grant to such persons le beau role they claim. It outrages a certain ideal instinct, even, to be asked to believe that they too can yield, in their measure, precisely ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of a small point of strong chroma, if repeated at intervals, sets up a notion of rhythm; but, in order to be rhythmic, there must be recurrent emphasis, "a succession of similar units, combining unlike elements." This quality must not be confused with the unaccented succession, seen in a measured scale of hue, value, ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... which no escape was ever found. No matter how ingenious or complex the enemy's design, a determined hold on their army as the primary naval objective has always set up a process of degradation which rendered the enterprise impracticable. Its stages are distinct and recurrent, and may be expressed as it ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... explain. The vitality and recurrent victory of Christendom have been due to the power of the Thing to break out from time to time from its enveloping words and symbols. Without this power all civilisations tend to perish under a load of language and ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... rock-ribbed heights of Crow's Nest. As she stood looking "taller than human," she reminded him of the figure of victory he had seen as a boy on the stairway of the Louvre. He stood still—again refreshed. The figure he then saw lived with him through life, strangely recurrent in moments of peril, on the march, or in the loneliness of ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... become discontented with her in his ungrateful discontent with himself. It is like the whimpering of a hurt animal, and the queer, ingenious metre, with its one rhyme set at wide but distinct and heavily recurrent intervals, beats on the ear like a knell. Blind and dumb forces speak, conjecture, half awakening out of sleep, turning back heavily to sleep again. Many poets have been sorry for man, angry with Nature on man's behalf. Here is a ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... and headstrong melody the tempest raged again, drowned with its waves the half-seen shores of heaven, and the solos continued, discouraged, interrupted by the recurrent weeping of the choir, giving, with the diversity of voices, a body to the special conditions of shame, the particular states of fear, the ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... true poet and master-critic, in pursuit of another idea, alludes to poetry as "being a rhythmical expression of emotion and ideality." Here at last we have form, spirit, and theme combined in one terse utterance. In poetry we look for the musical metre, the recurrent refrain of rhythm; while that which inspires it arises from the universal motives which Coleridge ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... out, about ten that night the Colonel's loud and stentorious breathing began to fail slowly. The intervals grew longer and longer between each recurrent gasp, and life died away at last in ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... to these types of evidence was what has been denominated spectral evidence, a form of evidence recurrent throughout the history of English witchcraft. In the time of the Protectorate we have at least three cases of the kind. The accused woman appeared to the afflicted individual now in her own form, again in other ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... illness had become so symmetrically recurrent that even the cook felt that he was pushing it too far, and the liveliness of her expression, when he was able to leave his couch and take the air in the backyard at about ten o'clock, became more disagreeable to him with each convalescence. There visibly increased, ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... with the initial scourge of blindness, had seen fit to take his Angelina away. He had had four sons. Three, one after another, had been removed, leaving only Manuel, the youngest. Recovering slowly, with agony, from each of these recurrent blows, his unquenchable exuberance had lived. And there was another thing quite as extraordinary. He had never done anything but work, and that sort of thing may kill the flame where an abrupt catastrophe fails. Work in the dark. Work, work, work! And accompanied by privation; ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... microscopes of committees and parties—and greatest of all, to afford (not stagnation and obedient content, which went well enough with the feudalism and ecclesiasticism of the antique and medieval world, but) a vast and sane and recurrent ebb and tide action for those floods of the great deep that have henceforth palpably burst forever their old bounds—seem never to have enter'd Carlyle's thought. It was splendid how he refus'd any compromise to the last. He was curiously antique. In that harsh, picturesque, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... summarily punished, with nobody but himself and his immediate connections being a penny the wiser; publicity and its attendant disgrace soon became more wholesomely dreaded than even fine or imprisonment, and when a period of three months had elapsed without the smallest sign of any recurrent restiveness on the part of the Council of Nobles, the two white men felt that Queen Myrra was firmly enough established upon her throne to be in no further need of their services; they therefore announced their intention to make an early departure, and ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... baths. What chance has a community of building up a steady and efficient working force, or even an army large enough for adequate defense, when it has a constant death-rate of ten per cent per annum, and an ever recurrent one of twenty to thirty per cent, by the sweep of some pestilence? The bubonic plague alone is estimated to have slain thirty millions of people within two centuries in Mediaeval Europe, and to have turned whole provinces into little better ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... the terms of the problem, better suited to their several conditions of life than the hybrids, they will inevitably increase more rapidly, and will continually tend to supplant the hybrids altogether at every recurrent severe ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... well-known fondness of boys for sharp, short nicknames; but this did not trouble him now. He and his eagerness, his boundless curiosity, and his lovable mistakes, were now part and parcel of the new life of Oxford—new to him, but old as the ages, that, with their rhythmic recurrent flow, like the pulse of—[Two pages of fancy writing are here omitted. ED.] BRIGHAM and BLACK were in chapel, too. They were Dons, older than BOB, but his intimate friends. They had but little belief, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 25, 1890 • Various
