|
|
|
More "Declension" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Indian character, manners, and customs, and in the curious philosophical traits of the Indian language. It is refreshing to find a person who, in reference to this language, knows the difference between the conjugation of a verb and the declension of a noun. There is a prospect, at least, of getting at the grammatical principles, by which they conjoin and build up words. It has been intolerable to me to converse with Indian traders and interpreters ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... languages exhibits a fine and bold peculiarity—a double declension of its Adjectives, depending on a condition of syntax. The Anglo-Saxon adjective, in its ordinary (or, as grammarians have called it, Indefinite) declension, makes the nominative plural for all the genders in E; and this remains ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... certainly, among my legacies, leave my latest curse to that unlucky predicament which hurried—tore me away from Castle Gordon. May that obstinate son of Latin prose [Nicol] be curst to Scotch mile periods, and damned to seven league paragraphs; while Declension and Conjugation, Gender, Number, and Time, under the ragged banners of Dissonance and Disarrangement, eternally rank against ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... power, that effectually keepeth some to salvation. Upon this second reason I now am, and am shewing how it comes to pass that they that are under the power of the things that we have afore discoursed, should notwithstanding that, return to their vomit again. One cause of this declension, or going back to iniquity, I have just now touched upon, and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... observed that it is possible to be able to spell certain words when they occur in a spelling lesson, but to miss them when employing them in composition. It is possible to learn a conjugation or a declension in tabular form, and then not be able to use the correct forms of words in speech or writing. Relate these facts to the laws of association, and recommend a method of instruction that ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... Bob, with a sudden declension in his high spirits; for he had been Tim's blood horse all the way from the church, and had come home rampant. ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... without that diligent attention to its prosperity which the interest of possession alone can give, and the authority of a principal alone can enforce, it quickly lost its fame for the excellence of its goods, and soon after its customers from the report of its declension. The produce, therefore, diminished every month; he was surprised, he was provoked; he was convinced he was cheated, and that his affairs were neglected; but though he threatened from time to time to enquire into the real state of the business, ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... disaster, and it was with a sentiment of relief, commensurate with the contempt inspired by such an explanation, that I was given to understand that it was the great author's unselfish effort in behalf of his old college comrade and life-long friend, that was supposed to imply a state of moral declension fitly indicated by the ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... addressed Yudhishthira, in these words, 'In days of old, all living beings that had been created were sorely afflicted with hunger. And like a father (unto all of them), Savita (the sun) took compassion upon them. And going first into the northern declension, the sun drew up water by his rays, and coming back to the southern declension, stayed over the earth, with his heat centered in himself. And while the sun so stayed over the earth, the lord of the vegetable world (the moon), converting ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... tree is to him like a schoolboy's first Latin declension, or a lawyer's first brief—the pledge of ability, the earnest of future performances. Every success braces the nerves of mind, as well as the muscles of body. A victory over the woodland was embodied in that fallen ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... are also a cyclometer, not unlike those used on bicycles, to show how far the boat travels on the wheels; a depth gauge, which keeps us accurately informed as to the depth of the boat in the water, and a declension indicator. By the long finger of the declension dial we could tell whether we were going up hill or down. Once while we were out, there was a sudden, sharp shock, the pointer leaped back, and then quivered steady again. Mr. Lake said that we had ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... injuriously called these real histories) extending beyond four volumes, and if I did not agree to the first four being published separately, he threatened to decline the article. (Oh, ignorance! as if the vernacular article of our mother English were capable of declension.) Whereupon, somewhat moved by his remonstrances, and more by heavy charges for print and paper, which he stated to have been already incurred, I have resolved that these four volumes shall be the heralds or avant-couriers of the ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... portraits of knights and dames in scarlet, white, and gold, it had not the sombre effect of the library. Here hung the portrait of Sir Anthony Cheverel, who in the reign of Charles II. was the renovator of the family splendour, which had suffered some declension from the early brilliancy of that Chevreuil who came over with the Conqueror. A very imposing personage was this Sir Anthony, standing with one arm akimbo, and one fine leg and foot advanced, evidently with a view to the gratification of his contemporaries ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... self-dependence. The first step in spiritual declension is this: "Let him that thinketh he standeth!" The secret of real strength is this: "Kept by ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... and Societies under their pastoral care, on the subject of the increasing negligence of the Publick Worship of God; which they consider as one of the most painful and alarming, among the various instances of declension and immorality, which at the present time threaten the very existence of religion in this country.—"In what manner," says the Address, "does this evil affect the political interests, the essential wellbeing, of the ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... shall not write a line to-day, Though many subjects merit my attention. To take one instance only, there is May (The month) at present in her last declension. Lord, what a dance she leads us on her May-toes, And spoils the beans ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... 'That he would not advise Mr Pope to try the experiment again of getting a great part of a book done by assistants, lest those extraneous parts should unhappily ascend to the sublime, and retard the declension of the whole.' Behold! these underlings are become ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum Fragmenta, edidit F. Field. 1865. Two volumes L6 6s. net" or "Shuckford's Sacred and Profane History of the World, from the Creation of the World to the Dissolution of the Assyrian Empire at the death of Sardanapalus, and to the Declension of The Kingdom of Judah and Israel under the Reigns of Ahaz and Pekah, with the Creation and Fall of Man. 1728, reprinted 1848. Pp ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... Dutch and Portuguese I have never read of; and it requires your knowledge of the springs of human action, and your lively description of "hair-breadth 'scapes," to make one care whether the hog bites the dog, or the dog bites the hog. Both nations were in rapid declension from their short-lived age of heroism, and in the act of experiencing all those retrograde movements which are the natural consequence of selfishness on the one hand, and bigotry on ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... Canaries; France humbled, England menaced, settlements made in Asia and Northern Africa—Spain in America become possessed of a vast continent and of more than one archipelago of splendid islands. Yet before a century was over the sovereign majesty of Spain underwent a huge declension, the territory under her sway was contracted, the fabulous wealth of the mines of the New World had been wasted, agriculture and industry were ruined, her commerce passed into the hands ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... language has a time of rudeness antecedent to perfection, as well as of false refinement and declension, I have been cautious lest my zeal for antiquity might drive me into times too remote, and crowd my book with words now no longer understood. I have fixed Sidney's work for the boundary, beyond which I make few excursions. From the authors which rose in the time of Elizabeth, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... given in the word of God touching the last days, is one which foretokens a wide-spread and lamentable declension in the religious world. The phrase which embodies it, is the one just quoted, "Babylon is fallen." The term "Babylon" is not intended nor used as a term of reproach, but rather as a descriptive word setting forth the very undesirable condition of "mixture" and "confusion" in the religious world. ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... biographer; while those attached friends (and Sterling possessed the happy magic that secures many such) who knew him best during this latter part of his career, would naturally be pained to have it represented, though only by implication, as a sort of deepening declension ending in a virtual retraction. Of such friends Carlyle was the most eminent, and perhaps the most highly valued, and, as co-trustee with Archdeacon Hare of Sterling's literary character and writings, he felt a kind of responsibility that no mistaken ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Wild orgies followed, and Aphaca became notorious for scenes to which it will be necessary to recur hereafter. The Adonis myth is generally explained as representing either the perpetually recurrent decay and recovery of nature, or the declension of the Sun as he moves from the summer to the winter constellations, and his subsequent return and reappearance in all his strength. But myths obtained a powerful hold on ancient imaginations, and the worshippers ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... less considerable than might be expected from the pen of a young author. However, we must remark some rather awkward examples of grammatical construction. The correct plural of "eucalyptus" is "eucalypti", without any final "s", the name being treated as a Latin noun of the second declension. "Slowly and dignified—it pursues its way" is hardly a permissible clause; the adjective "dignified" must be exchanged for an adverb. Perhaps Mr. Held sought to employ poetical enallage, but even so, the adjective does not correspond with "slowly"; besides, the use of enallage ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... statement is will be evident, that the future increase in the stock will be still more prodigious, and still more considerably outstrip the advance of population. The price therefore of cattle, great and rapid as has been its past declension, must annually experience a still further diminution. Of what will be their probable value in ten years more, it may enable us to form no very inaccurate estimate, by referring to what it was ten years back. In 1808, a cow and calf were sold by public auction for L105, and the ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... the newly discovered antiques. Here at last it seemed as though his native genius might suffer from contact with the potent style of his great rival; and there are many students of art who feel that Raphael's later manner was a declension from the divine purity of his early pictures. There is, in fact, a something savouring of overbloom in the Farnesina frescoes, as though the painter's faculty had been strained beyond its natural force. Muscles are exaggerated to give the ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... it, a superficial acquaintance with history may inform us. And we are now called upon by the universal cry of the nation, and urged by the perplexed and uncertain state of our foreign affairs, and declension of our wealth, and attacks upon our liberties at home, to recollect these precedents of magnanimity and justice, and to make another effort for the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... some think) beauty of person—receives both the homage and (what is doubtless preferable to her) the francs of numerous customers and admirers. The "wealth of either Ind" sparkles upon her hand, or glitters upon her attire: and if the sun of her beauty be somewhat verging towards its declension, it sets with a glow which reminds her old acquaintance of the splendour of its noon-day power. It is yet a sharply contested point whether the ice of this house be preferable to that of Tortoni: a point, too intricate and momentous ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... language is a branch of the Turanian family; it is written with the Roman alphabet, but it has fewer sounds; it is complicated in its declension and conjugation, but it has great capacity of expressing compound ideas in one word; it is harmonious in sound, and free, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... connection whatever by descent, collaterally, or otherwise, with the six first, it would be a more logical distribution to combine them according to the fortunes of the state itself, and the succession of its prosperity through the several stages of splendor, declension, revival, and final decay. Under this arrangement, the first seventeen would belong to the first stage; Commodus would open the second; Aurelian down to Constantine or Julian would fill the third; and Jovian to Augustulus would bring up the melancholy rear. Meantime it will be proper, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... conscious imitation of the sun. The custom of rolling a burning wheel down a hill, which is often observed at these ceremonies, might well pass for an imitation of the sun's course in the sky, and the imitation would be especially appropriate on Midsummer Day when the sun's annual declension begins. Indeed the custom has been thus interpreted by some of those who have recorded it.