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More "Abortive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all parties, the weak Duke of Alencon, after a vain and abortive attempt to raise himself into a position of greater distinction, as the husband of Elizabeth of England, in whose eyes he found no grace or favour, died ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... 'Shepherds-tell-me' air and tone. Lead me to one of your garden-seats: out of hearing to Dr. Middleton, I beg. He mesmerizes me, he makes me talk Latin. I was curiously susceptible last night. I know I shall everlastingly associate him with an abortive entertainment and solos on big instruments. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Society do the same effect, and is judged to be the same thing with the poyson both in colour and smell, and effect. I saw also an abortive child preserved fresh in spirits of salt. Thence parted, and to White Hall to the Councilchamber about an order touching the Navy (our being empowered to commit seamen or Masters that do not, being hired or pressed, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... for the moment, dodged moving logs, trod those not yet under way, and so arrived on solid ground. The jam itself started with every indication of meaning business, gained momentum for a hundred feet, and then plugged to a standstill. The "break" was abortive. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... Sheldon's ill luck, and declared he would never forgive himself for having advised the young man to embark in the cursed speculations. But Sheldon begged him not to be unnecessarily distressed, as it was no fault of his that the schemes proved abortive; and the good doctor finally coincided, and settled down to his ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... the lake in silence. Geoffrey's sermon was abortive. This girl was altogether outside the circle of his code of Good Form. He might as well preach vegetarianism to a leopard. Yet she fascinated him, as she fascinated all men who were not as dry as Aubrey Laking. She was so pretty, so frail and so fearless. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... are, and what His judgment will be, are the things here taught: not what He once did, nor what He once suffered, but what He is now doing—and what He requires us to do. That is the pure, joyful, beautiful lesson of Christianity; and the fall from that faith, and all the corruptions of its abortive practice, may be summed briefly as the habitual contemplation of Christ's death instead of His Life, and the substitution of His past ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... terminus just as Mary finished speaking. In the pause that followed she did not at first look at him. Her gaze had come to rest upon that abortive musical typewriter of his. Not quite in focus upon it, but as if in some corner of her mind she was wondering what it might be. But as the pause spun itself out, her glance, seeking his face, moved ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... minutes ago—when the odds had been set at one in a hundred. He knew that he could not press the wolverines in again. Taggi's distaste was too manifest; Shann had been lucky that the animal had made one abortive attack. ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... Couch's corps was now brought up, and Carroll's brigade struck the rebels on the left, and doubled them back on the centre, capturing a great many prisoners and confusing and rendering abortive Hill's attack in front. Hill sent for his reserves to come up, and three rebel brigades were thrown against Carroll, who was supported by the remainder of French's division and a brigade from Humphrey's division of Meade's corps, and ...
— Chancellorsville and Gettysburg - Campaigns of the Civil War - VI • Abner Doubleday
... Basilica is incredibly splendid. It seems a last pompous effort of formal Catholicism, and there are few more striking emblems of later Rome—the Rome foredoomed to see Victor Emmanuel in the Quirinal, the Rome of abortive councils and unheeded anathemas. It rises there, gorgeous and useless, on its miasmatic site, with an air of conscious bravado—a florid advertisement of the superabundance of faith. Within it's magnificent, and its magnificence has no shabby spots—a rare thing in Rome. Marble ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... the church. It is not so easy, however, to establish a schism. The Prussian chancellor learned this fact when he beheld the failure of his alt-Catholic scheme in Germany. Having tried the same game in Turkey, his projects, notwithstanding the aid and countenance of the Mussulman Power, proved abortive. The government of the sublime Porte had been very tolerant hitherto, as regarded its Catholic subjects. In the early days of Pius IX. it had concurred with the Holy See in establishing a Catholic bishop at Jerusalem; ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... conversation, she named a little abortive plan which I had not heard of till then; how, in the previous July, she had been tempted to join some friends (a married couple and their child) in an excursion to Scotland. They set out joyfully; she with especial gladness, for Scotland was a land which had its roots deep ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... bludgeons to break folk's heads, and are perpetually and officially employed in scenes of riot, the title of peace-officers—that is, because by his valour he compelled others to act with discretion. The Captain was the general referee in all those abortive quarrels, which, at a place of this kind, are so apt to occur at night, and to be quietly settled in the morning; and occasionally adopted a quarrel himself, by way of taking down any guest who was unusually pugnacious. This occupation procured Captain ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... would attract nobody. The true Temptation of this world and flesh wears grey rags, dishevelled hair, and an ashen cheek. Any expert will prove that. I can never believe that any one would be lured to destruction by those birds of paradise whom one has met in the stuffy, over-gilded, and, happily, abortive night-clubs and cabarets. If a consensus were taken, I think it would be found that wickedness gaily apparelled is seldom successful. It is the subtle and the sinister, the dark and half-known, that make the big appeal. Lace and scent and champagne and the shaded ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... other Southern States would have been left to their own counsels, South Carolina would have stood alone, and her Secession of 1860 would have proved as abortive as her Nullification of 1832. The Disunion movement in the remaining States of the South originated in Washington. Finding that the Cotton States, especially those bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, were moving too slowly, the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... hooks of the boa constrictor, the complete series of jointed finger-bones in the paddle of the manatee and the whale, are a few of the most familiar instances. In botany a similar class of facts has been long recognised. Abortive stamens, rudimentary floral envelope and undeveloped carpels are of the most frequent occurrence. To every thoughtful naturalist the question must arise, What are these for? What have they to do with the great laws of creation? Do they not teach us something of the system of nature? ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... between the two World Wars, Lithuania was annexed by the USSR in 1940. On 11 March 1990, Lithuania became the first of the Soviet republics to declare its independence, but Moscow did not recognize this proclamation until September of 1991 (following the abortive coup in Moscow). The last Russian troops withdrew in 1993. Lithuania subsequently restructured its economy for integration into Western European institutions; it joined both NATO and the EU in the spring ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... abortive attempt at insurrection under the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, the whole course of public events had tended to increase the difficulties and aggravate the sufferings in which the catholics of England found themselves inextricably ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... fight; the States General gave him the means for carrying on war, by establishing the odious "gabelle" on salt, and other imposts. John hoped with his new army to drive the English completely out of the country. Petty war began again on all the frontiers,—an abortive attack on Calais, a guerilla warfare in Brittany, slight fighting also in Guienne. Edward in 1335 landed at Calais, but was recalled to pacify Scotland; Charles of Navarre and the Duke of Lancaster were on the Breton border; the Black Prince sailed for Bordeaux. ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... establishment of San Juan Capistrano is naturally mentioned in this place, partly because of the abortive start made there a year before, and partly because its actual foundation constituted the next noteworthy incident in Junipero's career, this mission is, in strict chronological order, not the sixth, ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... she kept an eye of deep distrust. When, in 1541, Cartier and Roberval essayed to plant a colony in the part of ancient Spanish Florida now called Canada, she sent spies and fitted out caravels to watch that abortive enterprise. Her fears proved just. Canada, indeed, was long to remain a solitude; but, despite the Papal bounty gifting Spain with exclusive ownership of a hemisphere, France and Heresy at length took root in the sultry forests ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... so, my dear friend; I am at Besancon, while you thought I was traveling. I would not tell you anything till success should begin, and now it is dawning. Yes, my dear Leopold, after so many abortive undertakings, over which I have shed the best of my blood, have wasted so many efforts, spent so much courage, I have made up my mind to do as you have done—to start on a beaten path, on the highroad, as the longest but the ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... much, having always a childish aspect, although the features of his face were those of a man. They were, however, hard and badly cut. He seemed incomplete, abortive, only half finished, and disquieting as a mystery. He was a close impenetrable being, in whom there seemed always to be some active, dangerous ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... a mask having proved abortive, he was attired in a pirate flag of black, worn as a blanket, and having on it, in white muslin, what purported to be a skull and cross-bones but which looked like the word "ox" with the "O" ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... from the room. Since the night of the abortive raid upon The Cedars he had showed a marked aversion from the society of newspaper men. Regarding the facts of his donation to the fund he had vouchsafed no word to Zoe. Closely had the story of his doings at Richmond been hushed up; as closely as a bottomless ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... negotiations were conducted through the Bishop of Tarbes,[116] and at the first conference the Bishop raised a question in the name of his government, on the validity of the papal dispensation granted by Julius the Second, to legalise the marriage from which she was sprung. The abortive marriage Scheme perished in its birth, but the doubt which had been raised could not perish with it. Doubt on such a subject once mooted might not be left unresolved, even if the raising it thus publicly had not itself destroyed the frail ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... friend out With the expedition, and from him he had received a letter only a short time ago, telling him of all the delays and procrastinations which were already beginning to render abortive a well-planned scheme. It made his blood boil in his veins to think how the incapacity of those in command doomed the hopes of so many to such bitter disappointment, and lowered the prestige of England in the eyes of the ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... attempt to establish a channel of commerce without allowing them to participate in the profits, or to be permitted to exact a duty on all goods passing by water through their territory, must necessarily prove abortive. The jealousy of their character would be aroused, they would see in the traffic of the European a gradual decline of their own emoluments, and by degrees a total exclusion from those branches of commerce, from which they had hitherto derived the greatest profit. That the commerce ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Motion sleep; 310 Where silent Hours their death-like sway extend, Save when the avalanche breaks loose, to rend Its way with uproar, till the ruin, drowned In some dense wood or gulf of snow profound, Mocks the dull ear of Time with deaf abortive sound. [83] 315 —'Tis his, while wandering on from height to height, To see a planet's pomp and steady light In the least star of scarce-appearing night; While the pale moon moves near him, on the bound Of ether, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... This abortive attempt of the Ephraimites to leave Egypt was the first occasion for oppressing Israel. Thereafter the Egyptians exercised force and vigilance to keep them in their land. As for the disaster of the Ephraimites, it was well-merited punishment, because they had paid no heed to the ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... considered it so; for he left it in an unfinished condition, and immediately began a different story on the same theme,—the elixir of life. It has no connection with the sketch already mentioned, in which Alcott's personality becomes the mainspring, but with another abortive romance, called "The Ancestral Footstep," which Hawthorne commenced while he was in England. It is invaluable for the light it throws on his method of working. Descriptive passages are mentioned in it "to be inserted" at ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... national debt, which ministers would have to supply, would, according to the present disbursements and receipts, amount to 11,578,000l. unless that expenditure were reduced, every such attempt as they were at present making would, he was convinced, prove abortive: it was a mere topical application while a mortal distemper was raging within. He had taken no notice in his estimate of the charges for sinecures or the bounties on exports and imports: and yet the ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... little, hook-nosed fellow, who eyed us askance and was obviously glad when Holmes's architectural studies had come to an end. I could not see that in either case Holmes had come upon the clue for which he was searching. Only at the third did our visit prove abortive. The outer door would not open to our knock, and nothing more substantial than a torrent of bad language came from behind it. "I don't care who you are. You can go to blazes!" roared the angry voice. "To-morrow's the exam, and I won't ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Cruickshank was an able man and, what was rarer a fastidious politician. He had held office in the Dominion Cabinet, and had resigned it because of a difference with his colleagues in the application of a principle; they called him, after a British politician of lofty but abortive views, the Canadian Renfaire. He had that independence of personality, that intellectual candour, and that touch of magnetism which combine to make a man interesting in his public relations. Cruickshank's name alone would have filled ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... was much perplexed as to Henchard's motives in opening the matter at all; for in such cases we attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or in our friends; and forget that abortive efforts from want of heart are as possible to ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... manufactured between 1780 and 1814 were all of one pattern, and the one which Gourdon composed upon the Cup-and-Ball will give an idea of them. They required a certain knack or proficiency in the art. "The Chorister" is the Saturn of this abortive generation of jocular poems, all in four cantos or thereabouts, for it was generally admitted that six ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... last effort. This was hosiery webbing, which could be cut up and made into as-yet-unheard-of garments. Miss Pinnegar kept her thumb on this enterprise, so that it was not much more than abortive. And then ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... perception of matter yields as its result, a remote as well as a proximate object. The proximate object is the perception—the remote object is the reality. And thus the analysis of the given fact necessarily renders abortive every endeavour to construct a doctrine of intuitive perception. The attempt must end in representationism. The only basis for a doctrine of intuitive perception which will never give way, is a resolute forbearance from all analysis of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... a gesture whisked a couple of attentive waiters to the table, and in the twinkling of an eye—even an American eye—a place was laid for the Prince, with duplicates of all our abortive wine glasses. ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... days of the Holy Alliance, and after the revolution of 1830. The hatred of Protestantism led the two kings to draw together, though Henry II. had had no mean part in that work which had enabled the Protestant Maurice of Saxony to render abortive all the plans of Charles V. for the full restoration of Catholicism in Germany. During the thirty years that followed the death of Henry II., the dissensions of France had rendered her unable to contend with the House of Austria, then principally represented by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... three grand divisions, and a re-assignment of leading generals. Franklin was placed in command of the Third Grand Division, consisting of the First Corps under General Reynolds, and the Sixth Corps under General Smith. In the abortive Fredericksburg campaign which followed, these corps had the extreme left of the Union line, but it should have been evident from the start that with the opposing armies separated by a broad river occupying ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... thy father favours him. Richard, that vile abortive changeling brat, And Fauconbridge, are fallen at Henry's feet. They woo for him, but entreat my son Gloster may die for this, that ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... complicated obstructions to early marriages; and the chance is very great, that such obstacles prove insurmountable. In fine, there are few men who do not look back in secret to some period of their {p.226} youth, at which a sincere and early affection was repulsed or betrayed, or became abortive from opposing circumstances. It is these little passages of secret history, which leave a tinge of romance in every bosom, scarce permitting us, even in the most busy or the most advanced period of life, to listen with total indifference to a tale ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... heir, male or female, born after the making of the will, be passed over in silence, the will, though originally valid, is invalidated by the subsequent birth of the child, and so becomes completely void. Consequently, if the woman from whom a child was expected to have an abortive delivery, there is nothing to prevent the instituted heirs from taking the inheritance. It was immaterial whether the female family heirs born after the making of the will were disinherited specially or by a general clause, but if the latter mode be adopted, some legacy must be left them ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... the King of France, and the French prelates; where Becket also offered to make his submissions, with a salvo to the honour of God and the liberties of the church; which, for the like reason, was extremely offensive to the king, and rendered the treaty abortive. [MN 1169.] A third conference, under the same mediation, was broken off, by Becket's insisting on a like reserve in his submissions; and even in a fourth treaty, when all the terms were adjusted, and when the primate expected to be introduced to the king, and to receive the kiss of peace, ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... present occasion Tim Flaherty had outstayed his usual time, and was still in the kitchen when Ben reached home. They did not at first hear him, but when he made his last abortive attempt, and the shoes came clattering down, they could ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... five-and-twenty years drew on, he became less and less resigned. Circumstances were against the growth of such a feeling. One after another of his fellow-prisoners was ransomed and went home. More than once he was himself permitted to visit France; where he worked on abortive treaties and showed himself more eager for his own deliverance than for the profit of his native land. Resignation may follow after a reasonable time upon despair; but if a man is persecuted by a series of brief and irritating hopes, his mind no more attains to a settled frame of resolution, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for the present at least, was dead; knew, too, that a change had come over Dan's usually respectful attitude towards him, and Horse Egan's laughter and frequent allusions to abortive conspiracies emphasised all that the conspirator had guessed. The horrible fascination of the death- stories, however, made him seek the men's society. He learned much more than he had bargained for; and in this manner. It was on the last night before the regiment entrained to the front. ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... scurry before the Bourbons scuttled out of Paris in 1814, Bourrienne was made Prefet of the Police for a few days, his tenure of that post being signalised by the abortive attempt to arrest Fouche, the only effect of which was to drive that wily minister into ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... of attempts have been abortive in this field. Why they have failed to arouse the ardor of the parent has puzzled some of the pioneers. Child-culture as the foundation of all systems of education has continued more or less of a hope rather than an achievement because of a lack of appreciation ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... in a God of absolute and unbounded love, therefore I believe in a loving anger of His, which will and must devour and destroy all which is decayed, monstrous, abortive, in His universe, till all enemies shall be put under His feet, to be pardoned surely, if they confess themselves in the wrong and open their eyes to the truth. And God shall be All in All. Those ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... presented anew in Chile by the unauthorized action of the late United States minister in receiving into his official residence two persons who had just failed in an attempt at revolution and against whom criminal charges were pending growing out of a former abortive disturbance. The doctrine of asylum as applied to this case is not sanctioned by the best precedents, and when allowed tends to encourage sedition and strife. Under no circumstances can the representatives of this Government be permitted, ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... a campaign at Twickenham furnishes as little matter for a letter as an abortive one in Flanders. I can't say indeed that my generals wear black wigs, but they have long full-bottomed hoods which cover as little entertainment ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... the less easy seemed the justification of her desire for obscurity. From regarding it as a high instinct she passed into a humour that gave that desire the appearance of a whim. But could she really set in train events, which, if not abortive, would take her to the altar with ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... along to inquire after me; and if I happened to be awake, and the doctor permitted it, they would sit and chat with me for half an hour or so before retiring to their cabins, by which means I gradually acquired all the missing links in the story of the squadron's abortive cruise. ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... serious dissensions arising, but at the end of that time the natives laid a plot against the whites, of which, however, the latter were informed by an Otaheitan woman, and the two leaders paid for their abortive attempt with their lives. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... the plot for the overthrow of the king, and the means whereby it had been hoped to accomplish it, including the murder of the six chiefs who, it was believed, were powerful enough to render the scheme abortive. As the full, cold-blooded atrocity of the conspiracy became revealed, murmurs of anger and detestation, low at first, but louder as the story proceeded, began to run round the line of chiefs, while those who sat next the parties implicated edged away from ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... solved here with infinite tact—a problem of protuberant eyes and paralyzing self-consciousness, of unnatural silences and then unexpected attempts at speech that died in painful rasps and gurgles, of stubbing toes and nudging elbows, of a centipedal supply of arms and legs that interfered with abortive and conscience-stricken attempts at courtesy, and above all an interest in the weave of the carpet that was at once a mania and an epidemic—but by the time supper was well under way, things, in the language of Roger, had begun to hum, and by ...