... search of food, Clayton was stricken with fever. For days he lay tossing in delirium and suffering, but not once did the Russian come near him. Food the Englishman could not have eaten, but his craving for water amounted practically to torture. Between the recurrent attacks of delirium, weak though he was, he managed to reach the brook once a day and fill a tiny can that had been among the few appointments ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... it might catch me and whisk me leagues out to sea," said Anne, as one drenched them with radiance; and she felt rather relieved when they got so near the Point that they were inside the range of those dazzling, recurrent flashes. ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... clasp; beautiful as the gift was it was thrust aside with a certain impatience, for the next package, labelled "from Rosamond," but opened only to display the very counterpart of Amelia's gift; and a paper box with Kate's script outside held the recurrent pocket-book again in black velvet and gilt corners, while a little carved white-wood box, the work of Hal's patient fingers, showed within its lid a purse of silvered links which had cost all ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... rings with larks, the grave And distant rumour of the wave, The solitary sailing skiff, The gusty corn-field on the cliff, The corn-flower by the crumbling ledge, Or, far-down at the shingle's edge, The sighing sea's recurrent crest Breaking, resign'd to its unrest, All whisper, to my home-sick thought, Of charms in you till now uncaught, Or only caught as dreams, to die Ere they were own'd by memory. High and ingenious Decree Of joy-devising Deity! You whose ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... be said here that it is a good trick of description to repeat an epithet or phrase once used, when referring again to the same thing. The recurrent adjectives of Homer were the device of one who entertained a childlike audience. His trick is unconscious and instinctive with people who have a natural gift for children's stories. Of course this matter also demands common sense in the degree of its use; in moderation ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... curiosity which fastens upon the most trifling event that enlivens provincial life; and the Englishman's mute way of expressing his timid, earnest love tickled Mme. de Listomere. For her the periodically recurrent glance became a part of the day's routine, hailed daily with new jests. As the two women sat down to table, both of them looked out at the same moment. This time Julie's eyes met Arthur's with such a precision of sympathy ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... cannot see the heads of the leaders as they swing around the grey crags that almost scrape the tires on the left, while within a foot of the rim of the trail the right wheels whirl along the edge of a yawning canyon. The rhythm of the hoof-beats, the recurrent low whistle and crack of the whiplash, the occasional rattle of pebbles showering down to the depths, loosened by rioting wheels, have broken the sacred silence. Yet above all those nearby sounds there seems to ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... is evidently that of some special saint; the population is out in its brightest hues. Saints are in great authority with these people; their recurrent "days" fill the calendar; their ascribed specialties are as various as were those of the minor Greek or Egyptian deities. All is in reverence, be it added; canonization is a very sacred thing with the Catholic peasant. The power even of working ill seems to be, in curious ignorance, at times ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... childish "visions" intensified by the ax-stroke murder of his grand aunt (L. i. 142, and see close of this note). It chose for him the subject of the "Heart of Midlothian," and produced afterwards all the recurrent ideas of executions, tainting "Nigel," almost spoiling "Quentin Durward"—utterly the "Fair Maid of Perth": and culminating in "Bizarro" (L. x. 149). It suggested all the deaths by falling, or sinking, as in delirious ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... life, in the prime of youth and the beauty of youth, he knew the illusions of life for what they were; he despised the world, and made the utmost of the world. His felicity could not have been of the bourgeois kind, rejoicing in periodically recurrent bouilli, in the comforts of a warming-pan, a lamp of a night, and a new pair of slippers once a quarter. Nay, rather he seized upon existence as a monkey snatches a nut, and after no long toying with it, proceeds ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... white. On the writing-table were piles of paper-covered French books, representing for the most part the palmy days of the Romantics, though every here and there were intervening strata of naturalism, balanced in their turn by recurrent volumes of Sainte-Beuve. The whole had a studious air. The books were evidently collected with a purpose, and the piles of orderly MSS. lying on the writing-table seemed to sum up ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... recurrent decay is one of the heaviest that the human spirit can shoulder. Any theory of progress must come to terms with it, for Progress through history is certainly not an uninterrupted ascent; a spiral is the better image. And the weight must lie most heavily on a generation which feels its own self ...
