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More "Superlative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said my father, familiarly, "you son would know that though a scholar is often a fool, he is never a fool so supreme, so superlative, as when he is defacing the first unsullied page of the human history by entering into it the commonplaces of his own pedantry. A scholar, sir,—at least one like me,—is of all persons the most unfit to teach young children. A mother, sir,—a simple, natural, loving mother,—is the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... There be three manner of plantations of new sects. By the power of signs and miracles; by the eloquence, and wisdom, of speech and persuasion; and by the sword. For martyrdoms, I reckon them amongst miracles; because they seem to exceed the strength of human nature: and I may do the like, of superlative and admirable holiness of life. Surely there is no better way, to stop the rising of new sects and schisms, than to reform abuses; to compound the smaller differences; to proceed mildly, and not with sanguinary persecutions; and rather to take off the principal ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... objects are compared, the comparative and not the superlative degree should be used; thus, "Mary is the older of the two"; "John is the stronger of the two"; "Brown is the richer of the two, and the richest man in the city"; "Which is the more desirable, health or wealth?" "Which is the most ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... enamoured of this offspring of your brain, that you imagine it impossible, but he must produce something greater and more perfect than the present scene of things, which is so full of ill and disorder. You forget, that this superlative intelligence and benevolence are entirely imaginary, or, at least, without any foundation in reason; and that you have no ground to ascribe to him any qualities, but what you see he has actually exerted and displayed in his productions. Let ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... Mr. Pantin's manner was urbane but, observing him closely, Mrs. Toomey noted that his eyes suddenly presented the curious illusion of two slate-gray pools covered with skim ice. It was not an encouraging sign and her heart sank in spite of the superlative suavity of the tone ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... purpose by the mere restlessness of elemental forces; the amount of probability of their having been so produced being, however, according to the formula already set forth in its proper place, as one to infinity multiplied more or less frequently by itself. But what adequate superlative shall we invent to express the credulity, the credulosity run mad, of those who, in a matter of scientific belief, deliberately accept such odds. Observe how at once extravagantly gratuitous and painfully elaborate such credulosity is; how easily, on the one ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... be fondly chosen and pursued in proportion to its worth in administering to our enjoyments, and the other is to be avoided in proportion to its unhappy effects in multiplying our sorrows. This being an undeniable fact, the superlative value of a good name, procured by a virtuous course of conduct, appears, at once, to transcend all other considerations: A pure unsullied conscience before heaven is the most permanent bliss that a rational being can enjoy, and is of that enduring nature which no earthly power or ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... too minutely into the cause which might actuate him in this instance: suffice it to say, he immediately put the plan in execution; and in three days from the time he first saw the unfortunate Lieutenant, he had the superlative felicity of seeing him at liberty, and receiving an ample reward in the tearful eye and half articulated thanks of the ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... merits well of the republic, for doing what she can do towards the hospitalities of the season. I'm sure I never cursed her in my heart, even when her strong coffee has held mine eyes open till morning, and her superlative lobster salads have given me the very darkest views of human life that ever dyspepsia and east wind could engender. Mrs. Bogus is the Eve who offers the apple; but after all, I am the foolish Adam who take and eat what I know ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and reared all along almost on the verge of destitution; became eminent by his heroic devotion to scholarship, both as a translator and editor of classical works, his edition of "Virgil" the chief in the latter department; Carlyle almost ranks him among his heroes, and ascribes superlative merit to his book ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... in the tone of ecstasy broke suddenly on the air upon this new entrance, shattering what little composure Nehemiah had been able to muster; a wide-mouthed exaggeration of welcome in superlative phrases and ready chorus. Swiftly turning, he saw nothing for a moment, for he looked at the height which a man's head might reach, and the new-comer measured hardly two feet in stature, waddled with a very uncertain gait, ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... two miles and a half; and here she is, back at the nest, after foraging on the way, for the doughty creature arrives with her abdomen yellow with pollen. To come home again from the verge of the horizon is wonderful in itself; to come home with a well-filled pollen-brush is superlative economy. A journey, even a forced journey, ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... Spanish countries the mental activity of the people is principally manifested in an exuberant imagination which finds expression in superlative and poetical language. If there were any corresponding creative genius and executive ability in material affairs such a fertile and well-watered land as Puerto Rico would be the home of one of the richest communities ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... positive. If I say, 'My abbe is better than another abbe,' that is the comparative. And," he continued, turning his eyes toward the queen with an expression of intense affection, "if I say, 'My mamma is the dearest and best of all mammas,' that is the superlative." [Footnote: The dauphin's own words.—See Beauchesne's "Louis ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... darling? Worse is a word that couldn't be applied to that man. Worse is comparative. Positive he certainly was, superlative is mild, ...
— The Courting Of Lady Jane • Josephine Daskam
... and of the wisdom that comes with many years, tell you that if ever we are to free ourselves from the yoke of the oppressor, and to restore Peru to its ancient position of power and glory, we must be helped and guided in that great, that almost impossible task, by one who unites within himself superlative wisdom and superlative courage; and the crowning proof, to my mind, that heaven has now at last fulfilled its glorious promise is to be found in the fact that it has ordained our new Inca to be born an ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... three powers that can open the stage door to a girl who comes straight from private life,—a fortune, great influence, or superlative beauty. With a large amount of money a girl can unquestionably tempt a manager whose business is not too good, to give her an engagement. If influence is used, it must indeed be of a high social order to be strong enough favourably ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... the tremendous dream of their preparations postpones the beginning of the reality. Their mistake, if they have made a mistake, is an error of generosity. They are building with a view to flinging millions into the line when thousands a little earlier would be of superlative advantage. They had the choice of dribbling their men over in small contingents or of waiting till they could put a fighting-force into the field so overwhelming in equipment and numbers that its weight would be decisive. They were urged to learn wisdom from England's example ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... his confidence in fate. Eight years and three months nominally in the service, out of which in reality he had been absent four years and ten months either on furlough or without one, and already a general! Neither blind luck, nor the revolutionary epoch, nor the superlative ability of the man, but a compound of all these, had brought this marvel to pass. It did not intoxicate, but still further sobered, the beneficiary. This effect was partly due to an experience which demonstrated that strong as are the chains of habit, they are more easily broken than those ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Poyser was smoking his pipe, and his good-nature was therefore at its superlative moment, Hetty seized the opportunity of her aunt's absence to say, "Uncle, I wish you'd let me go ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... the whites, instead of the whites only; and as if slavery protected the rights of the slave instead of annihilating them. I thank God that I was withheld from the great folly and great sin of acknowledging a law for slavery—a law for any piracy—least of all for the superlative piracy. Nor have you forgotten how incessantly, in the late war, our enemies, Northern as well as Southern, were calling for this observance of the Constitution. As if the purpose of that paper was to serve those whose parricidal hands were at the throat ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... idea is nothing less than atrocious; and, in our judgment, the Adapter's actual purpose in putting it forth is to make his own superlative goodness seem proved by a ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... manage a third day's work in these parts as soon as possible. I should like to get to the third degree of comparison, and perhaps the superlative will turn up trumps for me somehow. Are there many more young women in the place as pretty as Mrs. Winburn? This marrying complaint is very ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... tenderness as only a spirit could smile, and pure as he had never dreamed purity could be. Her purity smote him like a blow. It startled him. He had known good and bad; but purity, as an attribute of existence, had never entered his mind. And now, in her, he conceived purity to be the superlative of goodness and of cleanness, the sum of ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... p. 983, as Josephus could not but know very well; but that he was esteemed as very ancient by them, and that they knew they had been first of all denominated "Danai" from this very ancient king Danaus. Nor does this superlative degree always imply the "most ancient" of all without exception, but is sometimes to be rendered "very ancient" only, as is the case in the like superlative degrees of other ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... away the impermanencies of that ancient age, and left standing but the palaces built upon the rock of the Soul. The Soul made the Upanishads, as it mide Paradise Lost; it made the former in the Golden Age, and the latter in this Age of Iron; the former through men gifted with superlative vision; the latter through a blind old bard. Therein lies the difference: all our bards, our very greatest, have been blind,—Dante and Shakespeare, no less than Milton. Full-flowing Time washed away the impermanencies of that ancient age, and left standing but the rock-built ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... is no love like His—so pure and constant and satisfying. What the sun is to a star-light, and the ocean to a pool left by the retiring tide, such is the love of Jesus compared with all other love. To have it is superlative blessedness; to miss it ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... comparative and superlative of infamy hitherto! but we must turn to "Grand old Texas" to find unblushing effrontry and irremediable rascality. Some months ago a creature named Otis, who conducts somewhere in Southern California a putrid abortion miscalled a newspaper, declared ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... late, and lengthened out by the greater lateness of many of the guests, and the superlative tardiness of the lady of the house, who had repudiated the cares of the hostess, and left the tea-equipage to her sister-in-law. Lucilla had been down-stairs among the first, and hurried away again after a rapid meal, forbidding any one to follow her, because she had so much to do, and on entering ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... truly benefited by such a period of close contact with people who ought by experience and knowledge to know better than he. The only thing that is probable is a falling-off, not an advance. I think it highly doubtful whether a ploughman from Ayrshire, however superlative his genius, would now be received at all in "the best houses" and by the first men and women in Edinburgh; and if not in Edinburgh, surely nowhere else would such a reception as that given to Burns await the untutored poet. The world has seldom another chance permitted to it, and in this case ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... crudelissimus, not 'cruelest man,' but 'most cruel man.' The superlative is often thus used to denote simply a high degree ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... discovering herself to May Hettly, by betraying her acquaintance with the celebrated receipt for Dunlop cheese, that she compared herself to Bedreddin Hassan, whom the vizier, his father-in-law, discovered by his superlative skill in composing cream-tarts with pepper in them. But when the novelty of such avocations ceased to amuse her, she showed to her sister but too plainly, that the gaudy colouring with which she veiled her unhappiness afforded as little real comfort, as the gay uniform of the soldier when ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... open your mouth and shut your eyes! It is a draught of Troy's own vintage that I offer you; racy, fragrant of the soil, from a cask these hundred years sunk, so that it carries a smack, too, of the submerging brine. You know the old recipe for Wine of Cos, that full-bodied, seignorial, superlative, translunary wine. ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... you were to my sight then, you have never—youth's loveliness set at defiance—been less so since. Forty years I think I have known you well. Thirty years we have been friends; and that word needs no epithet nor superlative to make it precious. This morning I called my wife to come and sit down by me, saying, "I will read you an old man's Idyl." And I read that in the March number of the "Atlantic." I believe Holmes wrote it; but whoever did, it is beautiful, and more than that it was ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... be, he will be a failure if he has not learned the great secret of dogged persistence in often unwelcomed toil. No character worth building up is built without continuous effort. If a man does not labour to be good, he will surely become bad. It is an old axiom that no man attains superlative wickedness all at once, and most certainly no man leaps to the height of the goodness possible to his nature by one spring. He has laboriously, and step by step, to climb the hill. Progress in moral character is secured by ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Johnson's own superlative powers of wit set him above any risk of such uneasiness. Garrick had remarked to me of him, a few days before, 'Rabelais and all other wits are nothing compared with him. You may be diverted by them; but Johnson ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... likewise, but no one is independent of genial society; and though in about a month she had made the acquaintance of most of the families round, and was on quite free and easy terms with all the Misses Sykes, and all the Misses Pearson, and the two superlative Misses Wynne of Walden Hall, yet, it appeared, she found none amongst them very genial: she fraternized with none of them, to use her own words. If she had had the bliss to be really Shirley Keeldar, Esq., lord ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... everywhere some restraint upon him. He is guarded with crowds, and shackled with formalities. The half hat, the whole hat, the half smile, the whole smile, the nod, the embrace, the positive parting with a little bow, the comparative at the middle of the room, the superlative at the door; and if the person be Pan huper sebastos, there's a Huper superlative ceremony then of conducting him to the bottom of the stairs, or to the very gate: as if there were such rules set to these Leviathans as ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... blight his faith in the superlative Mr. Shaw, and said nothing. This evidently pained him, and as we stood leaning on the rail in the shadow of the deck-house, watching the blue water slide by, he continued to sound the praises of his idol. It seemed that as soon as Miss Browne had beguiled ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... he had left unspoken to her. He was back again before the fire, telling her all that he did not tell her then. One gorgeous image after another swarmed to his brain. He was like a poet gone mad. He crowded sentence upon sentence, superlative upon superlative, until he found himself upon his feet, his cheeks hot, and his breath coming short. Then he caught sight of the crimson stain upon the wall and felt himself a murderer. He staggered back and threw himself full-length upon the couch, panting like one at the end of a long run. ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... which, at present, we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed our convictions with any adequate fidelity: but there is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... for the occasion; of which alternatives it is ten to one that the latter will be adopted. True it is that the ball-room at Willis's (in old days so well known as Almack's), though far too narrow for its length, offers a floor of superlative smoothness, and that its position, in the very heart of the St. James's quarter, leaves nothing to be desired; but the place is so generally associated with festivities of the public and semi-public ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... seat of his mistress. In not perceiving La Valliere, a frown came over his brow; but as soon as he saw D'Artagnan, who bowed to him—"Ah! monsieur!" cried he, "you have been diligent! I am much pleased with you." This was the superlative expression of royal satisfaction. Many men would have been ready to lay down their lives for such a speech from the king. The maids of honor and the courtiers, who had formed a respectful circle round the king on his entrance, drew back, on observing ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... labour. In such excursions we only part for a while; I am generally sure to find them again the following fall. This elopement of theirs only adds to my recreations; I know how to deceive even their superlative instinct; nor do I fear losing them, though eighteen miles from my house, and lodged in the most lofty trees, in the most impervious of our forests. I once took you along with me in one of these rambles, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... returned from a lecturing tour in the United States, and were much amused with her experiences. Having taken prolonged trips over the whole country, from Maine to Texas, for many successive years, Miss Anthony and I could easily add the superlative to all her narrations. ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... of faults. In overloading his sentences with jewelry he frequently obscures the sense; his beauties often degenerate into mere prettiness; his sweetness cloys. His free indulgence of the emotions, often at the expense of the intellect, leads to a riotous extravagance of superlative. But, above all, his richness distracts attention from matter to manner. In the case of an author so profoundly in earnest, this could not but be unfortunate; nothing enraged him more than to have people ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... this golden land; but melancholy is it to say, for the old purpose, as in olden times in the old country, 'FOR THE REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES;' and so yesterday we had a monster meeting on Bakery-hill, and I was the delegate of upwards of one thousand foreigners, or 'aliens,' according to the superlative ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... wryte in prayse of a gentlewoman, I would neither praise her christal eye, nor her cherrie lippe, etc. For these things are trita et obvia. But I would either find some supernaturall cause whereby my penne might walke in the superlative degree, or els I would undertake to answer for any imperfection that shee hath, and thereupon rayse the ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... more, if the Covenants be excepted, to give the Covenanted Church decision, stability, permanence, spiritedness, and undecaying strength, than the superlative formulas of truth produced by this illustrious Assembly. Our inheritance received from their hands should awaken our admiration for the men and our interest ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... and after the peace they spent some summer vacations in visits to the continent. They visited Switzerland, still unhackneyed, though Byron and Shelley were celebrating its charms. Long afterwards I used to hear from my mother of the superlative beauties of the Wengern Alp and the Staubbach (though she never, I suspect, read 'Manfred'), and she kept up for years a correspondence with a monk of the hospital on the St. Bernard. Her first child, Herbert Venn Stephen, was born September 30, 1822; and about this ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... reigns over the intelligible world, in that it gives birth to it by virtue of its inexhaustible fruitfulness.[642] The Supreme Good is GOD himself, and he is designated "the good" because this term seems most fittingly to express his essential character and essence.[643] It is towards this superlative perfection that the reason lifts itself; it is towards this infinite beauty the heart aspires. "Marvellous Beauty!" exclaims Plato; "eternal, uncreated, imperishable beauty, free from increase and diminution... beauty which has nothing sensible, nothing corporeal, as hands or face: which does ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... fact in the large cities where the struggle of life is superlative they outlast the men. About the time the children are grown, the husband, owing to the prolonged and terrific strain in competing with thousands of men as competent as himself, to keep his family in comfort, educate his children, ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... with profound recognition of the finely elaborated execution, and also of the inward perfection of vacancy—and, to say truth, with considerable impatience at being treated so very like infants though the lollipops were so superlative. We gladly changed for one Emerson's 'English Traits;' and read that with increasing and ever increasing satisfaction every evening; blessing heaven that there were still books ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... Agnes Pine had surrendered two millions sterling to become Mrs. Noel Lambert. Some romantic people praised her as a noble woman, who placed love above mere money, while others loudly declared her to be a superlative fool. But one and all agreed that she must have loved her cousin all the time, and that clearly the marriage with the deceased millionaire had been forced on by Garvington, for family reasons connected with the poverty of the Lamberts. ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... is a strong temptation to work the superlative to its limit. In this instance it is well to overcome temptation by succumbing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... what was the truth in speaking of his success, he became a subscriber to the Wiener Theaterzeitung, and had it sent to Warsaw. The criticism is somewhat long, but as this first step into the great world of art was an event of superlative importance to Chopin, and is one of more than ordinary interest to us, I do not hesitate to transcribe it in full so far as it relates to our artist. Well, what we read in the Wiener Theaterzeitung of August 20, 1829, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... that the Prince had not been able to devour me; for whom do we labour? I know that we are obliged to act as we do; I know, too, that we cannot do better; but should we rejoice at the fatal necessity which pushes us on to exert an action comparatively good and which will unavoidably end in a superlative evil?" ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... bring out to clearer demonstration the superlative glory of Christ than a thoughtful consideration of the story of the forerunner. They were born at the same time; were surrounded from their birth by similar circumstances; drank in from their earliest days the same patriotic aspirations, the same sacred ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... her once and for all. She was the sublimation of every dream that his romantic heart had conceived. He felt faint for a moment at the difficulties which bristled between himself and this superlative being, but he was a youthful conqueror, and life had been very amiable to him. He shook courage into his spirit and asked to be presented to ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... will be tired of all these fussy appreciations. But what one seems to miss nowadays is the presence of a writer of superlative lucidity and humanity, for whose books one waits with avidity, and orders them beforehand, as soon as they are announced. For one thing, most people seem to me to write too much. The moment a real success is scored, the temptation, no doubt adroitly ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... detestably over-cultivated garden. I'm sick of being told that it's the envy of the neighbourhood; it's like everything else that belongs to her—her car, her dinner-parties, even her headaches, they are all superlative; no one else ever had anything like them. When her eldest child was confirmed it was such a sensational event, according to her account of it, that one almost expected questions to be asked about it in the House ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... going to believe this," I say. "Once I didn't believe it myself. I realize that it all sounds impossible. But after you've once been there—" Then I'm off. When I've finished, there isn't an hysterical superlative adjective or a complimentary abstract noun unused in my vocabulary. I've told all the East about California. I've told many of the countries of Europe about California. I even tell Californians about California. I will say to the credit of Californians though that they listen. ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... being angry with Tanno than I had ever been in our lives. I comprehended why he, with all his superlative equipment of tact and intuition, had blundered; he could not but assume that circumstances were as they should have been rather than as they were; yet the blunder was, in a sense, unforgivable, and had created a social situation than which ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... the ultimate outcome, to use a double superlative, "a parliament of man and federation of the world" will be established which shall divide and distribute commerce as railroads are now said to agree on division of business and ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... religion. I have travelled the world over—I mean the inhabited parts—and in its broad extent there is not a people without worship of some kind. Wherefore my assertion, that beyond the arts, above the sciences, above commerce, above any or all other human concernments, religion is the superlative interest. It alone is divine. The study of it is worship. Knowledge of it is knowledge of God. Can as much be said ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... dissenter in most cases is an original thinker, to whom his enforced departure from the ways of his fathers is misery and pain. Generally he has a hard struggle with himself before he can give up, for the superlative truth which has taken possession of him, all the habits, the pious traditions of his life. He is the real Nonconformist—half martyr, half victim, of his convictions. But that Nonconformity which has come to be the faith in which a large number of people are trained is a totally different business, ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... up in some way for the deficiency of her musical performance. If plainness of dress indicates powers of song as it usually does, then Phoebe ought to be unrivaled in musical ability, for surely that ashen-gray suit is the superlative of plainness; and that form, likewise, would hardly pass for a "perfect figure" of a bird. The seasonableness of her coming, however, and her civil, neighborly ways, shall make up for all deficiencies in song and plumage. After a few weeks phoebe is seldom seen, except ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... Superlative Absolute[39] is by adding isimo instead of using muy. If the adjective ends in a vowel, this is elided before ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... effects upon the several figures Carter was invited to admire, and so on to a score of topics. The first thing was to make Carter think and talk, which he did in the happy-go-lucky way of his class, uttering nine mighty simple remarks, and then a bit of superlative wisdom, or something that sounded like it. And when he had shot his random bolts, Mr. Eden would begin and treat each picture as a text, and utter much wisdom on it ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... superlative, but in reality a point just below it should have been struck. For the dramatist, sending his imagination beyond earth to heaven, reserves one peak unscalable in the ascent of man towards the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... for which one of the toothless grannies at Almack's would have given half her dowry, seemed to be anxious of trying the experiment of how far the heart of an Englishman was susceptible of the tender passion, especially when excited by objects of such superlative beauty. It may be supposed that neither Clapperton nor Houston had as yet taken any lessons in the art and mystery of African dancing, and as to waltzing, neither of them felt any great inclination to be encircled in the arms of a negress, who, although ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... the ceiling of Veronese the dreaded Three still sat in secret council. Venice was still the city of subtle poisons and dangerous mysteries, but the days were gone when she had held the balance in European affairs, and she had become, in a superlative degree, the city of pleasure. Nowhere was life more varied and entertaining, more full of grace ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... the play with Hobhouse. Mrs. Jordan superlative in Hoyden, and Jones well enough in Foppington. What plays! what wit!—helas! Congreve and Vanbrugh are your only comedy. Our society is too insipid now for the like copy. Would not go to Lady Keith's. Hobhouse thought it odd. I wonder he should like parties. If one is in ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... called the national character. Apart from any natural prepossession in my own favour, I believed I was. Still, in every page of this enlightened writer, I find some captivating hypocrisy which has never occurred to me before, or some superlative piece of selfishness to which I was utterly a stranger. I should quite blush for myself before this stupendous creature, if remembering his precepts, one might blush at anything. An amazing man! a nobleman indeed! any King or Queen may make a Lord, but only ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... manner of his genius from this piece, would undoubtedly suppose that he abounded in filthy images, and excelled in describing the lower scenes of life." Let all such blockheads suppose what they choose. Pope—says Roscoe—"was well aware as any one of the superlative beauties and merits of Spenser, whose works he assiduously studied, both in his early and riper years; but it was not his intention in these few lines to give a serious imitation of him. All that he attempted was to show how exactly he could apply the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... table, a sofa, three or four chairs, and a piano. Everything was plain, but equally obviously everything was expensive, and the general impression given was that the owner had no desire to be surrounded by things he did not want, but insisted on the superlative quality of the things he did. The rugs, for instance, happened to be of silk, the bookcase happened to be Hepplewhite, the piano bore the most eminent of makers' names. There were three mezzotints on the walls, a dragon's-blood vase on the high, carved chimney-piece; the whole bore the unmistakable ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... detached from all that is topical or historical, or documentary or actual. It is also necessarily an effect of fine shades, delicate values, vanishing distinctions, of evasiveness, inconsequence, suggestion. It is also absolute, unrelated—it is positive or negative or superlative—it is never comparative. Well, the Anglo-Saxon public is totally insensible to such things. They can no more feel them, than a blind worm can feel the ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... double-shuttered. Now, it seems to be a law of nature that we must show our true selves at some time, and as the Scot must do it at home, and squeeze a day into an hour, what follows is that there he is self-revealing in the superlative degree, the feelings so long dammed up overflow, and thus a Scotch family are probably better acquainted with each other, and more ignorant of the life outside their circle, than any other family in the world. And as knowledge is sympathy, the affection ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... with those of Brahms as being among the great works in its class. Some of its lovers, in fact, would risk an unqualified superlative and call it the greatest. It certainly is remarkable for its inspired themes, its bold harmonies, its free and yet organic structure and for that sublime fervor which was the basis of Franck's genius. It is, in two respects, at least, a highly original work: in the unusual ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... purple, came in, and thought how like a sacred picture he looked; this, for her, was superlative praise. Martha's brother was there, ringing the one bell, which gave such a small fugitive sound that it made the white chapel seem like a tinkling bell-wether lost ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... [548] The superlative dextimus does not differ in meaning from the positive dexter. See Zumpt, S 114, note 1. [549] Minime cari; that is, maxime viles, 'who were most indifferent,' or 'valueless to him,' whose lives he was least inclined to spare. [550] 'As if he had not placed (there) any commander.' Imponere, ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... incurred the emperor's displeasure. The true character of this person had escaped the keen discernment of Horace, as well as the sagacity of the emperor; for in two epistles addressed to Lollius, he mentions him as great and accomplished in the superlative degree; maxime Lolli, liberrime Lolli; so imposing had been the manners and address ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... understood and memorized by every child. It has formed the basis of the religious education of German youth ever since. Though preceded by other catechisms from the pen of this and that colleague or disciple, it speedily displaced them all, not simply because of its authorship, but because of its superlative merit, and has alone maintained itself in general use. The versatility of the Reformer in adapting himself with such success to the needs of the young and immature is no less than extraordinary. Such a little book as this ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... whistled a little frivolous tune Which he felt to be pulsing with ecstasy, For he thought that success always followed desire, Such a very superlative fool was he. ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... more abundant manifestation of womanly intellect in France? The primary one, perhaps, lies in the physiological characteristics of the Gallic race—the small brain and vivacious temperament which permit the fragile system of woman to sustain the superlative activity requisite for intellectual creativeness; while, on the other hand, the larger brain and slower temperament of the English and Germans are, in the womanly organization, generally dreamy and passive. The type of humanity ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... engaged the interest of Tom McNeil, who said admiringly, as I, too, looked through the bars, "Ain't he a prompt little cuss?" I felt that with Tom it was the fascination of opposites; he never could understand superlative energy. ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... that transit His mercy shines forth more; and thus said David (Psalm, XLVII, 21) Domini, Domini, exitus mortis; [272] whence that reduplication which the Hebrew grammar calls ohatsere, [273] signifies the superlative in name and action. The same is the declaration of divine wisdom (Proverbs, XX): In viis justitiae ambulo, in medio semitarum judicii, ut ditem diligentes me. [274] The Father celestial summons them ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... of my maisteris dere, Gowere and Chaucere, that on steppis satt Of rhetorick, quhill thai war lyvand here, Superlative as poets laureate, In moralitee and eloquence ornate, I recommend my buik in lynis seven, And eke their saulis ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various
... deceived, philosophers say, is a misfortune, but not to be deceived is a superlative misfortune. If it is human to err, why should a man be called unhappy because he errs, since he was so born and made, and it is the fate of all? Do we pity a man because he cannot fly or does not ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... have their warehouses; and in the third, they usually live with their families. Those three different regions, sorry am I to say it, are all very dirty; indeed they may be said to be the positive, comparative, and superlative degrees of uncleanness. There are no glazed sashes in the windows, so that when it rains, and the shutters are closed, you are involved in utter darkness. The furniture is miserably scanty—some old fashioned, high backed, hardwood chairs, with a profusion of tarnished ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... was looking unusually well, and even those who had dubbed her "The Beautiful Yankee" added another superlative adjective. A spot of bright red burned in either cheek and she held her head very high. "How haughty she is!" Prescott heard some one say. Her height, her figure, her look lent colour ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... sprang up from a chair and curtsied fearsomely at the astonishing spectacle of Mr. Prohack, was fat in a superlative degree, and her obesity gave her a middle-aged air to which she probably had no right by the almanac. She looked quite forty, and might well have been not more than thirty. She made a typical London figure of the nondescript industrial class. It is inadequate to say that her shabby black-trimmed ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... his ship, but with a crew of two men, neither of whom could even steer, nor were they accustomed to go aloft; while he had fifteen prisoners below, who would naturally lose no opportunity of retaking the ship. His greatest difficulties were only now beginning. What consciousness of his superlative seaman-like qualities, what perfect and just self-reliance he must have possessed, to have undertaken the task of navigating a ship completely across the Atlantic with such means at his disposal! Considerate and generous, as well as brave, as soon as he had shaped a course ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... ancient Greeks, in their sculpture, for the delineation of their gods permitted themselves the use of the heroic size and made their immortals and their demi-gods more than common tall, and more than common comely, so might the modern historian seem privileged in the use of a superlative style in dealing with a life so phenomenal, so unbounded by the average horizon, so ungoverned by the ordinary laws. And yet no more is needed than the cold statement of the stages in that great story, of the steps which conducted to the summit ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... are nothing but vanity. He praises you from vanity, abuses you from vanity, loves and hates you from vanity. He is vain of his person, of his wealth, of his birth, of his title, vain of all he has, and all he has not. He sets so great a value on his innumerable and superlative good qualities, that he really has not been able (until he met with your humble servant) to find any individual of our sex on whom he could, conscientiously, bestow so great a treasure as his own right hand must inevitably give away. This has been the only reason—he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... material left littered about, the enemy must indeed have beat a hasty retreat. The dug-outs were filthy to the last degree, and there was no sign of any system of sanitation having been used by these people, who (p. 062) considered their "Kultur" to be superlative, and who desired to impose it on the rest of mankind. All through the campaign, whenever one had the opportunity of inspecting hostile trenches and billets, one always found the same thing, filth and lack ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... ecclesiastical history on the Continent, no period of equal intelligence is marked by the same degree of religious coldness and petrifaction. Theology was a special sufferer. The most useful departments were neglected, while the least essential were raised to superlative importance. Andreae places the following language on the neglect of the study of church history, in the mouth of Truth: "History, since she is exiled with me, readily consents to be silent and laughs at the experience of those who, because they ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... 1682, the Benchers of the Temples, wishing to obtain for their church an organ of superlative excellence, invited Father Smith and Renatus Harris to compete for the honor of supplying the instrument. The masters of the benchers pledged themselves that "if each of these excellent artists would set up an organ in one of the halls belonging to either of the societies, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... has been said it will be seen that Dante's masterpiece is largely based on literature of Irish origin; but there are other superlative exhibitions of human genius of which the same is true. One of these is the story of Tristan and Isolde. Tristan is the paragon of all knightly accomplishments, the most versatile figure in the entire literature of chivalry; while Isolde is an Irish princess. By a trick ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... shipping problems, now Secretary of State in President Wilson's Cabinet, was approached as a suffragist, known to have access to the President. Mr. Colby had just returned from abroad when I saw him. He is a cultivated gentleman, but he knows how to have superlative enthusiasm. ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... into a complete and passionate faith in the Christian religion and in the incarnation. He said that while love was the main principle in religion as a way of life, the most important contribution to humanity made by religion was hope. Hope in the destiny of man, in the superlative value of the individual, in the Personality of our Father ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... history have here been preserved. Traces of three different versions of the crossing of the Jordan may still, in their judgment, be found in the third and fourth chapters of the book of Joshua. The latest and most familiar narrative represents the crossing as a superlative miracle and the waters of the rushing river as piled up like a wall on either side. The Northern Israelite version appears to have stated that the waters of the Jordan were dried up, implying that the Hebrews crossed during the late summer when the river was ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... to bring all our faculties into the service of the spiritual life, is the ground of Christian virtue just as it is of every natural excellence. From this it follows that the distinction sometimes made between natural goodness and Christian goodness is unsound. A virtue is not a superlative act of merit, implying an excess of excellence beyond the requirements of duty. From the Christian standpoint there are no works of supererogation, and there is no room in the Christian life for excess or margin. As every duty is a bounden duty, so every possible excellence ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... as well as by Eastern politicians. Yuan Shih-kai, still pretending to stand aside, had kept his attention concentrated on this very essential matter; for, as we have repeatedly pointed out, he never failed to understand the superlative value of foreign support in all his enterprises,—that support being given an exaggerated value by the public thanks to China's reliance on foreign money. Accordingly, as if still unconvinced, he now very naively requested ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... last an evening alone with her again. It seems as if Wanda had saved up all the love, which had been kept from her, for this superlative evening; never had she been so kind, so near, so full ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... Pilgrim has lost his Note-book, and has been persuaded to offer a reward which shall maintain the happy finder thereof in an asylum for life. Benson—superlative Benson—has turned his shoulders upon Raynham. None know whither he has departed. It is believed that the sole surviving member of the sect of the Shaddock-Dogmatists is under ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... transparent medium through which the qualities of objects, the reflections of phenomena, the vibrations of aboriginal power, pass in blessed freedom, without deflection or jar, and on which the mysterious attraction of the Infinite exerts its supreme spell. To be there in a superlative degree is to have a mind which is an infinitesimal mirror of the All, and a heart responsive to that mind, every perception of truth in the realm of the intellect generating a correspondent emotion of good in the realm of affection. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... situation had its charm for the romantic Irish strain in her blood. The prospect of securing both entertainment and mystery at the modest expenditure of fifteen dollars a week impressed her as very good business, for she combined in the superlative degree the opposite qualities of romance and economy. To be sure, except for the advertisement she afforded and the gossip she provided, young Mrs. Fowler might not prove to be worth even her modest salary; but there was, on the other hand, a remote possibility ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... in such a station that they can give away much, and can only receive very little and quite inadequate returns for what they give. I have spoken of kings and princes, who alone can cause works to be accomplished, and whose superlative power depends upon the obedience and services of inferiors; but some there are, free from all earthly lusts, who are scarcely affected by any human objects of desire, upon whom fortune herself could bestow nothing. I must be worsted in a contest of benefits with Socrates, or with Diogenes, ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... possess the unparalleled power not merely of disentangling in retrospect, but of unravelling in prospect, and I have known him to relate coming events with unimaginable minuteness of precision. He was nothing if not superlative: his diatribes, now culminating in a very extravaganza of hyperbole—now sailing with loose wing through the downy, witched, Dutch cloud-heaps of some quaintest tramontane Nephelococcugia of thought—now laying down law of the Medes for the actual ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... What! do you call this 'loving the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and all your mind,—and your neighbour as yourself'? Whereas in truth you love nothing, not even your own soul; but only set a superlative value on whatever will gratify your selfish lust of enjoyment, and insure you from hell-fire at a thousand times the true value of the dirty property. If you have the impudence to persevere in mis-naming this "love," supply any one instance ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... merit of the hymn of Cleanthes to Jupiter, which you ascribe to it. It is as highly sublime as a chaste and correct imagination can permit itself to go. Yet in the contemplation of a being so superlative, the hyperbolic flights of the Psalmist may often be followed with approbation, even with rapture; and I have no hesitation in giving him the palm over all the hymnists of every language, and of every time. Turn ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... were matters of history. But the President of the nation to whose unbounded generosity and altruism the world owes a debt of gratitude that can only be acknowledged, not repaid, deservedly enjoyed a superlative measure of respect from his foreign colleagues, and the author of the project which was to link all nations together by ties of moral kinship was literally idolized by the masses. Never has it fallen to my lot to see any mortal so enthusiastically, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... have been able to delight in the landscape but for the good corporal, who was afraid to allow us even a little enjoyment of life. Later the artillery came up with a tremendous din and showed us the use of these superlative precautions. ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... Spangenberg found ranging there many hunters, living like Indians, who killed thousands of deer each year and sold the skins in the local markets or to the fur-traders from Virginia whose heavy pack-trains with their tinkling bells constantly traversed the course of the Great Trading Path. The superlative skill of one of these hunters, both as woodsman and marksman, was proverbial along the border. The name of Daniel Boone became synonymous with expert huntsmanship and almost uncanny wisdom in forest ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... she breathed deeply in relief. "I knew you wouldn't fail me. Look at that field, Phares—oh, this is a perfect day! There should be a superlative form of perfect for a day like this! Those fields have as many colors as the shades reflected on a copper plate: lilac, tan, ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... possessed sex magnetism in a superlative degree in spite of her deliberate aloofness, Clavering had, of course, been conscious from the first. Had not every male first-nighter been conscious of it? There was a surfeit of beauty in New York. A stranger, even if invested with mystery, must ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... from the lips of the two ladies had the merit of being perfect of its kind—softly insinuating and sweetly censorious, superlative in eulogy and infallible in opinion. The good visitors most conscientiously discharged what they deemed a great moral and social duty by enlightening the Lady de Tilly on all the recent lapses and secrets of the capital. They slid over slippery topics ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Stow, "is so called not of sweetness thereof, being very narrow and small and dark, but rather of often washing and sweeping to keep it clean." With all due respect to Stow, we suspect that the lane did not derive its name from any superlative cleanliness, but more probably from honey being sold here in the times before sugar became common and honey alone was used ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Sciences." Although the primeval forest has departed from its immediate vicinity, the region is still sylvan, the air is sweet and strong and almost alpine in quality, and the mountain panorama spread before one is superlative. Davidson showed a business faculty which I should hardly have expected from him, in organizing his settlement. He built a number of cottages pretty in design and of the simplest construction, and disposed them well for effect. He turned a couple ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... than expose it; he improved upon, and enlarged, it and made it a thing of magnitude; he and others of his quality discarded petty larceny and ascended into a sphere of superlative grand larceny. They knew with a cynical perception that society, with all its pompous pretensions to morality, had evolved a rule which worked with almost mathematical certainty. This rule was the paradoxical, but nevertheless true, one that the greater the theft ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... camp-fires upon the probable prospects of the next day. It was a question with them whether I should continue the march. Mostly all were of opinion that, since the master was sick, there would be no march. A superlative obstinacy, however, impelled me on, merely to spite their supine souls; but when I sallied out of my tent to call them to get ready, I found that at least twenty were missing; and Livingstone's letter-carrier, "Kaif-Halek"—or, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... appetites as might be left to them. The strained excitement which marks this pleasing production could not be maintained; but Edwards never shrank in cold blood from the most appalling consequences of his theories. He tells us, with superlative coolness, that the 'bulk of mankind do throng' to hell (vii. 226). He sentences infants to hell remorselessly. The imagination, he admits, may be relieved by the hypothesis that infants suffer only in this world, instead of being doomed to eternal misery. 'But it does ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... one exquisite sunset—one of those superlative sunsets that burn themselves into the consciousness with a joy akin to pain, and of which only a few are allotted to each human life. I stood watching the sinking sun throw a crimson net over the snow mountains as the shadow of night crept slowly up ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... excellence is in the third line, which is crack'd in the middle to express a crack, and then shivers into monosyllables. Yet has this diamond lain neglected with common stones, and among the innumerable admirers of Hudibras the observation of this superlative passage has been reserved for the sagacity ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... picture-gazing this morning at the famous Domenichino and Guido, both of which are superlative. I afterwards went to the beautiful cemetery of Bologna, beyond the walls, and found, besides the superb burial-ground, an original of a Custode, who reminded one of the grave-digger in Hamlet. He has a collection ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... shall we call it my mad mood. Not only did I enjoy the supper, which was most agreeable, but far more the conversation. Among the topics discussed, what gave me most delight was to hear your name mentioned by the Captain; nor was this all, for he still added to my pleasure, nay, to a superlative degree, by saying that, in the art of painting he held you to be sole and without peer in the whole world, and that so you were esteemed at Rome. I could not have been better pleased. You see that my judgment is confirmed; and so you must not deny that you are peerless, when I write it, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... personages. They sat very carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves to value any condition at a high rate.—I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven and unpresentable person.—The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight.—I esteem it a chief felicity of this country that it excels ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... back panting. Then she controlled herself and began to put on garment after garment, jewel after jewel, all of superlative magnificence. Every moment she glided to the great mirror; as often she tore off a garment or a jewel, flung it down impatiently, and seized others from her boundless store. At last she stood clad like a fabled daughter of old Bagdad; a robe of shimmering silk reached her ankles, ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... the past, our modern science soars, and our journals serve—but ideal and even ordinary romantic literature, does not, I think, substantially advance. Behold the prolific brood of the contemporary novel, magazine-tale, theatre-play, &c. The same endless thread of tangled and superlative love-story, inherited, apparently from the Amadises and Palmerins of the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries over there in Europe. The costumes and associations brought down to date, the seasoning hotter and more varied, the dragons and ogres ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... a pleasant one. Did one wicker basket equal so many fine products of superlative technology? Apparently it did. The natives had different values. To them, one pair of goggles was worth more than three carbines, a package of needles easily the equivalent ...