[809] Not less graphic, it may be said, is the mimicry of his apparent revolution by swinging a burning tar-barrel round a ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... parallels of 34 degrees and 27 degrees, a vast area of depressed interior, subjected in seasons of prolonged rains to partial inundation, by a dispersion of the several waters that flow upon it from the eastern mountains whence they originate; and bearing in mind at the same time, that the declension of the country within the above parallels, as most decidedly shown by the dip of its several rivers, is uniformly to the N.N.W. and N.W., it would appear very conclusive, that either a portion of our distant interior is occupied by a lake ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... husband and child. Even when the impossible Wanderer was concocted, she had had ample leisure, had as yet incurred none of her later domestic sorrows, and was assured of lavish recompense for her (it must be said) absolutely worthless labours. Why this steady declension, with which, considering the character of Cecilia, the court sojourn can have had nothing to do? And admitting it, why still uphold, as the present writer does uphold, Evelina as one of the points de repere ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... awkward question; and, for a second, I was at a loss for words to express to my satisfaction what I was doing. Penny seemed disappointed at my declension into disgrace, and murmured reproachfully: "O Rupert, my little Rupert, st. st." I saw that the game was up. Mr. Caesar had inquired what I was doing; and a survey of what I was doing showed me that, between some antecedent movements and some subsequent ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... and at a moment's notice, to leave their farms and homes, their standing crops . . . all to be taken possession of by natives, but that the Government is more powerless than ever to vindicate its assumed rights or to resist the declension that is threatening its existence." It then recites how all the other colonies and communities of South Africa have lost confidence in the State, how it is in a condition of hopeless bankruptcy, and its commerce annihilated whilst the inhabitants are ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... encourage one's friends to borrow one's books—not to offer individual books, which is much the same as OFFERING advice. That will probably take some of the shine off them, and put a few thumb-marks in them, which both are very wholesome towards the arresting of the furniture declension. For my part, thumb-marks I find very obnoxious—far more so than the spoiling of the binding.—I know that some of my readers, who have had sad experience of the sort, will be saying in themselves, "He might have ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... repeat the tradesman's dangerous experiment! But if there be any that have fallen into the same condemnation, as it is to be feared some may have done, may God of his mercy admonish them of it, and bring them back before such a declension, begun in the neglect of family religion, shall be consummated in the decay and loss of personal religion, and the growing irreligion both of your ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... also repeats the fat jokes of old Major Pendergast, the wit of the club, and which, though the general can hardly repeat them for laughing, always make Mr. Bracebridge look grave, he having a great antipathy to an indecent jest. In a word, the general is a complete instance of the declension in gay life, by which a young man of pleasure is apt to cool down into an obscene ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... to retrogress after the period of maturity. And an early retrogression means a short maturity. In women, the onset of an obesity, and coincidently, of a lazy and dull morale, coincides with this declension of the pituitary powers. All the glands of internal secretion, in fact, shrink and shrivel as old age advances. Only, as in other relationships, the predominating endocrine stamps its signature more visibly upon the documents of decadence than the others. Pituitary types, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... Latin words. In the fourth book, he traces those which relate to place; in the fifth, those connected with the idea of time; and in the sixth, the origin of both these classes, as they appear in the writings of the poets. The seventh book is employed on declension; in which the author enters upon a minute and extensive enquiry, comprehending a variety of acute and profound observations on the formation of Latin nouns, and their respective natural declinations from the nominative case. In the eighth, he examines the nature and limits of usage and analogy ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... political orator of his time. He took up the key-note first struck by Manius Curius, his ideal among Roman statesmen;(50) throughout his long life he made it his task honestly, to the best of his judgment, to assail on all hands the prevailing declension; and even in his eighty-fifth year he battled in the Forum with the new spirit of the times. He was anything but comely—he had green eyes, his enemies alleged, and red hair—and he was not a great man, still less ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... how Mrs. Kobbe and Miss Pray now and then warily conveyed a "doughnut" from the table to their pockets, with an air of dark declension from the moral laws. Having filled their own receptacles, they whispered me an entreaty to do the same, as we might be late with the tide and hungry on our way home. I complied in this, as in every case, gallantly; but in my very ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... lowest husbandmen, were afterwards exercised, with a stern and unrelenting impartiality, upon the whole people. For, notwithstanding the province before Debi Sing's lease was, from various causes, in a state of declension, and in balance for the revenue of the preceding year, at his very first entrance into office he forced from the zemindars or landed gentry an enormous increase of their tribute. They refused compliance. On this refusal he threw the whole body of zemindars into prison, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years? For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... between custom and innovation, constitutes the essence of vitality in human affairs. The nations by turns are protagonists in the drama of progress; by turns are doomed to play the part of obstructive agents. Intermingled in conflict which is active life, they contribute by their phases of declension and resistance, no less than by their forward movements, to the growth of an organism which shall probably in the far future be coextensive ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... gloried over the declension of Judaism. In presence of Benedict XIII, antipope, a Spaniard, wandering in Spain, because in Rome they would not own him, a formal disputation was carried on for sixty-nine days between Jerome of Santa Fe and other converts—or, as the Jews not improperly called ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... thus that the movement for short services began in the Cameronian kirk of Cairn Edward. They are an hour and twenty minutes now—a sore declension, ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... is, and de Maupassant being tinged with eroticism, his work is sure to be read with interest by mankind; but he is already classed. Nobody, now, despite all his brilliant excellences, would dream of putting de Maupassant with the first magnitudes. And the declension of Flaubert is one of the outstanding phenomena of modern French criticism. It is being discovered that Flaubert's mind was not quite noble enough—that, indeed, it was a cruel mind, and a little anaemic. Bouvard et Pecuchet was the crowning proof that Flaubert ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... you feel the whole immense mass above you moving as you press against it. You redouble your efforts—then turn round—and see the massy Loggan Stone, set in motion by nothing but your own pair of shoulders, slowly rocking backwards and forwards with an alternate ascension and declension, at the outer edges, of at least three inches. You have treated eighty-five tons of granite like a child's cradle; and, like a child's cradle, those eighty-five tons have ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... wider than that of the Barren Ground bear, is still not so extensive as that of the ursus americanus. The great chain or cordillera of the Rocky Mountains may be taken as the axis of his range—since he is found throughout its whole extent, from Mexico to its declension near the shores of the Arctic Sea. Some writers have asserted that he is confined to these mountains, but that is an error. To the west of them he is encountered throughout all the countries lying between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific coast— wherever circumstances ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... reck of change and fray; Watching the clouds at morning driven, The still declension of the day; And, when the moon is ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... to point out is an even sadder thing than that—namely, that Christian people may lose their strength because they let go their hold upon God, and know nothing about it. Spiritual declension, all unconscious of its own existence, is the very history of hundreds of nominal Christians amongst us, and, I dare say, of some of us. The very fact that you do not suppose the statement to have the least application to yourself is perhaps the very sign that it does apply. When the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Peter and John. They are noticed also by Jude. The two former suffered martyrdom under Nero. When the time of their departure drew nigh, they had separately a view of the then future state of the church; "particularly of the declension which were to take place in the kingdoms of this world, shall become the kingdom of our Lord and Christ." St. John had the same opened to his view in ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... quality in his manner, also, new to her. And these brought her down to earth, setting her feet thereon uncompromisingly. And the earth on which they were thus set was, it must be owned, rather ugly. A woman made of weaker stuff would have cried out against such sudden and painful declension. But Katherine, happily both for herself and for those about her, waking even from dreams of noble and far-reaching attainment, waked with not only her wits, but her heart, in steady action. Yet she in nowise went back on the revelation that had been vouchsafed to her. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... I must have gaz'd on thee for ever; —But oh! my Eyes grow heavy in the Play, As if some strange Divinity about me Told me my Safety lay in their Declension. —It is not Sleep!—sure, Kings do never sleep; That were a low submission to a Power A Monarch shou'd despise—but yet 'tis so: Ye Gods, am I but mortal then? Or do you ever sleep? I find ye do! But I must—and lose this lovely Object: Grant, oh ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... authors interested him more than their English contemporaries. In the former case he found, perhaps, less declension from the standard of the giants of whom he had been an eager student in his early manhood, when he read "all Balzac," and recorded his admiration for the "dignity" of Mme. de Stael's Germany. Dumas he loved then and always, ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... substantives (requiring a special notice) will be treated of hereafter. Substantives of the Second Declension form their genitive ...
— Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language - Shea's Library Of American Linguistics. Volume III. • Buckingham Smith
... mass of Englishmen, to the frustration of many generous ideals, but to the credit of their practical good sense, pronounced for the restoration of Charles the Second. It is impossible to think without anger and grief of the declension which was to ensue, from Cromwell enforcing toleration for Protestants to Charles selling himself to France for a pension, from Blake at Tunis to the Dutch at Chatham. But the Restoration was no national apostasy. The people as a body did not decline from Milton's ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... of 1596 as to be 'markitt for a special perriodic and fatall yeir to the Kirk of Scotland,' and he enters on his narrative of it 'with a sorrowful heart and drouping eyes,' so 'doolful' was the decay it ushered in. The declension is not to be wondered at; for where has a Church been found in which such prolonged oppression as the Scottish Church had been subjected to, did not weary the patience and damp the zeal of all but the most resolved members of its Communion? Had we been present ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... scientific grammarian, and to the systematizing influence which Greek exerted upon literary Latin, most verbs were made deponent or active once for all, a given noun was permanently assigned to a particular declension, a verb to one conjugation, and the slight tendency which the language had to the analytical method of forming the moods and tenses was summarily checked. Of course the common people tried to imitate their betters in ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... vanished; and true enough, as Lucifer says, it so happened that from the delay in the arrival of the running ships, there was not an ounce of either powder or pomatum to be had in the whole town, so I have been driven in my extremity—oh most horrible declension!—to keep my tail on hog's lard and ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... so much upon the dearness or cheapness of the seasons in the countries where they are carried on, as upon the circumstances which affect the demand in the countries where they are consumed; upon peace or war, upon the prosperity or declension of other rival manufactures and upon the good or bad humour of their principal customers. A great part of the extraordinary work, besides, which is probably done in cheap years, never enters the public registers of manufactures. The men-servants, who leave ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... be related, but must stand isolated in our thoughts, have their interest. Even lists of exceptions have their interest. If we are studying Greek accents it is interesting to know that pais and pas, and some other monosyllables of the same form of declension, do not take the circumflex upon the last syllable of the genitive plural, but vary, in this respect, from the common rule. If we are studying physiology, it is interesting to know that the pulmonary artery carries dark blood and the pulmonary vein carries bright blood, departing in this ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... and if your country rejects them she will not long hold the rank of the first nation in Europe. Her declension is begun, her ruin approaches; for, omitting all other arguments, can a state be well served when the raising of an opulent fortune in its service, and making a splendid use of that fortune, is a distinction more envied than any which arises from ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... head hang for shame. Born of the Jeffersonian horror of war, its evil communication corrupted morals among those whose standards were conventional only; for public opinion failed to condemn breaches of embargo, and by a natural declension equally failed soon after to condemn aid to the enemy in an unpopular war. Was it wonderful that an Administration which bade the seamen and the ship-owners of the day to starve, that a foreign state might be injured, and at the same time refused to build national ships ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... in Philip's declension happened in this way. Sylvia had made rapid progress in her recovery; but now she seemed at a stationary point of weakness; wakeful nights succeeding to languid days. Occasionally she caught a little sleep in the afternoons, but she usually ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... seven; I remember them very well. Above all, I recollect the fine excitement of seeing my own name in great long golden letters, with a word after them that Krak told me I ought to know meant "king," and was of the third declension. "Rex, Regis," said Krak, and told poor Victoria to go on. Victoria was far too excited, and Krak said we must both learn it to-morrow; but we were clapping our hands, and didn't pay much heed. Then ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... our fellow-citizens, a visible and prevailing impiety and contempt for the laws and institutions of religion, and an abounding infidelity, which in many instances tends to atheism itself. The profligacy and corruption of the public morals have advanced with a progress proportionate to our declension in religion. Profaneness, pride, luxury, injustice, intemperance, lewdness, and every species of debauchery and ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... describes the changes which followed the declension of the primitive church from its original ...
— On Singing and Music • Society of Friends
... de contrahend. et committ. stip. Didst thou ever hear the vulgar proverb, Happy is the physician whose coming is desired at the declension of a disease? For the sickness being come to a crisis is then upon the decreasing hand, and drawing towards an end, although the physician should not repair thither for the cure thereof; whereby, though nature wholly do the work, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... suppose that from 1568, the high noon of the family prosperity, to 1578, the first year of their mature embarrassments, one half the interval was passed in stationary sunshine, and the latter half in the gradual twilight of declension, it will follow that the young William had completed his tenth year before he heard the first signals of distress; and for so long a period his education would probably be conducted on as liberal a scale as the resources of ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... pause to consider the question why we Christians represent John the Baptist, who had nothing to do with a cross, as holding a cross; if it be not that while Jesus was supposed to represent the Sun in its annual ascension, John was supposed to represent the Sun in its annual declension? What other rational explanation have we of the facts, (1) that John is represented as saying that he baptised with water but that Jesus would baptise with fire (where the rains of winter and the heat of summer may be referred to); and (2) that the Christian Church in framing its calendar ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... fill the round of the world's dignities, and feast with the gods, exulting in Kudos. And when the talk is over, each goes his way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing clouds of glory;[6] each declines from the height of his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by slow declension. I remember, in the entr'acte of an afternoon performance, coming forth into the sunshine, in a beautiful green, gardened corner of a romantic city; and as I sat and smoked, the music moving in ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... terrific repulse we had at Cold Harbor, such absolute slaughter as I saw that afternoon on the green slope of Malvern Hill. The guns of the entire army were massed on the crest, and thirty thousand of our infantry lay, musket in hand, in front. For eight hundred yards the hill sank in easy declension to the wood, and across this smooth expanse the Rebs must charge to reach our lines. It was nothing short of downright insanity to order men to charge that hill; and so his generals told Lee, but ...
— A Ride With A Mad Horse In A Freight-Car - 1898 • W. H. H. Murray
... Awakening" of 1740-1743 were a time of religious declension. A Socinianized Arminianism had paralysed evangelistic effort. The First Church, Providence, had long since become Arminian and held aloof from the evangelism of Edwards, Whitefield and their coadjutors. The First Church, Boston, had become ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... them. The vilest inclinations, the basest actions, succeeded my amiable amusements and even obliterated the very remembrance of them. I must have had, in spite of my good education, a great propensity to degenerate, else the declension could not have followed with such ease and rapidity, for never did so promising a Caesar ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Louis XIV., whose triumphs have been so extravagantly celebrated by Voltaire, saw the culmination and declension of military glory and literary splendour at Paris, and of regal magnificence at Versailles. Gone were the times of cardinal dictators. When the ministers came after Mazarin's death to ask the king whom they should now address ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... its nominative. Now you may write, at the head of the first column, the word Nouns, and at the head of the second, Nom., for nominative. Then rule a line for the third column. What shall this contain!" "The declension." "Yes; and the fourth?" ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... least a foot in height. The first coup d'archet was made with the shirt-collar, which he folded down to its proper size; but the delicate part of the performance was still to come. Brummell "standing before the glass, with his chin raised towards the ceiling, now, by the gentle and gradual declension of his lower jaw, creased the cravat to reasonable dimensions; the form of each succeeding crease being perfected with the shirt which he had just discarded." We were not aware of the nicety which was demanded ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... now extinct, and therefore, pro tanto, rather presumtions of weakness than of strength as being mementoes of our losses, yet, on the other hand, all countervailing claims which had since arisen, and had far more than equiponderated the declension in that one direction, should have been then adopted into the titular heraldry of the nation. It was neither wise nor just to insult foreign nations with assumptions which no longer stood upon any basis of reality. And on that ground France was, perhaps, rightly omitted. But why, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... able to trace events to their true causes; to point out the influence of religion upon human policy, and of that policy on the Church of God; to exhibit the rise and fall of states and empires,—the advancement or declension of knowledge,—the state of barbarism or civilization which prevailed in the several countries of the world,—the laws, the manners, the institutions, which arose, were changed, improved, or deteriorated, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... domestic science work," he says. "They take as much pride in bringing to my office a good loaf of bread, or a well-prepared dish of vegetables or meat as they do in being able to give a perfect demonstration of a theorem in geometry, or a perfect conjugation or declension of a Latin word. Possibly ten years from now they may have more demand upon their ability to prepare a square meal for a hungry life companion, or to cut out a dress or apron for a younger member of the family than they will have need of doing ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... achievements which grace enabled her to accomplish was the cause; or, not improbably, a cherished satisfaction in the blessing she had received, instead of in the BLESSER Himself, may have led to the separation. She seems to have been largely unconscious of her declension; self-occupied and self-contented, she scarcely noticed His absence; she was resting, resting alone,—never asking where He had gone, or how He was employed. And more than this, the door of her chamber was not only closed, but barred; an evidence that His ...