— Progress and History • Various
... stammered. A recurrent attack of homesickness was upon her; that dreadful pulling of the heartstrings; that sinking feeling that she had cut herself loose from all to whom ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... But the excited gaiety which to the last he carried into every social gathering was often primarily the result of a moral and physical effort which his temperament prompted, but his strength could not always justify. Nature avenged herself in recurrent periods of exhaustion, long before the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... me a sheaf of correspondence in which I am asked to give my opinion as to our prospects of victory in the near future. I have one formula for reply. I refer my correspondents to a recurrent paragraph in The Times under the heading "News in Brief." It runs as follows: "At the close of play yesterday in the billiard match of 16,000 points up, between Inman and Stevenson, at the Grand Hall, Leicester Square, the scores were," etc., etc. After all, the deciding ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... vanishing. It is now a thing of the past, but we must credit the Police with gradually ending it. About this period there were still some rumblings of discontent amongst the Sioux Indians south of the boundary line in the region of Manitoba. There were recurrent "scares" and many rumours of "Ghost dances" on our side of the line, in expectation, it was said, of an incursion by the Sioux, who were reported to be stirring up our Indians to commit depredations on the settlers. But the presence ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... intention—to the air of beauty. There is an awkwardness again in having thus belatedly to point such features out; but in that wrought appearance of animation and harmony, that effect of free movement and yet of recurrent and insistent reference, The Tragic Muse has struck me again as conscious ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... height.[3] Such hopeful changes in the past, however, were not the prophecies of continuous advance; they were but incidental fluctuations in a historic process which knew no progress as a whole. Even the Stoics saw in history only a recurrent rise and fall in endless repetition so that all apparent change for good or evil was but the influx or the ebbing of the tide in an essentially unchanging sea. The words of Marcus Aurelius are typical: "The periodic movements ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... do? There's no place to go!" Emmett's heart had begun a furious pounding. His plight reminded him of how, in a recurrent nightmare, he had often found himself standing frozen before an oncoming truck, his legs immobile as he waited for death. He had always awakened with his heart beating furiously and his body bathed in a cold sweat, his mind ...
— No Hiding Place • Richard R. Smith
... why should you support the Papal Chair In fostering this recurrent apparition? Never (we gather) were your hopes more fair, Your moral in a more superb condition; Never did Victory's goal Seem more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... once as weighty, for he has given time and study to collecting the multitude of small facts which constitute the large fact. His opinion that political honesty is increasing with us has brought comfort to many good citizens who had grown despondent over the accounts of recurrent rascality in the newspapers and magazines. This is a typical case for the citation of authorities; for the facts are enormous in number, very widely scattered, and often contradictory. Only a man who has taken the pains to keep himself ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... should be allowed to stand in way of doing the best thing. Talk just now of pending vacancies on the Bench; such talk recurrent; sometimes more talk than vacancy. "But I pass from that," as ARTHUR BALFOUR says, when gliding over knotty points of question put from Irish Benches. If not vacancy to-morrow, sure to be within week, or month, or year. Why not make JEMMY LOWTHER a Judge? It ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... one or two sentences how I err? Perhaps it would be best for me to explain what I mean by the sense of beauty in its lowest stage of development, and which can only apply to animals. When an intense colour, or two tints in harmony, or a recurrent and symmetrical figure please the eye, or a single sweet note pleases the ear, I call this a sense of beauty; and with this meaning I have spoken (though I now see in not a sufficiently guarded manner) of a taste for the beautiful ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Such principles as have been used in the settlement of wage disputes have usually resulted from compromise; reason and economic analysis have usually been secondary factors. However, industrial peace cannot be secured by a recurrent ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... the assemblage in Conway's inn, with the glass, and the pipe, and the cards, and the uproarious jest or song. "But Scripture saith an ending to all fine things must be," and the friends of this jovial young "buckeen" began to tire of his idleness and his recurrent visits. They gave him hints that he might set about doing something to provide himself with a living; and the first thing they thought of was that he should go into the Church—perhaps as a sort of purification-house after George Conway's inn. Accordingly Goldsmith, who appears ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... this singular phenomenon without being able to explain it. At any rate it was clear that we were not in the main shaft of the volcano, but in a lateral gallery where there were felt recurrent tunes of reaction. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... prominent,[16] and will require to be drawn inwards or outwards, according to circumstances. The carotid and right subclavian arteries will then be felt lying close together crossed by the pneumogastric and recurrent nerves, the latter turning behind the subclavian. The nerves must be drawn inwards; the cardiac filaments of the sympathetic will then be observed, and drawn outwards. The subclavian vein lies below, ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... this head as on every other. There could be no more discussion among them on such a question than there had ever been, for none was needed to show that for these candid minds the newspapers and all they contained were a part of the general fatality of things, of the recurrent freshness of the universe, coming out like the sun in the morning or the stars at night or the wind and the weather ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... ever recurrent loneliness, day in and day out. His only friends were Charlie DeSoto and Butcher Stevens at first, whom he could watch and understand—feeling, also, the fierce spirit of battle cooped up and forbidden ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... traditional, obvious revision for suggestiveness, such as the recurrent mention of the mountain brook at the beginning of each of the first scenes; revision for ordinary sense, in the first draught I had honeysuckle among the scents on the darkened porch, whereas honeysuckle does not bloom in Vermont till late June; revision ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... sound in ordinary explosions, or "claps," but traveled in rapidly repeated echoes across the skies. The thick cloud of ashes which obscured the sun and the whole sky was cut through occasionally by a sword of lightning; but mostly the electricity showed itself in a recurrent, throbbing glow upon the northern horizon, not unlike some manifestations of ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... heavier breathing of the captain indicated that he was about to recover his senses, Harrigan performed the same services for himself. It was slow work, for now that the stimulus of action was gone, his weakness grew on him in recurrent waves. Finally a sound made him turn to see McTee propping himself up on the bunk with one elbow; his eyes, unconfused and steady, looked ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... to the door, where he turned and eyed the elder Cleigh, who was stirring his coffee thoughtfully. Suddenly the rogue burst into a gale of laughter, and they could hear recurrent bursts as he wended his way to ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... cultivation practices. Coffee is critical to the Ethiopian economy with exports of some $270 million in 2000/01, but historically low prices have seen many farmers switching to qat to supplement their income. The war with Eritrea in 1999-2000 and recurrent drought have buffeted the economy, in particular coffee production. In November 2001 Ethiopia qualified for debt relief from the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. Under Ethiopia's land tenure system, the government owns all land and provides long-term leases ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... be justified) that it is not a human being at all, but a mere embodiment of two or three characteristics which are fully displayed within the first ten minutes, and then keep on repeating themselves, like a recurrent decimal. Strong theatrical effects can be produced by this method, which is that of the comedy of types, or of "humors." But it is now generally, and rightly, held that a character should be primarily an individual, and only incidentally (if at all) capable ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... in the North American Review during 1903, and I had been open from far back to any pleasant provocation for ingenuity that might reside in one's actively adopting—so as to make it, in its way, a small compositional law—recurrent breaks and resumptions. I had made up my mind here regularly to exploit and enjoy these often rather rude jolts—having found, as I believed an admirable way to it; yet every question of form and pressure, I easily remember, paled in the light of the major propriety, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... thin-lipped; and those eyes! sunken and rimmed with purple; eyes that told tales of sorrow and, yes! of degradation. The crowd stood round her, sullen and apathetic; poor, miserable wretches like herself, staring at her antics with lack-lustre eyes and an ever-recurrent contemptuous shrug ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... confident that the following words of Canon Lyttelton spring from the truest spiritual insight: "To a lover of nature, no less than to a convinced Christian, the subject ought to wear an aspect not only negatively innocent, but positively beautiful. It is a recurrent miracle, and yet the very type and embodiment of