— Bolden's Pets • F. L. Wallace
... in the syllable -lyche form the comparative in -loker and the superlative in -lokest; as, positive uglyche ( ugly), comp. ugloker, superl. uglokest. The long vowel of the positive is often shortened in the comp. and superl., as in the ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... satisfaction for a time of claiming the tallest structure in the world; and now that the new Tower of Babel which has sprung up in Paris has killed that pretention, I think we shall feel and speak more modestly about our stone hyperbole, our materialization of the American love of the superlative. We have the higher civilization among us, and we must try to keep down the forth-putting instincts of the lower. We do not want to see our national monument placarded as "the greatest show on earth,"—perhaps it is well that it is taken down ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... contrived to pick quarrels with the very class of men whom it was his special interest to conciliate, and had been driven to set up an opposition serial of his own—the celebrated "Table Book"—which, notwithstanding the superlative excellence of his own illustrations and the talent of his literary contributors, comprising such names as John Oxenford, Horace Mayhew, Shirley Brooks, Mark Lemon, W. M. Thackeray, and others, could not manage to prolong its existence beyond its first volume. In matters connected ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... and ears and sense of the dear one to whom they are sent, is very sweet;—but for the girl who has made a shirt for the man that she loves, there has come a moment in the last stitch of it, sweeter than any that stars, haycocks, poetry, or superlative epithets have produced. Nora Rowley had never as yet been thus useful on behalf of Hugh Stanbury. Had she done so, she might perhaps have been happier even than she was during this journey;—but, without the shirt, it was one of the happiest moments ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... expresses the superlative when used with other signs; with coward it denotes a base coward; with hunger, starvation; and with sorrow, bitter sorrow. I have not seen it used with the sign for pleasure or that of hunger, nor can I learn that it ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... And I'm bound to say, I regard your claim to the possession of good taste as completely established.... 'Ware the horse, there! Look out! look out!" His eyes had followed the tall figure of the Mother-Superior, moving with the superlative grace and ease that comes of perfect physical proportion, carrying the black nun's robes, wearing the flowing veil of the nun with the dignity of an ideal queen. And the next instant, his charger, held with some others by a mounted orderly before the gates, and ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... rather in spirits than otherwise; and lodged pleasantly with Abbot Tobias and him, till the Campaign should begin. Two things surprise Valori: first, the great strength, impregnable as it were, to which Neisse has been brought since he saw it last,—superlative condition of that Fortress, and of the Army itself, as it gathers daily more and more about Frankenstein here:—and then secondly, and contrariwise, the strangely neglected posture of mountainous or Upper Silesia, given up to Pandours. Quite submerged, in a manner: Margraf Karl lies quiet among ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... democrat had, of course, another political duty besides that of securing the election of himself and his friends. His political system was designed, not merely to deprive him of grievances, but to offer him superlative opportunities. In taking the utmost advantage of those opportunities, he was not only fulfilling his duty to himself, but he was helping to realize the substantial purpose of democracy. Just as it was the function of the national ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... solely with the man who orders and pays for his labor, with a public which frequently follows only certain morbid impressions, with connoisseurs who make him restless, with auctioneers who receive every new work with praise and estimates of value such as would fitly honor the most superlative production. ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... may be helped a little forwarder on the path towards realization. One comes back to the before-mentioned analogy of flying. We had been assured over and over again, on the highest authority, that it was an idle dream. When we wanted to express the superlative degree of the impossible, we said "I can no more do it than I can fly." But the irrepressible spirit of man was not to be daunted by a priori demonstrations of impossibility. One day there came the rumour that the thing ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... distinct surprise to the first explorers of America that the natives used the bow and arrow so effectively. In fact, the sword and the horse, combined with the white man's superlative self-assurance, won the contest over the aborigines more than the primitive blunderbuss of the times. The bow and arrow was still more deadly ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... have proudly bidden defiance to the storms and blasts of half a thousand winters, and there still stand the gnarled old trees which have gently swayed to and fro while many a baron has ruled the Hall, and whose leaves after growing in superlative beauty, seeming to partake in the grandeur and pride of the "King of the Peak," have drooped and fallen, after having made, with their rich autumnal tints, a succession of beautiful living pictures ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... would have been greater had he lived earlier, Fielding had he lived later. But one cannot imagine Pope thriving in any other air or producing equal work under different influences. The qualities most esteemed by his contemporaries he possessed in a superlative degree; his limitations were common to the society in which he moved, and neither he nor it was conscious of them as such; consequently, what would have been impediments to a different nature were to his means of free and spontaneous action. And not only does he represent the ideas ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... ordinary death, as opposed to death by violence, saevitia principis.—Promptissimus quisque. The ablest, or all the ablest. Quisque with a superlative, whether singular or plural, is in general equivalent to omnes with the positive, with the additional idea however of a reciprocal comparison among the persons denoted ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... appreciably superior to most of the incidental quips. Pseudolus generously compliments Charinus on beating him at his own game of repartee (743). When Weise (Die Komodien des Plautus, p. 181) describes Ps. IV. 7 as "eine der ausgezeichnetsten Scenen, die es irgend giebt," his superlative finds a ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... signs of altruism are visible in Greece. There are few Germanophiles. "Do not fear for us," said M. Kalogeropoulos, to the French. "Greece will not ally herself to a corpse"—meaning Germany. In fact, there is among the Greeks only Graecophilism. If superlative and clamorous love of country is a virtue—they have it. For Greece, when you are down, you are down. As for fallen Germany, so for Russia in her humiliation Greece has no extra thought or care. Not a ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... as if in great surprise, and the gentleman addressed, turning round, exhibited a suit of clothes of the most superlative cut, a pair of whiskers of similar quality, a moustache, a head of ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... opulent, diffusing colour like a sunset, indifferent to their story or meaning, happy and content with the flaming feast outspread for our enjoyment. We stand before his Entombment at the Louvre, dumb before its superlative painting, with hardly a thought for the tragedy that it represents. Titian accepts the literary motive, and the artist in him straight forgets it. We walk from The Entombment to the little chamber where Rembrandt's Christ at Emmaus hangs, ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... the Man without a Navel, because, not being born of woman, there could be no umbilical cord to cut. The thought goes deep. In addition to the mythico theological pictures of the mechanical creation and superlative condition of the first man, two forms of statement have been advanced by thoughtful students of nature. One is the theory of chronological progressive development; the other is the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Continental life more congenial to him, and he had chosen early to enter a financial house which took him to the East and Constantinople. He was about twenty-seven years old at this period and was considered by himself and a number of women to be a creature of superlative charm. ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... place of no one else is worth disputing. Lloyd George is the consummate politician, limited by the meanness of his art. Clemenceau is the personification of nationality, limited by the narrowness of his view. Mr. Wilson alone had his hour of superlative greatness when the whole earth listened to him and followed him; an hour which ended with him only dimly aware of his vision and furiously conscious ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... nothing of self-reliance. All she knew was to be a consequential young lady of distinction, full of exalted qualifying adjectives in the superlative degree. But she was not so much to blame as her parents for her simpering and tossing the head with overstocked affectation. She was to be pitied for her unfortunate surroundings. Her "splendid man," a "beautiful gentleman," was a coarse, ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... it is remembered how great are the interests entrusted to the care of this board, and of these secretaries and of that chief clerk, it must be admitted that nothing short of superlative excellence ought to suffice the nation. All material intercourse between man and man must be regulated, either justly or unjustly, by weights and measures; and as we of all people depend most on such material intercourse, our weights and measures should to us be a source ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... coaxing, and take on unheard-of shapes. The highest building, the largest steamer, the fastest train, the book reaching the widest circulation have, in America, a clear title to respect. When the just functions of things are as yet not discriminated, the superlative in any direction seems naturally admirable. Again, many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions. An experimental ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... called a bed, but which is nothing more nor less than a beggarman's shakedown, where the smell, the heat, the filth, and above all, the vermin, are intolerable to the very farthest stretch of the superlative degree. As soon as their eyes begin to close here, they are roused by the bell-man, and summoned at the hour of twelve—first washing themselves as aforesaid, in the lake, and then adjourning to the prison which I am about to describe. There is not on earth, with the exception ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed our convictions with any adequate fidelity: but there is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like Christianity, qualifies ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... said. "I appreciate your spirit and, permit me to say, also your attempt to make me treat this terrible affair in a spirit of sport. But old Margaret is the superlative of stubbornness. We cannot expect to go to her to obtain information. I have lived in the house with her for more than six years. Can I say whether she is a saint or a crafty villainess? No. I know no more ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... that of the sultan, remained an unusual time in office, by an accusation enforced by a thousand purses of gold, he was enabled to produce a bowstring for his benefactor; and the sultan's "firmaun" appointed him to the vacant pachalik. His qualifications for office were all superlative: he was very short, very corpulent, very illiterate, very ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... his course, and confirm his confidence in fate. Eight years and three months nominally in the service, out of which in reality he had been absent four years and ten months either on furlough or without one, and already a general! Neither blind luck, nor the revolutionary epoch, nor the superlative ability of the man, but a compound of all these, had brought this marvel to pass. It did not intoxicate, but still further sobered, the beneficiary. This effect was partly due to an experience which demonstrated that strong as ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... to say, I regard your claim to the possession of good taste as completely established.... 'Ware the horse, there! Look out! look out!" His eyes had followed the tall figure of the Mother-Superior, moving with the superlative grace and ease that comes of perfect physical proportion, carrying the black nun's robes, wearing the flowing veil of the nun with the dignity of an ideal queen. And the next instant, his charger, held with some others by a mounted orderly ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... contrary, I think it has assisted it. Every neighbourhood loves to have a mystery of its own, and we, you must confess, have got a superlative one. The man has been found scrupulously honest, regular, and exact in his dealings; and were we to lose him now, and get a mere common-place person to succeed him, half the housewives of Walworth would perish of inanition. And now," said Sainsbury, rising, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... that her husband had deceived her, but as she could not at that moment get anything out of him, she forebore questioning him, and spoke of some pickled cucumbers which Akoulina Pamphilovna knew how to prepare in a superlative manner. All night long Vassilissa Igorofna lay awake trying to think what her husband could have in his head that she was ...
— The Daughter of the Commandant • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... This superlative organization produced upon Pa the effect of a state affair; it was something beyond him, above him; it interested him especially from the recruiting point of view; and what stimulated him above all was the troupes of trick cyclists. He had seen plenty of them in America, but then, wholly ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... years; and, before the middle of the century, the records tell us that the main body of the church was entirely completed. The right tower was uncompleted at this time, but was finished by Cardinal Philastre in 1430, up to which time intermittent labour had evolved a superlative combination of constructive and decorative excellencies. The extreme lightness of the west front is brought more and more to impress itself upon one by reason of the consistent disposition of the excellency and ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... common adjective, of the superlative degree; compared regularly, pure, purer, purest. 1. An adjective is a word added to a noun or pronoun, and generally expresses quality. 2. A common adjective is any ordinary epithet, or adjective denoting quality ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... "Fritz" last year when they spoke of the enemy. Now it is Hun or, as I have heard, "Yahun," being a superlative of Yahoo. In the Napoleonic wars we called the Frenchmen too many names for any one of them to endure; but this is the age ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... lord," he says, "mayhap your lordship has seen it." "My taste is driving, my lord, mayhap your lordship has seen me handle the ribbons." "My horses are all bloods, mayhap your lordship has noticed my team." "I pride myself on my seat in the saddle, mayhap your lordship has seen me ride." "If I am superlative in anything, 'its in my wines." "So please your ladyship, 'tis dress I most excel in ... 'tis walking I pride myself in." No matter what is mentioned, 'tis the one thing he did or had better than ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... him. Instead of walking about with his fellow-creatures in broad daylight and enjoying himself, he gets down to the bottom of the well of his thoughts, for the sake of now and then having a glimpse of a star. Everything must be in the superlative for him; everything must be pure and noble and celestial; his heart must be always heaving and throbbing, even when he is standing before a puppet-show. He never laughs or cries, but can only smile and weep; and there is mighty little difference between his weeping and his smiling. When anything, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... and any sense, but the eyes and ears and sense of the dear one to whom they are sent, is very sweet;—but for the girl who has made a shirt for the man that she loves, there has come a moment in the last stitch of it, sweeter than any that stars, haycocks, poetry, or superlative epithets have produced. Nora Rowley had never as yet been thus useful on behalf of Hugh Stanbury. Had she done so, she might perhaps have been happier even than she was during this journey;—but, without the shirt, it was one of the happiest moments of her life. There was nothing ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... before you can know what it's like. It's really the art of imposing one's will upon someone else's, of making that other person see things as you want them to see them—not as they really are. It's the power of deception carried to a superlative degree. And when that power is exhausted, the ticket may be said to have expired—and the prisoner returns to the dungeon. Sometimes he takes the other person with him. Sometimes he ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... His was a love such as rarely falls to the lot of woman. And his devotion to his girl and boy twins was something quite beyond words. These things were the mainspring of his life, and drove him to such superlative degrees of self-sacrifice that could surely only have been endured by a man of ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... climb the splendid mountain road that leads to the Schlucht, and nowhere else. From a giddy terrace cut in the sides of the shelving forest ridge we now get a prospect of the little lakes of Longuemer and Retournemer, twin gems of superlative loveliness in the wildest environment. Deep down they lie, the two silvery sheets of water with their verdant holms, making a little world of peace and beauty, a toy dropped amid Titanic awfulness ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... experiment, which absorbed our whole harvest of good little fruit, filled every room in the house with unutterable messes, produced much fermentation of temper as well as wine, and ended in a liquid product of such superlative nastiness, that to drink it defied our utmost efforts of obedience and my mother's own resolute courage; so it was with acclamations of execration made libations of—to the infernal gods, I should think—and no future vintage was ever tried, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... about these wonderful Roses of Sharon and this Song of Songs. Lies, all lies, every word of it! Yet, in spite of himself, from time to time, he liked to reread it. He fancied this was because of the sardonic pleasure its superlative phrases gave him, but the truth was it held him. He despised sentiment, tenderness, and, by the strangeness of the human mind, he went, by way of paradox, to the tenderest, most sublime spot in a book supreme in ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... proudly bidden defiance to the storms and blasts of half a thousand winters, and there still stand the gnarled old trees which have gently swayed to and fro while many a baron has ruled the Hall, and whose leaves after growing in superlative beauty, seeming to partake in the grandeur and pride of the "King of the Peak," have drooped and fallen, after having made, with their rich autumnal tints, a succession of beautiful living pictures which have delighted the lords and ladies of Haddon ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... benefited by such a period of close contact with people who ought by experience and knowledge to know better than he. The only thing that is probable is a falling-off, not an advance. I think it highly doubtful whether a ploughman from Ayrshire, however superlative his genius, would now be received at all in "the best houses" and by the first men and women in Edinburgh; and if not in Edinburgh, surely nowhere else would such a reception as that given to Burns await the untutored poet. The world has seldom another chance permitted to it, and in this ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... it; he improved upon, and enlarged, it and made it a thing of magnitude; he and others of his quality discarded petty larceny and ascended into a sphere of superlative grand larceny. They knew with a cynical perception that society, with all its pompous pretensions to morality, had evolved a rule which worked with almost mathematical certainty. This rule was the paradoxical, but nevertheless ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... sapid and extremely oily as the superlative ao implies. There are no finer, fatter cheeses in the world than those made of rich sheep milk in the mountains of Portugal ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... contrast very much; the more, as the soldier is his own chattel withal, and of superlative inches: Friedrich Wilhelm flames up into wrath; sends off swift messengers to bring these Judges, one and all instantly into his presence. The Judges are still in their dressing-gowns, shaving, breakfasting; they ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... philosophers say, is a misfortune, but not to be deceived is a superlative misfortune. If it is human to err, why should a man be called unhappy because he errs, since he was so born and made, and it is the fate of all? Do we pity a man because he cannot fly or does not walk on four legs? We might as well call ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... heard this she said, "Verily Al-Kuthayyir[FN193] was conspicuous for sweet speech and chaste, and he was superlative in his praise of Azzah when he sang" (and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Hence no one of the private citizens saved anything worth mentioning. In addition to other drains they surrendered servants for the fleet, buying them if they had none, and the senators repaired the roads at their individual expense. Only those who wielded arms enjoyed superlative wealth. They, to be sure, were not satisfied with their pay, though it was in full, nor with their outside perquisites, though of vast extent, nor with the very large prizes bestowed for the murders, nor with the acquisition of lands, which was made ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... never felt deeply in my life if that poem did not make me, both lately, and when I read it in MS. No alderman ever longed after a haunch of buck venison more than I for a spiritual taste of that "White Doe" you promise. I am sure it is superlative, or will be when dressed, i. e., printed. All things read raw to me in MS.; to compare magna parvis, I cannot endure my own writings in that state. The only one which I think would not very much win upon me in print is "Peter Bell;" but I am not certain. You ask me about ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... of altruism are visible in Greece. There are few Germanophiles. "Do not fear for us," said M. Kalogeropoulos, to the French. "Greece will not ally herself to a corpse"—meaning Germany. In fact, there is among the Greeks only Graecophilism. If superlative and clamorous love of country is a virtue—they have it. For Greece, when you are down, you are down. As for fallen Germany, so for Russia in her humiliation Greece has no extra thought or care. Not a humanitarian and philanthropic nation! One wonders how a Greek mind would interpret the ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... anything, and he hides his genuine nature behind a cloud of slang. He belittles everything he touches, he is afraid to utter a word from his inner heart, and his talk becomes a mere dropping shower of verbal counters which ring hollow. The superlative degree is abhorrent to him unless he can misuse it for comic purposes; and, like the ridiculous dummy lord in "Nicholas Nickleby," he is quite capable of calling Shakespeare a "very clayver man." I have heard of ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... or rather there is no such thing as pleasure for him. Instead of walking about with his fellow creatures in broad daylight and enjoying himself, he gets down to the bottom of the well of his fancies, in the hope of now and then catching a glimpse of a star. Everything must be in the superlative for him: everything must be pure, and majestic, and etherial, and celestial: his heart must be always throbbing and heaving, even when he is standing before a puppet show. He never laughs or cries, but can only smile and weep; ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... your face is a card among the flowers readin', 'to a fellow artist, from Sarah Bernhardt.' And—whilst we are, so to speak, on the subjeck—you can put in likewise what Eleanora Duse said o' me. You know who she is, I suppose, the very most superlative genius o' the stage, suh. Yes, suh, the very most. An' she says o' me when she went back to Italy, how I was the best ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... temperate climes claim for the apple and the onion superlative qualities. In the papaw the excellences of both are blended and combined. The onion may induce to slumber, but the sleep it produces is it not a trifle too balmy? The moral life and high standard of statesmanship of an American Senator ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... measure of the Indian mind, his friendship and confidence must not suffer eclipse. It is a superlative task, for the inner Indian shrine is crossed by only a favoured few. The Indian is averse to being photographed, for he feels that every picture made of himself by so much shortens his life. He looks at his portrait, ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... my maisteris dere, Gowere and Chaucere, that on the steppis satt Of rethorike quhill thai were lyvand here, Superlative as poetis laureate, In moralitee and eloquence ornate, I recommend my buk in lynis sevin, And eke thair soulis ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... than his calf's foot jelly liquefied and prepared by gas heat, except perhaps his meat biscuits of preserved Texas beef and Southdown mutton. A bottle of Chateau Yquem and another of Clos de Vougeot, both of superlative excellence in quality and flavor, crowned the repast. Their vicinity to the Moon and their incessant glancing at her surface did not prevent the travellers from touching each other's glasses merrily and often. Ardan took occasion ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... blundered, and broke down; amid this hubbub of unfamiliar intervals I should not myself have recognised the slip, but the audience were quick to catch it, and to jeer. To crown all, the Makin company began a dance of truly superlative merit. I know not what it was about, I was too much absorbed to ask. In one act a part of the chorus, squealing in some strange falsetto, produced very much the effect of our orchestra; in another, the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... independent of genial society; and though in about a month she had made the acquaintance of most of the families round, and was on quite free and easy terms with all the Misses Sykes, and all the Misses Pearson, and the two superlative Misses Wynne of Walden Hall, yet, it appeared, she found none amongst them very genial: she fraternized with none of them, to use her own words. If she had had the bliss to be really Shirley Keeldar, Esq., lord of the manor of Briarfield, there was not a single fair one in this and the two ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... please, I'll thank you to say no more like that about my master," she said with dignity. "He's neither shiftless, nor good-for- nothin'. His character is unbleachable! He's an artist an' a scholar an' a gentleman, an' a very superlative man. It's because he knows so much that—that he jest hain't got room for common things like ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... and derivative pronouns are unsusceptible of number or gender, in which they resemble the English; yet when it is necessary to distinguish the sexes, alca is used for the masculine, and domo for the feminine. The comparative is formed by prefixing jod or doi to the positive, and the superlative by cad or mu. Thus from chu limpid, are formed doichu more limpid, and muliu most limpid. There are no diminutives or augmentatives, which are supplied by means of the adjectives picki little, and buta great. Diminutives are also formed by changing a harsh sound ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... Serenus in the purest antiquity, yet being added in the transcendent degree to the word Emperour, the highest denomination that a Prince is capable of, it becomes of the same value. So that to interpret Illustrissimus unto diminution is to find a positive in a superlative, and in the most orient light to seek for darkness. And I would, seeing the near Boyars and Counsellors of his Tzarskoy Majesty are pleased to mention the Title given to his Tzarskoy Majesty by his Cesarian Majesty, gladly be satisfied by them, whether ever any Cesarian Majesty writ formerly ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... your master I shall be happy to see him." In a few moments I was honoured with the company of mine host of the Mitre, who, to do him justice, was a more humorous fellow than I had anticipated. Not quite so ceremonious as he of the Christopher at Eton, or the superlative of a Bond-street restaurateur; but with an unembarrassed roughness, yet respectful demeanour, that partook more of the sturdy English farmer, or an old weather-beaten sportsman, than the picture I had figured to myself of the polished landlord of the principal ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... ordinary type. To a curious and superlative degree he could appreciate a defeat as well as a triumph. His adventures had been a part of a life in which he had not always expected to win, and in to-night's game he admitted that he had been hopelessly and ridiculously beaten. Tragedy, to him, was a first cousin of comedy; ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... that is topical or historical, or documentary or actual. It is also necessarily an effect of fine shades, delicate values, vanishing distinctions, of evasiveness, inconsequence, suggestion. It is also absolute, unrelated—it is positive or negative or superlative—it is never comparative. Well, the Anglo-Saxon public is totally insensible to such things. They can no more feel them, than a blind worm can feel ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... hundred acres, and is as beautiful as an English park can be, and this is praise superlative. Flocks of sheep wander over the soft, green turf, and beneath the spreading trees are sleek cows which seem used to visitors, and with big, open eyes ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... mode of serving the remains of roasted game, but when a superlative salmi is desired, the birds must be scarcely more than half roasted for it. In either case, carve them very neatly, and strip every particle of skin and fat from the legs, wings and breasts; bruise the bodies well, and put them with the skin and other trimmings into a very clean stewpan. ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... sense as separating her from all who might, through the working of natural affection, act as her helpers in time of need, but made it possible for the slavery of the wife to the husband to take on more cruel forms. Although, it must be said, even capture gave a few women of superlative charm a chance to take precedence of common wives gained in ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... speaking of his success, he became a subscriber to the Wiener Theaterzeitung, and had it sent to Warsaw. The criticism is somewhat long, but as this first step into the great world of art was an event of superlative importance to Chopin, and is one of more than ordinary interest to us, I do not hesitate to transcribe it in full so far as it relates to our artist. Well, what we read in the Wiener Theaterzeitung of August 20, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... people, most of whom he seemed to know. He, on his part, told her many things about Versailles which she did not know, and she soon saw that he was a man of varied tastes and wide information. She wondered why he wore such a big turquoise ring and why he had such a wonderful waistcoat, such a superlative tie, such an amazing shirt and such a frightfully expensive pin. But it was not the first time in her life that she had met an otherwise intelligent man who made the mistake of over-dressing, and her first prejudice against him began to disappear. She even admitted to herself that he had ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... with the man who orders and pays for his labor, with a public which frequently follows only certain morbid impressions, with connoisseurs who make him restless, with auctioneers who receive every new work with praise and estimates of value such as would fitly honor the most superlative production. ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... years' term of governorship, the absurdity of which is superlative. It is so entirely contrary to the system of management in private affairs that it is difficult to imagine the cause that could have given rise to such a regulation. In matters great or small, the capability of the manager is the ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... Tennyson's 'Idyls,' with profound recognition of the finely elaborated execution, and also of the inward perfection of vacancy—and, to say truth, with considerable impatience at being treated so very like infants though the lollipops were so superlative. We gladly changed for one Emerson's 'English Traits;' and read that with increasing and ever increasing satisfaction every evening; blessing heaven that there were still books for ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... trash, a country which had produced a Charles Fox, who took at the passing of the Separation Act so opposite a view of human nature. Doubtless, the habitants are precisely, even at this day, as Sir James represented them to be. But it was superlative impudence in a man of plebeian extraction to say that he could not associate with members of Parliament, who followed the occupation of shopkeeping for a living. It surely was enough for Buonaparte to have stigmatized England as a nation of shopkeepers. Sir James might have left it alone, ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... constitution, a subject to which she had given the name "Snarleychology."[2] Her knowledge of the old man's ways was of longer date than mine, and she understood him infinitely better than I. "Suppose, now," I said "that Snarley had been able to express himself after the manner of superlative people like you and me, what would have come of it?" "Art," said Mrs. Abel, "and most probably poetry. He's just a mass of intuitions!" "What a pity they are inarticulate!" I answered, repeating the appropriate commonplace. "But they are not inarticulate," ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... The superlative value of these varied traditions is apparent. They were the links which bound later generations to their prehistoric past. Incidentally, in the characteristic language of Semitic tradition, they preserved the memory of many important events in their early tribal history. They are also the illuminating ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... hand, a superlative clearness is not necessarily admirable. To see truly, according to the fine saying of Renan, is to see dimly. If art is expression, mere clarity is nothing. The extreme clarity of an artist may be due not to his marvellous power of illuminating the abysses of his soul, ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... same people who draw terrible pictures of the power of the Roman Catholic Church already existing in Ireland at the present moment. They do not explain how both of these propositions can be true—how, if Ireland is already "priest-ridden"—a superlative phrase—without Home Rule, there is any room for an increase of that evil under Home Rule. They never seem to contemplate the possibility that the proper and natural corrective to the power of the priest, if it be excessive, is the creation of a ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... this was put in hand, and, after twelve months' hard work, was safely delivered to his Majesty, who declared it to be a "rich and rare jewel, and that there was no defect in the skill, care, and cost used in it, but a superlative diligence ...
