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More "Shallowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "O shallowness of human judgments! It was enough to be born a Samaritan in order to be rejected by the priest, and despised by the Levite. Yet now, what to us the priest and the Levite, of God's chosen race though they were? They passed ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Week" gives proofs of the shallowness of Rome's piety. Priests and people alike can weep, fast and faint, because their God is suffering and dying; all traffic can stop because, they say, "God has died"; but as soon as the death of Judas is announced, at ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... have every contempt," said he, in a hurried tone, "for the shallowness of idlers and talkers attempting to mould men by theories; but the question whether France is to remain a monarchy or not, is one of the most pressing importance to your highness's operations. It ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... Library. One is constantly reading attacks on these new and most promising institutions, and always these attacks base themselves on the fact that the number of novels taken out was so many times, so many hundred times greater than the number of "serious books." Follows nonsense about "scrappy" reading, shallowness of the public mind, and so forth. In Great Britain public pomposities take up the strain and deliver large vague, foolish discourses on our intellectual decline. It occurs to none of these people—nothing, indeed, ever does seem to occur to this sort of people—to inquire if a man or ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Your father himself spoilt her absolutely. She had never been crossed—had never known a moment's anxiety—never even been obliged to do anything she did not like—to do anything except please herself. She was beautiful—most beautiful; and if she was shallow, well, then the very shallowness only made her more attractive. She fascinated us all." The man's voice took on a softer tone as he spoke. "Francis loved her—madly—passionately. His overwhelming joy in their betrothal was a thing never to be forgotten by those who saw it. And ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... people by its apparent smallness. It seems merely the end of an overgrown parish church, and not of a great cathedral, and though that apparent smallness is partly owing to the enormous size of the windows, which prevent any structural division of parts, it is increased by the monotony and shallowness of the decoration. It is almost impossible, in fact, to believe that this is the east end of the loftiest and widest choir in England. The buildings on the south side of the choir are the vestry, the treasury, and ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... will crow like the bantam he is, while the other, who may be the greater, perhaps the better man, although in the wrong, is embittered by his smallness, and turns away with increased prejudice. Human nature can hardly be blamed for its readiness to impute to the case the shallowness of its pleader. Few men do more harm than those who, taking the right side, dispute for personal victory, and argue, as they are sure then to do, ungenerously. But even genuine argument for the truth is not preaching ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... attractions; originalities, and originalities, there are liberties, and liberties. Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with its spray leaping into the air like white troops of fawns, is free, I think. Lost, yonder, amidst bankless, boundless marsh—soaking in slow shallowness, as it will, hither and thither, listless, among the poisonous reeds and unresisting slime—it is free also. You may choose which liberty you will, and restraint of voiceful rock, or the dumb and edgeless shore of darkened sand. ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... palpably a snort of outraged patience and dignity. She couldn't fool him any longer—not even with that wide-eyed appealingly infantile stare. He knew, without looking closer, that there was a flare of mirth hidden within its velvet duskiness. And there was only one way to deal with such shallowness—that was with firm and unmistakable severity. He leaned forward and pounded one meager knee for emphasis as Judge Maynard had ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... poetry of Schubert. A new era had set in. These three composers were neither the fools of princes nor the servants of the public: they were in the world, yet not of it. They looked upon their art as a sacred thing; and most probably the shallowness of much of the music produced in such abundance towards the close of the eighteenth century spurred them on to higher efforts. Dussek had lived an irregular, aimless sort of life; he had wandered from one country to another, and had acquired the ephemeral ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... among intelligent beings of a near approximation of Ultimate Truth) to an orthodox dogmatism, which today is on a par with the unreality which this selfsame science has sought to eliminate from the shallowness of the human mind. ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... John Stuart Mill, for no better reason than that nature sometimes drowns men and burns them, and that childbirth is a painful process, maintained that God could not possibly be infinite. I shall not say what I think of the shallowness and self-conceit displayed by such an argument. What it proves is not the finiteness of God, but the littleness of man. The mind of man never shows itself so small as when it tries to measure the attributes and limit the ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... of a large share of the young persons who move in fashionable circles is to introduce some topic requiring depth of thought and sound judgment. Such a subject will usually produce either an instant lull in the conversation or a display of ignorance which cannot fail to reveal the shallowness of the speaker's intellect. It is this superficial class of minds that most easily fall victims to a sickly sentimentalism, which readily leads to digressions from the pathway ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... had been deliberately preferred and had enjoyed her triumph hardened Diane's heart against her. Nay, the open violence and abandonment of her grief seemed to the more restrained and concentrated nature of her elder a sign of shallowness and want of durability; and in a certain contemptuous envy at her professing a right to mourn, Diane never even reconsidered her own resolution to play out her father's game, consign Eustacie to her husband's murdered, and leave her to console herself with bridal splendours and a choice ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... too much a man of action and of thought to be prodigal of words. And she knew that a facility in making pretty speeches is in nine cases out of ten merely the refuge of those who desire to conceal indifference or shallowness of heart. ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... say that the textbook was a matter of entire indifference, and that he would as soon have a book of riddles as Kames's "Elements of Criticism," so long as he could make us think out our conclusions. With him our recitations were a perpetual contest of our wits against his; he showed us the shallowness of our acquisitions, and dissected mercilessly both textbook and the responses to the questions which he had drawn from it, admitting nothing and pushing the pupil perpetually into the deeper water as soon ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... speech; yet she knew that its apparent heartlessness did not really denote the state of her aunt's mind. It was merely bred of the lady's shallowness, and of her ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... Deeps.” During the period of that ancient alliance of these two streams the tract of country between Lincoln and Boston, or rather between the points now occupied by those places, would be scoured by a greatly-augmented volume of water, and this may possibly account in some degree for the shallowness of “The Wash,” and the number of submarine sandbanks which lie off the mouth of the present Witham. Had the union of the two streams continued to the present time, bringing down their united body of silt, Boston ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... walk. So the child is emboldened to send out its young, unpractised thoughts, by the confidence it has in the guidance and protection of its teacher. To acquire and retain the proper ascendancy over the mind of a child, two things are essential, ample knowledge and entire honesty. Shallowness and pretension may mislead for a while. But to hold a child firmly and permanently, the teacher must abound in knowledge, and must ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... Chirman or Kerman, and is divided into the two kingdoms of Macran and Madel, with these towns, Guadel, Calara, Tibique, Calamate, Goadel, and Diul. This coast is barren and most of it desert, and cannot be approached on account of the shallowness of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... fatal. The farther shore was invisible; he could perceive nothing but the slight gleam of water lapping the sand at his feet, as it flowed slowly, noiselessly past, and beyond, the dim outline of a narrow sand ridge. Even this, however, was encouragement, proving the shallowness of the stream. He turned about, his face so close ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... moment before they quickly veiled themselves. The child had something Southern in her. So, for the matter of that, had Terry. She was fond of Eileen, but, simple as she was, she had not had Eileen with her pretty constantly for many years without being aware of a certain shallowness in the girl. The blood under the fair skin ran ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... of the cities and towns now, and only set down the rivers and main features, as they continued their steady journey day after day for all of a week. At the end of that time the increasing shallowness of the river, the many sand bars and the nature of the discolored, rolling waters, made them sure they were approaching the mouth of the great Platte River, which, as they knew, rose far to the ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... Now as the sunset draws nearer, and the enriched light, withdrawn from the farther horizon, begins to pulsate more intensely in the quarter whence it must soon altogether fade, I begin to see that vague and widely ranging effects have a thinness and shallowness about them. It is a poor thing just to see oneself transiently reflected in a hundred little mirrors. There is no touch of reality about that. Little greetings, casual flashes of courteous talk, petty compliments—these are things that fade as soon ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... underweigh in the morning, but from the shallowness of the water anchored within a mile east of ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... do, the consummate vanity of John Adams, and the shallowness of his judgment, I can easily picture to myself that when he arrived at the Federal City he was strutting in the pomp of his imagination before the presidential house, or in the audience hall, and exulting in the language of Nebuchadnezzar, "Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the honour ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... over precedence are extremely amusing. The society of her day cared very little for good manners, knew, indeed, very little about them, but all questions of etiquette were of vital importance, and the Margravine herself, though she saw the shallowness of the whole system, was far too proud not to assert her rights when circumstances demanded it, as the description she gives of her visit to the Empress of Germany shows very clearly. When this meeting was first proposed, the Margravine declined positively to entertain the idea. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan to be ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... he were carrying nothing but himself; and he does have about him, besides, a few sobering thoughts as to the length and labour and some of the unforeseen chances of the way.' And as Dean Paget says in his profound and powerful sermon on 'The Disasters of Shallowness': 'Yes, but there is something else first; something else without which that inexpensive brightness, that easy hopefulness, is apt to be a frail resourceless growth, withering away when the sun is up and the hot winds ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... were many men whom Arianism suited by its shallowness. As soon as Christianity was established as a lawful worship by the edict of Milan in 312, the churches were crowded with converts and inquirers of all sorts. A church which claims to be universal cannot pick and choose like a ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... Paris, where he again encountered governmental hostility in the unfriendliness of Bonaparte, whose rejection alike of Gall and of Fulton, who wished to introduce steam navigation, demonstrated that great military and political ability may co-exist with great shallowness of mind in reference to all things new, original, and philanthropic. So it has always been, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... the remains of the temple of Jupiter Ammon, carrying with him a small boat built at Cairo, for the purpose of exploring the lake and the island in it, mentioned by Browne. He experienced great vexations from the inhabitants of Siwah; and the boat was of no use to him, owing to the shallowness of the lake, so that after a residence of three days at the Oasis, where he seems to have made no discoveries, he returned to Cairo in the company of some Augila merchants. On his way he passed the wood of petrified date trees discovered ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... all the characters in our history Bolingbroke must be pronounced to be most of a charlatan; of all the writing in our literature, his is the hollowest, the flashiest, the most insincere.' This is true. By his 'execution,' consummate though it be, he is unable to conceal his insincerity and shallowness. 'Bolingbroke,' said Lord Shelburne, was 'all surface,' and in that sentence ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... It runs like a stream with a musical waste, And gurgles along with the liquidest sweep;— 'Tis not deep as a river, but who'd have it deep? In a country where scarcely a village is found That has not its author sublime and profound, For some one to be slightly shallow's a duty, And Willis's shallowness makes half his beauty. His prose winds along with a blithe, gurgling error, And reflects all of Heaven it can see in its mirror: 700 'Tis a narrowish strip, but it is not an artifice; 'Tis the true out-of-doors with its genuine hearty phiz; It is Nature herself, and there's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... certainly enjoyed the meal, went fishing as usual. Coming back about eleven o'clock, they went in for a swim and got a lot of enjoyment out of this. In spite of the northern clime in which they were, the shallowness of the lakes permitted the water to get pretty well heated by the hot July and August sun, and swimming was a real pleasure. It was only now and then when they struck a lake fed mainly by springs that they found the water too cold ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... which I do not know. Honeysuckle also grows, though but slowly. Trees have recently been planted in the various compounds, and also along some parts of the road leading to the bungalows, but owing to the shallowness of the soil, and the roots so soon reaching the rock, they seldom grow to any size. Some casuarinas in the Mysore mine camp have grown to about twenty feet in height, but these have now struck the rock, and most ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... only have any reason to rebel, they cannot well conspire against government, but attack religion instead, and pride themselves on their exemption from prejudice. The "Age of Reason" is their manual. Its bold, clear, simple statements they can understand; its shallowness they are too ignorant to perceive; its coarseness is in unison with their manners. Thus the author has become the Apostle of Free-thinking tinkers and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... not desert the savage even at the grave of his wife. An amusing illustration of the shallowness of aboriginal grief where it seems "truly touching" may be found in an article by the Rev. F. McFarlane on British New Guinea.