— Union And Communion - or Thoughts on the Song of Solomon • J. Hudson Taylor
... these apparently opposing qualities are only divided from each other by almost insensible boundaries. The habitual exercise of strong self-control can alone preserve even our virtues from degenerating into sin, and a clear-sightedness as to the very first step of declension must be sought for by self-denial on our own part, and by earnest prayer for the assisting graces of the Holy Spirit, to search the depths of our heart, and open ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... language, and thus of preparing the way for their complete disappearance. The declensions of nouns became unsettled; nouns that used to make their plural in a or in u took the more striking plural suffix as that belonged to a quite different declension. The same things happened to adjectives, verbs, and other parts of language. The causes of this are not far to seek. Spoken language can never be so accurate as written language; the mass of the English and Danes never cared or could care much for grammar; and both parties to a conversation ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... fact only a probable reference to Egypt's invasion of Palestine in 608, Ch. II. 16, and part, if not all, of Ch. III. 6-18. The general theme is a historical retrospect—Israel's early loyalty to her God, and her subsequent declension to the worship of other gods, figured as adultery; along with a profession of penitence by the people, to which God responds by a stern call to a deeper repentance and thorough reform; failing this, her doom, though vaguely described as yet, is inevitable. The nation is addressed as a whole at ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... Little of their early history can be gathered from their traditions, extending back scarcely a century preceding the Revolution. Oka-na-sto-ta, one of their distinguished chiefs, visited England during the reign of George the Second. From his time they date the declension of their nation. His place of residence was at Echota, one of the Over-Hill Towns. Of the tumuli, or mounds scattered through the country, and other ancient remains, they know nothing, and considered them, when they took possession of the country, as vestiges of a more numerous ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... Latine Tongue, by a method of Vocabulary and Grammar; the former comprising the Primitives, whether Noun or Verb, ranked in their several Cases; the latter teaching the forms of Declension and Conjugation, with all possible plainness: To which is added the Hermonicon, viz. A Table of those Latin words, which their sound and signification being meerly resembled by, the English are the sooner learned thereby, for the use of ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... excursion. If such was the fact, it required considerable time to send a messenger the necessary distance, and to bring the two white men to the spot where they were to embark. Encouraged by these reflections, a new stock of patience was gathered, and the declension of the sun was ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... declension which arose after James VI. took the government into his own hands, the strict exercise of such discipline became specially odious to the king and his gay courtiers, and incessant efforts were made to relax its rigour. These, however, were in general directed to ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... hence progress is rapid. A second reason is that at the beginning there are many different respects in which progress can be made. For example, the beginner in German must learn nouns, case endings, declension of adjectives, days of the week; in short, a vast number of new things all at once. At a later period however, the number of new things to be learned is much smaller and improvement cannot be so rapid. A third reason why learning proceeds more rapidly at first is that the interest is greater ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... the declension of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, as well as the conjugation of verbs in both languages; but the grammatical arrangement of them does not come within the design of this work. The foregoing list ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... others gaping shattered mouths; the walls now presenting long lines of rampart, and now a succession of peaks. But still, although they had now traversed the chasm for seventy or eighty miles, they found no close and no declension to its solemn grandeur. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... self which, according to Marion, exists in all of us. But when she made further inquiries about her, with a view to rescuing her, she was daunted by the discovery that Lenore had been privately married to Delacour for some time past, and that her declension, which was really due to drink, dated from ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... granted, and for what, (I may not be quite particular.) To stop that he took in another person's name L1500 a year for life, and some time past he disposed of it, or sold his life out. He has been very still since his declension from the Whigs, and is not concerned in the slave-trade [question?] as I hear of." This letter, now in possession of Hall's kinsman, Dr. Dutton Steele of Philadelphia, contains an item not in Paine's account, which may have been derived from it. Hall was an English ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... it constitutes one of the most remarkable epochs in the whole of that thousand years which we may roughly reckon as constituting the history of Britain. In the commencement of that period, we may see, if not the setting, at any rate the declension of that system of personal rule which had existed under previous sovereigns, and which, after a brief and spasmodic revival in the time of George the Third, has now sunk, let us hope, into the limbo of forgotten things. The latter part of that 100 years saw the dawn of that ...
— William Harvey And The Discovery Of The Circulation Of The Blood • Thomas H. Huxley
... particular season, is now no longer peculiar to it, having been already dissipated and exhausted. Another cause he assigns is, "the too general desertion of the country, the great scene of hospitality." Now this was written just fifty-three years ago, and as all the causes assigned for the declension of this grand national festivity up to that period are incontrovertible, and have been operating even more powerfully ever since, they will sufficiently account for the still greater declension observable in our days. And the declension appears to me to consist in this,—there ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... is righteousness thus to fuse together our divisive impulses and march with one mind through life, there is plainly one thing more unrighteous than all others, and one declension which is irretrievable and draws on the rest. And this is to lose consciousness of oneself. In the best of times, it is but by flashes, when our whole nature is clear, strong, and conscious, and events conspire to leave us free, that we enjoy communion ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who appear in the Gospels are heartless formalists, if not worse; yet not only Annas and Caiaphas and their spiritual kindred ministered at the altar, but there were some in whose hearts the ancient fire burned. In times of religious declension, the few who still are true are mostly in obscure corners, and live quiet lives, like springs of fresh water rising in the midst of a salt ocean. John thus sprang from parents in whom the old system had done all that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... with respect to words. Attention is seldom paid to gender; boro rye and boro rawnie being said, though as rawnie is feminine, bori and not boro should be employed. The proper Gypsy plural terminations are retained in nouns, but in declension prepositions are generally substituted for postpositions, and those prepositions English. The proper way of conjugating verbs is seldom or never observed, and the English method is followed. They say, I dick, I see, instead of dico; I dick'd, I saw, instead of dikiom; if I had dick'd, ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... preparation of teachers began in the first quarter of the nineteenth century in Massachusetts. That state, with others, was suffering from an educational declension that had been going on for a long time. Matters were getting serious. Finally, a few clear-headed, far-seeing leaders made an analysis of the situation hoping to bring about a betterment of conditions. They quickly ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... there was little else to be heard but the declension of nouns, the conjugation of verbs, etc. When walking together, and even at meals, I was constantly telling him the names of different objects, as they presented themselves, in French; so that he was hourly laying in a stock of words, and sometimes little phrases. ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... were sacred to the Druids, so were they to the Israelites in their days of declension. And in Greece we find the famous oracle of Jupiter at the oaks of Dodona. To the ancient inhabitants of Italy the misletoe was a sacred emblem; and the golden branches of Virgil were none other ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... tones were invented to distinguish similar sounds. So that, at the present day, anyone who says ma will mean either an exclamation, hemp, horse, or curse according to the quality he gives to the sound. The language remains in a primitive state, without inflexion, declension, or distinction of parts of speech. The order in a sentence is: subject, verb, complement direct, complement indirect. Gender is formed by distinctive particles; number by prefixing numerals, etc.; cases by position ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... multiplication and vicissitude of forms. There is nothing single and rare in respect of nature, but in respect of our knowledge, which is a wretched foundation whereon to ground our rules, and that represents to us a very false image of things. As we nowadays vainly conclude the declension and decrepitude of the world, by the arguments we extract from our own weakness ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... expressed, And hoped it would not tend to make him vain. He thought it right his views thus to explain, And trusted they would give them due attention. Should his poor life be spared he would remain And labor hard to keep them from declension, Though of their falling off ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... end in nouns which are of the same declension this is properly called Homoioptolon, as the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... that separated her from her virginity. On the east side, several shops had been thrown into one, and forced into a semblance of eternal unity by means of a coat of stucco. And there was a fountain at the north end which was new to her. No other constructional change! But the moral change, the sad declension from the ancient proud spirit of the Square—this was painfully depressing. Several establishments lacked tenants, had obviously lacked tenants for a long time; 'To let' notices hung in their stained and dirty upper windows, and clung insecurely to their ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the Nile, and thenceforth shines with undiminished intensity to the end. The lustre of his well-deserved and world-wide renown, the consistency and ever-rising merit of his professional conduct, contrast painfully with the shadows of reprobation, the swerving, and the declension, which begin to attend a life heretofore conformed, in the general, to healthy normal standards of right and wrong, but now allowed to violate, not merely ideal Christian rectitude, but the simple, natural dictates of upright dealing between man and ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... obviously, "unless the Death of Death (Christ) had given death to Death by his own death, the gate of eternal life had been closed." A poetic specimen of declension! ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... had already begun Latin with my father, and had vainly endeavoured to share my educational advantages with Mrs. Bundle, by teaching her the first declension. ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... civilisation of Baghdad contrasting with the barbarism of Europe then Germanic, The Nights itself being the best expositor. On the other hand the action of the state-religion upon the state, the condition of Al- Islam during the reign of Al-Rashid, its declension from the primitive creed and its relation to Christianity and Christendom, require a somewhat extended notice. In offering the following observations it is only ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... with whiskey, which she offered to Maurice as an expression of her gratitude. "I do not know," said Maurice to me, as he told me the story, "that she will ever forgive me for declining, though I couched my declension as ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... Note the spelling of Grant in the feminine without an e. Adjectives of the third declension whose feminine was not distinguishable in Latin took no "e" in early French. A survival of this is found in ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... they meet, the one ascending to the point of junction, the one declining from it, but, at first, not in any marked degree, and only showing the characters which justify its being above called, generically, ignoble, as its declension ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... into sadness, then into a fast, Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness, Thence to a lightness; and, by this declension, Into the ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... generally takes twenty days to complete its course; in other words, the maturity and declension of the pustule takes that time to fulfil its several changes. The mode of vaccination is either to insert the matter, or lymph, taken from a healthy child, under the cuticle in several places on both arms, or, which is still ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... so ruinous as failure. The weaker a man is, the weaker he must become. When a man who seeks employment is shabby and gaunt and nerveless, his poverty lessens his chances, but to-morrow he will be weaker and shabbier, and day by day the rapidity of his declension will increase. ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... monosyllables, partly words rudely pieced together,—which has been described in a preceding chapter as characteristic of the Turanian race, and which is known in science by the general name of agglutinative, i.e., "glued or stuck together," without change in the words, either by declension or conjugation. The people of Shumir and Accad, therefore, were one and the same Turanian nation, the difference in the name being merely a geographical one. SHUMIR is Southern or Lower Chaldea, the country towards and around the Persian Gulf,—that very ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... resemblance already noted in the manner of its vowels and consonants, it has the roots of the vocables and their hidden and obscure meaning [sus prenezes, y misterios] and some gutturals; with the Greek, the articles in the declension of nouns, and in the conjugations the abundance of voices and moods; with the Latin, the abundance and elegance; with the Spanish, the fine structure, polish, and courtesy. As a proof of this, Father Pedro Chirino has inserted in his printed relation of these islands ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... Uller (it seems that when interstellar travel was developed, the names of Greek Gods had been used up, so those of Norse gods were used). It is the second planet of the star Beta Hydri, right angle 0:23, declension-77:32, G-0 (solar) type star, of approximately the same size as Sol; distance from Earth, 21 ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... Church gloried over the declension of Judaism. In presence of Benedict XIII, antipope, a Spaniard, wandering in Spain, because in Rome they would not own him, a formal disputation was carried on for sixty-nine days between Jerome of Santa Fe and other ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... depressed interior, subjected in seasons of prolonged rains to partial inundation, by a dispersion of the several waters that flow upon it from the eastern mountains whence they originate; and bearing in mind at the same time, that the declension of the country within the above parallels, as most decidedly shown by the dip of its several rivers, is uniformly to the N.N.W. and N.W., it would appear very conclusive, that either a portion of our distant interior ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... Lesson 124.—What is Declension? Decline girl and tooth. Decline the several personal pronouns, the relative and the interrogative. What adjective pronouns are declined wholly ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... are, it must be admitted, intricate. Each noun boasts two separate forms, and each of its declension-cases keeps a group of sub-cases within reach for special emergencies. There are only two regularly ordained verbs,—"to be" and "to have"; but they don different canonicals for each different ceremony, ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... to encourage one's friends to borrow one's books—not to offer individual books, which is much the same as OFFERING advice. That will probably take some of the shine off them, and put a few thumb-marks in them, which both are very wholesome towards the arresting of the furniture declension. For my part, thumb-marks I find very obnoxious—far more so than the spoiling of the binding.—I know that some of my readers, who have had sad experience of the sort, will be saying in themselves, "He might have mentioned a surer antidote resulting from ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... sounds. So that, at the present day, anyone who says ma will mean either an exclamation, hemp, horse, or curse according to the quality he gives to the sound. The language remains in a primitive state, without inflexion, declension, or distinction of parts of speech. The order in a sentence is: subject, verb, complement direct, complement indirect. Gender is formed by distinctive particles; number by prefixing numerals, etc.; cases by ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... said, some intimations of that speedy decay to which the whole civilised world, then limited within the Roman empire, was internally and imperceptibly tending. Nor was it many ages ere these prognostications of declension ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... you, do ye even so unto them."—I shall certainly, among my legacies, leave my latest curse to that unlucky predicament which hurried—tore me away from Castle Gordon. May that obstinate son of Latin prose [Nicol] be curst to Scotch mile periods, and damned to seven league paragraphs; while Declension and Conjugation, Gender, Number, and Time, under the ragged banners of Dissonance and Disarrangement, eternally rank against him in ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the almost universal declension, there was ever the remnant—Jew and Gentile—who "endured, seeing the invisible," and strengthening their souls in the special tribulation promise "He that shall endure unto the end, the same shall ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... in the word of God touching the last days, is one which foretokens a wide-spread and lamentable declension in the religious world. The phrase which embodies it, is the one just quoted, "Babylon is fallen." The term "Babylon" is not intended nor used as a term of reproach, but rather as a descriptive word setting forth the very undesirable condition of "mixture" and "confusion" ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... they fill the round of the world's dignities, and feast with the gods, exulting in Kudos. And when the talk is over, each goes his way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing clouds of glory; each declines from the height of his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by slow declension. I remember, in the entr'acte of an afternoon performance, coming forth into the sunshine in a beautiful green, gardened corner of a romantic city; and as I sat and smoked, the music moving in my blood, I seemed to sit there ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pronouncing AE like AI, that in the poets we occasionally find AI in the genitive singular of the first declension, appears to have little weight in ...
— The Roman Pronunciation of Latin • Frances E. Lord
... Greek Zeus. Ushas, dawn, again in the later Sanskrit is neuter. In the Veda it is feminine; and even the secondary Vaidik form Ushasa is proved to be of high antiquity by the nearly corresponding Latin form Aurora. Declension and conjugation are richer in forms and more unsettled in their usage. It was a curious fact, for instance, that no subjunctive mood existed in the common Sanskrit. The Greeks and Romans had it, and even the language ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... grace enabled her to accomplish was the cause; or, not improbably, a cherished satisfaction in the blessing she had received, instead of in the BLESSER Himself, may have led to the separation. She seems to have been largely unconscious of her declension; self-occupied and self-contented, she scarcely noticed His absence; she was resting, resting alone,—never asking where He had gone, or how He was employed. And more than this, the door of her chamber was not only closed, but barred; an evidence that His return was neither ...