— Little Gidding and its inmates in the Time of King Charles I. - with an account of the Harmonies • J. E. Acland
... she wore boldly; her beauty, quite striking at night; her figure of "the goddess sailing on clouds," rendered still more striking a dignity, which no one possessed more than she did, and which she pushed, when it was necessary, to a most superlative haughtiness. ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... the consolation of secretly disagreeing with her. I am still of the opinion that their admirable system of government, social and political, and their encouragement and provision for universal culture of so high an order, had more to do with the formation of superlative character than the elimination of ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... scruple, and, indeed, with great satisfaction." "Why, sir," said Johnson, "that is not so extraordinary: the King of Siam sent ambassadors to Louis the Fourteenth: but Louis the Fourteenth sent none to the King of Siam." This topic also enjoys another distinction. It is one of many proofs of the superlative excellence of Johnson's talk that it cannot be imitated. Hundreds of clever men have made the attempt, but, with the exception of a single sentence, not one of these manufactured utterances could impose for an ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... to land him. When considerately asked by my client whether he had any choice in the matter, he replied, somewhat facetiously, that he could not think of making a suggestion to one who had shown such superlative skill ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... thou darling of my soul! stop not till I rise superior to all superlative, till I mount triumphantly the pinnacle of glory, or at least open the way for one of my own family and name ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... soars, and our journals serve—but ideal and even ordinary romantic literature, does not, I think, substantially advance. Behold the prolific brood of the contemporary novel, magazine-tale, theatre-play, &c. The same endless thread of tangled and superlative love-story, inherited, apparently from the Amadises and Palmerins of the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries over there in Europe. The costumes and associations brought down to date, the seasoning hotter and more varied, the dragons and ogres left out—but ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... player. The embodiment was as natural as a sunbeam. Shakespeare has left no doubt about his meaning in Perdita. The speeches of all around her continually depict her fresh and piquant loveliness, her innate superiority, her superlative charm; while her behaviour and language as constantly show forth her nobility of soul. One of the subtlest side lights thrown upon the character is in the description of the manner in which Perdita heard the story of her mother's death—when "attentiveness wounded" her "till, from one sign of ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... corsets or soap. They were that kind; and they had a great many teeth, especially the daughters, who all three looked exactly thirty, no more and no less, and were apparently pleasantly conscious of superlative virtue. ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... looked away. A wave of superlative bitterness shook him, but he was too just to curse life, or anyone but himself. He did not even curse the worthless woman who had struck the curb from his inherited weakness and made him a slave instead of a rigid and insolent master. She had been no worse, hardly more captivating, ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... disputing. Lloyd George is the consummate politician, limited by the meanness of his art. Clemenceau is the personification of nationality, limited by the narrowness of his view. Mr. Wilson alone had his hour of superlative greatness when the whole earth listened to him and followed him; an hour which ended with him only dimly aware of his vision and furiously ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... himself that one of Henry's impulsive, buoyant letters would furnish the only efficacious antidote to Mirabelle. And he needed an antidote, and a powerful one, for during the past two weeks Mirabelle had been surpassing herself. That is, if one can surpass a superlative. ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... aright. She cast a swift look at Bridgie's face to assure herself that she was not the victim of a practical joke. She pressed her lips together to repress an exclamation of dismay. She had expected to behold a vision of loveliness—the superlative in the scale in which the two elder sisters made positive and comparative, but what she saw was an elf-like figure sitting huddled in the depths of an arm-chair, with tiny hands clasped together, and large dilapidated boots occupying the place of honour ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... city talk from the lips of the two ladies had the merit of being perfect of its kind—softly insinuating and sweetly censorious, superlative in eulogy and infallible in opinion. The good visitors most conscientiously discharged what they deemed a great moral and social duty by enlightening the Lady de Tilly on all the recent lapses and secrets of the capital. They slid over slippery topics like skaters on thin ice, filling their listener ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... was to form his ideas of the turn and manner of his genius from this piece, would undoubtedly suppose that he abounded in filthy images, and excelled in describing the lower scenes of life." Let all such blockheads suppose what they choose. Pope—says Roscoe—"was well aware as any one of the superlative beauties and merits of Spenser, whose works he assiduously studied, both in his early and riper years; but it was not his intention in these few lines to give a serious imitation of him. All that he attempted was to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... His love.—There is no love like His—so pure and constant and satisfying. What the sun is to a star-light, and the ocean to a pool left by the retiring tide, such is the love of Jesus compared with all other love. To have it is superlative blessedness; to miss it is ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... in the grand hall and was heavily laden with products of the State of New York. Owing to the approaching close of the Exposition, the agricultural and horticultural exhibits were heavily drawn upon. Great heaps of New York's superlative fruit and prize vegetables were used in decorating the table. Messrs. Bayno & Pindat served a tempting menu, features of which were those dishes always associated with Thanksgiving Day—roast turkey and pumpkin pie. A spirit of hearty good fellowship pervaded the entire occasion, and each one vied ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... have been picture-gazing this morning at the famous Domenichino and Guido, both of which are superlative. I afterwards went to the beautiful cemetery of Bologna, beyond the walls, and found, besides the superb burial-ground, an original of a Custode, who reminded me of the grave-digger in Hamlet. He has a collection of capuchins' skulls, labelled on the forehead, and taking down ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... that you have entirely lost your enemy. If you do, by all means come, pay us a visit, and see what we are doing in England. I have done an etching of Turner's 'Calais Pier,' 30 inches square, which is by many degrees the finest thing (if I may be permitted so superlative an expression) I have done or ever shall do. I mean to publish it about the close of the year. I have built a press for printing it, and am having paper made expressly, and real sepia (which is magnificent—both in color and price) got from the Adriatic for the ink! so that great ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... had so long been assistant, and was so near discovering herself to May Hettly, by betraying her acquaintance with the celebrated receipt for Dunlop cheese, that she compared herself to Bedreddin Hassan, whom the vizier, his father-in-law, discovered by his superlative skill in composing cream-tarts with pepper in them. But when the novelty of such avocations ceased to amuse her, she showed to her sister but too plainly, that the gaudy colouring with which she veiled her unhappiness afforded as little ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... surpassingly great though it is, is not the measure of the greatness of the leader of the Exodus. It is not in the deliverance from Egypt, it is in the constructive statesmanship that laid the foundations of the Hebrew commonwealth that the superlative grandeur of that leadership looms up. As we cannot imagine the Exodus without the great leader, neither can we account for the Hebrew polity without the great statesman. Not merely intellectually great, but morally great—a statesman aglow with the unselfish ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... few comedies on their stage; no farces. Cats care little for fun. In the circus, superlative ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... just returned from a lecturing tour in the United States, and were much amused with her experiences. Having taken prolonged trips over the whole country, from Maine to Texas, for many successive years, Miss Anthony and I could easily add the superlative to all ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... had passed, to become very sick of Harwich and myself; for of all dull holes in this kingdom of England, does not this one claim the superlative degree? Tuesday, the 4th, still found me on the same spot, gazing on the two lighthouses; and, to enhance my gaiety, R—— and P—— went to Ipswich to see a schooner yacht, being built for an old friend of R—— and at that moment on the stocks. They returned laden with turnips, carrots, ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... the more inclination and respect. The ancient sentence said, Let us be silent, for so are the gods. Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal. Every man's progress is through a succession of teachers, each of whom seems at the time to have a superlative influence, but it at last gives place to a new. Frankly let him accept it all. Jesus says, Leave father, mother, house and lands, and follow me. Who leaves all, receives more. This is as true intellectually as morally. Each new mind we approach seems to require an abdication ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... people do all the sights they see under the lead of a paid exhibitor, who goes through his lesson like a sleepy old professor. I missed seeing the slab with the inscription miserrimus. There may be other stones bearing this sad superlative, but there is a story connected with this one, which sounds as if ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... its inexhaustible fruitfulness.[642] The Supreme Good is GOD himself, and he is designated "the good" because this term seems most fittingly to express his essential character and essence.[643] It is towards this superlative perfection that the reason lifts itself; it is towards this infinite beauty the heart aspires. "Marvellous Beauty!" exclaims Plato; "eternal, uncreated, imperishable beauty, free from increase and diminution... beauty which ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Soudan is that of misery; nor is there a single feature of attraction to recompense a European for the drawbacks of pestilential climate and brutal associations. To a stranger it appears a superlative folly that the Egyptian Government should have retained a possession, the occupation of which is wholly unprofitable; the receipts being far below the expenditure, "malgre" the increased taxation. At so great a distance ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... worthy of note, because they show how strong an influence in the formation of words during the transition period is exerted by the forms most frequently heard—here the imperative. The child used first of all the imperative; last the subjunctive. The superlative and comparative were not used by this child until ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... and dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the ticklish business of securing what you can. I know not with what fine and costly material the heidelburgh Tun was coated within, but in superlative richness that coating could not possibly have compared with the silken pearl-colored membrane, like the line of a fine pelisse, forming the inner surface of the Sperm Whale's case. It will have been seen that ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... social system of the city. But I would not have it so. I would call it a part of the social system, just as much a part of the social system, and just as expressive of the national character, as the fine schools, the fine hospitals, the superlative business organizations, or Mr. George M. Cohan's Theater. A civilization is indivisibly responsible for itself. It may not, on the Day of Judgment, or any other day, lessen its collective responsibility by baptizing certain portions of its organism as extraneous "blots" ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... all these foregoing respects, Cookery has something more to recommend it, which gives it precedence before everything else in education; and though this is saying a great deal, I shall endeavour to demonstrate that it is perfectly true. I have already shown that Cookery is of superlative benefit, both in ensuring health and in acting as a preventive against habits of intemperance. But it is as a medium for training that Cookery is at its very best; for it is in reality an art; indeed, it is a master art. At the same ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... or slightest charm couldst imitate— Could thy blest strain in kindred colours trace The faintest wonder of her form and face— Poets would study the immortal line, And REYNOLDS own HIS art subdued by thine; That art, which well might added lustre give To Nature's best and Heaven's superlative: On GRANBY'S cheek might bid new glories rise, Or point a purer beam from DEVON'S eyes! Hard is the task to shape that beauty's praise, Whose judgment scorns the homage flattery pays! But praising Amoret we cannot err, No tongue o'ervalues Heaven, or flatters her! Yet she, by Fate's perverseness—she ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... "sincere and rational meaning" which pervades his compositions renders such an epithet improper. "His ear for rhythm," he continues, "though less true than in his prose, is seldom wholly at fault, and whether in prose or verse, he had the superlative merit that he could never write nonsense." Bunyan's earliest prison work, entitled "Profitable Meditations," was in verse, and neither this nor his later metrical ventures before his release—his "Four Last Things," his "Ebal and Gerizim," and his "Prison ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... the tone of ecstasy broke suddenly on the air upon this new entrance, shattering what little composure Nehemiah had been able to muster; a wide-mouthed exaggeration of welcome in superlative phrases and ready chorus. Swiftly turning, he saw nothing for a moment, for he looked at the height which a man's head might reach, and the new-comer measured hardly two feet in stature, waddled with a very uncertain ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... rival's legs,—from Mr. Brooke's failure to elicit a companion's ideas, or from Celia's criticism of a middle-aged scholar's personal appearance. I am not sure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary superlative existed, could escape these unfavorable reflections of himself in various small mirrors; and even Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin. Moreover, if Mr. ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... found that we were always thus met. The highest officer present—General, Colonel, or Commandant—was at every place at our disposition to explain things—and to explain them with that clarity of which the French alone have the secret and of which a superlative example exists in the official report of the earlier phases of the war, offered to the Anglo-Saxon public through Reuter. Automobiles and chauffeurs abounded for our small party of four. Never once at any moment of the day, whether driving furiously ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... essentially than is often realized to the success of a play, she became well known for her capital personations of old women and dowagers. Wife of the actor Norris, she had been one of the earliest members of Davenant's company, and her son, known as Jubilee Dicky from his superlative performance in Farquhar's The Constant Couple (1699), was a leading comedian in the reigns of Anne and the first George. Amongst Mrs. Norris' many roles such parts as Lady Dupe, the old lady in Dryden's Sir Martin Mar-All (1667), Goody ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... replaced by a salesgirl of such superlative dress and manner that her long jet earrings were like exclamations at the audacity of her personality. An habitual counter line-up of Broadway mental brevities in the form of young men with bamboo sticks and eyes with perpetual ogles in them, would while away the syncopated hours ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... I see," exclaimed Dick; "here's a bonnet, frightful—that's positive; another more frightful—that's comparative; and this with the superlative yellow tuft, I should call the most frightful of all. ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... in her bedroom, and the very finest bouquet of spring flowers on her table. Maggie would enjoy all that, she was so found of pretty things! And there was poor aunt Tulliver, that no one made any account of, she was to be surprised with the present of a cap of superlative quality, and to have her health drunk in a gratifying manner, for which Lucy was going to lay a plot with her father this evening. Clearly, she had not time to indulge in long reveries about her own happy love-affairs. With this thought ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... but picturesque figure; and for the lady whose light hand had wrought such havoc upon him to be seen dancing with him was sufficiently startling to elicit the universal remark—evidently considered superlative—that it was "just like Cora Madison!" Cora usually perceived, with an admirably clear head, all that went on about her; and she was conscious of increasing the sensation, when after a few turns round the room, she allowed her partner to conduct her to a secluding ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... too, men eminent for intellectual power, to whom the presence of a commanding spirit would in all other cases be a signal rather for rivalry than reverential acknowledgment.' 'I knew Maurice well,' says Mr. Gladstone in one of his notes of reminiscence, 'had heard superlative accounts of him from Cambridge, and really strove hard to make them all realities to myself. One Sunday morning we walked to Marsh Baldon to hear Mr. Porter, the incumbent, a calvinist independent of the clique, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... have travelled the world over—I mean the inhabited parts—and in its broad extent there is not a people without worship of some kind. Wherefore my assertion, that beyond the arts, above the sciences, above commerce, above any or all other human concernments, religion is the superlative interest. It alone is divine. The study of it is worship. Knowledge of it is knowledge of God. Can as much be said ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... two forms for this inflection: the comparative, expressing a greater degree of quality; and the superlative, expressing the ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... that comes with many years, tell you that if ever we are to free ourselves from the yoke of the oppressor, and to restore Peru to its ancient position of power and glory, we must be helped and guided in that great, that almost impossible task, by one who unites within himself superlative wisdom and superlative courage; and the crowning proof, to my mind, that heaven has now at last fulfilled its glorious promise is to be found in the fact that it has ordained our new Inca to be born an Englishman, ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... the acting of this part, Betterton benefited by Shakespeare's coaching: "Sir William Davenant (having seen Mr. Taylor, of the Black Fryars Company, act it; who being instructed by the author, Mr. Shakespear) taught Mr. Betterton in every particle of it, gained him esteem and reputation superlative to all other plays" (1789, p. 29). But cf. the Rise and Progress of the English Theatre, appended to Colley Cibber's Apology, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... going on the Blackfeet were advancing up the narrow pathway with superlative though needless caution, and no small amount of timidity. Each man took advantage of every scrap of cover he could find on the way up, but as the owner of the hut had taken care to remove all cover that was removable, they did not find much, and if the defenders had been there, that little ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... Why can we not in turn receive it so, And end this murmur for the life we live? And when we do so frantically strive To win strange faith, why do we shun to know That in love's elemental over-glow God's wholeness gleams with light superlative? ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... intelligible world, in that it gives birth to it by virtue of its inexhaustible fruitfulness.[642] The Supreme Good is GOD himself, and he is designated "the good" because this term seems most fittingly to express his essential character and essence.[643] It is towards this superlative perfection that the reason lifts itself; it is towards this infinite beauty the heart aspires. "Marvellous Beauty!" exclaims Plato; "eternal, uncreated, imperishable beauty, free from increase and diminution... beauty which has nothing sensible, nothing corporeal, as hands ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... continued our zigzag through Belgium, following most of the time dirt roads which, though not of superlative excellence, were an improvement on stone blocks. It took us practically all day to reach Antwerp, a hundred ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... attitude better; and besides, it suited his Scotch nature to refuse any approach to open admiration for anything out of the old land. His ordinary commendation was, "It's no that bad"; and his superlative was expressed in the daring concession, "Aye, it'll maybe dae, it micht be waur." So he followed the colonel about with disparaging comments that drove Coley to the verge of madness. When they came ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... gained his Mistress, the rest of his Story is not worth relating. My Friend carried his Discourse so far as to say, that it was for higher Beings than Men to join Happiness and Greatness in the same Idea; but that in our Condition we have no Conception of superlative Excellence, or Heroism, but as it is surrounded with a ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... of their foolish experiences, with reported tales of the dupes yet more heavily befooled and bled, caught and bound these men in fellowship. They had both met with some queer ones in their travels, and they compared notes: but they always came back to this superlative old fraud. After long wise and disconnected talk about the set of the wind, or the rates of pay on various lines, or stowage, or freights, or rigs, or currents, or the characters of various skippers and mates, or the liveliness or sulkiness or homeliness or fickleness of this or that kind ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... diminished, and this is called comparison; there are two degrees of comparison, the comparative, which increases or diminishes the quality, is formed by adding er to the adjective in its positive state; the superlative increases or diminishes the comparative to its last degree, and is formed by adding est to the adjective in its positive or original state, as long, longer, longest; short, shorter, shortest. When the adjective consists of more than two syllables, the comparative ...