[125] Scene: "A woman is being buried. The husband is lying by the side of the grave, apparently in ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... personal details of the great man's life, I have dwelt mainly on his public career. Apart from his brilliant conversations, his private life has few features of abiding interest, perhaps because he early tired of the shallowness of Josephine and the Corsican angularity of his brothers and sisters. But the cause also lay in his own disposition. He once said to M. Gallois: "Je n'aime pas beaucoup les femmes, ni le jeu—enfin rien: je suis tout a fait un etre politique." In ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... impossible that the Ovens will ever turn out the second Bendigo that many imagine. Hundreds differ from me, therefore it's hundreds to one that I'm wrong. The average wages, as far as I can judge, are an ounce a-week; some much more, many much less. We did not attempt digging ourselves. Eagle Hawk shallowness has spoilt us, for not even Octavius (who, you know of old, was a harder worker than either Frank or self) thinks it worth digging through fourteen or sixteen feet of hard clay for the mere pleasure of exercising our limbs. Provisions there were not at the high price that many ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... and look upon the fathers of two and three hundred years ago as mere pigmies, just emerging from an era of barbarism and ignorance, not at all to be compared with the proud wiseacres of our day. Never was there a greater mistake. The shallowness and flippancy of the leaders and politicians of this last quarter of the nineteenth century show them but little more than school-boys compared with the sturdy, sober-minded, deep-principled, dignified, and grand-spirited men who discovered and opened this continent and ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... manner puzzled Joyce. It seemed to her that Lucy attached immense importance to so trivial a thing as a mourning veil, yet she could not feel that this was all girlish frivolity and shallowness. Something in the child's whole manner disputed such a suggestion. Neither was her attitude towards Nate quite clear. She said she could not forgive, yet instinctively Joyce felt that neither did she entirely condemn. Could it be that deep within ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... shallowness and emptiness and glaring hypocrisy of this thing which calls itself the church; this thing which is so timid, so cowardly that it dares not touch any sin that is unpopular, I still believe that Christianity is in this land. To-day it is like a little ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... as to the depth or worth of this excitement beset Him. Sadly He looked on the eager multitudes, because He looked through them, and saw how few of them were bringing 'an honest and good heart' for the soil of His word. Just because He saw the shallowness of the momentary enthusiasm, He spoke this pregnant parable from a heavy heart, and as He tells us in His explanation of it to the disciples (ver. 10), uses the parabolic garb as a means of hiding the truth from the unsusceptible, and of bringing it home ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... took more freely to the use of sporting rifles and ammunition. Another element also in the less clean punctures of the short and cancellous bones was probably the less accurate and hard shooting of the Mauser rifles as they became worn; the bullets seemed to evidence this by the comparative shallowness of their rifle grooves, which, I take it, would mean less velocity and accuracy in flight. This would be of importance, since the clean puncture of cancellous bone was no doubt favoured by a high ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... too young to grasp the arguments at issue, his prejudices were strongly excited by the conventional Theism which pervades Figuier's work. Already it was the habit of his mind to associate popular dogma with intellectual shallowness; herein, as at every other point which fell within his scope, he had begun to scorn average people, and to pride himself intensely on views which he found generally condemned. Day by day he grew into a clearer ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... we arrived in the wake of the stranger we tacked and stood directly after her; and we had not been on the new tack more than ten minutes when I found, to my great gratification, that the Dolphin, despite the exceeding shallowness of her hull, was quite as weatherly a vessel as the chase, which was now nearly four miles ahead of us. But it was not until we had been in direct pursuit of her for a full hour that I was able to assure myself that we were ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... There was not a breath of air; not enough even to fill the small sail of the seaward-bound boat; but the rowers pulled with all their might and the vessel glided northward. The captain stood at the prow with his pole; sounding the current: his brother, no less skilled, took the helm.—The shallowness of the water made navigation very difficult, and those who knew the river best might easily run aground on unexpected shoals or newly-formed mud-drifts. The moon had scarcely risen when the boat was stranded ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... evil effects of speculation and newspaper reading is, that people have got in the way of not thinking much for themselves; of regarding as truth whatever is printed, and of not opening their eyes wide enough to discover the shallowness of the reasonings and falsehoods that are put forth at the behests of speculators, or of those who are managing corporations for speculative purposes. The American people have had an amazing experience ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... so much as he does. For here was Albert Charlton, bound by his vows to Helen Minorkey, with whom he had nothing in common, except in intellect, and already his sorrow was disclosing to him the shallowness of her nature, and the depth of his own; even now he found that she had no voice with which to answer his hungry cry for sympathy. Already his betrothal was becoming a fetter, and his great mistake ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... he might have had some hope of a more favorable hearing in the future. But he had no conception of any under-current of feeling in Margaret Adair. She had always seemed to him so frank, with a sweet, maidenly frankness, so transparent—without shallowness, that he was thrown into despair when she dismissed him. He was singularly ignorant of the nature of women, and more especially of young girls. His mother's proud, upright, rather inflexible character, ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... growing one, and operates in various ways. Its least mischief is shallowness; its greatest, the aversion to steady labor which it induces, and the low and feeble tone of mind which it encourages. If we would be really wise, we must diligently apply ourselves, and confront the same continuous application which our forefathers did; for labor is still, and ever will be, ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... This shallowness has no part in Byron himself. His weariness was a genuine outcome of the influence of the time upon a character consumed by passion. His lot was cast among spent forces, and, while it is no hyperbole ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion. She had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things. With the essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative nature, she was unable to conceive the fact that sensibilities were anything else than weaknesses. She had thought my weaknesses would put me in her power, and she found them unmanageable forces. Our positions ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... Capt. Henry Morgan and twelve hundred men, packed closely in their canoes; they never stopped, saving now and then to rest their stiffened legs, until they had come to a place known as Cruz de San Juan Gallego, where they were compelled to leave their boats on account of the shallowness of the water. ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... be a great mistake that would suppose the man who has thus multiplied the objects of his exertion to be of necessity superficial; superficial, that is, in the sense of shallowness or ignorance. Ordinary minds are bound by fetters, no doubt. Custom has rendered the pursuit of more than one idea all but impossible to them, and the vulgar adage of "Jack of all trades, master of none," applies to them in full force. But it must be remembered that a public man like Lord Brougham, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... they were my own. And their father's away so much that I think their mother sort of depends on me. Sometimes I get a little bothered—they're having the very best schooling and all the things money can give young people and yet—there's a sort of shallowness possessing them that makes them—well, not ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... was blowing.' The passion was gone. The thought of Langham still roused in her a pity that seemed to strain at her heartstrings. But was it really she, really this very Rose, who had rested for that one intoxicating instant on his breast? She felt a sort of bitter shame over her own shallowness of feeling. She must surely be a poor creature, else how could such a thing have befallen her and have left so ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... burdened with any secret; it was scarcely wonderful that she grew impatient and spoke harshly to Elizabeth when she insisted upon forcing trouble on her mind, which left to itself she was able, out of the very shallowness of her nature, ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... mean either stolidity or lethargy; far otherwise. Nor does it mean sluggishness, apathy or phlegmatism; quite the contrary. It does mean depth as opposed to shallowness, bigness as opposed to littleness, and vision as opposed to spiritual myopia. It means dignity, poise, aplomb, balance. It means that there is sufficient ballast to hold the ship steady on its way, no matter how much sail it spreads. When we see serenity, we are quite ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... a farewell nod. She was not hurt over the ill-bred manner in which she had been treated. She was disgusted with the other girl's utter shallowness. She was also visited by a sense of dull disappointment. Hurrying to overtake her own party, she discovered she was still carrying the freshman's golf bag. In the annoyance of the moment she had forgotten all about ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... at the beginning, and finishing it anywhere but at the end; attracted by its peculiar interest when done, and the peculiar difficulties that attend its execution; repelled by that appearance of insincerity and shallowness of tone, which seems its inevitable drawback. For the mind of the reader, always bent to pick up clues, receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate mechanism; and the book remains ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in its comprehension—at a certain point of brevity it would bid defiance to an army of Champollions. And thus he who has written very little, may in that little either conceal his spirit or convey quite an erroneous idea of it—of his acquirements, talents, temper, manner, tenor and depth (or shallowness) of thought—in a word of his character, of himself. But this is impossible with him who has written much. Of such a person we get, from his books, not merely a just, but the most just representation. Bulwer, the individual, personal man, in a green ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... forthwith makes its appearance at the surface. But decomposition is modified by innumerable circumstances—is hastened or retarded by innumerable agencies; for example, by the heat or cold of the season, by the mineral impregnation or purity of the water, by its depth or shallowness, by its currency or stagnation, by the temperament of the body, by its infection or freedom from disease before death. Thus it is evident that we can assign no period, with any thing like accuracy, at which the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... as such compliments go; but to-night she found herself remembering all the other women who had reigned before her, all those who would presently succeed her, and she was conscious of an impatient disgust of all the shallowness and insincerety of the ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... the fifth or sixth century of the Christian aera, the port of Augustus was converted into pleasant orchards; and a lonely grove of pines covered the ground where the Roman fleet once rode at anchor. [62] Even this alteration contributed to increase the natural strength of the place, and the shallowness of the water was a sufficient barrier against the large ships of the enemy. This advantageous situation was fortified by art and labor; and in the twentieth year of his age, the emperor of the West, anxious only for his personal safety, retired ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... a British mercantile firm, and a British government steamer made its first trip in November 1900. On the other great lakes and on most of the navigable rivers steamers were plying regularly before the close of the 19th century. However, the shallowness of the water in the Niger and Zambezi renders their navigation possible only to light-draught steamers. Roads suitable for wheeled traffic are few. The first attempt at road-making in Central Africa on a large scale was that of Sir T. Fowell Buxton and Mr (afterwards ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... could reach the shore. At another time, when swimming over to the small island, a shovel-nosed shark, which, as well as alligators, abound in those seas, struck me in the thigh, just as my foot could reach the bottom, and grounded itself, from the shallowness of the water, as I suppose, so that its mouth could not get round towards me. The blow I felt some hours after making the shore. By repeated practice, I at length became a pretty dexterous swimmer, and amused myself by passing from one ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... but to force upon him so much that he has rejected all. It has been the error of distracting and enfeebling the mind by an unmeaning profusion of subjects; of implying that a smattering in a dozen branches of study is not shallowness, which it really is, but enlargement, which it is not; of considering an acquaintance with the learned names of things and persons, and the possession of clever duodecimos, and attendance on eloquent lecturers, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... an inquiry to be a work of supererogation. Seeing clearly themselves the absurdity of prevalent popular views, and the shallowness of popular objections, they may be impatient of any discussion, on the subject. But it is submitted that there are many minds worthy {244} of the highest esteem and of every consideration, which have ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... streamlet disappeared, evidently finding its way out underground. Climbing the cross wall, from the top Smoke saw the lake beneath him. Unlike any mountain lake he had ever seen, it was not blue. Instead, its intense peacock-green tokened its shallowness. It was this shallowness that made its draining feasible. All about arose jumbled mountains, with ice-scarred peaks and crags, grotesquely shaped and grouped. All was topsyturvy and unsystematic—a Dore nightmare. So fantastic and impossible was it that it affected Smoke as more like a ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... from the trials, although it is said that the consumption was too rapid, and that it had to be mixed with Cardiff coal. Seven pits were sunk, and the concern lingered on until the year 1881, when its working was relinquished. The failure was attributed to the shallowness of the pits, which were only 30 metres deep, whilst it was supposed that if the excavation had been continued before these pits were flooded, shale and limestone strata could have been removed, exposing a still more valuable seam, in which case it might ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... found her own hunger for learning, her own strength and weakness, and while she had lost to the Widow Plosell, she had clearly seen that it was not her fault but Gus Carline's meagreness of mind and shallowness of soul. Instead of losing her confidence, she had found ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... wished to speak ill of her sister, only that she would be true and give this lover a chance to escape some of the pain if possible, by seeing the real Kate as she was at home without varnish or furbelows. Yet she reflected that those who knew Kate's shallowness well, still loved her in spite of it, and always bowed to ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... read: but that is all the more reason why women should be trained, by the perusal of a higher, broader, deeper literature, to distinguish the good novel from the bad, the moral from the immoral, the noble from the base, the true work of art from the sham which hides its shallowness and vulgarity under a tangled plot and melodramatic situations. She should learn—and that she can only learn by cultivation—to discern with joy, and drink in with reverence, the good, the beautiful, and the true; and to turn with the fine scorn of a pure and strong womanhood from the ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... grave is never opened a second time, a vast tract of country is occupied with these burial-fields, which add by no means to the salubrity of the vicinity. Much is gained, unquestionably, as regards the health of the inhabitants, by burying without the cities; but the shallowness of the graves contributes to render these vast accumulations of animal dust, at certain seasons more especially, a source of pestilential miasmata. The cemeteries near Scutari are immense, owing to the predilection which the Turks of Europe preserve ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... and horses wading not overleg. I have seen fishermen wading the main channel from side to side, their feet sinking into the dark mud, and thus discoloring the yellow water with a black track visible, step by step, through its shallowness. But still the Arno is a mountain stream, and liable to be tetchy and turbulent like all its kindred, and no doubt it often finds its borders of hewn stone not too far ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... palette, and then laid them on in untempered crudity. And who is not sensible of the vulgarity and coarseness of the account of Boswell? 