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Essay   Listen
noun
Essay  n.  (pl. essays)  
1.
An effort made, or exertion of body or mind, for the performance of anything; a trial; attempt; as, to make an essay to benefit a friend. "The essay at organization."
2.
(Lit.) A composition treating of any particular subject; usually shorter and less methodical than a formal, finished treatise; as, an essay on the life and writings of Homer; an essay on fossils, or on commerce.
3.
An assay. See Assay, n. (Obs.)
Synonyms: Attempt; trial; endeavor; effort; tract; treatise; dissertation; disquisition.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Essay" Quotes from Famous Books



... As to that essay of mine published in the first number of Ainsworth's Magazine, August 1842, long before the Patent Aerial Company started their projects, and very much noticed at the time,—Mr. Claude Hamilton ingrafted it in his work on Flying; the Duke of Argyll in a note before me commends ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... Leptosema Chambersii, F.M. Essay on the Plants of the Burdekin Expedition page 8. Near Davenport Range, and between the ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart

... tributes of Addison, Tennyson, and others, the throbbing paraphrases and ecstatic interpretations of Swinburne, are too well known to call for special comment in this brief note; but the concise summing up of her genius by Mr. Watts-Dunton in his remarkable essay on poetry is so convincing and illuminating that it seems to demand quotation here: "Never before these songs were sung, and never since did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers; and, from ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman

... was followed by a decided reaction against the proposal for the abolition of slavery. Professor Thomas R. Dew, of William and Mary College, crystallized the pro-slavery sentiment in a masterful essay entitled: A Review of the Debates in the Virginia Legislature of 1831-32. This essay dealt with the theoretical and practical aspects of slavery in all countries and especially with the rise and development of Negro slavery in America. It pointed out the difficulties ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various

... Prize at Cambridge, the subject being Christian Prayer considered in relation to the belief that the Almighty governs the world by general laws. This was published in 1874, with an appendix on The Physical Efficacy of Prayer. In this essay, written when he was twenty-five years old, Romanes shows the characteristic qualities of his mind and style already developed. The sympathy with the scientific point of view is there, as might be expected perhaps in a Cambridge ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes

... include reprints from the American Edition, of Mrs Cowden Clarke's valuable Introductory Essay, Glossary, &c., carefully revised and amplified. The Four-volume Edition will be printed from a new fount of Longprimer Ancient type, on fine toned paper, and will form four compact and handsome volumes. The One-volume edition will be printed from a new fount of Brevier Ancient type, on toned paper, ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere

... to see Mr. Johnston rowed away from the ship. Roger, accompanying him, returned late in the evening with half a dozen new men and a Mr. Cledd, formerly mate of the brig Essay, which had been wrecked a few weeks before in a typhoon off Hainan. He was a pleasant fellow of about Roger's age, and had a frank manner that we all liked. The new men, all of whom had served under him on the Essay, reported him to be a smart officer, a little severe perhaps, ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes

... the men most in demand described as 'all-round men'? Nor are all-round women without their admirers. Events, we know, move in a circle, as time moves in cycles—though, alas! not on them. The ballet and the bicycle are popular forms of the circle, and it is the charm of the essay to ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne

... was a professed antiquary, and one of the first water; he was master of Gwillim's Heraldry, and Mill's History of the Crusades; knew every plate in the Monasticon; had written an essay on the origin and dignity of the office of overseer, and settled the date on a Queen Anne's farthing. An influential member of the Antiquarian Society, to whose "Beauties of Bagnigge Wells" he had been a liberal subscriber, procured him a seat at the board of that learned body, ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough

... up as the proprietor of a small hotel, where he spent most of his time in the bar dilating to the customers in magnificent sentences that reminded me of the style of a poem called "The Essay on Man" (which I once tried to read and couldn't), about his feats as a warrior among the wild Mazitu and the ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard

... essay has attempted to make, as he himself phrases it, "a modest contribution to the natural history of Weltschmerz." What goes by that name is no doubt somewhat elusive; one can not easily delimit and characterize it with scientific accuracy. Nevertheless the word corresponds ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun

... segment of the universe which is accessible to us. The teachings of the doctrine of evolution as to the origin and destiny of Man have, moreover, a very great speculative and practical value of their own, quite apart from their bearings upon any ultimate questions. The body of this essay is accordingly devoted to setting forth these teachings in what I conceive to be their true light; while their transcendental implications ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske

... London Libraries, first printed in 1708 in The Monthly Miscellany, or Memoirs for the Curious. This little brochure was continued by Oldys, and the complete work published by Mr. James Yeowell in 1862. The Essay on the Invention of Printing, by Mr. John Bagford, in vol. XXV. of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, was, Dibdin says, drawn up by Wanley. The collection of ballads has been edited by the Rev. J.W. Ebsworth for the ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher

... two long parts there are five shorter essays which I have retained with little alteration, and these in one or two instances are consequently out of date, especially in what was said with bitterness in the essay on "Exotic Birds for Britain" anent the feather-wearing fashion and of the London trade in dead birds and the refusal of women at that time to help us in trying to save the beautiful wild bird life of this country and of the world generally from extermination. Happily, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson

... sir. She is a good and good-looking girl. On most important points we are thoroughly agreed. She won a prize essay on Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare's plays. Of course Shakespeare could not have written them—a thoroughly uneducated man, who never could have passed the fourth standard. But look at the plays! There are things in them that, with ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... house of assembly, nor even the privilege of trial by jury. And although it must be confessed that the strange ingredients of which this colony was formed, did not, at the epoch of its foundation, warrant a participation of these important privileges, it will be my endeavour in this essay to prove that the withholding of them up to the present period, has been the sole cause why it has not realized the expectations which its founders were led to ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth

... by Defoe's great contemporaries, Dryden, Swift, and Congreve; it does not seem to have occurred to Defoe that he could learn anything from their practice. He has his reward. "Robinson Crusoe" may continue to hold the child and the kitchen wench; but the "Essay on Dramatic Poesy," "The Battle of the Books," and "Love for Love," are for the men ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe

... box of the captured American packet, was nothing more than a project or draft of a treaty, which possibly the Dutch would never have completed. So far as they knew, he said, it might be merely a "speculative essay," or a "contemplative prospect;" and therefore it was no justifiable or assignable ground for going to war with them. These were arguments, however, for party purposes; opposition conceived that the declaration of war between England and Holland was setting the seal to Lord North's ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... of hands, on the part of a fool, in the bounding gait of a coxcomb, or the involuntary arrest of his footsteps, which marks the man who is deeply moved; in a word, you see upon the stoop certain questions as clearly proposed to you as if a provincial academy had offered a hundred crowns for an essay; but in the exit you behold the solution of these questions clearly and precisely given to you. Our task would be far above the power of human intelligence if it consisted in enumerating the different ways by which men betray ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac

... pedantic syndic of the theological faculty, entered the lists as Lefevre's opponent, and an animated dispute was waged between the friends of the two combatants. Of so great moment was the decision regarded by Poncher, Bishop of Paris, that he induced Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, to write an essay in refutation of the views of Lefevre.[137] But the Sorbonne, not content with this, on the ninth of November, 1521, declared that he was a heretic who should presume to maintain the truth of Lefevre's proposition. Lefevre himself would probably have ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... ago. The Republicans will not struggle to pass it in his absence and think that they have done a smart thing, but in the end Wilson and not Lodge would win by such a trick. The one greatest of vices is smart-aleckism. Sometime I shall write an essay on that subject. The burglar and the confidence operator and the profiteer and the profligate and the defaulting bank cashier are all victims of that disease—smart-aleckism. They will do a trick, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... ridicule of some affected ladies of the period, who pretended, with rather too much ostentation, to embrace the doctrines of Platonic Love. Mrs. Mary Astell, a learned and worthy woman, had embraced this fantastic notion so deeply, that, in an essay upon the female sex, in 1696, she proposed a sort of female college, in which the young might be instructed, and 'ladies nauseating the parade of the world,' might find a happy retirement. The plan was disconcerted by Bishop Burnet, who, understanding ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift

... which the mere artist looks with least interest—while the work, even when completed, will be nothing more than a single pinnacle of the historical edifice whose ground-plan is laid in the preceding essay, "Progression by Antagonism":—a plan, by the author's confession, "too extensive for his own, or any single hand to execute," yet without the understanding of whose main relations it is impossible to receive the intended ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... brief and unhappy meddling with fate, a new existence, one natural to him, among his own people, in the occupations he understood. He had not understood either himself or life in that strange, extravagant essay at living which he had made and ended, as he had thought, and of which nobody knew anything. How could he tell, he asked himself now, how much or how little was known? Was anything ever ended until death had put ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... laughter," said Thackeray, in his essay on the English humorists, "you would scarcely feel more interest about humorous writers than the life of poor Harlequin, who possesses with these the power of making you laugh. But the men regarding whose lives and stories you have curiosity and sympathy appeal to a great number of our other faculties, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... dark thoughts and feelings, dear Henrik, when your future appears fuller of hope than ever before? Your beautiful poetry; your prize essay, which is certain to bring you honour; the prospect of an advantageous post, a sphere of action which will be dear to you—all this, which in a few months will so animate your heart—why has it at this time so ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer

... [1373] This essay is more against the practices of the parasite than gulosity. It is entitled The art of living at the cost of others. Johnson wrote to one of Mrs. Thrale's children:—'Gluttony is, I think, less common among women than among men. Women commonly ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... Essay upon Leonardo, with the lines "we say to our friend" about Her who is "older than the rocks ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... is extravagant. This fact alone will mean the retention of the lecture system, wherever it can possibly be employed with success. (2) It is educationally the better method, for the average student and the average teacher. For the reconstruction of a lecture from notes means an essay in original work, in original thinking; while the recitation lapses all too readily into textbook ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... Professor Schoenborn's essay on Belgian neutrality is the least satisfactory exposition of the three professorial effusions; it is no credit to a man of learning, and is merely the work of an incapable partisan trying to make a bad cause into a good one. Schoenborn commences[145] with the customary German tactics ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith

... this paper on Inchcolm having been sent to his friend Dr. Petrie of Dublin, author of the well-known essay on the "Early Ecclesiastical Architecture and Round Towers of Ireland," it was returned after a time, enriched with many notes and illustrations. In now reprinting the paper these have been added, and are distinguished from the author's notes by having the letter P annexed to them. ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... Introduction, and Appendix II on 'Conflation' and the 'Neutral Text,' have been necessarily contributed by me. I am anxious to invite attention particularly to the latter essay, because it has been composed upon request, and also because—unless it contains some extraordinary mistake—it exhibits to a degree which has amazed me the baselessness ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... are endeavouring to explain to the student who intends to pursue this branch of anthropologic science the best and safest methods of observation open to him, hence they modestly term their little book "an essay on the method of historic sciences." They are bold enough to look forward to a day, as not far distant, when a sensible or honest man will no more dare to write history unscientifically than he would to-day be willing to waste his time and that of others on observing the heavens ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois

... glades for pleasure and repose, no vistas through which to view some towering hill or elevated temple; everything in that crowded space seems of the same value: he speaks with no more awe of "King Lear" than of the last Cobden prize essay; he has swallowed them both with the same ease, and got the facts safe in his pouch; but he has no time to ruminate because he must still be swallowing; nor does he seem to know what even Macbeth, with Banquo's murderers ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... Sir, I admire your style of writing, and your manner of thinking; and I am much obliged to my good friend and correspondent for sending me some of your productions. I inserted them all, and wished there had been more of them—quite original, sir, quite; took with the public, especially the essay about the non-existence of anything. I don't exactly agree with you, though; I have my own peculiar ideas about matter—as you know, of course, from the book I have published. Nevertheless, a very pretty piece of speculative philosophy—no such thing as matter—impossible that there should ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... figure, with placid countenance and solemn gravity of feature, would readily deceive any one as to the true mental organism within. The late parish priest of Alaminos (Batangas)—a Franciscan friar, who spent half his life in the Colony—left a brief manuscript essay on the native character. I have read it. In his opinion, the native is an incomprehensible phenomenon, the mainspring of whose line of thought and the guiding motive of whose actions have never yet been, and perhaps never will ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... compromise. I believed what everybody told me, and everybody has said, ever since the world was made,—that there is nothing evil in wealth and luxury, that they are given by God, that one may continue to live as a rich man, and yet help the needy. I believed this, and I tried to do it. I wrote an essay, in which I summoned all rich people to my assistance. The rich people all acknowledged themselves morally bound to agree with me, but evidently they either did not wish to do any thing, or they could not do any ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi

... were precisely of the same date with his habiliments, next came hobbling in. Poring through his spectacles over the catalogue which lay upon the counter, the first thing which caught his eye, was An Essay upon Old Maids. "Tom, Tom," said the complaisant Librarian, calling to a lad at the other end of the shop, "reach down the Old Maids for the gentleman. They won't appear to advantage, I'm afraid, a little dusty or damaged, with having laid so long upon ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... Christianity, rejecting the Hebrew form, regards this as a mere Hebraism, substituting the name for the being himself. The Israelites do not: and one secret society still existing, whose origin we shall trace in this essay, still preserves the Hebraistic sanctification of the original holy name as their form of recognition of each other, under solemnities ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield

... his telling me that a single short story of his, called 'The Vengeance of Vera Dalrymple,' had been instrumental in securing no less than thirty perfect specimens. Poor George! I was with him when he made his first attempt on the Scrutinizer. He had baited his hook with an essay on Evolution. He read me one or two passages from it. I stopped him at the third paragraph, and congratulated him in advance, little thinking that it was sympathy rather than congratulations that he needed. When I saw him a week afterwards he was looking haggard. I questioned ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... vigor of his administration, deeply impressed those who heartily disliked him. A strong illustration of this fact is presented in the character of the Protector as depicted by Lord Clarendon, in the History of the Great Rebellion; and by the poet Cowley in his essay ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... each day or week, are filed. The interior of the secretary is filled with heaps of similar notes, arranged in order, with titles over each compartment. When a topic is to be treated at length in a sermon or essay, these notes are consulted, reviewed, and arranged. He first draws up a skeleton of his subject, selecting with special care and making prominent the central principle that gives it unity, and from which branch forth correlative considerations. Until perfectly clear in his own mind as to the essential ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... little Frenchman of our acquaintance was ordered by his medical man to take a course of shower-baths. Such things being unknown to him in his fatherland, he of course found the first essay remarkably unpleasant, but with native ingenuity he soon discovered a remedy. On our asking him how he liked the hydropathic system, he replied, "Oh, mais c'est charmant, mon ami; I always take my parapluie ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster

... that colour was 'a penetrative quality that reaches to the innermost parts of the object,' adducing opposing facts. 'To give you a first instance,' he says, 'I shall need but to remind you of what I told you a little after the beginning of this essay, touching the blue and red and yellow that may be produced upon a piece of tempered steel; for these colours, though they be very vivid, yet if you break the steel they adorn, they will appear to be but superficial.' He then ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall

... and amidst the ruffles of an ill-natured world. I have tasted too severely of the lashes of man, to take any great satisfaction in any thing but doing my duty."[39] In his devout and magnificent Essay on the Sun, he says, "'tis admirable that this planet should, through so many ages of the world, maintain an uninterrupted course, that in so many thousands of revolving years, it should retain the same light, heat, and vigour, and every morning renew ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton

... with perfect smoothness and never arouses the ill-feeling aroused by the selections nominally made by the Prime Minister. To-day the Foundations of Belief may not be an essay which causes confidence in the ability of the author to pick the best bishops, and all the much-vaunted religious convictions of Mr. Gladstone did not make his nominations to the Episcopacy particularly ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey

... unpleasant aspects to the eye of the Englishman. There is more courage and passion in the Spaniard; more harmony and goodwill in the Englishman; the one is more like fire, the other like light. For Wordsworth, a poem is above all an essay, a means for conveying a lesson in forcible and easily remembered terms to those who are in need of improvement. For Unamuno, a poem or a novel (and he holds that a novel is but a poem) is the outpouring of a man's passion, the overflow of the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... and slavery. In 1853 C. Schmidt published an essay on the "Civil Society of the Roman World and its Transformation by Christianity," in which he thought it right to attribute all the softening of the mores in the first three Christian centuries to Christianity. Lecky, on the other hand, says: "Slavery ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... from Frances Power Cobbe an essay, in which she controverts Darwin's theory,[18] so far as the origin of the moral sense is concerned. It is written with all the energy of her vigorous intellect as a moral philosopher, yet with a kindly tribute to Mr. Darwin's genius. I repeat no one admires ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville

... never had justice done to them by serious students of literature, of life, and of history. One English writer, indeed, Mr. Havelock Ellis, has realised that 'there are few more delightful books in the world,' and he has analysed them in an essay on Casanova, published in Affirmations, with extreme care and remarkable subtlety. But this essay stands alone, at all events in English, as an attempt to take Casanova seriously, to show him in his relation to his time, and in his relation to human problems. And yet these ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... the gray light of the morning was mellowed by the rays of the sun, the main body of the combatants wheeled into column, and left the encampment with a show of high military bearing, that served to drown the slumbering apprehensions of many a novice, who was now about to make his first essay in arms. While in view of their admiring comrades, the same proud front and ordered array was observed, until the notes of their fifes growing fainter in distance, the forest at length appeared to swallow up the living mass which had ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper

... will discover these cells somewhere in the occipital lobes, another German will agree with him, a third will disagree, and a Russian will glance through the article about the cells and reel off an essay about it to the Syeverny Vyestnik. The Vyestnik Evropi will criticize the essay, and for three years there will be in Russia an epidemic of nonsense which will give money and popularity to blockheads and do ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... the neighbouring bushes, he let it fall, and most unscientifically hauled the fish out by the line, exclaiming, in the bitterness of his heart, "that rods were contemptible childish things, and that a stout branch of a tree was the rod for him." This last essay seemed to have frightened all the rest away, for not another bite did we get ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne

... lady's very first essay in a canoe, nevertheless she succeeded admirably in her effort, for it is far easier to learn a little of paddling than a little of rowing, as every neophyte ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... the historical essay above quoted, the author says: "The examination now completed of the political condition of the colonies, of the state of parties, and of the divisions in particular classes in society, and avocations in life, leads to the conclusion ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson

... publisher, who undertook, as a tradesman, to present his work for profit to the world. Upon these agents the government might have had all the hold it required: yet it never demanded the sight beforehand of any speech, essay, or satire which was advertised as about to appear. It was still content to punish after publication what it deemed to be censurable excesses. Severe and arbitrary as some of its proceedings were in this respect,... it must be allowed that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various

... way. The living antagonism of the Broad Church was surely with the Tractarians rather than with the evangelicals. Yet the most significant of the essays, those on miracles and on prophecy, touched opinions common to both these groups. Jowett, later Master of Balliol, contributed an essay on the 'Interpretation of Scripture.' It hardly belongs to Jowett's best work. Yet the controversy then precipitated may have had to do with Jowett's adherence to Platonic studies instead of his devoting himself to theology. ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... furnished by the men as committees, charged with the minute cares and supervision of the public schools," but declined the honor tendered her of delivering it in person. Sixty gentlemen from the convention visited her at the hotel, and, at their earnest request, she read the essay, which met with their emphatic approval of the plan she proposed. The employment of women in the common schools, and the system of normal schools, ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson

... Sohrab and Rustum Burke's Conciliation with the American Colonies Carlyle's Essay on Burns Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner Defoe's History of the Plague in London De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars Emerson's The American Scholar, Self-Reliance and Compensation Franklin's Autobiography ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... noise rather than appreciation, which their mistaken desires sought. Unhappily for them, they lose the substance, and only snap at the shadow. The audience may be large, but it will not listen to them. The novel may be more popular and more lucrative, when successful, than the history or the essay; but to make it popular and lucrative the writer needs a special talent, and this, as was before hinted, seems frequently forgotten by those who take to novel writing. Nay, it is often forgotten by the critics; they being, in general, men without the special talent themselves, ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes

... It is the half-informed who are verbose. She had written simply of the simple life which she knew so well. She had depicted Spanish daily life from the keenly instinctive standpoint of a woman's observation; and only a week before she had sent a single essay—marked number one—to the editor of the ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman

... influenced by the foregoing considerations. A recent writer, in an essay on the "Plague of Music," remarks that under the name of music we are afflicted with every variety of noise; for example, the sounds produced by hurdy-gurdies, bag-pipes and minstrels; the harpman, the lady who has seen better days, and ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... sites have taught me an important fact: that as much depends on the public spirit, unity of action, and zeal of the early proprietors, as upon the locality itself. The one is useless without these helps. General Washington wrote an able essay to prove the availability of Norfolk, Va., as the great commercial metropolis of the country. He speculated upon its being the great market for the West. His imagination pictured out some such place as New York ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews

... him in high terms as an agreeable and cultivated young man. His Excellency the baron is interested, too, in literature, or more strictly speaking——ah! what an exquisite butterfly! pray look at it!——more strictly speaking, in political economy. He has written an essay on some very interesting question, and wants to submit it ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev

... intelligent tenth must have been consoled by the enthusiastic applause which greeted the little piece. I have a fancy that mime would go far to restore sanity and tradition to the English stage, and every creditable essay in a delightful ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various

... vain will timorous ones essay To set the metes and bounds of Liberty. For Freedom is its own eternal law; It makes its own conditions, and in storm Or calm alike fulfils the unerring Will. Let us not then despise it when it lies Still as a sleeping lion, while a swarm Of gnat-like ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay

... In my essay describing the model city, Hygeiopolis, it was suggested that in every town there should be a building like a gas house, in which ozone should be made and stored, and from which it should be dispensed to every street or house at pleasure. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various

... type of voice and the natural temperament of the singer do not accord—as sometimes happens—he would be unwise not to adhere to the work for which his vocal means, not his preference, are best adapted. To follow the contrary path, and essay roles requiring for their fitting expression more dramatic fire and intensity than his vocal instrument can supply, would be to shorten his career, owing to the certain deterioration and possible extinction of the voice. There ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam

... very true to thee; My ever failing thou dost see: Let me, sweet mother, yet essay thee— Give me one happy sign, I pray thee. My whole existence rests in thee: One moment, only one, ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald

... absurdity of his task as he finally got rid of the little animal, and made his first essay at milking, finding to his great delight that he was successful, while the goat-mother took it all as a matter of course, and did not move while her new friend refreshed himself with a hearty draught of the contents of the ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn

... all the reading which you have ever read, did you ever read such a book as Locke's Essay upon the Human Understanding?—Don't answer me rashly—because many, I know, quote the book, who have not read it—and many have read it who understand it not:—If either of these is your case, as I write to instruct, I will tell you in three words what the book is.—It ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne

... they essay To bate the dame's halloing. With the widow of Thomas Blythe Their hands ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce

... of my translation of the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night will remember that, in the terminal essay (1884) on the history and character of the collection, I expressed my conviction that the eleven (so-called) "interpolated" tales, [1] though, in my judgment, genuine Oriental stories, had (with the exception of the Sleeper Awakened ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne

... I could not possibly purchase from such a fund, I sold my half-pay for two hundred pounds, which I lent upon bond to a young officer of the same regiment, on condition that he should insure his life, and restore one-fourth part of the sum by way of premium. I happened to be lucky in this first essay; for the borrower, having in six weeks expended the money, made an excursion on the highway, was apprehended, tried, convicted of felony, and cut his own throat, to prevent the shame of a public execution; so that his bond ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... Colchester, and William Scott, afterwards Lord Stowell. He took his degree in 1778, and in this year had the misfortune to lose his mother, who seems to have been an amiable and sensible person. In the next year, he obtained the Chancellor's prize for an English essay on "the affinity between painting and writing in point of composition;" and at the recital of this essay in the theatre he first became acquainted with Lord Mornington, afterwards Marquis Wellesley, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various