— Union And Communion - or Thoughts on the Song of Solomon • J. Hudson Taylor
... shook his head. Then he hastened to enlighten the wine-waiter, who had been about to refill his glass with port and had construed the gesture as a declension of the nectar. ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... an exception in favor of the Society of Friends. He inquired if J.G. Whittier was a "Friend" in regular standing, evidently intimating a doubt on that point, on account of his being so decided an abolitionist. The praise of such men is the strongest testimony that could be adduced to the declension of the Society of Friends in anti-slavery zeal. To a great extent I fear their sentiments on this subject have been held traditionally; and that in many cases, they have not only done nothing themselves, but by example and precept have condemned the ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... those which relate to place; in the fifth, those connected with the idea of time; and in the sixth, the origin of both these classes, as they appear in the writings of the poets. The seventh book is employed on declension; in which the author enters upon a minute and extensive enquiry, comprehending a variety of acute and profound observations on the formation of Latin nouns, and their respective natural declinations from the nominative case. In the eighth, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... manufacturers, merchants, and other traders of this city, most respectfully give to understand, that it is a truth, as melancholy, as it is universally known, that the declension of manufactures, which all the well-disposed citizens have remarked with the most lively grief, from the beginning of this century, has increased more and more for several years; and that this principal branch of the subsistence of the good ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... crucifixion declension dimension dissension distortion divulsion expulsion impulsion insertion intention occasion propulsion recursion repulsion revulsion scansion ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton
... literary and official texts. In the case of many of these terms, their appearance in Rashi is the earliest known; otherwise they occur only at a later date. And it is not difficult to put the laazim back into French, because of the well-defined system of transcription employed. Even the laws of declension (or what remained of declension in ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... great in peace and mighty in war: I ask you whether this 'land of old and just renown' has not a right to expect from her institutions a culture more in accordance with her present needs than that supplied by declension and conjugation? And if the tendency should be to lower the estimate of science, by regarding it exclusively as the instrument of material prosperity, let it be the high mission of our universities to furnish the proper counterpoise by pointing out its nobler uses—lifting ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... words, 'In days of old, all living beings that had been created were sorely afflicted with hunger. And like a father (unto all of them), Savita (the sun) took compassion upon them. And going first into the northern declension, the sun drew up water by his rays, and coming back to the southern declension, stayed over the earth, with his heat centered in himself. And while the sun so stayed over the earth, the lord of the vegetable world (the moon), converting the effects of the solar heat (vapours) into ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... time have never seen them. The vilest inclinations, the basest actions, succeeded my amiable amusements and even obliterated the very remembrance of them. I must have had, in spite of my good education, a great propensity to degenerate, else the declension could not have followed with such ease and rapidity, for never did so promising a Caesar ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... or in that power, that effectually keepeth some to salvation. Upon this second reason I now am, and am shewing how it comes to pass that they that are under the power of the things that we have afore discoursed, should notwithstanding that, return to their vomit again. One cause of this declension, or going back to iniquity, I have just now touched upon, and we have some ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... educational matters. "Our girls like the domestic science work," he says. "They take as much pride in bringing to my office a good loaf of bread, or a well-prepared dish of vegetables or meat as they do in being able to give a perfect demonstration of a theorem in geometry, or a perfect conjugation or declension of a Latin word. Possibly ten years from now they may have more demand upon their ability to prepare a square meal for a hungry life companion, or to cut out a dress or apron for a younger member of the family than they will have need of doing some of ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... with powdered sugar, and a highly geological home-made cake. The magnitude of these preparations quite took away Tom Pinch's breath; for though the new pupils were usually let down softly, as one may say, particularly in the wine department, which had so many stages of declension, that sometimes a young gentleman was a whole fortnight in getting to the pump; still this was a banquet; a sort of Lord Mayor's feast in private life; a something to think of, and hold ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... termination of the Himalayas, in the country of Cabul, to their eastern declension near the banks of the Burrampooter, there is no continuity that would entitle them to the appellation of a "chain of mountains." Between these two points they are cut transversely—and in many places—by stupendous valleys, that form the channels of great ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... period, however, and on both sides of the Border, the status of the minstrel or ballad-maker—for in old times the two went together, or rather were blent in one, like the words and music—had suffered sad declension. There was no longer question of royal harpers or troubadours, as Alfred the Great and as Richard the Lion Heart had been in their hour of need; or even of bards and musicians held in high favour and honour by king and court, like Taillefer or Blondel. ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... a sudden declension in his high spirits; for he had been Tim's blood horse all the way from church, and had come home ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... or their members end in nouns which are of the same declension this is properly called Homoioptolon, as the following ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the attention of the Government." And Mr Censor returns to the subject on March 3: "More Murders and horrid Barbarities have been committed within the last twelvemonth, than during many preceding years. This as we have before observed, is principally to be attributed to the Declension of Religion among the Common People." By the end of the month the above-named Act had received the royal assent; and the first clause thereof again yielded Fielding the satisfaction of seeing a measure which he had warmly recommended in his Enquiry now placed on the Statute ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... let your boys get too forward; the longer they stay, the longer they pay. I have known a dozen boys of six years standing in an academy, who neither knew the declension or conjugations of their accidence, their multiplication or pence table, or any thing else besides, which they had been sent to learn, and for the learning of which, some of them to my certain knowledge ...
— The Academy Keeper • Anonymous
... Cold Harbor, such absolute slaughter as I saw that afternoon on the green slope of Malvern Hill. The guns of the entire army were massed on the crest, and thirty thousand of our infantry lay, musket in hand, in front. For eight hundred yards the hill sank in easy declension to the wood, and across this smooth expanse the Rebs must charge to reach our lines. It was nothing short of downright insanity to order men to charge that hill; and so his generals told Lee, but he would not listen to reason that day, and so he sent regiment after regiment, and brigade after ...
— A Ride With A Mad Horse In A Freight-Car - 1898 • W. H. H. Murray
... old-fashioned methods of teaching; and (to quote Elder Concannon) he was a Latin scholar! Why the old gentleman should consider that accomplishment of such moment, when no pupil in the Poketown school ever arrived even to a Latin declension, was a ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... step in Philip's declension happened in this way. Sylvia had made rapid progress in her recovery; but now she seemed at a stationary point of weakness; wakeful nights succeeding to languid days. Occasionally she caught a little sleep in the afternoons, but she ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... saying, it was to please his young master on his return. "Likewise something in Lat'n," added Tom. "Nom'tive Mouser!—'nough to make ye mad, sir!" he exclaimed with pathos. The wretch had been put to acquire a Latin declension. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... somewhat overshot the mark—and to-day the sight of all this brisk life, going on just as it used to do, with the same insouciance and the same merriment, makes me wish to reflect, to gather up the fragments, to see if it is all loss, all declension, or whether there is something left, some ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... cup of penitence. He had known what it was to be resigned, what it was to break forth in a childish fury of rebellion against fate, and what it was to sink into the coma of despair. The time had changed him. He told himself no longer tales of an easy and perhaps agreeable declension; he read his nature otherwise; he had proved himself incapable of rising, and he now learned by experience that he could not stoop to fall. Something that was scarcely pride or strength, that was perhaps only refinement, withheld ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Camellias.—Introduce a gradual declension of artificial heat amongst all that have completed their growth. A curtailment in the supply of water, giving merely sufficient to keep them from flagging, will induce the ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane
... his arteries his grit is above par. For years Roush had been drinking to excess. He had reached the point where he dared not face in the open a man like Albeen with nerves of unflawed steel. The declension of a gunman, if once it begins, is rapid and sure. One of those days, unless Roush were killed first, some mild-looking citizen would take his gun from him and kick him out ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... must be said in extenuation of our nymph-like damsel's apparent subjection to levity—a declension which, in the sequel and in certain quarters, went neither unnoticed nor undeplored. But to labour this point is to forestall history. Immediately her change of attitude announced its existence ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... know that poem of Longfellow's, sir, that sounds exactly like the first declension. What is it?—'Marr's a ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... I shall not write a line to-day, Though many subjects merit my attention. To take one instance only, there is May (The month) at present in her last declension. Lord, what a dance she leads us on her May-toes, And spoils the beans and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... the navigation of the Mississippi? Spain excludes us from it. Is public credit an indispensable resource in time of public danger? We seem to have abandoned its cause as desperate and irretrievable. Is commerce of importance to national wealth? Ours is at the lowest point of declension. Is respectability in the eyes of foreign powers a safeguard against foreign encroachments? The imbecility of our government even forbids them to treat with us. Our ambassadors abroad are the mere pageants of mimic sovereignty. Is a violent and ...