'If he had not been a great fool he would not have been a great writer ... he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb,' and so forth, in which the shallowness of the analysis of Boswell's character matches the puerile rudeness of the terms. Here again, is a sentence about Montesquieu. 'The English at that time,' Macaulay says of the middle of the eighteenth century, 'considered a Frenchman who talked about ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... a solution! It is beside the matter to call the book ungodly, immoral, base. Le Sage would have answered: "Of course it is; for so is the world of which it is a picture." No; the most notable thing about the book is its intense stupidity; its dreariness, barrenness, shallowness, ignorance of the human heart, want of any human interest. If it be an epos, the actors in it are not men and women, but ferrets—with here and there, of course, a stray rabbit, on whose brains ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... now embarked were very small, owning to the shallowness of the river. The officers, assembled here from different parts of the country, detained us a whole day in order to have an opportunity of laying their several complaints before our physician, at the recommendation of Van-ta-gin, who ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... conscientiousness burned strong within him; and he fought to develop and to maintain breadth of public view and sanity of popular ideals. Blind patriotism was impossible for this great American: he exposed the shallowness of popular enthusiasms and the narrowness of rampant spread-eagleism, without regard for consequence to himself or his popularity. What a tribute to his personality that, instead of suffering, he gained in popularity by his honest ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... many a brilliant narrative of brilliant exploits has of late years been triumphantly demonstrated, and the shallowness of the sceptical scoffs with which little minds have carped at the great minds of antiquity has been in many instances decisively exposed. The laws, the politics, and the lines of action adopted or recommended by eminent men and powerful nations have been examined with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... the wise or the unwise, we learn that the profession which never had life may appear so well favoured for a time, that neither the false professor nor his converted neighbour may be aware of its shallowness. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Like most of his political type, he wallowed in his own peculiar snobbery. But of anything like companionship between father and daughter there had existed very little. While railing, wherever he found ears into which to rail, against the vicious luxury and sordid shallowness of the upper middle classes, his instinctive desire to shine above his poorer associates had sent Phyllis to an upper middle class school. Now Gedge had a certain amount of bookish and political intelligence. Phyllis ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... of the influence of literary knowledge of the Bible is the shallowness of much of our thinking. If the Bible were needed for nothing else in present literary life, it would be needed for the deepening of literary currents. The vast flood of flotsam and jetsam which pours from the presses seldom floats on a deep current. It ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... to the National, but contains much matter by United members. "Tempora Mutantur," a very meritorious short story by Marguerite Sisson, affords an illuminating contrast between the solid culture of 1834 and the detestable shallowness of the present time. This prevailing frivolity and unscholarliness is something which the United is seeking to remedy, and we are thankful indeed for stories such as this, which expose modern levity in all its ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... to our critical principle, if we did not recognise the historical effect of a speculation scientifically valueless. There has been no attempt to palliate either the shallowness or the practical mischievousness of the Social Contract. But there is another side to its influence. It was the match which kindled revolutionary fire in generous breasts throughout Europe. Not in France merely, but in Germany ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... one of his meadows that the turf turned brown or burnt up in squares during hot summer weather. This he conjectured to be caused by the shallowness of the soil over some ancient foundations; and some years before he had had the curiosity to open a hole, and soon came upon a hidden wall. He did not excavate farther, but the old folk, when they heard of it, remembered a tradition of a village having ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... . . .' Beauchamp hesitated to name the number of hours. He stood divided between a sense of the bubbling shallowness of the life about him, and a thought, grave as an eye dwelling on blood, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a great matted-together patch of earth fully thirty yards long and half as wide, a veritable island with bushes still in their places, floating steadily seaward, and helping to explain the muddiness of the water and the shallowness of the ocean far out and to right and left of where the ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... of the French Academy of Sciences deals with Mr. Darwin as the first Napoleon would have treated an "ideologue;" and while displaying a painful weakness of logic and shallowness of information, assumes a tone of authority, which always touches upon the ludicrous, and sometimes passes the limits ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... eagerness to finish things shows weakness. It certainly leads to shallowness, "Without haste, without rest" was Goethe's motto. I have heard of a woman who began to study botany at ninety. That shows a mind so trained and cultivated that the soil could not be exhausted with age. How good it was that she ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... a great help, especially now that it had been converted into a mill-race, and flooded beyond its usual proportions; for, when the Indians rushed into the water to wade across and assault the camp at close quarters, as the shallowness of the stream at that season of the year would previously have easily enabled them to have done, they found, to their astonishment, first that the current, which they did not expect to be more than a foot deep, rose above ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... fact that we are much more curious about the suppressed relations between the man and the woman than about the relations between both and our courts of law and private juries of matrons, produces that sensation of evasion, of dissatisfaction, of fundamental irrelevance, of shallowness, of useless disagreeableness, of total failure to edify and partial failure to interest, which is as familiar to you in the theatres as it was to me when I, too, frequented those uncomfortable buildings, and found our popular playwrights in the mind to (as ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... then with effort added, "and likewise, madam, with your pardon, I would say that though I verily believe it is nobleness of heart and spirit that inclines poor Antony to espouse your Grace's cause, there is to my mind a shallowness and indiscretion about his nature, even when most in earnest, such as would make me loath to commit any woman, or any ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... foreboding settled upon his spirit, as the darkness settled upon the hills. Here he was, alone and unknown,—a bashful boy as yet, utterly wanting in that ready audacity by means of which persons of extreme shallowness often push themselves into notice. Well might he foresee days of gloom, long days of waiting and struggle, stretching like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... and swift, and neither the one nor the other went deep enough to be lasting. The faith that is built on 'signs and wonders' is easily battered down; the repentance that is due to a thunderstorm is over as soon as the sun comes out again. The shallowness of the contrition in this case is shown by two things,—the request to Samuel to pray for them, and the boon which they begged him to ask, 'that we die not.' They had better have prayed for themselves, and they had better ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the shallowness of the river at this season, and to the rapids, the steam-boat is unable to go up the whole way to Peterborough, and a scow or rowboat, as it is sometimes termed—a huge, unwieldy, flat- bottomed machine—meets the passengers ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... "foerden" or firths on the eastern side of Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein, and the ragged sounds or "Bodden" that indent the Baltic shore of Germany from the Bay of Lubeck to the mouth of the Oder River.[450] Although the shallowness of the bordering sea and the sand-bars and sand reefs which characterize all flat coasts here also exclude the largest vessels, such coasts have nevertheless ample contact with both land and sea. They tend to develop, therefore, the activities ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... thing for you to do is to resolve to be "mother's own boy," as the sneering tongue of shallowness puts it, just as long as you possibly can. It will be the greatest luck you will ever have, if you are able to be "mother's own boy" as long as she lives. Don't be afraid that that will make you effeminate and soft; don't think ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... accessories to give them their full effect. But I think one cannot with justice bestow higher praise than this. To speak candidly, I felt, in reading the tale, a wondrous hollowness in the moral and sentiment; a strange dilettante shallowness in the purpose and feeling. After all, 'Jack' is not much better than a 'Tony Lumpkin,' and there is no very great breadth of choice between the clown he IS and the fop his father would have made him. The grossly material life of the old ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... young pines, next year, to leeward of a clump of cone-bearing trees. In the Moor such self-sown woods come to no ripeness. The pines are unhealthy and stunted, hung with gray moss, and eaten out with canker. The excessive moisture and the impenetrable subsoil, and the shallowness of the congenial sand that encouraged them to root make the ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... I amuse people; I know it. You—and everybody—say I am all cleverness and froth—not to be taken seriously. But did it ever occur to you that what you see in me you evoke. Shallowness provokes shallowness, levity, lightness, inconsequence—all are answered by their own echo.... And you and the others think it is ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... there was enough grass to blow in the wind and frost had wholly left for the season; to balance this there have been two brief snow squalls, three deluges that washed even big beans out of ground, and a scorching drought that reduced the brooks, unsheltered by leafage, to August shallowness. But to-day has been entirely lovable and full of the promise that after all makes May the garden month of the year, the time of perfect faith, hope, and charity when we may believe ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... had now at last reached the entrance of what appeared to be a lake, which was in the neighbourhood of the Polar Sea, if not that sea itself; but the variety of channels, the strength of currents, the shallowness of the water and quantity of ice with which it was beset, with the ignorance of their guide, rendered it impossible to make any further advance that season. The object of the expedition, however, had been accomplished. The largest northern river of ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... gave place immediately before her earnest dignity and before the look of large humanity which distinguished her so vitally from the women whom he knew. He felt her sincerity of purpose at the same instant that he felt Gerty's shallowness and the artificial glamour of the hot-house air in which he had hardly drawn breath. There was an appeal in Laura's face which he had never seen before—an expression which seemed to him to draw directly from the elemental pulse; and ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... ripe, the whole circular grove, at a little distance, looks like a big handful of flowers set in a cup to be kept fresh—a tuft of goldenrods. Its feeding-streams are exceedingly beautiful, notwithstanding their inconstancy and extreme shallowness. They have no channel whatever, and consequently are left free to spread in thin sheets upon the shining granite and wander at will. In many places the current is less than a fourth of an inch deep, and flows with so little friction it is scarcely visible. Sometimes ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... body leant forward till the head descends nearly to the feet when the spine and knees are extended. In the flat plunge, the swimmer must fling himself forward in an inclined direction, according to the depth or shallowness of the water; when he touches the bottom, he must rise in the same manner as ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... the book is admirable. Both the skeptic who sneers and the bigot who denounces might learn a beautiful lesson from its calm, yet earnest pages. It is free from the brilliant shallowness of Renan, and the bitterness which sometimes marred the teachings of Parker. It is a generous, tender, noble book,—enjoying, indeed, over most works of its class a peculiar advantage; for, while its logic has everywhere a masculine strength and clearness, there glows through ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... (1826), deals, somewhat more sensibly, with the same social class as Bulwer's 'Pelham.' In his novels of this period, as in his dress and manner, he deliberately attitudinized, a fact which in part reflected a certain shallowness of character, in part was a device to attract attention for the sake of his political ambition. After winning his way into Parliament he wrote in 1844-7 three political novels,' Coningsby,' 'Sybil,' and 'Tancred,' which set forth his Tory creed of opposition to the dominance ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... circling overhead and flock after flock flying about the shore, which grew more beautiful each minute; but before they had glided far over the lagoon, Carey's attention was taken up by the shallowness of the water, and he reached out over the side to gaze in wonder through the perfectly limpid medium at what seemed to be a garden of flowers of the most beautiful and varied tints. There were groves, too, of shrubs, whose