— A Week of Instruction and Amusement, • Mrs. Harley
... there is a strong temptation to work the superlative to its limit. In this instance it is well to overcome temptation by succumbing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... upon the obsolete! I wished to show you a few young gentlemen slightly superlative and ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... of all these fussy appreciations. But what one seems to miss nowadays is the presence of a writer of superlative lucidity and humanity, for whose books one waits with avidity, and orders them beforehand, as soon as they are announced. For one thing, most people seem to me to write too much. The moment a real success is scored, the temptation, no doubt adroitly whispered by publishers, to produce a similar ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... can under no consideration tolerate the idea of being taught by this despised and humble throng the doctrine of salvation through the grace and mercy of God alone, not through man's own merits. They cannot endure the teaching that their offering—the mass, regarded by the Papists as a work of superlative merit and holiness—avails ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... store from his previous ones. There were no more bargains. Everything was of the superlative best, and superlative best prices were charged. He catered to the most expensive trade in town. Only those who could carelessly afford to pay ten per cent. more than anywhere else, patronised him, and so excellent ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... In descriptions of them superlative follows upon superlative. The cocks of most species are arrayed in scarlet and black; the hens are not a whit less brilliantly attired in yellow and sable. One species lives entirely in the plains, others visit them in the cold weather; the majority are permanent residents of the hills. The solitary ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... that can trade in corruption, and can deliberately pollute itself with ideal wickedness for the sake of spreading the contagion in society, I wish not to conceal or excuse the depravity. Such degradation of the dignity of genius, such abuse of superlative abilities, cannot be contemplated but with grief and indignation. What consolation can be had Dryden has afforded by living to repent, and to testify his repentance.' Johnson's Works, vii. 293. He quotes Congreve, and of Congreve he says: 'It is acknowledged, with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... word shockingly misused in these latter days, the word Appreciation. The personal sympathy which Mr Arnold evidently had with Gray neither makes nor mars here; all is purely critical, purely literary. And yet higher praise has never been given by any save the mere superlative-sloppers of the lower press, nor juster criticism meted out by the veriest critical Rhadamanthus. Of its scale and kind, this, I think, is the most perfect example of Mr Arnold's critical power, and it is so late that it shows that power to have been not merely ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... pictures, and her saints, and her architecture, as we praise things dead, they are the most angered by her appearance on this modern field all armed, just as she was, with works and art and songs, sometimes superlative, often vulgar. Note you, she is still careless of art or songs, as she has always been. She lays her foundations in something other, which something other our moderns hate. Yet out of that something other came the art and song of the Middle Ages. And what art or songs have you? ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... presenting a remarkable contrast to most of our rich men's attempts at the same. The dinner, cooked by a cordon bleu of the cuisine [A]—whose resources in the way of "hot plates" and other accessories for furnishing a superlative dinner are unrivaled—is often served on glittering plate, or china almost equally valuable, by men six feet high, of splendid figure, and dressed with the most scrupulous neatness and cleanliness. Gloves are never worn by servants in first-rate English houses, but ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... Agassiz than the richest man in America. In another little book, "The Kingdom of Light," the author, who is a lawyer, says that Concord, Massachusetts, has influenced America to a greater degree than New York and Chicago combined. I think I'll blot out the superlative degree in my grammar, for the comparative gives me all the ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... necessarily detached from all that is topical or historical, or documentary or actual. It is also necessarily an effect of fine shades, delicate values, vanishing distinctions, of evasiveness, inconsequence, suggestion. It is also absolute, unrelated—it is positive or negative or superlative—it is never comparative. Well, the Anglo-Saxon public is totally insensible to such things. They can no more feel them, than a blind worm can feel the ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... manners of the young people of to-day is obtrusiveness and exaggeration. By obtrusiveness I mean a style of speech and manners that attracts attention and remark; by exaggeration I mean the too constant use of the superlative in conversation, and a certain incongruity and inappropriateness of expression which is very offensive to the cultivated taste. Such expressions as "perfectly awful," "perfectly beautiful," "too ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... Mr. Yerkes of Chicago offered an unlimited sum for the provision of the University of that city with a "superlative" telescope. And it happened, fortunately, that a pair of glass discs, nearly 42 inches in diameter, and of perfect quality, were ready at hand. They had been cast by Mantois for the University of Southern California, when the erection of a ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... shed over the soul was still ours. It was not classed as a "necessary," and the retailers being free to charge freely for it could sell it at a price too "long" for the purses of the many. Dry bread is an unpalatable thing, and the new "Law's" loaf was superlative in that respect. The grocer was beginning to discriminate, so far as he dared, between his friends (his customers) and the casual purchaser, whose affected cordiality did not deceive the shrewd old wretch. Butter had ceased to be practical politics; fruit ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... Mrs. Lane!" he summed up, and when Isabelle smiled at his enthusiasm, he grew red of face and stuttered in his effort to make her comprehend all that his superlative meant. "I know what I am saying. I have been all over Europe and this country. Every surgeon who comes here says the same thing. You can't even imagine anything that might be better. There isn't much in the world where you can't imagine a something better, an improvement. There's ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... conceived, it is a sort of logical violation and unnaturalness; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with this very folly. The desire for "freedom of will" in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... darkness above and beneath and around her ... a suffocating compression of the stagnant air ... a thrilling consciousness of the close approach of the two cruel orbs.... a superlative stillness ... and then a mighty attrition, in which the mortal part of the poor girl was about to be ground to atoms, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... then, Lammas stands as a day of account, and Latter Lammas will consequently signify the day of doom, which in effect, as to all payments of money, or worldly transactions in money, is never. Latter here is used for last, or the comparative for the superlative, just as it is in a like case in our version of the book of Job, "I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth," meaning of course the last day, or the end of the world. That the last day, or Latter Lammas, as to all temporal ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... there, beyond the rocks and lawns and red japonicas, lay the blue and shining water-lake in its confining banks of green. And upon its softly quivering surface floated the rubber-neck-boat-birds, white and sweetly silent instead of red and screaming—and the superlative length and arched beauty of their necks surpassed the wildest of Ikey Borrachsohn's descriptions. And relying upon the strength and politeness of these wondrous birds there were indeed "mans und ladies und boys und little girls" embarking, disembarking, and placidly weaving in ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... splendid toilet; the rouge which she wore boldly; her beauty, quite striking at night; her figure of "the goddess sailing on clouds," rendered still more striking a dignity, which no one possessed more than she did, and which she pushed, when it was necessary, to a most superlative haughtiness. ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... go on! Who would then have dreamt that the illustrious George {170b}—he of the Piazza—would ever be 'honoured with instructions to sell'? that his eulogistic pen would be employed in giving the puff superlative to the Elysian haunts of quondam fashion—in other words—painting the lily-gilding refined gold? But, alas! Simpson, the tutelar deity, departed ('died,' some say, but we don't believe it), and, at the moment he made his last bow, Vauxhall ought to have been closed; ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... Love—Superlative, Eternal, Gradually unfold the mystery To Man, who by Satanic schemes infernal, Had fall'n from happiness to misery. And he by Faith's keen eye could clearly see Its full development when Jesus came The sinner's Surety and best Friend to be; Who "bore the Cross and still despised the ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... frivolous tune Which he felt to be pulsing with ecstasy, For he thought that success always followed desire, Such a very superlative fool was he. ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... Magic owed a great deal of its success to the admirable production of Mr. Kenelm Foss and the excellence of the cast. Miss Grace Croft was surely the true Patricia. Of the Duke of Mr. Fred Lewis it is difficult to speak in terms other than superlative. Those of my readers who have suffered the misfortune of not having seen him, may gain some idea of his execution of the part from the illustrations to Mr. Belloc's novels. The Duke was an extraordinarily good likeness of the Duke of Battersea, as portrayed by Chesterton, with rather more than ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... compliments on the success of a coiffure he felt to be his own creation. The fellow was too familiar, thought Oliver, with increasing irritation. He darkened, grew glum and silent; and when, after dinner, Martigues approached him with a luckless tribute to Madame Shaw's superlative loveliness, he answered curtly, and turned on his heel. Myra witnessed the brief discourtesy, and later very gently taxed him with it. What had the unfortunate artist done? He faced her like a sulky boy and would not answer; but she was quick to penetrate ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... inquiry whether, if self-restraint and wise discipline are desirable for every faculty of the mind and body, the tongue and hand alone should be allowed to riot in wanton excess. If even the legitimate superlative must be handled, like dynamite, with extreme caution, blackguardism of every degree is a nuisance to be summarily discountenanced and abated by those who know the difference between grandeur and bigness, between Mercutio and Tony Lumpkin, ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... under the tension—then they were abreast and his heart broke and the apple of life was dead sea fruit to his palate. She had spoken. She had even smiled and waved her riding crop, but she had done both with so superlative an indifference that it seemed she had not really seen him at all. She was chatting vivaciously with Jimmy and Jimmy had been laughing as raucously as a jackal—and so they had passed him by. The event which had ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... Dick; "here's a bonnet, frightful—that's positive; another more frightful—that's comparative; and this with the superlative yellow tuft, I should call the most frightful of all. So, Nelly's ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... dispute had arisen between Messieurs Gall and Nightshade; the latter pertinaciously insisting on having his new poem reviewed by Treacle, who he knew would extol it most loftily, and not by Gall, whose sarcastic commendation he held in superlative horror. The remonstrances of Squire Headlong silenced the disputants, but did not mollify the inflexible Gall, nor appease the irritated Nightshade, who secretly resolved that, on his return to London, he would beat his drum in Grub Street, form a mastigophoric ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... curiosity and to show his people that he had said no more than what was the truth in speaking of his success, he became a subscriber to the Wiener Theaterzeitung, and had it sent to Warsaw. The criticism is somewhat long, but as this first step into the great world of art was an event of superlative importance to Chopin, and is one of more than ordinary interest to us, I do not hesitate to transcribe it in full so far as it relates to our artist. Well, what we read in the Wiener Theaterzeitung of August ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... altruism are visible in Greece. There are few Germanophiles. "Do not fear for us," said M. Kalogeropoulos, to the French. "Greece will not ally herself to a corpse"—meaning Germany. In fact, there is among the Greeks only Graecophilism. If superlative and clamorous love of country is a virtue—they have it. For Greece, when you are down, you are down. As for fallen Germany, so for Russia in her humiliation Greece has no extra thought or care. Not a humanitarian and philanthropic nation! One wonders how a Greek mind ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... influence was working its inward way. My paramount interest had always been literary, though regarded as a gentle diversion, not degraded to a bread-and-butter concern. Ever since I had fallen under the superlative spell of R.L.S., in whom the cunning enchantment of the written word first became manifest, I had understood that books did not grow painlessly for our amusement, but were the issue of dexterous and intentional skill. I had thus made a stride from Conan Doyle, Cutcliffe ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... at the head of them. See Authentic Records, Part II. p. 983, as Josephus could not but know very well; but that he was esteemed as very ancient by them, and that they knew they had been first of all denominated "Danai" from this very ancient king Danaus. Nor does this superlative degree always imply the "most ancient" of all without exception, but is sometimes to be rendered "very ancient" only, as is the case in the like superlative degrees of ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... highly imaginative, and their world is peopled with supernatural beings, whilst Ovid is surpassed in the number and ingenuity of their metamorphoses. Their nerves are highly strung, they are emotional to the hysteric degree, and they do everything in the superlative fashion. They love at first sight, and one glimpse of a face is enough to set them in flames; they cease to sleep or to eat until they are admitted to the adored presence, they weep till they faint, they rend ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... than Fort Bourke, and it was not until he was across the river that he passed the outermost cattle-stations, which had sprung rapidly into existence since his last visit to the neighbourhood. The Narran was then followed up until the Balonne was reached. This river, in his superlative style, Mitchell pronounced to be the finest in Australia, with the exception of the Murray. He then struck and followed the Culgoa upwards until it divided into two branches; he skirted the main one, which retained the name of the Balonne. ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... woman the world has ever known. Three weeks of steeping one's soul in the oldest, most complete and satisfactory ruins on the face of the earth. Here, in delving into the past, we would have no use for the comparative word "hundreds." We could boldly use the superlative word "thousands." What memories! what dreams! what fragments of half-forgotten history and romance came floating through the brain! I have, generally, little use for guide-books except, afterwards, to verify what I have seen. But I admit that I had an especial longing to reach the temple ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... whole idea is nothing less than atrocious; and, in our judgment, the Adapter's actual purpose in putting it forth is to make his own superlative goodness seem proved by a logical ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... play with Hobhouse. Mrs. Jordan superlative in Hoyden, and Jones well enough in Foppington. What plays! what wit!—helas! Congreve and Vanbrugh are your only comedy. Our society is too insipid now for the like copy. Would not go to Lady Keith's. Hobhouse thought ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... known to history for his work in vindicating the national power under the Constitution. That was the need in his day and he met it with superlative wisdom and skill. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that he favored federal encroachment upon the powers reserved to the states. On the contrary, he rendered decisions in favor of state rights which would be notable were they not overshadowed by ...
— Our Changing Constitution • Charles Pierson
... Grand Canon itself did not dwarf everything else, the scenery of these plateaus would be superlative in interest. It is not all desert, nor are the gorges, canons, cliffs, and terraces, which gradually prepare the mind for the comprehension of the Grand Canon, the only wonders of this land of enchantment. These are contrasted ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... [the] impnis of my maisteris dere, Gowere and Chaucere, that on the steppis satt Of rethorike quhill thai were lyvand here, Superlative as poetis laureate, In moralitee and eloquence ornate, I recommend my buk in lynis sevin, And eke thair soulis ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... lieutenant, swooped down upon me, declaring that I must not be further fatigued, and marched me back to my room, put me to bed, gave me a dainty little meal of broth and the breast of a roasted chicken, administered a stiff dose of some new concoction, characterised chiefly by its superlative nastiness, and then left me to go to sleep, which ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... then, nine kinds of union according to dimensions. Amongst all these, equal unions are the best, those of a superlative degree, i.e., the highest and the lowest, are the worst, and the rest are middling, and with them the high[33] are better ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... copied from Murray's, is teaching the old explanation of the alphabetic elements to "more than one hundred thousand children and youth," is also vending under his own name an abstract of the new scheme of "tonicks, subtonicks, and atonicks;" and, in one breath, bestowing superlative praise on both, in order, as it would seem, to monopolize all inconsistency. "Among those who have successfully laboured in the philological field, Mr. Lindley Murray stands forth in bold relief, as undeniably ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of late, having carried out thoroughly to my own satisfaction two considerable illnesses, had a birthday, and visited Honolulu, where politics are (if possible) a shade more exasperating than they are with us. I am told that it was just when I was on the point of leaving that I received your superlative epistle about the cricket eleven. In that case it is impossible I should have answered it, which is inconsistent with my own recollection of the fact. What I remember is, that I sat down under your immediate ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at least in French, seems to be the more fashionable spelling; but Abulghazi Khan must have known the true name of his ancestor. His etymology appears just: Zin, in the Mogul tongue, signifies great, and gis is the superlative termination, (Hist. Genealogique des Tatars, part iii. p. 194, 195.) From the same idea of magnitude, the appellation of Zingis ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... positive, comparative and superlative of infamy hitherto! but we must turn to "Grand old Texas" to find unblushing effrontry and irremediable rascality. Some months ago a creature named Otis, who conducts somewhere in Southern California a putrid abortion miscalled a newspaper, declared in his columns that ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... The sentence defined was the sum of daily shame, sorrow, homesickness and misanthropy. Shame in the proud man admits of no degrees of intensity. If it exist at all, it is superlative. To this was added the loss of Rachel. How little it would take to satisfy him, now that she was wholly denied to his eyes! Only to look down on her again, unseen, from his aery in the ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... and cut him short. He spread it out once more, and securing its corners began to describe the effects of the various sorts of artificial manure on the different crops, his cleverness in combining them, and his latest triumphant discovery of the superlative mixture that was to strike all ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... were active and muscular, and soon showed that they thoroughly understood how to use their clumsy tools to the best advantage. They were led by and worked under the directorship of a lean, shrunken, withered old grey-haired hag of superlative ugliness, who did no work herself, but went constantly back and forth along the line of workers, bearing in her hand a long thin pliant rattan, which she did not hesitate to smartly apply to the shoulders of those who seemed to her to be doing less than their fair share of the work in hand. This ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Arabian dates, Peaches and plums, and clusters fresh from vines, And all imaginable sweets, and cakes, And here are drinking-cups, and long-necked flasks In wicker mail, and bottles broached from casks, In cellars delved deep, and winter cold, Select, superlative, and centuries old. What more can I desire? what book can be As rich as Idleness and Luxury? What lore can fill my heart with joy divine, Like luscious fruitage, and enchanted wine? Brimming with Helicon ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... infinite blue ocean, with all these human beings on board, and the smoke tranquilly mounting up into the sea-air from the cook's funnel as if it were a chimney in a city; and every thing looking so cool, and calm, and of-course, in the midst of what to me, at least, seemed a superlative marvel. ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... "doggerel" to it, the "sincere and rational meaning" which pervades his compositions renders such an epithet improper. "His ear for rhythm," he continues, "though less true than in his prose, is seldom wholly at fault, and whether in prose or verse, he had the superlative merit that he could never write nonsense." Bunyan's earliest prison work, entitled "Profitable Meditations," was in verse, and neither this nor his later metrical ventures before his release—his "Four Last Things," his "Ebal and Gerizim," and his "Prison Meditations"—can ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... invited to admire, and so on to a score of topics. The first thing was to make Carter think and talk, which he did in the happy-go-lucky way of his class, uttering nine mighty simple remarks, and then a bit of superlative wisdom, or something that sounded like it. And when he had shot his random bolts, Mr. Eden would begin and treat each picture as a text, and utter much wisdom ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... claims to preeminence among recognized forms of verse will soon convince any intelligent reader of its superlative ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... furnish the only efficacious antidote to Mirabelle. And he needed an antidote, and a powerful one, for during the past two weeks Mirabelle had been surpassing herself. That is, if one can surpass a superlative. ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... compliments Charinus on beating him at his own game of repartee (743). When Weise (Die Komodien des Plautus, p. 181) describes Ps. IV. 7 as "eine der ausgezeichnetsten Scenen, die es irgend giebt," his superlative finds a ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... that very evening, was miraculously restored to sight. And, truly with a notable, almost miraculous, speed, the feelings of all Norway for King Olaf changed themselves, and were turned upside down, "within a year," or almost within a day. Superlative example of Extinctus amabitur idem. Not "Olaf the Thick-set" any longer, but "Olaf the Blessed" or Saint, now clearly in Heaven; such the name and character of him from that time to this. Two churches dedicated to him (out of four that once ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... to the town. It was easy to see that they were the immediate jewels of his soul; there was not one piece which he did not know and love as if it had been his child, though there were so many thousands that he alone could keep strict count of them. He insisted gravely upon the superlative value of the least significant in appearance, but he could joke a little about other things than coins. There was an old mosaic which we admired, with a faded God of Love ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... a nice mode of serving the remains of roasted game, but when a superlative salmi is desired, the birds must be scarcely more than half roasted for it. In either case, carve them very neatly, and strip every particle of skin and fat from the legs, wings and breasts; bruise the bodies well, and put them with the skin ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... enquire too minutely into the cause which might actuate him in this instance: suffice it to say, he immediately put the plan in execution; and in three days from the time he first saw the unfortunate Lieutenant, he had the superlative felicity of seeing him at liberty, and receiving an ample reward in the tearful eye and half articulated thanks of the ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... Latin verb the principal parts of which are: fero, ferre, tuli, latus. The last form is found in a number of English words; as, dilate, elate, legislate, relate, superlative, translate. The meaning of the root in these words, as in the ten given above, is ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... historical peoples of the world have been located on soils that thirst for water, may find its explanation in the intrinsic value of arid soils. From Babylon to the United States is a far cry; but it is one that shouts to the world the superlative merits of the soil that begs for water. To learn how to use the "desert" is to make ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... dog, they would hardly have quarreled with his owner over Jan's price. But it happened there were none. And the result was that Jan had to be put through his paces five separate times for the benefit of five separate prospective purchasers, not one of whom was really capable of appreciating his superlative quality, before the five hundred dollars demanded did eventually find its way into Jean's pouch and he was called upon to part with his leader. He intended to give Snip the leadership of his team now, because Snip was a curiously remorseless creature; and to buy a husky ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... occasion. I never felt deeply in my life if that poem did not make me, both lately, and when I read it in MS. No alderman ever longed after a haunch of buck venison more than I for a spiritual taste of that "White Doe" you promise. I am sure it is superlative, or will be when dressed, i. e., printed. All things read raw to me in MS.; to compare magna parvis, I cannot endure my own writings in that state. The only one which I think would not very much win upon me in print is "Peter Bell;" but I am not certain. You ask me about your ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... Social in its nature, it respects everything which tends to unite men. It delights in measure.