... interesting thing about the Twayne edition is the essay that forms the introduction to that volume, and is reprinted here. The essay is by Dr. John D. Clark, an eminent scientist of the fourties and fifties and one of the discoverers of sulfa, the first "miracle drug." It describes in great detail the planetary ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr

... not go to Laracor like an unmannerly spraenekich ferrow.(4) Have you seen my Letter to Lord Treasurer? There are two answers come out to it already;(5) though it is no politics, but a harmless proposal about the improvement of the English Tongue. I believe if I writ an essay upon a straw some fool would answer it. About ten days hence I expect a letter from MD; N.30.—You are now writing it, near the end, as I guess.—I have not received DD's money; but I will give you a note for it on Parvisol, ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... commend it, such as it is, to the Blessing of the great Physician, and could wish the Reader to make up its many Deficiencies, by Mr. Flavel's Token for Mourners, and Dr. Grosvenor's Mourner; to which, if it suit his Relish, he may please to add Sir William Temple's Essay on the Excess of Grief: Three Tracts which, in their very different Strains and Styles, I cannot but look upon as in the Number of the best which our Language, or, perhaps, any other, has ...
— Submission to Divine Providence in the Death of Children • Phillip Doddridge

... by Prior, consisting of "An Essay on Learning," I find this curious and interesting passage entirely ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... of rooms all well and comfortably furnished, but although my imagination may have been responsible for the idea, they all seemed to possess a chilly and repellent atmosphere. I felt that to essay sleep in any one of them would be the merest farce, that the place to all intents and purposes was uninhabitable, that something incalculably evil presided over ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... mounting five hundred and forty-four guns, and manned by three thousand sailors and marines, rode at anchor in the rock-girt harbour, the fortress itself, with its formidable outworks, containing two hundred and nineteen cannon and seventeen mortars. Bold men only could essay the capture of such a fortress, but such were Wolfe, Amherst, and Admiral Boscawen, whose ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... three to two. We may therefore believe that the ray-florets are useful in protecting the flowers from being gnawed by insects. (Introduction/9. 'Gardener's Chronicle' 1861 page 1067. Lindley 'Vegetable Kingdom' on Chrysanthemum 1853 page 706. Kerner in his interesting essay 'Die Schutzmittel der Bluthen gegen unberufene Gaste' 1875 page 19, insists that the petals of most plants contain matter which is offensive to insects, so that they are seldom gnawed, and thus the organs ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin

... branch of the subject two reservations have been made. First, no reference is made to the occasional appearances of very high Adepts from other planets of the solar system and of even more august Visitors from a still greater distance, since such matters cannot fitly be described in an essay for general reading; and besides it is practically inconceivable, though of course theoretically possible, that such glorified Beings should ever need to manifest Themselves on a plane so low as the astral. If for any reason They ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater

... brilliant works, that is noticed at all; and a false sneer, a sneer irrelevant to the case, at any work dismissed by name as unworthy of notice. The three works, selected as the gems of Pope's collection, are the 'Essay on Criticism,' the 'Rape of the Lock,' and the 'Essay on Man.' On the first, which (with Dr. Johnson's leave) is the feeblest and least interesting of Pope's writings, being substantially a mere versification, like a metrical multiplication-table, ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... multiplied ad infinitum; but if enough has been said to induce one human being to revert to the diet of his ancestors, the object of this essay ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile

... a new delight, a higher inspiration. In none of his essays is he seen to greater advantage than in Dream Children, which follows this brief sketch. The only people young or old who do not love this beautiful essay are those who have not read it or who have read it without really understanding it. You may need to read it once just to see what it is about; again with the aid of the notes and comments we make upon it; a third time to let it cast its spell upon you. If you do that you ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... Christian demonology in detail and give an account of its various aspects is outside the scope of this essay. Its origin is a twofold one, partly the Jewish demonology, which just at the commencement of our era had received a great impetus, partly the theory of the Greek philosophers, which we have characterised above when speaking of Xenocrates. The Christian doctrine ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann

... encouragement she became herself again, collected, aggressive, confronting him undismayed before recognition dawned upon Blue Serge, and, with it, some amused appreciation of her effrontery. Even so, his first essay at response was nothing more formidable than a ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... panacea—the "crank" of our later terminology—became a familiar one. He abounded at non-resistance conventions and meetings of universal peace societies and of woman's rights associations. The movement had its grotesque aspects, which Lowell has described in his essay on Thoreau. "Bran had its apostles and the pre-sartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, tailored impromptu from the tar-pot. . . . Not a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), professing ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers

... Go, and seek not to return. For, once ye are gone, I will warn every post about this army, and there will be so shrewd a watch upon all pilgrims that, once again, were ye the very devil, ye would find it ruin to make the essay." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... former the new savior of the world. He says, "Napoleon first solved the enigma of equality and liberty—his chief aim was the prevention of despotism—his chief desire, to eternalize the dominion of virtue." In the course of 1808, it was said in the essay, "On the Regeneration of Germany," that the Germans were still children whom it was solely possible for the French to educate: "Our language is also not logical like French—if we intend to attain unity, we must adhere with heart and soul to him who has smoothed the path to it, to him, our securest ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... of Dante, being an Essay towards studying Himself, his World, and his Pilgrimage. By ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... writer of tragedies which connect the sixteenth century with the classical school of later years, became the advocate of a protectionist and a colonial policy in his Traicte de l'OEconomie Politique; the style of his essay towards economic reform has some of the passion and enthusiasm of ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... re-read the little essay to him in instalments, and at the end he said victoriously, "You blethering crittur, there's no sic woman. It's ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie

... among us until November, 1684, (just 150 years since.) Master Cheever presided over the Latin 38 years, till he died at 93. He was the teacher of two of the Mathers, and the second Doctor said of him in an obituary essay, with his own ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks

... entered, "eh bien, is every thing pret for our voyage?" "Yes, my dear"—we presume, from this appellation, that the gentleman was her caro sposo, as she might say,—"or at least every thing will be ready shortly; but let me essay again to dissuade you from this foolish expedition"—"de grace, Sir Charles, ayez pitie de moi; do not pester me with your betises; I am determined to faire une autre visite to my cher Paris, so that all you may say ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... a thorn? Then count it not a whit! Man is well done with it; Soon as he's born He should all means essay To put the plague away; And I, war-worn, Poor captured fugitive, My life most gladly give - I might have had to ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert

... hand, and coil of line on his back, he takes up the Innuit man's burden, and does it with an air both determined and debonair. If you ask a mother if she does not think this a somewhat tender age for her boy to essay to keep up with the men on the hunt, she merely smiles as she sews her waterproof seam, and says, "The First Innuits ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... more aptI doubt it not. You shall peruse, upon your next visit to Monkbarns, my trivial Essay upon Castrametation, with some particular Remarks upon the Vestiges of Ancient Fortifications lately discovered by the Author at the Kaim of Kinprunes. I think I have pointed out the infallible touchstone of supposed ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... 10. Write an essay upon the subject that Journalism is better as a stick than a crutch, and show that it is useless to take up your pen if you have not already provided (from other sources) for the payment ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 1, 1892 • Various

... in an admirable style and, though arranged without apparent method, a system of political philosophy may be gathered from their contents. Thus the third essay, That Politics may be reduced to a Science, defends that thesis, and dwells on the ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley

... cause of the disease may be (and I do not pretend that the conditions of urban life are an adequate explanation) the malady is there, and will probably prove fatal to our civilisation. I have given my views on this subject in the essay called The Future of the English Race. And yet there is a remedy within the reach of all if we would only ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... white teeth showing humorously, when Sophie again entered the room. He had forgotten her, forgotten all about her. As she came in he made a quick, courteous movement to rise—too quick; for a sharp pain shot through his breast, and he grew pale about the lips. But he made essay to stand ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... not without some ingenious machines. In a premium essay upon the cultivation of cotton, read before the Georgia Agricultural Society, the Hon. Mr. Chambers thus describes one invented by himself for covering the seed: 'I would cover with a board made of some hard wood, an inch or an inch and a half thick, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... Troy. She remained in Egypt, and Achaeans and Trojans fought for a mere shadow, formed by the Gods out of clouds and wind. In the "Cyclops" of Euripides, a satirical drama, the cynical giant is allowed to speak of Helen in a strain of coarse banter. Perhaps the essay of Isocrates on Helen may be regarded as a kind of answer to the attacks of several speakers in the works of the tragedians. Isocrates defends Helen simply on the plea of her beauty: "To Heracles Zeus gave strength, to Helen beauty, which naturally rules over even strength itself." Beauty, he ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang

... This was not true of Scott's poems, which only expressed one-half of his nature, and were almost pure romances. But in the novels the business of life is even better portrayed than its sentiments. Mr. Bagehot, one of the ablest of Scott's critics, has pointed out this admirably in his essay on The Waverley Novels. "Many historical novelists," he says, "especially those who with care and pains have read up the detail, are often evidently in a strait how to pass from their history to their sentiment. The fancy of Sir Walter could not help ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton

... [Compare the details of the preparation of the Reform Bill published by Lord Russell in the last edition of his 'Essay on the British Constitution.' Much of this conversation of Lord Lyndhurst's is extremely wide of the truth, but it is retained to show what was said and believed by competent persons at ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville

... often, marking through clear spaces of water—temporarily made so by the concentric dartings of the fish above the surface—certain larger and less unwary wights, which swam slow and deep; our anglers would cautiously essay to drop their lines down to these last. But in vain; there was no passing the uppermost zone. No sooner did the hook touch the sea, than a hundred infatuates contended for the honor of capture. Poor fish of Rodondo! in your victimized confidence, you ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

... several days had passed that I at length discovered a route where here a crack, there a tiny ledge, and again a small projection, offered a precarious chance of foot or hand-hold, and where, if anywhere at all, a human being might essay the terrible climb to the desert above, with a remote chance of success. My mind made up on this point, I made what preparation I could for the climb, and for the desert beyond it. My water bottle was still sound, and little as it held it must suffice. ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell

... of this club, for literary societies despise the affairs of the real worker—they are interested in the bladdery essay written by ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read

... Americans who are here come to see us. . . . Mr. Harding brought with him a gentleman, whom he introduced as Mr. Alison. Mr. Bancroft asked him if he were related to Archdeacon Alison, who wrote the "Essay on Taste." "I am his son," said he. "Ah, then, you are the brother of the historian?" said Mr. Bancroft. "I am the historian," was the reply. . . . An evening visitor is a thing unheard of, and therefore my life is very lonely, now I do not go into society. I see no one ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)

... when the question of the sale of the domain lands was agitated (in 1790), he published an essay in which he lays down the following principles: "The force of a State is in proportion to its population; population is in proportion to plenty; plenty is in proportion to tillage; and tillage, to personal and immediate interest, that is to the spirit of property. Whence it follows, ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... in the dingle making a horse-shoe. Having no other horses on whose hoofs I could exercise my art, I made my first essay on those of my own horse, if that could be called horse which horse was none, being only a pony. Perhaps, if I had sought all England, I should scarcely have found an animal more in need of the kind offices of the smith. On three of ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... been included only so far as seemed necessary to an understanding of the general works, and no attempt has been made to cover the terms applied to musculature and other details of microscopic structure: this has seemed rather to be outside of the scope of the present essay. ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith

... No. I, brings us before a masterpiece. With the possible exception of the C minor Nocturne, this one in the sombre key of C sharp minor is the great essay in the form. Kleczynski finds it "a description of a calm night at Venice, where, after a scene of murder, the sea closes over a corpse and continues to serve as a mirror to the moonlight." This is melodramatic. Willeby analyzes it at length with ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... because it would restrict their liberty. This liberty, of course, is largely imaginary. In its common manifestation, it is no more, at bottom, than the privilege of being bamboozled and made a mock of by the first woman who ventures to essay the business. But none the less it is quite as precious to menas any other of the ghosts that their vanity conjures up for their enchantment. They cherish the notion that unconditioned volition enters into the matter, and that under volition there is not only a high degree of sagacity ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... my essay was examined, the three gentlemen above-named were affrighted. There are truths the unstudied simplicity of which emits a lustre which obscures all the results of an eloquence which exaggerates or extenuates; Louis XIII. furnished such proofs ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... deal to do. She has an essay to write for her professor, you know, and her hands are ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... we know what they teach. Their notes of our lessons are brought to me, books full of them, and there I see what they know; for if they can write down a plain account of facts and doctrines, that is a good test of their having taken in the teaching. George Sarawia's little essay on the doctrine of the Communion is to me perfectly satisfactory. It was written without my knowledge. I found it in one of his ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the seventeenth century was largely shaped by the popularity of the drama. In the eighteenth century the drama gave place to the essay, and it is to the sketch and essay that we must go to trace the evolution of the story during this period. Voltaire in France had a burning message in every essay, and he paid far greater attention to ...
— Short-Stories • Various

... irresistibly, unless, by earlier watchfulness and prayer, we may have been enabled to avoid them. For vain will it be, with faculties at once weakened by the decay of nature and perverted by long habits of worldliness, to essay, for the first time, to force our way into the kingdom of heaven. Old age is not the season for contest and victory; nor shall we then be so able to escape unharmed from the temptations of life as to stand before the ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold

... shape rather than hue. The origin of sculpture is somewhat obscured in the thickening mists of antiquity, but it was no doubt one of the earliest symbols of ideas made use of by man. In fact, in its primitive development, there is considerable evidence to show that it was the first essay at a recorded language. The Egyptian hieroglyphics, those mysterious etchings upon the rock, representing animals, men, and nondescript characters, were unquestionably rude attempts to hand down to posterity some ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... translation appeared at Brussels by "F. A. S. Chartreux, a Bruxelles." In 1642 a second French translation was published at Troyes, by "R. P. Francois Bouillon, de l'Ordre de S. Francois, et Bachelier de Theologie." Mr. Thomas Wright in his "Essay on St. Patrick's Purgatory," London, 1844, makes the singular mistake of supposing that Bouillon's "Histoire de la Vie et Purgatoire de S. Patrice" was founded on the drama of Calderon, it being simply a translation of Montalvan's "Vida y Purgatorio," ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... locale of John Gilpin—Cheapside, and who having armed himself with a large blue bag fitted with elaborate treatises upon the corn laws, and among other pamphlets a recent number of Punch, forthwith travelled to Oxford, and by the kind permission of the meeting was permitted to essay a speech, about what nobody could divine, and in a manner truly original. It is, however, due to the monopolists of Oxfordshire to state that they did not accredit their volunteer champion, and even went so far as to request that ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various

... is the initial volume of the Rougon-Macquart series. Though it was by no means M. Zola's first essay in fiction, it was undoubtedly his first great bid for genuine literary fame, and the foundation of what must necessarily be regarded as his life-work. The idea of writing the "natural and social history of ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... without adapting himself to his wife's desires for love" (O. Adler, Die Mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes, pp. 159 et seq., 181 et seq.). "I have seen an honest woman shudder with horror at her husband's approach," wrote Diderot long ago in his essay "Sur les Femmes"; "I have seen her plunge in the bath and feel herself never sufficiently washed from the stain of duty." The same may still be said of a vast army of women, victims of a pernicious system of morality which has ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... Great Frederick, in his youth, an idealist, and did he not write a touching essay on the evils of absolutism? But he ended by embracing the tyranny of kings—even as you and I, ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... most firmly rooted customs of old China was the examination essay for literary degrees on some purely Chinese subject relating to a remote past. But August 29, 1901, to the amazement of the literati, an imperial edict abolished that time-honoured custom and directed ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... of "Alice in Wonderland" tempted Mr. Dodgson to make another essay in the same field of literature. His idea had not yet been plagiarised, as it was afterwards, though the book had of course been parodied, a notable instance being "Alice in Blunderland," which appeared ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood

... as to the character of Mr. Darwin's theory is Professor Huxley. We have some hesitation in including the name of this distinguished naturalist among the advocates of Darwinism.[19] On the one hand, in his Essay on the Origin of Species, printed in the "Westminster Review," in 1860, and reprinted in his "Lay Sermons," etc., in 1870, he says: "There is no fault to be found with Mr. Darwin's method, but it is another thing ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... interest of the narrative, and information thus obtained has been added either in the form of Notes or Appendix. Under the latter head, acknowledgment is principally due to an able and interesting essay on the architecture of Cashmere, by Capt. Cunningham, and also to a paper by M. Klaproth, both of whom appear to have treated more fully than any other writers the subjects ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight

... writer, is to misunderstand his mind and his method. The Consolatio is not, as has been maintained, a mere patchwork of translations from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists. Rather it is the supreme essay of one who throughout his life had found his highest solace in the dry light of reason. His chief source of refreshment, in the dungeon to which his beloved library had not accompanied him, was a memory well stocked ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

... indulgence he was compelled to have for my lively, impetuous, and ever-excitable disposition, in such contrast with his own. He studied the English writers diligently: Pope, if not his model, was his aim; and, in opposition to that author's "Essay on Man," he had written a poem in like form and measure, which was to give the Christian religion the triumph over the deism of the other work. From the great store of papers which he carried with him, he showed me poetical and prose compositions ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... school into a local Chautauqua served by local lecturers. She made a run of ten miles to hear the trouble shooter's lecture. She saw the boys and some of the girls give an explanation of the telephone and the use of it. She heard the teacher give as a language exercise the next day an essay on the ethics and proprieties of eavesdropping on party lines; and she saw the beginning of an arrangement under which the boys of the Woodruff school took the contract to look after easily-remedied line troubles in the neighborhood on the basis which paid for a telephone for the school, ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick

... who disapproved of these proceedings read aloud to the Bibliotaph that scorching little essay entitled Involuntary Bailees, written by perhaps the wittiest living English essayist. An involuntary bailee—as the essayist explains—is a person to whom people (generally unknown to him) send things which he does not wish ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent

... Clay, "Economics for the General Reader," pages 237-38. See also Essay by the same author entitled, "The War and the Status of the Wage Earner" in a volume entitled, "The Industrial Outlook" for a more extensive analysis of the part played by the standard of life ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis

... to have been her lot to make her way in life by her own active exertions. Her father ceased to keep house on the marriage of his older daughters, and from that time until she was fifteen she lived alternately with them. Then she made her first essay in teaching ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... the average price of grain was, in the same manner, much lower in the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, than in the two centuries preceding, has been observed both by Mr Dupr de St Maur, and by the elegant author of the Essay on the Policy of Grain. Its price, during the same period, had probably sunk in the same manner through ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... wrong?" Now through a parting cloud The pale moon peer'd from her tempestuous shroud, And Bateman's face was seen; 't was deadly white, And sorrow seem'd to sicken in his sight. "Oh, speak! my love!" again the maid conjured, "Why is thy heart in sullen woe immured?" He raised his head, and thrice essay'd to tell, Thrice from his lips the unfinished accents fell; When thus at last reluctantly he broke His boding silence, and the maid bespoke: "Grieve not, my love, but ere the morn advance I on these fields must cast my parting glance; For three long years, by cruel fate's ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White

... but indistinctive one of "Smith." It is highly probable that this prudential act was also his first step towards rectitude. For whether the change was a question of moral ethics, or merely a superstitious essay in luck, he was thereafter strictly honest in business. He became prosperous. He had been sustained in his flight by the intention that, if he were successful elsewhere, he would endeavor to communicate with his ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte

... to get it this morning." And Helen put the letter into her aunt's hands, while the latter gazed helplessly, first at it, and then at the girl. There is an essay of Bacon's in which is set forth the truth that you can bewilder and master anyone if you are only sufficiently bold and rapid; Mrs. Roberts was so used to managing everything and being looked up to by everyone that Helen's present mood left ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair

... now in his 80th year. After going through the ordinary course of education at Gottingen, and having made a rapid tour through Holland, England, and France, he became a pupil of Werner at the mining school of Freyburg, and in his 21st year published an "Essay on the Basalts of the Rhine." Though he soon became officially connected with the mining corps, he was enabled to continue his excursions in foreign countries, for, during the six or seven years succeeding the publication of his first essay, he seems to have visited Austria, Switzerland, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... his Essay "On Liberty," Mill for once becomes passionate. In presenting his Bill of Rights, in stepping forward as the champion of individual liberty, he seems to be possessed by a new spirit. He speaks like a martyr, or the defender of martyrs. The individual human soul, with its unfathomable endowments, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller

... am thinking of probably began life by a misapplication, to himself, of Emerson's essay on Self-Reliance: a great and beautiful essay, but Oh! how much has it to answer for in the survival of the unfittest. Alas! that the wheat and tares must grow together till the harvest. It is the syrup of phosphorus by which weakly mediocrity develops into sturdiness, a sturdy ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne

... afternoon, young ladies," she said, "I have received a communication from Sir John, and as you are all interested in the Scholarship, which may be offered another year to some further girls of Cherry Court School, I may as well say that I have just received a letter from him suggesting the theme for the essay. I will repeat to ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade

... "Introduction to The Morgante Maggiore" ibid., pp. 279-281); and, again, the success of Beppo, and, still more, a sense of inspiration and the conviction that he had found the path to excellence, suggested another essay of the ottava rima, a humorous poem "a la Beppo" on a larger and more important scale. If Byron possessed more than a superficial knowledge of the legendary "Don Juan," he was irresponsive and unimpressed. He speaks (letter to Murray, February ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... letter written by Mr. Jefferson in 1820, and now to be found in the seventh volume of his correspondence, at page 177. It seems he had been presented by a gentleman of the name of Jarvis with a book, or essay, or periodical, called the Republican, and he was writing in acknowledgment of the present, and noting some of its contents. After expressing the hope that the work will produce a favorable effect upon the minds of the ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... sorrow; for she might not be delivered of it save by a knight who was of passing good name both of his lands and deeds. And after that all the great knights had striven in vain to draw the sword from its sheath, a poor knight, poorly arrayed, felt in his heart that he might essay it, but was abashed. At last, however, when the damsel was departing, he plucked up courage to ask if he might try; and when she hesitated he said: "Fair damsel, worthiness and good deeds are not only in arrayment, but manhood and worship ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice

... head, for his lucubrations were received with favour. That entitled 'How to Live Cheerfully on Forty Pounds a Year', created a sensation among the unemployed. 'Education: Its Aims, Objects, Purposes, and Desirability', gained him the respect of the shallow-minded. As for his celebrated essay on 'Life Insurance Regarded in its Relation to the Masses', read before the Working Men's Mutual Improvement Society, Isle of Dogs, it was received with a 'literal ovation' by an unintelligent audience ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... description of a good judge is one of the finest paragraphs in oratory, ancient or modern. His second, or perhaps his first great work in art is his sketch of Demosthenes in his lecture on the Eloquence of Revolutionary Periods. As a specimen of essay writing it is not surpassed by any passage to be found ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell

... from the press of Daniel Fowle, who in the previous July had removed from Boston, where he had undergone a brief but uncongenial imprisonment on suspicion of having printed a pamphlet entitled "The Monster of Monsters, by Tom Thumb, Esq.," an essay that contained some uncomplimentary reflections on several official personages. The "Gazette" was the pioneer journal of the province. It was followed at the close of the same year by "The Mercury and Weekly Advertiser," ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich



Words linked to "Essay" :   memoir, gamble, pass judgment, fight, prove, essayist, try out, composition, test, writing, evaluate, report, piece of writing, endeavor, verify, essayer, assay, thanatopsis, risk, hazard, theme, float, grope, seek, move, lay on the line, put on the line, act, attempt, struggle, field-test, adventure, written material, take a dare, disquisition, pick up the gauntlet, chance, give it a whirl, effort, try, give it a try, examine, have a go, strive, take a chance, take chances, endeavour, judge, control



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