branches were of delicate shades of lavender, yellow, orange, and purple, ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... zeal to serve my fellow men, For years I criticised their prose and verges: Pointed out all their blunders of the pen, Their shallowness of thought and feeling; then Damned them up hill ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... service in that quarter is quite inadequate to effectually guard the line, even at those points where the incursions are usually made. An experiment of an armed vessel on the Rio Grande for that purpose is on trial, and it is hoped that, if not thwarted by the shallowness of the river and other natural obstacles, it may materially contribute to the protection ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... them, forgive them, and even submit to them. He must know of them whether they be cold-blooded or passionate, whether true or false, and how far true, and how far false. The depth and the breadth, and the narrowness and the shallowness of each should be clear to him. And, as here, in our outer world, we know that men and women change,—become worse or better as temptation or conscience may guide them,—so should these creations of his change, ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... language which followed the Norman Conquest rose the heights of thirteenth-century romance. From the dull poetic pedantries of the age which succeeded Chaucer rose the glittering pinnacles of Shakespeare and his fellows. From the coldness and shallowness of the eighteenth century rose the rich and varied tableland of whose occupants Burns was one of the first and Tennyson and Browning perhaps the last. No other literature has shown such recuperative power, a thought full of hope and ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... is not to be expected that we should trouble ourselves with the matter at issue between the rival hierarchies on the other side of the water. It is a very pretty quarrel, however, and good must come out of it, as it cannot fail to attract popular attention to the shallowness of the spiritual pretensions of both parties, and lead to the conclusion that a hierarchy of any sort has very little in common with the fishermen and tent-makers ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of vanity, her disregard for dress and personal adornment, her hatred of fashion, her contempt for the vanities of the capital, were all causes why her native beauty did not shine or shone very little. The intense shallowness of her complexion, indicating a very bilious constitution, still ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... world, as they would to the skirts of any other world, in default of the sporting one—form an integral and significant, and, it may be, an honourable and useful part, of the English literature of this day; and, therefore, all shallowness, vulgarity, stupidity, or bookmaking in that class, must be as severely attacked as in novels and poems. We English owe too much to our field sports to allow people to talk nonsense ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... pleasure and in profit; good nonsense well talked only less admirable than good sense well delivered; and a spirit of fun the next best thing to a serious spirit; and moreover, thank God, they are quite compatible! I think the stupid shallowness of society has some deep causes; one among which is, of course, that by devoting all their energies and all their faculties and all their time to mere amusement, as they have no right to do, people fail of their aim, and are neither well amused nor well occupied, nor well anything else. For if "all ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... mere hostelry, of which we occupy the apartments for a time, which others better than we have sojourned in before, who are now where we should desire to be with them. Fortunately for mankind, as some counterbalance to that wretched love of novelty which originates in selfishness, shallowness, and conceit, and which especially characterizes all vulgar minds, there is set in the deeper places of the heart such affection for the signs of age that the eye is delighted even by injuries which are the work of time; not ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... of a word of sympathy." Another names, "Frivolity, want of definiteness of purpose." Still another says: "The giving of so little time to serious reflection and for preparation for the responsible duties of life. In other words, frivolity of manner, shallowness of thought, and, as a consequence, insipidity of speech are strongly marked faults in some young ladies." This writer pleads for deeper, intenser earnestness. "Young women will reach a high excellence of moral character only as they ...
— Girls: Faults and Ideals - A Familiar Talk, With Quotations From Letters • J.R. Miller
... slack water, we again weighed: the serenity of the weather did not long continue, but soon increased to a brisk gale, accompanied by thunder, lightning and rain; we were driven with great impetuosity through the narrow channel between the bar and the shore, and from the shallowness of the water, the rollers continually broke over our heads, threatening our destruction every moment. Providentially we surmounted these dangers, and at 5 P.M. entered the river, which is interspersed with islands and picturesque objects, that ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... "naturalistic philosophy," stems directly, not from Zola, Flaubert, Augier and the younger Dumas, but from the Greeks. In the midst of democratic cocksureness and Christian sentimentalism, of doctrinaire shallowness and professorial smugness, he stands for a point of view which at least has something honest and courageous about it; here, at all events, he is a realist. Let him put a motto to his books, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... the only deep passion of his life, and memory of whom was to come to the surface touchingly in his old age. Miss Charpentier, or Carpenter, as she was called, with her vivacity and quaint foreign speech "caught his heart on the rebound"; there can be no doubt that, in spite of a certain shallowness of character, she made him a good wife, and that his affection for her deepened steadily to the end. The young couple went to live at Lasswade, a village near Edinburgh, on the Esk. Scott, in whom the ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... was sore shaken, and, withal, was in so extreme a leak, that we were rather upon the point to leave her than to keep her any longer; yet, hoping to bring all to good pass, sought the coast of Florida, where we found no place nor haven for our ships, because of the shallowness of the coast. Thus, being in greater despair, and taken with a new storm, which continued other three days, we were enforced to take for our succour the port which serveth the city of Mexico, called St. John de Ullua, which ...
— Voyager's Tales • Richard Hakluyt
... to the settlement, young Clarendon followed the regular trail, over which he had passed scores of times. Not far from the house he crossed a broad stream at a point where the current (except when there was rain) was less than two feet deep. Its shallowness led to its use by all the settlers within a large radius to the southward, so that the faintly marked trails converged at this point something like the spokes of a large wheel, and became one from that ...
— The Story of Red Feather - A Tale of the American Frontier • Edward S. (Edward Sylvester) Ellis
... passed from the mast-head to a girdle round their respective bodies, and off they set along the banks; sometimes, on reaching creeks, irrigating channels, or unequal projections, plunging up to their necks, and wading or swimming with their burthen, as the depth or shallowness of the water required. In this way all the communication up the Tigris and Euphrates is carried on when the wind blows down those rivers. The business of tracking as may be conceived, is extremely fatiguing and dangerous: in fact, so excellent a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 560, August 4, 1832 • Various
... getting power or as a means of doing good; whether he seeks it within or without the code. One might go on indefinitely, including such matters as whether he seeks superiority with tact or the reverse and whether he understands the essential shallowness and futility of his pursuit or not. To be superior is back of most of striving, and it is the most camouflaged of all human motives and pleasures. For this is true: that the preaching of humility, of righteous conduct, of service, of self-sacrifice, ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist philosophizing I have had to go back to a shallow wigpated age. The optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... listened. I saw both the slap-dash mode in which he dealt with subjects on which he had not thought, and the temperament which admitted suspicion when the means of knowledge came in his way. Having seen his two phases, I wonder neither at his more than usual exhibition of shallowness when shallow, nor at the intensity of the contrast ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... not using oars. That would have been impossible in a channel so narrow. They were pushing the boat through the water by means of a long pole, but it was not very easily managed, because of the shallowness of the water and the bushes that ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... She knew that Gustave Lenoble was of a very different stamp from those specimens of the genus tiger whose impertinent admiration had often wounded and distressed her; but she was inclined to attribute the fault of shallowness to a nature so frank and buoyant as that ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... her youth burdened with any secret; it was scarcely wonderful that she grew impatient and spoke harshly to Elizabeth when she insisted upon forcing trouble on her mind, which left to itself she was able, out of the very shallowness of her nature, ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... a few cows were kept on the Marsh farms, for, owing to the shallowness of the dykes, it was difficult to prevent their straying. However, Joanna boldly decided to fence all the Further Innings. She could spare that amount of grazing, and though she would have to keep down the numbers of her sheep till after she had bought Great Ansdore, she expected to make ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... instructive lesson in American political history—the most significant warning and beacon-light to coming generations. I say that the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth terms of the American Presidency have shown that the villainy and shallowness of rulers (back'd by the machinery of great parties) are just as eligible to these States as to any foreign despotism, kingdom, or empire—there is not a bit of difference. History is to record ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... more reason why women should be trained, by the perusal of a higher, broader, deeper literature, to distinguish the good novel from the bad, the moral from the immoral, the noble from the base, the true work of art from the sham which hides its shallowness and vulgarity under a tangled plot and melodramatic situations. She should learn—and that she can only learn by cultivation—to discern with joy, and drink in with reverence, the good, the beautiful, and the true; and to turn ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... engagement is so matter-of-fact that neither of us can be jealous. And it was a mere flirtation—she was too silly for him. He's fond of rowing, and kindly gave her an airing for an evening or two. I'll warrant they talked the most unmitigated rubbish under the sun—all shallowness and pastime, just as everything is at watering places—neither of them caring a bit for the other—she giggling like a goose all ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... the vulgarity and coarseness of the account of Boswell? 'If he had not been a great fool he would not have been a great writer ... he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb,' and so forth, in which the shallowness of the analysis of Boswell's character matches the puerile rudeness of the terms. Here again, is a sentence about Montesquieu. 'The English at that time,' Macaulay says of the middle of the eighteenth century, 'considered a Frenchman who talked ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... of a case he had recently disposed of, a rector of his diocese who was guilty of an atheistic book. He spoke feelingly of what he called the shallowness of rationalism, of the dangers of the age, beautifully of that splendid past which the church must conserve. He told of some lectures he himself was to deliver on the fallacies of socialism. "It's ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... their confession easy and swift, and neither the one nor the other went deep enough to be lasting. The faith that is built on 'signs and wonders' is easily battered down; the repentance that is due to a thunderstorm is over as soon as the sun comes out again. The shallowness of the contrition in this case is shown by two things,—the request to Samuel to pray for them, and the boon which they begged him to ask, 'that we die not.' They had better have prayed for themselves, and they had better have asked for ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... conduct. But whatever another's consciousness of mental inferiority may be, this unhallowed temper will produce determined resistance. The very worm that crawls upon the earth will resent the giant's tread. If, on the contrary, it be united to shallowness of capacity, it will render its unhappy possessor utterly contemptible notwithstanding other exterior attractions which might otherwise command attention. It is, in this case, the effect of egregious ignorance; and so far from extorting ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... the French Academy of Sciences deals with Mr. Darwin as the first Napoleon would have treated an "ideologue;" and while displaying a painful weakness of logic and shallowness of information, assumes a tone of authority, which always touches upon the ludicrous, and sometimes passes the ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the First Officer. "But if that is the case, how do you account for the shallowness of the water in the passage and out here in the basin? An earthquake violent enough to split that hill would make a crack in the earth ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... The life of the country, her total lack of vanity, her disregard for dress and personal adornment, her hatred of fashion, her contempt for the vanities of the capital, were all causes why her native beauty did not shine or shone very little. The intense shallowness of her complexion, indicating a very bilious constitution, ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... be so, then, let it end on this note of seeming harmony and of silent discord; it was her mother's act, not her own. Truth was in her and had made once more its appeal; once more deep had called to deep only to find shallowness. For spiritual shallowness there must be where an appeal such as hers could be ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... neither the genius, the learning, nor the judgment to qualify you for literature.'" In the same magazine for June, 1874, Paul Hamilton Hayne condemned severely the provincial literary criticism which had prevailed, — "indiscriminate adulations, effervescing commonplace, shallowness and poverty of thought." "No foreign ridicule," he said, "however richly deserved, nothing truly either of logic or of laughter, can stop this growing evil, until our own scholars and thinkers have the manliness and honesty to discourage instead ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... officers on board told us its story. After the fall of Fort Fisher the Rebels retired to Fort Anderson, and offered a desperate resistance to our army and fleet. Owing to the shallowness of the water the latter could not come into close enough range to do effective work. Then the happy idea of this sham monitor suggested itself to some one. It was prepared, and one morning before daybreak ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... destructive, have, in truth, restored to splendour, and almost created anew, far more than they have assailed with censure, or dismissed from consideration as unreal. The truth of many a brilliant narrative of brilliant exploits has of late years been triumphantly demonstrated; and the shallowness of the sceptical scoffs with which little minds have carped at the great minds of antiquity, has been in many instances decisively exposed. The laws, the politics, and the lines of action adopted or recommended by