— When the Yule Log Burns - A Christmas Story • Leona Dalrymple
... Crusca in his closet pent, He toils to give the crude conception vent Abortive thoughts, that right and wrong confound, Truth sacrific'd to letters, sense to sound; False glare, incongruous images combine, And noise and ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... factious jargon. All which, if it were to be first rased from his book (as just so much of nothing to the purpose) how little would remain to give the trouble of an answer! To which let me add, that the spirit or genius, which animates the whole, is plainly perceived to be nothing else but the abortive malice of an old neglected man,[8] who hath long lain under the extremes of obloquy, poverty and contempt; that have soured his temper, and made him fearless. But where is the merit of being bold, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... be worth the saving. But this is not the point at issue. Government too good, as well as too bad, may have a baneful influence on men. Its character is a secondary matter. The purpose of self-government is to intensify individual responsibility; to promote abortive attempts at wisdom, through which true wisdom may come at last. Democracy is nature-study on a grand scale. The republic is a huge laboratory of civics, a laboratory in which strange experiments are performed; but by which, as in other laboratories, wisdom may arise ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... our inability to conceive it as false. "The inconceivability of its negation is the test by which we ascertain whether a given belief invariably exists or not." "For our primary beliefs, the fact of invariable existence, tested by an abortive effort to cause their non-existence, is the only reason assignable." He thinks this the sole ground of our belief in our own sensations. If I believe that I feel cold, I only receive this as true because I can not conceive that I am not feeling cold. "While the proposition ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... actions, and sometimes even determine them, by a process analogous to that of suggestion upon a hypnotized person, and this is so because of the tendency in every idea to resolve itself into action—an idea being simply an inchoate or abortive act. It was this notion that suggested to Fouillee his theory of idea-forces. But ordinarily ideas are forces which we accommodate to other forces, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... Quaker conference, where, for hours perhaps, nobody opens his mouth. It now bore an aspect of a political club meeting. But it was a quiet, peaceful, obedient debating society. It has left the record of its abortive undertakings in the "Kogisho Nishi" or journal of "Parliament." The Kogisho was dissolved in the year of its birth. And the indifference of the public about its dissolution proves how small ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... Paris, have often dwelt on this notion of a Renaissance in the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, a Renaissance within the limits of the middle age itself—a brilliant, but in part abortive effort to do for human life and the human mind what was afterwards done in the fifteenth. The word Renaissance, indeed, is now generally used to denote not merely that revival of classical antiquity which took place in the fifteenth century, and to which the word ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... burning backwards towards the breech—an arrangement identical in principle with that of the modern Prussian "needle gun," for which great merit has been claimed. The flint-locks induced more determined efforts, but all were abortive, as the magazines for priming and the pan covers were continually blown off on the explosion of the charge. Indeed, from the earliest match-lock down to the present time, the premature explosion of several chambers, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... By no rational being could a just and benevolent life be accepted as proof of such astonishing announcements. Miracles are the necessary complement then of the truth of such announcements, which without them are purposeless and abortive, the unfinished fragments of a design which is nothing unless it is the whole. They are necessary to the justification of such announcements, which, indeed, unless they are supernatural truths, are the wildest delusions. The matter and its guarantee are the two parts of a ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... design had proved abortive, went directly to the place of rendezvous, and told the first of his troops whom he met that they had lost their labour, and must return to their cave. He himself set them the example, and they all returned as they ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... Society was incorporated in 1663 as the Royal Society of London for promoting Natural Knowledge. In the same year there was an abortive insurrection in the North against the ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... significance of this ultimate duality would be rendered abortive if the future were determined in any more definite way than by the premonition, the hope, the dream, the passion, the prophecy, the vision, of those invisible companions whose existence is implied whenever two separate souls communicate their ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... write with the imbecile idea of rendering those preparations abortive. No, I am not so mad. My sole view is to explain the motive of my conduct in a particular instance, and to obviate the accusation of treachery which may be ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... happen, then it concerns the protestants of England to do that something, which, if they had spoken out, had been direct treason. Here is fine legerdemain amongst them: they have acknowledged a vote to be no more than the opinion of an house, and yet from a debate, which was abortive before it quickened into a vote, they argue after the old song, "that there is something more to be done, which you cannot chuse but guess." In the next place, there is no such thing as incapacity ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... fully expressed in action the benevolent views which he has indicated in the following words. "No humble cottage youth or maiden will ever acquire the charm of pleasing manners by rules, or lectures, or sermons, or legislation, or any other of those abortive means by which we from time to time endeavour to change poor human nature, if they are not permitted to see what they are taught they should practise, and to hold intercourse with those whose manners are superior to their own." This intercourse will probably lead to something like accomplishments ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... have,' he answered, as rather nervously he began to gather up some abortive commencements and ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... one went about high-booted, and possibly his fangs were not powerful enough to penetrate a boot, but, anyhow, he never made the attempt; he tried to snap at the hands instead, and as he could only jump up a foot or so, he continued making a series of abortive little leaps, each futile attempt at reaching his aggressor's hands adding to the creature's insane rage. When the escuerzo was beside himself with fury, the pupil would dip his stick into the oily residue of his pipe, ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... significant than the movements which succeeded it; for it was a definite attempt, seriously undertaken, to force modern languages into a classical mould, while the other and later affectations were merely passing extravagances, possessing little dynamical importance. In this way, short-lived and abortive as it seemed, euphuism anticipated the literature of the ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... given the above resume of the correspondence in 1875-77, and of the abortive efforts to induce the Ameer to comply with our demands, because it is evident that if he continued to resist compulsion must almost inevitably ensue. At about the same time, Quetta, in the Bolam, was occupied by a considerable British force, which was naturally regarded as a threat on Afghanistan. ...
— Indian Frontier Policy • General Sir John Ayde
... horse stumbled, the laden car ran on top of him like a landslip, and, with an abortive flounder, he collapsed beneath it. Once down, he lay, after the manner of his kind, like a dead thing, and the covered car, propped on its shafts, presented its open mouth to the heavens. Even as I sped headlong to the rescue in the wake of Robert and Croppy, I fore-knew that Fate had after all ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... vacillated and delayed—for she was informed of the schemes of the royalists, and hoped that if Louis XVIII. should ascend the throne, she would be delivered from all the burdensome exactions of the republic—now saw that this abortive attempt had removed the royalists still further from their object and more firmly consolidated the republic; she was therefore inclined to push on negotiations more speedily, and to show greater readiness to bring on a ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... tedious, are his readings marked only by their general tameness and mediocrity, be sure of this, he will speedily find himself talking only to empty benches, his enterprise will cease and determine, his name will no longer prove an attraction. Abortive adventures of this kind have in our ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... infinitely wise Being make such glorious creatures for so mean a purpose? Can he delight in the production of such abortive intelligences, such short-lived reasonable beings? Would he give us talents that are not to be exerted? capacities that are never to be gratified? How can we find that wisdom which shines through all his works, in the formation of man, without looking on this world as only a nursery ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... deprives the King of every expedient and every hope, on this subject, by its invariable resolution to regard and treat the Americans as its subjects. Such a resolution renders abortive every exertion, that may be made for obtaining peace. It utterly destroys the plan of the two mediating powers, since it decides, in the most peremptory manner, the question which is the subject of dispute, and the direct ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... pretended lady the small-pox. Other contrivances in his head to bring Clarissa back, if she should get away. Miss Howe's scheme of Mrs. Townsend is, he says, a sword hanging over his head. He must change his measures to render it abortive. He is of the true lady-make. What that is. Another conversation between them. Her apostrophe to her father. He is temporarily moved. Dorcas gives him notice of a paper she has come at, and is transcribing. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... and interruption used to come freely now stand empty. There had long been complaint of its inadequacy; Oxford had set the example of a special edifice, and as far back as 1857 a Building Fund had been started, which, however, dragged on an abortive existence from year to year, a constant matter of gibes. 'Can the North restore the Union?' Mr. Trevelyan asked. 'Never, sir; they have no Building Fund'; and the punning jest brought down a storm ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... to a juke box in Manfred's Tavern. He'd been there many times before, and he was sure several of the couples recognized him. But except for a few abortive glances in his direction, it was as if he were a stranger in a city halfway around ...
— The First One • Herbert D. Kastle
... a saying that a man may have typhoid while still on his legs. Twenty, maybe thirty years ago I had abortive typhoid, and was going about with it, had had it some days before it knocked me over. Well, England and France and Italy have caught the disease already. England may seem to you to be untouched, but the microbe ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... prosperous operation, than in plans for changing them, or substituting others in their stead. Were it not that such a course would be unjust to individuals, a long and melancholy catalogue might easily be made out of abortive plans which have sprung up in the minds of young men in the manner I have described, and which, after perhaps temporary success, have resulted in partial or total failure. These failures are of every kind. Some ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... not a reverse to this picture? Are there no drawbacks to this success? Is there no chapter of abortive plans, of unfaithful agents, of surgeons and attendants appropriating or squandering charitable gifts? These are questions which are often honestly asked, and the doubts which they express or awaken have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... you tread, a dry spot flashes around your step, and grows moist as you lift your foot again. Pleasant to pass along this extensive walk, watching the surf-wave;—how sometimes it seems to make a feint of breaking, but dies away ineffectually, merely kissing the strand; then, after many such abortive efforts, it gathers itself, and forms a high wall, and rolls onward, heightening and heightening, without foam at the summit of the green line, and at last throws itself fiercely on the beach, with a loud roar, the spray flying above. As you walk along, you are preceded by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the abortive efforts of Cartier and Roberval, the French authorities had made no serious or successful attempt to plant a colony in the New World. That is not surprising, for there were troubles in plenty at home. Huguenots and Catholics were ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... once taken to render such an attempt abortive. Our pickets were doubled; Admiral Porter was notified, so that the river might be more closely watched; material was collected on the west bank of the river to be set on fire and light up the river if the attempt was made; and batteries were established along ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... force was engaged in abortive attempts, the Athenians and their allies came up fresh from their victory over the Thebans. Headed by the Tegeans, they burst like a deluge into the encampment, and the Persians, losing all heart, sought wildly to hide ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... Secocoeni tribe and the head wife of the late chief, Secocoeni. This tribe, it will be remembered, was the one which successfully resisted the Boers under President Burger and Commandant Paul Kruger—a successful resistance which was one of the troubles leading directly to the abortive annexation of the Transvaal. The Secocoeni tribe were afterwards conquered by British troops, and handed over to the tender mercies of the Boer Government upon ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... leave unsack'd, If Jove, esteeming me too good for earth, Raise me, to match [239] the fair Aldeboran, Above [240] the threefold astracism of heaven, Before I conquer all the triple world.— Now fetch me out the Turkish concubines: I will prefer them for the funeral They have bestow'd on my abortive son. [The CONCUBINES are brought in.] Where are my common soldiers now, that fought So ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part II. • Christopher Marlowe
... cruel compulsion; but would leave me to my choice, or to my desire of living single; he would have been content to undergo a twelvemonth's probation, or more: but he was confident, that one month would either complete all their purposes, or render them abortive: and I best knew what hopes I had of my father's receding—he did not know him, if I ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... placenta and nerve centers explains the pathogenesis of abortion and the birth of dead fetuses ("mortinatatite") Copper and lead did not cause abortion, but mercury did so in two out of six cases. Arsenic is a powerful abortive agent in the guinea-pig, probably on account of placental hemorrhages. An important deduction is that whilst the placenta is frequently and seriously affected in syphilis, it is also the special seat for the accumulation of mercury. May this not explain its therapeutic action in this disease? ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... rickety, incongruous, faded, tattered, good-for-nothing patchwork of its substance, ready to sink in a heap upon the floor, as conscious of its own unworthiness to be erect. Shall I confess the truth? At its present point of vivification the scarecrow reminds me of some of the lukewarm and abortive characters composed of heterogeneous materials used for the thousandth time, and never worth using, with which romance writers (and myself, no doubt, among the rest) have so overpeopled the world ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... show how Shakespeare has developed in the interval. Both are stern, able, and heartless; but Edmund unites to these more complex feelings known only to the close student of life. Weakness and passion mingle in his love; superstition and some faint, abortive motion of conscience unite ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... interview with him. That unfortunate minister had, indeed, the highest esteem for Borrego, and had intended raising him to the station of minister of finance, when the revolution of the Granja occurring, of course rendered abortive this project, with perhaps many others of a similar kind which he might ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... true that the greatest successes grow out of great failures. In numerous instances the result is better that comes after a series of abortive experiences than it would have been if it had come at once. For all these successive failures induce a skill, which is so much additional power working into the final achievement. Nobody passes at once to the mastery, in any branch ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... my friend, has proved abortive; Still there remains an after-game to play: My troops are mounted; their Numidian steeds Snuff up the winds, and long to scour the desert. Let but Sempronius lead us in our flight, We'll force the gate where Marcus keeps his guard, And hew down all ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... break through these obstructions, the toil had been intolerable and disproportioned to the object. Nero, however, who longed to achieve things that exceeded credibility, exerted all his might to perforate the mountains adjoining to Avernus, and to this day there remain traces of his abortive project. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... evident that the small rent which had been produced in the lower part of the balloon, by the abortive attempt to obtain access to the valve, could not have been the cause of a fall ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... depends upon foresight of possible future results, and there is no intelligence in present behavior. Let there be imaginative forecast but no attention to the conditions upon which its attainment depends, and there is self-deception or idle dreaming—abortive intelligence. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... viable in modern conditions. The assemblage of the States in one Union was never intended to put one State at the mercy of another. If, however, well considered programs of legislation are rendered abortive in a State in consequence of the flow of commerce into it from other States, then it becomes the duty—certainly it is within the discretion of Congress—which alone can govern commerce among the States, to supply the required relief. See especially Assistant Attorney General ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... Argentina theatre has lost his voice on the way, or when the male prima donna[4.1] of the Valle theatre is laid up with a cold,—in brief, when the chief source of recreation which the Romans were hoping to find proves abortive, and then comes Holy Thursday and all at once cuts off all the hopes which might perhaps have been realized It was just after one of these unlucky Carnivals—almost before the strict fast-days ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... little further, it may even appear that many of the lower, and particularly the more distorted, forms of animal life, instead of being abortive or undeveloped stages in a continuous evolutionary progress, are actually the product of a diminishing energy, stages in a process of degeneration, and therefore leading not upward to ever higher stages of development having issue at last in a completed perfection, ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... collect each faculty of face, And every feat perform of sly grimace; 170 Let the grave sneer sarcastic speak thee shrewd; The smutty joke ridiculously lewd; And the loud laugh, through all its changes rung, Applaud the abortive sallies of her tongue; Enroll'd a member in the sacred list, Soon shalt thou sharp in company at whist; Her midnight rites and revels regulate, Priest of her love, and ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... inspire the current literatures of Europe. He is conscious of the conflicts of family and sex, of the contrasts of poverty and wealth. Of such stuff, also, are his books. Their body is mature: but their mental and spiritual motivation remains infantile. At once, it is reduced to an abortive simplification whereby the reality is maimed, the reader's wish fulfilled as it could only be in fairyland. But the fairyland is missing: the sweet moods of fairyland have withered in the arid sophistications of American life.... And yet the authors of this sort of book are ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... quilt was embroidered by the hands of Mary-Queen of Scots, during her imprisonment at Fotheringay Castle; and having evidently been a work of years, she had doubtless shed many tears over it, and wrought many doleful thoughts and abortive schemes into its texture, along with the birds and flowers. As a counterpart to this most precious relic, our friend produced some of the handiwork of a former Queen of Otaheite, presented by her to Captain Cook: ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... distinguish it. They differ, however, in all cases, in the opposite arrangement of the leaves and small branches of the Ash, and their alternate arrangement in the Hickory. One of these branches invariably becomes abortive, as the tree increases in size, so that their opposite character is apparent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... seditione civili, i.e. after the abortive attempt of Lepidus to make himself master of the state 77 B.C. C. Dolabellam, impeached for illegal extortion during his government of Macedonia. Repetundarum (sc. pecuniarum), post-Aug. for de repetundis (pecuniis), used i. of money extorted by an ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... to think—the Bonnie Lassie says that I am flattering myself thereby—that it was the momentary halt caused by my abortive effort to hold the gate, which gave time for a greater than my ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the distance between the branches and glanced at the abyss below. Its companions seemed to entertain a feeling of pity for it. Numbers of them came back, as if to watch the jump and encourage the little one. A third time it made an abortive effort to spring, and looked round pitifully, whereupon Moses gave vent to an uncontrollable snort of ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... table-land, covered with low shrub growths; after some ten or twelve miles of this, they descended among winding ridges, into a narrow valley,—the Poway valley. It was here that the Mexicans made one of their few abortive efforts to ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... seem to have excited in Denham's contemporaries expectations which were never fulfilled. This uprise, as well as that of the Irish (which took place the year before it), turned out, on the whole, abortive. And yet what fine lines and sentiments are the following, culled from "Sophy" almost ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... another, fully endorsed the principle underlying Fremont's abortive Emancipation Proclamation. He advocated immediate emancipation both as a political and a ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... described above as so worthy of encouragement. By the time that the voluntary practice thus initiated has given some steadiness of hand, and some tolerable ideas of proportion, there will have arisen a vague notion of body as presenting its three dimensions in perspective. And when, after sundry abortive, Chinese-like attempts to render this appearance on paper, there has grown up a pretty clear perception of the thing to be done, and a desire to do it, a first lesson in empirical perspective may be given by means of the apparatus occasionally ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... with joy, had been the expedition of Delvile to open to him his plan, than was his own, though only goaded by desperation, to make some effort with Cecilia for rendering it abortive. Nor could all his self-denial, the command which he held over his passions, nor the rigour with which his feelings were made subservient to his interest, in this sudden hour of trial, avail to preserve his equanimity. The refinements of hypocrisy, and the arts of insinuation, ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... absence, of the monarch. It became, therefore, a monarchy only in name, composed, in fact, of democratic forces. The constitution of 1812 was the attempt of inexperienced men to accomplish the most difficult task in politics. It was smitten with sterility. For many years it was the standard of abortive revolutions among the so-called Latin nations. It promulgated the notion of a king who should flourish only in name, and should not even discharge the humble function which Hegel assigns to royalty, of dotting ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... these triumphant operations in Western Affghanistan, General Pollock still lay inactive at Jellalabad; and some abortive attempts were made to negotiate with the dominant party at Cabul for the release of the prisoners taken the preceding winter. Since the death of Shah-Shoojah, the throne had been nominally filled by his third son, Futteh-Jung, the only one of the princes who was on the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... grieved at making her yearly preserves for no one but her uncle and herself, was becoming almost ridiculous. Those who felt a sympathy for her on account of her good qualities, and others on account of her defects, now made fun of her abortive marriages. More than one conversation was based on what would become of so fine a property, together with the old maid's savings and her uncle's inheritance. For some time past she had been suspected of being au fond, ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... lodge, why you came, how long you mean to stay; with twenty more inquisitive speeches, which to a subject of more liberal governments must necessarily appear impertinent as frivolous, and make all my hopes of bringing home the most trifling presents for a friend abortive. So there is an end of that felicity, and we must sit like the girl at the fair, ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... then and for ever after. He showed a generous mind; he wrote to his wife soon after: "Executive force and vigour are rare qualities; the President is the best of us." And Lincoln's generosity was no less; his private secretary, Nicolay, saw these papers; but no other man knew anything of Seward's abortive rebellion against Lincoln till after they both were dead. The story needs no explanation, but the more attentively all the circumstances are considered, the more Lincoln's handling of this emergency, which threatened the ruin of his Government, ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... pencil, and is headed "Maer, May 1842, useless"; it also bears the words "This page was thought of as introduction." It consists of the briefest sketch of the geological evidence for evolution, together with words intended as headings for discussion,—such as "Affinity,—unity of type,—foetal state,—abortive organs." ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... Peterkin of the baptismal charge across the line of white posts, had been the first out of the redoubt on to the glacis in that abortive effort, living up to the bronze cross on his breast. He was one of the half dozen out of the score that had started to return alive. The psychology of war had transformed his gallantry; it had passed from simulation to reality, thanks to his established conviction ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... spot "Septimius Felton" was written; but the manuscript, thrown aside, was mentioned in the Dedicatory Preface to "Our Old Home" as an "abortive project." As will be found explained in the Introductory Notes to "The Dolliver Romance" and "The Ancestral Footstep," that phase of the same general design which was developed in the "Dolliver" was intended to take the place of ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... but possess the original character of their father, fierce and unsettled, living in a state of perpetual hostility against the rest of the world. Every attempt to subdue or extirpate them, has proved abortive. The Egyptians and Assyrians were equally unsuccessful, and whatever partial dominion Cyrus and the Persians might obtain, they could never penetrate the interior of the country, or reduce them to ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... matter which we call crystals take on the form of regular geometrical solids? Or, again, are they, as others thought, the products of the germs of animals and of the seeds of plants which have lost their way, as it were, in the bowels of the earth, and have achieved only an imperfect and abortive development? It is easy to sneer at our ancestors for being disposed to reject the first in favour of one or other of the last two hypotheses; but it is much more profitable to try to discover why they, who were really not one whit less sensible persons ...
— The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology - Essay #2 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of it, if kept constantly working, to obtain just water enough to keep us alive. The party who had tried to sink a well had invariably been stopped by hard limestone rock in every place they had tried, and all their attempts to penetrate it by means of a cold chisel and pickaxe had proved abortive. The party which had been out with me searching for water had not seen the slightest sign which indicated its presence on the island: we had taken a spade with us, but wherever we dug had come down upon the solid rock. Under these circumstances I reduced ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... Brummel, or D'Orsay, or any other professional dandy might die envying! As for the King of Hearts, he looks as much like a pet of the fair sex as Boanerges or Bung the Beadle. And what strange anatomical proportions they exhibit, with their gigantic heads, abortive necks, and the calves of their legs protuberant around their tibias and fibulas, alike before and behind! And then they are all left-handed! Were these the gay gallants and fair dames of the golden age of chivalry? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... were still more disturbed by the abortive issue of Louvet's denunciation of Robespierre: he began to forebode the commencement of the Reign of Terror; he was paralysed with sorrow and dismay, and stung with disappointment, that no paramount ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... apparentes, modo disparentes", especially, when one comes near them; and if one come in the way against them, unto whom they vanish; but presently appear behind and hold on their course. If it be a little candle pale or bluish, then follows the corps either of an abortive or some infant; if a big one, then the corps of some one come to age: if there be seen two, or three, or more, some big, some small together, then so many and such corpses together. If two candles come from divers places, and be seen to meet, the corpses ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... are gratuitous by Article 22; consequently, they have from fifteen to thirty thousand francs per annum. They have the peculiar privilege of receiving their salary, and the prerogative of "not opposing" the promulgation of the laws. They are all illustrious personages."[2] This is not an "abortive Senate,"[3] like that of Napoleon the uncle; this is a genuine Senate; the marshals are members, and ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... few words, he told her of West's abortive attempt to plunge a second time into the black depths from which he had so recently escaped, of the man's absolutely selfless devotion, of his rigid refusal to suffer even her love for him to move him ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... Walton, after an expression of impatience, as if disappointed at finding that the advance which he had made towards an explanation with his young friend had proved unexpectedly abortive, composed his brow as if to deep thought, and walked several times to and fro in the apartment, considering what course he was to take in these circumstances. "It is hard to censure him severely," he said, "when I recollect that, on ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... all the doctrine, all the literature based upon that conception has become irrelevant and meaningless in the light of the new ideal. We no longer conceive the individual save as one in a chain of births. Fatherless, he is inconceivable; sonless, he is abortive. His soul, if he have one, is inseparable from its derivation from the past and its tradition to the future. His duty, his happiness, his value, are all bound up with the fact of paternity; and the same, mutatis ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... consequence of this was that, between October and April, he was in the hospital four times, always owing to an increase in the low fever induced by physical and mental exhaustion. Through the winter, Becker had made a few feeble attempts at protection, all of which proved abortive. But finally, in the early spring, noting Ivan's look of frailty, and fearing a breakdown that must be brought to the notice of Prince Michael, he took the case in hand vigorously, and procured ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... Canea, my archaeological mission being abortive, I was told by the Christian secretary of the pasha that the difficulty had been that I had not offered to give to His Excellency the coins that might be found in the excavations, and that if I did this I might hope for a firman. As it was not in my power to give what, by the agreement arrived ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... Congress, in which also the Poles and Yugoslavs participated, issued a manifesto to Europe on June 12, 1848, proclaiming the "liberty, equality and fraternity of nations." It ended prematurely by the outbreak of an abortive revolt in Prague, provoked by the military, which resulted in bloodshed and in the re-establishment of reaction ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... title to a long deserted camp— interesting testimony to the diligence and patience of the deceased occupants was obtained. It was evident that the sea had been largely drawn upon for supplies, if only on account of the many abortive and abandoned attempts at fishhooks in more or less advanced stages of completion. The brittleness of the fabric and the crudeness of the tools employed had evidently put the patience of the makers to severe task, who for one satisfactory hook must have ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... European, American and Indian pharmacopoeias is emmenagogue, antispasmodic, anthelmintic, excitant, diaphoretic, antiseptic and abortive. It contains an essential oil, and rutinic acid (C25H28O15, Borntrager), starch, gum, etc. The essential oil is greenish-yellow, thick, acrid and bitter; specific gravity 0.911. It boils at 228, is slightly soluble in water, and soluble in absolute ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... Correspondence of Montcalm. His Employments. His Impressions of Canada. His Hospitalities. Misunderstandings with the Governor. Character of Vaudreuil. His Accusations. Frenchmen and Canadians. Foibles of Montcalm. The opening Campaign. Doubts and Suspense. London's Plan. His Character. Fatal Delays. Abortive Attempt against Louisbourg. Disaster to the ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... Maxwell advised navigating the river about May, when the Cacimbo or dry season begins; and with arms, provisions, and merchandize he expected to reach the sources in six weeks. The scheme, which was rendered abortive by the continental war of 1793, had two remarkable results. It caused Mungo Park's fatal second journey, and it led to the twin expeditions of ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... make that person a citizen in the honest sense of the word. Let Mr. Warrington live among us half a dozen years, and then we shall see. The senator, who is not without some wisdom and experience, will doubtless withdraw this abortive candidate. It's the only logical thing he can do. We dare say that the dramatist accepted the honor with but one end in view: to find some material for a new play. But Herculaneum declines to be so honored. He is legally, but not morally, a citizen. He is a meddler, and Herculaneum ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... issue. Government too good, as well as too bad, may have a baneful influence on men. Its character is a secondary matter. The purpose of self-government is to intensify individual responsibility; to promote abortive attempts at wisdom, through which true wisdom may come at last. Democracy is nature-study on a grand scale. The republic is a huge laboratory of civics, a laboratory in which strange experiments are performed; ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... paused on the spots steadied for the moment, dodged moving logs, trod those not yet under way, and so arrived on solid ground. The jam itself started with every indication of meaning business, gained momentum for a hundred feet, and then plugged to a standstill. The "break" was abortive. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... now related the case more circumstantially; and both were struck with it, as at this moment a very heavy misfortune. Not only might her own perilous journey, and the whole purposes of the emperor embarked upon it, be thus rendered abortive; but their common enemies would by this time be possessed of the whole information which had been so critically lost to their own party, and perhaps would have it in their power to make use of themselves as instruments for defeating their own most ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... were not the only factors in his downfall. He was beaten by the Allied morale, and also by the Allied strategy. Von Kluck, the Commander of the German right, hurrying on in an abortive pursuit of the British Army, found that he was outflanked by the army of Gallieni, which, stronger than his own, threatened his line of communications. To press on towards Paris would have been suicidal. To linger in his present ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... w-will p-pass for w-wit w-with nine-ninet-teen out of t-twenty.' — 'And affected stuttering for humour: replied our landlord, tho', God knows, there is an affinity betwixt them.' It seems, this wag, after having made some abortive attempts in plain speaking, had recourse to this defect, by means of which he frequently extorted the laugh of the company, without the least expence of genius; and that imperfection, which he had at first counterfeited, was now become so habitual, that he could not ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... snored ponderously the whole time. Katie was so thoroughly shocked that she did not know which way to look; Norman, who had recovered his good-humour, and Alaric, could not refrain from smiling as they caught the eyes of the two girls; and Mrs. Woodward made sundry little abortive efforts to wake her uncle with her foot. Altogether abortive they were not, for the captain would open his eyes and gaze at her for a moment in the most good-natured, lack-lustre manner conceivable; but then, ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... ought to invite the Marquis to supper at their lodgings, and he would take upon himself to provide everything proper for the occasion. Matta desired to know if it was to play at quinze, and assured him that he should take care to render abortive any intention he might have to engage in play, and leave him alone with the greatest blockhead in all Europe. The Chevalier de Grammont did not entertain any such thought, being persuaded that it would be impossible to take advantage of any such opportunity, in ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... so an unsuccessful author turns critic. But a young spirit panting for fame, doubtful of its powers, and certain only of its aspirations, is ill-qualified to assign its true value to the sneer of this world. He knows not that such stuff as this is of the abortive and monstrous births which time consumes as fast as it produces. He sees the truth and falsehood, the merits and demerits, of his case, inextricably entangled.... No personal offence should have drawn from me this public ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... Wood, induced the Anti-Slavery Committee, after several other abortive attempts to effect a compromise, to think of bringing the case under the notice of Parliament. The heads of Mary's statement were accordingly engrossed in a Petition, which Dr. Lushington offered to present, and to give notice at the same time of his intention to bring in a Bill to provide ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... ablest and most devoted zealots whose names stand on the missionary rolls of his Order. His companions were Masse, Daniel, Davost, De Nou, and the Father Superior, Le Jeune. Masse was the same priest who had been the companion of Father Biard in the abortive mission of Acadia. [ See "Pioneers of France in the New World." ] By reason of his useful qualities, Le Jeune nicknamed him "le Pre Utile." At present, his special function was the care of the pigs and cows, which he kept in the inclosure around the ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... has it any claim to especial mention in these chapters. I am not saying that it is unworthy of attention: on the contrary, there is no subject relating to the village that demands so much. If, as I believe, it is one, and the foremost, of those activities which are largely abortive because they have not got into touch with the spontaneous movement of the village life, the matter is of the utmost seriousness. But this is not the place for entering into it; for I have not set out to criticize the varied experiments in reform which ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... of Richard III; and a comparison of the two will show how Shakespeare has developed in the interval. Both are stern, able, and heartless; but Edmund unites to these more complex feelings known only to the close student of life. Weakness and passion mingle in his love; superstition and some faint, abortive motion of conscience unite to torment him ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... world. To this day the Arabs are not only a distinct people, but possess the original character of their father, fierce and unsettled, living in a state of perpetual hostility against the rest of the world. Every attempt to subdue or extirpate them, has proved abortive. The Egyptians and Assyrians were equally unsuccessful, and whatever partial dominion Cyrus and the Persians might obtain, they could never penetrate the interior of the country, or reduce them to tributary subjection. In vain did Alexander plan their destruction; the hand of Providence ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... upon human actions, and sometimes even determine them, by a process analogous to that of suggestion upon a hypnotized person, and this is so because of the tendency in every idea to resolve itself into action—an idea being simply an inchoate or abortive act. It was this notion that suggested to Fouillee his theory of idea-forces. But ordinarily ideas are forces which we accommodate to other forces, deeper and ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... envoy. He owns that with that envoy he had relations which he took the greatest pains to conceal from his own government; that they met twice a day; and that their conversation chiefly turned on the vices of Napoleon, on his designs against Spain, and on the best mode of rendering those designs abortive. In truth, Barere's baseness was unfathomable. In the lowest deeps of shame he found out lower deeps. It is bad to be a sycophant; it is bad to be a spy. But even among sycophants and spies there are degrees of meanness. The vilest sycophant ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... torchlight, which had gone to plunge into the town and grow darker among the dungeon-cells of the bedchambers, there to hatch more forgetfulness in the gloom, more evil and misery, or to breed unavailing generations who will be abortive at the ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... devise vast plans, would dream of glory, and betake myself to work; but a pleasure party would divert me from the noble projects based on so infirm a purpose. Vague recollections of these great abortive schemes of mine left a deceptive glow in my soul and fostered my belief in myself, without giving me the energy to produce. In my indolent self-sufficiency I was in a very fair way to become a fool, ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... working, to obtain just water enough to keep us alive. The party who had tried to sink a well had invariably been stopped by hard limestone rock in every place they had tried, and all their attempts to penetrate it by means of a cold chisel and pickaxe had proved abortive. The party which had been out with me searching for water had not seen the slightest sign which indicated its presence on the island: we had taken a spade with us, but wherever we dug had come down upon the solid rock. Under these circumstances I reduced the allowance to ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... and a gesture whisked a couple of attentive waiters to the table, and in the twinkling of an eye—even an American eye—a place was laid for the Prince, with duplicates of all our abortive wine glasses. ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... talents fit, With much deceit and little wit. Thou hast, as thou shall quickly see, Deceived thyself, instead of me; For how can heavenly wisdom prove An instrument to earthly love? Know'st thou not yet, that men commence Thy votaries for want of sense? Nor shall Vanessa be the theme To manage thy abortive scheme: She'll prove the greatest of thy foes; And yet I scorn to interpose, But, using neither skill nor force, Leave all things to their natural course. The goddess thus pronounced her doom: When, lo! Vanessa in her bloom Advanced, like Atalanta's star, But rarely seen, and ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... to make a nest like a blackbird. It is vain then to contend that the ease and certainty with which an action is performed, even though it may have now become matter of such fixed habit that it cannot be suddenly and seriously modified without rendering the whole performance abortive, is any argument against that action having been an achievement of design and reason in respect of each one of the steps that have led to it; and if in respect of each one of the steps then as regards the entire action; for we see our own most reasoned actions become no less easy, unerring, automatic, ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... one of your garden-seats: out of hearing to Dr. Middleton, I beg. He mesmerizes me, he makes me talk Latin. I was curiously susceptible last night. I know I shall everlastingly associate him with an abortive entertainment and solos on big ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Martin, playing with the little hand upon his wrist, 'that my attempts to advance myself at home have been baffled and rendered abortive. I will not say by whom, Mary, for that would give pain to us both. But so it is. Have you heard him speak of late of any relative of mine or his, called Pecksniff? Only tell me what I ask ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... lead a man to ask the question: 'Why did my actions yesterday contradict my reason?' The reply to this question will nearly always be: 'Because at the critical moment I forgot.' The supreme explanation of the abortive results of so many efforts at self-alteration, the supreme explanation of our frequent miserable scurrying into a doctrine of fatalism, is simple forgetfulness. It is not force that we lack, but the skill to remember exactly what our reason would have us ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... him," I insisted, "for the unspeakable torment of those months of barrenness, of abortive ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... On the contrary, accumulation in the placenta and nerve centers explains the pathogenesis of abortion and the birth of dead fetuses ("mortinatatite") Copper and lead did not cause abortion, but mercury did so in two out of six cases. Arsenic is a powerful abortive agent in the guinea-pig, probably on account of placental hemorrhages. An important deduction is that whilst the placenta is frequently and seriously affected in syphilis, it is also the special seat for the accumulation of ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... went to Rome, where, joining the archbishop and other refugees, they used every available means to injure the commercial credit of the Medici in that city. Their attempts greatly annoyed Piero; but by his friends' assistance, he was enabled to render them abortive. Diotisalvi Neroni and Niccolo Soderini strenuously urged the Venetian senate to make war upon their country, calculating, that in case of an attack, the government being new and unpopular, would be unable to resist. At this time there resided ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... the then Statsmen and other wayes to reenter to his place, yet he was never able to effectuat it, and then he procured Mr. Wm. Ramsay his second sone to be made conjunct Clerk of Edr. Bot his death att Newcastell some few years after made the designe of this profitable place abortive. ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... proved abortive, owing to the blundering shortsightedness of the then Government, for which Lord Derby was chiefly responsible, but what little foothold we possess in New Guinea, is certainly due to General ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... "Neither, thanks. In an abortive attempt to preserve my youth I neither take tea nor drinks between meals. I will have one of your excellent cigarettes and get round to the club. Why, this is Enton over ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... designing, even a little history and grammar, and thus a little of everything. How many times have I regarded with poignant compassion that sad work of nature, mutilated by society! How many times have I followed in the darkness the pale and vacillating gleams of a spark flickering in abortive life! How many times have I tried to revive the fire that smouldered under those ashes! Alas! her long hair was the color of ashes, and we called ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... emphasis and significant eyes—as that Bampton preacher not long ago, who assured us, apropos of the resurrection of the body, that 'all attempts to resuscitate the inanimate corpse by natural methods had hitherto been experimentally abortive.' I go into the place where degrees are given—the Convocation, I think—and there one hears a deal of unmeaning Latin for hours, graces, dispensations, and proctors walking up and down for nothing; all in order to keep up a sort of ghost of things passed ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... the machinery we were using. But I was not excited about being held up on the Caraquet road,—after I'd once been to Skunk's Misery. I was not red-hot about hurrying there, either; I wanted to give Hutton time to get back to his lair and feel easy about pursuit after his abortive raid. "I expect we'll worry along," I said idly. "Gimme that ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... was at last cleared of snow. It was now ready, waiting for the elements to render abortive in a few short hours the labour of many days. Julyman and Steve had spent the brief daylight in setting up a snow-break before the open sheds which housed the sleds and canoes. Oolak was at the quarters of ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... though chaplains were earnest and zealous, the men gradually found cards more exciting than exhortations. They turned from the "wine of life" to the canteen of "new dip" with a spiteful thirst. There were attempts by the higher officers—which proved abortive—to discountenance gambling; and the most stringent efforts of provost-marshals to prevent the introduction of liquor to camp reduced the quantity somewhat, but brought down the quality to the grade of a not very ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... other creatures shall perish as the brute beasts by whom they were begotten, not having a reasonable soul nor any breath of the Almighty infused into them; and such can never be capable of resurrection. And the same is also true of imperfect and abortive births. ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... of Longstreet to bring the enemy to an engagement outside of Knoxville proving abortive, the commanding General determined to close the campaign for the season, and to put his troops in as comfortable winter quarters as possible. This was found on the right or east bank of the Holston, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... just so much of nothing to the purpose) how little would remain to give the trouble of an answer! To which let me add, that the spirit or genius, which animates the whole, is plainly perceived to be nothing else but the abortive malice of an old neglected man,[8] who hath long lain under the extremes of obloquy, poverty and contempt; that have soured his temper, and made him fearless. But where is the merit of being bold, to a man that is secure of impunity to his person, and is past apprehension of anything ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... father's house, and her very sharpness and prickly spiritualism were for the child's enduring good. Her attempts, however, to make Leam regard mamma in heaven as in any wise different from mamma on earth were utterly abortive. Leam's imagination could not compass the thaumaturgy tried to be inculcated. Mamma, if mamma at all, was mamma as she had known her; and if as she had known her, then she was unhappy and desolate, seeing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... answer, as has actually occurred in the present instance. But to the point. I am willing to do what I can to extricate you from your situation. Your first scheme[114] I was considering; but your own impatience appears to have rendered it abortive, if not irretrievable. I will deposit in Mr. Murray's hands (with his consent) the sum you mentioned, to be advanced for the time at ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... step nearer Mr. Job Pratt, and the letter was reluctantly yielded; though not until the widow Martin had made a nervous but abortive snatch at it. ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... World Wars, Lithuania was annexed by the USSR in 1940. On 11 March 1990, Lithuania became the first of the Soviet republics to declare its independence, but this proclamation was not generally recognized until September of 1991 (following the abortive coup in Moscow). The last Russian troops withdrew in 1993. Lithuania subsequently has restructured its economy for eventual integration into Western European institutions and was invited to join NATO ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the one character in the other. To the last, he was an aristocrat in sentiment, a democrat in opinion. "Vulgarity," he writes with a pithy half-truth, "is far worse than downright black guardism; for the latter comprehends wit, humour, and strong sense at times, while the former is a sad abortive attempt at all things, signifying nothing." He could never reconcile himself to the English radicals; and it has been acutely remarked, that part of his final interest in Greece lay in the fact that he found it a country of classic memories, "where a man might be the ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... sixteenth century that tidings of the golden empire in the south reached the Spaniards, and more than one effort was made to discover it. But these proved abortive, and it was not until after the brilliant conquest of Mexico by Cortes that the enterprise destined for success was set on foot. Then, in 1524, Francisco Pizarro, Almagro, and Father Luque united their efforts to pursue the design ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... resembling a mere deliberative meeting or quiet Quaker conference, where, for hours perhaps, nobody opens his mouth. It now bore an aspect of a political club meeting. But it was a quiet, peaceful, obedient debating society. It has left the record of its abortive undertakings in the "Kogisho Nishi" or journal of "Parliament." The Kogisho was dissolved in the year of its birth. And the indifference of the public about its dissolution proves how small an influence ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... year of her reign, made an abortive attempt to abolish her subjects' beards by an impost of 3s. 4d. a year (equivalent to four times that sum in these "dear" days) on every beard of more than a fortnight's growth. And Peter the Great also laid a tax upon beards in Russia: nobles' ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... made to raise the young grizzlies, but these have all been abortive, the animals proving anything but agreeable pets. As soon as grown to a considerable size, their natural ferocity displays itself, and their dangerous qualities usually lead to the ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... down with my day dreams in the sagebrush. Pale herds of antelope were in the distance, and near by the demure prairie-dogs sat up and scrutinized me. Steve, Trampas, the riot of horsemen, my lost trunk, Uncle Hughey, with his abortive brides—all things merged in my thoughts in a huge, delicious indifference. It was like swimming slowly at random in an ocean that was smooth, and neither too cool nor too warm. And before I knew it, five lazy imperceptible hours had gone thus. There was ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... resolution to jump, and twice did its little heart fail as it measured the distance between the branches and glanced at the abyss below. Its companions seemed to entertain a feeling of pity for it. Numbers of them came back, as if to watch the jump and encourage the little one. A third time it made an abortive effort to spring, and looked round pitifully, whereupon Moses gave vent to an ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... terra firma we both shook ourselves, sending an emerald spray flying in all directions; and then abortive attempts were made to dry Tibe with the handkerchiefs of the united party. A few hurried "Thank you's" were all I got from the Chaperon at the time, but on board "Lorelei" she had something more ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... nobles, was further exalted by the introduction of cannon into warfare, which only the king possessed. Two pretenders to the throne, Lambert Simnel (1487), and Perkin Warbeck (1492), were raised up; but the efforts made to dethrone Henry proved abortive. He kept watch over his enemies at home and abroad, and punished all resistance to his authority. Circumstances enabled the founder of the Tudor line to exalt the power of the king over the heads of both the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Two abortive attempts characterised the sixties of last century in France. As regards the first of these, it was carried out by three men, Nadar, Ponton d'Amecourt, and De la Landelle, who conceived the idea of a full-sized ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... a reverse to this picture? Are there no drawbacks to this success? Is there no chapter of abortive plans, of unfaithful agents, of surgeons and attendants appropriating or squandering charitable gifts? These are questions which are often honestly asked, and the doubts which they express or awaken ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... sharp knocks, and the struggles of the fish are over, but the kingfisher's have only begun. How he gags and writhes, swallows his dinner, and then, regretting his haste, brings it up again to try another wider avenue down his throat I The many abortive efforts he makes to land his dinner safely below in his stomach, his grim contortions as the fishbones scratch his throat-lining on their way down and up again, force a smile in spite of the bird's evident distress. It is small wonder ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... monarchs of this century took in the days of the Holy Alliance, and after the revolution of 1830. The hatred of Protestantism led the two kings to draw together, though Henry II. had had no mean part in that work which had enabled the Protestant Maurice of Saxony to render abortive all the plans of Charles V. for the full restoration of Catholicism in Germany. During the thirty years that followed the death of Henry II., the dissensions of France had rendered her unable to contend with the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... unlearn it all; and then, acquiring in less than a fortnight a very considerable mastery over the mallet—for mine was one of the not unfrequent cases in which the mechanical knock seems, after many an abortive attempt, to be caught up at once—I astonished Uncle David one morning by setting myself to compete with him, and by hewing nearly two feet of pavement for his one. And on this occasion my aunt, his wife, who had been no stranger to his previous complaints, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... it is impossible to express the abortive attempt at a bow which accompanied this salutation "I want to know if the minister ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... monthly minstrel show. How pool tables were introduced and a restaurant started. How the movement to introduce beer was defeated by a small majority. How, after due discussion, they adopted some seemingly hard policies, such as the exclusion of all Negroes and Chinamen. How Squeaks led an abortive attempt to disqualify all Jews. How the gymnasium became the focal centre of all the boys in the neighbourhood. How they organized a strong-arm squad of a dozen club members who acted as police, and without offense, because they were of themselves. At the end of the ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... men who have nobly striven and nobly failed. He alone is in an evil case who has set his heart on false or selfish or trivial ends. Whether he secure them or not, he is alike unsuccessful. But he who "loves high" is king in his own right, though he "live low." His plans may be abortive, but himself is sure. God may overrule his desires, and thwart his hopes, and baffle his purposes, but all things shall work together for his good. Though he fall, he shall rise again. Every defeat shall ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... of Yerba Buena crowded with strange craft, but its streets with queer characters—adventurers of every race and clime— among whom may be heard an exchange of tongues, the like never listened to since the abortive attempt at building the ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... here, capered, coughed, spat. Asaki fired from the hip and the thing screeched, clawed at its chest where the dark blood spewed out, and raced for them. Nymani cut the beast down and they waited tensely for the attack of the thing's tribe, which should have followed the abortive lunge on the part of their scout. But there was nothing—neither sound ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... instructor in the college at Zaragoza. Desiring to labor among the heathen, he entered the Philippine missions, arriving at Manila June 28, 1626. About that time, the Jesuits attempted to found missions in Formosa and Jolo, to which task Colin was assigned; but, these proving abortive, he remained at Manila, occupying a chair in the Jesuit college, and acting as confessor to Governor Nio de Tavora. After the latter's death, Colin became rector of the college, and soon afterward was sent (1634) to the new mission of Mindoro, where he spent three ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various
... intensifying, perpetuating, and (to some extent at least) localizing the effects of remedies upon the brain and spinal cord. I speak of resuming these studies because, as far back as 1880 and 1882, I made some attempts—albeit rather abortive—in the same direction. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... busied himself with opening a way to the wound. Out over the flats swung the long skirmish line, picturesque in the variety of its undress, Cutler striding vociferous in its wake, while a bugler ran himself out of breath, far to the eastward front, to puff feeble and abortive breath into unresponsive copper. And still the same flutter of distant, scattering shots came drifting back from the brakes and canons in the rocky wilds beyond the stream. The guard still pursued and the Indians ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... learned one lesson, however—patience—and he would have many more to learn; he had also been taught not to take hasty views, but to wait for the long result. And his heart lifted when, after the abortive siege of Charleroi, he was summoned for a second time to the Prince's presence. On this occasion the Prince said little, but it was to the point; it was the ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... suffered, it would have been more than a miracle had she avoided. Her watchfulness rendered more plots abortive than those which contributed to her fall; and they were many and various. And all her greater trials and hardships were owing to her noble resistance and ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... ray of light streamed on his uncurtained couch, and showed to Morton the working of his harsh features, which seemed agitated by some strong internal cause of disturbance. He had not undressed. Both his arms were above the bed-cover, the right hand strongly clenched, and occasionally making that abortive attempt to strike which usually attends dreams of violence; the left was extended, and agitated, from time to time, by a movement as if repulsing some one. The perspiration stood on his brow, "like bubbles in a late disturbed stream," and these marks of emotion were accompanied with broken ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... join'd by France, which brought us into great danger; and the laboured and long-continued endeavour of our governor, Thomas, to prevail with our Quaker Assembly to pass a militia law, and make other provisions for the security of the province, having proved abortive, I determined to try what might be done by a voluntary association of the people. To promote this, I first wrote and published a pamphlet, entitled PLAIN TRUTH, in which I stated our defenceless situation in strong lights, with the necessity of union and discipline ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... be a 'clock,' altho no one of us has seen the hidden works that make it one. We let our notion pass for true without attempting to verify. If truths mean verification-process essentially, ought we then to call such unverified truths as this abortive? No, for they form the overwhelmingly large number of the truths we live by. Indirect as well as direct verifications pass muster. Where circumstantial evidence is sufficient, we can go without eye- ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... has raised up impassable barriers between the races. I understand by this expression, that the blacks are of a different species from ourselves, so that all attempts to generate offspring between us and them must prove as abortive, as between a man and a beast. It is a law of Nature that the lion shall not beget the lamb, or the leopard the bear. Now the planters at the south have clearly demonstrated, that an amalgamation with their slaves is not only possible, ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... however, one spark of consolation. It came from the fact that Rodney Bayham, of Bayham, followed her always with his eyes. It had been three years since she had tried her abortive love-affair with him. Yet still, on the winter mornings he would ride up to her shafts and just say: "Good day," and look at her with eyes that were not imploring, but seemed to say: "You see, I am still, as the Germans say, ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... with an abortive attempt of Philip to fulfil his favourite dream—the conquest of England. The new year opened with a spirited effort of Prince Maurice to measure himself in the open field with the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... this abortive effort was the establishment of the notorious "Dead Line." A few days later a gang of negros came in and drove a line of stakes down at a distance of twenty feet from the stockade. They nailed upon this a strip of stuff four inches wide, and then an order was issued that ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... strange combination of the sublime and the ridiculous in these abortive onsets; the appearance of prodigious power in their ponderous limbs, coupled with the almost ludicrous shuffle of their clumsy gait, and the fury of their apparently resistless charge, converted in an instant into timid retreat. They rushed madly down the enclosure, ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... simpler to recommence the business entirely. She sagaciously agreed. As she by no means wished to wound him again, she made no inquiry about those other formalities which, owing to red-tape, had so unexpectedly proved abortive! She knew she was going to be married, and that sufficed. The next day she carried out her filial idea ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... sudden look of rage with which he turned on her. His face grew a mottled red, his clenched fist made an abortive gesture as though he would ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... he reached the gloomy library of the eminently respectable club, where he was accustomed, before dining, to study the evening papers and to write his letters, the choice had been made; and after one or two abortive efforts, he composed to his satisfaction a diplomatic epistle, which he addressed to Oswyn (with whom he enjoyed a nodding acquaintance) at the restaurant in ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... of 1830, these Templars have made public, but abortive efforts, to bring themselves into notice, by instituting some ceremonies, in which they appeared openly in ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the Transvaal until he was needed. His impetuosity spoiled the scheme. Instead of waiting until the Committee was properly armed and had seized Kruger, he suddenly crossed the border with his forces. The Raid was a fizzle and the commander and all his men were captured by the Boers. This abortive attempt was the real prelude to the Boer War, which came ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... of the time of Constantine and his immediate successors, which grew up very gradually, was the result of the Oriental superstitions which distorted Christianity and disturbed the old philosophy. The abortive attempt of the Emperor Julian to create a reaction in favor of heathenism was the cause of the open antagonism between the classical and Christian forms of literature. The church, however, was soon enabled not only to dictate its own rules of literary ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... all hopes of staying at home will be abortive, but more of this when, in the latter part of next week, you shall be ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... face of the country; individual feats of prowess, too, commemorated in the romantic ballads of the time, were achieved; but no victory was gained, no important post acquired. The king in vain excused his hasty retreats and abortive enterprises by saying, "that he prized the life of one of his soldiers more than those of a thousand Mussulmans." His troops murmured at this timorous policy, and the people of the south, on whom the charges of the expeditions fell with ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... Through terror-haunted days. A shock, a cry Whose echoes ring the globe—the spectre's laid. Hurled o'er the abyss, see the crowned martyr lie Resting in peace—fear, change, and death gone by. Fit end for nightmare—mist of blood and tears, Red climax to the slow, abortive years. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... chosen the very hour in which she had nothing whatever to amuse her, and he was a very welcome interruption. And, upon the whole, she liked her grandson. She had paid his gambling-debts twice, she had taken the greatest interest in his various duels, and sided passionately with him in one abortive love-affair. ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... Nothing but the sharpest essence of villany, compounded with the strongest distillation of folly, could have produced a menstruum that would have effected a separation. The Congress in 1774 administered an abortive medicine to independence, by prohibiting the importation of goods, and the succeeding Congress rendered the dose still more dangerous by continuing it. Had independence been a settled system with America, (as Britain has advanced,) she ought ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... leaning over the little railing of the yacht, watching, at least I was, the smooth, green water gliding under the clean-cutting keel, we had been talking earnestly for some time. "A thought has value only as it is a potential action; if the action be abortive, the thought is as useless as a crank that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... oratorical charlatans, undoubtedly only produce mischievous compounds and destructive explosions.—Nevertheless good procedure remains good even when ignorant and the impetuous men make a bad use of it; and if we of to day resume the abortive effort of the eighteenth century, it should be within ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... am opposed to measures that ignore the constituted authorities, but we find ourselves living under extraordinary conditions, and the law—God save the name—has proved itself abortive. It is time for the better element to join bands; we must get together, sir. I am willing to take the initial steps and issue the call for a mass meeting of our best citizens. I am prepared to address such a meeting." The very splendor of his conception dazzled the judge; this promised ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... have past; it shall come into my nets only on the day upon which I have fixed in my own mind. Thunder, bombs, and cannons; meditate upon your operations, skilful captains; hasten, young warriors. I shall silence your noise, I shall dissipate your projects, and make your efforts abortive; all shall end in vain smoke, for I shall conduct ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... 4th. Public interest in the abortive attempt to reinstate Dom Corria De Sylva as President was waning rapidly when it was fanned into fresh activity by news that reached this port to-day. It appears that on the 31st ulto. a daring effort was made to free De Sylva, who, with certain other ministers expelled ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... carry these institutions into more complete and prosperous operation, than in plans for changing them, or substituting others in their stead. Were it not that such a course would be unjust to individuals, a long and melancholy catalogue might easily be made out, of abortive plans which have sprung up in the minds of young men, in the manner I have described, and which after perhaps temporary success, have resulted in partial or total failure. These failures are of every kind. Some are school-books on a new plan, which succeed in ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... proximate object. But the analysis of the perception of matter yields as its result, a remote as well as a proximate object. The proximate object is the perception—the remote object is the reality. And thus the analysis of the given fact necessarily renders abortive every endeavour to construct a doctrine of intuitive perception. The attempt must end in representationism. The only basis for a doctrine of intuitive perception which will never give way, is a resolute ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... the end they sent for me. I said to the man: 'A child would have saved her!' And he—I can hear him now, answering: 'Ah! but that would have nullified all the use and purpose of our example for humanity.' The idiot—the abortive, impossible, dreary idiot! And if ever there was a woman intended by wholesome Nature to bear and nurture babes, it was that woman, who died to prove the possibility of carrying on the business of living ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... every minute is travailing in pain, as it were, and is delivered of some one birth or another, and no creature can open its womb sooner, or shut it longer, than the appointed and prefixed season. There is no miscarrying as to him whose decrees do properly conceive them though to us they seem often abortive. Now, join unto this, to make the allusion full, as long as they are carried in the womb of time, they are hid from all the world. The womb is a dark lodging and no understanding nor eye can pierce into it, to tell ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... English soil. The afforestation of the district, however, and its conversion into a royal demesne had clipped off a large section of his estate, while other parts had been confiscated as a punishment for his supposed complicity in an abortive Saxon rising. The fate of the ancestor had been typical of that of his descendants. During three hundred years their domains had gradually contracted, sometimes through royal or feudal encroachment, and sometimes through such gifts to the Church as that with ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... had passed since the Commander-in-Chief had officially proclaimed the capital. During this time much had happened. An abortive conference had taken place at Omaruru itself, the Germans, we were informed afterwards, asking for terms that we were in no mind to give them. The railway line between Swakopmund and Karibib, broken up by dynamited bridges, had been to a great extent repaired. The poorly rationed troops were ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... lemon yellow, fragrant, small, in clusters close to the slender, brittle twigs. Six petal-like sepals; sterile flowers with 9 stamens in 3 series; fertile flowers with a round ovary encircled by abortive stamens. Stem: A smooth shrub 4 to 20 ft. tall. Leaves: Alternate, entire, oval or elliptic, 2 to 5 in, long. Fruit: Oblong, red, berry-like drupes. Preferred Habitat - Moist woodlands, thickets, beside streams. Flowering Season - March-May. ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... elapsed, and the horrid situation so truly loathsome, that Mr. Lithgow waited with anxious expectation for the day, which, by putting an end to his life, would also end his torments. But his melancholy expectations were, by the interposition of Providence, happily rendered abortive, and his deliverance obtained from ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... and the "Unknown." She was the wife of Count de Valmont, and mother of Florian, "the foundling of the forest." In order to come into the property, Baron Longueville used every endeavor to kill Eugenia and Florian, but all his attemps were abortive, and his villainy at length was brought to light.—W. Dimond, The Foundling of ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... intermediate base, between Europe and the American continent, to which the fleets retired when the armies went into winter quarters. No sound strategic operation on shore was undertaken in the West Indies except the seizure of Sta. Lucia by the English, and the abortive plan against Jamaica in 1782; nor was any serious attempt against a military port, as Barbadoes or Fort Royal, possible, until naval preponderance was assured either by battle or by happy concentration of ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... to the subject, which had suffered interruption through his abortive little act of mercy. "You knew my uncle in Italy. It seems strange, Benjulia, that I should never ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... continent of Europe, affairs were more disturbing. Several attempts were made on the life of the King of the French, while an abortive insurrection with a view of establishing a military empire was made by Louis Bonaparte at Strasburg. The Prince was allowed to leave the country and go to the United States, but his accomplices were detained for trial. In Algiers the French Government determined to prosecute operations against ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... understanding. An essay on human misunderstanding should be no less interesting and important. Illusion to a small extent is one of the main causes, if indeed it is not the main cause, of progress, but it must be upon a small scale. All abortive speculation, whether commercial or philosophical, is based upon it, and much as we may abuse such speculation, we are, all of ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... ruins, and for want of a better name they have been designated chimney-like structures. At the time that they were examined they were supposed to be new, and the first hypothesis formed was that they were abortive chimneys, but further examination showed that this idea was not tenable. Subsequently Nordenskioeld's book on the Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde was published, and it appears therefrom that this feature is very common in the ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... less easy seemed the justification of her desire for obscurity. From regarding it as a high instinct she passed into a humour that gave that desire the appearance of a whim. But could she really set in train events, which, if not abortive, would take her to the altar with ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... able to pursue the promptings of their long-checked ambition. Soon several hundreds of waggons drawn by long teams of oxen came lumbering into Natal, for the purpose of establishing there the Republic, which had so often been planned out in imagination and never yet found any but an abortive existence. This ideal State was eventually formed and called the Republic of Natalia, and it enjoyed for ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... occupy, and on France especially she kept an eye of deep distrust. When, in 1541, Cartier and Roberval essayed to plant a colony in the part of ancient Spanish Florida now called Canada, she sent spies and fitted out caravels to watch that abortive enterprise. Her fears proved just. Canada, indeed, was long to remain a solitude; but, despite the Papal bounty gifting Spain with exclusive ownership of a hemisphere, France and Heresy at length took root in the sultry ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... aristocratic quarters of the town, it was as disorderly a square as could be found in all London. Royal suggestions, the labors of a learned committee especially appointed by James I. to decide on a proper system of architecture, and Inigo Jones's magnificent but abortive scheme had but a poor result. In Queen Anne's reign, and for twenty years later, the open space of the fields was daily crowded with beggars, mountebanks, and noisy rabble; and it was the scene of constant uproar and frequent riots. As soon as a nobleman's ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... fortunately had not touched the poisoned provisions. In the feasting that had to celebrate this satisfactory denouement it was possible to substitute other food for that which had been taken on the abortive journey. Magic or the fear of it had saved the situation; but the instincts of loyalty had been fired previously by a character that had many attractive features and never allowed firmness ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... representatives of higher plants in the mycelium or roots, stem, branches, and at length capsules bearing sporidia, which correspond to seeds. It is true that leaves are absent, but these are sometimes compensated by lateral processes or abortive branchlets. A tuft of mould is in miniature a forest of trees. Although such a definition may be deemed more poetic than accurate, more figurative than literal, yet few could believe in the marvellous beauty of a tuft of mould if they never saw it as exhibited under the ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... and multitudinous forms they assume. It has been calculated, I need hardly say by a German professor, that the possible number of derivatives from one given name is 6, 000, but fortunately most of the seeds are abortive. ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... hair, that served equally for cap, coat and robe. His wild dark eyes gleamed, as Captain Truck passed the lamp before his face, and it was sufficiently apparent that he fancied a very serious misfortune had befallen him. As any verbal communication was out of the question, some abortive attempts were essayed by the two mariners to make themselves understood by signs, which, like some men's reasoning, produced results exactly contrary to what had ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... shook his head, saying, "A miss was as good as a mile." One of the dragoons had seen the preparations of the Skinner—who had been left alone by the rest of his gang, as soon as they had made their abortive attempt at revenge—and was in the act of plunging his spurs into his horse as the fellow fired. The distance to the rocks was but small, yet the speed of the horse compelled the leader to abandon both money and musket, to effect his escape. The soldier returned ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... Jehovah Boanerges Cranfill, the champion leg elongator of the universe, finds it hard work to keep fat in the Baptist field—must add professional beggary to his schemes of predacity. You may tie your abortive little paper to the tail of the "Ape," but that animal is too weak in the hinder legs to pull it out of a financial hole. Go plug yourself. Shuck your long-tailed hand-me-down Albert Edward, trade your paper for a double-shovel plow, gird up your yarn galluses and make a reasonable effort to ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... In the abortive, unsatisfactory attempt to follow out one fluctuating clue, not without whiteness, and heaving often upwards, but frail, wavering, ravelled, and tangled, so that scarcely could he find one line that held together, Louis awoke to find his father wondering ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... state of health, been inspired with the fear of hurrying me out of the world as I advanced in my pregnancy, by thus tormenting and obliging me to take sudden journeys to avoid him; and then his speculations on my uncle's fortune must prove abortive. ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... man, "without exception of any in the world!" And a few days after meeting Bales, "of set purpose to affront and disgrace him what he could, showed Bales a piece of writing of secretary's hand, which he had very much laboured in fine abortive parchment,"[111] uttering to the challenger these words: "Mr. Bales, give me one shilling out of your purse, and if within six months you better, or equal this piece of writing, I will give you forty pounds for it." This legal deposit of the shilling was made, and the challenger, or appellant, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... violate the commands of the late Emperor, and directing that he should be destroyed. In obedience to this rescript the Tokugawa officials were treated with such harshness that Keiki found it impossible to calm their indignation; it culminated in an abortive attack upon Kyoto. Thereupon, Keiki retired to Yedo, which city he subsequently surrendered unconditionally. But all his former adherents did not show themselves equally placable. An attempt was made to set up a rival candidate for the throne in the person of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... DISEASES. Aged above 70 years Epilepsy and planet Abortive and still-born Fever and ague Childbed women Pleurisy Convulsion Quinsy Teeth Executed, murdered, Worms drowned Gout and sciatica Plague and spotted fever Stone Griping of the guts Palsy Scouring, vomiting Consumption and French bleeding pox Small pox Dropsy and tympany Measles Rickets and ...
— Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic • Sir William Petty
... horses for their pleasure, &c. And if they failed in the observance of these injunctions, they were to be fined for the first, and deposed for the second transgression. These laws were made under King Constantine II. but his successor Gregory rendered them abortive by his indulgence. The age following this, is not remarkable for witnesses to the truth, but historians are agreed, that there were still some of the Culdees who lived and ministred apart from the Romanists ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... imaginary monster—without man as her acknowledged principal! As true as I had once a mother whom I loved, were there any possible prospect of woman's taking the social stand which some of them,—poor, miserable, abortive creatures, who only dream of such things because they have missed woman's peculiar happiness, or because nature made them really neither man nor woman!—if there were a chance of their attaining the end ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the Church share the fate of John's disciples, who scattered like sheep without a shepherd when Herod chopped off their master's head? Why did not the Church share the fate of that abortive rising, of which we know that when Theudas, its leader, was slain, 'all, as many as believed on him, came to nought.' Why did these men act in exactly the opposite way? I take it that, as you cannot account for Christ ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... the Rocky Mountains realize—nay, exceed—the dream of my childhood. It is magnificent, and the air is life giving. I should like to spend some time in these higher regions, but I know that this will turn out an abortive expedition, owing to the stupidity ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... plant, allowing no root sprouts or suckers to spring up since such a condition prevents the bearing of nuts. I followed his advice with my two Jones hybrids and removed all surplus sprouts. This resulted in more abundant flowers and some abortive involucres but still no nuts developed. In the spring of 1940, I systematically fertilized numerous pistillate flowers of these plants with a pollen mixture. On the branches so treated, a fairly good crop of nuts similar to those of ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... the broad noon, standing before a closed door, on opening which we behold the vista of an arched corridor that extends into everlasting midnight. In these days, when glass has been applied to so many new purposes, it is a pity that the architect had not thought of arching portions of his abortive tunnel with immense blocks of the lucid substance, over which the dusky Thames would have flowed like a cloud, making the sub-fluvial avenue only a little gloomier than a street of upper London. At present, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... the patriotic spirit aroused by the military aggressions of France and the achievements of the British navy was strong, and revolutionary principles were seldom publicly professed. Some abortive projects of Irish conspirators in 1798 for co-operating with the corresponding society led to the appointment of a committee of the commons, which reported on the revolutionary societies in March, 1799. Bills were passed for suppressing these societies and ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... and the mere man of business, who can see nothing but particular circumstances. Of lawgivers in whom the speculative element has prevailed to the exclusion of the practical, the world has during the last eighty years been singularly fruitful. To their wisdom Europe and America have owed scores of abortive constitutions, scores of constitutions which have lived just long enough to make a miserable noise, and have then gone off in convulsions. But in the English legislature the practical element has always predominated, and not seldom unduly predominated, over the speculative. To ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and from a disinterested delight in deformity and cruelty. They are hags of mischief, obscene panders to iniquity, malicious from their impotence of enjoyment, enamoured of destruction, because they are themselves unreal, abortive, half-existences—who become sublime from their exemption from all human sympathies and contempt for all human affairs, as Lady Macbeth does by the force of passion! Her fault seems to have been an excess of that strong principle ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Pleasant to pass along this extensive walk, watching the surf-wave;—how sometimes it seems to make a feint of breaking, but dies away ineffectually, merely kissing the strand; then, after many such abortive efforts, it gathers itself, and forms a high wall, and rolls onward, heightening and heightening, without foam at the summit of the green line, and at last throws itself fiercely on the beach, with a loud roar, the spray flying above. As you walk along, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... of the Indian—a silent, little, hook-nosed fellow, who eyed us askance and was obviously glad when Holmes's architectural studies had come to an end. I could not see that in either case Holmes had come upon the clue for which he was searching. Only at the third did our visit prove abortive. The outer door would not open to our knock, and nothing more substantial than a torrent of bad language came from behind it. "I don't care who you are. You can go to blazes!" roared the angry voice. "To-morrow's the exam, and I won't be drawn ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the Marxian Materialistic Conception of History. The political, legal, ethical and all human institutions have their roots in the economic soil, and any reform that does not go clear to the roots and affect the economic structure of society must necessarily be abortive. Any thing that does go to the roots and does modify the economic structure, the bread and butter side of life, will inevitably modify every other branch and department of human life, political, ethical, legal, religious, etc. This makes the social question an economic question, and ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... waited restlessly, a week of weary sightseeing and abortive attempts at holiday making. No answer came. On the eighth day he moved on to ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... skill and science," says Coxe, "had this enterprise been concerted that at the very moment when it assumed a specific direction the enemy was no longer enabled to render it abortive. As the march was now to be bent toward the Danube, notice was given for the Prussians, Palatines, and Hessians, who were stationed on the Rhine, to order their march so as to join the main body in its progress. At the same time ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... a juke box in Manfred's Tavern. He'd been there many times before, and he was sure several of the couples recognized him. But except for a few abortive glances in his direction, it was as if he were a stranger in a city halfway ...
— The First One • Herbert D. Kastle
... surrounded and attacked a detachment of 500 Italian troops at Dogali, killing more than 400 of them. Reinforcements were sent from Italy, whilst in the autumn the British government stepped in and tried to mediate by means of a mission under Mr (afterwards Sir Gerald) Portal. His mission, however proved abortive, and after many difficulties and dangers he returned to Egypt at the end of the year. In April 1888 the Italian forces, numbering over 20,000 men, came into touch with the Abyssinian army; but negotiations ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... such abortive disparagement, the only importance of which arises from its being annexed to and associated with a standard political text-book, let us refresh our memories, our patriotism, our best sympathies of mind and heart, by tracing once more the services and delineating the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... up for the million years that have passed him by, the million years during which the dim sketch which is the basis of all ethics has lain in his brain undeveloped, or developed only into a few fantastic and abortive God ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... hatred had to cease before the sweet voice of justice and kindness. Israel stands, while his enemies have vanished away from the arena of history; their endeavors to make Israel faithless to his God and his creed have proved futile and abortive. Israel has conquered politically and religiously. Day after day witnesses the crumbling to pieces of the barriers that have secluded them from intercourse with their fellow-citizens; the old code of laws has become obsolete, and on the new pages is inscribed the name of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... the church of the Miracoli), I found this to possess the more subtle qualities of design. And yet, in the cloisters of St. John Lateran at Rome, you have Greek work, if not contemporary with this at Pisa, yet occupying a parallel place in the history of architecture, which is abortive, and monstrous beyond the power of any words to describe. Vasari knew no difference between these two kinds of Greek work. Nor do your modern architects. To discern the difference between the sculpture of the font of Pisa, and the spandrils of the Lateran cloister, requires thorough training of ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... Upon unstaid perverseness! Know ye not That we are worms, yet made at last to form The winged insect, imp'd with angel plumes That to heaven's justice unobstructed soars? Why buoy ye up aloft your unfleg'd souls? Abortive then and shapeless ye remain, Like the untimely embryon of a worm! As, to support incumbent floor or roof, For corbel is a figure sometimes seen, That crumples up its knees unto its breast, With the feign'd posture stirring ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... find them not, and will be surprised when your western friend tells you that these are the voices of the prairie hens, miles away, holding their annual convention, the queer cuckooing not being loving sounds, but notes of war—abortive attempts at crowing, which the rival males set up as they prepare to do battle ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... overwhelming body of armed constabulary. Fifty men and a couple of sub-inspectors attended the serving of some civil-bill processes towards Newport only a few days ago, and a similar body attended to witness an abortive attempt at eviction on Miss ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... designs abortive prove We've been so long in hatching, And cunning knaves are forced to move From home for fear of catching; The rabble soon will change their tone When our intrigues they see, And cry God save the Church and Throne, Then low, boys, down ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... practicability of protecting our important cities on the seaboard by fortifications and other defenses able to repel modern methods of attack. The time has now come when such defenses can be prepared with confidence that they will not prove abortive, and when the possible result of delay in making such preparation is seriously considered delay seems inexcusable. For the most important cities—those whose destruction or capture would be a national humiliation—adequate ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... been advised not to interfere with the chief of his people, and he had (after one abortive and painful experience) obeyed his superiors, accepting the hut tax which was sent to him (and which was obviously and ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... the use of the ordinary Indian missiles, but a few useless shots were exchanged from the fusees of the chiefs, more in bravado than with any expectation of doing execution. As some time was suffered to elapse, in demonstrations and abortive efforts, we shall leave them, for that period, to return to such of our characters as remained in the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... parties, the weak Duke of Alencon, after a vain and abortive attempt to raise himself into a position of greater distinction, as the husband of Elizabeth of England, in whose eyes he found no grace or favour, died early, unlamented, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... sleep; 310 Where silent Hours their death-like sway extend, Save when the avalanche breaks loose, to rend Its way with uproar, till the ruin, drowned In some dense wood or gulf of snow profound, Mocks the dull ear of Time with deaf abortive sound. [83] 315 —'Tis his, while wandering on from height to height, To see a planet's pomp and steady light In the least star of scarce-appearing night; While the pale moon moves near him, on the bound Of ether, shining with diminished round, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... the fellow in his lair. I feel certain of it. Of course they have been followed, but only in daylight, and then they are found to be on their ordinary business. But there is one of them who goes abroad at night; and all attempts at following him have proved abortive. He loses himself in the chapparal paths in spite of the spies. That is why I am certain ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... phase of its primary sense we find the epithet used to express the excellence and characteristic qualities proper to the idea or standard of its subject, to wit, genuine, thrifty, well-liking, appropriate, not abortive, monstrous, prodigious, discordant. In the Litany, "the kindly fruits of the earth" is, in the Latin versions "genuinus," and by Mr. Boyer rightly translated "les fruits de la terre chaqu'un selon son espece;" for which Pegge takes him to task, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... offer them in sacrifice to God: and for this reason too they were forbidden (Deut. 23:18) to offer "the hire of a strumpet or the price of a dog in the house of . . . God." For the same reason they did not offer animals before the seventh day, because such were abortive as it were, the flesh being not yet firm on account of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... even in this form, was again abandoned, as we learn from the prefatory note to Pierce in "Our Old Home," written in July, 1863. He there speaks of it as an "abortive project, utterly thrown aside," which "will never now be accomplished." In November of that year, "The Dolliver Romance" was announced for serial publication; and in the first page of the isolated opening scene, published in July, 1864, occurs the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... which he had upon him. In a passion I seized a knife that was lying by me, and leaped upon Nerba, the ruffian who, besides, had fired at me and had held me by the hair while my eyes were being burnt prior to my abortive execution. Wilson and Karak Sing seized and disarmed me, but there was a general stampede of the Tibetan officers, and thus our interview and negotiations were ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... one who has fully expressed in action the benevolent views which he has indicated in the following words. "No humble cottage youth or maiden will ever acquire the charm of pleasing manners by rules, or lectures, or sermons, or legislation, or any other of those abortive means by which we from time to time endeavour to change poor human nature, if they are not permitted to see what they are taught they should practise, and to hold intercourse with those whose manners are superior to their own." This intercourse will probably lead to something ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... worst against him—and that only in the opinion of the cut-and-dried among his fellow-scientists, who shook their heads doubtfully—had been a certain belletristic tendency. Now, however, that his abortive work had appeared and he had suffered his great defeat, all serious scientists said it was the cultivation of side interests that had weakened his strength and led the promising young intellect along the path ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... and famine. Under the command of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers, who had only just arrived with plans for the future of the settlement, the small band of survivors boarded ship to abandon an abortive experiment in ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... If those designs abortive prove We've been so long in hatching, And cunning knaves are forced to move From home for fear of catching; The rabble soon will change their tone When our intrigues they see, And cry God save the Church and Throne, Then low, ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... faithfully in his behalf, his sentence was commuted, first to twenty, and then to twelve years in the gallies, or, as it is in Cuba, the chain-gang. His efforts to see Clara, in order to disabuse her mind of the belief of my death, was abortive; and she, after finishing her year as a novice, took the veil—and she is now a nun in the Ursuline Convent at Matanzas, while her noble brother is a slave, with felons, laboring with the cursed chain-gang in the same city ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... Hospitalities. Misunderstandings with the Governor. Character of Vaudreuil. His Accusations. Frenchmen and Canadians. Foibles of Montcalm. The opening Campaign. Doubts and Suspense. London's Plan. His Character. Fatal Delays. Abortive Attempt against Louisbourg. Disaster to ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... you came, how long you mean to stay; with twenty more inquisitive speeches, which to a subject of more liberal governments must necessarily appear impertinent as frivolous, and make all my hopes of bringing home the most trifling presents for a friend abortive. So there is an end of that felicity, and we must sit like the girl at the fair, ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... ending pieces de resistance were occupying the table, what were called French dishes were, for custom's sake, added to the solid abundance. The French, or side dishes, consisted of very mild but very abortive attempts at Continental cooking, and I have always observed that they met with the neglect and contempt that they merited. The universally adored and ever popular boiled potato, produced at the very earliest period of the dinner, ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... of insanity. But there was no need of this. His caprices had their origin in a mind that lacked the support of an engrossing purpose, and in feelings that preyed upon themselves for want of other food. If he were mad, it was the consequence, and not the cause, of an aimless and abortive life. ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Lord Cumnor's, which was close to Squire Hamley's property; that very piece for which he had had the Government grant, but which now lay neglected, and only half-drained, with stacks of mossy tiles, and lines of up-turned furrows telling of abortive plans. It was not often that the squire rode in this direction now-a-days; but the cottage of a man who had been the squire's gamekeeper in those more prosperous days when the Hamleys could afford to preserve, was close to the rush-grown ground. This old servant and tenant was ill, and had ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... comes the sound of an abortive chorus: "With a hey ho, chivy, hark forrard, hark forrard, tantivy!" Jarring out into a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... put in practice by the invading armies as they swept over the face of the country; individual feats of prowess, too, commemorated in the romantic ballads of the time, were achieved; but no victory was gained, no important post acquired. The king in vain excused his hasty retreats and abortive enterprises by saying, "that he prized the life of one of his soldiers more than those of a thousand Mussulmans." His troops murmured at this timorous policy, and the people of the south, on whom the charges of the expeditions fell with peculiar heaviness, from their neighborhood to the ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... of outraged Nature. A little before the end they sent for me. I said to the man: 'A child would have saved her!' And he—I can hear him now, answering: 'Ah! but that would have nullified all the use and purpose of our example for humanity.' The idiot—the abortive, impossible, dreary idiot! And if ever there was a woman intended by wholesome Nature to bear and nurture babes, it was that woman, who died to prove the possibility of carrying on the business of living ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... forms, especially in the Greek, which have no precisely correspondent forms in the English, and yet these are not unfrequently the most forcible expressions of any to be found in the original; any attempt to render these literally must be abortive; and a literal rendering, or as nearly literal as possible, is the worst translation, because it sacrifices the clearness, force, and precision, to say nothing of the grace and delicacy, of the original. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... his sentence. Was he calm? Was he agitated? Did he bless his murderer? Did he give utterance to any deep reflections on human life? All that is shrouded in silence. He bowed his head, and the sharp stroke fell flashing down. We know that, we know no more—apparently a noble life abortive. ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... most competent bacteriologists, a man whose career had passed the stage of the problematical. The worst against him—and that only in the opinion of the cut-and-dried among his fellow-scientists, who shook their heads doubtfully—had been a certain belletristic tendency. Now, however, that his abortive work had appeared and he had suffered his great defeat, all serious scientists said it was the cultivation of side interests that had weakened his strength and led the promising young intellect along the path ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Designs is Secrecy, And in Affairs of State 'tis Honour's Guard; For Wisdom cannot form a Scheme so well, But Fools will laugh if it should prove abortive; And our Designs once known, our Honour's made Dependent on ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... "Septimius Felton" was written; but the manuscript, thrown aside, was mentioned in the Dedicatory Preface to "Our Old Home" as an "abortive project." As will be found explained in the Introductory Notes to "The Dolliver Romance" and "The Ancestral Footstep," that phase of the same general design which was developed in the "Dolliver" was intended to take the place of ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... deacon of the church; later he was burgomaster of New Amsterdam. Michiel Jansz and Thomas Hall were farmers, the latter, the first English settler in New York State, having come to Manhattan as a deserter from George Holmes's abortive expedition of 1635 against Fort Nassau on South River. Elbert Elertsz was a weaver, Hendrick Kip a tailor. Govert Loockermans, on the other hand, brother-in-law to both Couwenhoven and Cortlandt, was the ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • J. F. Jameson, Editor
... argument or by authority that we are not wrong in believing in our own existence or that of an external world, or did we attempt to establish the trustworthiness of our faculties by resolving it into the veracity of God, our effort must needs be as abortive as it is superfluous, since it involves the necessity not only of proving the fact, but of proving the proof itself, and that, too, by the aid of the very faculties whose trustworthiness is in question! There are certain ultimate facts beyond which it is ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... surely lead a man to ask the question: 'Why did my actions yesterday contradict my reason?' The reply to this question will nearly always be: 'Because at the critical moment I forgot.' The supreme explanation of the abortive results of so many efforts at self-alteration, the supreme explanation of our frequent miserable scurrying into a doctrine of fatalism, is simple forgetfulness. It is not force that we lack, but the skill to remember exactly what our ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... hostilities; he enters into an abortive alliance with Sertorius. Third Mithridatic War. Lucullus ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... and no creature can open its womb sooner, or shut it longer, than the appointed and prefixed season. There is no miscarrying as to him whose decrees do properly conceive them though to us they seem often abortive. Now, join unto this, to make the allusion full, as long as they are carried in the womb of time, they are hid from all the world. The womb is a dark lodging and no understanding nor eye can pierce into it, to tell ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... undoubtedly only produce mischievous compounds and destructive explosions.—Nevertheless good procedure remains good even when ignorant and the impetuous men make a bad use of it; and if we of to day resume the abortive effort of the eighteenth century, it should be within the guidelines ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... for our subject.—The imagination is, on the intellectual side, equivalent to will. Proof: Identity of development; subjective, personal character of both; teleologic character; analogy between the abortive forms of the ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... Bowse's boarding-house so late that night that even Steinberger and Bowles had ended their day. The gas in the hall was turned down to a glimmering point, and the house was silent for the night. Even a cat who stole to him and rubbed herself against his leg miauwed in a sort of abortive whisper, opening her mouth wide, but emitting no sound. When he went cautiously up the staircase he carried his damp overcoat with him, and hung it in company with the tartan muffler close to the heater in the upper hall. Then he ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... that Sedgwick had full possession of the town, and Gibbon and Howe had returned from their abortive attempt to turn the enemy's flanks, the sun was some two hours high. As the works could not be captured by surprise, Sedgwick was reduced to the alternative of assaulting them ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... knew almost certainly that this visit was the last she would ever receive from Joe Chillis, and, though she tried hard to seem unaffected by the parting, and to talk of his return hopefully, the effort proved abortive, and conversation flagged. Still he sat there silent and nearly motionless through the whole evening, thinking what thoughts she guessed only too well. With a great sigh, at ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... the two World Wars, Lithuania was annexed by the USSR in 1940. On 11 March 1990, Lithuania became the first of the Soviet republics to declare its independence, but Moscow did not recognize this proclamation until September of 1991 (following the abortive coup in Moscow). The last Russian troops withdrew in 1993. Lithuania subsequently restructured its economy for integration into Western European institutions; it joined both NATO and the EU in the ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... succeed the minds of husband and wife are troubled by doubts and anxieties which are damaging to their intimate relationships. And, moreover, if this harmful restraint succeeds in preventing conception there eventuates the inevitable prevalence of sex excitement followed by abortive and half-realised satisfaction, and the enhanced risk of the man or woman yielding to outside ...
— Love—Marriage—Birth Control - Being a Speech delivered at the Church Congress at - Birmingham, October, 1921 • Bertrand Dawson
... difficulties, it was quite impossible to find enough competent teachers who would undertake the work of instruction, so the matter fell through, and, as I do not believe in the "blind leading the blind," I am convinced that any attempt to establish an English Dramatic Academy will prove abortive. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... dear friend; I am at Besancon, while you thought I was traveling. I would not tell you anything till success should begin, and now it is dawning. Yes, my dear Leopold, after so many abortive undertakings, over which I have shed the best of my blood, have wasted so many efforts, spent so much courage, I have made up my mind to do as you have done—to start on a beaten path, on the highroad, as the longest but the safest. ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... and on France especially she kept an eye of deep distrust. When, in 1541, Cartier and Roberval essayed to plant a colony in the part of ancient Spanish Florida now called Canada, she sent spies and fitted out caravels to watch that abortive enterprise. Her fears proved just. Canada, indeed, was long to remain a solitude; but, despite the Papal bounty gifting Spain with exclusive ownership of a hemisphere, France and Heresy at length took root in the ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... and the crossing of the fox or the hare. This being useless, he attempts to escape by plunging into some lake or river that happens to lie in his way, and when, at last, every attempt to escape proves abortive, he boldly faces his pursuers, and attacks the first dog or man ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... the empty apartment that had once belonged to Max Hawkes, and stared at nothing in particular. It was five hours since the abortive robbery. He was alone. ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... could not imagine how I should be able to support myself, unless I fed upon snails and other insects, which they offered, by many learned arguments, to evince that I could not possibly do. One of these virtuosi seemed to think that I might be an embryo, or abortive birth. But this opinion was rejected by the other two, who observed my limbs to be perfect and finished; and that I had lived several years, as it was manifest from my beard, the stumps whereof they plainly discovered through ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... delayed till Mr. Roebuck's motion was carried, by a large majority, not amidst the cheers, but to the odd accompaniment of the derisive laughter of the Liberal members who had voted for the motion. Lord Aberdeen's Ministry immediately resigned office; and after an abortive attempt on the part of Lord Derby, at the request of the Queen, to form a new Ministry, Lord Lansdowne and Lord John Russell were in succession asked to take the leadership, but each in his turn had to own his inability to get the requisite men to act under him. In summoning Lord John ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... Abortive attempts were made by the pure royalists to palliate the treachery of the government. They tried to persuade the people that the tranquillity and welfare of the nation depended but on the re-establishment of an absolute monarch, ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... laboured and long-continued endeavour of our governor, Thomas, to prevail with our Quaker Assembly to pass a militia law, and make other provisions for the security of the province, having proved abortive, I determined to try what might be done by a voluntary association of the people. To promote this, I first wrote and published a pamphlet, entitled PLAIN TRUTH, in which I stated our defenceless situation in strong lights, with the necessity of union and discipline for our defense, and promis'd to ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... the Civil War the great majority of legal practitioners obtained their preparation in a law office. Though the University of Pennsylvania attempted to establish a law school in 1791, and Columbia in 1797, both attempts were abortive, and it remained for Harvard to establish the first permanent law school in 1817. Even this was but a feeble affair until Justice Joseph Story became associated with it in 1830. Up to 1870 but three ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... admit that we have made something that answers to progress in material things, but I deny that we have made any advance in moral attainment. A few rise above the average level, for the rest it is the old story of cycles of abortive effort with no lasting good to the race. We may theorize and idealize as we like," he went on to say, "but Bebel is right when he tells us that 'every man is the product of his times and ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... was withdrawn from Canada in the midst of this small and abortive mutiny. For sixteen years, all told, this gallant soldier of Wolfe's army had administered the country he helped to conquer, and no Governor before or since has earned a more deserving fame. Quebec and Montreal strove to outdo ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... BOLETUS EDULIS. Pileus cushion-like, dry, brown-gray or drab, thick. Flesh white, unchangeable. Tubes white-yellow to green. Stem very thick, often abortive in shape, bulbous at ...
— Mushrooms of America, Edible and Poisonous • Anonymous
... carrying on war, by establishing the odious "gabelle" on salt, and other imposts. John hoped with his new army to drive the English completely out of the country. Petty war began again on all the frontiers,—an abortive attack on Calais, a guerilla warfare in Brittany, slight fighting also in Guienne. Edward in 1335 landed at Calais, but was recalled to pacify Scotland; Charles of Navarre and the Duke of Lancaster were on the Breton border; the Black Prince sailed for Bordeaux. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... granules, of the same size and appearance as the remaining pro-nucleus. They are detached cell-buds; their separation from the large mother-cell takes place in the same way as in ordinary "indirect cell-division." Hence, the polar cells are probably to be conceived as "abortive ova," or "rudimentary ova," which proceed from a simple original ovum by cleavage in the same way that several sperm-cells arise from one "sperm-mother-cell," in reproduction from sperm. The male sperm-cells in the testicles must undergo similar changes in view of the coming ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... and to trust once more to my recollections, aided by the diary which I kept at the time. A few extracts from the latter will carry me on to those scenes which are indelibly fixed in every detail upon my memory. I proceed, then, from the morning which followed our abortive chase of the convict and our other strange experiences ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... affixed a reputable appellation to such an error. And as a father ought not to contemn his son, if he has any defect, in the same manner we ought not [to contemn] our friend. The father calls his squinting boy a pretty leering rogue; and if any man has a little despicable brat, such as the abortive Sisyphus formerly was, he calls it a sweet moppet; this [child] with distorted legs, [the father] in a fondling voice calls one of the Vari; and another, who is club-footed, he calls a Scaurus. [Thus, does] this friend of yours live more sparingly than ordinarily? Let him be styled a man of frugality. ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... using. But I was not excited about being held up on the Caraquet road,—after I'd once been to Skunk's Misery. I was not red-hot about hurrying there, either; I wanted to give Hutton time to get back to his lair and feel easy about pursuit after his abortive raid. "I expect we'll worry along," I said idly. "Gimme that clean ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... to them is proved by the desperate but abortive attempts they made to break through in the second phase ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... deputation to ask counsel of the old sage. He, if any one, would find some means of averting or, at any rate, mitigating the fearful calamity impending over the town and country, and against which prayer, sacrifice, processions, and pilgrimages had proved abortive. They were quite resolved to leave no means untried, not even if heathen magic should ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... w-with nine-ninet-teen out of t-twenty.' — 'And affected stuttering for humour: replied our landlord, tho', God knows, there is an affinity betwixt them.' It seems, this wag, after having made some abortive attempts in plain speaking, had recourse to this defect, by means of which he frequently extorted the laugh of the company, without the least expence of genius; and that imperfection, which he had at first ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... disinterestedness of Hamilton pervaded the assembly with all the power of his fascinating manners. The flashing eloquence of Gouverneur Morris recalled the dangers of anarchy, which must be accepted as the alternative of an abortive experiment. The calm, clear, statesmanlike views of Madison, the searching and profound expositions of King, the prudent influence of Franklin, at length ruled ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... claim the reader's attention. The sketches of American life and tendencies, both Northern and Southern, are given with discrimination and truth. The dying scene, which closes the First Part, seems to us nobly wrought. The "death-bed hymn" of the slaves sounds a pathetic wail over an abortive life shivering on the brink of the Unknown. In the Second Part we find less of the color and music of a poem, and more of the rapid movement of a drama. The doom of Slavery upon the master now comes into full relief. The characters of Herbert and his father are favorable specimens ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... some time she was lost in thought. This man was keen enough of wit to know the price at which her favours were bought; brave enough not to flinch, or to make abortive effort to avoid his fate. Her whole experience brought feeling of disgust toward men, when once satiated. With this man the chord of pity was touched. The honoured sleeves were wet with the honoured tears as she made answer to the plea. Without slightest ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... consequently, they have from fifteen to thirty thousand francs per annum. They have the peculiar privilege of receiving their salary, and the prerogative of "not opposing" the promulgation of the laws. They are all illustrious personages."[2] This is not an "abortive Senate,"[3] like that of Napoleon the uncle; this is a genuine Senate; the marshals are members, and the ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... absence of all effective machinery of Government, I perceive that it would be quite abortive to attempt to raise a revenue from licences to dig for gold in that region. Indeed, as Her Majesty's Government do not at present look for a revenue from this distant quarter of the British dominions, so neither are they prepared to incur any, expense on account of it. ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... reasons were not the only factors in his downfall. He was beaten by the Allied morale, and also by the Allied strategy. Von Kluck, the Commander of the German right, hurrying on in an abortive pursuit of the British Army, found that he was outflanked by the army of Gallieni, which, stronger than his own, threatened his line of communications. To press on towards Paris would have been suicidal. To linger in his present ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... continued to treat him like a baby. She had never got over examining his face and his ears and his fingernails to make sure that he had cleaned them properly. He couldn't so much as comb his hair to suit her; all through his abortive attempt at college, and later at a job, she had done it ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... baulked by its rugged steepness and the fire of the Afghans holding the sungahs on its face. Sir Frederick Roberts had to recognise that the direct attack by so weak a force unaided by a diversion, could not succeed, and he ordered further efforts to be deferred. The casualties of the abortive attempt included three officers, one of whom, Major Cook, V.C. of the Goorkhas, than whom the British army contained no better soldier, died of his wound. Macpherson was directed to hold the ground he had won, including ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... at Washington as practically closing the submarine controversy, and the German war-cloud, which had assumed serious proportions, gradually passed away. ABORTIVE REVOLT IN IRELAND. ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... rattle that accompanied these words, the warder bowed and went. Jacques Collin clung wildly to this hope; but when he saw the doctor and the governor come in together, he perceived that the attempt was abortive, and coolly awaited the upshot of the visit, holding out his wrist for the doctor to ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... purpose of secession by arms against the force which the United States brought to bear against them. Were their arms victorious? If they were, then their secession was an accomplished fact. If not, it was nothing more than an abortive attempt—a purpose unfulfilled. They failed to maintain their ground by force of arms. In other words, they failed to secede. But if," he concluded, "the Southern States did go out of the Union, it would make those in the South who resisted the Confederacy guilty of treason to an independent ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... of London deprives the King of every expedient and every hope, on this subject, by its invariable resolution to regard and treat the Americans as its subjects. Such a resolution renders abortive every exertion, that may be made for obtaining peace. It utterly destroys the plan of the two mediating powers, since it decides, in the most peremptory manner, the question which is the subject of dispute, and the direct or indirect decision of which should be ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... with respect to the fair orphan having thus proved abortive, he lost no time in bewailing his miscarriage, but had immediate recourse to other means of improving his small fortune, which, at this period, amounted to near two hundred pounds. Whatever inclination he had to resume the character he had ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... while long on zeal are shy on boodle. Even Jehovah Boanerges Cranfill, the champion leg elongator of the universe, finds it hard work to keep fat in the Baptist field—must add professional beggary to his schemes of predacity. You may tie your abortive little paper to the tail of the "Ape," but that animal is too weak in the hinder legs to pull it out of a financial hole. Go plug yourself. Shuck your long-tailed hand-me-down Albert Edward, trade your paper for a double-shovel plow, gird ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... President, if fairly judged, was on the whole very moderate. He soon treated it with contempt, and it was quite evident that there was no national enthusiasm behind it. The Socialist party was growing rapidly in the great towns; in June, 1849, there was an abortive Socialist insurrection in Paris, and a somewhat more formidable one at Lyons. They were easily put down, but the Socialists captured a great part of the representation of Paris, and they succeeded ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... peaches. Whenever a tree, like the peach tree or the pecan or the black walnut, sets its fruit in the spring, you will find that there are cross-pollinated and self-pollinated fruits. These will begin to drop their nuts or their fruit at definite stages. Furthermore we will find the abortive seeds are not one size. This means that there were definite stages of the pollination and of the fertilization. I should like to work that up and find what ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... quiet Quaker conference, where, for hours perhaps, nobody opens his mouth. It now bore an aspect of a political club meeting. But it was a quiet, peaceful, obedient debating society. It has left the record of its abortive undertakings in the "Kogisho Nishi" or journal of "Parliament." The Kogisho was dissolved in the year of its birth. And the indifference of the public about its dissolution proves how small an influence it ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... tact—a problem of protuberant eyes and paralyzing self-consciousness, of unnatural silences and then unexpected attempts at speech that died in painful rasps and gurgles, of stubbing toes and nudging elbows, of a centipedal supply of arms and legs that interfered with abortive and conscience-stricken attempts at courtesy, and above all an interest in the weave of the carpet that was at once a mania and an epidemic—but by the time supper was well under way, things, in the language of Roger, had begun to hum, and by the time ...
— When the Yule Log Burns - A Christmas Story • Leona Dalrymple
... But they don't mean to have them. They mean to be self-governing in their spiritual lives. And this intention is the half-perceived current which runs through our age and galvanizes so many queer revolts. It would be interesting to trace out the forms it has taken, the abortive cults it has tried and abandoned. In another connection I pointed to autonomy as the hope of syndicalism. It would not be difficult to find a similar assertion in the feminist agitation. From Mrs. Gilman's profound objections against a "man-made" world to the lady who would like to vote about her ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... the comprehension of the changes effected in that period of transition, for which Hawke and Rodney stand, to recognize the distinctive lesson of each of these two abortive actions, which together may be said to fix the zero of the scale by which the progress of the eighteenth century is denoted. They have a relation to the past as well as to the future, standing far below the level of the ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... seemed to Eustace, who knew "Jemima's Vow" and also her previous abortive work almost by heart, that he was very intimately acquainted with Augusta, and as he was walking home that May evening, he was reflecting sadly enough of all that he had lost through that cruel shipwreck. He had lost Augusta, and, what was more, he had lost his uncle and his uncle's vast fortune. ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... joy, by defamation praise; To this collect each faculty of face, And every feat perform of sly grimace; 170 Let the grave sneer sarcastic speak thee shrewd; The smutty joke ridiculously lewd; And the loud laugh, through all its changes rung, Applaud the abortive sallies of her tongue; Enroll'd a member in the sacred list, Soon shalt thou sharp in company at whist; Her midnight rites and revels regulate, Priest of her love, and demon ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... intelligence; but the moment the life is contracted by mining, millwork, or any oppressive and monotonous labour, the accents and phrases become debased. It is part of the popular folly of the day to find pleasure in trying to write and spell these abortive, crippled, and more or less brutal forms ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... he was with newly-regained possessions, the yeoman had made but abortive attempts to detach the timepiece; and Sam, with a dawning grin on his countenance, now mounted on a chair, officiously held by one of the guests, and speedily handed ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... detained by a debt of twenty pounds, as if I owed a thousand. Notwithstanding all my representations, he would not part with one shilling over the net sum which I at first stipulated; so that all my measures were rendered abortive, and I found it altogether impracticable to execute those resolutions I ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... destroyed, and the colonists themselves scalped and murdered by the French and their Indian allies. French spies gained early intelligence of every movement contemplated by the British, and were thus, in many cases, the means of rendering those movements abortive. The grand British scheme of the year, however, was the reduction of Louisburg, in furtherance of which an armament such had never before been collected in the British Colonies, assembled at Halifax. This ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... failed, and the annexation of Texas was the annexation of a foreign republic. The so-called State of Transylvania and State of Franklin had been attempted secessions of western counties of the original states of Virginia and North Carolina, respectively, and their abortive attempts at admission addressed to the Continental Congress, and not to the Congress of the United States. With full right, then, did California, by express resolution spreading the explanation upon the minutes of her constitutional convention[7], avowedly place upon her great ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... Public interest in the abortive attempt to reinstate Dom Corria De Sylva as President was waning rapidly when it was fanned into fresh activity by news that reached this port to-day. It appears that on the 31st ulto. a daring effort was made to free De Sylva, who, with certain other ministers ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... his utmost to justify the actions of Hudson Lowe, but no one can read his work without feeling that the historian was conscious all through of an abortive task. He reproduces in vain the instructions and correspondence between Lowe and his Government, and the letters and conversations with Napoleon and members of his household, and deduces from these that the Governor could not have acted otherwise ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... copulating with other creatures shall perish as the brute beasts by whom they were begotten, not having a reasonable soul nor any breath of the Almighty infused into them; and such can never be capable of resurrection. And the same is also true of imperfect and abortive births. ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... farces just mentioned, and notice on the one hand the rather amorphous production which, during the first thirty years of Elizabeth, represented the influence of a growing taste for personal and lively dramatic story on the somewhat arid soil of the Morality and Interlude, and, on the other, the abortive attempt to introduce the regular Senecan tragedy—an attempt which almost immediately broke down and disappeared, whelmed in the abundance of chronicle-play and melodrama. And finally we shall show how the two rival schools of the university ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... in its wild state has been considered as a productive and nutritive grass; it grows best in moist places; but the seeds have been found in general abortive, and the grass consequently only to be propagated by planting the roots, a trouble by far too great to succeed to any extent.—See ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... a long succession of them, filled with melancholy evidences of incapacity and defeat in almost every department of human activity—plans of abortive military campaigns, prospectuses of moribund business enterprises, architectural and engineering drawings of structures never to be reared, charts, models, unfinished musical scores, finally a huge papier-mache globe ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... ammunition, which were built upon a ship of vast size; within the castles were 200 Turks, who were intended to distract the attention of the defendants by continually pouring in all sorts of artificial fireworks. This device was however abortive, as Jacome Leite went by night in two small vessels with twenty men, and though discovered he succeeded in setting the floating castle on fire, a great part of which blew up with all the Turks, and the remainder of the ship burnt with so great a flame that the enemy was seen ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... pleased with Baudin's work.* (* Girard, writing in 1857, stated that rumours about Baudin's conduct, circulated before the arrival of Le Geographe, induced the public to believe that the expedition had been abortive, without useful results, and that it was to the interest of the Government to forget all about it. F. Peron, page 46. But Girard cites no authority for the statement, and as he was not born in 1804, he is not himself an authoritative witness. ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... distance, and you find them not, and will be surprised when your western friend tells you that these are the voices of the prairie hens, miles away, holding their annual convention, the queer cuckooing not being loving sounds, but notes of war—abortive attempts at crowing, which the rival males set up as they prepare to do ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... enough of the story was now known, to ascertain that it came from Robertson; and from the date, it appeared to have been written about the time when Andrew Wilson (called for a nickname Handie Dandie) and he were meditating their first abortive attempt to escape, which miscarried in the manner mentioned in the beginning of ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the standard of their patron, as Indian chiefs in the American wars brought the tomahawks of their tribes to the standard of France or England. Celtic independence greatly contributed to the general perpetuation of anarchy in Scotland, to the backwardness of Scotch civilization, and to the abortive weakness of the Parliamentary institutions. Union with the more powerful kingdom at last supplied the force requisite for the taming of the Celt. Highlanders, at the bidding of Chatham's genius, became the soldiers, and are now the pet soldiers, of the British monarchy. A Hanoverian tailor with ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... were to be first rased from his book (as just so much of nothing to the purpose) how little would remain to give the trouble of an answer! To which let me add, that the spirit or genius, which animates the whole, is plainly perceived to be nothing else but the abortive malice of an old neglected man,[8] who hath long lain under the extremes of obloquy, poverty and contempt; that have soured his temper, and made him fearless. But where is the merit of being bold, to a man that is secure of impunity to his person, and is past apprehension of anything else? ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... remarked in reply to the toast of his health at the farewell dinner given to celebrate his removal to London, "I cannot speak; if I could, I should not have left you." But if he could not speak he could write, and the establishment of Blackwood's Magazine, after its first abortive numbers, gave him scope. "The scorpion which delighteth to sting the faces of men," as he or Wilson describes himself in the Chaldee Manuscript (for the passage is beyond Hogg's part), certainly justified the description. As to this famous Manuscript, the late Professor Ferrier undoubtedly ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... and science had this enterprise been concerted, that at the very moment when it assumed a specific direction, the enemy was no longer enabled to render it abortive. As the march was now to be bent towards the Danube, notice was given for the Prussians, Palatines, and Hessians, who were stationed on the Rhine, to order their march so as to join the main body in its progress. At the same time directions were sent to accelerate ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... doctor permitted it, they would sit and chat with me for half an hour or so before retiring to their cabins, by which means I gradually acquired all the missing links in the story of the squadron's abortive cruise. ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... extraordinary degree, of this custom of putting the natural demand for amusement out of sight, as some untidy housekeepers put dust, and pretending that it was swept away. And yet it was ministered to, in a dull and abortive manner, by all who made this feint. Looking in at what is called in Dullborough 'the serious bookseller's,' where, in my childhood, I had studied the faces of numbers of gentlemen depicted in rostrums with a gaslight on each side ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... sections of Germany the special situation of the peasants seems to have led to similar conditions. We know a charming region in Southwest Germany, where, in the garden of every peasant, there stands the so-called "Sevenbaum," whose properties are applied to abortive purposes. In another district of the same country the regular two-child system prevails among the peasants: they do not wish to divide the places. Moreover, striking is the measure in which literature, that treats with and recommends the means of "facultative sterility," increases ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... Massachusetts to enter on such an undertaking so prolonged the discussion that the war was over before a decision was reached; but Connecticut seized the Dutch lands at Hartford, and Roger Ludlow, who had moved to Fairfield from Windsor after 1640, began an abortive military campaign of his own. The situation remained unchanged as long as the Dutch held New Netherland, and the region between Greenwich and the Bronx continued to be what it had been from the beginning of settlement, a territory occupied only by Indians and a few straggling ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... at the time of the newspaper rumours (they were vague and soon died out) of an abortive military conspiracy in Russia, I remembered the glimpse I had of that motionless group with its central figure. No details ever came out, but it was known that the revolutionary parties abroad had given their assistance, had sent emissaries in advance, ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... French king. The negotiations were conducted through the Bishop of Tarbes,[116] and at the first conference the Bishop raised a question in the name of his government, on the validity of the papal dispensation granted by Julius the Second, to legalise the marriage from which she was sprung. The abortive marriage Scheme perished in its birth, but the doubt which had been raised could not perish with it. Doubt on such a subject once mooted might not be left unresolved, even if the raising it thus publicly had not itself destroyed the frail chance of an undisputed succession. If the relations of Henry ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... zealots whose names stand on the missionary rolls of his Order. His companions were Masse, Daniel, Davost, De Nou, and the Father Superior, Le Jeune. Masse was the same priest who had been the companion of Father Biard in the abortive mission of Acadia. [ See "Pioneers of France in the New World." ] By reason of his useful qualities, Le Jeune nicknamed him "le Pre Utile." At present, his special function was the care of the pigs and cows, which he kept in the inclosure around the buildings, lest they should ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... meet women with an inherent bias for politics; and those are not, as a rule, the highest type of the sex—it is only occasionally that they are so. The interest most women feel in politics is secondary, factitious, engrafted on them by the men nearest to them. Women are not abortive men; they are a distinct creation. The eye and the ear, though both belonging to the same body, are each, in a certain sense, a distinct creation. A body endowed with four ears might hear remarkably ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... then 'twixt dark smoke and forked Fires that take the shape of serpents, Fills the trembling air with horror. I, too, gave that thunder voice, So that all men heard the promise, But the lightning bolt was wanting. Yes, ah me! it proved abortive, And before it touched the earth Was by dallying winds made sport of. No, it is not death that grieves me, Even a death of such dishonour, 'Tis because at last are ended, In my youth's fresh opening blossom, My offences. Life I wish for To begin from this day forward ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... diplomatic intervention became necessary to the protection of the interests in the American claim of Alsop and Company against the Government of Chile. The Government of Chile had frequently admitted obligation in the case and had promised this Government to settle. There had been two abortive attempts to do so through arbitral commissions, which failed through lack of jurisdiction. Now, happily, as the result of the recent diplomatic negotiations, the Governments of the United States and of Chile, actuated by the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... Italian troops at Dogali, killing more than 400 of them. Reinforcements were sent from Italy, whilst in the autumn the British government stepped in and tried to mediate by means of a mission under Mr (afterwards Sir Gerald) Portal. His mission, however proved abortive, and after many difficulties and dangers he returned to Egypt at the end of the year. In April 1888 the Italian forces, numbering over 20,000 men, came into touch with the Abyssinian army; but negotiations took the place of fighting, with the result that both forces retired, the Italians only leaving ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... finished. It was quite an affecting sight, I used to think, to see him with the kite when it was up a great height in the air. What he had told me, in his room, about his belief in its disseminating the statements pasted on it, which were nothing but old leaves of abortive Memorials, might have been a fancy with him sometimes; but not when he was out, looking up at the kite in the sky, and feeling it pull and tug at his hand. He never looked so serene as he did then. I used to fancy, as I ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... Government. In October raiding parties were sent into New England, and an effort was made to set fire to New York City in retaliation for the destruction of Southern property by order of Federal generals. These efforts proved abortive, perhaps adding many votes to the majority with which Lincoln was reelected. And when the Confederate Congress reassembled in November the fortunes of the South were recognized as almost past remedy. Georgia did not rise to overwhelm Sherman; the supplies ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... convex of Fire, Outrageous to devour, immures us round Ninefold, and gates of burning Adamant Barr'd over us prohibit all egress. These past, if any pass, the void profound Of unessential Night receives him next Wide gaping, and with utter loss of being 440 Threatens him, plung'd in that abortive gulf. If thence he scape into what ever world, Or unknown Region, what remains him less Then unknown dangers and as hard escape. But I should ill become this Throne, O Peers, And this Imperial Sov'ranty, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... barbarism, and instil into their minds the pure lessons of Christianity; and at the same time admonished them to trade equitably, and take no advantage of their untutored simplicity. It does not appear that much attention was paid to either of these injunctions, or if there was, the efforts proved as abortive as those they made to discover the western passage. The moral wilderness still remains around their settlements on the East Maine, while those of the brethren on the opposite coast of Labrador bloom and blossom ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous
... an effort to thank the Hakim, but his heart was too full, and the indistinct sounds which accompanied his abortive attempts to reply induced the kind physician to desist from his premature endeavours at consolation. He left his new domestic, or guest, in quiet, to indulge his sorrows, and having commanded all the necessary preparations for their departure on the morning, ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... hoped only temporarily, with his wife's property of Asbies, and in the autumn of 1580 he offered to pay off the mortgage; but his brother-in-law, Lambert, retorted that other sums were owing, and he would accept all or none. The negotiation, which was the beginning of much litigation, thus proved abortive. Through 1585 and 1586 a creditor, John Brown, was embarrassingly importunate, and, after obtaining a writ of distraint, Brown informed the local court that the debtor had no goods on which distraint could be levied. {12b} ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... I write with the imbecile idea of rendering those preparations abortive. No, I am not so mad. My sole view is to explain the motive of my conduct in a particular instance, and to obviate the accusation of treachery which may be ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... to adopt some different course of action. Shalmaneser had discovered during his abortive campaign that there were discords and jealousies among the various Phoenician cities; that none of them submitted without repugnance to the authority of Tyre, and that Sidon especially had an ancient ground of quarrel with her more powerful sister, and ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... first design, my friend, has proved abortive; Still there remains an after-game to play; My troops are mounted; Let but Sempronius head us in our flight, We'll force the gate where Marcus keeps his guard, And hew down all that would oppose our passage. A day will bring ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... imitated with more or less ingenuity. Happily the error is recognised, as far as the best workmanship is concerned, in France. The legitimate imitator's art no longer includes that of depicting wear and brownness, rendering abortive so much excellent work. ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... the shelving rocks and did not come in until the next morning. We were so fortunate as to find our tent, and after much difficulty pitched it under an oak-tree. All efforts to light a fire and keep it blazing proving abortive, we spread our blankets upon the ground and endeavoured to sleep, although we could feel the cold streams of water running through the tent and between and ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... property of time, space, or matter. It belongs essentially to the keeping of accounts, but is merely an incident to the transactions of trade. Nature has no partiality for the number 10; and the attempt to shackle her freedom with them [decimal gradations], will for ever prove abortive.' And again: 'To the mensuration of the surface and the solid, the number 10 is of little more use than any other. If decimal arithmetic is incompetent to give the dimensions of most artificial forms, the square and the cube, still more incompetent is it to give the circumference, the area, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... Cleopatre of Marmontel, he fancied that he could reproduce the hissing of the asp, just as the automaton invented for the purpose by Vaucanson might have done it. The abortive effort made them laugh all the evening. The ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... accomplices they tortured horribly; and did not even give 'em the honour of being beheaded on Tower Hall,—they being sent away as common traitors to Old Palace Yard (close to the scene of their desperately meditated but fortunately abortive crime), and there half-hanged, cut down while yet warm, disembowelled, their Hearts and Inwards taken out and burnt by Gregory (that was hangman then, and that, as Gregory Brandon, had a coat-of-arms given him as a gentleman, through a fraud practised upon Garter King), and their mangled ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... Science, that the summer figs of Paris, in Provence, Italy, and Malta, have all perfect stamina, and ripen not only their fruits, but their seed; from which seed other fig-trees are raised; but that the stamina of the autumnal figs are abortive, perhaps owing to the want of due warmth. Mr. Milne, in his Botanical Dictionary (art. Caprification), says, that the cultivated fig-trees have a few male flowers placed above the female within the same covering or receptacle; ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... 1775 he was allowed to give up law, not, however, to return to theology, but to begin the study of medicine. But medicine, though at first it seemed more attractive, failed, like law, to call forth his full energies. In the mean time another interference on the part of the Duke proved even more abortive, and to a certain extent determined the path which Schiller's genius was to take in life. The Duke had prohibited all German classics at his Academy; the boys, nevertheless, succeeded in forming a secret library, and Schiller read the works of Klopstock, Klinger, Lessing, Goethe, and Wieland's ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... handsome edifice is on a scale to accommodate three or four times the present population. It was first opened in the year 1831: and the commissioners for improving the town endeavoured to establish a permanent market for cattle, &c., to be held in the large open space in front, but the attempt proved abortive—Newport lying so much more conveniently for the general resort of agriculturists and tradesmen from every quarter of the island.—It is remarkable, however, considering the spirit of the inhabitants for public improvements, that it should have ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon
... there were signs that at some period of the development of the whale it had possessed a double row of teeth, because at the bottom of these upper sockets we found in a few cases what seemed to be an abortive tooth, not one that was growing, because they had no roots, but a survival of teeth that had once been perfect and useful, but from disuse, or lack of necessity for them, had gradually ceased to come to maturity. The ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... all nature testifies, the male and female principles which together created the universe, the infinite father and mother, without whom, in perfect accord and exact equality, the best government of nations has always been crippled and abortive. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... results, and there is no intelligence in present behavior. Let there be imaginative forecast but no attention to the conditions upon which its attainment depends, and there is self-deception or idle dreaming—abortive intelligence. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... its commencement is laid out with an intention that it shall be populous. The houses are not all built at once, but there are the places allocated for them. The streets are not made, but there are the spaces. Many an abortive attempt at municipal greatness has so been made and then all but abandoned. There are wretched villages, with huge, straggling parallel ways, which will never grow into towns. They are the failures—failures in which the pioneers of civilization, ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... innumerable. Germany had become, to revive a comparison then much in vogue, an irresolute Hamlet, sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. Talk, talk, everywhere, and nowhere the strong hand of constructive statesmanship. And so came the abortive revolution of 1848, with its ensuing disgusts, until finally the man of destiny appeared and conducted affairs, by way of Sadowa and Sedan, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Lower Chinese, and the country would then, with the same quantity of food, support a greater population. But to effect this must always be a most difficult, and, every friend to humanity will hope, an abortive attempt. Nothing is so common as to hear of encouragements that ought to be given to population. If the tendency of mankind to increase be so great as I have represented it to be, it may appear strange that ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... little history and grammar, and thus a little of everything. How many times have I regarded with poignant compassion that sad work of nature, mutilated by society! How many times have I followed in the darkness the pale and vacillating gleams of a spark flickering in abortive life! How many times have I tried to revive the fire that smouldered under those ashes! Alas! her long hair was the color of ashes, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... is not because Bodoni printed better than our popular printers—that his books upon vellum are more beautiful than those produced by the London presses—but that the Italian vellum (made of the abortive calf) is, in general, more white and delicate. There is not, perhaps, a lovelier little VELLUM BOOK in existence than the Castle of Otranto, printed by Bodoni in 1796, 8vo. A copy of this, with the plates worked on white satin, was in the collection of Mr. G.G. Mills; ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... weapons against which the King of Greece and his Government had nothing to oppose. They tried to explain the true nature of the abortive Benazet negotiation, showing that, if there was any breach of faith, it was not on their part; they denounced the falsehoods and the exaggerations relating to the suppression of the seditious outbreak; they asked that a mixed Commission should be appointed to conduct an impartial inquiry ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... vulnerable by human passion, however long and well guarded, still vulnerable,—liable, at last, to a union with Instinct. Passion obscures both Insight and Forecast. All effort to elevate Instinct to Idealism is abortive, the laws of their being not coinciding (in the early stage of the existence of the one). Instinct is either alarmed, and takes refuge in Superstition or Custom, or is left helpless to human charity, or given over ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... town, and sometimes out on the plain I lay down with my day dreams in the sagebrush. Pale herds of antelope were in the distance, and near by the demure prairie-dogs sat up and scrutinized me. Steve, Trampas, the riot of horsemen, my lost trunk, Uncle Hughey, with his abortive brides—all things merged in my thoughts in a huge, delicious indifference. It was like swimming slowly at random in an ocean that was smooth, and neither too cool nor too warm. And before I knew it, five lazy imperceptible hours had gone thus. There was the Union ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... northern parts of the continent, had been among the first adventurers to North America. Their voyages of discovery are of a very early date, and their attempts to establish a colony were among the first which were made. After several abortive efforts, a permanent settlement was made in Canada, in the year 1604, and the foundation of Quebec was laid in the year 1608. In November 1603, Henry IV. appointed De Mont lieutenant-general of that part of the territory ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... Protestants, were laid out on the great rivers of the colony. As they were located in the middle region, east of the fall line, among pine barrens, or in malarial lands in the southern corner of the colony, they all proved abortive as towns, except Orangeburg[96:5] on the North Edisto, where German redemptioners made a settlement. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who came to Williamsburg, on Black River, suffered hardships; as did the Swiss ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... the literary spirit of heathen Greece and the Christian scholarship of the time of Constantine and his immediate successors, which grew up very gradually, was the result of the Oriental superstitions which distorted Christianity and disturbed the old philosophy. The abortive attempt of the Emperor Julian to create a reaction in favor of heathenism was the cause of the open antagonism between the classical and Christian forms of literature. The church, however, was soon enabled not only to dictate its own rules of literary criticism, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... different effect, and I have often been forcibly struck by an emphatical description of damnation, when the spirit is represented as continually hovering with abortive eagerness round the defiled body, unable to enjoy any thing without the organs of sense. Yet, to their senses, are women made slaves, because it is by their sensibility ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... horizon of literature and science since the Peace —the poems of Schiller, Goethe, and Byron, the prose writings of Scott, Jean-Paul, Berzelius, Davy, Cuvier, Lamartine, and many more. They warmed themselves beside these great hearthfires; they tried their powers in abortive creations, in work laid aside and taken up again with new glow of enthusiasm. Incessantly they worked with the unwearied vitality of youth; comrades in poverty, comrades in the consuming love of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... factionalism. But he is most attracted by prurient sexual adventures. A vulgar work obviously meant to appeal to a neurotic taste for sexuality, it includes no attack on Swift as it explores at length some topics to which Gulliver in his memoirs only tangentially alludes. The second abortive effort, an animal satire of exotic talking fowl, also resembles Swift's satire as it touches on several similar topics—the hypocrisy of the people, the scepticism of their nobility, the love of luxury of the higher clergy—but again because it includes no comment on Swift's personal ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... your foot again. Pleasant to pass along this extensive walk, watching the surf-wave;—how sometimes it seems to make a feint of breaking, but dies away ineffectually, merely kissing the strand; then, after many such abortive efforts, it gathers itself, and forms a high wall, and rolls onward, heightening and heightening, without foam at the summit of the green line, and at last throws itself fiercely on the beach, with a loud roar, the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... there should be two metropolitan provinces, of York and London (which he knew as the old Roman capitals of Britain), and that each should consist of twelve episcopal sees. Paulinus now went to York in furtherance of this comprehensive but abortive scheme. A miraculous escape from assassination, or what was reputed one, gave the Roman monk a hold over Eadwine's mind; but the king decided to put off his conversion till he had tried the efficacy of the new faith by a practical appeal. He went on an expedition against ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... carried out of the town.[3] Josephus expatiates on the terrible suffering, and again and again he denounces the iniquity of the Zealots, who continued the resistance. "No age had a generation more fruitful in wickedness; they confessed that they were the slaves, the scum, the spurious and abortive offspring of our nation." John committed the heinous sacrilege of using the oil preserved in the Temple vessels for the starving soldiers. "I suppose," says the ex-priest writing in the Roman palace, "that had the Romans made any longer delay in attacking these abandoned men, the city would ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... was held on Egyptian affairs, but was abortive; and Mr. Gladstone while announcing that he wished to get out of Egypt as soon as circumstances would allow, admitted that institutions, however good, were not likely to survive the withdrawal of our troops. Lord Northbrook was next despatched ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... aberration, abeyance, abhorrent, abject, abjure, aboriginal, abortive, abrade, abrasion, abrogate, absolution, abstemious, abstention, abstruse, accelerate, accentuate, acceptation, accessary, accession, accessory, acclamation, acclivity, accolade, accomplice, accost, acerbity, acetic, achromatic, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... the earlier portion of General Pepe's work, to the exclusion of its latter chapters. We can take but little interest in Neapolitan history since 1815, in the abortive revolutionary struggles and manoeuvres of the Carbonari and other would-be liberators. Nor do the ample details given by the general greatly increase our respect for Italian patriotism; whilst we trace more than one discrepancy between the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... information of Captain Smith, who had frequently visited them, an outlet must surely be found. The choice of this crew, little accustomed to discipline, could not be doubtful. In order not to render the outlay of the Company completely abortive, Hudson was obliged to make for the Faroe Islands, to descend southward as low as 44 degrees, and to search on the coast of America for the strait, of the existence of which he had been assured. On July 18th, he disembarked on the continent, in order to replace his foremast, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... is tainted.... The restored Basilica is incredibly splendid. It seems a last pompous effort of formal Catholicism, and there are few more striking emblems of later Rome—the Rome foredoomed to see Victor Emmanuel in the Quirinal, the Rome of abortive councils and unheeded anathemas. It rises there, gorgeous and useless, on its miasmatic site, with an air of conscious bravado—a florid advertisement of the superabundance of faith. Within it's magnificent, and its magnificence has no shabby spots—a rare ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... hook-nosed fellow, who eyed us askance and was obviously glad when Holmes's architectural studies had come to an end. I could not see that in either case Holmes had come upon the clue for which he was searching. Only at the third did our visit prove abortive. The outer door would not open to our knock, and nothing more substantial than a torrent of bad language came from behind it. "I don't care who you are. You can go to blazes!" roared the angry voice. "To-morrow's the exam, and I won't be drawn ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
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