[426] The love of beauty is mainly the love of measure or proportion. The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius, or a prodigious usefulness, if you will hide the want of measure. This perception comes in to polish and perfect the parts of the social instrument. Society ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... miracle in himself, I cheerfully grant you that as well. But, in a lecture one must not multiply miracles praeter necessitatem; and when Tyndale has been granted you have yet to face the miracle that forty-seven men—not one of them known, outside of this performance, for any superlative talent—sat in committee and almost consistently, over a vast extent of work—improved upon what Genius had done. I give you the word of an old committee-man that this is not the way of committees—that only by miracle is it the way of any committee. ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... not therefore ascribe to you any superlative degree of virtue, when we believe that we may inform you of our change of condition without danger of malignant fascination; and that when you read of the marriage of your correspondents Hymenaeus and Tranquilla, you will join your wishes to those of their other friends for the happy event of an ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... out his soul in words he had left unspoken to her. He was back again before the fire, telling her all that he did not tell her then. One gorgeous image after another swarmed to his brain. He was like a poet gone mad. He crowded sentence upon sentence, superlative upon superlative, until he found himself upon his feet, his cheeks hot, and his breath coming short. Then he caught sight of the crimson stain upon the wall and felt himself a murderer. He staggered back and threw himself full-length upon the couch, panting ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... thinker who clearly recognized and emphatically asserted the superlative importance of love was Schopenhauer. Whereas Hegel (II., 184) parroted the popular opinion that love is peculiarly and exclusively the affair of the two individuals whom it directly involves, having no concern with the eternal interests of family and race, no universality (Allgemeinheit). ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Holy Spirit them inspires. For conscience is an inward thing, and none Can govern that aright but God alone. Nor can a well-informed conscience lower Her sails to any temporary power, Or bow to men's decrees; for that would be Treason in a superlative degree; For God alone can laws to conscience give, And that's a badge of His prerogative. This is the controversy of this day Between the holy God and sinful clay. God hath throughout the earth proclaim'd that He Will over conscience hold the sovereignty, ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... not far from the town, called Crooksbury Hill, which rises up out of a flat in the form of a cone, and is planted with Scotch fir-trees. Here I used to take the eggs and young ones of crows and magpies. This hill was a famous object in the neighbourhood. It served as the superlative degree of height. 'As high as Crooksbury Hill,' meant with us, the utmost degree of height. Therefore, the first object my eyes sought was this hill. I could not believe my eyes! Literally speaking, I for a moment thought the famous ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... exhibiting that supposed kingly and divine faculty in the way of speech or argument; thus putting themselves on a level with their subjects, and by meeting them on their own ground, with their own weapons, giving occasion for comparisons, perhaps not altogether favourable to that theory of a superlative and divine difference which the doctrine of a divine right to rule naturally presupposes. 'For,' he says, 'neither is it enough for those who govern and command us, and have all the world in their hand, to have a common understanding, and to be able to do what the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... of those superlative sunsets that burn themselves into the consciousness with a joy akin to pain, and of which only a few are allotted to each human life. I stood watching the sinking sun throw a crimson net over the snow mountains ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... "Doubtless Dyce finds that superlative honor a perfect panacea for her grief," said Louis sarcastically. "It is eminently fitting that Brutus and Caesar should have walked as chief mourners for they have lost the truest friend they ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... Lucy's best prints and drawings in her bedroom, and the very finest bouquet of spring flowers on her table. Maggie would enjoy all that, she was so found of pretty things! And there was poor aunt Tulliver, that no one made any account of, she was to be surprised with the present of a cap of superlative quality, and to have her health drunk in a gratifying manner, for which Lucy was going to lay a plot with her father this evening. Clearly, she had not time to indulge in long reveries about her own happy love-affairs. With this thought she walked toward the door, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... to express different degrees of comparison. The regular degrees have been reckoned three; positive, comparative, and superlative. These are usually marked by changing the termination. The positive is determined by a comparison with other things; as, a great house, a small book, compared with others of their kind. This is truly a comparative degree. The comparative adds er; as, a ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... incomparable, a golden glow in which valley and hill bask lazily. Its winters are warm with sunshine and cold with the crisp crackle of frost. Its springs—they might be worse. Any Coloradoan will admit the climate is superlative. But there is one slight rift in the lute, hardly to be mentioned as a discord in the universal harmony. Sudden weather changes do occur. A shining summer sun vanishes and in a twinkling of an eye the wind is ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... dotted a courtesy, quickly and gracefully as a butterfly touching a flower, and then darted back into the room she had left. There they were met by a taller young lady, who was introduced as "My daughter Rosabella." Her beauty was superlative and peculiar. Her complexion was like a glowing reflection upon ivory from gold in the sunshine. Her large brown eyes were deeply fringed, and lambent with interior light. Lustrous dark brown hair shaded her forehead in little waves, slight as the ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... was a scamp in the superlative degree, the burly ruffian who seated himself by his side looked the character much better. He was not a man to beat about the bush. As he expressed it, he wanted to come to business ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... Richard II (Act i, sc. 2) the terms "fair and crystal" applied to a clear sky, and in Romeo and Juliet (Act i, sc. 2) the word is used to denote superlative excellence, where a lady's love is to be weighed against her rival ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... to R. N. Williams is a steady baseliner of second class. Williams is apt to crush a top-flight player in a burst of superlative terms, yet fall a victim to the erratic streak that is in him when some second-class player plays patball with him. Such defeats were his portion at the hands of Ritchie and Mavrogordato in England, yet on the same trip he scored notable ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... beauty. There is allurement about her body; sylph-like, sinuous; the olive tint of her complexion, the wonderful glory of her hair and the glowing night-black of her eyes. Men pause; she is of the superlative kind that robs the reason, a supreme glory of passion and life and beauty, at whose feet fools and wise men would slavishly frolic and folly. She seldom speaks, but those who have heard her say that it is like rippling water, of gentleness and softness and of the mellow ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... Wilhelm, had made the most of the little hair that remained to him. He wore a neat pair of trousers, a soft shade of some dark color, a silk waistcoat of superlative elegance and the very newest cut, a shirt with open-work, its linen hand-woven by a Friesland woman, and a blue-and-white cravat. His watch chain, like the head of his cane, came from Messrs. Florent and Chanor; and the coat, cut by old Graff himself, was of the ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... the rights of the slave instead of annihilating them. I thank God that I was withheld from the great folly and great sin of acknowledging a law for slavery—a law for any piracy—least of all for the superlative piracy. Nor have you forgotten how incessantly, in the late war, our enemies, Northern as well as Southern, were calling for this observance of the Constitution. As if the purpose of that paper was to serve those whose ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... to consider a similar subject, also very worthy of attention: I mean what has been called "the vice of the superlative." If we study the inhabitants of a country, we notice differences of temperament, of which the language shows signs. Here the people are calm and phlegmatic; their speech is jejune, lacks color. Elsewhere temperaments ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... suppressed a single touch in the picture of this beautiful friendship. But Liszt's help was not limited to material things. What was infinitely more valuable to Wagner, and what excited his gratitude to even more superlative utterance, was the confidence which Liszt showed in his genius, and without which, it is no exaggeration to say, Wagner's greatest works ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... society; and though in about a month she had made the acquaintance of most of the families round, and was on quite free and easy terms with all the Misses Sykes, and all the Misses Pearson, and the two superlative Misses Wynne of Walden Hall, yet, it appeared, she found none amongst them very genial: she fraternized with none of them, to use her own words. If she had had the bliss to be really Shirley Keeldar, Esq., ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... clusters, on what is barefacedly called a bed, but which is nothing more nor less than a beggarman's shakedown, where the smell, the heat, the filth, and above all, the vermin, are intolerable to the very farthest stretch of the superlative degree. As soon as their eyes begin to close here, they are roused by the bell-man, and summoned at the hour of twelve—first washing themselves as aforesaid, in the lake, and then adjourning to the prison which I am about to describe. There is not on earth, with the exception of pagan rites,—and ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... view, though both houses and grounds were on a more modest scale than those of Loringwood. They lacked the grandeur suggested by the century-old cedars she had observed along the Loring drive. The Terrace was much more modern and, possibly, so much more comfortable. It had in a superlative degree the delightful atmosphere of home, and although the stranger had been within its gates so short a time, she was conscious of the wonder if in all her varied experience she had ever been in so real a ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... enough, "Yes, I know you aren't going to believe this," I say. "Once I didn't believe it myself. I realize that it all sounds impossible. But after you've once been there—" Then I'm off. When I've finished, there isn't an hysterical superlative adjective or a complimentary abstract noun unused in my vocabulary. I've told all the East about California. I've told many of the countries of Europe about California. I even tell Californians about California. I will say to the credit of Californians though that they listen. Listen! did ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... undertake to wryte in prayse of a gentlewoman, I would neither praise her christal eye, nor her cherrie lippe, etc. For these things are trita et obvia. But I would either find some supernaturall cause whereby my penne might walke in the superlative degree, or els I would undertake to answer for any imperfection that shee hath, and thereupon rayse the prayse ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... mine in London was lately consulted by a lady of quality, of most distinguished merit, what was the best History of England for her son to read. My friend recommended Hume's. But, upon recollecting that its usher was a superlative panegyrick on one, who endeavoured to sap the credit of our holy religion, he revoked his recommendation. I am really sorry for this ostentatious alliance; because I admire The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... regulation toilet for dinner. The pair had asked questions of their guide, the gardener, who told them so much of Moreau's beauty that they felt the necessity of "rigging themselves up" (studio slang). They, therefore, put on their most superlative suits and then walked over to the steward's lodge, piloted by Jacques Moreau, the eldest son, a hardy youth, dressed like an English boy in a handsome jacket with a turned-over collar, who was spending his vacation ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... Superb belega. Superficial suprajxa. Superficies suprajxo. Superfluity superfluo. Superfluous superflua. Superhuman superhoma. Superintend observi, zorgi pri. Superior supera. Superior, a superulo. Superiority supereco. Superlative (gram.) superlativo. Supernatural supernatura. Supernumerary ekstrulo. Superscription surskribo. Supersede anstatauxi. Superstition supersticxo. Superstitious supersticxa. Supervise observi. Supper noktomangxo. Supplant anstatauxi, uzurpi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... strike the superlative, and I expected now that he would state his business, but the old man had one more shot ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... years longer, her shattered society would finally accept the gentle Joseph as its regenerator. It was not unnatural for the Emperor to regard his Confederation of the Rhine as safe and loyal; yet, just as in the Moscow campaign his superlative strategy far outran the remainder of his system, so he had failed, embodiment of the new social order as he believed himself to be, in fully estimating the creative force of the revolution in middle and southern Germany. Some inkling of the national ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Byron asserts, that execution is everything, and the class or subject nothing. The highest subjects, equally well executed (which, however, rarely happens), are the best. But the power of execution, the manner of seeing nature, is one thing, and may be so superlative (if you are only able to judge of it) as to countervail every disadvantage of subject. Raphael's storks in the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, exulting in the event, are finer than the head of Christ would have been in almost any other hands. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... no love like His—so pure and constant and satisfying. What the sun is to a star-light, and the ocean to a pool left by the retiring tide, such is the love of Jesus compared with all other love. To have it is superlative blessedness; to miss it is ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... "look" and their jewels are simply divine. With all this beyond criticism, it is very difficult to say whether they are beautiful or not, naturally; the general effect is so perfect. They, as far as grooming and superlative "turnedoutness" is concerned (I had to make a new word), are the ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... for which they were prepared, but, as Salmasius put it, 'for a king to be arraigned in a court of judicature, to be put to plead for his life, to have sentence of death pronounced against him, and that sentence executed,'—oh! horrible impiety. To this Milton replies: 'Tell me, thou superlative fool, whether it be not more just, more agreeable to the rules of humanity and the laws of all human societies, to bring a criminal, be his offence what it will, before a court of justice, to give him leave to speak for himself, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... 40,000 new paletots, he does not mean that he has got that number packed up in a box. If required to do so, he will supply them to that extent,—or to any further extent. A long row of figures in trade is but an elegant use of the superlative. If a tradesman can induce a lady to buy a diagonal Osnabruck cashmere shawl by telling her that he has 1,200 of them, who is injured? And if the shawl is not exactly a real diagonal Osnabruck cashmere, what harm is done as long ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... we call it my mad mood. Not only did I enjoy the supper, which was most agreeable, but far more the conversation. Among the topics discussed, what gave me most delight was to hear your name mentioned by the Captain; nor was this all, for he still added to my pleasure, nay, to a superlative degree, by saying that, in the art of painting he held you to be sole and without peer in the whole world, and that so you were esteemed at Rome. I could not have been better pleased. You see that my ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... and everything that went to make up a sweet, clean, uneventful life. And then into this Arcadia dropped one day a stranger, with an amazing experience of the outer world, a kaleidoscopic brain, an extraordinary personal magnetism and a unique combination of driving force and superlative ambition. ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... was as superlative as was his helplessness. He could only bristle and tear his vocal chords with his rage. But it was a very ancient and boresome experience to Collins. He was even taking advantage of the moment to glance across the arena and size up what ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... the reading, the chorister arose with superlative dignity, and gave the key. Unfortunately, the choir dropped a tone or two too low, and the first verse was sung at that disadvantage. Discovering the blunder, the key was again given, but the singers were now getting nervous, and instead of rising, ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... this, it is hardly superlative to say that, since art began, no man has ever felt the exquisite and subtle harmony of line to the same degree as Ingres. Naturally the best examples of this, his greatest quality, are to be found in his rendering of the nude ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... feminine weakness, continued to dilate upon the superlative excellences of Daubeney until ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... I am at home alone, with a little pain in my left wrist; but the right one has no brotherly feeling for it, and would not be put off so. You ask how you have deserved such attentions? Why, by deserving them; by every kind of merit, -and by that superlative one to me, your submitting to throw away so much time on a forlorn antique—you two, who, without specifying particulars, (and you must at least be conscious that you are not two frights,) might expect any fortune ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... readers,—there is that within which unspeakably distinguishes him from all other past and present Sansculottists. The grand unparalleled peculiarity of Teufelsdroeckh is, that with all this Descendentalism, he combines a Transcendentalism, no less superlative; whereby if on the one hand he degrade man below most animals, except those jacketed Gouda Cows, he, on the other, exalts him beyond the visible Heavens, almost to an equality ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the development of Spanish countries the mental activity of the people is principally manifested in an exuberant imagination which finds expression in superlative and poetical language. If there were any corresponding creative genius and executive ability in material affairs such a fertile and well-watered land as Puerto Rico would be the home of one of the richest communities on the globe. By her situation she ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... Chettam's poor opinion of his rival's legs,—from Mr. Brooke's failure to elicit a companion's ideas, or from Celia's criticism of a middle-aged scholar's personal appearance. I am not sure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary superlative existed, could escape these unfavorable reflections of himself in various small mirrors; and even Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin. Moreover, if Mr. Casaubon, speaking for himself, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the leaders of that party, Vane, Fiennes, St. John, Martin, the men in England the most celebrated for profound thought and deep contrivance; and by their well-colored pretences and professions, they had overreached the whole nation. To deceive such men, would argue a superlative capacity in Cromwell; were it not that besides the great difference there is between dark, crooked counsels and true wisdom, an exorbitant passion for rule and authority will make the most prudent overlook the dangerous consequences of such measures as seem to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... orders and pays for his labor, with a public which frequently follows only certain morbid impressions, with connoisseurs who make him restless, with auctioneers who receive every new work with praise and estimates of value such as would fitly honor the most superlative production. ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... card with the lines in horizontal position. Point to the lines and say: "See these lines. Look closely and tell me which one is longer. Put your finger on the longest one." We use the superlative as well as the comparative form of long because it is often more familiar to young subjects. If the child does not respond, say: "Show me which line is the biggest." Then withdraw the card, turn it about ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... variety of this book, this fundamental is most strictly adhered to; there is not a wicked action in any part of it, but is first and last rendered unhappy and unfortunate; there is not a superlative villain brought upon the stage, but either he is brought to an unhappy end, or brought to be a penitent; there is not an ill thing mentioned but it is condemned, even in the relation, nor a virtuous, just thing but it carries its praise along with it. What can more exactly answer the rule laid ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... conversing with each other over their camp-fires upon the probable prospects of the next day. It was a question with them whether I should continue the march. Mostly all were of opinion that, since the master was sick, there would be no march. A superlative obstinacy, however, impelled me on, merely to spite their supine souls; but when I sallied out of my tent to call them to get ready, I found that at least twenty were missing; and Livingstone's letter-carrier, "Kaif-Halek"—or, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... extraordinary: the King of Siam sent ambassadors to Louis the Fourteenth: but Louis the Fourteenth sent none to the King of Siam." This topic also enjoys another distinction. It is one of many proofs of the superlative excellence of Johnson's talk that it cannot be imitated. Hundreds of clever men have made the attempt, but, with the exception of a single sentence, not one of these manufactured utterances could impose for an instant upon a real Johnsonian. That single ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... blessing he dismissed the congregation to their dinners, with such appetites as might be left to them. The strained excitement which marks this pleasing production could not be maintained; but Edwards never shrank in cold blood from the most appalling consequences of his theories. He tells us, with superlative coolness, that the 'bulk of mankind do throng' to hell (vii. 226). He sentences infants to hell remorselessly. The imagination, he admits, may be relieved by the hypothesis that infants suffer only in this world, instead of being doomed to eternal misery. 'But it does ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... this morning at the famous Domenichino and Guido, both of which are superlative. I afterwards went to the beautiful cemetery of Bologna, beyond the walls and found, besides the superb burial ground, an original of a Custode, who reminded me ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... considered a swearer. He took to it, as a lad does, who wishes to show that he has arrived at man's estate. Every thing with the judge was "damned bad" or "damned good," damned hot or cold, damned stupid, &c. It was his epithet, his adjective, his participle, his sign of positive and superlative, his argument, his judgment. He could not have got on without it. To deprive Thurlow of his "damn" would have been to shave his eyebrows, or to turn his growl ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... According to such a view, that two streams of life, in plant and animal, flow side by side, but under the guidance of different laws. The problems of vegetable life are, it must be said, extremely obscure, and for the penetrating of that darkness we have long had to wait for instruments of a superlative sensitiveness. This has been the principal reason for our long clinging to mere theory, instead of looking for the demonstration of facts. But to learn the truth we have to put aside theories, and rely only on direct experiment. We have to abandon all our preconceptions, and put our questions ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... and pursued in proportion to its worth in administering to our enjoyments, and the other is to be avoided in proportion to its unhappy effects in multiplying our sorrows. This being an undeniable fact, the superlative value of a good name, procured by a virtuous course of conduct, appears, at once, to transcend all other considerations: A pure unsullied conscience before heaven is the most permanent bliss that a rational being can enjoy, and is of that enduring nature which no earthly power or misfortune can ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... some, as was natural, made pitiful slips. I observed with secret and scarcely concealed satisfaction his courageous loyalty in defence of his friends, and his hitting out in their defence when he believed them to be assailed. One superlative intelligence, eager to do honour to the guest, yet ignorant of his claim to such honour, gave him a wonderfully facile and racy comment on the pre-Raphaelite painters, and, in particular, made the ridiculous blunder of a deliberate attack upon Rossetti, and then paused for ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... soil is acid! The University soil survey men say that the acidity is positive in the surface, comparative in the subsurface, and superlative in the subsoil. Two of them insisted that the subsoil has an acid taste. The analysis of a set of soil samples collected near Heart-of-Egypt shows that to neutralize the acidity of the surface soil will require seven hundred and eighty pounds of limestone per acre, while ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... are not generally admired, being didactic in style, bare, and obscure. Among his best known publications are his volume "Nature," and his lectures, "The Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century," "The Superlative in Manners and Literature," "English Character and Manners," and "The Conduct of Life." In 1850 appeared "Representative Men," embracing sketches of Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... he understood the full force of the attraction between them. The real energy and deliberation, the unswerving purpose in her magnetized the weakness at the roots of his ardent, impulsive, but unstable character. Moreover, in spite of the superlative passion which he had aroused in her, she lacked the animal magnetism which was his in abundance. Her oneness was a magnet for his gregariousness and concentrated it upon herself. That positive quality in him overwhelmed and intoxicated her; and in intellect he was far more brilliant and far less ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... not once, but a score of times. The brocades that I promised to show you after supper will be my witness. And there are some superlative satin and silk lengths which my Lady Rayne wished particularly to see. Will ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... after supper bolted to his room and began to scrub for the superlative toilette, after collecting a pair of kid gloves from Butcher Stevens and a purple tie from Dennis de Brian de Boru, Snorky Green was finally convinced that matters had ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... man had two sons"—so begins the best and most famous story in the world's literature. Use of the absolute superlative is always dangerous, but none will gainsay that statement, I am sure. This story, which follows that familiar tale afar off, indeed, begins in the same way. And the parallelism between the two is exact up to a certain point. ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... crowds one could hear the shrill cry of some belated newsboys, calling an "Extra Special"—the only superlative left to one of the more enterprising papers whose every ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... anchorite's playing was both a mystery and a revelation. I had never before heard anything to compare with it, nor do I expect ever to hear the like again. Talent, taste, feeling, were there, all in superlative degree, and disclosed with the unassuming confidence of power; whilst long and loving practice in solitude had averted a certain artificiality which, in the judgment of the uninitiated, generally ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Three weeks of steeping one's soul in the oldest, most complete and satisfactory ruins on the face of the earth. Here, in delving into the past, we would have no use for the comparative word "hundreds." We could boldly use the superlative word "thousands." What memories! what dreams! what fragments of half-forgotten history and romance came floating through the brain! I have, generally, little use for guide-books except, afterwards, to verify what I have seen. But I admit ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... a one-word comparative degree in the case of both piano and forte seems to necessitate the hyper-superlative degree as given above, but the practice of using four, or even five p's or f's is ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... were to my sight then, you have never—youth's loveliness set at defiance—been less so since. Forty years I think I have known you well. Thirty years we have been friends; and that word needs no epithet nor superlative to make it precious. This morning I called my wife to come and sit down by me, saying, "I will read you an old man's Idyl." And I read that in the March number of the "Atlantic." I believe Holmes wrote it; but ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... inexhaustible fruitfulness.[642] The Supreme Good is GOD himself, and he is designated "the good" because this term seems most fittingly to express his essential character and essence.[643] It is towards this superlative perfection that the reason lifts itself; it is towards this infinite beauty the heart aspires. "Marvellous Beauty!" exclaims Plato; "eternal, uncreated, imperishable beauty, free from increase and diminution... beauty which ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... formed by adding kham before an adjective, followed by ban ia (than), or simply ia, and the superlative by adding such adverbs of intensity as tam, eh, eh than, tam eh, shikaddei, which are followed generelly by ia ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... can know what it's like. It's really the art of imposing one's will upon someone else's, of making that other person see things as you want them to see them—not as they really are. It's the power of deception carried to a superlative degree. And when that power is exhausted, the ticket may be said to have expired—and the prisoner returns to the dungeon. Sometimes he takes the other person with him. Sometimes ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... boys were so busy studying that they could give but little time to Club meetings and there was nothing done beyond the making of some plans for the summer and the taking of a few long walks. The Ethels and Dorothy and Della were doing their best to make a superlative record, also. With Helen and Margaret life went more easily, for graduation days were yet two ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith
... corruption, and can deliberately pollute itself with ideal wickedness for the sake of spreading the contagion in society, I wish not to conceal or excuse the depravity. Such degradation of the dignity of genius, such abuse of superlative abilities, cannot be contemplated but with grief and indignation. What consolation can be had Dryden has afforded by living to repent, and to testify his repentance.' Johnson's Works, vii. 293. He quotes Congreve, and of Congreve he says: 'It is acknowledged, with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... comes back with all the glory of its russet brown departed and a sort of limp, anaemic look about it. And when the wearer has lain upon the veldt at full length for long hours together in rain and sun and dust-storm his kit assumes an inexpressible dowdiness, and preserves only its one superlative merit of so far resembling mother earth that even the keen eyes behind the Mauser barrels fail to spot Mr. Atkins as he lies prone behind his stone ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... told himself that one of Henry's impulsive, buoyant letters would furnish the only efficacious antidote to Mirabelle. And he needed an antidote, and a powerful one, for during the past two weeks Mirabelle had been surpassing herself. That is, if one can surpass a superlative. ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... do all the sights they see under the lead of a paid exhibitor, who goes through his lesson like a sleepy old professor. I missed seeing the slab with the inscription miserrimus. There may be other stones bearing this sad superlative, but there is a story connected with this one, which sounds as ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... was due, perhaps more than to anything else, to the superlative quality of her labour. The Chinese was the perfect type of industry. He had always been that. For sheer ability to work no worker in the world could compare with him. Work was the breath of his nostrils. It was to him what wandering and fighting in far ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... consciousness that he must prey or be preyed on. John Rex was no common swindler; his natural as well as his acquired abilities saved him from vulgar errors. He saw that to successfully swindle mankind, one must not aim at comparative, but superlative, ingenuity. He who is contented with being only cleverer than the majority must infallibly be outwitted at last, and to be once outwitted is—for a swindler—to be ruined. Examining, moreover, into the history of detected crime, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... and shut your eyes! It is a draught of Troy's own vintage that I offer you; racy, fragrant of the soil, from a cask these hundred years sunk, so that it carries a smack, too, of the submerging brine. You know the old recipe for Wine of Cos, that full-bodied, seignorial, superlative, translunary wine. ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... metrical adventure, although one of her most original poems, As I Drank Tea Today, has an irregular rime-scheme. For the most part, she follows both in subject and style the poetic tradition. She has the gift of song—not indeed in the superlative degree—but nevertheless unmistakable; and she has a full mind. She is neither optimist nor pessimist; I should call her a sympathetic observer. The following poem sums up fairly well her ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... wound up with this sublime comparison, Methinks we may proceed upon our narrative, And, as my friend Scott says, 'I sound my warison;' Scott, the superlative of my comparative— Scott, who can paint your Christian knight or Saracen, Serf, lord, man, with such skill as none would share it, if There had not been one Shakspeare and Voltaire, Of one or both of whom he seems ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... cause Doe I perswade! when I would speake, my heart Checks its bold orator, my tongue, and tells it Tis traitorous to its Mr.—Noble Sir, [kneele I doe conceit you infinitly good, So pittiful that mercy is in you Even naturally superlative, (forgive me, If I offend) you doe in this transgresse Humanity, to let a lady love you Without requitall. But I must professe To heaven and you, that here Ile fix to earth, Weepe till I am a statue, but Ile gaine Your pitie for ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... ranks with those of Brahms as being among the great works in its class. Some of its lovers, in fact, would risk an unqualified superlative and call it the greatest. It certainly is remarkable for its inspired themes, its bold harmonies, its free and yet organic structure and for that sublime fervor which was the basis of Franck's genius. It is, in two respects, at least, a highly original work: in the unusual moods of the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... the prose story Job is pictured as a man of superlative piety and prosperity. According to the popular standards of the earlier day he lived a blameless life. His afflictions came simply as a means of demonstrating the unselfish character of his piety. In rapid succession he is ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... "mayhap your lordship has seen it." "My taste is driving, my lord, mayhap your lordship has seen me handle the ribbons." "My horses are all bloods, mayhap your lordship has noticed my team." "I pride myself on my seat in the saddle, mayhap your lordship has seen me ride." "If I am superlative in anything, 'its in my wines." "So please your ladyship, 'tis dress I most excel in ... 'tis walking I pride myself in." No matter what is mentioned, 'tis the one thing he did or had better than any one else. This conceited fool was duped into believing a parcel ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... In the case now under analysis the quality seems to resolve itself into pure self-confidence. Miss Corelli's method of capturing the public mind is not a trick which anybody else might copy. It is the result of a real, though perilous, gift of nature—a gift which she possesses in something of a superlative degree. Nobody could pretend to such a gift and succeed by virtue of the pretence. Miss Corelli is, at least, quite serious in the belief that she is a woman of genius. She is only very faintly touched with doubt when she thinks that the people who are laughing at her are ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... ancient age, and left standing but the palaces built upon the rock of the Soul. The Soul made the Upanishads, as it mide Paradise Lost; it made the former in the Golden Age, and the latter in this Age of Iron; the former through men gifted with superlative vision; the latter through a blind old bard. Therein lies the difference: all our bards, our very greatest, have been blind,—Dante and Shakespeare, no less than Milton. Full-flowing Time washed away the impermanencies of that ancient age, and left standing but the rock-built ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... an inventor of the highest order, the Dance of Death also discloses an interpreter in wood of signal, and even superlative, ability. The designs are cut—to use the word which implies the employment of the knife as opposed to that of the graver—in a manner which has never yet been excelled. In this matter there could be no better judge than Mr. W. J. Linton; and ...
— The Dance of Death • Hans Holbein
... in the incarnation. He said that while love was the main principle in religion as a way of life, the most important contribution to humanity made by religion was hope. Hope in the destiny of man, in the superlative value of the individual, in the Personality of our ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... Bristol, took up his habitation near the hot well, where he stayed during the remaining part of the season. As for the miserable Celinda, she became more and more addicted to the vices in which she had been initiated by his superlative perfidy and craft, until she was quite abandoned by decency and caution. Her father's heart was torn with anguish, while his wife rejoiced in her fall; at length her ideas were quite debased by her infirmity; she grew every day more and more sensual and degenerate, and contracted ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... of undoubted originality, "that all words called substantives are but names in the fourth degree of comparison; that is to say, in a degree above the one commonly called the superlative." We durst not doubt that Mr Kavanagh is here right; but, for persons of slow perception like ourselves, we should have liked to see a little more fully explained what are the first, second, and third degrees of comparison of those names, of which hat, stick, thing, hand, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... dates, Peaches and plums, and clusters fresh from vines, And all imaginable sweets, and cakes, And here are drinking-cups, and long-necked flasks In wicker mail, and bottles broached from casks, In cellars delved deep, and winter cold, Select, superlative, and centuries old. What more can I desire? what book can be As rich as Idleness and Luxury? What lore can fill my heart with joy divine, Like luscious fruitage, and enchanted wine? Brimming with Helicon ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... wind. The poor old horse, utterly exhausted by this last effort, slipped and fell, and without making any attempt to rise lay panting on the ground. Our unhappy travellers found themselves in a sad predicament indeed—wet, cold, tired and hungry, all in the superlative degree—blinded by the driving snow, and lost, without any means of getting on save their own powers of locomotion, in the midst of a great desert—for the white covering which now lay upon everything had obliterated almost all traces ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... human beings on board, and the smoke tranquilly mounting up into the sea-air from the cook's funnel as if it were a chimney in a city; and every thing looking so cool, and calm, and of-course, in the midst of what to me, at least, seemed a superlative marvel. ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... Tammany was a blot on the social system of the city. But I would not have it so. I would call it a part of the social system, just as much a part of the social system, and just as expressive of the national character, as the fine schools, the fine hospitals, the superlative business organizations, or Mr. George M. Cohan's Theater. A civilization is indivisibly responsible for itself. It may not, on the Day of Judgment, or any other day, lessen its collective responsibility by baptizing certain portions of its organism as ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... perfection: its rendition of the grand operas and its weekly concerts in the Odeon cannot easily be surpassed. The singers are not equal to the orchestra, for Berlin and Vienna offer greater inducements; but there are people here who regard this orchestra as superlative. They say that the best orchestras in the world are in Germany; that the best in Germany is in Munich; and, therefore, you can see the inevitable deduction. We have another parallel syllogism. The greatest pianist in the world is Liszt; ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... married Felons on the left," and so on till every sort and condition and geographical situation had been thus distinguished. But the toasts proper aroused displays of the most affectionate loving-kindness. Each reference to a Felon was greeted with warm cheers, and each reference touched the superlative of laudation. Every stroke of humour was noisily approved, and every exhibition of tender feeling effusively endorsed. And all the estates of the realm, and all the institutions of the realm and of the town, and all the services of war and peace, and all the official ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... rumpled and lame, and not in the least like Miss Anita Adair. She almost wished she were at home, gazing from her bed to the washstand and hearing her mother puttering about in the kitchen making breakfast; to Kedzie's young heart it was the superlative human luxury to know you ought to get up ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... xliii); the relative construction with when, as, which when (I, xvii), that when (VII, xi); the comparative of the adjective in the sense of "too," as, weaker (I, xlv), harder (II, xxxvi); the participial construction after till, as, till further tryall made (I, xii); the superlative of location, as, middest (IV, xv); and the old gerundive, as, wandering wood (I, xiii). Most of the gallicisms found are anglicized loan words from the French romans d'aventure, such as, disseized, ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... temperate climate can form an idea of the beauty of the animal in its native desert. Born in the scorching sun, nursed on the burning sand of the treeless and shadowless wilderness, the gazelle is among the antelope tribe as the Arab horse is among its brethren, the high-bred and superlative beauty of the race. The skin is as sleek as satin, of a colour difficult to describe, as it varies between the lightest mauve and yellowish brown; the belly is snow-white; the legs, from the knee downwards, are also ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... my left wrist; but the right one has no brotherly feeling for it, and would not be put off so. You ask how you have deserved such attentions? Why, by deserving them; by every kind of merit, -and by that superlative one to me, your submitting to throw away so much time on a forlorn antique—you two, who, without specifying particulars, (and you must at least be conscious that you are not two frights,) might expect any fortune ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... piece, would undoubtedly suppose that he abounded in filthy images, and excelled in describing the lower scenes of life." Let all such blockheads suppose what they choose. Pope—says Roscoe—"was well aware as any one of the superlative beauties and merits of Spenser, whose works he assiduously studied, both in his early and riper years; but it was not his intention in these few lines to give a serious imitation of him. All that he attempted was to show how exactly he could apply the language and manner ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... the erstwhile prima donna. "I might have known that when one is unlucky one may become still more unlucky. The superlative of bad luck has been my portion. But I did so wish to win. I wanted to bring back enough gold to send you all ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... made such a mistake (I mean of over-seriousness to indefinite compliments), no, never in my life before—indeed my sisters have often jested with me (in matters of which they were cognizant) on my supernatural indifference to the superlative degree in general, as if it meant nothing in grammar. I usually know well that 'boots' may be called for in this world of ours, just as you called for yours; and that to bring 'Bootes,' were the vilest of ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... in clusters, on what is barefacedly called a bed, but which is nothing more nor less than a beggarman's shakedown, where the smell, the heat, the filth, and above all, the vermin, are intolerable to the very farthest stretch of the superlative degree. As soon as their eyes begin to close here, they are roused by the bell-man, and summoned at the hour of twelve—first washing themselves as aforesaid, in the lake, and then adjourning to the ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... before the middle of the century, the records tell us that the main body of the church was entirely completed. The right tower was uncompleted at this time, but was finished by Cardinal Philastre in 1430, up to which time intermittent labour had evolved a superlative combination of constructive and decorative excellencies. The extreme lightness of the west front is brought more and more to impress itself upon one by reason of the consistent disposition of the excellency and delicacy of ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... 1680: the Dominican transcriber of the record in 1906 has added a very illuminating note, revealing the immutability of the system and showing that the rulers possessed in a superlative degree the Bourbonesque trait of learning nothing and forgetting nothing: "Even when I was a missionary to the heathens from 1882 to 1892, I had occasion to observe the said policy, to inform the chief of the fortress of the measures that he ought to take, and to make a false ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the next months of Cicely's life should be all happiness. And money won't buy the kind she needs: one can't pick out the right companion for such a child as one can match a ribbon. What she wants is spontaneous affection, not the most superlative manufactured article. She wants the sort of love ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... prophets and righteous men. It was so in the past, and in modified forms it is so today. The plain fact is that humanity has in it a depth of incapacity to behold, and of angry indisposition to admire, lofty and noble lives. The power of the darkness to blind men is set forth once in the superlative degree that we may all beware of it in the lower instances, by that fact, the most tragical in the history of the world, 'the Light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness apprehendeth ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... This club, which was in Piccadilly, at the corner of Bolton Street, was originally founded, in 1807, by Lord Headfort, John Madocks, and other young men, for musical gatherings. But glees and snatches soon gave way to superlative dinners and gambling at macao. Byron, Moore, and William Spencer belonged to Watier's—the only men of letters admitted within its precincts. From 1814 to 1816 Brummell lost heavily; he could obtain no further supplies, and was completely ruined. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... sovereign people, not by the sovereign itself. All this was absolutely opposed to the concentration of all powers, which was the prevailing purpose since the alarm of invasion and treason, and was easily confounded with the theory of provincial rights and divided authority, which was dreaded as the superlative danger of the time. That which, under the title of Federalism, was laid to their charge, must be counted to their credit; for it meant that, in a limited sense, they were constitutional, and that there were degrees of ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... call it my mad mood. Not only did I enjoy the supper, which was most agreeable, but far more the conversation. Among the topics discussed, what gave me most delight was to hear your name mentioned by the Captain; nor was this all, for he still added to my pleasure, nay, to a superlative degree, by saying that, in the art of painting he held you to be sole and without peer in the whole world, and that so you were esteemed at Rome. I could not have been better pleased. You see that my judgment is confirmed; ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... Orlando and his companions. The principal characters are Orlando, Charlemagne, Renaud, Agramant, Ferragus, Angelica, Bradamante, Marphisa. The tone is extremely varied and the author is in turns joyous, satirical, pathetic, melancholy, and even tragical. Ariosto is the superlative poet of fantastic imagination combined with a foundation of good sense, reason, and benevolence. Goethe has said of him very aptly: "From a cloud of gold wisdom sometimes thunders sublime sentences, whilst to a harmonious lute, folly seems to riot in savage digressions yet all the while maintains ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... care what I eat," cried Amelia. "The care of the body is entirely beneath those who have learned to prize the superlative value of ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... ethereal beings, passion and devotion wrapped in forms of ethereal mould, and surrounded by an impalpable effulgence which distinguished them from all others of the sex throughout the world. Whatever was of the South was superlative. To be Southern-born was to be prima facie better than other men. So the self-love of every man was enlisted in this sentiment. To praise the South was to praise himself; to boast of its valor was to ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... conversion—being turned around. Ask Peter what it is and, as he looks back upon his old benighted condition, he cries that it is like coming out of the darkness into a marvelous light. Ask Paul what it is and, with his love of superlative figures, he cries that it is like being dead and being raised again with a great resurrection. Ask John what it is and, with his mystical spirit, he says that it is being born again. See the variety that comes from vitality—no stiff methods, no stiff routine of experience, but throbbing ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... joy in heart they parted. Densuke betook himself to the yashiki of Matsudaira Aki no Kami at Kasumigaseki. No difficulties were encountered. Taro[u]bei was not so superlative as a cook that the substitute could not be better than the original. At this place Densuke acted the part of the komatsukibatta. This is a narrow brown weevil, some three parts of an inch in length, and which stands on its head making the repeated ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... the fixed stars is only expressible by a row of figures which stretches across a page; suppose it stretched across two or across a dozen pages, should we be any the wiser, or have, in the least degree, a clearer notion of the superlative distances? We civilly say, "Dear me!" when the astronomer looks to us for the appropriate stare, but we only say it with the mouth; internally our remark is, "You might as well have multiplied by a few more millions ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... I'm bound to say, I regard your claim to the possession of good taste as completely established.... 'Ware the horse, there! Look out! look out!" His eyes had followed the tall figure of the Mother-Superior, moving with the superlative grace and ease that comes of perfect physical proportion, carrying the black nun's robes, wearing the flowing veil of the nun with the dignity of an ideal queen. And the next instant, his charger, held with some others by a mounted ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... new solution. The persistence of the ideal of Perfected Man; Has it any basis in history? The superlative faculty of spiritual sight as depicted by artists, painters and sculptors. Symbols of consciousness. The way in which the higher consciousness expresses itself. Certain peculiar traits which distinguish those destined ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... a distinct surprise to the first explorers of America that the natives used the bow and arrow so effectively. In fact, the sword and the horse, combined with the white man's superlative self-assurance, won the contest over the aborigines more than the primitive blunderbuss of the times. The bow and arrow was still more ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... cut flower. For all of these reasons the Aster would be a standard flower. Their great popularity is based, however, on two qualifications not mentioned above, and both of which they possess in a superlative degree. These qualities are great beauty of flower and a wonderful diversity and perfection ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... of the divine and superlative excellency of the things of religion; a real sense of the excellency of God and Jesus Christ, and of the work of redemption, and the ways and works of God revealed in the gospel. There is a divine and superlative glory in these ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... Spirit them inspires. For conscience is an inward thing, and none Can govern that aright but God alone. Nor can a well-informed conscience lower Her sails to any temporary power, Or bow to men's decrees; for that would be Treason in a superlative degree; For God alone can laws to conscience give, And that's a badge of His prerogative. This is the controversy of this day Between the holy God and sinful clay. God hath throughout the earth proclaim'd that He Will over conscience hold the sovereignty, That He the ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... of geography; the Englishman expresses rapture by the phrase "not half-bad" where the foreigner piles superlative on superlative of gush. It is our quality and our defect that we have a strange shyness, which prevents the exhibition of emotion for fear of ridicule. On our stage, as in our real life, the beloved son comes home from a long voyage, and, meeting his father, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... and present the same objects; good horses, cruel riders, knowing men, dupes, jockeys, gamblers, and a large assemblage of mixed company. But this is a gayer scene than most others; and every epithet, appropriate to a course, diminutive or otherwise, must be in the superlative degree when applied to Ascot. This is the general, and often the only impression that most men ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... is a word that couldn't be applied to that man. Worse is comparative. Positive he certainly was, superlative is mild, ...