— The Federalist Papers
... of the declension of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, as well as the conjugation of verbs in both languages; but the grammatical arrangement of them does not come within the design of this work. The foregoing list of words is a selection of those that are most ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... in the declension of pronouns.' When accompanied by the preposition kita, "with," there is a tmesis of the preposition, and the pronouns are placed between its first and second syllable; e.g. vi, him''-ki-ni-ta, "with him." This takes place in every number and ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... which have earned for their author the foremost place among the Doctors of the Western Church. But his greatest work, without any doubt, is the treatise on the 'City of God.' The Roman empire, as Augustine's life passed on, was hastening to its end. Moral and political declension had doubtless been arrested by the good influence which had been brought to bear upon it; but it was impossible to avert its fall. "Men's hearts," as well among the heathen as among the Christians, were "failing them for fear and for looking after those ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... counting the badgers' skins. There were eighteen, and the moths had got into them, so that the draught under the door puffed little drifts of hair over the polished boards. Then he settled down to the first Latin declension—Musa, a muse; vocative, Musa, O muse!; genitive, Musae, of a muse. ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... months, at the bidding of native chiefs and at a moment's notice, to leave their farms and homes, their standing crops . . . all to be taken possession of by natives, but that the Government is more powerless than ever to vindicate its assumed rights or to resist the declension that is threatening its existence." It then recites how all the other colonies and communities of South Africa have lost confidence in the State, how it is in a condition of hopeless bankruptcy, and its commerce annihilated whilst the inhabitants are divided into ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... was as interesting as mansions in a state of declension usually are, as the excellent county history showed. That popular work in folio contained an old plate dedicated to the last scion of the original owners, from which drawing it appeared that in 1750, the date of publication, the windows were covered with little scratches like black flashes of lightning; ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... as to be 'markitt for a special perriodic and fatall yeir to the Kirk of Scotland,' and he enters on his narrative of it 'with a sorrowful heart and drouping eyes,' so 'doolful' was the decay it ushered in. The declension is not to be wondered at; for where has a Church been found in which such prolonged oppression as the Scottish Church had been subjected to, did not weary the patience and damp the zeal of all but the most resolved members of its Communion? Had we been present at one of the diets of the Assembly, ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... instrument, and never failed in foretelling a shower of rain, or squall of wind. It is remarkable, that when we got to the north of 60 degrees, the symparometer acted directly opposite to that plan for which it was intended; and instead of the declension of the oil being indicative of bad weather, and its ascension prognostic of fair weather, a direct contradiction to the movement of the barometer was the result. Let those who understand the matter account for the fact. The coldness of the climate could have had no influence, for the temperature ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... select the warmest railway rug she could find; for the teacher, though she was not a very learned nor judicious school-mistress, had a heart and affections of her own. She had once, it is true, taken the word legibus (dative plural of lex, a law) for an adjective of the third declension, legibus, legiba, legibum; and Margaret had criticised this grammatical subtlety with an unsparing philological acumen, as if she had been Professor Moritz Haupt and Miss Marlett, Orelli. And this had led ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... thought I must have gaz'd on thee for ever; —But oh! my Eyes grow heavy in the Play, As if some strange Divinity about me Told me my Safety lay in their Declension. —It is not Sleep!—sure, Kings do never sleep; That were a low submission to a Power A Monarch shou'd despise—but yet 'tis so: Ye Gods, am I but mortal then? Or do you ever sleep? I find ye do! But I must—and lose this lovely Object: ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... probably! Still, I am puzzled by human greatness. A century hence what will he matter, this Pevensey? His ascent and his declension will have been completed, and his foolish battles and treaties will have given place to other foolish battles and treaties, and oblivion will have swallowed this glistening bluebottle, plumes and fine ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... anti-ministerial spirit" and the growth of worldliness and lax living among the people. "What are the reasons that have provoked the Lord to bring his judgments upon New England?" Such was the primary question which the Synod of 1679 was called upon to answer. "Declension from the primitive foundation work, innovation in doctrine and worship"—this, according to a committee of the deputies, was the true cause. "A spirit of division, persecuting and oppressing of God's ministers and precious saints," said ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... history as a minister of dauntless courage. He breasted the destructive flood of declension, and endured the buffeting of the waves. His humility prepared him for great service in the kingdom of God. He was deeply grieved by reason of the loose doctrines and practices prevailing within the ministry. The Church was infected and corrupted with the inventions of man. Through his effort ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... the priests who appear in the Gospels are heartless formalists, if not worse; yet not only Annas and Caiaphas and their spiritual kindred ministered at the altar, but there were some in whose hearts the ancient fire burned. In times of religious declension, the few who still are true are mostly in obscure corners, and live quiet lives, like springs of fresh water rising in the midst of a salt ocean. John thus sprang from parents in whom the old system had done all that it could do. In his origin, as in himself, he represented the consummate ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... grammar, too, has been elaborated with such incredible minuteness by native grammarians, that I am not surprised if many scholars who begin the study of Sanskrit turn back from it in dismay. But it is quite possible to learn the rules of Sanskrit declension and conjugation, and to gain an insight into the grammatical organization of that language, without burdening one's memory with all the phonetic rules which generally form the first chapter of every ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... Sir, to offer me one of your Fergussons. I thank you for it, as I ought; but, in truth, I have more pictures than room to place them; both my houses are full, and I have even been thinking of getting rid of some I have. That this is no declension of your civility, Sir, you will see, when I gladly accept either of your medals of King Charles. I shall be proud to keep it as a mark of your friendship; but then I will undoubtedly rob ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... As declension among those who had protested against the corruptions of Antichrist, under the ministry of the first angel of reform, together with the continued impenitence of the multitude who still wondered after the beast, called for the appearance of the second angel of revival, so the moral condition ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... that the creative faculty has taken a lower form than it held in the epic and the tragedy. But since in this form it acts on more extensive material and reaches more men, we may well believe that this temporary declension is preparatory to some higher development, when the poet shall idealise life without making abstraction of any of its elements, and when the secret of existence, which he now speaks to the inward ear of a few, may be proclaimed on the house-tops to the ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... far less considerable than might be expected from the pen of a young author. However, we must remark some rather awkward examples of grammatical construction. The correct plural of "eucalyptus" is "eucalypti", without any final "s", the name being treated as a Latin noun of the second declension. "Slowly and dignified—it pursues its way" is hardly a permissible clause; the adjective "dignified" must be exchanged for an adverb. Perhaps Mr. Held sought to employ poetical enallage, but even so, the adjective does not correspond with "slowly"; besides, the use ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... is perhaps in a worse condition than with respect to words. Attention is seldom paid to gender; boro rye and boro rawnie being said, though as rawnie is feminine, bori and not boro should be employed. The proper Gypsy plural terminations are retained in nouns, but in declension prepositions are generally substituted for postpositions, and those prepositions English. The proper way of conjugating verbs is seldom or never observed, and the English method is followed. They say, I dick, I see, instead of dico; I dick'd, I saw, instead of dikiom; if I had dick'd, instead ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... despite these wise regulations, should catch the morbus, there is only one antidote, the name whereof is Vismuthum. Vismuthum, vismuthi, neuter gender, second declension. In Hungarian viszmuta, in Slovak vismuthium, in ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... Societies under their pastoral care, on the subject of the increasing negligence of the Publick Worship of God; which they consider as one of the most painful and alarming, among the various instances of declension and immorality, which at the present time threaten the very existence of religion in this country.—"In what manner," says the Address, "does this evil affect the political interests, the essential wellbeing, of the community? All the branches of morality are indissolubly connected. From one breach ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... he, is Rome. Many a day have I been kept in school without my dinner because I was not able to parse thee idly by, Roma—Rome—noun of the first declension, feminine gender, that a quarter of a century ago caused me punishment, I have thee now literally under foot, and (knocking his cigar) throw ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... of lines are harmonious and beautiful, and we know that they are essential to the character and structure. They are organic lines, in short. They mean life and growth. In principle they are radiating and recurring lines; in each form they repeat each other in varying degrees of direction and declension of curve. No two lines are alike, yet there is no contradiction and no unnecessary line, and variety is combined with unity. Each affords a perfect instance of harmonious composition of line, and gives us definite principles upon which to ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... Jeremiah—in fact only a probable reference to Egypt's invasion of Palestine in 608, Ch. II. 16, and part, if not all, of Ch. III. 6-18. The general theme is a historical retrospect—Israel's early loyalty to her God, and her subsequent declension to the worship of other gods, figured as adultery; along with a profession of penitence by the people, to which God responds by a stern call to a deeper repentance and thorough reform; failing this, her doom, though ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... Neoplatonists did. Judged from the stand-point of pure science, of empirical knowledge of the world, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle marks a momentous turning-point, the post-Aristotelian a retrogression, the Neoplatonic a complete declension. But judging from the stand-point of religion and morality, it must be admitted that the ethical temper which Neoplatonism sought to beget and confirm, was the highest and purest which the culture of the ancient world produced. This ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... our language, and thus of preparing the way for their complete disappearance. The declensions of nouns became unsettled; nouns that used to make their plural in a or in u took the more striking plural suffix as that belonged to a quite different declension. The same things happened to adjectives, verbs, and other parts of language. The causes of this are not far to seek. Spoken language can never be so accurate as written language; the mass of the English and Danes never cared or could care much for grammar; and both parties to a conversation ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... his work is sure to be read with interest by mankind; but he is already classed. Nobody, now, despite all his brilliant excellences, would dream of putting de Maupassant with the first magnitudes. And the declension of Flaubert is one of the outstanding phenomena of modern French criticism. It is being discovered that Flaubert's mind was not quite noble enough—that, indeed, it was a cruel mind, and a little anaemic. Bouvard et Pecuchet was the crowning ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... household, and in his ripe experience and knowledge of the Indian character, manners, and customs, and in the curious philosophical traits of the Indian language. It is refreshing to find a person who, in reference to this language, knows the difference between the conjugation of a verb and the declension of a noun. There is a prospect, at least, of getting at the grammatical principles, by which they conjoin and build up words. It has been intolerable to me to converse with Indian traders and interpreters here, who have, for half their lives, been using a language ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... more than their English contemporaries. In the former case he found, perhaps, less declension from the standard of the giants of whom he had been an eager student in his early manhood, when he read "all Balzac," and recorded his admiration for the "dignity" of Mme. de Stael's Germany. Dumas he loved then and always, ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... 