law; and it may be confidently affirmed that, in spite of the blundering of many generations, there is nothing in a normally-constituted child's mind which refuses to take in the subject from this point of view, provided that ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... unfaltering, the most high Zeus, for that thy chosen hour recurrent hath sent me with a song set to the music of the subtle lute for a witness to the greatest of all games—and when friends have good hap the good are glad forthwith at the sweet tidings—now therefore, O son of Kronos, unto whom AEtna belongeth, the wind-beaten ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... been mustered out of the army and come back to the valley wanting to pick up again the dropped thread of his former life. He was striving earnestly and prayerfully to blot from recurrent memory that October morning scene on "York's Hill" ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... of the English damsels whom M. Guy de Maupassant dislikes so much, is written in such French as the lady could muster. It explains that recurrent mystery, WHY ENGLISHWOMEN ABROAD SMELL OF GUTTA-PERCHA. The reason is not discreditable to our countrywomen, but if M. de Maupassant asks, as he often does, why Englishwomen dress like scarecrows when they are on the Continent, Miss Harriet does not ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... down abruptly on his haunches, thrusting his nose upward, the mouth opening and closing with jerking movements, each time opening wider. These jerking movements were in unison with the recurrent spasms that attacked the throat, each spasm severer and more intense than the preceding one. And in accord with jerks and spasms the larynx began to vibrate, at first silently, accompanied by the rush ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... and Latin grammars over which I spent years of terrible toil. Somewhat survives the years, vague, inexact and never at hand when wanted. Enough for me that I know pretty well where to find what I have once read. I have been drawn to the authors, who have written especially for me, by a certain, recurrent impulse and appetite. Then I can go to the shelf in the dark. I find that memory is a faculty over which we cannot use the whip and spur to much purpose. It goes its own gait through barren or fertile fields, gathering many ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... deity, O Elephanta? How many centuries were spent by weak man in digging out in your stone bosom this town of temples and carving your gigantic idols? Who can say? Many years have elapsed since I saw you last, ancient, mysterious temple, and still the same restless thoughts, the same recurrent questions vex me snow as they did then, and still remain unanswered. In a few days we shall see each other again. Once more I shall gaze upon your stern image, upon your three huge granite faces, and shall feel as hopeless as ever of piercing the mystery of your being. This secret fell ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... adaptation to the needs of the Normal Social Life. He has attained nothing of that frictionless fitting to the needs of association one finds in the bee or the ant. Curiosity, deep stirrings to wander, the still more ancient inheritance of the hunter, a recurrent distaste for labour, and resentment against the necessary subjugations of family life have always been a straining force within the agricultural community. The increase of population during periods of prosperity has led at the touch of bad seasons and ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Ark of our happy childish memories is built, if not of gopher-wood, at least upon the lines laid down in Scripture. Has Hammy ever tried to get his to float? Mine invariably used to sink—straight to the bottom of the bath. Perhaps that continually-recurrent catastrophe had something to do with the sapping of my infant faith, or the establishment of a sinking-fund of doubt regarding the veracity of the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... swollen rivers; but I may refer to a recent account by Mr. Bettington "Asiatic Society" 1845 June 21st, of oxen, deer, and bears being carried into the Gulf of Cambray; see also the account in my "Journal" 2nd edition page 133, of the numbers of animals drowned in the Plata during the great, often recurrent, droughts.) ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... her, not looking at her, looking at nothing in particular, his eyes turning vaguely from the mist-enveloped trees outside to the flowers on the writing-table, and his eyebrows, always very expressive, knitting themselves a little or lifting as if in the attempt to dispel recurrent and oppressive preoccupations. It would have been natural in their free intercourse that, after a certain lapse of time, Helen should ask him what the matter was, helping him often, with the mere question, to recognise that something was the matter. ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... hear'st me not: I walk alone. The doubt within me, and the dark without, In my sad ears, the waves' recurrent moan, Sounds like the surges of the sea of death, Beating for evermore the shores of time With muttered prophecies, which sorrow saith Over and over, like a set slow chime Of funeral bells, tolling remote, forlorn, ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean |
