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Elemental   /ˌɛləmˈɛntəl/  /ˌɛləmˈɛnəl/   Listen
Elemental

adjective
1.
Relating to or being an element.
2.
Relating to severe atmospheric conditions.
3.
Of or being the essential or basic part.  Synonyms: elementary, primary.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Elemental" Quotes from Famous Books



... universe. They feel, too, a sense of deep gratitude to one who has shown them how divine is the soil under foot—veritable star-dust from the gardens of the Eternal. He has made us feel at one with the whole cosmos, not only with bird and tree, and rock and flower, but also with the elemental forces, the powers which are friendly or unfriendly according as we put ourselves in right or wrong relations with them. He has shown us the divine in the common and the near at hand; that heaven lies about us here in this world; that the glorious and the miraculous are not to be sought ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus

... Mingles the romance of the forest with the romance of man's heart, making a story that is big and elemental, while not lacking in sweetness and tenderness. It is an epic of the life of the lumberman of the great forest of the Northwest, permeated by out of door freshness, and the glory of the ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.

... orders of life, or that they are at least closely related, seems to be indicated by the absence from the entire language of any general term for God. True, there are many beings in Zuni Mythology godlike in attributes, anthropomorphic, monstrous, and elemental, which are known as the "Finishers or makers of the paths of life," while the most superior of all is called the "Holder of the paths (of our lives)," Ha[']-no-o-na wi-la-po-na. Not only these gods, but all supernatural ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing

... But perhaps all these comrades of mine struggled just like me and sought something new, a path in life of their own, and like me were brought by force of circumstances, society, and race—by that elemental force against which man is powerless—to the condition I am in," said he to himself in moments of humility; and after living some time in Moscow he no longer despised, but began to grow fond of, to respect, and to pity his comrades in destiny, as ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... time. Grizzle knew, although he himself did not, that he had not of late been eating so well; and he had never quite recovered his exertions in Lord Lick-my-loof's harvest-fields. Now, for the first time in his life, he began to find his strength unequal to elemental war. But he laughed at the idea, and held on. The wind was right in his face, and the cold was bitter. Nor was there within him, though plenty of courage, good spirits enough to supply any lack of physical energy. His breath grew short, and his head began to ache. He longed for home that ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... in the nature of things to become at the outset Byronic, and Byronism was not, of course, in reality so much a pessimism about civilised things as an optimism about savage things. This great revolt on behalf of the elemental which Keats and Shelley represented was bound first of all to occur. Robert Browning junior had to be a part of it, and Robert Browning senior had to go back to his water colours and the faultless couplets of Pope with the full sense of ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... primordial. It was no place for trivial ideas and thoughts of little things. The mind harked back unconsciously to the broad, simpler, basic emotions, the fundamental instincts of the race. The huge spaces of earth and air and water carried with them a feeling of kindly but enormous force—elemental force, fresh, untutored, new, and young. There was buoyancy in it; a fine, breathless sense of uplifting and exhilaration; a sensation as of bigness and a return to the homely, human, natural life, to the primitive old impulses, irresistible, changeless, ...
— Blix • Frank Norris

... That's neither here nor there. But—Enoch, if anybody should cut my right hand off—Enoch"—Her voice fell brokenly. She was a New England woman, accustomed neither to analyze nor talk. She could only suffer in the elemental way of dumb things who sometimes need a language of the heart. One thing she knew. The man was hers; and if she reft herself away from him, ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown

... arrive, in stormy January weather; which continued wildly blowing for weeks; forbidding all egress Westward, especially for invalids. These elemental tumults, and blustering wars of sea and sky, with nothing but the misty solitude of Madeira in the distance, formed a very discouraging outlook. In the mean while Falmouth itself had offered so many resources, and seemed so tolerable in climate and otherwise, while this wintry ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... judge the values of life according to material advantage ... German life is heroic life. Germany is not a mere community of existence and of interests whose only function is to insure the material and cultural needs of its members, but it also represents an elemental obligation on the part of the members. The eternal Germany cannot be drawn in on the map; it does not consist of the constitution or the laws of the state. This Germany is the community of those who are solemnly ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various

... there is a second elemental condition which vitally affects the human race; and that is sex. Social organization thus comes to have a twofold aspect. On the one hand, and perhaps primarily, it is an organization of the food-quest. On the other hand, hardly less fundamentally, ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett

... There is a state of decadence, that may come to any race,—that has perhaps in every race cycles of its own for appearing,—when artists go for their ideals and inspiration, not to the divine world of the Soul, but to vast elemental goblinish limboes in the sub-human: realms the insane are at home in, and vice-victims sometimes, and drug-victims I suppose always. Denizens of these regions, I take it, are the models for some of our cubists and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... ultimate atoms in a chemical elemental atom, we did not count them throughout, one by one; when, for instance, we counted up the ultimate atoms in sodium, we dictated the number in each convenient group to Mr. Jinarajadasa, and he multiplied ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater

... fantastic dance on the hearth rug before him, the firelight flashing through the thin, gray draperies. Even the Professor breathed a little faster as the lithe figure swayed and bent and curved into wonderful lines, which melted ever into new ones. It was young, elemental joy, every step of it; sexless, no Bacchante dance, but rather a paeon of ecstasy, such as a dryad might have danced in the woods. At the climax she stood poised, her arms lifted in exultation. Then she dropped ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke

... had not suffered. There was no line or track of experience, on her broad, tranquil brow, nor was there the hushed, restrained expression left in all eyes that have deeply mourned and bitterly wept. The look was serene and youthful, with such happiness as might come from health and elemental life,—such as a Dryad might have in her songful bowers, or a Naiad plunging in the surf. But it was a shallow face, and pleased only as the sunshine does. For my part, I would rather listen to the sorrowful song of the pine-tree: that is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various

... the creation of a state within the state. Whether this estimate is true or erroneous, the concessions asked for were given, but the supplementary treaties insuring the protection of minorities are believed to have little chance of being executed, and may, it is feared, provoke manifestations of elemental passions in the countries in which ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... grass or a tall reed in the marshy places near the shore made the slightest movement. Nature was absolutely still. It was the dead, weird quiet before the awful hurricane; the quietude of death before the elemental war. ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young

... passionate uncertain hand for that divine something which they thought of as justice and right. And this was what Rousseau both partially foresaw and helped to prepare,[98] while the common politicians, like Choiseul or D'Aiguillon, played their poor game—the elemental forces rising unseen into tempest ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... This elemental struggle was to resolve itself into one between Aryan and non-Aryan—the Slav and the Finn; and this again into one between the various members of the Slavonic family; then a life-and-death struggle with Asiatic barbarism in its worst form ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele

... now appeared that tremendous and elemental force—most revolutionary of all the great changes we have noted in the swiftly changing West—the bringing in of thousands of horned kine along the northbound trails. The trails were hurrying from the ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough

... a narrow theory of natural religion that allowed no other meaning to these myths. Many another elemental warfare is being waged around us, and applications as various as nature herself lie in these primitive creations of the human fancy. Let it only be remembered that there was never any moral, never any historical purport in them in the infancy of ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... branches in great blobs; there was an incessant, shrill chatter of people, and occasional shouts. It was the rally of mankind after a defeat by a primitive force of nature. It was the eternal reassertion of human life and a higher organization over the elemental. Men who had walked doggedly the morning before now moved with a spring of alacrity, although the road was very heavy. There was a new light in their eyes; their cheeks glowed. Ellen had no doubt whatever that if Robert Lloyd had not ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... uncompromising hatred of Slavery which had grown into a consuming passion throughout the North and had resulted in the election of Lincoln as a purely sectional candidate—behind and underneath this apparent moral rage lay a bigger and far more elemental fact—the growing consciousness of the laboring man that the earth and the fullness ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... the rest. Mrs. Flaxman laid down her fan; there were no melting passages to bring tears in this symphony, descriptive of primeval darkness, and confusion of the elements, the evil spirits hurrying away from the glad, new light into their native regions of eternal night—the thunder and storm and elemental terrors. Presently I turned to Mr. Winthrop. He was sitting erect in his chair, his eyes no longer closed in languorous enjoyment; when suddenly the measure changed to that delicious passage descriptive of the creation of birds. Mr. Bovyer's ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter

... was not I; I had no concern in the thought that then fell upon me unbidden and undesired; my individual voice can give you but praise and loving words; and the voice that said "I am glad" was not my voice, but that of the will to live which we inherit from elemental dust through countless generations. Terrible and imperative is the voice of the will to live: let him who is innocent cast ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... the mountain; it roared its rage at Mungo, and Mungo answered back, quivering with a rage as great, under our feet. One feels here as if one were constantly dropping, unasked and unregarded, among painful and violent discussions between the elemental powers of the Universe. Mungo growls and swears in thunder at the sky, and sulks in white mist all the morning, and then the sky answers back, hurling down lightnings and rivers of water, with total disregard of Mungo's visitors. The way the water rushes down from the ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... sense of power, and at the proper hour before sunset, when the vast mass of leaping, foaming water is shot through with the colors of the spectrum, it is one of the most exquisite sights the world can offer; the elemental forces are overwhelming, but the loveliness is engaging. One turns from this to the noble mass of El Capitan with a shock of surprise, however often it may have been seen. This is the hour also, in the time of high-water, to see the reflection ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... forest of lighted candles, the sudden opening of the black door and the blowing in of the cold night wind, the passing of the voices out into the air, the soft, dying away of the singing and then the hushed expectation of the waiting for the return—all this had in it something so elemental, so simple, and so true to the very heart of the mystery of life that all trouble and sorrow fell away and ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... Bartholomew's caravel and send the disabled vessel back to Espanola. The shouting sea, as though encouraged by this triumph, hurled tempest after tempest upon the one lonely small ship that was staggering on its way to Spain; and the duel between this great seaman and the vast elemental power that he had so often outwitted began in earnest. One little ship, one enfeebled man to be destroyed by the power of the sea: that was the problem, and there were thousands of miles of sea-room, and two months of time ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... believeth in me shall never die," and then, "Nay, but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." She did not say anything in showing me these passages, and I found something in her action touchingly childlike and elemental, as well as curiously heathenish. It was as if some poor pagan had brought me his fetish to test its effect upon me. "Yes," I said, "those are things that we hardly know what to do with in our philosophy. They seem to be said as with authority, and yet, somehow, we cannot ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells

... the balustrade, one on either hand of the stairways leading down on north and south into the sunken area. (p. 64.) On one side, on the north, the Elemental Power holds in check the Dragon of Fire. The whole figure expresses the primitive terror of Fire, a fear that still lives in the beasts. On the other side lies Water, the roaring Ocean, kelp in his hair, Neptune's ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... to annoy him. No man can make omelettes without breaking eggs. Only the fortunate few can make money without soiling their hands. There is no room in the primary stages of taking salmon for those who shrink from sweat and strain, from elemental stress. The white-collared and the lily-fingered cannot function there. The pink meat my lady toys with on Limoges china comes to her table by ways that would appal her. Only the men who toil aboard the fishing boats, with line and gear and gutting knife know ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... the landscape carried no hidden horror of glaciers in its bosom. The brooding heat of the profligate vegetation; the cool charm of the running water; the terrific splendor of the June thunder-gust in the deep and solitary woods, were all sensual, animal, elemental. No European spring had shown him the same intermixture of delicate grace and passionate depravity that marked the Maryland May. He loved it too much, as though it were Greek and half human. He could not leave it, but loitered on into July, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... heart and purposes, and not merely of his taste and sentiments, have been the great songs of his own and of every land and age; if he can see in the divine poetry of David and Solomon, of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and, above all, in the parables of Him who spake as never man spake, the models and elemental laws of a people's poetry, alike according to the will of God and the heart of man; if he can welcome gallantly and hopefully the future, and yet know that it must be, unless it would be a monster ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... was a man of somewhat elemental passions when he was aroused, and he was thoroughly aroused then—"have you no mercy, no pity? This is too much! I don't want to hear a word about ...
— A Little Traitor to the South - A War Time Comedy With a Tragic Interlude • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... a bit of a sea yarn after all. I felt that to bring out its deeper significance which was quite apparent to me, something other, something more was required; a leading motive that would harmonize all these violent noises, and a point of view that would put all that elemental fury into ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad

... crozier or the alb. Rear him in a happy nursery, amid our brave-browed Anglo-Saxon infancy, and he will find some way to strangle with the skipping-rope or brain with the brick. Circumstances may be favourable, training may be admirable, hopes may be high, but the huge elemental hunger of Innocent Smith for blood will in its appointed season burst like a ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton

... transforming element; and the conformity of the halo with our existing knowledge of the ranges is reason for assuming that, whatever the origin of the more active associate of uranium, this passed through similar elemental changes in the progress of its disintegration. There may, however, have been differences in the ranges which the halo would not reveal. It is remarkable that uranium at the present time is apparently responsible ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... one side, and sympathy on the other. With Ben Blankenship the struggle—if there was a struggle—was probably between sympathy and cupidity. He would care very little for conscience and still less for law. His sympathy with the runaway, however, would be large and elemental, and it must have been very large to offset the lure of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... both of them were well aware of it. Each felt the other's presence exert a magnetic thrill. Each listened eagerly to what the other said. Each thought of nothing, and each cared for nothing, in the other's absence. It was a great compelling elemental force which drove the two together and bound them fast. Beside this marvelous experience, how pale and pitiful and paltry seemed ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... will be manifest at once that it is purely hypothetical throughout, and that it includes a variety of topics which never have been, and never can be made the subjects of experimental verification. For it postulates, in the words of an acute writer, "the establishment of nuclei in the body of the elemental mass, as well as the action of heat on its substance, and then seeks to explain the concentration of the nebulous particles into these nuclei by the force of gravitation, the rotation of the bodies so produced by the confluence of the nebulous fluid, the separation ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... eddying Sorgues, lashed by millwheels, broken by weirs, divided in its course, channelled and dyked, yet flowing irresistibly and undefiled. Blue, purple, greened by moss and water-weeds, silvered by snow-white pebbles, on its pure smooth bed the river runs like elemental diamond, so clear and fresh. The rocks on either side are grey or yellow, terraced into oliveyards, with here and there a cypress, fig, or mulberry tree. Soon the gardens cease, and lentisk, rosemary, box, and ilex—shrubs ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... by the maidens, were a pure delight. There was one movement, when heads were tossed back and then brought swiftly forward over hollowed breasts and lifted knees that had in it an exquisite fleeting beauty. But memory holds best the grace of the simpler and more elemental movements, the airy swing and poise of feet and limbs in straight flight, linked ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various

... a simple man, and always prefer to reduce things to elemental simplicity. I raise no opposition, but I express my opinion. Nature is one ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay

... the brig's quarter-deck for some time in silence, as if the elemental quietude which prevailed above and below had infected them. Both men were broad, and apparently strong. One of them was tall; the other short. More than this the feeble light of the ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... well convinced of the existence of such elemental beings; frequent accidents in mines showed the potency of the metallic spirits, which so tormented the workmen in some of the German mines by blindness, giddiness, and sudden sickness, that they have been obliged to abandon mines well known to be rich in silver. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... resumed the Shadow, 'when our thoughts are not fixed upon any particular object, that our bodies are subject to all the vagaries of elemental influences. Generally amongst worldly men and frivolous women, we only attach ourselves to some article of furniture or of dress; and they never doubt that we are mere foolish and vague results of ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald

... from the men, we ran the heated circle of the building to find a loophole and offer aid if a living soul should be left; the night around us bright as day, busier than day, and a human now added to elemental horror. Janet would not quit her place. She sent her carriage-horses to Bulsted, and sat in the carriage to see the last of burning Riversley. Each time that I came to her she folded her arms on my ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... of the lines that spring from each point of M M, with its east, or pole of contraction, and d its west, or pole of diffluence and expansion—we have presented to us the universal quadruplicity, or four elemental forms of power; in the endless proportions and modifications of which, the innumerable offspring of all-bearing Nature consist. Wisely docile to the suggestions of Nature herself, the ancients significantly ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... keynote of the excesses of the French Revolution, for nothing arouses the fury of the unclean so much as cleanliness, and a man has been killed before now for daring to wash his hands. And it is this elemental love of destroying that has raged through Belgium in the last few months, for though destruction has been the policy of their commanders, the German soldier has done it for love. No order could ever comprehend the ingenious detail of much ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar

... that love is a thing like a chemical element: with a fixed symbol 84 and a rigid atomic equivalent. And so it may be; but, like the philosopher's stone, hitherto it has defied detection in its elemental form. The fact ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain

... certain picture was shown at the Bijou Palace, a gripping drama of mother-love, of a clean-limbed young American type wrongfully accused of a crime and taking the burden of it upon his own shoulders for the sake of the girl he had come to love; of the tense play of elemental forces in the great West, the regeneration of a shallow society girl when brought to adversity by the ruin of her old father; of the lovers reunited in that West they ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson

... teachings of a scene so fair! In storm or calm, thy grateful shade My fond retreat was ever made. There have I marked the thunder cloud Invest all heaven with sable shroud; There heard the peal arouse again The echoes of the Turret glen, While Auchingarroch from afar Rolled back the elemental war; There have I watched wing'd lightning play Adown Glenartney's rugged way, Or gild each flinty summit hoar From Callander to far Ken More; There seen the Ruchill deluge foam, And o'er the strath in eddies roam, Sweeping beyond the power to save ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various

... moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself and his house, and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and it. He perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still he have elemental power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is Instinct.' Thus ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... I miss any of the worst places, Dale," he shouted, to make his voice heard above the din of the elemental strife. ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn

... the same reason affect contempt for the mixture of blood and for what they consider the Mongol characteristics of the Bulgarians. What is certain is that between Bulgarians and Germans (including German Austrians and Magyars) there has never existed that elemental, ineradicable, and insurmountable antipathy which exists between German (and Magyar) and Slav wherever the two races are contiguous, from the Baltic to the Adriatic; nothing is more remarkable than the way in which the Bulgarian people has been flattered, studied, and courted ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... means an environment of month-long nights and concentrated summers, in which all feelings are intensified, and love and dread and gratitude and longing are nearer and deeper than in milder and more temperate regions, where elemental opposites are, as ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun

... dealing with such a book, what passage in it is best or worst? Either the fancy, carried away utterly captive, follows the poet whither he will, or the whole conception is a failure. Perhaps, after the elemental splendour and storm of the final scene, what clings most to the memory is how Shibli Bagarag, hard beset in the Cave of Chrysolites, touched the great lion with the broken sapphire hair of Garraveen; or again, how on the black ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... shrinking from bloodshed, however politic and needful—for my Leo, as yet thou art no true philosopher—this were quickly done, since I can command a weapon which would crush their armouries and whelm their navies in the deep; yes, I, whom even the lightnings and Nature's elemental powers must obey. But thou shrinkest from the sight of death, and thou believest that Heaven would be displeased because I make myself—or am chosen—the instrument of Heaven. Well, so let it be, for thy will is mine, and therefore we will tread a ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard

... clearly portrayed; some added words, however, betray the origin of the Cardinal's idea. "The earth also," he says, "would appear as a shining star to any one outside the fiery element." It was, in fact, an extension to the sun of the ancient elemental doctrine; but an extension remarkable at that period, as premonitory of the tendency, so powerfully developed by subsequent discoveries, to assimilate the orbs of heaven to the model of our insignificant planet, and to extend the brotherhood ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... Strong elemental passions Lane had seen and felt in people during the short twenty-four hours since his return home. All of them had stung and astounded him, flung into his face the hard brutal facts of the materialism of the present. Surely it was an abnormal condition. And ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey

... of nature was more clearly observed, and the identity of nature throughout the known world, the separate powers were subordinating themselves to a single supreme king; and, as the poets had originally personified the elemental forces, the thinkers were reversing the earlier process, and discovering the law under the person. Happily or unhappily, however, what they could do for themselves they could not do for the multitude. Phoebus and Aphrodite had been made too human to be allegorised. Humanised, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... chalk cliffs gleaming through them at intervals. A thin mist filled the valleys with violet hues, the sea was bright and a fresh breeze carried us gaily along. The aspect of the country displayed the energies of elemental powers: nowhere can the origin of chalk mountains be more plainly seen than here, where we have the process before us in all its stages, from the living reef, shining purple through the sea, to the sandy beach strewn with bits of coral, to the high table mountain. We ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... be accustomed for the sake of their physical well-being, as well as because, in a moral point of view, it is of the greatest significance. Cleanliness will not endure that things shall be deprived of their proper individuality through the elemental chaos. It retains each as distinguished from every other. While it makes necessary to man pure air, cleanliness of surroundings, of clothing, and of his body, it develops in him a sense by which he perceives accurately the particular limits of being ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz

... among quite modern musicians, and though indeed he appeals to our nerves more forcibly than any of them, has that breadth and universality by which emotion ceases to be merely personal and becomes elemental. To the musicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, music was an art which had to be carefully guarded from the too disturbing presence of emotion; emotion is there always, whenever the music is fine music; but the music is something ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... architect calls it "an historical expression of the successive ages of the world's growth." He suggests four stages: the nebulous world, symbolized by the central fountain, in which Robert Aitken of San Francisco has worked out a stupendous study of primeval passions. Out of chaos, come the elemental forces, Water, Land and Light. The braziers and cauldrons symbolize Fire. The two sentinel columns, flanking the tower on either side, are Earth and Air. The eight paintings, by Frank Brangwyn of London, in the corridors in great richness ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt

... thought, is definitely relegated to the secondary position by its best exponents. The Vedic religion is tribal in form, and in the pre-mythological stage.[205] In the Ramayana and Mahabharata, on the contrary, "we trace unequivocal indications of a departure from the elemental worship of the Vedas, and the origin or elaboration of legends which form the great body of the mythological religion of the Hindus."[206] The pre-mythological and the mythological stages of Hindu religion, therefore, are both discoverable from the ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... The mystery dimly understood, That love of God is love of good, And, chiefly, its divinest trace In Him of Nazareth's holy face; That to be saved is only this,— Salvation from our selfishness, From more than elemental fire, The soul's unsanetified desire, From sin itself, and not the pain That warns us of its chafing chain; That worship's deeper meaning lies In mercy, and not sacrifice, Not proud humilities of sense And posturing of penitence, But love's unforced obedience; That Book and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... thunders on the winds are borne! And see yon spiral column, black as night, Rearing triumphantly its wreathing form; Ruin's abroad, and through the murky light, Drear desolation marks the spirit of the storm. * * * * * * How changed the scene; the awful tempest's o'er; From dread array and elemental war The lightning's flash hath ceased, the thunder's roar— The glorious sun ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland

... mankind and goddess of child-birth (Hist. de Nueva Espana, Lib. i, cap. 6, Lib. vi, cap. 27). Further particulars of her are related by Torquemada, Monarquia Indiana, Lib. ii, cap. 2. The tzitzime were mysterious elemental powers, who, the Nahuas believed, were destined finally to destroy the present world (Sahagun, l. c., Lib. vi, cap. 8). The word ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton

... associates, and to combat—as one combats the alkali dust of the Plains—all the insinuating minutiae of house-building. The new home of the Marshalls moved on with the summer, and reached in due course the stage when such elemental features as walls and roofs gave way to the minor considerations involved in the swinging of doors, the placing of gas-jets, and the arrangements of pantries. Eliza Marshall now began to appear more frequently on the scene, and to confound both architect ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller

... Will watched this elemental unrest, and it served to soothe that greater storm of sorrows and self-condemnation then raging within him. His nature found consolation here, the cool hand of the Mother touched his forehead as she passed in her robe of rain, and for the first time since childhood the man hid his ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... charcoal are chiefly carbon. The diamond is pure crystallized carbon, and charcoal made from pure sugar is pure, uncrystallized carbon. This can easily be made by heating a lump of sugar on a red hot stove until only a black coal remains. Now these different solid materials represent carbon in the elemental form or free state. But carbon may unite with other elements to form chemical compounds, and these may be ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins

... our walks abroad we meet acquaintances who view with alarm the immediate future of the self-styled human race; but we find ourself unable to share their apprehension. We do not worry about lead, or iron, or any other element. And human nature is elemental. You can flatten it, as in Russia; you can bend, and twist, and pound it into various forms, but you cannot decompose it. And so the "new order," while perhaps an improvement on the old, will not be so very different. Britannia will go on ruling the waves, ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor

... center for nature, running out threads of relation through everything, fluid and solid, material and elemental. The earth rolls; every clod and stone comes to the meridian; so every organ, function, acid, crystal, grain of dust, has its relation to the brain. It waits long, but its turn comes. Each plant has its parasite, ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... essence, passing through death's portal, Put on nobler presence in a life immortal? Or is man but matter, that a touch ungentle, Back again may shatter to forms elemental? ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor

... rocked upon the waves, presenting the pale countenance, now half in shadow, now wholly concealed by the overhanging shrubs, and now in full relief, but always with a sweet, radiant, immovable calm upon the features, in strange contrast to the elemental roar and ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage

... storm, the devilish ambush of the pieuvre, and all other evils are terminated and evaded and sanctified by the embrace and the euthanasia of the sea. Perhaps it is poetry rather than novel or even romance—in substance it is too abstract and elemental for either of the less majestical branches of inventive literature. But it is great. "By God! 'tis good," and, to lengthen somewhat Ben's famous challenge, "if you like, you may" put it with, and not so far ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... unity of organization pervading the world of insects. He sees how nature, seizing upon this archetypal form has, by simple modifications of parts here and there, by the addition of wings and other organs wanting in these simple creatures, rung numberless changes in this elemental form. And starting from the simplest kinds, such as the Poduras, Spiders, Grasshoppers and May flies, allied creatures which we now know were the first to appear in the earlier geologic ages, we rise to the highest, the bees with their complex forms, their diversified ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard

... minutes Mrs. Cafferty came into the room. She was, as every woman is in the morning, primed with conversation about husbands, for in the morning husbands are unwieldy, morose creatures without joy, without lightness, lacking even the common, elemental interest in their own children, and capable of detestably misinterpreting the conversation of their wives. It is only by mixing amongst other men that this malignant humor may be dispelled. To them the company of men is like a great bath into which a husband will plunge ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens

... ever more and more of the canvas; until we find the whole interest of one of Hugo's romances centring around matter that Fielding would have banished from his altogether, as being out of the field of fiction. So we have elemental forces occupying nearly as large a place, playing (so to speak) nearly as important a ROLE, as the man, Gilliat, who opposes and overcomes them. So we find the fortunes of a nation put upon the stage with ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... influences, she would be an acquisition. Those elderly ladies, who sit on the edge of ballrooms sampling the stuff of humanity between finger and thumb and breathing so evenly that the necklaces, which rise and fall upon their breasts, seem to represent some elemental force, such as the waves upon the ocean of humanity, concluded, a little smilingly, that she would do. They meant that she would in all probability marry some young ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... of Briareus the Giant, who had an hundred hands, found a Moral in him, who could so cunningly and copiously disguise his aforesaid elemental hands, that by mixing, he could make them appear an hundred; and if not so many sorts, so many degrees of writing. He had also many pretty excursions into Poetry, and could flourish Matters as well ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley

... that it is impossible to define it exactly. It was not by the force of persuasion that he agitated. It was not his thought which awakened the thought of others. But he aroused every rebellious heart and awoke there an 'elemental' anger. And this anger, transplendent with beauty, became creative and showed to the exalted thirst for justice and happiness an issue and a possibility of accomplishment. 'The desire for destruction is at the same time a creative desire,' Bakounin ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... neglected bardic literature which O'Grady was the first to reveal in a noble manner. He had the spirit of an ancient epic poet. He is a comrade of Homer, his birth delayed in time perhaps that he might renew for a sophisticated people the elemental simplicity and hardihood men had when the world was young and manhood was prized more than any of its parts, more than thought or beauty or feeling. He has created for us or rediscovered one figure which looms in the imagination as a high comrade of Hector, Achilles, Ulysses, Rama or ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady

... its effect. A man may weary, after a while, of camels and bedouin maidens and all the picturesque paraphernalia of Arab life; or at least they end in becoming so trite that his eyes cease to take note of them; but there are two spectacles, ever new, elemental, that correspond to deeper impulses: this of palms in the waste—the miracle of water; ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

... a turbid stream under an August sun. Their talk was strong and crisp, after the fashion of the mining West. It could not be printed without editing, yet in that atmosphere it was without offense. There is a time for all things, even for the elemental talk ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine

... himself—married. In his family, to regain his lost consequence, he determined to keep up the same passive obedience, as in the vessels in which he had commanded. His orders were not to be disputed; and the whole house was expected to fly, at the word of command, as if to man the shrouds, or mount aloft in an elemental strife, big with life or death. He was to be instantaneously obeyed, especially by my mother, whom he very benevolently married for love; but took care to remind her of the obligation, when she dared, in the slightest instance, to question ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... beautiful, Clasping the earth in love, and throwing back The smile of heaven from waves of amethyst; Or whether, freshened by the busy winds, It bears the trade and navies of the world To ends of use or stern activity; Or whether, lashed by tempests, it gives way To elemental fury, howls and roars At all its rocky barriers, in wild lust Of ruin drinks the blood of living things, And strews its wrecks o'er leagues of desolate shore, - Always it is the sea, and men bow down Before its vast and ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay

... characteristics of the men and women of past generations. When we re-tell the old tales of our ancestors, we sit beside them over the peat-fire; and, as we glory with them in their strong heroes, and share their elemental joys and fears, we breathe the palpitating air of that old mysterious world of theirs, peopled by spirits beautiful, and ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie

... nervous and irritable. Sailors are simple-minded men, as a rule; their mental processes are elemental. They began to mutter that the devil-ship of the Turner line was at her ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... younger Rutherfords had inherited their dark, good looks. The family likeness was strong in all of them, but nature had taken her revenge for the anti-social life of the father. The boys had reverted toward savagery. They were elemental and undisciplined. This was, perhaps, true of Beulah also. There were moments when she suggested in the startled poise of her light body and the flash of her quick eyes a wild young creature of the forest set for night. But in her case atavism manifested itself ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine

... we attempted the first part, February being the very worst month. After many days of glorious weather the temper of the atmosphere gave way; the mercury fell to 28.5, and we were indulged with a succession of squalls and storms, mists and rain. The elemental rage, it is true, was that of your southern coquette, sharp, but short, and broken by intervals of a loving relapse into caress. In the uplands and on the northern coast, however, it shows the concentrated spleen and gloom of a climate ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... and all the related qualities that are named in the dictionary, are MADE OF THE ELEMENTALS, by blendings, combinations, and shadings of the elementals, just as one makes green by blending blue and yellow, and makes several shades and tints of red by modifying the elemental red. There are several elemental colors; they are all in the rainbow; out of them we manufacture and name fifty shades of them. You have named the elementals of the human rainbow, and also one BLEND—heroism, which is made out of courage and magnanimity. Very ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... think of those I have loved, and lost, as having returned to earth, as having become a part of the elemental wealth of the world—I would rather think of them as unconscious dust, I would rather dream of them as gurgling in the streams, floating in the clouds, bursting in the form of light upon the shores of ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom

... American citizen beduking himself in his lodge, or affirming his consequence in the Scheme of Things as an elemental unit of a parade. ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... pertaining to every human being, into which all lesser ones run. There are things in a house that every one, high or low, rich or poor, ought, according to his means, to seek. I think I shall class them according to the elemental division of the old philosophers: Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. These form the groundwork of this need-be,—the sine-qua-nons of ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... half of the wall. Lurking behind this tapestry was the stage for the tabloids, and the general company had to crowd themselves into the remainder or wander forlornly about in the space in front of the tapestry. The playlets again are almost bound to be just concentrated episodes, probably elemental in theme and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various

... down a few hurried notes. The helm makes a bound. My uncle falls full length; I creep close to him. He has laid a firm hold upon a rope, and appears to watch with grim satisfaction this awful display of elemental strife. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... O winged bark! how swift along the night Pass'd thy proud keel! nor shall I let go by Lightly of that drear hour the memory, When wet and chilly on thy deck I stood, Unbonnetted, and gazed upon the flood, Even till it seemed a pleasant thing to die,— To be resolv'd into th' elemental wave, Or take my portion with the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb

... Chamber is as desolate as a grazing ranch in Meath. Honourable members snatch at the opportunity of cultivating their souls in the theatres, clubs, restaurants, and other centres of culture in which London abounds. The Irish Party is compelled by the elemental necessities of the situation to speak with one voice on matters regarding which there would properly be at least two voices in an Irish Parliament, precisely identical in personnel. Ulster Unionism presents ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle

... "people" and her "people"—the piano music and the song, and in this setting our friend, "quite clever" at botany and "going in" for it "as a profession," and the girl, gratuitously beautiful; so I figured the arranged and orderly environment into which this claw of an elemental force had thrust ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... master sat at a table with his eyes fixed on a small mountain of blackish-gray rock. He had given orders to admit none. Fingering the pointed fragments he experienced more emotion than ever before in his kaleidoscopic life. He sat in profound contemplation of that which prehistoric and elemental fires had laid down for his use. There was in his mind no question of strangeness that it should be himself who had decided that the thing was there and must be unearthed. It was the turning of another page in the book of his own history, the beginning ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan

... a tenor with considerable dramatic quality in his voice. The words of the song must be extemporized to suit each new occasion; so also, must the elemental tonal forms be extemporaneously combined, for the music must fit the words, and these will vary in rhythm and meter with each performance. The music may be considered constant, however, in that the form of each component motive is ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole

... the man as he uttered them seemed suddenly galvanized with a new force, a force irresistible, elemental, even sublime. The elder brother's brows went up in amazement. He did not know Stumpy in that mood. He found himself confronted with a power colossal manifested in the meagre frame, and before that power instinctively, wholly ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell

... possibilities within herself that she devoted her entire attention to her own actions and impulses, and was completely drawn away from the consideration of the motives of others by her struggle with the elemental forces in which she found herself engulfed. The temper aroused by John's objection to her Thanksgiving company had indications in spite of the fact that she had controlled it. Elizabeth knew that she had but barely ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger

... preface of Dr. Guyer's remarkable book, "Being Well Born," we read the following: "It is no exaggeration to say that during the last fifteen years, we have made more progress in measuring the extent of inheritance and in determining its elemental factors than in all previous time." If this is true, it would seem to be almost criminal for teachers and parents to neglect to acquaint themselves with the fundamental laws of heredity. This author says further: "Since what a child becomes is determined so largely by its ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall

... round summit without being aware of it. They stood 15,781 feet above the sea-level! No envious peak rose above their heads. The whole world lay below them, bathed, too, in bright sunshine, for the storm, which had so suddenly swooped upon them, was confined, like an elemental body-guard, to the head of the mountain-king. But, clear though it was at the moment, they were too high in the air to see anything quite distinctly, yet this hazy aspect had a charm of its own, for it increased the feeling and idea of vastness in connection ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne

... for the fantastic and even monstrous shapes of cliff and ledge and overhanging rock masses without calling up some gigantic upheaval of all nature's vast play of forces; earthquakes, fire, volcano, flood, wind, sand spouts of enormous height and velocity, one after the other all these elemental storms must have rocked and heaved and rent and tortured the earth and after all had passed by, the hurricane of volcanic fire and missiles must have scattered the debris of high mountains twisted into lumps of matter, varying in size from a sky ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon



Words linked to "Elemental" :   elements, element, basic



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