eminent men and powerful nations have been examined with keener ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... of those who were reckoned by the world's standards as wise or mighty or noble. On the contrary, in choosing His leaders God had purposely chosen those reckoned by the world's standards foolish that He might show plainly the shallowness of what they deem wise. And so things reckoned weak had been chosen to give the conception of what true strength is. And things even base, and despised, and not counted at all had been used that so men might learn the God-standards of wisdom and strength and honor and of what ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... thoroughly am I converted to the love of Jean Paul, and wonder at the indolence or shallowness which could resist so long, and call his profuse riches want of system! What a mistake! System, plan, there is, but on so broad a basis that I did not at first comprehend it. In every page I am forced to pencil. I will make me a book, or, as he would say, bind me a bouquet ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... often hear complaints of the shallowness of the present age, and of the decay of profound science. But I do not think that those which rest upon a secure foundation, such as mathematics, physical science, etc., in the least deserve this reproach, ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... that we arrived in the wake of the stranger we tacked and stood directly after her; and we had not been on the new tack more than ten minutes when I found, to my great gratification, that the Dolphin, despite the exceeding shallowness of her hull, was quite as weatherly a vessel as the chase, which was now nearly four miles ahead of us. But it was not until we had been in direct pursuit of her for a full hour that I was able to assure myself that we were undoubtedly ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... to effectually guard the line, even at those points where the incursions are usually made. An experiment of an armed vessel on the Rio Grande for that purpose is on trial, and it is hoped that, if not thwarted by the shallowness of the river and other natural obstacles, it may materially contribute to the protection of the herdsmen ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... The shallowness of the sea and the numerous currents, which at each change of the tide dashed against and injured the lesser vessels, much retarded the Admiral's progress, and to avoid the perils of the shallows he always sent one of the lighter caravels ahead; this vessel being ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... what I should like you to be?" she said, with a bright smile and one of those sudden descents into shallowness which he ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... differ from me, therefore it's hundreds to one that I'm wrong. The average wages, as far as I can judge, are an ounce a-week; some much more, many much less. We did not attempt digging ourselves. Eagle Hawk shallowness has spoilt us, for not even Octavius (who, you know of old, was a harder worker than either Frank or self) thinks it worth digging through fourteen or sixteen feet of hard clay for the mere pleasure of exercising our limbs. Provisions ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... worth little, but I am bound to speak it—that there are few things which the so-called Christianity of this day needs more than an intenser realisation of the fact, and the gravity of the fact, of personal sinfulness. There lies the root of the shallowness of so much that calls itself Christianity in the world to-day. It is the source of almost all the evils under which the Church is groaning. And sure I am that if millions of the people that complacently put themselves down in the census as Christians could but once ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... off one-half of it in forty years is a wonderful showing; but a great incubus remains in the other half, and it demands the nation's attention. What the census calls literacy is often very shallow. The cause of this shallowness lies, in part, in the poor character and short duration of Southern schools; in the poverty that snatches the child from school prematurely to work for bread; in the multitude of mushroom colleges and get-smart-quick universities scattered over the ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... true that the erroneousness and shallowness of this conception of his faith was dimly perceptible to Alexey Alexandrovitch, and he knew that when, without the slightest idea that his forgiveness was the action of a higher power, he had surrendered directly ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... failed us, and we lay roasting in the sun until mid—day, the current sweeping us to the northward, and still farther on to the bank, until the water shoaled to three fathoms. At this time the sun was blazing fiercely right overhead; and from the shallowness of the water, there was not the smallest swell, or undulation of the surface. The sea, as far as the eye could reach, was a sparkling light green, from the snow—white sand at the bottom, as if a level desert had been suddenly submerged under a few feet of crystal clear water, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... hardly a house to be seen, or a tree or a blade of grass. I might even add, or a mountain or a river, for the one was too often a heap of agglomerated sand and clay cut into unsightly chasms by the rain, and the other generally degenerated into a mere stagnant swamp, its shallowness and dryness increasing regularly with its length. The only houses were log ranches, called Relays, hardly visible in their sandy surroundings, and separate from each other by a mean distance of ten miles. The only trees were either stunted cedars, ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... prejudices." The above requirements are well stated for critics who, by reason of the authority of their position as press writers, are teachers of art. As to the personnel and qualifications of this Faculty of Instruction, investigation would prove embarrassing. The shallowness of the average review of current exhibitions is no more surprising, than that responsible editors of newspapers place such consignments in the hands of the all-around-reporter, to whom a picture show is no more important ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... within half an hour of your entering them. Some few of them do communicate with other main channels to the great upper river, and others are main channels themselves; but most of them intercommunicate with each other and lead nowhere in particular, and you can't even get there because of their shallowness. It is small wonder that the earlier navigators did not get far up them in sailing ships, and that the problem had to be solved by men descending the main stream of the Niger before it commences to what we in Devonshire should call "squander itself about" in all these channels. And in addition ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... reputation. His pictures of manners are true, but not sufficiently elevated above the range of every-day life; he has exhausted the surface of life; and as there is little progression in his dramas, and every thing turns usually on the same point, this adds to the impression of shallowness and ennui, as characteristic of the existing state of society. Willingly would he have abolished masks altogether, but he could hardly have compensated for them out of his own resources; however, he retained only a few of them, as Harlequin, Brighella, and Pantaloon, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... hope of a more favorable hearing in the future. But he had no conception of any under-current of feeling in Margaret Adair. She had always seemed to him so frank, with a sweet, maidenly frankness, so transparent—without shallowness, that he was thrown into despair when she dismissed him. He was singularly ignorant of the nature of women, and more especially of young girls. His mother's proud, upright, rather inflexible character, conjoined with great warmth of affection and rare ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... formerly pleasant were strange to us now. We had no spur to enliven our thoughts in our monotonous life. To the careless there was nothing startling in this moral numbness, but the more sensitive among us grieved over it, and were humiliated by the shallowness that ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... structure as soon as she knew about it, and locked it up in a box in her own room. To make up for it she allowed him to write a novel on condition of its being kept secret. From that time she began to reckon only upon herself. Unhappily there was a good deal of shallowness and lack of judgment in her attitude. Destiny had kept her too long an old maid. Now one idea after another fluttered through her ambitious and rather over-excited brain. She cherished designs, she positively desired ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... boys stood upon the wharf awaiting the arrival of the first boatload of General Funston's regulars from the big transports which had anchored in the harbor the night before. Because of the shallowness of the water, everything in Vera Cruz harbor has to be brought ashore in small boats, known as lighters. As the boys watched the first of these to approach there was something in the face and bearing of the officer in command which attracted ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler
... steaks, hot biscuits, porridge with milk and apricots. They certainly enjoyed the meal, went fishing as usual. Coming back about eleven o'clock, they went in for a swim and got a lot of enjoyment out of this. In spite of the northern clime in which they were, the shallowness of the lakes permitted the water to get pretty well heated by the hot July and August sun, and swimming was a real pleasure. It was only now and then when they struck a lake fed mainly by springs that they found the water ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... said that eagerness to finish things shows weakness. It certainly leads to shallowness, "Without haste, without rest" was Goethe's motto. I have heard of a woman who began to study botany at ninety. That shows a mind so trained and cultivated that the soil could not be exhausted with age. How good it was that she was still fresh enough to respond to new thoughts! ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... agreeably to him, with whom we deal, is more than to speak in good words, or in good order. A good continued speech, without a good speech of interlocution, shows slowness: and a good reply or second speech, without a good settled speech, showeth shallowness and weakness. As we see in beasts, that those that are weakest in the course, are yet nimblest in the turn; as it is betwixt the greyhound and the hare. To use too many circumstances, ere one come to the matter, is wearisome; to use none ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... and people belong together. National Socialism has restored the concept of the people from its modern shallowness and sees in the people something different from and appreciably greater than a chance social community of men, a grouping of men who have the same external interests. By people we understand an entire living body which is racially uniform and which is held together ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... time the difference in circumstances, the fuller, richer life that he must have led in these years of patronage and prosperity, accounts for a certain "shallowness and complacency" which distinguishes his work during this period as sharply from that which preceded as from that which followed it; and fine as is his accomplishment during these years, especially in portraiture, it includes fewer of those ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... — N. shallowness &c adj.; shoals; mere scratch. Adj. shallow, slight, superficial; skin deep, ankle deep, knee deep; just enough to ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Owing to the shallowness of the river at this season, and to the rapids, the steam-boat is unable to go up the whole way to Peterborough, and a scow or rowboat, as it is sometimes termed—a huge, unwieldy, flat- bottomed machine—meets the passengers at a certain part of the river, within sight of a singular ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... the other never have wanted, a Book of which they can say, This is our Creed and Code,—or rather Anti-creed and Anti-code. And Strauss seems perfectly secure against the sort of answer to which Voltaire's critical and historical shallowness perpetually exposed him. I mean to read the Book through. It seems admitted that the orthodox theologians have failed to give any sufficient answer.—I have also looked through Michelet's Luther, with great delight; and ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... this attitude of criticism when the new editor himself, bursting in upon her little parlor in a golden nimbus of optimism, radiant good humor and success, showed up the shallowness and the ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... perhaps the only deep passion of his life, and memory of whom was to come to the surface touchingly in his old age. Miss Charpentier, or Carpenter, as she was called, with her vivacity and quaint foreign speech "caught his heart on the rebound"; there can be no doubt that, in spite of a certain shallowness of character, she made him a good wife, and that his affection for her deepened steadily to the end. The young couple went to live at Lasswade, a village near Edinburgh, on the Esk. Scott, in whom the proprietary instinct was always very strong, took great pride in the pretty little cottage. ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... battlefield, you can scarcely see them for the flowers that have sprung up about them since. Of course, if the world had chosen, it might have said some hard truths about the Marquise, might have taken her to task for shallowness and an overweening preference for one child at the expense of the rest; but the world of Paris is swept along by the full flood of new events, new ideas, and new fashions, and it was inevitable the Mme. d'Aiglemont ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... the Twentieth Century who know enough about education to be aware of the shallowness of our knowledge of it, and of the imperfection of the existing educational systems of our country, it may be difficult to realise that in the years when things were at their worst, at any rate in the field of elementary education, the ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... intention of criticising themselves, being perfectly happy and self-satisfied, like Zarathustra's triumphant pigs. The whole of life is summed up in their own infinitesimal ego; and by their spirit of shallowness it is that I am infected. Ah, well! when you are with wolves you've got to howl. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... went away, not in anger or impatience, but in sadness. Brought up to reverence her elders, she had ignored the shallowness of her aunt's character in happier days. But now Mrs. Colfax's conduct carried a prophecy with it. Virginia sat down on the landing to ponder on the years to come,—on the pain they were likely to bring with them from this ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... college presidents, and men who under the old regime had been in high walks of life. Occasionally some conservative newspaper or magazine would praise him and his company highly; but he knew the shallowness of all the patter of praise. He knew that he paid for it in one way or another, and he grew cynical; and in his lonely afternoons on the river, often he laughed at the whole mockery of his career, smiled at the thought of organized religion, licking his boots ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... won fame by the reading of an elegy at the burial of Larra. Zorrilla was a most prolific and spontaneous writer of verses, much of which is unfinished in form and deficient in philosophical insight. But in spite of his carelessness and shallowness he rivaled Espronceda in popularity. His verses are not seldom melodramatic or childish, but they are rich in coloring and poetic fancy and they form a page xxxviii vast enchanted world in which the Spaniards still delight to wander. His ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... outstretched, the knees bent, and the body leant forward till the head descends nearly to the feet when the spine and knees are extended. In the flat plunge, the swimmer must fling himself forward in an inclined direction, according to the depth or shallowness of the water; when he touches the bottom, he must rise in the same ...
— The Book of Sports: - Containing Out-door Sports, Amusements and Recreations, - Including Gymnastics, Gardening & Carpentering • William Martin
... of intriguers and renegades. From time to time it takes care to warn its readers. Instead of lamenting over all its defections, the democratic sheet would do better to lay the blame on itself, and confess the shallowness of its theories. When will this organ of popular interests and the electoral reform cease to hire sceptics and spread doubt? I will wager, without going further, that M. Leon Durocher, the critic of M. Leroux, is an anonymous or pseudonymous ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... information, however, has removed these apprehensions for the present. To secure our commerce in that sea with the smallest force competent, we have supposed it best to watch strictly the harbor of Tripoli. Still, however, the shallowness of their coast and the want of smaller vessels on our part has permitted some cruisers to escape unobserved, and to one of these an American vessel unfortunately fell a prey. The captain, one American seaman, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson
... saw and pondered well. What lurked beneath, they surmised as shrewdly as they could, but it was impossible, with plummet and fathom-line ever in hand, to sound the way with perfect accuracy, where the quicksands were ever shifting, and the depth or shallowness of the course perpetually varying. It was not easy to discover the intentions of a government which did not know its own intentions, and whose changing policy was controlled ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Beatrice. Before descending into the garden, Giovanni failed not to look at his figure in the mirror,—a vanity to be expected in a beautiful young man, yet, as displaying itself at that troubled and feverish moment, the token of a certain shallowness of feeling and insincerity of character. He did gaze, however, and said to himself that his features had never before possessed so rich a grace, nor his eyes such vivacity, nor his cheeks so warm a ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and it is rather amusing, as well as instructive, to see the somewhat muddy sources which, swelled by affluents of verbiage and invention, gather head enough to contribute their share to the sonorous shallowness of "the leading journal of Europe." When we learn, as we do from this "Diary," what a contributor to that eminent journal is, when left to his own devices,—that he does not know the difference between would and should, (which, to be sure, is excusable in an Irishman,) that he believes in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... Helvetius was thinking less of the theological disputes of the day than of bringing the philosophy of sensation, the philosophy of Locke and Condillac, into the political field, and of deriving from it new standards and new forces for social reconstruction. And in spite of its shallowness and paradoxes, his book did contain the one principle on which, if it had been generally accepted, the inevitable transition might have taken place without ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... VIII., page 148, in 1848, Binney expressed the view that the sediments of the Coal Period were marine rather than estuarine, and were deposited on the floor of an ocean, which was characterised by a "uniformity and shallowness unknown" in any oceanic area of the present day. -on marshes of Coal period. -on ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... much adapted for comprehending subtile and difficult thoughts. He took up the ground that things are what they are in themselves, and was incapable of grasping the idea that greatness and littleness, depth and shallowness, are relative things. An altercation ensued, which resulted in threats on the part of Smith that he would throw Brown into the river; and a coolness was occasioned between the friends ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... canoes), or carved and painted skiffs, all manned by an amphibious race in Nature's suit of brown, which renders the wearers indifferent to overturned boats, water-logged blotos, and collapsing rafts, though the encouraging statements of our Malay crew as to the warmth and shallowness of the water in case of any contretemps, is less reassuring to the travellers who venture shoreward on the risky craft. The loan of the captain's boat makes the visit to Dongalla an experience of unalloyed pleasure, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... our world show its shallowness and its immeasurable stupidity. How dare woman say to her sister woman, "I am better than thou!" In how much has she been tried and tempted? How much does she know of life and its hideous tests? How much does she ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... instance is to say what vulgarity is. Now its essence, I imagine, consists in taking manners, actions, words, opinions on trust from others, without examining one's own feelings or weighing the merits of the case. It is coarseness or shallowness of taste arising from want of individual refinement, together with the confidence and presumption inspired by example and numbers. It may be defined to be a prostitution of the mind or body to ape the more or less obvious defects of others, because by so ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... immediately. You see it isn't everybody who is so lukewarm, so anaemic, as to make a cheerful old maid. Cheery old maids are the condemnation of modern English womanhood Their frequency in England shows the shallowness of the average modern woman's passion. Among all warm-blooded peoples old maids are known to be ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... all that I have lost or feel uncertain about.' And his last written utterance, signed 'Your Old Niebuhr,' contains a lament that 'depth, sincerity, originality, heart and affection are disappearing,' and that 'shallowness and arrogance are becoming universal.' After all allowances for whatever of defect, one can well point to such a character as an illustrious example of true and ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... reminiscence of a forgotten culture that once adorned the mind; as if the mind of one philosophesas pote met' erotos, fallen into a new cycle, were beginning its spiritual progress over again, but with a certain power of anticipating its stages. It has the freshness without the shallowness of taste, the range and seriousness of culture without its strain and over-consciousness. Such a habit may be described as wistfulness of mind, the feeling that there is "so much to [251] know," rather as a longing after what is unattainable, than as a hope to apprehend. Its ethical ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... for eleven days on melons and water, besides being momentarily exposed to the musketry of the Arabs and the fellahs. We luckily escaped with but a few killed and wounded. The rising of the Nile was only beginning. The shallowness of the river near Cairo obliged us to leave the xebec and get on board a djerm. We reached Gizeh at three in the afternoon of the 23d ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... to the Ambassador if we desired, but unofficially we were warned to think twice before we took such a step, the hint being thrown out that it would be better for us to refrain from talking to him unless first questioned. The shallowness of the official decree was vividly brought home to us when we were forcibly confined to barracks, and this frequently occurred while the ambassadorial visitor was in ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... than we have sojourned in before, who are now where we should desire to be with them. Fortunately for mankind, as some counterbalance to that wretched love of novelty which originates in selfishness, shallowness, and conceit, and which especially characterizes all vulgar minds, there is set in the deeper places of the heart such affection for the signs of age that the eye is delighted even by injuries which ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... at none of the cities and towns now, and only set down the rivers and main features, as they continued their steady journey day after day for all of a week. At the end of that time the increasing shallowness of the river, the many sand bars and the nature of the discolored, rolling waters, made them sure they were approaching the mouth of the great Platte River, which, as they knew, rose far to the west in the ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... feeling.—Laughter and tears issue from the same source, we are told, and the Gettysburg speech revealed a depth and a quality of tenderness that men had not, before, been able to recognize or appreciate. The absence of a sense of humor betokens shallowness in that it reveals an inability to feel deeply. People who feel deeply often laugh in order to forestall tears. Lincoln was a great soul and his sense of humor was one element of his greatness. His apt stories and his humorous personal experiences ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... imagine of her sincerity a deliberate purpose of letting the poor fellow show all the shallowness that was in him, and of amusing itself with his satisfaction in turning his empty mind inside out for her inspection. She seemed, if not genuinely interested, to be paying him an unaffected attention; but when the lady across the table addressed a word to him, Miss ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... numerous authorities., Still, he groups them together in one complete and continuous story, and gives them to the world as history; nor does the world impute to him either dishonesty, ignorance, credulity, or shallowness, because in every single event he does not specify the exact amount of evidence on which his ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... Since Pedagogics is capable of no such exact definitions of its principle and no such logical deduction as other sciences, the treatises written upon it abound more in shallowness than any other literature. Short-sightedness and arrogance find in it a most congenial atmosphere, and criticism and declamatory bombast flourish in perfection as nowhere else. The literature of religious tracts might be considered to rival that of Pedagogics in its ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... from strife. It resulted also that frequent changes of allegiance took place, for a family had often to choose between total ruin, on the one hand, and comparative prosperity at the sacrifice of constancy, on the other. Some historians have adduced the incidents of this era as illustrating the shallowness of Japanese loyalty. But it can scarcely be said that loyalty was ever seriously at stake. In point of legitimacy there was nothing to choose between the rival branches of the Imperial family. A samurai might-pass from the service of the one to that of the other without doing ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Americans just from farms, workshops, commercial pursuits, and the back woods and country villages of the north, are not of the material that foreign officials are made of, and in trying to imitate them they only show their shallowness. Do not, I beg of you, change one particle from what you have been as a private soldier, unless it is to have your pants fit better, and wear a collar. Of course, you will be thrown among officers more than you have before. Imitate their ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... excitement beset Him. Sadly He looked on the eager multitudes, because He looked through them, and saw how few of them were bringing 'an honest and good heart' for the soil of His word. Just because He saw the shallowness of the momentary enthusiasm, He spoke this pregnant parable from a heavy heart, and as He tells us in His explanation of it to the disciples (ver. 10), uses the parabolic garb as a means of hiding the truth from the unsusceptible, and of bringing it home ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... guidance, that she criticised them. In reality they were selfish, narrow, worldly; their teaching came from no deep convictions, nor from a high moral purpose; and hence her criticism. She laid bare the shallowness of their thoughts, the selfishness of their purposes, and the spiritual unfruitfulness of their teachings. Criticism so unsparing and so just, because based on the most searching insight into character and conduct, it would be difficult ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... the world had a perverse fate decreed that Tarrant should take an interest in the affairs of Woman—as if she wanted his aid to arrive at her goal; a charlatan of the poor, lean, shabby sort, without the humour, brilliancy, prestige, which sometimes throw a drapery over shallowness? Mr. Pardon evidently took an interest as well, and there was something in his appearance that seemed to say that his sympathy would not be dangerous. He was much at his ease, plainly, beneath the roof of the Tarrants, and Olive reflected that though Verena had told her much ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... year or two older than Virgie, a perfect blonde, with a tall, beautifully developed form, and with a face such as poets and artists rave about. It was a pure oval, faultless in feature and coloring, and yet withal, if closely studied, there was a suspicion of shallowness and insincerity in the full, sapphire eyes, and the perfectly formed ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... reach in a wretched condition, not knowing where to turn to next. You must remember that the leads are slippery, and that if you were to fall into the canal, considering the height of the fall and the shallowness of the water, you would most certainly be killed if you could swim like sharks. You would be crushed to death, for three or four feet of water are not sufficient to counteract the effect of a fall from such a height. In short, the best fate you can expect is to find yourselves on ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... ready-witted man. He had that clearness which is founded on shallowness. He doubted nothing; and, therefore, gave you all that he himself knew, or meant, with great completeness. His voice was very fine, and his tones exquisitely discriminating. His mind had no progression ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... amount of thought and philosophy to which only a very elaborate analysis would do justice. It is a book of very high merit. We hope its reception will be such as to induce the author to continue it. Its neglect would be a mark of the shallowness of the age and its indifference ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... a very large bay, perfectly secure from all winds, save from north to east, but unfortunately a great portion of it is rendered useless by the shallowness of the water. The best anchorage is with Point Sir Isaac, bearing north-north-west, about one mile and a half from the western shore in four or five fathoms. In working in with a southerly wind, you may stand to the eastward until you bring the above point to bear south-west by ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... Ontario is so high during a sharp gale, that it was at first thought the smaller class steamboats could not live on it; and on Lake Superior, the waves almost rival those of the far-famed Cape of Storms, while the ground-swell, owing to the comparative shallowness, or little specific gravity of the fresh water, is such as to make the oldest sailor sick. Whether the water in the lowest depths of Lakes Superior and Ontario be salt or fresh, we can not ascertain; for ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... of scattered groves on the landward slopes, the country is virtually treeless, the forests for which Dalmatia was once famous having been cut down by the Venetian ship-builders or wantonly burned by the Uskok pirates, while every attempt at replanting has been frustrated by the shallowness of the soil, the frequent droughts, and the multitudes of goats which browse on the young trees. The dreary expanse of the Bukovica, lying between Zara and the Bosnian frontier, is, without exception, the ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... country between Lincoln and Boston, or rather between the points now occupied by those places, would be scoured by a greatly-augmented volume of water, and this may possibly account in some degree for the shallowness of “The Wash,” and the number of submarine sandbanks which lie off the mouth of the present Witham. Had the union of the two streams continued to the present time, bringing down their united body of silt, Boston would either never have come into existence at all, or ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... and even submit to them. He must know of them whether they be cold-blooded or passionate, whether true or false, and how far true, and how far false. The depth and the breadth, and the narrowness and the shallowness of each should be clear to him. And, as here, in our outer world, we know that men and women change,—become worse or better as temptation or conscience may guide them,—so should these creations of his change, and every change should be noted ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... the settlement, young Clarendon followed the regular trail, over which he had passed scores of times. Not far from the house he crossed a broad stream at a point where the current (except when there was rain) was less than two feet deep. Its shallowness led to its use by all the settlers within a large radius to the southward, so that the faintly marked trails converged at this point something like the spokes of a large wheel, and became one from that point ...
— The Story of Red Feather - A Tale of the American Frontier • Edward S. (Edward Sylvester) Ellis
... find it deeper or shallower," said the Shining Ones, "according to the depth or shallowness of your belief in the King of ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... firths on the eastern side of Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein, and the ragged sounds or "Bodden" that indent the Baltic shore of Germany from the Bay of Lubeck to the mouth of the Oder River.[450] Although the shallowness of the bordering sea and the sand-bars and sand reefs which characterize all flat coasts here also exclude the largest vessels, such coasts have nevertheless ample contact with both land and sea. They tend to develop, therefore, the activities appropriate to both. A fertile soil ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... brilliant narrative of brilliant exploits has of late years been triumphantly demonstrated, and the shallowness of the sceptical scoffs with which little minds have carped at the great minds of antiquity has been in many instances decisively exposed. The laws, the politics, and the lines of action adopted or recommended ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... attempt was made, two hundred shells were fired without producing any effect. When fired en ricochet, they diverged to the right and left in a manner which gave Vasiladhi the appearance of an enchanted spot. Captain Hastings conjectured that this singular circumstance was owing to the shallowness of the water; the mud approaching the surface close to the fort, afforded so much more resistance to the shells which fell in its immediate vicinity, as to cause a more marked deviation in the line ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... two surfs at Waikiki: the big, bearded man surf that roars far out beyond the diving-stage; the smaller, gentler, wahine, or woman, surf that breaks upon the shore itself. Here is a great shallowness, where one may wade a hundred or several hundred feet to get beyond depth. Yet, with a good surf on outside, the wahine surf can break three or four feet, so that, close in against the shore, the hard-sand bottom may be three feet or three inches under the welter of surface foam. To dive ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... spite of the shallowness and emptiness and glaring hypocrisy of this thing which calls itself the church; this thing which is so timid, so cowardly that it dares not touch any sin that is unpopular, I still believe that Christianity is in ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... with Mr Gunnery's distaste. Though too young to grasp the arguments at issue, his prejudices were strongly excited by the conventional Theism which pervades Figuier's work. Already it was the habit of his mind to associate popular dogma with intellectual shallowness; herein, as at every other point which fell within his scope, he had begun to scorn average people, and to pride himself intensely on views which he found generally condemned. Day by day he grew into a clearer understanding of the memories bequeathed ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... frost had wholly left for the season; to balance this there have been two brief snow squalls, three deluges that washed even big beans out of ground, and a scorching drought that reduced the brooks, unsheltered by leafage, to August shallowness. But to-day has been entirely lovable and full of the promise that after all makes May the garden month of the year, the time of perfect faith, hope, and charity when we ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... then, and I am—" She lost control of herself as though she had passed into a hypnosis, uniquely frozen with passion, incapable of movement, of the accommodation of her sight; her breathing was slow, almost imperceptible in its shallowness. "I am a part of you," Savina went on when she had recovered. "It would kill me if I weren't. But it does mean something." Her heel cut until he thought ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of his life was spent on the water. On the shore of every lake or stream or sea near which he dwelt, he had a boat moored. He had latterly enjoyed this pleasure again. There are no pleasure-boats on the Arno; and the shallowness of its waters (except in winter-time, when the stream is too turbid and impetuous for boating) rendered it difficult to get any skiff light enough to float. Shelley, however, overcame the difficulty; he, together with a friend, contrived a boat such as the huntsmen carry about with them in ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... been at fault, or that merit—that is to say, our own conspicuous quality—is liable to be out-stripped in this world by imposture. It is consoling if we can wrap ourselves in the belief that good work can be extracted from bad brains, and that shallowness, affectation, and levity can, by some strange chemistry, be transmuted into a substitute for genius. Do we not all, if we have reached middle age, remember some idiot (of course he was an idiot!) at school or college who has ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... of each denomination in each town at least once—the preaching is, for the most part, very poor. There are certainly two or three exceptions; but 'what are they,' one is irreverently apt to exclaim, 'among so many?' The shallowness and often halting pace of these discourses is doubtless due, in large measure, to the colonial love of extempore preaching. For sermons read out of a book public opinion of all denominations in Australia has the greatest contempt. Like English lower ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... self-respect, is most ignominiously ignored by the stylish Mrs. Money,—her father was a cobbler,—more noted for brocades than brains,—or the refined Miss Blood,—her grandfather was third-cousin to some Revolutionary major,—more distinguished for shallowness than for spirit,—does he not smile in his sleeve, with great irreverence for the brocades and the birth, at the easy way in which the old fellow has wheedled them into his power by tickling their conceit and vanity? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... minutes a very effectual screen was interposed between them and the principal point of danger. Much ingenuity and readiness were manifested in making this simple arrangement, in which the two workmen were essentially favored by the natural formation of the bank, the indentation in the shore, the shallowness of the water, and the manner in which the tangled bushes dipped into the stream. The Pathfinder had the address to look for bushes which had curved stems, things easily found in such a place; and by cutting them some distance beneath the bend, and permitting ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... story, which consists in beginning your yarn anywhere but at the beginning, and finishing it anywhere but at the end; attracted by its peculiar interest when done, and the peculiar difficulties that attend its execution; repelled by that appearance of insincerity and shallowness of tone, which seems its inevitable drawback. For the mind of the reader, always bent to pick up clues, receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate mechanism; and the book remains enthralling but insignificant, like a game of chess, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the facility and shallowness of his melody. Yet with all their weaknesses, his operas contain many tunes which have wound themselves into popular affection, and in the eyes of Bank-Holiday audiences, 'Maritana' stands second ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... might be given of the shallowness of the Indian's mind. In his student days he will often slave at his books to an extent almost unparalleled in any other student world. But when he has attained the goal and secured his diploma, which is the summit of his ambition, ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... details of the great man's life, I have dwelt mainly on his public career. Apart from his brilliant conversations, his private life has few features of abiding interest, perhaps because he early tired of the shallowness of Josephine and the Corsican angularity of his brothers and sisters. But the cause also lay in his own disposition. He once said to M. Gallois: "Je n'aime pas beaucoup les femmes, ni le jeu—enfin rien: je suis tout a fait un etre politique." In dealing with him as a warrior and statesman, ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... lay on her lap; she had just begun to read it. Her hands, crossed upon each other, had fallen upon the page; she had found something of herself in those first chapters. Something that reminded of her old longings and hindrances; of the shallowness and half-living that had been about her, and the chafe of ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... culminated enlightenment, dignity, wisdom, and intelligence, and look upon the fathers of two and three hundred years ago as mere pigmies, just emerging from an era of barbarism and ignorance, not at all to be compared with the proud wiseacres of our day. Never was there a greater mistake. The shallowness and flippancy of the leaders and politicians of this last quarter of the nineteenth century show them but little more than school-boys compared with the sturdy, sober-minded, deep-principled, dignified, and grand-spirited men who discovered and opened this continent ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... alleged "naturalistic philosophy," stems directly, not from Zola, Flaubert, Augier and the younger Dumas, but from the Greeks. In the midst of democratic cocksureness and Christian sentimentalism, of doctrinaire shallowness and professorial smugness, he stands for a point of view which at least has something honest and courageous about it; here, at all events, he is a realist. Let him put a motto to his books, and ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... She had never been crossed—had never known a moment's anxiety—never even been obliged to do anything she did not like—to do anything except please herself. She was beautiful—most beautiful; and if she was shallow, well, then the very shallowness only made her more attractive. She fascinated us all." The man's voice took on a softer tone as he spoke. "Francis loved her—madly—passionately. His overwhelming joy in their betrothal was a thing never to ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... upspringing of a forest of young pines, next year, to leeward of a clump of cone-bearing trees. In the Moor such self-sown woods come to no ripeness. The pines are unhealthy and stunted, hung with gray moss, and eaten out with canker. The excessive moisture and the impenetrable subsoil, and the shallowness of the congenial sand that encouraged them to root make the young trees ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... the destiny to which He has raised us. It may be due most of all to the impression made on our mind and heart by the sacrifice at the cost of which Jesus procured salvation for us. And here the depth or shallowness of our theology will be sure to tell. If our views are superficial either of the difference which salvation has made to ourselves or of what Christ did to constitute Himself the Saviour, the likelihood is that we shall love ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... being shot away and vast numbers of men being slain. The next morning the Dutch seemed disposed to renew the bloody work of the previous day, but their courage failed as the English admiral bore down, and putting up their helms, they ran for their native coast, followed by Blake until the shallowness of the water compelled him to desist from pursuit. The Dutch, though thus signally defeated, would, it was thought, again attempt to regain their lost power on the return of spring, and information was received that their most celebrated admiral, ...
— The Boy who sailed with Blake • W.H.G. Kingston
... be false to our critical principle, if we did not recognise the historical effect of a speculation scientifically valueless. There has been no attempt to palliate either the shallowness or the practical mischievousness of the Social Contract. But there is another side to its influence. It was the match which kindled revolutionary fire in generous breasts throughout Europe. Not in ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... placed where it will best perform its office for a generation. In England, the rule and the habit in all things, is thoroughness and permanency; yet the first and greatest mistake there in drainage was shallowness, and it has required years of experiments, and millions of money, to correct that mistake. If we commit the same folly, as we are very likely to do, we cannot claim even the originality of the blunder, and shall be ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... prayer, then, be our constant and careful study. We shall find in it much to rebuke the shallowness, the selfishness, the dulness, and the sluggishness of our prayers; and we shall also find in it a model of instruction, and the inspiration of all true petition and intercession. The Christian who learns from the prayers of ...