34. A stone once set in motion cannot be recalled, because it is then placed under the operation of natural laws which cannot be controlled or altered, so too in Moral declension, there is a point at which gravitation operates irretrievably, "there is a certain bound to imprudence and misbehaviour which being transgressed, there remains no place for repentance in the natural course of things." Bishop Butler's Analogy, ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... in our austere and thrifty Glen there was only one high day, and that was Sacrament Sabbath. It is rumoured—but one prefers not to believe scandals—that the Scottish Kirk nowadays is encouraging a monthly Sacrament, after which nothing remains in the way of historical declension except for people to remain for the Sacrament as it may occur to them, and for men like Drumsheugh to get up at meetings to give their religious experiences, when every one that has any understanding will know that the reserve has gone out of Scottish character, and the reverence ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... an' here was news! - Mere hymn-books cockin' in the pews - A humanised abomination, Unfit for ony congregation. Syne, while I still was on the tenter, I scunnered at the new prezentor; I thocht him gesterin' an' cauld - A sair declension frae the auld. Syne, as though a' the faith was wreckit, The prayer was not what I'd exspeckit. Himsel', as it appeared to me, Was no the man he used to be. But just as I was growin' vext He waled a maist judeecious text, ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tendency to regard every object, natural or artificial, as endowed with life and intelligence. Polytheism, again, he conceives to have been a step in advance, an improvement on the preexisting state of things, instead of being, as it really was, a declension from a purer and better faith, an aberration from the light of Nature, not less than from the lessons of Revelation. He conceives Monotheism, whether as taught, to the Jews by Moses, or to the world at large by Christ and his apostles, to have ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... exhibits a fine and bold peculiarity—a double declension of its Adjectives, depending on a condition of syntax. The Anglo-Saxon adjective, in its ordinary (or, as grammarians have called it, Indefinite) declension, makes the nominative plural for all the genders in E; and this remains as the regular ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... master, without that diligent attention to its prosperity which the interest of possession alone can give, and the authority of a principal alone can enforce, it quickly lost its fame for the excellence of its goods, and soon after its customers from the report of its declension. The produce, therefore, diminished every month; he was surprised, he was provoked; he was convinced he was cheated, and that his affairs were neglected; but though he threatened from time to time to enquire into the real state of the business, and investigate the cause of its decay, he felt himself ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... the present century, not very long before my own time, after many years of moral and intellectual declension, the University of Oxford woke up to a sense of its duties, and began to reform itself, the first instruments of this change, to whose zeal and courage we all owe so much, were naturally thrown together for mutual support, against the ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... pang. To this lordly place I, poor miserable sinner, was a debtor by wrong and shame. Let no one laugh at me because my sin was small: it was enough for me, being that of one who had stolen for the first time, and that without previous declension, and searing of the conscience. I hurried towards the building, anxiously looking ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... tongues!' and yet would not use the one they each possessed to witness for their Lord. I knew a man who wanted to go to China as a missionary, who would not testify for Christ in the neighbourhood where he lived. That meant declension, not growth. Growth comes by using the grace, stretching out and reaching forth; the power ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... represent John the Baptist, who had nothing to do with a cross, as holding a cross; if it be not that while Jesus was supposed to represent the Sun in its annual ascension, John was supposed to represent the Sun in its annual declension? What other rational explanation have we of the facts, (1) that John is represented as saying that he baptised with water but that Jesus would baptise with fire (where the rains of winter and the heat ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... of the churches we may perhaps afford to dispense with and suffer no loss, but not this glorious means of grace. If in any place they have lost their power, the fault is not in the institution, but in the Church; religious declension is the greatest enemy to this good old custom. If the Lord's people return to their first love, the lovefeast will resume its former glory and power. Oh, Lord, "wilt Thou not revive us again, that Thy people may rejoice ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... for declension it is, though we achieve all the confidences of Melampus, and even master with him the pleasant argot of the woods — may still be ours if we suffer what lives in us of our primal cousins to draw us down. On the other hand, let soul inform and irradiate body as it may, ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... hung off and on, all that day and for six days besides. And when he had watched seven days he knew something. For you are certain to know something if you give for seven days your whole thought to it, even though it be only the first declension, or the nine-times table, or the ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... unto God." Also, whenever you are under any particular temptation or affliction; whenever you are going to engage in anything which will expose you to temptation; whenever you perceive any signs of declension in your own soul; when the state of religion around you is low; when your heart is affected with the condition of individuals who are living in impenitence; or when any subject lies heavily upon your mind;—make the matter, ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... and youthful happiness of the poet. Now if we suppose that from 1568, the high noon of the family prosperity, to 1578, the first year of their mature embarrassments, one half the interval was passed in stationary sunshine, and the latter half in the gradual twilight of declension, it will follow that the young William had completed his tenth year before he heard the first signals of distress; and for so long a period his education would probably be conducted on as liberal a scale as the resources of Stratford would allow. Through this earliest section of his life he would ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... most ancient inhabitants from those whose descendants yet remain, is one of the very points at issue. If the descendants of the mound and temple builders yet exist, the traditions of the era have passed from them in the process of their declension. But whoever the builders were, and whether their blood still flows in the existing race or not, they clung, like this race, so firmly to their ancient mythology and religion as to impress it indelibly on the features of their architecture, and in almost every ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... such an explanation, that I was given to understand that it was the great author's unselfish effort in behalf of his old college comrade and life-long friend, that was supposed to imply a state of moral declension fitly indicated by ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... France. These both put off, a poor petitioner, A care-craz'd mother to a many sons, A beauty-waning and distressed widow, Even in the afternoon of her best days, Made prize and purchase of his wanton eye, Seduc'd the pitch and height of his degree To base declension and loath'd bigamy: By her, in his unlawful bed, he got This Edward, whom our manners call the prince. More bitterly could I expostulate, Save that, for reverence to some alive, I give a sparing ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... c. de contrahend. et committ. stip. Didst thou ever hear the vulgar proverb, Happy is the physician whose coming is desired at the declension of a disease? For the sickness being come to a crisis is then upon the decreasing hand, and drawing towards an end, although the physician should not repair thither for the cure thereof; whereby, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... word out of the dictionary, for the bookbinder's English was rather scanty at the best, and was not literary. As for the grammar, I was getting that up as fast as I could from Ollendorff, and from other sources, but I was enjoying Heine before I well knew a declension or a conjugation. As soon as my task was done at the office, I went home to the books, and worked away at them until supper. Then my bookbinder and I met in my father's editorial room, and with a couple of candles on the table between us, and our Heine and the dictionary ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... result before the incident I am about to relate. There must have been, however, a gradual declension towards it, although the pain which followed upon this has almost obliterated the recollection of preceding follies. Nobody does anything bad all at once. Wickedness needs an apprenticeship as ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... to who, which, and what to form the Compound Relative Pronouns. They are used when the antecedent is omitted. For declension, see above. ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... In the times of declension which arose after James VI. took the government into his own hands, the strict exercise of such discipline became specially odious to the king and his gay courtiers, and incessant efforts were made to relax its ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... "unless the Death of Death (Christ) had given death to Death by his own death, the gate of eternal life had been closed." A poetic specimen of declension! ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... fell, The sire, who dozed by the decanters, Started, and dreamed of misadventures. The rotten brick decayed to dust; The iron was consumed by rust; Each tabid and perverted mansion Hung in the article of declension. ...
— Moral Emblems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Pendergast, the wit of the club, and which, though the general can hardly repeat them for laughing, always make Mr. Bracebridge look grave, he having a great antipathy to an indecent jest. In a word, the general is a complete instance of the declension in gay life, by which a young man of pleasure is apt to cool down ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... both the homage and (what is doubtless preferable to her) the francs of numerous customers and admirers. The "wealth of either Ind" sparkles upon her hand, or glitters upon her attire: and if the sun of her beauty be somewhat verging towards its declension, it sets with a glow which reminds her old acquaintance of the splendour of its noon-day power. It is yet a sharply contested point whether the ice of this house be preferable to that of Tortoni: a point, too intricate and momentous ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... treasury for the erection of churches and support of the clergy perplexed the executive. The ordinary revenue showed symptoms of declension, and the council passed a bill which declared that new imposts were impracticable, and vested a discretionary power in the government to refuse assistance to any new undertaking (1841). Thus the principle of the church act was subverted, and the grant of money ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... from this terrible declension of the drama, we went, in a mood intensely ill-natured, to witness how the "Horse of the Pyrenees" would behave himself at Sadler's Wells. From the piece so called we anticipated no amusement; we thought the regular company would make but sorry equestrians, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... remarkable epochs in the whole of that thousand years which we may roughly reckon as constituting the history of Britain. In the commencement of that period, we may see, if not the setting, at any rate the declension of that system of personal rule which had existed under previous sovereigns, and which, after a brief and spasmodic revival in the time of George the Third, has now sunk, let us hope, into the limbo of forgotten ...
— William Harvey And The Discovery Of The Circulation Of The Blood • Thomas H. Huxley
... own, which was capable of being set to notes."—Id. "Why are we so often frigid and unpersuasive in public discourse?"—Id. "Which is only a preparation for leading his forces directly upon us."—Id. "The nonsense about which, as relating to things only, and having no declension, needs no refutation."—Fowle cor. "Who, upon breaking it open, found nothing but the following inscription."—Rollin cor. "A prince will quickly have reason to repent of having exalted one person so high."—Id. "Notwithstanding it is the immediate subject of his ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... First Declension form their genitive in que, and usually are such as terminate ...
— Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language - Shea's Library Of American Linguistics. Volume III. • Buckingham Smith
... preceding the "Great Awakening" of 1740-1743 were a time of religious declension. A Socinianized Arminianism had paralysed evangelistic effort. The First Church, Providence, had long since become Arminian and held aloof from the evangelism of Edwards, Whitefield and their coadjutors. The First Church, Boston, had become Socinianized and discountenanced ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... horses and dogs, except when law steps in to encourage the breeding of disputes; not to mention the evils arising from crossing the old breed; nor can we much wonder at it, when we reflect on the altered way of life, the change of habits, and the declension of virtue, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