— The Courting Of Lady Jane • Josephine Daskam
... nearer to being angry with Tanno than I had ever been in our lives. I comprehended why he, with all his superlative equipment of tact and intuition, had blundered; he could not but assume that circumstances were as they should have been rather than as they were; yet the blunder was, in a sense, unforgivable, and had created a social situation than which nothing could ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... Delessert herbarium. The unjustifiable name Unona odoratissima, which incorrectly enough has passed into many writings, originated with Blanco,[2] who in his description of the powerful fragrance of the flowers, which in a closed sleeping room produces headache, was induced to use the superlative "odoratissima." Baillon[3] designated as Canangium the section of the genus Uvaria, from which he would ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... six times, as I had done above; and these produced a sentence—that I could not but see his confusion. This sentence produced two or three more. I believe my aunt had been his tutoress; for it was his awe, his reverence for so superlative a Lady [I assure you!] And he hoped—he hoped—three times he hoped, before he told me what—at last it came out, that I was too generous (generosity, he said, was my character) to despise him for such—for such—for ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... of the navy throughout the war one month after the armistice had been signed, Secretary Daniels paid the highest tribute to the widely recognized efficiency of Vice-Admiral Sims; he had also superlative praise for Rear-Admiral Rodman, who commanded our battleships attached to the Grand Fleet; for Vice-Admiral Wilson, commanding our forces in French waters; for Rear-Admiral Niblack, our Mediterranean commander, Rear-Admiral Dunn in the Azores, and Rear-Admiral ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... he took the world quietly, and his doing so undoubtedly had important bearings on his style. We give another anecdote, which illustrates this peculiarity of his mind as well as the superlative folly of duelling. Not long after his marriage, with all his indifference to his wife, he was persuaded into a fit of singular jealousy. He was intimate with an ex-captain of dragoons, by name Poignant, who had retired to Chateau-Thierry; a frank, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... Power is necessary against the Turks. But in Germany, what need of Austria being so superlative? Why should not, say, Three Electors united be able to oppose her?... Monsieur, I find it is your notion in England, as well as theirs in France, to bring other Sovereigns under your tutorage, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... an appeal which would be understood by Western statesmen as well as by Eastern politicians. Yuan Shih-kai, still pretending to stand aside, had kept his attention concentrated on this very essential matter; for, as we have repeatedly pointed out, he never failed to understand the superlative value of foreign support in all his enterprises,—that support being given an exaggerated value by the public thanks to China's reliance on foreign money. Accordingly, as if still unconvinced, he now very naively requested the opinion of his chief legal adviser, Dr. Goodnow, ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... tales of the dupes yet more heavily befooled and bled, caught and bound these men in fellowship. They had both met with some queer ones in their travels, and they compared notes: but they always came back to this superlative old fraud. After long wise and disconnected talk about the set of the wind, or the rates of pay on various lines, or stowage, or freights, or rigs, or currents, or the characters of various skippers and mates, or the liveliness or sulkiness or homeliness or fickleness of this or ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... unusually well, and even those who had dubbed her "The Beautiful Yankee" added another superlative adjective. A spot of bright red burned in either cheek and she held her head very high. "How haughty she is!" Prescott heard some one say. Her height, her figure, her look lent colour to ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... in the superlative degree, the burly ruffian who seated himself by his side looked the character much better. He was not a man to beat about the bush. As he expressed it, he wanted to come ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... driven to the necessity of helping in this, too, by the fact that the present warden would furnish the men with only the same outfit as in summer, the under-clothes they might happen to have on at the time, added. And, in making out this summer suit, he would construe the letter of the law in the superlative degree, which says, "A suit of cheap clothing,"—he obtaining the cheapest, the most miserably poor. To illustrate, a man left prison in one of those suits, and, before walking a mile, was obliged to call ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... until he was across the river that he passed the outermost cattle-stations, which had sprung rapidly into existence since his last visit to the neighbourhood. The Narran was then followed up until the Balonne was reached. This river, in his superlative style, Mitchell pronounced to be the finest in Australia, with the exception of the Murray. He then struck and followed the Culgoa upwards until it divided into two branches; he skirted the main one, which retained the name of the Balonne. On the 12th of April he came to the natural ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... By the power of signs and miracles; by the eloquence, and wisdom, of speech and persuasion; and by the sword. For martyrdoms, I reckon them amongst miracles; because they seem to exceed the strength of human nature: and I may do the like, of superlative and admirable holiness of life. Surely there is no better way, to stop the rising of new sects and schisms, than to reform abuses; to compound the smaller differences; to proceed mildly, and not with sanguinary ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... as he seems, he would shudder to wrong A dog with the loss of a hair; And the angels of shine and superlative song See his heart and ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... audacious feat of rendering two powerful batteries innocuous rejoined their shipmates; everything was accepted as a matter of course. It was fully realised by all hands that the deed was one, the successful accomplishment of which required the display of nerve and courage of superlative character, but it was understood that the entire expedition, from start to finish, from its departure from Topsham to its return thither, demanded the constant exhibition of these same qualities—and ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Pantin's manner was urbane but, observing him closely, Mrs. Toomey noted that his eyes suddenly presented the curious illusion of two slate-gray pools covered with skim ice. It was not an encouraging sign and her heart sank in spite of the superlative suavity of the tone in which ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... As has been seen, De Quincey is fond of superlative statements. A writer may or may not be true in his claims; the habitual assumption, however, predisposes his reader to ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... indeed that I love a woman who is capable of loving as you do. "As you do" is a stronger expression than any superlative. How can you praise my words, when I, without wishing to, hit upon some that hurt you? I should like to say, I write too well to be able to describe to you my inward state of mind. Oh, dearest! Believe me, there is no question in you that has not its answer ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... poem did not make me, both lately, and when I read it in MS. No alderman ever longed after a haunch of buck venison more than I for a spiritual taste of that "White Doe" you promise. I am sure it is superlative, or will be when dressed, i. e., printed. All things read raw to me in MS.; to compare magna parvis, I cannot endure my own writings in that state. The only one which I think would not very much win upon me in print is "Peter Bell;" but ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... be mistaken!" said Victorine. "I know that she will not be invited. The marchioness hates her; Mrs. Gilmer is the only rival whom Madame de Fleury takes the trouble to detest; and it makes me indignant to see a lady of her superlative fascinations annoyed by this little upstart American. One must admit that Mrs. Gilmer is very pretty; her figure scarcely needs help, and she is so vivacious, and has so much aplomb, so much dash, that the ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... in Spita-ces, is followed by a guttural ending, which is either a diminutive corresponding to the modern Persian -efc, or perhaps a suffixed article. In Spit-amas, the suffix -mas is the common form of the superlative, and may be compared with the Latin -mus in optimus, intimus, supremus, and the like. Ehambacas contains the root rafno, "joy, pleasure," which we find in Pati-ramphies, followed by the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... belega. Superficial suprajxa. Superficies suprajxo. Superfluity superfluo. Superfluous superflua. Superhuman superhoma. Superintend observi, zorgi pri. Superior supera. Superior, a superulo. Superiority supereco. Superlative (gram.) superlativo. Supernatural supernatura. Supernumerary ekstrulo. Superscription surskribo. Supersede anstatauxi. Superstition supersticxo. Superstitious supersticxa. Supervise observi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... spiritual life, is the ground of Christian virtue just as it is of every natural excellence. From this it follows that the distinction sometimes made between natural goodness and Christian goodness is unsound. A virtue is not a superlative act of merit, implying an excess of excellence beyond the requirements of duty. From the Christian standpoint there are no works of supererogation, and there is no room in the Christian life for excess or margin. As every duty is a bounden ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... symbols. The commonest form of abbreviation is the substitution for a word of its initial letter; but, with a view to prevent ambiguity, one or more of the other letters are frequently added. Letters are often doubled to indicate a plural or a superlative. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... adventures are as nothing compared to the daring of the hourly existence of the heroic souls whose lives are cast upon the banks of Newfoundland. The fishermen may seem wild and reckless, rough and illiterate; but supreme danger and superlative sacrifice breed noble qualities, and beneath the rough exterior of the fisherman you will never fail to find a MAN, and no cheap imitation of the genuine article. None but a man can face for a second time the frown of the North Atlantic, ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... acquaintance with the heroic sorrows of the world. There is no page of history, however dark, there is no beautiful old tale, however tragic, which does not impart some strength and some distinction to the awakening mind. It is possible to overrate the superlative merits of insipidity as a mental and moral force in the development ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... nothing, they arrest a quiet decent-minded man like myself with the same spasmodic disgust as a pun in literature—the subject is a transparent excuse; they are mere indecent and unedifying exhibitions of himself. He thinks it is something superlative to do everything in a startling way. He cannot even sign his name without being offensive. He lacks altogether the fundamental quality of a gentleman, the magnanimity to be ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... The cold and heartless manner in which these men treat the subject, and the stoical apathy with which they contemplate the result of their hard metaphysics, are extremely remote from our usual conceptions of piety and humanity. Well might that superlative woman, Mrs. Susanna Wesley, say, "The doctrine of predestination, as maintained by rigid Calvinists, is very shocking, and ought utterly to be abhorred." The dark spirit of inflexible wrath which the American Calvinists have imputed to the Deity, ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... Benchers of the Temples, wishing to obtain for their church an organ of superlative excellence, invited Father Smith and Renatus Harris to compete for the honor of supplying the instrument. The masters of the benchers pledged themselves that "if each of these excellent artists would set up an organ in one of the halls belonging to either of the societies, they would have ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... while it bids God speed to him who robs his neighbor of himself? Slavery is the highest possible violation of the eighth commandment. To take from a man his earnings, is theft. But to take the earner, is compound, superlative, perpetual theft. It is to be a thief by profession. It is a trade, a life of robbery, that vaults through all the gradations of the climax at a leap—the dread, terrific, giant robbery, that towers among other robberies, a solitary ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... have just observed, so far as verb forms were concerned, but in the comparison of adjectives and in the use of the cases it steadily made headway, and ultimately triumphed over the synthetical principle. The method adopted by literary Latin of indicating the comparative and the superlative degrees of an adjective, by adding the endings -ior and -issimus respectively, succumbed in the end to the practice of prefixing plus or magis and maxime to the positive form. To take another illustration of the same characteristic ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... my maisteris dere, Gowere and Chaucere, that on steppis satt Of rhetorick, quhill thai war lyvand here, Superlative as poets laureate, In moralitee and eloquence ornate, I recommend my buik in lynis seven, And eke their saulis ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various
... remembered how great are the interests entrusted to the care of this board, and of these secretaries and of that chief clerk, it must be admitted that nothing short of superlative excellence ought to suffice the nation. All material intercourse between man and man must be regulated, either justly or unjustly, by weights and measures; and as we of all people depend most on such ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... * * "I have been picture-gazing this morning at the famous Domenichino and Guido, both of which are superlative. I afterwards went to the beautiful cemetery of Bologna, beyond the walls, and found, besides the superb burial ground, an original of a Custode, who reminded one of the grave-digger in Hamlet. He has a collection of capuchins' ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... look me right in the face. Madame de Montinisant has assured me that you were very nice, very sweet, very submissive, very modest, in fact ail the good qualities in the superlative, and that you were worthy of entering into the sisterhood of the Holy Virgin, in spite of your youth; is that ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... Where a very great deal of power is needed for the making of an article or material of comparatively small weight and bulk proportioned to its value—such for instance as calcium carbide or aluminium—the immediate vicinity of the source of natural power will offer superlative inducements. But an immense number of things lie between the domains of these two classes, and for the economical manufacture of these it is imperative that both cheap power and low wharfage ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... Mexico, his attempt to engraft democratic principles there, and the anarchy that came of it were matters of history. But the President of the nation to whose unbounded generosity and altruism the world owes a debt of gratitude that can only be acknowledged, not repaid, deservedly enjoyed a superlative measure of respect from his foreign colleagues, and the author of the project which was to link all nations together by ties of moral kinship was literally idolized by the masses. Never has it fallen to my lot to see any mortal so enthusiastically, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... structure in the world; and now that the new Tower of Babel which has sprung up in Paris has killed that pretention, I think we shall feel and speak more modestly about our stone hyperbole, our materialization of the American love of the superlative. We have the higher civilization among us, and we must try to keep down the forth-putting instincts of the lower. We do not want to see our national monument placarded as "the greatest show on earth,"—perhaps it is well that it is taken ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... years"—I did not know he was so old—"that my own nature is intolerant; he may even corroborate his proof by pointing to my occasional acts of thoughtless disregard for another's opinion; yet all this array does not overwhelm me, for I know [Italics mine] that I am not intolerant." This superlative confidence in his own goodness makes me think of the congressman of whom it was said, "He is the most distinguished man in Washington. I know he is, for ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... our zigzag through Belgium, following most of the time dirt roads which, though not of superlative excellence, were an improvement on stone blocks. It took us practically all day to reach Antwerp, a hundred and ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... morality, the dull, meaningless round of useless lessons, the habit of herding in unhealthy rooms with unhealthy companions, all tend to develop a creature which can be regarded only as one of Nature's failures, if I may parody a phrase of the superlative Beau Brummel's. ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... passion of the man, the fresh blood of the man, Rick—and Ada, and little Cobweb too, for you are all interested in a visitor—that I speak of," he pursued. "His language is as sounding as his voice. He is always in extremes, perpetually in the superlative degree. In his condemnation he is all ferocity. You might suppose him to be an ogre from what he says, and I believe he has the reputation of one with some people. There! I tell you no more of him beforehand. You must not be surprised to see him ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... loud and startling—bells ringing, boys shouting, wheels rattling, and beyond these immediate notes a steady hum like the murmur of an orchestra heard through closed doors. All this was wonderful enough but it was nothing at all to the superlative fascination of that multitude of books. Peter found a hard little chair in a dark corner and sat down upon it. Here he was in the very heart of his kingdom! He could never read all the books in this place if ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... called his Philosophical Works. A worthy friend of mine in London was lately consulted by a lady of quality, of most distinguished merit, what was the best History of England for her son to read. My friend recommended Hume's. But, upon recollecting that its usher was a superlative panegyrick on one, who endeavoured to sap the credit of our holy religion, he revoked his recommendation. I am really sorry for this ostentatious alliance; because I admire The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and value the greatest part of An Inquiry into the Nature ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... above) for the comparative, and apuedi for the diminutive. Ubura, from the verb uburau to be before in time, and adiki, from adikin to be after in time, are also used for the same purpose. The superlative has to be expressed by a circumlocution; as tumaqua aditu ipirrun turreha, what is great beyond all else; bokkia uessa dauria, thou art better than I, where the last word is a compound of dai uwuria of, from, than. The comparative degree of the adjectives ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... everything, and the class or subject nothing. The highest subjects, equally well executed (which, however, rarely happens), are the best. But the power of execution, the manner of seeing nature, is one thing, and may be so superlative (if you are only able to judge of it) as to countervail every disadvantage of subject. Raphael's storks in the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, exulting in the event, are finer than the head of Christ would have been in almost any other hands. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... certainly has received no other, than such as rain, and wind, and heat, and cold, have made upon it; and those are rather marks of dignity, than deformity. What reason else, then, can be assigned for its preservation to this day; but that the savage and the saint have been equally awed by its superlative beauty. ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... the cardinal number for the ordinal; and that what he renders one should be first, or chief. We find that it was a sacred title; and, when single, it was conferred upon a Babylonish Deity: but, when repeated, it must denote greater excellence: for the Amonians generally formed their superlative by doubling the positive: thus Rab was great; Rabrab signified very great. It is, indeed, plain from the account, that it must have been a superlative; for he says it was designed to represent what was esteemed summum maximumque, the most eminent and great. ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... to come. At the end of the year Leonetta had returned; and, if it is possible to imagine the superlative surpassed, certainly Leonetta's appearance on her return, her increased vivacity, her perfect command of French, her new tricks with her hair and clothes, utterly eclipsed the Leonetta who had left her Kensington home a ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... meaning perpetually corrected and enriched by a more thorough appreciation of dependence in things, and a finer sensibility to both physical and spiritual fact—and this ridiculous ascription of superlative power to minds which have no effective awe-inspiring vision of the human lot, no response of understanding to the connection between duty and the material processes by which the world is kept habitable for cultivated man, will be ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... complices, their cheerful leader said: 'Now is the time and place (sweet friends) and we the persons be That must give England breath, or else unbreathe for her must we. No tyranny is fabled, and no tyrant was in deed Worse than our foe, whose works will act my words, if well he speed: For ill to ills superlative are easily enticed, But entertains amendment as the Gergesites did Christ. Be valiant then, he biddeth so that would not be outbid, For courage yet shall honour him though base, that better did. I am right heir ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Paganism and Christianity of Camoens, and merely shows how strongly the most rationalistic of epic poets felt the value of some imaginary relaxation in the limits of human existence. Is it, then, only as such a relaxation that supernatural machinery is valuable? Or only as a superlative kind of ornament? It is surely more than that. In spite of the fact that we are not seriously asked to believe in it, it does beautifully and strikingly crystallize the poet's determination to show us things that go past the reach of common knowledge. But by putting it, ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... Hurricane Mountain, his place "Glenmore" and its "Summer School of the Culture Sciences." Although the primeval forest has departed from its immediate vicinity, the region is still sylvan, the air is sweet and strong and almost alpine in quality, and the mountain panorama spread before one is superlative. Davidson showed a business faculty which I should hardly have expected from him, in organizing his settlement. He built a number of cottages pretty in design and of the simplest construction, and disposed them well for effect. He turned a couple of farm buildings which were on the grounds into ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... rotating, gyrating, circumambulating astronomer, an animated teetotum lost in the sky. I saw no reason to hope that I should not go on thus forever, revolving around the sun until my bones, whitening among the stars, might be revealed to the superlative powers of some future telescope, and become a subject of absorbing interest, the topic of many a learned paper for the astronomers of a future age. Afterward I was comforted by the reflection that in airless space, although I might die and my body become ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... beauty of the river, from the happy frame of body and mind we were in, owing to the excellent dinner we had just partaken of at that place, consisting of roast beef, roast turkey, apple tart, cranberry preserve, and a most superlative Charlotte Russe—pretty good fare for an hotel in a mountain pass! No wine or stimulants of any kind were allowed, or what the consequence might have been on papa's restless state of mind it would be difficult to say; as it was, I counted that he rose from his seat to look at the view from ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... virtue. Receive the honour of the Clarissimatus, as a testimony to the excellence of your past life and a pledge of your future prosperity. Observe, you are not called Clarus, but Clarissimus. Everything that is most excellent may be believed of him who is saluted by such a splendid superlative.' ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... Donatello has carved some three dozen children, we have a series of instantaneous photographs. Nobody else had enough knowledge or courage to make rigid bars of children's legs: here they swing on pivots from the hip-joint. It is the true picture of life, rendered with superlative skill and bravura. But Donatello's children serve a purpose, if only that of decoration. At Padua they form a little orchestra to accompany the duets. The singing angels there are among the most charming of the company; and whether intentionally or not, they give the impression of having ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... exclaimed, how tenderly does she beam her lovely eye upon me! How often have I drank delicious extacy from the delicacy of those unrivalled charms! How often have they taught me to anticipate superlative and uninterrupted bliss! Mistaken and delusive hope! [returning the miniature to his bosom.] Vain and presumptuous assurance. Then [pointing to the grave] there behold how my dearest wishes, my fondest expectations ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... turned upon some projected reforms in cavalry drill and movements, which ultimately turned out to be impracticable and were not carried into effect. William, in his impulsive, impetuous, and somewhat arrogant way, declaimed in a loud tone of voice on their superlative merits, declared himself in their favor, and added that he would do his utmost to see them carried through, as he regarded them as indispensable to raise the standard and tone of ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... With superlative courage she turned and surrendered both her own. She wanted to prove herself, at all points, simply his friend; and he gave her no cause to repent of her courage, or to suspect the strong restraint he put upon himself during that brief contact, which, at a moment so charged ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
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