— The Prayers of St. Paul • W. H. Griffith Thomas
... of Chagres went Capt. Henry Morgan and twelve hundred men, packed closely in their canoes; they never stopped, saving now and then to rest their stiffened legs, until they had come to a place known as Cruz de San Juan Gallego, where they were compelled to leave their boats on account of the shallowness of the water. ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... true, however, that she should not have published the very first paragraph in her book, which presents an inaccuracy and shallowness of thought quite amazing in a person of her fine perceptions, talent and culture. We allude to the contrast she attempts to establish between Raphael and Titian, in placing mind in contradistinction to beauty, as if beauty were merely physical. Of course she means no such thing; but the passage ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... his wife, and the very thought that she had been deliberately preferred and had enjoyed her triumph hardened Diane's heart against her. Nay, the open violence and abandonment of her grief seemed to the more restrained and concentrated nature of her elder a sign of shallowness and want of durability; and in a certain contemptuous envy at her professing a right to mourn, Diane never even reconsidered her own resolution to play out her father's game, consign Eustacie to her husband's ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Henri IV ruff fell the loose flesh of his jaws. Altogether, it was the face of a man who was practically if not actually dead. But in the eyes, there lay the life of the man. From under jutting brows they peered as witnesses of a brain which had accumulated a rare knowledge of mankind, man's shallowness, servility, hypocrisy, his natural inability to obey the simplest laws of nature; a brain which was set in motion always by calculation, never by impulse. They were grey eyes, bold and fierce and liquid as a lion's. None among the great had ever beaten them down, for they were truthful eyes, ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... ears this thrill of recognition, when one exile, even among the dead, meets another, of their common citizenship of "no mean city!" Of this classic "patriotism" the world requires a Renaissance, that we may be saved from the shallowness of artificial commercial Empires. The new "inter-nationalism" is the sinister product of a generation that has grown "deracinated," that has lost its roots in the soil. It is an Anglo-Germanic thing and opposed to it the proud tenacity of the Latin race turns, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... without perspective, but whose meaning is at once understood, and which somehow convey what I may call a genuine impression. Any countryman would tell you at once that the illustrations of half the books of the present day are mere vamped-up shallowness, drawn from a city man's mind in a city room by gaslight. You must consider that the countryman who lives out of doors, and always with nature, is, as regards his reading, very much in the same mental position as the people ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the juice, and if a very clear jelly is desired, filter it through a piece of cheese cloth previously wrung out of hot water. Boil the juice,—rapidly at first, but more gently as it becomes thickened,—until of the desired consistency. The time required will vary with the quantity of juice, the shallowness of the dish in which it is boiled, and the heat employed. One hour at least, will be required for one or two quarts of juice. When the juice has become considerably evaporated, test it frequently by dipping a few drops on a plate ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... retaining the spirit of an elegant and refined social life. She was exclusive by nature and instinct, as well as by tradition, and could not dispense with the arts and amenities which are the fruit of generations of ease; but the energy and force of her intellect could as little tolerate shallowness and pretension, however disguised beneath the graceful tyranny of forms. Her salon offers a sort of compromise between the freedom of the philosophical coteries and the frivolities of the purely ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... considerations, that "when we try to visualize the motions of the air having one thousand separate tones, to present to the eye of the mind the battling of the pulses, direct and reverberated, the imagination retires baffled at the attempt;" and he might have added, the shallowness and fallacy of the wave theory of sound was made apparent. He, however, does express himself as follows: "Assuredly, no question of science ever stood so much in need of revision as this of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... hardly have tolerated at a later date. Nevertheless, we think her admirers may be satisfied with this example of her youthful style. The charm with which she manages to invest a simple ingenuous girl like Catherine, the brightness of Henry Tilney—even the shallowness of Isabella and the boorishness of John Thorpe—are things we part from with regret. And in parting with our friends at the end of one of her novels, we part with them for good and all; they never re-appear in another shape elsewhere; even Mrs. ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... lilac gown!" gasped the sufferer, and with a mighty effort she came to. She would have come back from the edge of the grave to shield silk from water. Finally she wreathed her arms round Lucy, and kissed her so tenderly, warmly and sobbingly, that Lucy got over the shock of her shallowness, and they kissed and cried together most joyously, while Baldwin, after a heroic attempt at jubilation, retired from the room with a face as long as your arm. A bas les revenants!! She went to the housekeeper's room. The housekeeper persuaded her to stay and take a bit of dinner, and ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... graces! fourfold wonder Of wit and beauty, love and wisdom! Canst thou Beatify the ascetic's savagery To heavenly prudence? Horror melts to pity, And pity kindles to adoring shower Of radiant tears! Thou tender cruelty! Gay smiling martyrdom! Shall I forbid thee? Limit thy depth by mine own shallowness? Thy courage by my weakness? Where thou darest, I'll shudder and submit. I kneel here spell-bound Before my bleeding Saviour's living likeness To worship, not to cavil: I had dreamt of such things, ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... like the sea. When they is the worst, they do all the shoutin' an' roarin' themselves, an' ye jest might as well pull in yer sail an' lie low. When they is past, an' the calm sets in, 't is plain shallowness t' use yerself up then. Folks in cities don't learn this lesson; they ain't got no such teacher, an' that's why they wear out sooner, an' have that onsettled air. They think noise an' bustle o' their makin' can do away with troubles, but it can't, Janet. So like ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... and they ran several rows of netting makai, the water being very shallow for quite a distance out. The shark's flippers were all bound by the ropes with which the man Nanaue had been bound, and this with the shallowness of the water prevented him from exerting his great strength to advantage. He did succeed in struggling to the breakers, though momentarily growing weaker from loss of blood, as the people were striking at him with clubs, spears, stone adzes and anything ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... politics, but stood apart from the great antislavery cause just as he did from the transcendental philosophy; neither of these two main movements in the life of his times touched him at all in a personal way. It belongs to the shallowness of his objection to undertake the biography, his dislike to take office as a kind of pay, that it was easily removed. Fields very sensibly persuaded him that he should not neglect so favorable an ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... eyes, but it is not blindness. Nobody else ever sees so much as he does. For here was Albert Charlton, bound by his vows to Helen Minorkey, with whom he had nothing in common, except in intellect, and already his sorrow was disclosing to him the shallowness of her nature, and the depth of his own; even now he found that she had no voice with which to answer his hungry cry for sympathy. Already his betrothal was becoming a fetter, and his great mistake was disclosing itself ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... four sporting papers. Ida turned from them with bitter disappointment. She seemed to take the measure of Brian Wendover's mind in that frivolous collection, and she was deeply pained at the idea of his shallowness. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... smiles, to feel flattered, though he knows full well what she is and her dire necessity. She could not doubt that he was speaking the truth, yet she could not believe that conceit could so befog common sense in a man who, for all his slowness and shallowness, ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... generations old? Even those two had been generations of tumultuous struggle. Oftener had the Shah been seen racing for his life on a Arab of the Hedjas, than eating "dillecrout"[1] in peace, or dealing round a card-table grand crosses of the Dooraunee order. The very origin of Affghan royalty fathoms the shallowness of the water on which it floated. Three coincidences of luck had raised Ahmed to the throne. One dark night his master Kouli Khan, for the benefit of all Asia, had his throat cut. This Kouli, or Nadir Shah, was much more of a monster ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... depth is, however, soon increased to 10 feet or more, and so continues down to what Schwatka calls Marsh Lake. The miners call it Mud Lake, but on this name they do not appear to be agreed, many of them calling the lower part of Tagish or Bove Lake "Mud Lake," on account of its shallowness and flat muddy shores, as seen along the west side, the side nearly always travelled, as it is more sheltered from the prevailing southerly winds. The term "Mud Lake" is, however, not applicable to this lake, as only a comparatively small ...
— Klondyke Nuggets - A Brief Description of the Great Gold Regions in the Northwest • Joseph Ladue
... them to do so. He meant it kindly, but inasmuch as his answers were invariably quite wrong—with a distinctive and inimitable wrongness peculiar to himself—the result to his followers was eminently unsatisfactory; and with the shallowness of youth that, ignoring motives, judges solely from results, they would wait for ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... Giovanni himself. He was like his country and its traditions, revealing himself only in glimpses. He attracted her immensely through his subtle impersonality underlying all that was seemingly personal. She could not fathom his depth, nor determine his shallowness—she did not even guess which it might be. She was irresistibly drawn to him; yet she was on her guard, as one who, looking down from a great height, in fear of vertigo clings to the parapet over which he leans. The parapet she clung to was her own good American ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... course the extent or shallowness of Paracelsus' claim is a matter of quite secondary interest. We are concerned with the poet's presentment of the man—of that strange soul whom he conceived of as having anticipated so far, and as having focussed ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... earnest zeal and love for the truth of God's Word and of the Confessions of the Church, nor did it have any men among its theologians who were able to expose thoroughly in the English language the error, the hollowness and shallowness of the miserable productions of a Schmucker and Kurtz, who were made Doctors of Theology by God in His wrath and by Satan as a joke and for the purpose of ridicule. On the contrary, they seemed to be not a little impressed with the theological learning ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... my mind, a very great significance, since it not only proves the Portuguese origin of the chart, but also the genuineness of the discovery made in that as it showed that the discoverers were fully aware of the shallowness of the water off this part of the coast ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... by new offences, to add more shame to that with which he had already stained them. But he showed no tendency to further guilt. His character appeared to have been radically changed (as, indeed, from its shallowness, it well might) by his miserable fate; or, it may be, the traits now seen in him were portions of the same character, presenting itself in another phase. Instead of any longer seeking to live in the sight of the world, his impulse was to shrink into ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... six ports on the neighbouring Sea of Azof, Taganrog, where Alexander I. died in 1825, is the most considerable, although steamers have to anchor at a considerable distance from it, owing to the shallowness of the roadstead. The annual value of its exports of corn, wool, tallow, etc., is about five millions sterling, and, as at Nicolaief, British shipping is chiefly employed in the trade. Much of the produce shipped here comes from Rostov-on-the-Don, the chief centre of ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... world saw its own grinning face. It threw back a most brilliant picture of the surface of society, showed manners but not the elementary passions of human nature. As a whole, it leaves an impression of hardness, shallowness, and levity. The polite cynicism of Congreve, the ferocious cynicism of Swift, the malice of Pope, the pleasantry of Addison, the early worldliness of Prior and Gay are seldom relieved by any touch of the ideal. The prose of the time was excellent, but the poetry ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of the Roman Catholics consistent with a Protestant throne? is their divided allegiance perilous or not to a Protestant government? are their religious prejudices consistent with the rights of the national religion? We have now the melancholy proof of the shallowness of all the declamation on the subject. We see that power has been used only for public disturbance; that pledges are scoffed at; and that, in the fifteenth year of this boasted conciliation, Ireland is more turbulent, faction ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... water taken up proved to be 1.034, or .008 greater than the water of the Southern Indian Ocean, westward of the Island Amsterdam, although the temperature in which it was weighed was higher by 14 deg.. This circumstance, with the shallowness of the inlet and the land having been seen to close round so nearly, made me give up the intention of attempting to proceed any higher up, since no river of importance was to ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... 'Tis not deep as a river, but who'd have it deep? In a country where scarcely a village is found That has not its author sublime and profound, For some one to be slightly shallow's a duty, And Willis's shallowness makes half his beauty. His prose winds along with a blithe, gurgling error, And reflects all of Heaven it can see in its mirror: 700 'Tis a narrowish strip, but it is not an artifice; 'Tis the true out-of-doors with its genuine hearty phiz; It is Nature herself, and there's something ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... hostility in the unfriendliness of Bonaparte, whose rejection alike of Gall and of Fulton, who wished to introduce steam navigation, demonstrated that great military and political ability may co-exist with great shallowness of mind in reference to all things new, original, and philanthropic. So it has always been, and so ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
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